@hugoagogo
Pelican must be about to come up with something good, having studied Biology/Biochemistry. That must be worth more than the knowledge of someone like Mark Poynter who may have studied chemistry, biology, botany, ecology, zoology, conservation, fire management etc as part of a single degree and then researched/worked in/with forests for their entire career.

As Mark says "...we have a real problem if governments are influenced by GetUp! campaigns and unbalanced media reporting.." Unfortunately the voices of those who have studied Medicine, Education, Arts or Politics are more widely heard than the voices of those who studied Forests.

In a perfect world we would have the ability to halt all forestry activities in Tasmania's current public native forest, reclaim all private land in Tasmania, have foresters plant the cleared farmland (look at it, there must be at least a million hectares)... and wait to see how many years it takes for the Greens to declare the new forests "old-growth" and halt all forestry activity on the island. Perhaps the editors of the Tasmanian Times could head up fire management and park enforcement.

As much as Green groups will deny this their ultimate aim is for Australia to never produce a single stick of timber. Closing down native forest operations is not enough, extreme groups also target the private plantation industry too (citing lack of biodiversity, toxic leaves and chemical issues). Grow whatever agricultural crop you want, however you want, as long as it isn't a timber tree

Sarnian

You are quite wrong about this because you wrongly assume that every native forest is an 'old growth' forest, when it is not and never was. I don't blame you for this, because this is how the environmental lobby portrays forestry - which is quite deceitful.

Tasmania in fact has 3.116 million hectares of native forest, which is 64% of its original 4.82 million ha - the balance was cleared for agriculture, and some has become plantation. Tassie has 300,000 ha of plantation most probably established on agricultural land.

Yes, 1.24 million ha is 'old growth' forest, out of the total of 3.116 ha, but at least 80% of this is reserved and some more is unsuitable, and so there is not lot being logged anymore, and none is being converted to plantation.

@gippy: As Mark says "...we have a real problem if governments are influenced by GetUp! campaigns and unbalanced media reporting.."

That last paragraph was the weakest part of Mark's essay. He always ends the same way, and he has been banging on this same drum in articles here since about 2008. So we have titles like:

- Ignoring fact, logic, and expertise
- The rise of blogging, mainstream media, and Victoria’s river red gum forests
- Deforestation deceit reflects badly on environmental campaigners

He seems to be so passionate about this I sometimes wonder if he is lobbying for a law that only allows the considered options just like his to be published.

This never did make much sense. Yes, the greenies have waged their campaign's, but industry always answered in kind. Forestry and allied industries set up their own equivalents to organisations like the Australian Conversation Foundation, some obvious like the "Timber Communities Australia", some less obviously called the "Australian Environmental Foundation". They were every bit as effective as the greenies in getting their message across. Yes, possibly less outright lies, but they made up for it with their omissions and spin.

It looked to me like the industry groups pretty much got what they needed. Far achieving an over the top land grab, the greens were just preventing industrial carte blanche over the environment. They might have been a bit extreme in how they went about it at times, but that was the net effect. The complete out-flanking of the non-renewable wood chipping industry by the global greens was a complete surprise give how weak the local greens had been.

Now of course we have witnessed things like the anti-mining tax campaign, the anti-pokies-regulation campaign, and the anti-pain-smokes-packaging campaign, and I'm not so sure it is so evenly balanced. The corporations have bigger bank accounts and hire bigger megaphones. With this amount of commercial political muscle on display, MWPOYNTER's "those greens are being nasty to us" complaints are getting beyond tiresome.

Gippy,

Pelican is normally much quicker off the mark, and I must say I was interested in the response, seeing as we’d been treated to her/his CV.

rstuart,

I find Mark's articles to be cracking good reads. They are badly needed responses to the incessant hijacking of the public sphere by the usual unrepresentative self styled eco-mullahs. And I have it on good authority that Mark’s items are religiously read by influential folks.

"Yes, possibly less outright lies, but they made up for it with their omissions and spin."

Can you provide us with some examples rstuart of these "outright lies" or are you relying on what you heard from TCA, AEF et al?

RE: Poynter and Cinders..."RUN AWAY!"

maaate

Try these for recent deceitful ENGO statements:

“Victoria’s Mountain Ash forests once covered 170,400 hectares. Shockingly, only 2,000 hectares (1.17%) now remain unlogged and unburnt.”
The Wilderness Society fundraising pamphlet, June 2011

“Recent figures show that logging is still permitted within 76% of Australia’s native forests...”
Markets for Change publication, ‘Retailing the Forests’ campaign, May 2011