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Logging and bushfires

By Mark Poynter - posted Wednesday, 25 January 2012


This includes the errant claim that since the 2009 bushfires ".... uncommon areas of unlogged forest are increasingly sought after for timber and pulpwood harvesting". In fact, timber harvesting is limited to wood production zones that were designated in the Central Highlands Regional Forest Agreement 15 years ago. Nothing has been changed to allow logging to expand beyond these zones into other forests that may have survived the recent fires.

The paper also asserts that ".... cutting burnt forest (ie. salvage logging) has major negative environmental impacts and long term effects on forest recovery and biodiversity". This wrongly implies that salvage logging is a widespread activity and ignores both its limited extent and the stronger operational prescriptions that are applied to it to minimise its environmental impact – prescriptions which take account of advice from ANU scientists.

In reality, salvage logging is limited only to fire-killed forests within the designated wood production zones. Its extent is further constrained by limited contractor capacity and the relatively short time-frame before killed standing timber starts to degrade. Less than 1% of the forests burnt by the 2009 'Black Saturday' bushfires were salvage logged, and similarly low proportions of forests burnt in the huge 2003 and 2006-07 Victorian fires were salvage logged. At a landscape scale the impact of salvage logging is minimal.

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Lindenmayer et al (2011) also claims that extensive logging and wildfire have placed the Central Highlands forests into the grip of the 'previously unrecognised' phenomena – the 'landscape trap'. This has allegedly forced mountain ash forests to be permanently suspended in a regrowth state thereby disadvantaging life-forms reliant on later stages of vegetation development that are no longer attainable.

However, the concept of 'landscape traps' is not new at all. It is well known that ash-type eucalypt forests, if burnt twice in succession less than 15-20 years apart, will generally have insufficient seed to self-regenerate and will revert to another vegetation type in the absence of human intervention.

What is less appreciated is that Victorian foresters have for decades been intervening to avert 'landscape traps' by artificially regenerating fire-damaged ash-type forests. This started with replanting the Black Spur, north of Healesville after the 1939 bushfires; and continued on a larger scale in the 1970s and 1980s on the Toorongo Plateau. It has continued on numerous State Forest sites following the 2006-07 and 2009 bushfires. This has been ignored by this 'new research' and its accompanying media coverage.

Combating widely promoted misconceptions that are ostensibly derived from 'peer-reviewed' research, presents considerable difficulties. There are arguably two options: 1) Get a countering letter or research article published in the same scientific journal; or 2) Get some media coverage for already existing alternate scientific views.

In the wake of the most recent Lindenmayer et al (2011) paper, a letter co-written by the former Head of Forestry at the University of Melbourne, Professor Ian Ferguson, and the former Head of the CSIRO Bushfire Research Unit, Phil Cheney, was submitted for publication to the same journal. However, it was rejected without explanation thereby raising further questions about the potential manipulation of science to maintain an academic agenda. Their letter has since been published in the latest edition of Australian Forestry where it will unfortunately go largely unnoticed.

On the second option, hard experience shows that forestry issues are largely only newsworthy to media outlets which tend to report them primarily from a sensational green-left perspective. They typically display little interest in publishing alternate views that could be seen to undermine their editorial stance on issues such as logging.

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Interestingly, in aCanberra Times article on September 17th, Professor Lindenmayer, who has been so central to this episode, noted that "There is general disrespect for science these days among politicians. The Government will pick up the phone to talk to lobbyists before they will if ever – talk to a scientist".

This arguably reveals the justification for publishing fairly inconsequential papers in online journals specifically to create a platform for sensational media coverage.  The media's need for dramatic headlines and short, simplistic messages often sees it ignore inconvenient details and complexities. Whether by design or not, this can create and spread unwarranted fears and misconceptions amongst the wider community

This, plus the media's thrall of supposedly unimpeachable academic credibility can allow loosely-formed hypotheses to morph unchallenged into established fact by ignoring alternate scientific views which may be far better informed.

Unfortunately, the propensity for scientists to use the media is blurring the clear demarcation that once existed between scientific objectivity and activism. This has undermined academic credibility to a degree that now makes it difficult to discern differences between environmental scientists and lobbyists. Given this, politicians can hardly be blamed for any perception that they disrespect science.

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About the Author

Mark Poynter is a professional forester with 40 years experience. He is a Fellow of the Institute of Foresters of Australia and his book Going Green: Forests, fire, and a flawed conservation culture, was published by Connor Court in July 2018.

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