Time for new questions

Photo by Ula Majewski

This is the great dichotomy of ideals in our times. This division of values is so huge that it has become a civil war between the forest industry and the environmentalists in Tasmania. So large that peace talks have been organised and the intergovernmental agreement (IGA) on forestry is one result.

I am not going to pretend to know all the details and steps in this process, nor claim to be the fount of all solutions to the problem; However, I am going to make some observations and ask a few pointed questions in the hope that somehow we, as a community and a nation, may perhaps begin to see our way clear to thinking about this issue in a different light.

At this point in time, it would appear that the environmental side of the war is winning. Forestry Tasmania appears to be in trouble financially, logging contractors are going out of business, less timber is being harvested and private forestry land is being sold off. The future of environmental conservation is looking rosy. The future of the timber industry is looking grim.

Now, when you have a problem, and things are not working out the way you would like and you want to work out a solution, ideally, you ask yourself a series of questions:

• 1st question you ask yourself is: “What is going wrong?”
• The 2nd is: “How do I actually want it to work?”
• And the 3rd is: “How do I fix the problem to make it work the way I want it to work?”.

Currently, it seems to me that the answer to question 3, that the Environmental groups are working from is: Stop logging anything that looks like old growth and protect as much bio-diversity as possible. Working backwards, the answer to question 2 was: All old growth and other precious ecosystems must be locked up and saved. The answer to question 1 was: we are destroying all our precious ecosystems and bio-diversity reserves.

Fair enough, it is a valid concern, the loss of precious ecosystems and bio-diversity is a problem that will effect our world for generations to come. The issues of deforestation and thereby the creation of infertile soils and deserts is not a new problem. The rise of ancient civilisations followed the use of forest timber and the fall of those civilisations followed the resultant deforestation (for a potted history see: http://www.eh-resources.org/wood.html). Over 3000 years ago, the middle east was covered with rich forests, now it is desert.

If we are to prevent this happening to us, then yes, we do need to care for our forests. However, there is more to it than that. There are more questions and issues here and my belief is that the current view is shallow at best. Just for the moment, I would like you to consider this question: When we can no longer source timber products from our own forests, from who’s forests are we going to source our timber products? Are we so selfish that we would sacrifice the forests of other communities and nations just to protect our own forests?

There is still a demand for timber products: lumber for building, paper, cardboard and other packaging materials, furniture, etc. If we don’t use timber, what else do we use? metals? plastics? these are finite resources, once all the ore has been mined and all the oil pumped, where will we get new metals and plastics from apart from recycling & mining rubbish heaps? Timber and other plant fibres, however, are a renewable resource, perhaps the only true renewable resource available to us.

So, going back to the 1st question: What is going wrong? answer: we are destroying all our precious ecosystems and bio-diversity reserves. OK, good answer, but let’s not stop there, let us expand on that… Why are the forests being destroyed? The logging industry is not logging just for the fun of it! They are fulfilling a commercial demand for the product. The demand for product is being driven by the consumers of the product. So who are the consumers? WE ARE, We all are.

We are all, all of us, every last one of us, responsible for the destruction of the forests.

We can not lay the blame for deforestation and bio-diversity loss at the feet of the timber industry, since they are only the symptom of our consumerism and population size, not the cause of the issue at hand.

So, now the 1st question becomes a new question, or rather, a set of questions:

• How can we best steward our resources (mineral and vegetative) for the benefit of both the natural environment and for the people, both now and for the children yet unborn?
• How do we reduce the need for those resources in order to make the preservation of the environment easier?
• How do we learn to think for the long term and the next generation rather than for what we can get out of it now?
• How do we expand our thinking to include the whole world within our social and environmental community?
• How do we achieve all this without resorting to monocultures (plantation death zones and broad acre farming)?
• What does our culture, our society, our standard of living and our methods of forest and farming practices need to be, in order to achieve this?

Janice lives in Launceston, Tasmania and thinks the meaning of ‘plantation’ needs to be changed from ‘monoculture tree farm managed by corporate policy and disconnected employees ‘ to ‘Mixed species forest that looks and acts as much like old growth as possible, but which is cared for, with the intention of harvesting, by a farmer/forester who’s job and life’s work is to care for that specific field/plot/coop’.