Mark, you may not like what I'm saying but you'd really be wise to recognise that when:

* 65% of people polled oppose your industry
* big plantation companies go bankrupt
* banks and others start to disinvest in large forestry operations
* $ billions are lost to small investors in forestry MIS
* plantations have a real prospect of being toxic to water
* too many people are cheering at your misfortune

...you have a problem, and it's a big one.

Refusing to listen to others isn't going to serve you well.

I travelled round N. Tasmania over the course of a year with farmers, fishermen, tourism operators, small business people, truck drivers and others all educating me about the impacts of wood chipping on their lives. Until those experiences I knew almost nothing of the plantation situation. I saw what they were telling me first hand.

You don't have to be a genius to work it all out.

But in the ensuing mess, thousands are likely to suffer unless the 'leaders' of forestry extract their digits and start finding ways to earn more than a couple of hundred dollars per hectare per year from their land. That return should be in the thousands or tens of thousands, there's enough opportunities out there. But forestry seems to be only capable of thinking about wood chips, the least valuable use for timber. The opportunities are boundless but not with the kind of managers that forestry has.

No wonder you forestry people are worried. Viewed with hostility by a majority of the population, watching their businesses go bankrupt, watching their own managers fighting for position while passing the pain down the line to contractors who cannot afford it.

Wake up Mark. This happens to many industries...I've seen it all before. Start looking at alternatives and listening carefully to those who are describing what's happening in a different way so that you can create some more options...or alternatively keep denying the facts and keep blaming others as you go down. The choice is yours.

Mikester
I have read you whole article now and as expected you one-sidedly express the usual range of highly contentious points arraigned against forestry as though they are fact. I have made some points against each one as follows:

"free water to feed their 3,000 sq km plantation estate" - no plantations are irrigated and farmers don't pay for rainwater falling on their land, so why should plantation owners?

"free roads and bridges plus their maintenance" - timber production was originally regarded as a public service because we all use wood products, and the roads and bridges also serve the public for recreation and tourism and provide access for fire control and management. When used for timber production, the industry pays a road levee for their use and royalties for the timber feeds back into managing forest infrstructure - how is this free use?

"paid forestry research and publicity" - forestry is a scientific discipline like any other which is constantly engaging in reserach and development often in a government/industry funding partnership. If you are advocating that this shouldn't happen, you would also be advocating it not happen in other scientific disciplines such as agriculture - would this be good for Australia?

"legal exemptions from planning, .... and other laws that apply to everyone else"
It has been explained infinitum that forestry is not exempt from the EPBC Act, a view that was reiterated by an Independent Review last year - so why is it stll being said?

“In exchange they cut down our forests to sell as wood chips to overseas markets"
They also produce a range of high value solid wood products. We needn't have sold our woodchips overseas if the first proposal to build a pulp mill had succeeded in the late 1980s. I wonder why it didn't it get off the ground?

"dominate our roads with overloaded log trucks" Overloaded? Where is the evidence?

"put poisons in our water supplies" There is no evidence for this.

I could go on, but will continue later.

Mark,

On water, trees have root systems that are 15m long and penetrate deep into groundwater supplies which is totally different to the situation with wheat or peas for farmers. Either you know this and are deliberately trying to dissemble, or you don't. Food farmers have to pay for irrigation water from rivers and creeks which are constantly being drained by trees up catchment. They know the impacts of large area plantations on their water supplies - forestry does not.

Roads and bridges are put in by Forestry Tasmania, maintenance is carried out by Councils who pay the expense from general revenues. The public pays for both.

I didn't mention the EPBC Act, you did. Forestry is exempt from Tasmania's LUP Act (along with many others) which is the most relevant planning Act here.

These factors and the others that I raise are entirely real, simply denying them or trying to divert me onto irrelevant tracks (e.g. EPBC) isn't going to work.

It seems that all you are doing is restating internal forestry industry propaganda, telling the world what you tell yourselves. You are making the mistake (as did Kevin Rudd) of believing your own marketing.

How do you explain all the forestry failures recently? Most common 'explanation' is that the 'Greens' did it. I believe that to be total nonsense. A few greens with that kind of power? Doesn't make sense.

My message is simple really, the world is changing fast and forestry is trying to act in the same old ways - the result is bankruptcy.

The things I am telling you here, about water, roads, exemptions and so on are pretty well researched and well understood in the community. They aren't a 'green' conspiracy at all.

Too many forestry people cannot hear the community because they are convinced that all arguments against forestry must somehow be false, that there's a conspiracy against forestry and that forestry is right to be chipping our forests and using our food production land for pulp mill feedstock.

To hear, you first of all have to make room for new information.

Mikester .... continued
I won't comment specifically on your last post but will continue with my overall assessment of your article, which in part addresses new points you have just raised.

Re pulpwood plantations @ "With a production rate per hectare of land of around 150 tonnes per hectare taking around 15 years to grow ... "

This equates to a growth rate of 10 tonnes/ha/yr which substantially understates the reality as has been noted by others on the Tasmanian Times thread to your article.

In my experience, there are clearly some plantations that have been inappropriately established on poor quality land that may grow that poorly, but I would suggest that the overall Tasmanian average is in the high teens. Evidence? Well, in 2006, the average plantation harvesting yield in the Green Triangle area which straddles the Vic/SA border equated to an average growth rate of 17 tonnes/ha/yr. I would contend that Tasmania, with more reliable rainfall may average a bit better than this.

This mistake discredits the veracity of your economic analysis as well as other things such as your ball-park estimate of plantation water use.

Moving on though, you are intent on distancing what you term as community views from the campaign views of the major environmental groups. The key question that needs to be asked is how many in the community actually have any personal experience of forestry, and how many are simply swept up in an outrage manufactured by repetitive exposure to the sort of self-righteous conveyance of supposed 'facts' that you are espousing?

Eg. how does the community come to a view that plantations are toxic? Again, you present this as a virtual given, when it remains unproven. Certainly, it was featured on ABC TV at the behest of a local medical doctor who has been associated with three activist groups that have campaigned for years against plantations. Community view or activist view? Your efforts to seperate the two seems to be an attempt to escape the wacky perception that many others in the community have of these groups and their essentially similar views.

Mikester ... continued
I guess though that the crux of your article and your earlier responses to my posts is that forestry must just accept that it is wrong (or disliked) and must change.

However, given that the so-called community opposition you are espousing is largely a house of cards with limited substance, there is the real risk that change made to something that is not actually that bad will result in outcomes that are worse both environmentally and economically.

It is notable that forestry's critics, such as yourself, rarely suggest how such change should occur. Instead you just outline a grab bag of opposition to virtually every aspect of forestry in both plantations and native forests and say just deal with it, otherwise you will go down.

You also never to stop to think that potential options may have already been considered and rejected in the evolution of the current industry systems and structure, and that those 'forestry leaders' who are not cheerleading for change are aware of this.

So, here's a few questions for you:
How do we get more out of hardwood pulpwood plantations? If we grow them longer, we may produce some higher value products, but the costs are higher and the wait for a return far longer. Will the economics be any better?

Even if they produce higher value products, these plantations will still produce a lot of waste - without a woodchip industry, what would we do with this? Burn it perhaps, or use it for biomass energy production? But hang-on, the community doesn't want a woodchip indistry, hates burning, and opposes biomass energy from wood. What do you suggest?

If we don't fully utilise all the wood coming form plantations don't we further reduce their economic viability? Who will pay to retain this viability?

If the community is opposed to export woodchipping, why don't we value-add in Tasmania by building a pulp mill?

Mark, I've got plenty of ideas about change that have forests selectively logged for timbers and plantation land returning thousands of dollars per hectare per year but this is not the place.

"You also never to stop to think..." Oh really, are you just trying to win me over?

I think OLO lost my last post but I'll say it again. Forestry is a part of a wider community. Communities don't need to understand foresty to understand its impacts upon them any more than a pedestrian injured by a car needs to understand the car's workings to understand their injury.

Who needs a woodchip/fibre industry in a high cost and remote economy? If you want to get rid of forest 'waste', why not mulch it in Bartlett's food bowl. It's forestry that's hit the wall, not the community. Wake up.

The public, that's us, has already paid for the pulp wood plantations, either in tax money of $3,200 ha or from 'investors' who put up to $6,000 ha. Now you want us to pay more?

If the community is opposed to export woodchipping, why don't we value-add in Tasmania by building a pulp mill?

Didn't you read my article? Don't you understand the problems with trying to work a global commodities market with declining mean prices whether as pulp or chips