FORESTRY VALUES

ANDREW Walker from Neville Smith Forest Products and Peter Boyer have contributed valuable opinion pieces about native forest management and forest protection from different but overlapping standpoints (Talking Point, January 5). Boyer makes persuasive arguments for protecting forests and rewilding landscapes to store vast quantities of carbon and recreate habitat for vulnerable species.

Walker’s equally powerful point is that dangerously high fuel loads in world heritage areas and reserves amid the heating and drying effects of climate change creates inevitability of catastrophic wildfires, destroying habitat and native animals, releasing vast quantities of greenhouse gases and threatening human lives and property.

Discussion must include how fuel is to be reduced, bearing in mind climate change has already made cool burning more problematic. I agree with Boyer, conversion of biodiverse forests to eucalyptus regrowth and monoculture plantations by clear-felling then burning of coupe residues and reseeding or planting does not fit with the planetary crises. Indigenous people did use fire in their forest management system but this can’t be equated with, or even considered remotely similar to, the far more destructive industrial forest management regime which was favoured by Forestry Tasmania, and now by Sustainable Timber Tasmania in our publicly owned forests. All that said, it seems a step too far to reject all harvesting of native forest for timber with reliance purely on plantation trees. Surely it is possible to harvest much lower volumes of native timber, and value it much more greatly, without having a significant detrimental effect on habitat and in keeping with the need to store much more carbon and protect water catchments? Frank Nicklason

North Hobart