Our organization, in contact with many community groups in Victoria, is finding that as more and more of the state's forests fall to the most severe form of logging ever devised, i.e. clearfelling, residents in all regions are rallying to the defence of the forests they value.
The Otways protesters are not alone in their anxiety about the fate of Victoria's forests.
In Gippsland they are joined in their opposition to the current native forest destruction by strong community support for a Strzelecki National Park in an area of the Strzeleckis sold off by the Kennett Government to American and Australian financial institutions. The ignoring of the call for the remnants of the Great Forest of Gippsland to be protected has left residents unhappy and vowing to fight on.
Further to the east in East Gippsland, local residents, including wildlife surveyors, are calling today for a moratorium on logging in the Goolengook catchment forests where the endangered Long-footed Potoroo has been found in an area of forest marked out for clearfelling. Farmers and Field Naturalists of the Portland district are making front-page news as they question the ringbark-poisoning of old trees in one of the last large tracts of coastal forest and woodland in the South-West of Victoria , the popular Cobboboonee Forest.
In the North East local groups working to protect forests on and near the Stanley Range believe they are not being listened to in the Regional Forest Agreement process now underway while residents in the Central Highlands near Melbourne are appalled by the full scale destruction of the Mountain Ash ecosystems since the RFA for that region was signed in early 1998. The so called Regional Forest "Agreements " by entrenching the felling of Victoria's remaining forests, are causing regional forest " anxiety " on a huge scale.
Our organization has consistently raised concern about RFA processes and until the woodchipping industry is removed from native forests and the timber industry is reformed into a secure cropping system on both farmland and already existing plantations the anxiety of many Victorians will continue.