Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Forestry

The Story of Wielangta: How Environmentalists Mistake ‘A Timber Town That Disappeared’ for Pristine Wilderness

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There is a lot of forest in Tasmania.

In the south east of the island, there was once a thriving timber town known as Wielangta. In its heyday it had a general store, bakery, blacksmiths’ shops, a school and of course several saw mills.

Wielangta was ravaged by bushfires in the 1920s and abandoned in 1928.

I visited the area yesterday with Phelim McAleer and Ann McElhinney – the Irish born producers of Mine Your Own Business.

All we saw was forest. The town has disappeared.

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This is some of the beautiful blue gum forest we saw along the Wielangta forest drive.

The forest has re-grown and like most forest in Tasmania is now falsely considered pristine wilderness. But within the forest there is a rusted boiler and decaying tramlines — all that remains of the once thriving timber town known as Wielangta.

Interestingly, according to the website dedicated to Bob Brown’s fight to stop logging in Wielangta forest, this forest is described as “the most untouced and secluded area within 50 km of the Hobart CBD. It is a tiny fragment of the complex biodiversity here at the end of the last Ice Age.”

Wielangta forest is home to the swift parrot, wedge-tailed eagle and broad toothed stag beetle.

Parts of the forest have been cleared felled and then burnt by timber workers since European settlement. And the forest has always regrown.

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Here’s Phelim in a recently burnt coup, perhaps looking for the town that disappeared?

Tassie forests Phelim looking for ancient stag 2.JPG
Here’s Phelim perhaps looking for the ancient Wielangta (broad toothed) stag beetle.

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Thanks to Alan Ashbarry for taking us to Wielangta and for organizing the Tasmanian showing of Mine Your Own Business. Following the screening last night there was much comment over drinks, about how relevant the film is to Tasmanian timber communities struggling to survive against environmentalism. The film will be screened tonight (Wednesday night) in Sydney and tomorrow (Thursday night) in Perth. For more information visit http://ipa.org.au/events/event_detail.asp?eventid=120 .

Net Increase in Forest Cover Globally

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For years, environmentalists have been raising the alarm about deforestation. But even as forests continue to shrink in some nations, others grow — and new research suggests the planet may now be nearing the transition to a greater sum of forests.

A new formula to measure forest cover, developed by researchers at The Rockefeller University and the University of Helsinki, in collaboration with scientists in China, Scotland and the U.S., suggests that an increasing number of countries and regions are transitioning from deforestation to afforestation, raising hopes for a turning point for the world as a whole. The novel approach, published this week in the online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looks beyond simply how much of a nation’s area is covered by trees and considers the volume of timber, biomass and captured carbon within the area. It produces an encouraging picture of Earth’s forest situation and may change the way governments size up their woodland resources in the future.

Read more: http://newswire.rockefeller.edu/?page=engine&id=549

How Many Trees Did Bob Carr Really Save? A Note from Cinders

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Hi Jennifer,

The former Premier of NSW, Bob Carr, has made the following claim in a Daily Telegraph Editorial:

“ONE of my first acts as premier in 1995 was to introduce controls on the clearing of native vegetation. It was controversial and it involved me in endless arguments.

But stopping broadacre land clearing in NSW (Queensland followed) is the only thing that has enabled Prime Minister John Howard to boast that Australia can meet its Kyoto targets.”

I have compared this claim with information compiled by the Australian Greenhouse Office and it doesn’t appear to stack up.

landuse change emissions.JPG

The table indicates that landuse change emissions have reduced dramatically from 1990 to now by about 70 percent. Much of this occurred prior to 1995, the date Mr. Carr claims that he acted. In fact the table shows an extremely small decrease from 1995 to 2003 for New South Wales. There was no significant change in Queensland from 1995 to 2002.

Mr Carr’s statement that stopping broad acre land clearing in NSW in 1995 is the only thing that allows Australia to meets its Kyoto targets is not supported by the available evidence.

In the same article Mr Carr claims:

“In 1800 much of North America, South America, Australia and Asia was covered by forest. But the explosion in the human population meant massive clearing. Australia lost an estimated two-thirds of its vegetation.”

These statements can be compared with the Department of Environment and Heritage Australian Native Vegetation Assessment 2001 that states:

“At a continental scale, approximately 13% of the total land has been cleared.”

This assessment estimates that about 50% of the continent was covered by forest and woodland. Indeed this was mostly woodland, with forest accounting for just over 44 million hectares or about 6% of the continent. In 2001 the Audit estimated that over 31 million hectares remained, that is 71% of the original extent. This is less than a third of the forest cleared not two thirds as claimed by Bob Carr.

Regards Cinders.

Possums Killing River Red Gums: A Note from Michael O’Brien

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Dear Jennifer,

I was reading your blogs criticising the misrepresentation of the facts surrounding the Murray river floodplains and death of river red gums. I own a property on the Murray river floodplains, downstream of Echuca. My property has river red gum wetlands that have quite naturally not recieved any flooding since 1995.

For the last 15 years my red gum wetland and many other red gum wetlands in the region have suffered massive decline in tree health and in some instances all of the trees have been killed. It is changing the look of the landscape and is quite obviously a regional catastrophe.

But what is the cause? Ask any of the experts and they insist it is “drought”, but in my district the average rain for the past 15 years has only been slightly below the long term average and in reality the redgums have probably had as much flooding as they ever did in dry periods.

Death by Possum2blog.JPG

The actual cause of the tree death is something much more cute and cuddly, common brush-tailed possum’s. Brush-tailed possums are abundant in these hollow redgums. At times I have spotted up to 15 mature possums in one tree. Each summer the trees grow a few leaves and then for the remainder of the year the possums strip them clean. The trees can only take about three years of this kind of constant bombardment before they die. From the 200 large trees within my wetland at least 75% have died in the last 10 years, and the remainder are in poor health.

Prior to European settlement in the area, the local Aboriginals heavilly utilized brush-tailed possums for food, clothing etcetera. So much so that one of the early pastoralists in the area referred to them as the “possum-eaters”.

As an experiment I possum guarded a number of random trees last November.

The following photograph I took this morning of one of the possum- guarded trees. The trees in the photograph were all in similar health at the time of guarding last November.

Possum attack is a widespread problem in the Murray flood plains now that possums are unable to be utilized and managed, and probably explains a lot of the premature death of red gums that people are witnessing in this natural dry period.

Regards,
Michael O’Brien

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Note from Jeff Yugovic, added 13th December, 2015

“Although my work is widely accepted by the general public and many practical conservationists, I am being ignored by academia and am regarded as a heretic by some ratbag ‘conservationists’.

My discussion paper is online and is updated periodically:

http://www.spiffa.org/do-ecosystems-need-top-predators.html ”

This paper quotes the above blog post.

Log a Tree, Sequest Some Carbon: Mark Poynter

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Only 10 percent of Victoria’s native forests are logged. Yet anti-logging campaigners are still unhappy, ramping up a campaign in conjunction with the upcoming state election to have the industry closed down completely.

Why anyone would oppose the sustainable harvest of such a small percentage of Victoria’s extensive native forest estate is difficult for me to understand. Then again I see both environmental and economic benefits in growing and cutting down trees as part of the active management of a native forest.

In ‘Campaigners can’t see forest for trees’ Mark Poynter* expains the value of logging in terms of carbon sequestration:

“Sustainable logging in Victoria’s designated wood production zones produces about 1.5 million cubic metres of hardwood sawlogs and residual logs a year from an estimated total harvested biomass of about 2.1 million cubic metres, including roots, bark, branches and foliage. The concept of sustainability dictates that annually harvested amount is replaced by an equivalent volume of growth.

Carbon sequestered each year in new biomass growth in Victoria’s production zones is estimated to be equivalent to saving 2.6 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. This is net of emissions from fuel and power use inherent to timber production and emissions from the regeneration process. It is also additional to the carbon that could have been sequestered if the forest had alternatively been left unlogged.

Putting this into perspective is that clean energy produced from Victorian wind farms has been estimated to save 250,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year. Put another way, if anti-logging campaigns were to close Victoria’s native forest timber industry, 10 times as many wind turbines as now exist would be required just to make up for the carbon sequestration lost by “locking up” wood production forests.

Enhanced carbon sequestration is only part of the “greenhouse” benefit of sustainable logging. Australian domestic hardwood production also offsets imports of tropical hardwoods and the use of steel, aluminium and concrete that offer poor environmental outcomes.”

Read the full article, click here .

If 10 times as many wind turbines would be required to offset the locking up of wood production in the 10 percent of the forest that is still harvested, how much more carbon could be sequested if government allowed logging in say 30 percent of the forest estate? Not to mention the potential environmental and economic benefits.

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Mark Poynter is a forestry consultant, member of the Institute of Foresters of Australia and a member of the Australian Environment Foundation (AEF). His slide show entitled ‘Saving Australian Forests, A Counter-Productive Indulgence’ given at the recent AEF conference can be viewed by clicking here.

Keeping Wildlife In the Freezer

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When I worked for the sugar industry, there was a guy who lived in Ingham, in Far North Queensland, who used to regularly pull the same fish out of the freezer when there was a fish kill and get it on television as an example of poisoning from acid sulfate soils.

It seems activists also keep wildlife in their freezers in Tasmania and have no worries pulling a possum killed by a motorcar out of the freezer and parading it as an example of 1080 poisoning. At least that’s the message we get from Pier Akerman writing in The Daily Telegraph on Saturday in a piece entitled ‘Hello, wasn’t that the ex-possum again?’.

While some activists have no real interest in the truth, just a particular barrow to push, you would like to think journalists from the Australian national broadcaster, the ABC, were a bit more diligent. But it seems they don’t even have a particularly good system for keeping track of file tape/news footage… click here.