Logging unsustainable if Leadbeater’s possum is to survive, says Zoos Victoria

Support given for Great Forest National Park in central highlands.

The head of Victoria’s zoos says the scale of logging in the state’s central highland forests is environmentally unsustainable and has backed the creation of a new national park as giving key endangered species the best chance of survival.

A letter sent by Zoos Victoria chief executive Jenny Gray to the state-owned timber company VicForests in January says recent scientific modelling had led the zoos to form the view that rates of highland harvesting could not be viewed as “ecologically sustainable”.

The rules for logging in the central highlands would not save the state’s critically endangered faunal emblem, the Leadbeater’s possum, from extinction, she said.

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Tom Arup, The Age