THERE HAVE been prominent media reports of claims by political notables, including the State Premier and the nation’s PM, that the newly-signed forests agreements should end debate and controversy in this matter.

No, not now, not ever.

One element of these urgings seems to imply that politics has now been taken out of the issue.

Wrong again – the very fact of making these assertions, and seeing that they were so prominently reported, is in itself a political act, one which would engender its own quasi-Newtonian opposite [if not exactly equal] reaction.

What’s more, this federal-state Labor-Liberal agreement was a classic political compromise, and all compromises by their very nature leave unsatisfied both the parties to them, as well as other interested parties. Each party got far less than the 85 to 95% it wanted, and had to settle for, say, 45 to 55% – are we really expected to think that they just then give up on what they gave up ?

[None of the above about compromise is intended to demean the notion: a free society, a secular, liberal culture cannot last without it, nor without the acceptance of give-and-take as the norm for the civilised resolution of most disputes. We should be wary of supporting, let alone trusting, people and movements who decry consensual democracy as a sell-out.]

As for ideologues and single-issue fetishists in general, 55% is no way near enough; their approach is more often than not an “all-or-nothing” one, where democratic give-and-take is always cowardly betrayal, and where the guiding principle in debates is that they who are not with us are against us.

Cancelling all debate about forests will lessen the incentive for further enquiry into a thicket of matters to do with items such as threatened species

What the majority of the populace sees as a sensible compromise is always a sell-out of first principles. You see this reductionist attitude in groups ranging from the religious right, especially to do with abortion and homosexuality, to the far left, notably in its anti-globalisation fixation. No matter that an abortion will save the life of someone who is someone else’s mother, sister, daughter, wife and colleague; no matter that contemporary international economic arrangements mean that fewer people now starve, are illiterate or mired in deep poverty.

Cancelling all debate about forests will lessen the incentive for further enquiry into a thicket of matters to do with items such as threatened species, or new timber-working techniques, or the development of alternative sources for income and meaningful work, efforts which often lead to many new discoveries, a broader range of evidence-based knowledge and a deeper level of understanding of the ecological, economic and social dynamics, balances and interactions involved.

Recall Trofim Denisovich Lysenko, 1898-1976.

No, not another Denisovich related to the fictional Ivan – in fact, Trofim helped to give characters like Ivan Denisovich days on end in the gulag. Comrade Trofim is sub-titled in his Chambers Biographical Dictionary entry as “Soviet geneticist and agronomist” [pp 961-2, 7th edition, 2002]. In 1935 he developed a theory of genetics which suggested that environment can alter the hereditary material.

So far, so good: he had a new theory, developed in part by doing CPSU* -authorised work to ameliorate CPSU-directed famines in the Ukrainian SSR. One of the utterly essential fundamentals of empirical science is that there are no final answers, that every theory, no matter how apparently watertight, is up for, at least, modification, and at most, replacement.

No such niceties for Tovarishch T D Lysenko, once he had become Director of the Institute of Genetics of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, a post he held for a quarter century 1940-65. In this post, as told in Chambers, “he pronounced the Mendelian theory of heredity to be wrong, ruthlessly silencing scientists who opposed him”.

Silencing opponents may have sent Soviet biological science back to the discredited Lamarckianism of the late 18th century, but it worked wonders for Lysenko’s career: according to The Hutchinson Dictionary of Scientific Biography [pp 449-450, 2nd edition 1994] he rose rapidly from senior specialist in the Department of Physiology at the All-Union Institute of Genetics in Odessa via Scientific Director to Director. “He actually contributed very little to scientific knowledge and his importance has been attributed to his friendship with the Soviet political leaders Josef Stalin and Nikita Khrushchev, who awarded Lysenko many honours: he was made a Hero of Socialist Labour, and received the Order of Lenin eight times and the Stalin Prize three times.

A cautionary tale indeed

“As a leader of the Soviet scientific world, Lysenko . . . created an environment conducive to the spread of unverifiable facts and theories, such as . . . the transformation of viruses into bacteria. [T]his period represented the dark ages of Soviet science, and research into several areas of biology came to a halt”.

A cautionary tale indeed.

It has its happy parallel in Nazi Germany’s equally closed-mind attitude to “Jewish science”: Albert Einstein’s work made no contribution to whatever there was of Hitler’s A-bomb developments.

Further back in time, the dead hand of the Roman Church’s Holy Inquisition in the Catholic counties of southern Europe saw scientific endeavour move to the less minatory and more open-minded Protestant north, and scientific discoveries became the province of German, Dutch, Nordic and British empiricism.

No, Eminent Political Persons, chopping off and hosing down further debate on forestry is not, in the words of the title of your jointly-endorsed brochure, any part of The Way Forward for Tasmania’s Forests.

Peg Putt and Bob Brown often may come across as boringly and irritatingly repetitive and sanctimonious, but (i) it’s not mandatory to listen to them; (ii) they, like all of us, are entitled to their say [but, equally, unentitled to expect as of right that we take any notice of them] and (iii) they have been elected in free and fair elections precisely because of their views.

So, Messrs Howard, Lennon and, as far as we can tell at the moment, Beasley, in the words of Robert Zimmerman [whom you probably remember from your youth], “the wheel’s still in turn”.

* as in Communist Party of the Soviet Union

PS.: In A Way Forward for Tasmania’s Forests, under the heading Tasmanian Softwood Industry Development Program – $10 million, it is promised that “[a]n assistance will be provided for [u]pgrading of existing transport linkages to support more efficient log cartage”: does this mean that Tasmanian road-users can look forward to fewer over-filled log-truck juggernauts destroying the State’s roads and menacing Robin and Leslie Motorist ? Will we see more of this kind of bulk haulage transferred to what’s left of the rail network ?

Just hoping.

Leonard Colquhoun 7248