Threatened with logging …
Ed: On the one hand Premier Will Hodgman opens a you-beaut new tourist road ( HERE ) to encourage (record) visitors ( HERE ). At the same time the RET opens the way for forest furnaces ( HERE ), the tracks are thrown wide open ( HERE ) and logging gets the green light … Subsidised logging of Australia’s largest temperate rainforest wilderness in the Tarkine and the threat of forest furnaces under pending federal legislation is spelling serial erosion for one of the world’s last wild places.
Media Release:
Alarm over Premier Hodgman’s rainforest logging in Tasmania’s Tarkine
Hodgman’s Government continues to damage tourism benefits for the NW region while logging the scenery, as conservationists protest at Executive Building in Hobart today (Wed).
Subsidised logging of Australia’s largest temperate rainforest wilderness in the Tarkine and the threat of forest furnaces under pending federal legislation is spelling serial erosion for one of the world’s last wild places.
Save the Tarkine’s Campaigner Scott Jordan said, ‘Tax-payer subsidised logging managed by Forestry Tasmania is occurring in old growth and rainforests. The equivalent of 40 AFL football grounds is being lost right now in the Tarkine.’
Bob Brown Foundation Campaign Manager Jenny Weber said, ‘Tourism initiatives for the Tarkine in the absence of secure protection, fly in the face of the wild natural beauty tourists come to see facing destruction. Premier Hodgman will promote himself as supporting tourism in the Tarkine by opening a tourist road this week. But at the same time he is backing the logging of forest coupes that surround the route. This is an extraordinary failure to understand what tourists to the Tarkine appreciate.’
‘Woodchipping the Tarkine, logging rainforest timbers for Britton Brothers, and delivering logs out of the Tarkine for the controversial company Ta Ann to sell into Japanese markets, is beginning to impinge on Australia’s largest temperate rainforest wilderness’, Jenny Weber said.
‘The biggest new threat to the ancient forests of the Tarkine is the inclusion of burning native forests as part of the Renewable Energy Target. The Tarkine should be a National Park, not a woodpile for forest furnaces,’ Jenny Weber said.
‘The Hodgman Government has set Tarkine’s forests back 30 years by opening regional reserves and conservation areas to subsidised logging,’ Scott Jordan said
‘Tourism for the Tarkine will deliver 1100 jobs with forest protection while jobs in subsidised logging of the Tarkine’s unique forests are diminishing. Logging in the Tarkine is costing the taxpayer while protection as a National Park and World Heritage listing would bring substantial and ongoing economic gains for the regional economy,’ Scott Jordan said.
The Bob Brown Foundation and Save the Tarkine are calling for a National Park and World Heritage listing for the Tarkine.
*Wikipedia’s definition of Schizophrenia …
• Carol Rea in Comments: The logging of this area of the Tarkine is bizarre, deranged, idiotic, irrational, senseless, daft and unhinged. It is not schizophrenic. To use a serious medical diagnosis and link it with pictures of destruction and enviromental violence is insulting and potentially damaging to individuals with this diagnosis. During my 30 year working life as a clinician in mental health services I came to know hundreds of people with this diagnosis. So I speak from a position of experience and some authority. People with the lived experience of schizophrenia have to defend against the public misconception that they are more likely to commit an act of violence than anyone else. This is not so and it is time the community and writers woke up to the damage this causes. Please don’t perpetuate this stigmatisation TT.
• John Francis in Comments: Okay, so what about ‘Tasmania and madness’, or ‘Tasmania and stupidity’, or ‘Tasmania and vandalism’ or ‘Tasmania and a diseased State of Mind’? I also work in mental health in Tasmania. Some commentators here could give Tassie Times readers enough credit to distinguish between a diagnosable mental illness and the use of a metaphor in the context of a piece of journalism about forestry. Would we object to people describing the spread of some noxious practice or idea as ‘cancerous’? Frankly, I am much more disturbed by Tony Abbott and other right wing politicians and journalists talking about ‘death cults’ and thereby glamourising the appeal of groups like ISIS to vulnerable teenagers.
• Frank again in Comments: “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” Albert Einstein. This is Tasmania in mid 2015…
• bob hawkins in Comments: #8. I’m with you Artemisia. Let the language live. Editor, please don’t change that headline. It does no damage to anyone. (Gay once had another meaning. I don’t mind its new meaning — I think it is well chosen — but I sure do mourn the passing of its old meaning.) #5 & #6 are trying to do to TT what His Disgustingness Emperor Tony is trying to do to the ABC.
• Ben Cannon in Comments: As someone diagnosed with schizophrenia, I concur that the definition of schizophrenia within the DSM does somewhat correlate with successive Tasmanian governments, and indeed many governments the world over. The persistence in delusional thinking which has little connection with reality. The development of superstitions based on the idea that if it worked once, even if due to coincidence or under different conditions, it should work again. The delusions of grandeur that they actually belong in a position of responsibility. All common symptoms in schizophrenia, religion, pseudo-science, public commentators, economics, and only functional for entertainment executives. In short much of the world system has become mentally ill. The sooner it realises the fact the sooner it can get help …
• Pilko in Comments: A more mature editor would’ve forseen that the use of the term “schizophrenia” would likely offend & result in the topic being hijacked by a discussion about whether people have the right to be offended/or not by the use of the word schizophrenic in the article headline. This scenario is so often played out on Tasmanian Times. The reason? Because the TT club are righteous, seldom in error, have the world summed up & therefore have no need of boundaries …
• Peter Henning in Comments: I don’t believe it. So it’s no longer possible to use words metaphorically? Have we become so stupid? A pox on such ridiculous nonsense. I shall now use that splendidly descriptive word schizophrenic at every possible occasion. I should have been using cancerous as a matter of course, but now kick myself for not doing so …
• Bryan Green: Abbott Government slaps down Hodgman and Groom
• Nick McKim: Hunt Leaves State Government Isolated on World Heritage Area Logging and Mining Commonwealth Environment Minister Greg Hunt has left the Tasmanian government completely isolated in its plan to allow logging and mining in Tasmania’s World Heritage Area. The United Nations has come down on the state government like a ton of bricks, and now Mr Hunt has failed to support plans for logging and mining. What more will it take for the Tasmanian government to see reason? The state government’s representative in Bonn will now be alone in arguing for logging and mining in the TWWHA. Minister Matthew Groom now has no option but to withdraw his plan and redraft it to ensure proper protection of natural and cultural heritage values. If the state government fails to see reason, there is a real risk that the United Nations will declare the WHA as ‘in danger’, which would be an extreme international embarrassment for Tasmania and Australia. Logging and mining in an area that has been protected for all of humanity for its outstanding universal values is like bulldozing the pyramids of Egypt and using the rubble as road gravel. It simply beggars belief.
• Peter Henning in Comments: … It is true that many of the people who comment on TT have been doing so for years, but that applies to a whole range of people across the spectrum, including some real stalwarts of the ‘far right’, some of the most conspicuous of whom refuse to use their own names. It is equally true that the same old issues and arguments get recycled again and again, like a never-ending carousel. But why is that? The answer is clear enough. Throughout all those years the political issues in Tasmania have remained the same. Tasmanian politicians have learned nothing, have changed not one bit in all the years since they sold their souls to Gunns. They stay focused on repeating past failures. They stay focused on forestry as an essential service. They stay focused on pulp and an obsession with destruction of the landscape, even though the costs have been demonstrated time after time to far outweigh the benefits.
