Clear felling worse than we know
Colin Smith, Glen Waverley, The Age (letter), 23/2/2000
Thanks to Tracey O'Brien for her letter (19/2) about clearfelling without
restoration. In fact, the situation is even worse than Tracey thinks. The
forests will not regenerate in two generations. They will never regenerate.
The plan of the clearfellers is to create an even-age monocultural plantation
- sans ferns etc - and to harvest it on an 80-year rotation. This is far
too short for the development of trees with hollows for native fauna.
And to compound the offence, this destruction is being done in our water
catchments despite scientific and economic evidence - from the right-wing
Tasman Institute among others - that we stand to lose far more in quantity
and quality of water than we will gain in woodchips. Then there is the
soil erosion; the loss of tourist potential; and the public money spent
in direct subsidy of this industry - an industry that is all about woodchips
with a 15 per cent sideline in sawlogs, which adds no value, and (for instance)
in the Otways region provides only 1.7 per cent of the jobs.