Proposed TRP Amendments - Lorraine Leach Healesville Resident Submission
Subject: VicForests application for amendments to its Timber Release Plans
To the Board of Directors,
Vicforests
April 7, 2010
Dear Directors,
As a long time member of the Healesville community and greatly concerned for the viability of our natural eco-systems, I am horrified at VicForest’s proposed changes to the 2006/07 – 2010/11 Timber Release Plan for Central, Benalla/Mansfield and the North East Forest Management Areas, primarily to satisfy a commitment that should never have been made, i.e. to supply cheap wood fibre to an insatiable woodchip industry.
The Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) is Victoria's lead government agency for sustainable management of water resources, climate change, bushfires, public land, forests and ecosystems. As such, DSE is obligated to uphold the Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act 1988 that provides for the preparation and revision of a Flora and Fauna Guarantee Strategy, which must set out how the flora and fauna conservation and management objectives are to be achieved.
This Strategy must also include proposals for guaranteeing the survival, for 250 years or into perpetuity, the abundance and evolutionary development in the wild of all taxa and communities of flora and fauna, ensuring the proper management of potentially threatening processes. The threat of the proposed changes is clearly indefensible.
DSE will be unable to fulfil its obligations under the Act if it allows these changes to proceed, given that these areas contain the only habitat for the endangered Leadbeaters Possum and that 30 percent of these tiny marsupials reside in State Forests that have already been devastated by the February 2009 fires.
The proposal by VicForests, as expected, makes no mention of fauna or flora, nor of the impact that clearfelling these new green coupes will have on them.
It is clear that complying with contractual obligations to supply cheap timber is the only obligation considered by VicForests. The organisation is incapable of environmental considerations – and I am gravely concerned that DSE is too, and that it will authorise these unsustainable demands, as it always has. Such authorisation will totally negate the statement on DSE’s website that a ‘key objective is to conserve native biodiversity’.
There has been no environmental audit since the 2009 fires and no new coupes, particularly ‘green’ coupes, should be approved until an audit and environmental impact statement is undertaken, with widespread community consultation inclusive of the tourism and viticulture industries that are far more important to the economic future of the communities in areas subjected to unsustainable logging.
I can advise you personally, after attending the recent Marysville Sustainability Expo on 28th March that there is an enormous amount of pent-up anger amongst local residents from Marysville, Buxton, Taggerty, Narbethong, Alexandra, Toolangi and even Eildon, against VicForests and the clearfelling of fire affected forests that is destroying any hope of the economic recovery of Marysville.
They are angry that VicForests are calling fire-affected but clearly recovering, living trees “fire killed” - and logging them regardless.
Other crucial factors that DSE and the Board of Directors of Vicforests must consider are:
- The high levels of carbon stored in the Mountain Ash, which is the targeted species - standing Mountain Ash store more carbon than any other trees on earth. Clearfelling them may come to be viewed in the not too distant future as a crime against humanity because of their ability to mitigate climate change when left standing.
- The Monitoring Annual Harvesting Report reveals that there is a huge 87% backlog in coupe regeneration after harvesting in the Central region alone. As climate change reduces the quantity and reliability of rainfall, successful regeneration of logged coupes can no longer be guaranteed, rendering it imperative to preserve our remaining native forests, particularly ‘green’ trees.
- Logging of wet forests has the potential to increase their susceptibility to more fires in the future (refer http://www.industrysearch.com.au/Features/Forest-logging-creates-fire-traps-academic-4857 ) at a time when climate change is also increasing the frequency and severity of wildfires. Professor David Lindenmayer has spent over 25 years researching the forests in South East Australia.
Sales commitments, and contractual harvest and haulage obligations are not an acceptable reason to demand any new ‘green’ coupes.
Indeed, so-called ‘salvage’ logging for cheap wood fibre is unsustainable after the devastating 2009 fires and our native forests must be allowed to recover naturally, if we are to pass on a sustainable environment to our children and grandchildren.
I call upon VicForests and DSE to consider their moral obligation to present and future generations – you do not have the right to endanger the common good for the unsustainable, short-lived financial benefit of a few.
Yours faithfully,
Lorraine Leach
Healesville 3777