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NAFI Documents Forest Policy Issues Managing our Forests Protecting our environment Protecting forest ecosystems Forests for industry Forests for wood products Forests for renewable energy |
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LibraryThe End of ForestryThree of the great casualties of the deep green religious war have been the truth, science and the death of economics as a force for good.By Roger Underwood As if I wasn't depressed enough already by the state of forestry in Australia, I have recently re-read George Orwell’s novel “1984”. Although written over 50 years ago it is still remarkably relevant to modern politics and public sector management. It is also very poignant to an Australian forester. To most of us, the end of forestry (at least as far as the native forests are concerned) is now in sight. 1984 is about the triumph of the revolution. The book is set in a "future" time when the forces of totalitarianism are in complete control. To survive in the new regime, it is necessary to accept the Party’s values without question, and to subjugate personal judgement and experience to the ruling ideology……. or die. There is a moving scene late in the book where the hero Winston Smith, who has fought long and hard against the ruthless and autocratic rule of The Party, and has suffered years of imprisonment and torture, suddenly comes to the realisation that he has another option. Instead of swimming against the current, he can turn around and float with it…. all he needs to do is accept everything that he has previously rejected. Two and two do make five! Freedom is Slavery! Yes! War is Peace, and Ignorance is Strength. Winston realises how easy it is. He needs only to surrender his lifetime beliefs, and everything else follows: no more fighting, no more bitterness, no more enemies! There are many foresters working in government agencies who now feel like this. Powerless to defend themselves within regimes dominated by environmentalist totalitarians, they have been forced to surrender and swim with the tide, or get out. The great ecomyth (that there is a terrible environmental crisis in native forests that can only be fixed by turning the whole area into national park), is no longer even debated. The revolution has triumphed. Reading "1984” and thinking about these things, led me to reflect on the rise and fall of the forestry profession in Australia, particularly with respect to its role in managing native forests for the widest possible public benefit. The forestry I was taught, and tried my best to put into practice, involved the active management of forests, based on the best science we had available at the time, with the aim of benefiting the widest possible spectrum of society in the long term. We accepted the need for conservation reserves, and we created them. We understood the value of forested catchments, and we protected them. We provided for wildlife and for recreation. But we also accepted the need to use forests for production of timber (which we regarded as an environmentally friendly commodity), and to view at least part of the forest estate as having economic and social values, as well as environmental. It was called “managing for multiple use”, and it was our religion. But the trouble with religions is that not everybody shares the same one. Thus, across history conflicts over religious beliefs have led to religious wars, and so it did here too. Our religion was unacceptable to the environmentalists, who had a different vision for the forests, and they declared war. In the end, they proved to be more uncompromising, warlike and fanatical, they were more cunning propagandists, and they more skillfully exploited the weak points of the political system to their advantage. They won, and are now calling the shots. As in all wars, there have been casualties. And, as is always the case, was first casualty was the truth. The environmentalists said what they liked, so long as it supported their cause and irrespective of whether it was true. They chose some key elements of forest management which they knew could be twisted to enormous advantage, notably clearfelling, woodchipping, and controlled burning, and they used the power of the media to portray these as fearsome beasts, wreaking havoc on an unprotected and virginal forest. Popular and gullible business and sporting personalities were recruited as spokespersons for the propaganda campaign, and they spoke their lines like skilled actors. The journalism "profession" was totally taken in by this, thrilling to the stories of disaster with which they were fed, and rubbing their hands with glee over episodes of manufactured violence and conf1ict. True to the greatest tenet of totalitarianism, the environmentalists justified any means to achieve their end, and this enabled them to play with the truth as a kitten plays with a ball of woo1. Foresters (especially those who were public servants) had no idea how to deal with this, and were left bobbing in the wake of the Green Blitzkrieg. We were the detritus of war. The second great casualty was science. It was abandoned by the environmentalists because it failed to give answers which supported the mythology. No matter how hard they tried, they could not get science to support their propaganda. Time and again the public was told that clearfelling, woodchipping and prescribed burning was causing extinction of flora and fauna, the drying up of wetlands, pollution of rivers and the air, net production of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, global warming, salinity, desertification of forests, destruction of tourism and so on. These statements would be issued as press releases, and then regurgitated by journalists with spaniel-like fidelity. The only trouble was that the actual research in the field gave exactly the opposite results. The flora survived logging, the wildlife returned to regrowth forests, wetlands and streams were unaffected, and no new deserts could be found in forest zones. Fire turned out to be a natural element of the environment and any given fire regime could be shown to benefit some element of the ecosystem and disbenefit others. Tourism actually flourished in regrowth forests. As far as could be determined, there has not been a single species of plant or animal which could be said to have become extinct as a result of clearfelling, woodchipping or controlled burning. So science was simply abandoned and the research branded by the environmentalists as "flawed" because it gave the wrong answers. A similar thing happened in the USA where the Spotted Owl, once the almighty symbol and champion species of the environmentalists, and the cause of many timber communities being shut down, is now known to live very happily in regrowth forests. The Owl has also been abandoned. The other reason for abandoning science was the discovery that it didn’t matter. To their pleasant surprise, the environmentalists realised that the media and the public were not interested in science anyway – what they wanted was sensation, conflict, and disaster. Bad news stories, no matter how fatuous, were always preferred to good news stories, especially by young journalists with no appreciation of the wider picture, or of the historical background. The final great casualty was the death of economics as a force for community good. The forest management system which I practiced was one which generated revenue which the government could direct elsewhere for the good of society. It provided jobs, regional economic benefit and a useful home-grown commodity. This has now been replaced by a system which is its mirror image, The “New Forestry” absorbs funds redirected to forests from elsewhere in the community, is designed to punish regional economies and is one from which jobs are being lost. This change has been accepted without a whimper by the Australian public, the media and by academics. There is a good explanation of course. Most of these people live very comfortably in the suburbs, and the changes which have been introduced in the forested areas do not touch their prosperous and contented lives. Thus has the New Forestry and its underlying mythology triumphed across Australia. I am reminded of the statement by British Prime Minister William Pitt, after yet another of Napoleon's victories on the continent: “Roll up the map of Europe. We will not need it for another 20 years." The explanation for all this can be reached by taking the analogy between environmentalism and religion one step further. All religions are underpinned by mythology and this usually is superficially simple, but contains hidden messages and ironical twists. The latter are essential, because they add the touch of mystery and unquestioning spiritualism necessary for a good religion. This is demonstrated by looking at the following statements and attached ironies taken directly from the environmentalists’ dogma for Australia’s forests: • Australia’s native forests have been destroyed - but are still there and need to be saved; • The last of the Old Growth forest is under threat from timber cutting - but it is also in reserves where timber cutting is banned; • Forestry has caused the extinction of rare species - although these mostly survive only in the forest and must therefore be protected from clearfelling., woodchipping and controlled burning; • Timber cutting destroys biodiversity - but regrowth forests have such high conservation value that they must never be logged; • Timber cutting is responsible for salinity - although all the streams in the cutover forest run fresh, and therefore must be protected from any further timber cutting; • Prescribed burning by foresters destroys the forest ecosystem – but State forests subjected to prescribed burning for decades are still “pristine” and must be urgently transferred to national park. • The conversion of State forests to national parks means there is not enough timber to supply industry - which proves that past cutting rates were unsustainable; • The community must be in charge of the forests, not the professionals - but the professionals should be held accountable when things go wrong. • Doing nothing achieves everything. "Nature" can look after itself - therefore endangered species are better off in an unmanaged conservation reserve than in managed State forest; • Management is not needed on the ground, only at the highest level i.e. in the city where environmentalists can sit on authorities and commissions and draw up management plans which specify "no management". This dogma has been very effectively communicated. The credit for this must go to the media, which (without comprehending the degree to which it had been manipulated by the environmentalists) developed a nice double whammy. In the first place, only pictures of freshly logged areas were ever shown, and these preferably included images of innocent primary school-aged children, weeping to the sounds of sweetly melodious flutes. Pictures of regrowth forests were banned from newspapers and the television screens, except for older regrowth, which was called old growth. In the second place, no proper analysis of the issues, or critical examination of the ecomyths were ever attempted – journalists invariably accepted uncritically all the views and statements of the environmentalists, and delivered these up to readers on a plate. Criticism by journalists was directed only at the views of the "vandals" from the forestry profession and timber workers (lumped together by West Australian journalist Tony Rees under the sneering epithet of “Greedies"). We were also subjected to the supreme irony (completely over the head of their editors and journalists) of Australian newspapers printed on newsprint made from woodchips, being stridently anti-woodchipping. The environmentalist's campaign of lies and propaganda was brilliantly successful. Most Australians I meet these days are firmly convinced that our forests are on their last legs. Some of them are so convinced of the need to help save the last remnant gum tree that they give good money to environmental groups, and vote the Green card on election day. They have in their mind a mental image of our forest areas as a vast, smoking cleancut, gushing salty water, and littered with the corpses of rare marsupials, while evil-looking forestry officers pace about smirking, waiting for the smoke to dissipate so that they can plant up a monoculture of some commercially useless exotic species. When I try to tell them the truth is otherwise, they simply don't believe me. I might as well be an astronomer addressing a meeting of the Flat Earth Society. The other reason for the environmentalist’s success was the simplicity of their goal. How easy it is to oppose something, compared to the difficulty of making something work! Opposition is gloriously black and white and intellectually undemanding - it requires no thinking, research, analysis or creativity. If you don't like something, for example prescribed burning for fuel reduction, you simply insist that it be stopped. No compromise arrangement is acceptable. The alternative approach, which is what foresters were trying to do, was to try to carry out prescribed burning, because it was known to be an effective way of minimising the threat of bushfires, but to make it work, taking into account all the various elements of' the system, the research findings, the demands of nature and of the community, and so on. I now realise we didn’t stand a chance: attempting to manage a complex operation like forest fire control is tricky enough by itself, because of the way system elements interact, and because from time to time mistakes will be made as you move along the learning curve. But to explain what you are doing in the face of critics whose only solution is “stop it or you will go blind" is impossible. I am reminded of one of Klaus von Clausewitz's axioms of war: whoever really knows what they want, has the edge. It is far easier to know you want something not to happen, than to know how to make something happen, especially if that something, like prescribed burning is inherently complex. The response of the State governments to the mythological crisis in our forests (and here I am mainly talking about WA, NSW and Victoria) has also been very interesting. As well as engineering the crisis, the environmentalists have also come up with the solution, and this has been adopted unquestioningly by governments of the day. An elected government these days knows on which side its bread is buttered: the greens put them into power, and will keep them there if they behave themselves. The Green Solution (adopted with unquestioning loyalty by governments put into office by green preferences) is to save the forest by turning State Forests into national parks and wilderness areas, and then withdrawing management, or handing responsibility for management over to local community groups who have ideals but no resources. The forester’s credo of "Management for Multiple Use” has been replaced by that of the politician: "Management To Appease the Greens, Get Elected and Stay in Office”. This response is not surprising. The environmental activists now calling the shots from behind the Ministerial thrones are consummate political manipulators – but they are not trained, nor do they have any experience in practical land management. Furthermore they know better than anyone the dangers of getting involved in complex management issues or of attempting sophisticated land management in which the satisfaction of multiple objectives is attempted - they saw how vulnerable this made the forestry profession. It has been a key tactic of the greens to avoid offering up real working alternative systems, and to shy away from making a commitment to any particular management approach. They understand that it is easier to confine themselves to criticising the status quo and then to do nothing, thus ensuring they are not exposed in turn to the very sort of criticism they have been dishing out. Furthermore, the option of tackling a "problem" by active management does not fit within their key dogma that "doing anything is always worse than doing nothing", a shocking perversion of the Precautionary Principle. Nowhere is this better demonstrated than in the green approach to bushfire management. Under the leadership of the green bureaucrats who now run the nation’s national parks and wildlife services (who are responsible for bushfire management in most of the nation’s forests these days), nothing is done until disaster strikes. Then the disaster is blamed on someone or something else – it’s the fault of the drought, or the arsonists, or the incompetent bushfire brigades, or the hot weather resulting from global warming, or practically anything. And in any case, if a few hundred thousand hectares of nice forest get incinerated, why, that’s just dear old Mother Nature at work! The green logic seems to run like this: (a) its not our fault and (b) why worry? In a couple of hundred years you will hardly notice there had been a fire at all. Some aspects of the New Forestry in Australia make sad reading to a forester. For example: • Across most of Australia these days, the State’s forest management strategy no longer applies to all the forests - it only now applies to the remnant State forests and Timber Reserves. The rest of the forest is managed according to plans for individual reserves, drawn up without coordination by different planning teams or local community groups. This means that there is no longer an overarching strategic approach to issues like fire and disease management, pest, weed and feral animal control, water resource management and access. Forest policy has been so splintered across tenures, agencies and community groups as to have become both incomprehensible and meaningless. • Increasingly the State forest services are being led by people without practical forest management experience, without any training in silviculture or bushfire management, and with no perspective on the influences of, and interactions between social history and land management. • State Ministers for the Environment, Forests and Natural Resources have set up forest management advisory bodies dominated by people with no experience in the bush. This means that Ministerial advice on critical issues like bushfire management is based entirely on academic or ideological perspectives, not real-world ones. • Professional foresters are no longer recruited by State forest services, or are recruited in numbers way below the rate of loss through transfer to other agencies, retirement or redundancy. A large number of Australian professional foresters are no longer working in forestry, having been drawn off into park management or specialist work, or are working only in the plantation side of the job. • The former system in which young foresters were mentored by experienced foresters, which had operated successfully since the 1920s, no longer exists. Forestry is no longer a career, to which people devote their entire lives. The passing down of forest lore, professional heritage, forestry traditions, even humorous bush yarns, has lapsed. This means that the store of corporate knowledge, silvicultural and fire control artistry and bush wit and wisdom in agencies is steadily running down. As a result wheels must be reinvented and mistakes repeated, and for those on the inside, the whole business has become a grim struggle to satisfy insatiable masters. • Professional foresters are steadily being replaced by non-graduate foresters, or by non-foresters as the managers of forest districts and regions. In the most extreme example, the position of Director of Forests in Western Australia is now filled by a former television newsreader. Worse, in some areas the old forestry districts, for so long the hub of day-to-day forest planning, operations and community relations at the local level, are also disappearing, as the inexorable process of “restructuring” proceeds toward some unknown or ill-defined administrative objective. I sympathise with (but do not support) Australian foresters who now find themselves, like Winston Smith in Orwell’s 1984, wondering whether to keep fighting the flood-tide of lies, twisted mythology and mal-administration, or simply to give in, turn around and float with the current. The struggle to get the real story across has been very tiring, and there have been no rewards. Moreover, there have been no thanks. In WA, for example, the Premier boasted that his “saving” of the old growth forests was “the greatest conservation achievement in the history of the State”. He failed to observe that the forests "saved" were there because foresters saved them from alienation for agricultural development many years ago, protected them from fire and disease over a period of nearly 80 years before he came on the scene and even in some cases regenerated them after timber cutting. Unless there is a major regime change in the near future, continuing in a job in government forestry in Australia means the inevitable participation in disasters. These disasters, the big bushfires which rip the guts out of the forests, kill firefighters and burn into farms and towns, are regarded by experienced foresters as both inevitable and on-going. The equation is unrelenting - fuels are accumulating while at the same time fire management expertise and firefighting resources are dwindling. Worse than this, it is the men and women in the forest districts who have to risk their lives fighting these fires, and who are so often judged, blamed and found to be incompetent every time the catastrophe is realised. Our political masters have fashioned a system in which it is impossible to find who is accountable at Ministerial level, and will always try to find the scape-goats down in the agency. The inner-city greenies and academics who manipulated the political system so that it became impossible for responsible bushfire mitigation programs to be implemented, are also never found to be accountable. They mostly become invisible when bushfires rip the forests to bits. This contrasts with their activity in situations where they can take the high moral ground. If someone inadvertently cuts down a tree in a stream reserve, or a log truck runs over a single possum, journalists are deluged with their pathetic bleating, and another forest officer or timber worker is humiliated in the media. My advice to government foresters who are tempted to turn and swim with the current therefore, is that this particular river has a very precipitous waterfall just around the bend. Going over the falls onto the rocks below will be no more fun than trying to keep swimming upstream. The most ironical thing about the New Forestry is that Australia’s Old Growth Forests are now actually less secure than they once were. In the leave-it-to-nature systems now being introduced, mature forests so carefully preserved from logging are being burnt by high intensity fires, and the old trees are dying and then are left to rot and fall. In some cases, nature will ensure that they are replaced by even-aged seedlings, but it will still be a worse result overall than if the areas had been logged and regenerated, because of the other costs associated with the original reservation. This is a bitter tragedy, because it could have been avoided, and because a great many unemployed timber and forest workers will have suffered needlessly. I am not saying here that all forests should be logged. I support the need for reserves. But the failure by current State governments in Australia to follow up the national parking of Old Growth Forests with effective bushfire management is a criminal negligence. It will, in my view, be looked back on by future Australians as one of the nation’s most infamous conservation bungles. But on the other hand, if the immediate calamity is bad enough, if our new national parks and towns continue to be burned, and if some poor crew of firefighters lose their lives trying to escape a wildfire in a wilderness area in which the access roads were closed to satisfy the demands of a few bushwalkers, maybe the pendulum will commence a downward swing. Then maybe some people with real practical experience (if any remain) will get a say in things. Maybe….. maybe by 2084. |
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