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Academic freedom under attack from foresters institute : Comments
By Roland Browne, published 23/4/2010Alarm bells ring for request to silence critics in relation to the governance of the Tasmanian forestry.
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In 1995, New Scientist reported on outspoken American ecologist and academic, Paul Ehrlich, who caused a furore in Australia by claiming that the work of the country's ecologists was being censored and suppressed.
"Every time I come out here I am taken aside by my ecological colleagues and told that they can't get the word out because they are under threat," Ehrlich told a forum in Sydney. A foreword he wrote for a book on Australia's biodiversity had been censored by a government department. The original foreword, he said, "was critical of censorship.“
Last year, Adelaide Now daily paper reported on fifteen academics and doctors including a Nobel Prize-winner and two Australians of the year, who warned of the "mind-blowing risk" of the Olympic Dam expansion.
The outspoken Union of Concerned Scientists has ten eminent academics on their board.
It’s ironic that you question the integrity of courageous academics when you would have us believe that the pesticides you use in forestry are stringently regulated.
The majority of these pesticides are so hazardous that they are not available to the public. The quack APVMA has allowed your industry to spray millions of litres of lethal toxins from the skies, dumping hazardous solutions over communities and the landscape where they drift into ‘prohibited’ areas including rivers and waterways with impunity.
Yet only yesterday in Santiago, three pollutant companies were shut down for allowing dust to drift over one community and for polluting only one river.
Free and frank intellectual inquiry has always been under assault by dodgy legislative acts and by the chilling effect of secrecy and intimidation in industry and governments. Australia's ignominious environmental history lays testament to that.
It is society’s last hope that courageous academics in all disciplines, continue as educators to promote public debate, particularly on the industrial carnage which prevails, hence the degraded state of Australia’s biodiversity and consequently, the serious issue of economic blowouts in areas of public health.