Ian, if Jennifer agrees, it would be interesting to read a guest post by you on your land and forestry practices. ie a short case study/story: a bit of the history, perhaps a photo or 2 to illustrate your points about how (and how not) to manage the land, the trees and native habitat in your neck of the woods, and what you think is the solution to the cluster of forest-related issues.

As far as the impact of “small mammals,” well, we are small mammals, too. Now as everyone familiar with mammalian behavior knows, these critters avoid fouling their nest. My guess is, humans got plenty of that mammal behavior and exert themselves to the limit of their intelligence to keep their nest a nice place.

We’re nesting on this planet, and want to keep it a nice place, and maybe some want to complain about human nesting habits, but hey, there’s nobody else around to give us potty-training. We’re as good as we are and that’s it.

Schiller.

Comment at a previous blog post from Christine Jones about small mammals:

“The open, park-like appearance of many areas at the time of European settlement has often been attributed to indigenous burning regimes. More recent evidence suggests that the healthy grasslands and friable soils described by the first settlers were more likely to have reflected the high abundance of small native mammals, such as bettongs and potoroos most of which are now locally extinct .. with the loss of the regenerative effects of small native mammals in Australia since European settlement, managed grazing is now arguably the only natural means by which grasslands can be ‘improved’ in a holitistic way.”
see http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/000828.html

These “concessions” are frequently mistaken by foreign observers to be “legal logging” while the local communities who try to continue with their traditional use of the forest are regarded as “poachers” and “illegal loggers”.

In legal terms, the local communities should have a right to maintain their ‘existing use rights’ as an express provision of the Montreal Protocol, without need for any sort of development approval or permit process. But when these rights are assumed to be non-existent then the so-called permit held by the General is seen as the primary instrument in law.

And clearly, all the damage is being inflicted by the large scale ‘legal logging’ while the small scale, repairable impact, harvesting is done by the ‘poachers’.

And all the international certification schemes succeed in doing is impose a whole new layer of opportunity to extract baksheesh from the disadvantaged communities.

And it is quite interesting to note that the European greens have fully supported the certification of wood from their own native forests and their consumers actually prefer their wood to come from native forest instead of plantations.

Indeed, the distinction between plantation and native forest is not very clear because one of the most effective ways to establish a forest on cleared land is to plant a small number of trees of different species and then wait for them to bear seed and regenerate a regrowth forest. This way nature makes the choice of which species goes best in which spot. It has worked very well on my place.

But here in Australia, the greens have fought tooth and nail to try and deny certification to all forest types that are not plantation.

To those of us who have always taken the view that ‘how you get there is what the journey is all about’ it is pure lunacy.

I have this scenario in my imagination when, in AD 2063, the last SE Asian rainforest is lost, and orang utans are only found in zoos. The world will look around to see where all that wood went. Australia will be standing quietly in the background, with vast areas of forest locked up in the 1990s and 2000s, much of it approaching its period of senescence, and a long history of living off other people’s wood. We’ll point to China of course, but our per capita consumption will possibly be high by world standards. Yes, we’re accused of greed on many counts, but if forests are still an iconic green issue in 2063, we will deserve whatever we get when the reckoning is made.

I don’t mind what the mechanisms are, but they have to operate within a real market. Before you get to mechanisms, you have to develop a national ethos that allows a realistic mechanism to be developed, and that mechanism means we will have to compromise on our desire to save every tall smooth-barked tree we can (but only in Aus). The RFAs were meant to do this, but the greens refused to be involved in this process and then worked furiously to destroy the Agreements once they were drawn up. In WA, this was very successful for the greens and the RFA lasted only a few months before the industry was decimated due to public anxiety whipped up by a campaign run with the full support of the local daily newspaper (which, as many people have observed, is printed on paper).

Boxer if we pursue a strategy of only consuming the amount of wood that we produce nationally (or regionally), then it’s an argument for national self-sufficiency that goes against the whole premise of free markets and international trade according to comparitive advantage. We already wear accusations of being a greedy nation and I don’t doubt that we will attract further criticism for this.

Meanwhile, international trade continues (and objections to further logging in Aust continue). Would the best strategy be ethically based trade in certified sustainable wood only? ie widespread (international) adoption of FSC, not just voluntary fringe action by some NGO’s, some businesses and some individuals.

Does anyone have experience with the role that small mammals and other small organisms play in minimising fuel loads (before their numbers generally declined)?

Undisturbed forest – I don’t know. It’s one of those statistics that can be turned to your advantage whatever your perspective. To me, it makes more sense to consider each forest type individually. Eg, if you clear a vast area of wheatbelt land to grow food (a million acres a year!), then the total area of native vegetation may be significantly reduced. Meantime, a tall forest type x that is not cleared (because it’s not land desired for broadacre farming) may be largely undisturbed. It makes little sense to treat the tall forest type x according to the situation that has developed in the wheatbelt region.

Old growth forest is a poorly defined concept in my opinion. When a search was made for the oldest jarrah in SW of WA, the oldest tree was a bit over 300 years old. This is a relatively slow-growing forest where the strategy is survival of the individual. In forests like mountain ash, where the strategy is to produce millions of saplings, grow like mad and more than 95% of the trees die before they reach maturity, the chances of finding trees older than jarrah seems unlikely. People have used the diameter of trees to imply an age; big trees are older. This is comprehensively wrong in many, if not all, cases because the biggest trees are the biggest because they have grown several times faster than their neighbours. So 600+ years seems way too long for any forest that grows fast enough to be considered a commercial resource. Also worth noting that not one species has been recorded as being driven to extinction by logging in Australia.

For the purposes of a concise argument elsewhere I suggested that a whole forest could be logged if the rotation was long enough. This is an oversimplification. I think it would be much better to debate how much forest needs to be preserved to ensure no loss of biodiversity (and it should be possible to quantify this) than to have the current debate which is just both sides saying “we want more” and “youse guys are all wankers”.

There are many many Aus forests that have been regenerated since the 19th century. I think any of the forests that are hotly debated today (these are all tall and usually smooth barked species) would have numerous examples of regen spread across the last 100 years.

Stopping Asian deforestation. There are more factors than our consumption, including other nations’ imports and clearing for oil palms etc. But wood is a globally traded commodity. If you take more from the global resource than you are growing as a nation, then you must be depleting someone else’s forest, even you import all your wood from NZ plantations (which are grown on land that used to support tall native forest). As a net wood importer, while we lock up more and more Australian resources for our sense of well being, we are making up the deficit directly from the global resourse. I heard a WWF guy on the ABC say today that we are the biggest individual market for PNG sawn wood. So if we grew all our own wood, other countries would continue to use the rainforests. But at the moment we are following the feeding frenzy strategy. Keep our resource under the bed and use as much as possible of others nations’ forests before those forests are all gone. If we don’t rip ‘em off, someone else will. I would bet London to a brick that we will be condemned for this in the future as a greedy first world nation. Which, when you look at it, we are.

I also don’t have much time for the argument that they’re going to clear this forest anyway, so we may as well buy the wood. The sale of the wood probably pays for the clearing. Analogy – the sale of the hide from a cow pays for the act of slaughtering of the cow, so vegetarians should not use any leather, even if they don’t eat the meat which is the principal product.

From memory, I read (in a international article) that it’s 3% – 5% depending on choice of parameters. Re: regrowth, again from memory: an old-growth forest state can take 600-1000 years to reach.

***Is there no good reason at all to conserve/protect the remaining old-growth forests in Aust? Should we just log it all?***

As it’s practised today, is Australian forestry sustainable – and how can we be sure if it takes 65-80 years for regrowth?

Re: Asia – If Australia logged 100% of its forest area, would that stop Asian deforestation, or are there additional factors at play in Asia (eg: palm plantations)?