We had the pleasure of the company of a very interesting man for an hour and a half today. Acting as our tour guide for the Pemberton Sawmill, he turned out to be quite a character and a fountain of opinion, if not knowledge.
Now about our age, his story started in Broome as a 19 year old, a chef by trade. As is the want of teenagers, he was young, in love and with a fire in the belly. His girlfriend of the time was a greenpeace activist and was getting involved in the campaign to save the old growth forests of the soouthwest. Much to the horror of his family, he gave up a stable job to move to Pemberton to become part of the protest movement.
It was there that he discovered the underbelly of green activism. While the motives were real and honourable, the methods and the people were anything but. As a trained professional chef he had given up much to join the movement, but what he found was a collection of people on welfare, avoiding reality in the cultivation and consumption of marijuana. However, what really confronted him was the discovery that the “old growth forest” in which he and others were hugging trees had in fact been clear-felled in the 1930s. The media pinup trees, while impressive in size, were in fact at that stage only 60 or so years old.
As he said, he does not make, change or give up ideas lightly. However, he was confronted with a popular view being presented in the media, with facts on the ground that he knew first hand not matching. His journey of discovery of the facts became part of his life story. All of this was happening in the middle of the political process which ultimately was to end logging in old-growth forests in Western Australia. This resulted in what has become known as the regional forest agreements.
During the time of the protests there was little control over forestry. Logs were taken and used for whatever purpose as rapidly as possible. Little regard was made for the quality of the resource, nor to the long-term damage being done on the ground. It was nonetheless a relatively mature industry which had been managing and regrowing forests for in excess of 80 years. What the regional forest agreement, or RFAs achieved was to put some scientific basis behind the sustainability goal.
The RFAs were indeed negotiated differently in each region. The outcomes in WA were very different from those in Tasmania. This is due to many parts, including the nature of the forest, but also in large measure to the political realities in place in the different states. In WA, it meant an overnight end to logging of true old-growth forests and better protection of the land currently under managed forestry. In means that better practices are used to control erosion and maintain soil quality. It also means that felling practices maintain habitat to preserve biodiversity in regrowth. It also means that a sawmill must achieve a certain level of value from the logs provided to it, which effectively ended chipping of quality logs.
The downside for the people in the industry however was a reduction in the overall logging take, and so many jobs were lost from the industry forever. It did give certainty though, and regrowth forests are now getting older on average, and so the extraction should be sustainable forever.
So what happened to our tour guide? Well, after examining the facts for himself he became a timber worker himself and worked in the mill for eight years. We suspect post the girlfriend. When the RFA came along, he took a retrenchment knowing that he could return to being a chef, while others around him had fewer choices. He is an ardent supporter of the RFA, even though he believes the option chosen extracts logs at only one quarter of the sustainable rate. He is very happy that the forests will be protected for his children, and that a timber industry will remain long into the future.
As he says, you need to consider the whole picture. We need building materials. The alternative is steel and to get that you clear fell vast tracts to make mines for iron ore and coal and the forest never returns, even after the mine is spent. At least the timber can be managed sustainably. The trouble is that the balanced view never made it into the media. Perhaps if it did, he would have lived out his days in Broome?
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