The principles are simple. The player selects an ecosystem, such as city, farm or wetland, examines its environmental troubles and then applies one of several suggested solutions. A scoreboard tallies up how the selected solution for, say, waste disposal affects economic prosperity and environmental wellbeing now and in the future.
My daughter chose the mountains ecosystem but had barely got her head around the implications for pygmy possums of building roads into alpine resorts before I asked her to go back to the home board. "There's no forest ecosystem," I said. "So?" she said. "Every broad ecosystem in Australia is represented there except forests," I said. "So? Can I play now?" "No. Type in forests and see what it comes up with." "But you said I could play this game!" "Yeah, just a minute - type in forests." The information bank came up with agroforestry. Same answer if my daughter typed in trees or any other various forest elements that I could think of. I kicked her off the computer with a vague promise that she could save the planet later, and sat down to thoroughly examine the game.
Generally speaking, Mission: Australia makes an honest fist of complex environmental issues, albeit with a few curious aspects -- I wonder if poisoning is really the best answer to the rabbit scourge, for instance. But what stands out most is not the admirable breadth of issues dealt with, but the one utterly left out: native forests. It leaves the unwitting player unaware that forests are ecosystems in their own right.
There appears to be no conspiracy, just a massive oversight. The CD is an initiative of the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts, as part of its Australia on CD series. The, content was determined by, among others, Landcare Australia, whose media and communications manager, Brooke Lewis, explained: "If forests have been excluded, it wasn't by decision. It is a mistake we have made."
Maybe it is not such a surprising mistake. In recent years, forests appear to have become Australia's forgotten environmental issue. Once, a political party's stance on forests was perceived as capable of influencing elections. But since the coalition won federal office in 1996, forests have all but disappeared from public view.
I doubt that the public no longer cares, or is satisfied that the ideal solution is the regional forest agreements process being implemented by the Federal Government. I doubt that the public knows enough to decide whether the RFAs are indeed a reasonable compromise between green and industry demands. Politicians, bruised over the years by brawls about forests, appear content to leave it that way.
But all being quiet doesn't necessarily mean all is well. Many aspects of the RFAs deserve proper public debate. For instance, the RFA legislation before the Senate will give the agreements the force of law even before most have been signed. Unlike other laws, agreements will then be able to be changed at ministerial level, without being subject to parliamentary scrutiny.
All forests covered by an RFA will be exempt from Commonwealth environmental protection laws, export licence controls and greenhouse gas inventories. Industry can also claim compensation if future governments with different priorities reduce timber volumes.
Considering that the processes for determining critical ecological factors such as sustainable timber yield could be described as opaque at best, the RFA legislation appears likely only to enshrine secrecy. Avoiding more potential electoral unpleasantness over forests also suits the industry as it battles to find new markets now that plantation timber dominates the supply of bulk construction material.
Witness the industry's heavy-handed response to the book Forest-Friendly Building Timbers, which the BBC Hardware chain supported until bowing to pressure and threats of legal action by the National Association of Forest Industries. The book tells consumers how to build and renovate houses without using native forest timber; it says logging in forests contributes to mass species extinction. The association says such assertions amount to misleading information about a competitor.
Yet similar claims about logging have been a staple of green literature for years without anyone being threatened with legal action. Maybe the publisher, Alan Gray, put his finger on the reason for the industry's sudden hypersensitivity when he said this was the first time such a book had had the potential to reach a mass, mainstream audience. Legislative regulation is slow and subject to political expediency, whereas winning over consumers to a cause can swiftly hit an industry where it hurts -- in the hip pocket.
There is an existential question that asks: if a tree falls in the forest and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? Maybe it's time again for the public to get out into the forest and start listening.
Claire Miller is The Age's environment reporter. E-mail: cmiller@theage.fairfax.com.au