WESTERN AUSTRALIA
Karri on logging?
In the south-western corner of Australia, the fate of some of the worlds tallest trees is currently being contested. Old growth karri forest is being clearfelled by the Bunnings company under logging plans established by the Western Australian state government department in charge of natural resources, CALM (Conservation and Land Management). Opposing them are several groups of committed forest activists utilising an ingenious variety of non-violent direct actions to slow down and stop the logging.
There is an Action Request at the end of this article
The karri (Eucalyptus diversicolor) is the second tallest hardwood tree in the world (after its near relative, the mountain ash - Eucalyptus regnans - of Victoria and Tasmania), growing to heights of 90 metres (295 feet) and over 400 years of age. The karri and other giant eucalypts of southwest western Australia, such as jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata), marri (Eucalyptus calophylla) and red tingle (Eucalyptus jacksonii), are geographically isolated from the forests of eastern Australia by several thousand kilometres of desert and scrub, and consequently are biologically unique, harbouring a wide range of endemic plants and wildlife species. Before the arrival of Europeans, these forests covered about 3,600,000 hectares in the southwest of the state (1.4% of Western Australias land area), but now only 600,000 hectares (16%) remain as old growth - the remainder has either been cleared for farmland or logged and is now covered in second growth forest or plantations.
At present 15,000 hectares of old growth are being clearfelled each year, and 350,000 of the remaining 600,000 hectares of old growth are available for logging, including 50,000 hectares of karri forest. Conservation groups have been campaigning against the logging of the remaining old growth forest for a number of years, but have had limited success to date. A new national park - Shannon, covering 53,000 hectares - was established by CALM in the heart of the karris range in 1988, but much of the area had previously been logged and now contains regrowth forest.
More recently, an 8 month non-violent blockade in the 4,000 hectare Giblett forest in 1997 prevented any clearfelling from taking place there then, and the area has had a temporary reprieve until the results of Western Australias Regional Forest Agreement (RFA) are made public - this is scheduled to happen in June 1999. The current area of contention is in the Wattle State Forest, which is strategically situated between Shannon and Mount Frankland National Parks. Unlike much of Shannon National Park, the karri forest there is old growth, and if protected it would form an ideal link between the existing parks, thereby providing a much larger contiguous area of protected forest.
However, CALM has other plans for the Wattle, and 2 coupes -Wattle 1 and 2, totalling 36 hectares, were logged in November and December 1998. Karri trees almost 3 metres (9.8 feet) in diameter at the base were felled, and the forest left as a flattened wasteland, with 85% of the harvest (and 99% of the marri which is felled) scheduled to be converted to low grade woodchips and shipped to Japan. Although some karri timber is used as sawlogs, the fate of many of these 400 + year old giants is to be ground up for woodchips and made into cardboard boxes for consumer products such as televisions, hifi systems etc which are used once and then discarded, adding to the mountains of rubbish in landfill sites around the world (the chips are not of sufficient quality to be used for higher grade end uses such as glossy paper).
During the logging there were continuous actions by forest activists, including tree-sitting in platforms high in the giant trees and people padlocking themselves to heavy machinery, resulting in over 50 arrests. While these forest rescuers (a term they prefer to protesters) were unable to stop the logging, they did slow it down, and gained considerable support in Western Australia - doctors, lawyers and business people sponsored 2 full page ads in the Western Australian newspaper, in support of an end to the logging of old growth forest.
After the Christmas and New Year break, logging was due to start in the 110 hectare Wattle 3 block, and the forest rescuers were dug in - literally - to prevent any more ancient karri being felled. On each of the 3 access roads into the Wattle 3 site, old cars have been dug into the ground across the roads, usually where the road crosses a stream, so that logging vehicles cannot simply bypass the blockade. A small hole has been cut through the bottom of each car, and through this protrudes a pipe which has been set in concrete buried in the ground underneath. The pipe is just big enough so that an activist lying in the car can put their arm down it and then, using a heavy duty clip attached to a chain on their arm, they can lock on to a steel pin which is set horizontally in the concrete at the bottom of the pipe. Using this method, the activists can only be removed by having the whole car cut away from around them and the concrete dug up - work which takes the police at least 8 or 9 hours per activist.
Other activists were ready to occupy platforms 35 metres up in the largest karris - too high for any cherry-pickers to be used to remove them. However, this tactic only had limited success in Wattle 1 and 2 - the loggers simply left the occupied trees and one or two around them when they clearfelled everything else, so they now stand as sad sentinels to their fallen brethren, and are exposed and vulnerable to windthrow - their future is far from certain.
While the activists have relatively good relationships with the loggers and the police, they face a formidable array of repressive and Orwellian legislation which has been put in place by the state government, in a vain attempt to stifle the direct action campaigns. One law has made it an offence for anyone to be in a State Forest (ie publicly-owned forest land) between 9 pm and 6 am, and while this could have serious implications for people such as fishermen and campers, in practice it is only used against the forest activists. One woman had been fined $300 for camping in the state forest during the Giblett campaign in 1997. She refused, on principle, to pay the fine, and so now is suffering from another piece of repressive legislation: in order to avoid the martyrdom of activists being imprisoned for not paying their fines (and the subsequent publicity and public sympathy this would generate), the government has instituted a cunning punishment for non-payment of fines under $500 - confiscation of the persons drivers licence. This confiscation is indefinite until the fine is paid, therefore having a much longer effect on any non-paying activists than a short prison sentence, and it also goes unnoticed and unpublicised in the media.
The third element of the governments legal arsenal against the activists is the declaration of logging zones as Temporary Control Areas (TCAs). This is typically done just before logging of a forest coupe is due to start, and covers a period of 90 days, during which any unauthorised persons entering the area are liable to a fine of $2,000. This time period is long enough for the loggers to clearfell the area and sanitise it, by burning all the branches they leave behind, and replanting it with a regimented monocultural tree-farm of karri seedlings, planted in straight lines at regular spacings - a far cry from the biological diversity of the forests they replace.
This lost biodiversity includes Baudins cockatoo (Calyptorhynchus baudinii), a species growing up to 60 cm. long, and which is endemic to the karri and marri forests of the southwest of Western Australia. These birds mate for life and research has indicated that they always return to the same nest site - a hollow in a mature karri tree - each year. Thus the felling of old growth karri forests means that the Baudins cockatoos living in them are deprived of their nesting sites, and therefore will probably never reproduce again.
Logging of old growth karri forest also permanently displaces the other fauna which lives in the forest, including the quokka (a small wallaby), the mardo (a small carnivorous marsupial) and the quenda, or southern brown bandicoot, which is a threatened species in Western Australia. While CALM justifies the logging by stating that such animals escape into the forest surrounding their clearcuts, this naively assumes that the neighbouring forests are empty of such species and therefore have vacant space for these logging refugees to flee into. In practice, of course, the same species will almost certainly have already occupied all the suitable sites in the surrounding areas and therefore the actual outcome is a net decrease in the populations of the affected wildlife.
In the light of this, and the loss of these unique giant trees, it is not just the forest rescuers which are speaking out against CALM and its exploitation of the forests. In December 1998, the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency - an independent watchdog body set up by the state government to monitor the effectiveness of governmenrt departments such as CALM), issued a report which was highly critical of CALM on a number of counts. Chief amongst these is the overcutting of jarrah by 50% - apparently one reason for this is that jarrah grows on soils with aluminium deposits underneath them, and these are being eyed by mining interests, which are a powerful industry in Western Australia. The report concluded that CALMs karri and jarrah logging operations are not sustainable, and called for reforms.
Regrettably, however, the state government has not acted upon the EPA reports conclusions, which are contested by CALM, but instead has chosen to appoint an adjudicator, to determine which viewpoint - the EPA report, or CALMs - is correct! CALM was established in 1984, when the government department responsible for conservation was merged with the Forestry Department, in what can only be described as a cynical example of putting the fox in charge of the hen house. CALM is expected to meet most of its running costs out of timber royalties, so its conservation work inevitably plays second fiddle to the logging it is responsible for - hence the reason old growth karri is being logged in the Wattle State Forest, while the logged areas of karri, such as the Shannon referred to above, and the Boranup Forest further west, are made into National Parks.
Even the use of the innocuous-sounding acronym, CALM, for a department responsible for the razing of the giant karri trees, can be seen as an attempt by the state government to soothe away peoples concerns about the loss of their unique ancient forests. Meanwhile, CALM is currently negotiating a new 6 year contract for 680,000 tonnes of chiplogs a year with Bunnings, the main logging company in the state. Timber royalties can be as low as Aus. $9 a tonne for charcoal grade jarrah and Aus. $18 a tonne for woodchip grade karri/marri - figures which are lower than in many Third World countries, and which effectively represent massive government subsidies of the logging operations.
It makes no sense at all for Western Australia, one of the wealthiest areas in the world, to be selling its remaining priceless karri forest heritage, which after all only covers 0.24% of its 2.5 million square kilometre territory, at prices which cost the taxpayers money! So far, the forest rescuers have been successful in preventing any logging in the Wattle 3 coupe - no attempt has been made to fell any trees there since Christmas.
Support for their campaign continues to grow throughout Western Australia, and in February 300 business people gathered outside the state parliament buildings in Perth and jammed the governments telephone lines with their mobile phones, in protest at the logging of old growth karri. This reflects widespread frustration that public opinion about the forests is being ignored, in favour of the interests of powerful logging companies - an opinion poll carried out in July 1998 by AMR Quantum Harris (pollsters to the Department of the Premier and the Cabinet) showed that 9 out of 10 Western Australians dont want their old growth forests clearfelled. With this rise in broad-based sentiment on behalf of the forests, the pressure is growing for a change in the governments attitudes towards the forests.
However, the incumbent government is quite entrenched in its position, and in any case it is unlikely that anything will happen until the results of the RFA (Regional Forest Agreement) process are made public in June this year. This process has been underway for almost 3 years and was orginally set up by the Federal Government to solve the problem of the controversies surrounding logging of old growth forests in almost all the Australian states. When finalised, it will take the form of a 20 year contract between the state and federal governments which specifies how much forest can be logged, how much protected etc. I
n practice however, the process in Western Australia (and in the other states as well, to a lesser or greater extent) has been manipulated by the state government and the logging and mining interests to tilt the outcome very much in favour of business as usual for the clearfelling of the forests. Initially, the Western Australian conservation movement tried to be fully involved in the RFA process, but were blocked in this by the state government. As the full extent of the bureaucratic machinations became apparent, such as falsely boosting the amount of forest in conservation reserves by counting narrow strips of vegetation left along roads and streams after logging, and forcing changes to, or suppressing, consultants reports which came up with findings and recommendations counter to the governments wishes, the conservation groups withdrew from the RFA process completely.
Instead, they have drawn up their own proposals for a comprehensive conservation reserve system, which would substantially expand the area of protected old growth forest, end all woodchipping and clearfelling, and at the same time would allow for a sustainable logging industry based on plantation harvesting and high-value end use logging of some state forest areas. The attitudes of the conservation groups and forest rescuers on the one hand and of the government and the logging industry on the other represent two different world views with regard to the natural world around us.
As such, they are not unique to Western Australia, but are in fact a microcosm of what is taking place all over the planet. Will the fate of the worlds last old growth forests be clearfelling for conversion to wasteful packaging material, in a final orgiastic spasm of our rapacious consumer culture, or will they be protected, to continue their evolutionary role as the habitat for all their constituent species, and for future generations of humans to enjoy?
In Western Australia, the forest destroyers are some of the best paid workers in the state, whilst the forest rescuers are unpaid volunteers, often with no possessions to their name, but a total commitment to the survival of these unique forests. The fate of the last karri forests, containing some of the tallest hardwod trees in the world, depends on their ability to succeed in the current struggle.
How you can help:
Please send polite letters, expressing concern for the fate of the karri forests, and calling for the ending of all old growth forest logging in Western Australia, to:-
The Premier,
Hon. Richard Court MLA,
Parliament House,
Perth,
Western Australia 6000,
Australia.
Fax: +61-8-9322-1213
or via the World Wide Web at www.premier.wa.gov.au/Please send letters of support or donations to:-
Western Australia Forest Alliance, c/o Conservation Council, 79 Stirling Street, Perth, Western Australia 6000, Australia. Email: conswa@iinet.net.au
Web Site: www.wafa.org.au
Source: Article written by: Alan Watson Featherstone (Alan Watson Featherstone is the Executive Director of Trees for Life, an award-winning conservation charity working to restore the Caledonian Forest in Scotland, and the producer of the Trees for Life Calendar and Diary each year. He is currently on a 6 month sabbatical with his wife and son in Australia).