VicForests – the scandals!

The report to Treasury on the performance of VicForests was revealed in late February via an FOI by the Age newspaper. >Read it here. . It details much of their mismanagement and appalling behaviour. They have illegally logged forests, not adhered to their charter, not regenerated thousands of hectares of logged forest, lost millions of …

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Activists attack sustainability claim

ENVIRONMENTALISTS have made corporate Australia their number one target as they ramp up pressure on the producers of the top paper brand Reflex to stop using timber logged from native forests. The battle between the Wilderness Society and Australian Paper has spilled into cyberspace: last week the company convinced Google to stop showing advertisements for …

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Google accused of papering over ads

GOOGLE has been accused of stifling free speech after it banned an ad attacking a paper manufacturer over its environmental record. The Wilderness Society paid to have its ad on Google promoting a boycott against a paper manufacturer that uses wood sourced from Australian old-growth forests. When web users typed into Google the words ”office …

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Mixed reaction to Brumby forest plan

Bob Humphreys, a saw miller from Cann River and President the of the Victorian Association of Forest Industries, says “I’ve seen the writing on the wall myself for quite a long time. As far as I’m concerned the industry is as good as dead in the water.” http://www.abc.net.au/rural/vic/content/2010/11/s3066516.htm

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Aboriginal burn-off theory hosed down

Aboriginal Australians didn’t regularly use fire to manage the bush claims a new study, but experts aren’t convinced. TRADITIONAL THEORY SUGGESTS THAT Australian Aborigines have regularly burned-off the bush as a method to manage the landscape over the last 50,000 years. But an analysis of fossilised charcoal now contests that idea. The new research suggests that …

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VicForests pulls facts … out of a hat.

After a complaint was made about the content of VicForests’ “Flora, Fauna and Wood Production” factsheet, they have pulled it off their web site and replaced it with several new “fact” sheets that are just about as bad as the original. VicForests has been running around media outlets trying to build “relationships” and in the …

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Indigenous burn control a myth: study

New research puts paid to the belief that Aboriginal people used fire on a large scale to control vegetation across Australia. The research team, who published their findings in the latest edition of the journal Quaternary Science Reviews, examined charcoal records dating back 70,000 years at 223 sites across Australasia. Lead researcher Dr Scott Mooney, …

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Cold water is poured on Aboriginal burnoff culture

The popular notion that Aborigines carried out widespread burning of the Australian landscape is a myth, research shows. A study of charcoal records has found that the arrival of the first Australians about 50,000 years ago did not result in significantly greater fire activity across the continent. An international team of scientists led by Scott …

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$400,000 annually to silence critics

With the late 2010 state election out of the way, VicForests released its 2010 Sustainability report, a classic piece of Spin from the last days of the Brumby era. This year VicForests appears to be more concerned with hosing down community concerns over salvage logging and biodiversity protection than providing any information about its performance …

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Victorian State Election outcome

It looks like the Coalition is well and truly home and hosed, as they say. They’ll have a majority in both houses of parliament. Their forest policy includes commitments to ”review harvesting rotations for faster growing native species such as mountain ash” which can be read as converting native forests into even more intensively managed …

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