600 YEARS OLD!
A hundred years ago the excuse was ignorance for destroying ancient forests. Now the only excuse is pure, cold-blooded, merciless politics, union corruption and political donations to the ALP.
In March 2009, it was confirmed that an old growth tree cut down on Brown Mountain was older than Christopher Columbus and was young when Joan of Arc rode around France. The radiocarbon dating results from the New Zealand laboratory showed there was a 68% chance that the piece of wood EEG took from the stump was growing between 1435 and 1490 AD (and that wasn’t from the centre of the stump). The tree was 550-600 years old!
This significant find turns current theories on tree ages on their heads. Until now, foresters guessed large trees were 200-250 years old. The tree sampled had about a 10 metres girth at 1.4m above ground level. The larger trees, now stumps, could have been growing when Marco Polo sailed the oceans. Measuring in at 12 or more metres means that these giants could have survived 800-1000 years of fires, storms and drought, only to be taken out by a chainsaw-wielding homo-sapien in 2009 in just under an hour.
And would you believe that this ancient great grandmother began to resprout just weeks after having been savagely decapitated. The optimistic new shoots were killed off totally in April when a hot management burn incinerated the remaining life out of the once magnificent stand of ancient forest.
Such mammoth trees have taken centuries to grow and store their carbon. No bureaucrat had better utter that word “sustainable”within my hearing!
When this astonishing discovery was brought to the attention of our state government and the question asked if they will be reassessing their prescriptions for large tree protection, the answer – in writing – was no. They still intend to keep knocking over ancient trees to maintain that “balance” between the environment and jobs!
Mr Brumby promised to protect the “last significant stands of old growth forest” in 2006. Since then, hundreds of hectares have been annihilated. If this new discovery doesn’t make our forests’ significant and worth protecting, what more evidence does Mr Brumby need?