Your Say

Dear Evan,

I fell about laughing after I read your letter in The Mercury (Friday August 5). You do not seriously expect us to believe that clearfell/burn/poison is a superior forestry practice to the genuinely selective single-tree harvesting of what you term the “bad old days”.

Modern industry jargon terms such as “sustainable harvesting” “variable retention” and “structural diversity” cannot disguise the fact that clearfell/burn/poison is still the method employed — it’s just that a few clumps of trees are left standing — as some kind of sad industrial window-dressing — among the hectares of destroyed forest and dead wildlife.

It’s easy to discover the truth about what is going on in our forests — just visit and compare a forest logged during the “bad old days” ( a “bod” forest) with a modern clear-felled and re-planted coupe (a “rec”). In a “bod” forest you will observe — and probably feel somewhat saddened by — the stumps of huge old trees felled by an old-time forester.

At least you know that the felled trees produced the timber for ships or lovely old homes. At least the forest still exists all around you as a vibrant living system — you hear the birds singing and at night you hear the animals foraging.

In the “rec” forest there is only death. The ground is black and baked from burning. The carcasses of poisoned wombats, wallabies and possums lie all around. (To be eaten later by the few Tasmanian Devils that remain — who ingest the poison in their turn). The eucalypt seedlings stand in military style rows — hectare upon hectare of the same type, same size, same fate — to produce toilet paper and cardboard packaging a couple of decades down the track. The forest and the animals are gone. They will never return.

The safety of forestry workers can and should be ensured by modern training and equipment. The economics of forestry can and should be ensured by the selective production of high-quality sawlogs.

Shame on you Evan for your cant and your weasel words. I suspect you even believe them — but We are not deceived.

Loren H Mills
Sorell