Chris Harries A response to: My question is …
THE LAST TIME I held a dialogue with a tsunami the tsunami won. There are some forces that are not amendable to polite dialogue.
David, I know you mean well but you have not been witness to the four decades of endless ‘dialogue’ that have transpired over logging since the state of Tasmania was initially carved up into five forestry concessions and handed over to logging companies in the early 1970s. That dialogue has never stopped.
In more recent years areas of remnant high conservation forests (the answer to your question) have been haggled over since the the cows came home and have been endlessly delineated and drawn up on maps for all to see. These critical areas mainly come down to areas of the Southern forests bordering the World Heritage area, the Tarkine Wilderness and the North East rainforests.
That is not sto say that logging of forests does not cause immense distress amongst the Tasmanian people in other areas precious to them and the multitudinous related issues that have accompanied this rampant industry – whether it be contamination of their town water supplies, the horrendous and immensely cruel poisoning of native wildife by 1080, loss of tourist amenity, road fatalities caused by log jinkers, smoke filled Autumn skies….. the huge litany of costs wrought on Tasmania by the logging industry goes right down to the bottom of the sea, where escaped organisms from ship ballasts is wreaking havoc on marine environments. No rigorous cost-benefit analysis would deliver a positve verdict on this rampant industry.
Thankfully, against this tsunami of destruction there are a few courageous citizens who will put their bodies on the line. This is their last resort statement, not a replacement for dialogue.
We should think of the forest protesters as the antibodies that exist in our own bodies trying to defend us against harmful invasions that can harm or kill us. They represent our immune system at work. Antibodies are primarily programmed to protect and defend the whole body against a fatal invasion, but they will protect our vital organs – our heart and brain – no holds barred.
To those in industry and government who attempt to portray environmentalists as insatiably greedy, it is a soboring thought to realize that the environment movement has never had an intrinsic victory. Oh, yes, there have been moral victories, even sensational ones like that of the Franklin dam, but year in and year out the Tasmanian, national and global environments are on a negative slide. As reported by our governments’ own State-of -the-Environment’ reports, year in and year out forest cover declines, biodiversity is lost, deserts spread, fish stockes decline. The story goes on.
The Franklin wilderness sat there intact, millions of years before the dam was proposed. All that was saved was its impending destruction for the benefit of 8 years of electrity growth. Every environmental ‘success’ has been like this – a small hedge agsinst the tsunami of Progress.
I find it truly amazingly, even as the our planet’s critically important greenhouse layer goes critical, those pitiful few citizens who are prepared to stand up and point out the insanity of it all are labelled as insatiably greedy for not being prepared to compromise their values. Meanwhile, consumer values are held in high regard. Please drop this subliminal accusation of mindless greed.
Last Sunday I had an earnest conversation with a Tasmanian business man about Jarod Diamond’s book ‘Collapse’ and we talked about the enormous challenges that climate change and peak oil are posing for society. Bereft of a reasonable answer to the overall human condition his response was: “Well you know, Chris, civilizations come and civilisations go. That’s the way it has always been. You can’t turn around the tide of history”.
This is from an upstanding Christian man who will rail against drink driving and such issues with high moral conviction and consuming passion. But when it comes to the much larger issues facing humankind his moral stance frizzles to a dispassionate fatalism. The big picture, staring us all in the face, is too big for him to handle. He is not alone.
Fortunately many people are not taking collapse of our civilisation as a given, including many in business who are seeing the writing on the wall and are challenging their own world view. They now know that for business to survive and prosper there has to come a reconciliation with the limits of the planet to provide and absorb the demands of business enterprise.
Climate change and the global financial crises have forced us all to marry the big picture with our smaller concerns. Forest logging can’t escape this larger scrutiny. Nor can the environment movement. It has to adjust and it will. It may have been able to do things better, but Just don’t accuse it of insatiable greed.
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