9 June 2020

Native forest logging is just mindbogglingly unsustainable. I can’t even begin to imagine the kind of mental gymnastics it took to rationalise VicForests’ exemption from national environment laws in the first place. We’re in a climate and ecological emergency; we must keep our carbon-rich forests intact and our endangered species habitats protected.

After the massively destructive fires of last summer, why are we not doing more to protect what’s left?

David Lindenmayer, an ecologist at ANU, has said that native logging adds significantly to fire severity, and that ‘salvage logging’ in fire-affected forests is especially harmful, further disturbing areas where wildlife is trying to recover; altering the forest composition so that it becomes more fire prone, with flammable species taking the place of the original species; and increasing fuel load, thereby raising fire risk.

In response to reasoned and evidence-based arguments like this, what do we hear from VicForests? Baseless assurances, hidden behind a cowardly veil of anonymity:

“‘Many academics and fire experts agree that harvesting does not elevate fire risk,’ a [VicForests] company spokesman said, asking not to be named… VicForests was asked for more information to support the company’s assertion that native logging, and salvage logging in particular, do not increase the risk of wildfires, but it declined to respond further” (as reported in Japan Times).

VicForests would do well to consider critical thinking expert Peter Ellerton’s caution that “If we don’t take the trouble to try and make the reasoning that is sensible to us also accessible and meaningful to other people, then that’s not public reasoning, it’s just a different kind of assertion.”

Organisations that rely on unjustified assertions to make their case have no intellectual credibility, and every empty pronouncement they make is merely a fresh insult to their audience.

If you want to take action to stop the logging of our precious unburnt native forests, today is a good day for it.