Blasphemy from a forester
Until he returned recently to Australia, expatriate Jim Douglas had spent the last eight years as the World Bank’s Forests Adviser in Washington. Writing a guest editorial in “Australian Forestry”, he had this to say about Australia’s forests:
“I will go out on a limb here and suggest that the conservation, recreation and carbon values of the Australian natural forest resource are worth more than its log value on net present value terms. Sustainable forest management projects should be evaluated with full incorporation of the resultant loss of non wood values; the formula should not be based merely on a technical estimate of maintaining log volume increment over the stand”.