Clean Water and sustainable land usage

Many people, including some in the Our Common Ground movement, appear as seeing the issue of ending clear-felling of old growth forests as dependent on the increasing use of plantations.

However, have the dire effects of monoculture plantations been adequately, or even seriously, considered in this rethinking? The reality is that plantations create major problems: for water quality, as well as availability for farmland and food supply. They have already destroyed some farming communities, and have had hugely deleterious effects on human health and wildlife from the chemical poisons necessary to maintain monoculture plantations.

Here is what veteran forestry workers have said about water quality:

Much of the antagonism expressed towards current forest practices is directed towards its effect upon water quality, particularly in the catchments, where massive hydrological changes are seen to be taking place. Some people are scornful of industry and government scientists, who are thought to turn up to do their studies and take their measurements at precisely the times when they can be sure of not finding anything in breach of the Forest Practices Code. ‘There are people up here can’t read and write’, said one person, ‘and none of us are scientists, but we’re here all the time, and we see things – dead wombats in the creeks and that, the creeks foaming like anything – stuff that the bloody scientists never see because they aren’t here when it’s there in front of you.’
(from a paper by Dr Peter Hay, delivered to a Search Round Table held at the University of Tasmania’s Hobart Campus on April 12 2008.)

Plantations were encouraged by the Howard Government’s Manage Investment Scheme (MIS, a tax dodge that allowed investors 100 percent tax credit. They have been taken up by a few individual investors, but mainly by large corporations as a means of writing off company profits, and for obtaining carbon credits. However, forestry operations are excluded from official carbon emission figures, though the planting of new trees in plantations is included. Thus, destroying old growth forest and replacing it with monoculture seedlings presents the illusion in official figures that such forestry operations are carbon positive, when the truth is precisely the opposite.

Temperate old growth forests are one of the best carbon sinks available whereas monoculture plantations are replanted in short cycles, negating any carbon storage effect, they have serious negative effects on soil fertility, they degrade water quality, they soak up the fragile water table, and they use water needed for agriculture and domestic purposes.

Bob Loone, Deputy Mayor Meander Valley has put on record that:

Over 13,000 ha of farmland have been destroyed by MIS forestry corporations. …(in areas that) …were mostly family farms, many with irrigation or low cost irrigation potential, with better class of soils and higher rainfall than the midlands. …Plantation forestry is unsustainable. It destroys soil fertility, aerial spraying poisons our ratepayers, closes down businesses, destroys jobs, tourism, agricultural production and potential. Forestry has deceived both State and Federal governments into supporting, at a huge and ongoing cost to taxpayers, the destructive and ongoing MIS scams. The MIS scams are a self-imposed national tragedy. MIS has been and continues to be a blight, a community killer, a cancer on all municipalities.
(From A BETTER TASMANIA www.tapvision.info )

Toxins in the Georges River

The toxic state of the Georges River is a strong warning of what can happen to water quality when plantations are in water catchment areas. St. Helens GP, Dr. Alison Bleaney, noticed that normally rare cancers were unduly frequent in her patients. And in 2004 there was extensive oyster mortality in Georges Bay. The government’s ‘investigation’ then denied that there was a problem. Drs Bleaney and Scammell, supported by Oyster farmers, persisted in testing the water for toxicity and found that the source was not from chemical spraying as had been surmised, but from the leaves of the exotic plantation tree E. nitens that had been bred for toxicity to minimise spraying. (Her story ran on ABC Television’s Australian Story 15th and 22nd February 2010).

For their pains, Dr Bleaney and fellow investigator Dr Marcus Scammell were excoriated both by government and by local business. In a summary of the events published on Tasmanian Times, Dr Scammell wrote:
As indicated above the Government was aware of the January results leading to a combined sampling effort on the 14th of February 2005. Despite the oyster deaths and now finding toxic surface water as well as some toxic grab samples the Government decided it was natural and therefore not an issue and to the best of the authors knowledge stopped sampling for toxicity.

As one of Tasmania’s and Australia’s top scientific experts on water related issues, Dr D.E. Leaman, wrote:
A conclusion like that of Bleaney and Scammell’s was drawn several years ago but, because the government panel considered the toxin natural, nothing more was done. A toxin is a toxin and we need to know all about it and its risks. Because this toxin might involve the forest industry, any review must be fully independent. We should thank, not accuse, Bleaney and Scammell for their concern and effort, while observing that our government has yet to match that care and concern.
(Sunday Tasmanian, 21st March, 2010, p. 45)

Dr Andrew Lohrey insists that: “… protecting water quality comes from protecting catchments. All the arguments like MIS damage, FSC accreditation, e. nitens toxins, agricultural runoff and the role of plantations fit within the broad and hitherto uncontroversial focus of protecting our river catchments.”
(personal email 14-5-2010)

The real situation we face is that vast stockpiles of woodchips are lying idle, the world market for both chips and wood-pulp is oversupplied and Tasmania is not well placed to compete. Taxpayers should no longer be positioned to provide scarce timber resources and public money to maintain an industry that is both uneconomic and an ecological disaster. For example, quality paper is already being made more cheaply, with little water and no chemicals from banana tree stems.

The future lies in a timber industry based on selective harvesting for building, furniture and crafts production rather than clearfelling for chips and pulp. Public money needs to be used to support the future rather than wasted on trying to restart the doomed woodchip circus. Adequate support for retraining of workers and the development of sustainable industries is a more sensible way to go than throwing public money at doomed forest destruction and monoculture plantation ventures.

Vica Bayley has suggested that “Global markets have moved on and the rest of the world rejects Tasmania’s native forest wood chips, burning them in power stations is a desperate new plan to keep woodchipping alive.”
(6th June, Tasmanian Times)

If water quality is to be improved in our catchment areas, the e. nitens plantations must be removed and no more planted in Tasmania. According to www.tastimber.tas.gov.au existing plantation ash, or e. nitens, timber can be used structurally in commercial, industrial or domestic construction. Some builders suggest that some plantation ash timbers are superior to timber from pine plantations in structural terms, and that it is easier for carpenters to work with than are our natural Tasmanian hardwoods. Every possible avenue to reduce the cost of removing trees bred to produce poison in their leaves needs to be explored.

The cost of not removing trees that produce damaging toxins in their leaves will increase the longer we leave it, like the cost of not tackling climate change. The evidence available indicates that failure to act on the clearance issue as a matter of some immediate urgency could be very costly to human health and our whole natural environment. And that of course means that it could result in an economic and social disaster of quite massive proportions.

The changes needed require much more than private talks between two party leaders and cabinet discussions. Senator Christine Milne’s Where has your money gone? article brings to the light of day the depth of the problem and how the top public servants, as well as politicians, have been/are involved in the machinations to keep woodchipping alive.
(2nd June, Tasmanian Times).

The essential problem is that corporations have control of the forestry industry and, through eyes blinkered by greed and ignorance, see short term profitability as their major goal. Unfortunately, they also have control over elected governments, who not only legislate for the benefit of these party donors rather than for the people who elected them, they subsidise these failing industries with public money. The Tasmanian forestry industry has received over $638 million in state and federal subsidies in the past eleven years, realizing a return of only 2.17 per cent, which is ‘well below a reasonable benchmark,’ given also that those eleven years were boom times for the Australian economy. That was a year ago: forestry losses since then have been even greater, yet government supports by both major parties, and the ensuing ecological damage, continues unhindered.

Real democracy needs to be introduced into economic and social decision making. The stakes are high in short term economic and social, including health terms. In the longer term it is the human, our children and their children’s, future that is at stake.

2. Wells, G. ‘Wells Economic Analysis’, Report prepared for The Wilderness Society (Tasmania) Inc. and Environment Tasmania Inc., May 2009, p. 2. Reported in Sunday Tasmanian, 7th June, 2009.