Rechtub it has been a very good thread.
Few city dwellers know just how much some towns and whole areas exist because of the timber industry, still.
I would like as a trained negotiator, to see both sides sit and talk, we have shown here the ability to both protect the industry and our forests.
Some wrongly thought of plantations as the only way to replant forests, yes pine is done that way.
But seed trees are left in some cases and natural regrowth is used, slower less effective but it works.
We can and should improve that.
Near here a coastal City pumps its recycled water on to hardwood true plantations, IMO to closely planted ,some idiot set it on fire and more loss than better thought out planting would have bought.
Hope others are thinking about this.

Spot on, Belly.

For the life of me, I don't understand this antipathy to trees. Trees suck CO2 out of the atmosphere and store it for fifty years or more while they are growing, and then for however long the timber is used. At the end of its working life, a piece of timber could be mulched and put back into the soil to eventually enrich it.

Across the North, using the vast flows of rivers there, what would be so bad about drip-fed swathes of trees of a multitude of Indigenous species, call them plantations if you like, being planted and maintained by Aboriginal communities, who could then harvest, mill and process that timber, accruing the revenue from it ? And re-planting three to one, as you suggest ?

Of course, species should be appropriate to the areas. Of course, they should be planted far apart, ten metres or more, and of course there should be periodic patch-work cool-burns to minimise the risk of catastrophic fires. Christ, it's not rocket-science.

And who knows what sorts of technologies will be available in fifty or a hundred years, to fire-proof, termite-proof etc., that timber ? Who knows what uses it may be put to with the introduction of those technologies ?

Cheers,

Joe

Belly,
Since the beginning of mining in Western Australias Eastern Goldfields in the late 1800s the dryland forests were decimated, the timber being cut to fuel boilers and mine props etc. Railway lines running every which way in the bush purely to provide timber to the mines. An estimated 25 million tons of timber were harvested.
This all stopped in the 60s with the advent of electrical and diesel power and a change in mining. Over the last 40 odd years or so I have been watching these dryland forests slowly coming back and come back they have. Nothing done by man except protection. From the Western edge of the Nullarbor through to the wheat belt it is slowly becoming forest again. Not dense rainforest for sure but it is an asset once again for a variety of reasons.
Good to see I have to admit.
SD

Shaggy Dog in my childhood in the southern highlands dad cut pit props.
I went with him far more often than to school.
It is interesting that my then teacher tore up my enrollment form in front of the class! in quite a rage at my work/not going to school.
He ran for the ALP!
5 standard props came from one mountain ash, but cutters serving 5 mines cut the area out , all harvesting then came from right near the place I settled.
Joe yes every word true.
A new forest base industry is in its infancey here, for more than 100 years we have burned old wood to make charcoal.
Used mostly in steel improvement but much more.
Now a known but not used use has been revived, Market stalls sell it by the bag full to add to any type of garden.
It massively improves growth and stores carbon!