After all the gloom we have to report on here’s a little something to warm our hearts and bring us hope… The insatiable monster that consumes most of East Gippsland’s forests is the Eden woodchip mill. Without that, logging would stop. Could it possibly be on the way out? Apparently the global economic downturn is …
With the help of a new instrument (laser range finder) that uses light beams to precisely measure distance, a 101 metre tall Eucalyptus regnans has been discovered in Tasmania’s Arve Valley.The MCG towers are 85 metres, but these trees almost defy earthly physics to pump water up to their top leaves. They named the tree …
Don Burke supports what many see as the biggest drought inducing, climate changing, extinction enhancing, environmental brutes in Australia. And just as Gunns has done to Tassie, Burke has done to his own credibility – viciously trashed it. More than a gardener, Don Burke is chairman of the Australian Environment Foundation, a lookalike false green …
After a $300 million upgrade, Australian Paper’s (AP) Maryvale pulp and paper mill is on the market. Reflex copy paper is their most well known brand and is the reason the Central Highlands and Strzelecki forests have been logged and destroyed for decades. PaperlinX has recently put its mills up for sale, realising it’s not …
Old forests – those that are more than 200 years old – are not protected by international treaties because they were thought to be carbon neutral. But a team from Belgium says such forests actually continue to take up carbon dioxide and are therefore important carbon sinks. Sebastiaan Luyssaert and colleagues at Antwerp University reckon …
City and country residents have had to cope with choking air during April as DSE lit up over 150,000 hectares of healthy forest in its “management burns”. The EPA does not take air quality readings in regional areas – they don’t want to know how bad it is. In the city a reading of 150 …
Over Autumn/Winter 08, farmers were given permits to shoot dozens of native Black Swans who were moving from the Gippsland Lakes’ onto farm paddocks to graze. Why? Because the Lakes have become so sick and contaminated that much of the area is dying, including the Swan’s food, the water grasses. The issuing of permits to …
Contrary to the longstanding view that ageing forests are carbon neutral or even pollute more than they absorb, new evidence shows that forests that reach peak maturity do not stop soaking up and storing carbon. A team of scientists have recently searched literature and databases for forest carbon-flux estimates. In the 11/8/08 edition of Nature, …
Science is clearly not a part of the Brumby government’s justification to triple burns across the state to almost 400,000 ha, or 1/20th of public land a year. Despite the ENRC inquiry quoting scientific papers, Jenny Barnett from the VNPA, discovered that these papers didn’t back up calls for increased burning at all. They in …
Here’s another example of the government being at odds with itself. Two recent reports contradicted each other. In early December, at the same time the Environment Commissioner, Dr Ian McPhail, released his damning State of the Environment report for Victoria, the Brumby Government supported the other bushfire report and a trebling of burns across our …
