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That is why they and their colleagues at the Coolaroo Clinic, on Melbourne's northern plains, have put up a poster in the waiting room alerting patients to the hazards of clear-fell logging. They hope it will give people staring at the wall something to think about.
The poster's message is simple: healthy forests equal healthy water, which equals healthy people - and clear-felling costs water that a dry continent can ill afford to lose. It offers patients a stark visual choice: crystal stream in lush forest, or blackened bombsite of a newly clear-felled and burnt logging block.
Most people would not necessarily make the link between a secure supply of clean water flowing from the tap and the fate of native forests, but Ramsay says it is a fundamental public health issue. Ask any health professional with experience in a developing country. "And it would be very encouraging to clients to know that we were taking a stand," Ramsay adds.
Driving the campaign against clear-felling is the group Doctors for Native Forests, which was formed in the belief that the Federal and State Governments did not take health issues seriously when they enshrined the logging status quo in 20-year regional forest agreements last year.
The group's poster and petition campaign, calling for an end to clear-felling in water catchments, was launched in earnest last month. At last count, 1000 surgeries around the state had the poster up, including several clinics in the Premier's Williamstown electorate. Vicdoc, the Australian Medical Association's state journal, has also endorsed the campaign in its editorial this month.
Doctors for Native Forests chairman Suresh Pathy, an anaesthetist at Footscray's Western Hospital, said the group was hard-pressed to keep up with the demand for posters as word spread. Even vets were calling in, wanting to join the campaign.
According to Pathy, many health professionals were sympathetic to the conservation cause but reluctant to take a stand for fear of being associated with fringe elements in the environment movement. Doctors for Native Forests gave the profession a voice in its own right. And for the public, it meant information from a trusted source.
Ramsay agrees, saying that while "people think doctors are bastards as a race in general, they do listen to and respect their own doctor, especially on public health matters, such as smoking. A poster in the waiting room shows that this is something that we would like them to think about".
At issue is how clear-felling affects water quantity and quality. Studies by Dr Rob Vertessy of the Cooperative Research Centre for Catchment Hydrology show that clear-felling reduces run-off by up to 50per cent because the mass of young trees growing back absorbs more water than a mature forest. Run-off begins to recover after 40 years but takes 150 years to return to pre-logging levels.
Run-off after logging is also muddied, while clear-felling adds to the risk of landslips that bare the earth to the elements. While the murky run-off phase may be relatively short-lived, it still adds to sediment and nutrient build-up in waterways and dams. In dry times, as water levels drop, algal blooms and other quality problems develop. These are often dealt with using expensive chemical treatments.
A clear-felled patch here and there in an otherwise intact mature forest would not have much impact. But the pattern of logging in the Otways and the Wombat State Forest means catchments are on their way to being dominated by trees that will never be older than 60 years before being felled again. These catchments supply water to Warrnambool, Ballarat, Bacchus Marsh, Melton and Geelong.
About 62per cent of Melbourne's water comes from catchments controlled by Melbourne Water and closed to logging since the 1800s to protect quality and quantity. However, there is clear-felling every year in catchments, such as the Thompson and Upper Yarra tributaries, controlled by the Department of Natural Resources and Environment.
Faced with a mounting outcry about the water issue in south-western Victoria last year, Conservation and Environment Minister Sherryl Garbutt promised an independent hydrological study for the Otways. The Sinclair Knight Mertz study, the results of which were released last month, concluded that continued logging would make little difference to existing run-off levels for Warrnambool and Geelong. But if logging stopped and the catchments were left to age undisturbed, run-off would increase substantially.
No logging meant the annual run-off in Warrnambool's catchment would increase by 26per cent by 2080, and by 10per cent in Geelong's catchment - an amount roughly equivalent to the annual water consumption of Colac, a town of 11,000 people.
The consultants assumed no change in historical rainfall averages, but climate change is likely to make water scarcer and more valuable. South-eastern Australian, for instance, is expected to get hotter and drier, with river flows reduced 12 to 35per cent.
Garbutt dismissed the findings, saying it was not possible for forests to be undisturbed. She pointed out that the consultants found a catastrophic bushfire would have a similar effect to logging, and she said the catchments would certainly be disturbed by bushfire. Any claims that water yield could be increased if logging stopped were not backed up by the facts and therefore "purely theoretical".
The facts, however, don't back up the spin. Sinclair Knight Mertz also said the fire risk in the Otways was low. Colac's closed water catchment, for instance, has not suffered a bushfire for 150 years, and even that one had more to do with disturbance by settlement and logging than natural conditions. Before white settlement, Victoria's forests were made up of trees 400 to 500 years old and more, suggesting very little in the way of catastrophic bushfires akin to clear-felling.
Other studies suggest that clear-fell logging dries out forests, increasing the risk of fire while reducing the ecosystem's natural resilience. A 1996 Department of Natural Resources and Environment report, The effect of clearfell logging on tree-ferns in Victorian wet forest, for instance, said that clear-felling killed almost all ferns. Normally, ferns quickly recover after bushfires to shade the forest floor and boost moisture retention while the tree canopy grows back. But after clear-felling, ferns were replaced by plants typical of drier, more fire-prone forests.
It all seems a long way from Coolaroo, and politics rather than science has so far carried the day on forest management. But asked whether they might simply be seen to be taking sides in an intensely political issue capable of toppling governments, Ramsay says the good health of forests goes beyond politics.
"I know there has been a disappointing response from both parties in terms of doing anything, but I see it as more than a political issue," he says. "It doesn't disturb me to be backing one party more than the other. This is a fundamental issue that goes beyond politics. I wouldn't know which party had the better policy, but I do know both have been fairly disappointing on it."
Hodgson agrees, saying certain issues concern the whole of society, and the environment is one of them. "As general practitioners, we have a role as leaders to try to influence people's thinking, but it is very difficult to know as a GP when you should do something about that. We are always taught not to be judgmental, but every now and then, you do need to act."
Indeed, they wonder, is the forest debate any more political than other public health campaigns in which doctors have been at the forefront, whether it be smoking regulations or compulsory seatbelts? Hodgson notes that he has sat on mental health care committees, and mental health was a political issue. Doctors also do vaccinations, another important area of public debate. "I don't think you can isolate it out," he says.
Besides, Ramsay says, theirs is a generation defined by political activism. At university, he was immersed in the Vietnam protests and active in the Australian Union of Students. "I think if you ask doctors, they are quite active, but they should be more active ... People listen to them."
So far, the government has largely ignored Doctors for Native Forests, while the timber industry has accused them of suffering more from an attack of the NIMBYs than altruism. The executive director of the Victorian Association of Forest Industries, Graeme Gooding, told the ABC last month that the doctors were getting involved in forests because they owned holiday houses along the Otways coast.
Ramsay raises an eyebrow when that one is put to him. Most GPs would be hard-pressed to afford a holiday home anywhere, he says. But he and his family, like many of his patients, do habitually rent a house or camp at the Otways for the summer. His clients are drawn there to escape the confines of their suburban blocks and be refreshed in a place of natural beauty. This is medicine for the soul - as essential to human wellbeing as a safe and secure water supply.
Ramsay says he has always been amazed when driving to the coast at the amount of logging over the past 20 years. He imagines his patients would be similarly bothered to see destruction in a place so important for their recreation and relaxation.
And once clear-felled, Hodgson adds, the forest is never the same again.
And for what?
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