This is a scab:.

These are Forestry Scabs:

Forestry Scabs of clearfelled Tasmanian endangered old-growth forests

Google Earth reveals the clearfell truth behind the Forestry propaganda

(Click satellite image to enlarge – note environmental protestors’ ObserverTree)

To download Google Earth software (93MB), go to:   ^http://www.google.com/earth/index.html

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This is an aerial close up of Forestry Scabs:

Forestry Scabs pocking the endangered Upper Florentine Forest, 2011

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This is the ‘Forestry Plunder’

Old Growth which in the case of the Styx Valley, Forestry Tasmania labelled ‘Coupe SX015‘

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Recall 2006:   ‘Forests protected: another tall story‘

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[Source: ‘Forests protected: another tall story”, in Tasmanian Times, 20060327, ^http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php/article/forests-protected-another-tall-story]

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Two days after the election the police moved into the Styx Valley to apprehend a small band of protesters. An arrest was made and a 70-metre-tall tree holding a protest platform was blown up! Cable logging was set to resume in the Styx Valley of the Giants.

Yet last year both the state and federal Governments claimed that they had saved the giant trees of the Styx. Indeed, they claimed to have resolved the entire forests debate.

This week’s developments have given the lie to those claims. Not only is logging making a comeback in the Styx; it is also about to start in parts of the Weld and Upper Florentine that have never before seen a chainsaw. Other key areas are likely to follow, from the Tarkine in the far north-west, where there are still 400 square kilometres of threatened oldgrowth forest, to South Sister on the East Coast, Bruny Island in the south and the beleagured north-east highlands.

The Styx case is a classic example of how the governments deal with forest issues. One of the new reserves they have promised to create is the 336-hectare Styx Tall Trees Forest Reserve. This reserve occurs on either side of Skeleton Road, the road up which 4000 people marched on a cold, drizzly day in July 2003 to protest at logging.

The Reserve’s southern boundary occurs very close to the huge stump on which speakers at the rally delivered their speeches. The reserve contains several well-known giants, including the Chapel Tree — an 85-metre-tall giant which is the second most massive known living thing in Tasmania. It also contains the Mount Tree and Icarus Dream, which, at 96 and 97 metres respectively, are the tallest known trees in the Southern Hemisphere. The Two Towers, Gothmog, the Perfect Tree and the Andromeda Twins are other registered giants within the reserve.

Declaration of this reserve will be very welcome. However, cold hard scrutiny reveals that very little loggable forest has been conceded by the industry here. About 20 hectares were already in the informal Andromeda Reserve, which contains some of the tall trees mentioned above.  In addition, Forestry Tasmania’s Giant Trees policy and protocols, adopted in the wake of the El Grande debacle, require the establishment of buffers of at least 100 metres radius around each registered giant. The abundance of giant trees in this patch of forest means that logging had already been severely curtailed.

In essence, the creation of the Styx Tall Trees Reserve is a minimalist recognition that little logging could have proceeded amongst these statuesque giants anyway.

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Protected the bare minimum area

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A look at the mapped boundaries of the reserve shows them to be very convoluted. That’s because the reserve has been designed to accommodate areas planned for logging.

Last year, Forestry Tasmania scheduled 26-hectare coupe SX18F. This created a cable-logged cut on the steep slopes immediately south-east of the Reserve. The imminent destruction of the tall oldgrowth forests in coupe SX15A will mark the southern edge of the reserve. Immediately west of the reserve is the already-logged SX13D and the scheduled SX13K. Later in the logging schedule come SX18E and SX13J.

Forestry Tasmania logging the Styx Valley of its ancient old growth

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The conclusions to be drawn from this are simple.

Forestry Tasmania protected the absolute bare minimum area of tall-eucalypt forest in the Styx Tall Trees Forest Reserve.

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“Forestry Tasmana is now embarking on a program of ringing the reserve with new coupes.  This appears to be an obvious bid to pre-empt any future expansion of the reserve.  This strategy will have the effect of isolating the giants from adjacent protective forest. The reserve will become increasingly prone to the ‘edge effects’ of fire, wind and disease. This situation is not assisted by the messy design of the reserve.”

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Forestry Tasmania will claim that it has protected these giants and met all of its legislated obligations. In fact, Forestry Tasmania has still failed to meet the targets set in the RFA for the protection of oldgrowth Eucalyptus regnans — the tallest flowering plant on Earth.

The Howard Government has been a party to this sham, providing millions of dollars of taxpayers’ funds to the logging industry and state government as ‘compensation’.

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‘Forests Onslaught to Follow Election’

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by Geoff Law, Tasmanian Campaign Coordinator, The Wilderness Society, 20060318, comment to an article in the Tasmanian Times of a speech made by Richard Flanagan, Parliament House Rally, Hobart, 16 March 2006, ^http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/article/we-will-not-give-up/]

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‘An onslaught of burning, logging and clearing in Tasmania’s forests will follow Saturday’s election, according to the Wilderness Society.

“New logging operations in the Styx, South Sister, Weld and Jackeys Marsh, huge new areas of tree-clearing, and another 30,000 hectares of burning are set to follow the election,” said the Society’s Tasmanian Campaign Coordinator, Geoff Law.

The burning program is set out in a brochure about forestry burn-offs distributed by Forestry Tasmania and FIAT in the Derwent Valley Gazette on Wednesday. It says: This autumn, the forest industry plans to prepare about 30,000 hectares of land for planting or sowing in patches scattered across Tasmania.

Logging is also poised to move into contentious forests in the Upper Florentine, at South Sister and unprotected parts of the Tarkine.

Mr Law said that his warning was based on:

• Forestry Tasmania’s attempt to log coupe SX15A in the Styx Valley, which was put on hold two weeks ago after the efforts of a handful of protesters. The logging machinery is poised and ready to go as soon as the election is out of the way.
• Forestry Tasmania’s interim draft Three Year Plan which has scheduled almost 16,000 hectares of tree-clearing for this calendar year as well as logging at South Sister, Jackeys Marsh, in the Weld and Upper Florentine Valleys and unprotected parts of the Tarkine
• The brochure on burning, which presents ‘Facts about the forest industry’s planned burning program during Autumn’ and which foreshadows 30,000 hectares of burning this autumn.’

A Styx Legacy

A Eucalyptus regnans giant stump is all that remains of one of the huge trees

felled to make way for the logging road in coupe SX 15A in the Styx Valley.

^http://www.lexicon.net/peterc/Tasmania/Tas01.htm

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‘Forestry Tasmania’s Sustainability Charter for Threatened species, communities and habitats‘

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“Aim:  Maintain viable populations of all existing animal and plant species and communities found in State forests.
This will involve:

• Increasing understanding of ecology and habitats of threatened species and communities and implementing appropriate management
• Active participation in the management of threatened species, communities and habitats
• Implementing specific strategies to protect threatened species and their habitats.”

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 A rare giant Eucalyptus regnans of the nearby Upper Florentine

(Photo by Editor 20110928, free in public domain, click photo to enlarge)

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2012 Year of the Forestry Scab?

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In late 2011 and now going into 2012, Forestry Tasmania are at it again, trying to clearfell the Styx Valley of its old growth.

Get the lastest from the forest protest at The ObserverTree below Mount Mueller in the Styx Valley.

Click:  ^http://observertree.org/

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The following comments were posted by Tigerquoll 20111102, on  Tasmanian Times to the article ‘Tasmania’s longest running forest blockade celebrates 5-year milestone‘, by Miranda Gibson, Still Wild Still Threatened (20111101), which began…

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‘Today “Camp Flozza” celebrates its fifth birthday. The forest blockade has been running continuously for the past five years, holding off logging operations in the Upper Florentine Valley’.  [Read More].

Styx Valley Holocaust

– old-growth clearfelled by Forestry Tasmania

(Photo by editor 20110929 – free in public domain)

(Click photo to enlarge, then click again to enlarge again)

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“A Conservation Agreement halting logging in 430,000 hectares is now over-due. The Intergovernmental Agreement signed in August explicitly states that logging operations must be rescheduled or where this is not possible compensation given. Every hectare of forest lost in this area now represents a complete breach of the promises made by the government.”

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~ Miranda Gibson, Still Wild Still Threatened

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Of old growth defenders:

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently—they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
~ Steve Jobs [1955-2011]

History will recount – the steadfast commitment by these forest defenders to hold their ground, to dig in, in the face of an overwhelming enemy, compares to the dusty amateurs that became the rats of Tobruk.

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Of old growth rapers:

Styx Valley hillside clearfelled – beyond Forestry Tasmania’s locked gates.

(Photo by editor 20110929 – free in public domain)

(Click photo to enlarge, then click again to enlarge again)

 

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A morally-wise person would not put down an animal because it was injured. Moral civilized society has evolved the ‘Veterinary’ profession – a highly skilled field, more highly qualified than human ‘General Practice Medicine’ – why?

In the wild, a female mammal may kill an impaired offspring only to save its remaining healthy young scarce food to survive.

In Tasmania, old growth forests are becoming scarcer by the day, and yes this is still occuring in the 21st Eco-Century, not the 19th Timbergetting Century.

But in the selfish eyes of industrial loggers, any broken branch justifies the clearfell and scorched earthing of old growth forests by the hectare, which are innocuously relegated as ‘coupes’.

What then is a coupe?  A forest coupe is earmarked for logging.  A selected section of an intact, pristine native old growth forest is earmarked by Forestry Command for ‘harvesting‘, read ‘logging‘, read ‘forest ecology slaughter‘, read ‘forest wildlife habitat destruction‘.  Yet to the logger mind forest reads as plunderable timber, and these days as low grade commodity woodchip to greedy asian profiteers, only to sustain a diehard, got-no-where-to-go  desperate logger culture.  The log-till-I-drop logger mentality is no different to morbidly obese American juveniles confessing dependence on Maccas Big Macs.

I fear loggers would do same to their grandparents once impaired.

‘Corporate industrialism’ is worse than Herbert Spencer’s ‘survival of the fittest’ mindset. It is self-serving Forest Eugenics – evident in Forestry Tasmania’s programmed conversion of native Tasmania into plantations and the scourge of its genetically modified Eucalyptus nitens now exterminating Tasmania’s next condemned species – the Tasmanian Devil.

Beware the Forest Nazis lurking in the privets.

Holocaust is what the Nazis did

This is what Forestry Tasmania did recently to The Tarkine.

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‘Forest Eugenics’ is what Forestry Tasmanian ‘scientists‘ are doing today –

GM-modified Eucalypt nitens plantations replacing native Old Growth

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Is this where GM Nitens (shining gum) is taking Tasmanian ecology – to ‘elite forests’?

– superior growth rate, disease resistant, herbicide resistant, but perhaps the GM-exterminator of Tasmanian Devils.

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Why did Gunns abandon its respected local north coast hardware business to greedily exploit Tasmania’s irreplaceable natural forests?

Gunns board’s single decision sought to selfishly exploit Tasmania to its core and will go down in Tasmania’s history as the worst for all participants and for all Tasmania and Tasmanians.  Gunns only divided a community that traditionally has sought subsistence from its valuable natural asset…because Gunns was greedy, not responsible, not acccountable to Tasmania or Tasmanians!  Now the Board says its proposed Bell Bay Pulp Mill in the Tamar Valley “is critical to any strategy for achieving a modern Tasmanian forest industry.”  [Gunns media release 25-November 2010].  High values forestry is not about woodchips to Asia.  How does woodchip commonity distinguish the Tasmanian export product?  Small selected timber for custom crafted timber furnitur, but this is not an industrial scale business model.

If Gunn’s has access to $2.5 billion to build a destructive and unwanted pulp mill, think of the lost opportunities of that $2.5 billion to other investment projects that could instead make a genuine difference to Tasmanians and their Island State.

“Even if Gunns gets its pulp mill, we will stop them selling their pulp by uthe same method we stopped them selling their woodchips. We will badger the buyers and embargo goods all the way down the product line. After a while no one will touch it.”

[Source: ‘Rod’, a valued contributor to Tasmanian Times, 5th December 2010, http://tasmaniantimes.com/index.php?/weblog/article/greens-warn.-gunns-threatens.-premier-promises/]

Peter Cundall AM, a horticulturalist and television personality in Australia.

He currently lives in Tasmania’s Tamar Valley,and is prepared to defend important habitat to the point of being arrested.

Hale Peter Cundall!