THE people of the Latrobe Valley are right to be dismayed by the looming fate of the Australian Sustainable Hardwoods mill at Heyfield. Gippsland has long been the centre of the hardwood timber industry in Victoria, and the hardwood timber industry has long played a major part in Gippsland’s development and in its prosperity. The …
The impending closure of Heyfield sawmill has pitted senior federal ministers against each other, a premier, farmers and conservationists. By Karen Middleton. In the federal government, Josh Frydenberg is, among other things, the minister for protecting wildlife and saving trees. In the agriculture portfolio, his Nationals colleague Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce is effectively the …
How ironic that the timber industry chose March 21st, International Forest Day, to barricade Parliament with logging trucks and demand accelerated logging of the dwindling mature forests of the Central Highlands! When the rest of the world was reflecting on the benefits of forest wilderness for people, for economies and for the planet itself, we …
Josh Frydenberg’s actions belie his words and show a disregard for the significance of forests to our survival, writes Dr Oisin Sweeney. ON THE MORNING of 21 March, I got a call from a journalist in response to a media release our organisation, the National Parks Association of NSW (NPA), had put out for International …
The Coalition Government can’t resist the logging industry, subsidising the destruction of forests as “carbon neutral” at the expense of pesky wind, solar or other annoying competitors, writes Frances Pike. SUBSTITUTING wood biomass, burning it with coal and calling it “renewable energy”, just because trees regrow, doesn’t make it carbon neutral. Instantly, the combustion emits …
An independent scientific assessment into the conservation value of Victoria’s most-loved tall forests reveals almost half are unprotected and open to logging. The report debunks industry myths that more than 90% of these forests are somehow protected, they are not. The report reveals that, based on tenure alone, the forest industry has access to at …
Originally Published at http://www.ecoshout.org.au/are-you-sick-logging-industry-spin
Matt Ruchel, member of the Forest Industry Task Force and our executive director, explains why sawmills and the pulp and paper industry don’t understand how forests work. Forests are living ecosystems, not magic puddings, and cannot supply something that doesn’t exist. The recent declaration by VicForests, the state government’s logging agency, that there is insufficient …
LIKE politician Danny O’Brien, I’m angry about the Australian Sustainable Hardwoods sawmill debacle. Very angry. This disaster should have been avoided. Successive governments, of all persuasions, have badly mismanaged timber resources. A sawmill company is now gaming the system, demanding access to timber it knows is not there. Sawmill workers will be losers. But so …
Just because it’s been done before, doesn’t mean it should be done again. European colonisation brought logging into the Bellingen Shire and throughout Australia. It was the keystone for large-scale development providing both housing and an agricultural base. But more than 200 years later, a comprehensive review of 150 scientific papers on land-clearing and rainfall, conducted by Dailan …
