Jobs and an environment richness which can be plundered for jobs, and Profit, the real driver.
Logging of an environmental is beginning to be seen as a finite.
Plantations do not seem to provide the variety seen in natural woodlands nor perhaps the resilience.
Does this matter.
Do they provide everything necessary for providing workers to produce profit? The early industrial revolution says life is possible even when limited.

CO2 reduction perhaps- old growth?

Can plantations provide the things necessary for continued human existence including jobs?
Do pulp mills add to pollution it seems currently yes.

All a foretaste of short term thinking for when we have increased population more and in so doing reduced the natural environment, then presumably the need for jobs will also increase.
If we treat all as having a designed obsolescence?
A downward cycle of destruction.
In the name of Profit and short term objectives.
Worth a SLAAP writ?
I probably will not vote Rudd anyway.

Ah dear me!
10/8/07; a couple of months after this article was published. just clearing email and checked this out.
Will any one ever read this?
How sorry I feel for Dr Natasha Cica. A well educated but naive woman who dared hope that if Australians couldn't be good we could at least try to rise above evil.
I write this on the day when an argument has broken out between rudd and beattie over council amalgamations in queensland. We all know what beatties' policy means. More developers; less conservation.
Should I keep this. Look back in another couple of months and see how it's further turned out?