Locked Up or Locked Out?

Pic: Rob Blakers, http://www.robblakers.com/

“Locked up”. Here’s an interesting phrase, has a nice evocative ring to it: Trees Behind Bars.

The propagandist who came up with it is a genius. Presses several buttons and harkens back to the convict days, which, as we know, still underlie so many aspects of Tasmanian social attitudes and outlooks and the way things are done in the Apple Isle.

Some people use the term in a calculated and manipulative way. Others, members of the general public, have picked it up and use it without giving it a thought, repeating it as a mindless mantra, without considering its connotations and ramifications (it was even used during the recent Margiris dispute—“locking up” the fish—now that would be a feat). It’s a very insidious metaphor, and deliberately so, I think.

“Locked up” in what sense and by whom and for whom? Although this bit of cynically contrived hyperbole very much implies that the forests, if saved, will become off limits for any use, the reality is that the forests would be opened up, would become available for a much wider range of uses than those for which they are available now: a gene bank for future developments in biotechnology (where the big money will be); a carbon bank; a refuge for the absolutely unique endemic species with which Tasmania abounds but which are now being napalmed into cinders (before a very large proportion of them even become known to science); places for recreation and re-creation; a major drawcard for interstate and overseas visitors and hence the venue for ecotourism ventures of a range of types, sizes and experiences; protection of watersheds that provide water for human consumption, irrigation and the generation of carbon-free electricity; a source of specialty timbers with small-scale, low-impact selective logging; and on and on it goes.

Then, of course, there is the intrinsic value of the forests as forests, as forests unique in the world, as living systems that set Tasmania apart, that give it its distinctive, and potentially distinguished, character—others see this, why don’t Tasmanians, and especially Tasmanian governments?

All this would represent true multiple use, something precluded by the current industrial-scale destruction in FT’s fiefdom. (Yes, FT does have a tourism venture or two of their own, unless they’ve sold them. As I recall, they include an “airwalk” overlooking a view of extensive destruction and something dismal in a swamp somewhere—pitiful and half-hearted attempts to convince the public that FT is about more than slash and burn on a scale undreamt of, and sensibly never even attempted, by an indigenous horticulturalist farming in Borneo’s jungles, or what is left of them after Ta Ann et al. have finished with them.)

Once one gets past the narrow mindset that the forests are of no use unless they are clearfelled, napalmed and replaced with arboreal monoculture, and puts some intelligence and imagination into it, the possibilities become endless.

Without a doubt, FT should be broken up. What Tasmania needs is an organisation devoted to the intelligent , imaginative and innovative use of the state’s living assets, an organisation that connects with Tasmania, its people and its needs for the future in a much more inclusive and mindful way. Tasmania must remove this thing shackled to its leg and impeding its progress. It must dispatch this rapacious, inward-looking, unimaginative, remarkably inefficient (how much do FTsdebts cost Tasmanians annually?), and unaccountable saurian, implementing 19th century attitudes with 21st century technology. (Did I mention devious?)

Locked up. How accessible are the forests now to the public? From my own experience and decades of journeys in Tasmania, not much.Certainly not as it was in the past.Either a great many of them no longer exist because they’ve been clearfelled and replaced by tree crops or they are barricaded and entry forbidden.

I’d say that in actual fact most of Tasmania’s non-Heritage Area forests are locked up right now, while we, the public, are locked out.

And this situation will continue, and even worsen, unless an entirely different approach is taken to Tasmania’s forests and a new organisation established to develop and implement it. So many possibilitiesbecome evident once one’s capacity to innovate is no longer locked up in the currentmyopic mindset.