It can, be argued that the people who voted for the Greens, and in Tasmania for Independent Andrew Wilkie, in the August 2010 federal election have created a situation in which some moves towards more open Government will be possible. Australia’s recent election results have, to some extent, focused attention on who actually makes the major decisions about the social economic and environmental issues that largely determine how many people will live.
A major feature of our world’s problems is that the key decisions about economic ,social/cultural and environmental issues are made by unelected people behind closed doors. Governments around the world, including many of those formed from parliaments that have been elected, allow, and actually promote this situation(1) Executive government and behind the door decisions making, in conditions of massive donations to political parties and favours to top public servants, by privately owned and controlled corporations with massive amounts of accumulated capital, is the frequent practice. Short term personal gain at the expense of the public interest and the human future is accepted as the norm.
The introduction of more democratic methods of deciding our economic, social/cultural and environmental future is certainly something that many of us hoped for when we cast our votes for candidates who we saw as being capable of contributing to real change. We cannot be condemned for our hopes but if we want our dreams to actually be realised we ourselves, as ordinary citizens, need to come to grips with the complexity and contradictory and destructive character that is the reality of our capitalist corporation controlled economy both locally and worldwide. This all impacts on the possible futures for our children
The Tasmanian scene
The problems are global but also manifest in particular ways at local levels. In Tasmania forestry corporations and forest practices have long been a major source of economic social and political cultural divisions.
A photo of a large cable logged area published in a brochure, authorised by Dr. Andrew Lohrey, who was a minister in past State labor Governments, ‘vividly illustrates part of what is happening in Tasmania’s water catchments as result of deeply faulted forestry practices. The caption under the photo reads —Above: South Esk catchment: this steep terrain was cable logged of all vegetation and is now used for plantation forestry – run off from chemicals will enter the water supply.
This same brochure reveals- to quote- “In the last four years alone ,these rivers have been contaminated with poisonous pesticides: the Duck, Inglis, Bird, Jordon, Montagu, Prosser, Rubicon, South Esk, George, Little Swanport, Macquarie, Great Forrester, Brumby Creek, Derwent and Liffey,
This brochure makes the point that pesticide poisons come from farming and forestry land uses. And that forestry plantations are now “growing in 44 of the State’s 48 water catchments.”Further— “Water testing by our state government is done sporadically and pesticide detections rarely result in investigations to find their source.”
This assessment is underlined by the work of Dr Peter Hay, who, in a paper delivered to A SEARCH Foundation Round Table in Hobart on April 12-2008, quotes people living in the catchment areas being clear felled for plantations as follows “…we’re here all the time , and we see things- dead; wombats in the creeks and that, creeks foaming like anything- stuff the bloody scientists never see because they aren’t here when its there in front of you.”(2)
These sorts of concerns are only part of the sad story of clear felling and monoculture plantations.
Clear felling, or highly mechanised slash and burn and dangerous chemical fed monoculture plantations is falsely presented as world’s best forestry practice in Tasmania., This has been responsibly calculated as having cost the public purse an average of upwards of $64million over each of the last twelve years. These gifts from the public purse have totaled $767 million over those years..(3) As indicated above large areas of the water catchments of many of our rivers have and are being damaged by both clear felling and monoculture plantation practices.
Widely published and detailed papers written by the deputy mayor of the Meander Valley Municipal Council, Bob Loone, revealed that large tracts of our best agricultural land have been/are being turned into monoculture plantations at considerable cost to our farming communities and our overall economy. Further there is the now revealed, but still officially denied,- near certainty that the E Niten trees, sometimes called plantation blue-gums, widely used in monoculture plantations,- have been bred to produce poisonous toxins in their leaves.
Then again there is the well documented revelation in Mike Bolan’s Tasmanian Times article, pasted on June 15th 2010, that, without the above mentioned hundreds of Millions of $ from the public purse, paper from woodchips and pulp is simply not economically possible. All of this underlines the urgency of a new approach to forestry in Tasmania
Novelist and public figure Richard Flanagan put it rather colorfully in a factually well substantiated article about Gunn’s pulp mill and surrounding issues pasted on Tasmanian Times on the 20th of August 2010 when he wrote “…And so the racket continued, rorting the taxpayer, screwing the workers, raping the land, and attacking and sometimes destroying any who dared questioned what was happening. And at the end of the racket what did we have? A forest industry on its knees.” (4)
This alarming reality takes on greatly increased dangers in today’s conditions of climate change and the series of acute crises besetting corporation controlled globalization.
The now revealed realities of the uneconomic character of the paper from pulp industry and the increasing evidence of the damage caused by monoculture plantations have to be faced up to.
For several decades most of us who opposed clear felling and the export of woodchips, had failed to recognise, or to do enough about exposing the fact, that paper from pulped woodchips was/is a gigantic con. A con that is not only ecologically unsustainable but was and is economically dependent on massive public subsidies. These subsidies are covered up, but none the less, as revealed above, they are very large. A current and possibly looming tragedy is that ‘Our Common Ground ‘a self appointed group of people purporting to represent environmentalists, are part of a behind closed doors exercise that could give Gunns mill or some version of same a social licence.
Recent leaked information from these secret talks indicate that the social licence being angled for is one that would come with the necessity, to pulp, but economically and ecologically damaging chemically dependent monoculture plantations and the continuance of the environmental disaster called clear felling.
The struggle to preserve wilderness is essential. However, there are also other issues involved in land uses. Humans require clean water, food and shelter and in our modern state we have developed other demands on our physical environment, for example, comfortable housing, the vehicles and infrastructure required to meet the demand for travel.
The large areas of land use resulting from our over use of private transport, urban sprawl and in some cases grossly oversized houses aside, for another discussion, still leaves us with our need for clean water and growing the food we need to survive. To ignore the many faceted aspects involved and assume that it is environmentally permissible to condone an industry that requires the sort of abuse of land, particularly in water catchments, that is illustrated in the clear fell practices referred to above is wrong.
The people who have faced physical assaults and other damages as they struggled to defend our forests are deserving of better support in terms of the heeding of the realities outlined above by people who appoint themselves as spokes persons.
A situation has developed in which the front line of the struggle, to find real solutions, —stop the rape of our forests and destruction of water and soil quality, —has gone well beyond the thinking of some environmental figures. Among the several more apparent expressions of this reality is the above mentioned work of people like the deputy mayor of the Meander Valley Municipal Council in recent years to publically expose the damaging effects of monoculture plantations. Then there is the also above mentioned work of Dr Lohrey, Dr Hay and Dr Bleaney that exposes the effects of chemicals necessary to monoculture plantations on the water we drink.
Further there is the work of skilled foresters like Frank Strie who argues the need for selective harvesting rather than clear felling and for prolysis to turn forest waste into soil enriching biochar.
Going beyond single issue politics and developing a politics that seeks to grasp and grapple with the consequences of the, real if de facto, control corporations have over governments and public policies is essential. The debate is not only about trees but is actually about how our societies function and our way of life. A continuing analysis of the damaging ecological and economic effects of monoculture plantations has become another urgent need.
One pre-election worry was that the misguided efforts of people associated with ‘Our Common Ground’ would open a split within the environmental movement and thus prevent the electoral shift to the Greens and Wilkie that eventuated in the August election from happening. The election is over and the results held promise. However the danger of a damaging split in the Green Movement will continue so long as some prominent individuals in the environmental movement refuse to admit that the many negative ecological and economic effects resulting from monoculture plantations actually exist.
Open discussions of these matters are an essential part of uniting all of those people who want a forest industry that no longer robs the public purse and pushes us further along the road to massive ecological and continuing economic disasters. The real essence of the division is actually the interests of Tasmania and the vast majority of Tasmanians as opposed to foreign and local corporation profits continuing to be fed by massive raids on our public purse. There is also the important issue of the rights of our children to an environment capable of sustaining decent standards of human life.
Restoring and reinvigorating our forests with sustainable practices that can provide creative and sustainable work opportunities is possible. Retraining workers, ending public subsidies to the dead end industry current forest practices have created and learning from the sustainable forestry practices that are happening in some other countries is a way to go.
The Now We The People Tasmania group paper titled’ “From Forest Destruction and Public Subsidies to Profitable and Sustainable Forestry Practices “ (posted on Tas Times 30-08-10 3.01am, HERE ) suggests some principles and ideas for open discussion. Responses ie ,75 comments on TT plus some responses direct to NWTP suggest interest. There is however, in my view, need for further steps to bring together the wide field of clearly evident expertise that exists .in terms of practical proposals for change.
Forestry, as currently practised in Tasmania, differs from coal mining, or quarrying, in that forestry in Tasmania is a short as well as along term drain on the public purse. In terms of environmental damage clear felling and monoculture plantations, in Tasmania at least, rival open cut mining in some other States. There is neither economic nor environmental sense in the current practices pushed by Gunns and Forestry Tasmania. The need for radical and real change is urgent.
REFERENCES
(1)Writing on South America, the out standing American critic and writer Professor Noam Chomsky in some chapters his latest book “Hopes and Prospects” relates how some South American Governments are having some successes in combating the piracy of their countries wealth that has been an important foundation of US wealth and their current power over the world. This is a bright light clouded by the terrible cost in human suffering and lives of South American people at the hands of European colonial powers and then, for the last few hundred years, of the USA. Most other governments around the world, whilst differing in many ways pander to the USA and its ruling large multi national corporations in one way or another . Part of this is the effect of mind-less spin,—part is fear of a mean and self centred military colossus—and part is the effect of a colonial mentality in the major political parties
(2)Hay Peter Collected papers 2007-8 “Shared Values Shared Future Reimagining the Good Society”SEARCH Foundation Page57 ISBN 9781876300159
(3)Dr. Graeme Wells. http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz “Amos and Wells on Forestry subsidies: Round 3” ( HERE ).
(4)“The Flanagan article ”THE DEVINE LIE” ( HERE ) was first published on the ABC’s THE DRUM
Max Bound is an Octogenarian with life long experience as a social–political activist including over 30 (thirty) years as an environmental activist. He is retired from a working life as a labourer, coal miner, organiser, building worker — and after mature age tertiary studies and receiving a B A in Environmental Design and Graduate Diploma in Urban planning —work as a planner, Research Officer and Coordinator.
