Listen Closely Australia: Your Forests Are Being Felled
4/12/99
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Title: Listen Closely Australia: Your Forests Are Being Felled
Source: The Age
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: April 12, 1999
Byline: Claire Miller
cmiller@theage.fairfax.com.au
THE Federal Government recently released a CD-ROM called Mission:
Australia, which is intended to teach schoolchildren about the
delicate balancing act of sustainable development. I took it home and
gave it to my eight-year-old daughter for a test run.
The principles are simple. The player selects an ecosystem, such as
city, farm or wetland, examines its environmental troubles and then
applies one of several suggested solutions.
A scoreboard tallies up how the selected solution for, say, waste
disposal affects economic prosperity and environmental wellbeing now
and in the future.
My daughter chose the mountains ecosystem but had barely got her head
around the implications for pygmy possums of building roads into
alpine resorts before I asked her to go back to the home board.
``There's no forest ecosystem,'' I said. ``So?'' she said. ``Every
broad ecosystem in Australia is represented there except forests,'' I
said. ``So? Can I play now?'' ``No. Type in forests and see what it
comes up with.'' ``But you said I could play this game!'' ``Yeah,
just a minute - type in forests.''
The information bank came up with agroforestry. Same answer if my
daughter typed in trees or any other various forest elements that I
could think of. I kicked her off the computer with a vague promise
that she could save the planet later, and sat down to thoroughly
examine the game.
Generally speaking, Mission: Australia makes an honest fist of
complex environmental issues, albeit with a few curious aspects - I
wonder if poisoning is really the best answer to the rabbit scourge,
for instance. But what stands out most is not the admirable breadth
of issues dealt with, but the one utterly left out: native forests.
It leaves the unwitting player unaware that forests are ecosystems in
their own right.
There appears to be no conspiracy, just a massive oversight. The CD
is an initiative of the Department of Communications, Information
Technology and the Arts, as part of its Australia on CD series. The
content was determined by, among others, Landcare Australia, whose
media and communications manager, Brooke Lewis, explained: ``If
forests have been excluded, it wasn't by decision. It is a mistake we
have made.''
Maybe it is not such a surprising mistake. In recent years, forests
appear to have becom Australia's forgotten environmental issue.
Once, a political party's stance on forests was perceived as capable
of influencing elections. But since the coalition won federal office
in 1996, forests have all but disappeared from public view.
I doubt that the public no longer cares, or is satisfied that the
ideal solution is the regional forest agreements process being
implemented by the Federal Government. I doubt that the public knows
enough to decide whether the RFAs are indeed a reasonable compromise
between green and industry demands. Politicians, bruised over the
years by brawls about forests, appear content to leave it that way.
But all being quiet doesn't necessarily mean all is well. Many
aspects of the RFAs deserve proper public debate. For instance, the
RFA legislation before the Senate will give the agreements the force
of law even before most have been signed. Unlike other laws,
agreements will then be able to be changed at ministerial level,
without being subject to parliamentary scrutiny.
All forests covered by an RFA will be exempt from Commonwealth
environmental protection laws, export licence controls and greenhouse
gas inventories. Industry can also claim compensation if future
governments with different priorities reduce timber volumes.
Considering that the processes for determining critical ecological
factors such as sustainable timber yield could be described as opaque
at best, the RFA legislation appears likely only to enshrine secrecy.
Avoiding more potential electoral unpleasantness over forests also
suits the industry as it battles to find new markets now that
plantation timber dominates the supply of bulk construction material.
Witness the industry's heavy-handed response to the book Forest-
Friendly Building Timbers, which the BBC Hardware chain supported
until bowing to pressure and threats of legal action by the National
Association of Forest Industries. The book tells consumers how to
build and renovate houses without using native forest timber; it says
logging in forests contributes to mass species extinction. The
association says such assertions amount to misleading information
about a competitor.
Yet similar claims about logging have been a staple of green
literature for years without anyone being threatened with legal
action. Maybe the publisher, Alan Gray, put his finger on the reason
for the industry's sudden hypersensitivity when he said this was the
first time such a book had had the potential to reach a mass,
mainstream audience. Legislative regulation is slow and subject to
political expediency, whereas winning over consumers to a cause can
swiftly hit an industry where it hurts - in the hip pocket.
There is an existential question that asks: if a tree falls in the
forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?
Maybe it's time again for the public to get out into the forest and
start listening.