Let’s cut to the chase. The Forest Wars is essential reading for every politician, union leader, newspaper editor, and forestry worker. But will any read it?

Only folk who want to learn whether native forest logging is worth losing millions of taxpayer dollars every year (from Australia’s leading expert on forest ecology, resource management, and conservation science) will bother.

While plantation logging is an industry with a future, if sufficiently well regulated, native forest logging is economic insanity, and a devastating environmental catastrophe. And we’ve known it for decades.

Any time you hear a politician praise the native forest logging ‘industry’, they’re…well, I was about to say ‘lying through their damn teeth’, but is it a lie if they make a heart-felt personal choice to ignore all economic and environmental evidence and simply believe the guff spewing out of the forestry PR?

David Lindenmayer, and his publisher and editors, have done a terrific job on this book. It’s simple, readable, transparent, fact-checkable and every point he makes is pragmatic and uses thoroughly peer-reviewed science.

Lindenmayer takes the reader through 37 key myths about native forest logging. Each industry myth turns truth on its head to claim that native forest logging creates ‘jobs and growth’, is good for the economy, good for forests and wildlife, good for fire prevention and good for climate. But for every myth spruiked by the politicians, unionists, and forestry shills, not one is left standing when Lindmayer’s done. Science for the win.

There’s nothing ‘sustainable’ about native forest logging in Tasmania – not their logging practices, not the tiny number of jobs on offer, not the funding we taxpayers pour into subsidising every single job, not the reality that we’re bulldozing the habitat of threatened and endangered flora and fauna for woodchips for export.

Independent economists like John Lawrence have long shown the economic absurdities of native forest logging, which both our major parties in Tasmania are rabidly in favour of expanding.

Politicians know it’s all a con, but there’s votes in blue-collar demographics if you utter the sacred mantra, ‘jobs and growth’. While there are still forests to bulldoze, despite the costs to taxpayers, the increase in greenhouse gasses, the increased fire risks, and destroyed wild habitats, politicians will loudly support the destruction of our forests, citing the same myths debunked in The Forest Wars.

The cynicism of the industry even manage to reach new heights with so-called ‘renewable’ biomass energy derived from ‘forestry waste’ which, left alone, is itself habitat for a myriad of critters. Biomass energy is just another lie, and is anything but ‘clean’, ‘green’, or ‘renewable’. Yet, laughably, it’s used to greenwash increased emissions and environmental destruction as ‘action on climate’.

Lindenmayer holds up each industry myth about fire, forestry and conservation, then simply and clinically shows how the science reveals the myth to be yet another deliberate lie by a corrupt industry, backed by uncaring and self-interested politicians. It’s easy to feel a sense of hopelessness. How can things improve if the powerful investors, Chamber of Commerce and their tame politicians simply don’t give a damn?

Lindenmayer thankfully ends The Forest Wars with a game-plan, backed by economists and environmentalists alike, which points to the sustainable – and real – jobs and growth that would come from saving our incredibly valuable native forests, and all the threatened species in them.

There’s money in regenerative forestry, and jobs for forestry workers. There are jobs for First Nations mob managing country. There’s a serious need for an army of well-equipped fast-response regional fire-fighters. There’s serious money in expanding tourism beyond a handful of mass-tourist destinations by caring for our remaining forests, creating trails and providing trained guides. There’s even money for locals to hunt and kill deer for wild venison – if we ever have a government willing to prioritise Tasmanian wildlife over destructive feral animals.

The Forest Wars is perhaps poorly named. It’s not a history of two opposing sides; the clichéd “greenies versus forestry”, it’s a series of 37 powerful grenades that explode every rotten, corrupt myth the industry has put forward.

It’s time to end native forest logging. It’s time to stop lying otherwise, and to plan for our forestry workers to be supported as they transition to real jobs – sustainable jobs that make our State and our world stronger, and provide for our kids and grandkids.

It’s time our politicians and media grew up and dealt with that reality. To them I say, read the damn book, you lying bastards.

The Forest Wars, by David Lindenmayer, Allen & Unwin, 219pp, ISBN: 978 1 76147 075 2, RRP. $34.95

B.P. Marshall is a scriptwriter and author, and lives on the frontline of  the War on Nature, waged by our governments and their mates in the corporate sector.