LONG understood to be the lungs of the earth, the world’s great forests are much more important in the carbon cycle than was previously believed, soaking up one-third of all fossil fuel emissions, according to new research. Standing forests remove 2.4 billion tonnes of carbon a year from the atmosphere, almost five times Australia’s total …
WHEN is an environment group no longer an environment group? Seems an odd question to ask in a rural paper, but stick with me. Planet Ark, famous for encouraging us to recycle greetings cards to save trees, is set to endorse clearfell logging of native forest. The Australian Forestry Standard – an alternative logging certification …
THE Ombudsman has been asked to investigate VicForests for allowing thousands of tonnes of wood salvaged from the Black Saturday bushfires to be exported to China in breach of a government contract. The Wilderness Society has lodged a complaint with Ombudsman George Brouwer after VicForests confirmed a private company, Pinex Logging, had breached a contract …
The Australian public keeps changing its mind on climate change. No wonder our leaders don’t know where to step. Most Australians say they don’t want a carbon tax. So what do they want? After all, over the past year, Australians have transformed themselves from a citizenry worried about global warming, and asking for something to …
THE financial woes of the state government’s commercial forestry arm VicForests have deepened, with it forced to go back to Treasury for a bigger loan. VicForests’ line of credit with Treasury has doubled in three years, from $12.5 million in 2009 to $25 million this year, as the company struggles with cash-flow problems. The deepening …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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, …
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 …
