Dear Jennifer,
I would like to share an example of the absurdity and wastage which goes under the name of endangered or threatened species management in southwestern forests [of western Australia], part of the ‘great diversity hotspot’ referred to by Professor Myer and others.
A few months ago I visited the karri forest and drove out with a former colleague to have a wander in the Warren and Dombakup State forests, south of the Warren National Park. I once knew these areas very well; I had been the District Forester at Pemberton in the 1960s and 1970s. The Warren and Dombakup State forests were at the time being cutover to supply sawlogs to the big sawmill at Pemberton. Part of my job was the preparation of the logging plans for the mill, supervision of the treemarking (selection of seed trees), quality control of logging operations and the post-logging regeneration of the cutover forest. The clearfelling took place over two or three years, and the regeneration operations in the summer of 1971/72. This involved a process of “scrub-rolling” (using a bulldozer to flatten the tall dense understorey of karri wattle so we would get an even seedbed) and then burning to create an ashbed at a time when there was ripe seed in the crowns of the retained seed trees.
Karri trees only produce seed every 4 or 5 years, so the timing of regeneration operations is very critical. The burns themselves were a tremendous challenge, because of the heavy fuels in the national parks to the north and west, but we had a good handle on the seed cycle, and I had a cadre of very experienced field staff and forest workmen. The whole business succeeded wonderfully. The following winter we got a mass germination of karri seedlings, plus all the other plants which come away after fire in this country. The log landings and some of the old snigging tracks were planted with karri seedlings from the nursery at West Manjimup.
It was great to revisit this forest 35 years later. The hillsides are now covered with tall (>40 metres), swaying karri trees as far as the eye can see, and the day I was there the bush was alive with birdsong and rich with wildflowers. I was told the fauna (which is mostly nocturnal) is abundant, and I sampled for myself the good clear water running in the streams. In one section there was a commercial thinning operation going on, taking out the smaller less vigorous trees to free up the bigger and better trees, and enhance their maturity. The logs were being sold to a sawmill for the production of tile battens, and the thinned stands looked absolutely magnificent.
The whole thing appeared to me to be a working example of ecologically sustainable forest management, with the new forest replacing the old and already providing environmental services as well as commercial values, and growing sturdily into the Old Growth of the future. It seemed to me that here was a scene of beauty and productivity, something of which we could all be proud. Not so.
To my surprise I noticed that all through the regrowth, officers from the Department of Conservation and Land Management (CALM) had been designating areas in which the thinning operations were banned. These were marked with plastic tape. When I asked what was going on, it was explained to me that a CALM officer had discovered “rare” species of cryptogams (liverworts) growing on the karri wattle in the regrowth forest in this area.
A liverwort is a primitive green, moss-like slime which grows on the trunks of woody shrubs in higher rainfall forest areas all over the world).
CALM feared that the liverworts would be destroyed in the thinning operation and become extinct. So in these areas the thinning was banned. This will have a number of downsides, including a reduction in the rate of development of the stand, loss of commercial value and income, demand for officer time to delineate the exclusion zones and police them, loss of profit to thinning contractors and a much more difficult forest in which to carry out green burning for wildfire mitigation (unthinned karri regrowth is tricky to burn). Carried forward, it will mean that the areas can never be logged again and are more vulnerable to high intensity summer bushfires.
To put this into context: on an evolutionary scale, liverworts are a very ancient type of plant. They have undoubtedly lived in the karri forest for as long as there has been karri forest, and that is countless thousands of years. Certainly they have not evolved in this area during the last 35 years. Over the eons they would have survived thousands of bushfires, including mild burns lit by Aborigines and high intensity stand replacement fires lit by lightning. By their very presence in the regrowth forest, these liverworts demonstrate that they were quite able to survive the forest being clearfelled, scrub-rolled and given a hot regeneration burn and converted from old growth to regrowth. While CALM admit that the liverworts may well have recovered after the clearfelling and hot regeneration fire, they regard them as too delicate to survive selective thinning of the subsequent regrowth forest.
I did some checking and discovered that these liverwort species are well known from as far afield as the Stirling Ranges and are widespread (though scattered, and their distribution is not mapped) throughout the southern forests. They may not be “rare”, but CALM has decided they are “threatened”. So that’s that.
I challenged CALM over the idiocy of their policy, thinking that perhaps they did not understand the history of the area. Far from it. They knew, but it made not one iota of difference. The good old Precautionary Principle was duly trotted out, and as usual presented as unchallengeable. Neither did the disgraceful waste of staff resources involved in the “protection” of these non-rare and non-threatened species worry anyone. I was left wondering whether CALM has too many staff, with not enough to do.
I don’t go so far (as some Old Growth Foresters do) as to suggest that the environmental ideologues in government are deliberately playing the threatened species card to stop timber cutting in the karri forest. I think it is more likely that inexperienced young CALM staff with an academic background in environmental science rather than forestry, and with a burning desire to do something for the environment suddenly found themselves with an opportunity, and went for it, without thinking through the logic or the consequences. I have observed many young people in the new environmental and land management agencies, and they share a common characteristic: they know what they are against, but they do not know what they are for.
The multipurpose-multivalue and pro-active forest management system I was taught and then practiced as a young forester has been replaced by a vacuum, and in groping for something to do (as opposed to something to stop), they come up with something silly. The worst thing about all this, to my mind, is that the senior people in government, the people who are running the show, let it happen.
Yours sincerely,
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
What the young inexperienced CALM staff are doing, because they have been conditioned that way, is strive to manage the whole ecosystem for the benefit on one species. Nobody with a bit of knowledge of forest ecology would act that way, so why do they? Because the species of interest is on some government list. What will be the results of this tunnel vision management, this failure to think holistically? They don’t know. But, by jingo, its a safe thing to do a a public servant isn’t it!
When the current Labor govt in WA came to power, it was at the height of the squabble over native forests – the squabble was one of the reasons for a change of government. Under the new cabinet, the CEO of CALM was dispatched in accordance with the wishes of the Conservation Council of WA and the culture of the organisation changed.
CALM was originally formed with an approximately equal weighting on “conservation” and “land management”, and the revenue from the commercial forests was used to support an increased level of management in a wide variety of conservation reserves. With the new (at that time) Labor Minister, the organisation was brought around to sail in accordance with the world view of the doctors’ wives. Land management is evil, conservation is lovely. Everything is Green, Bambi reigns Supreme. (See, I’m more than just a pretty face and a pain in the neck, I’m a poet as well. Multiskilling, it’s all the go.)
They tried to change CALM’s name, to remove “land management”, such a dirty dirty phrase, but as I recall that was blocked in the Upper House as being a waste of money. So the current letterhead is really a reflection of where CALM is now. I don’t have a digital copy of the letterhead to measure this, but I reckon the two evil words are about font size 6 and the lovely word “conservation” is a bold font size 30. At morning prayers in the office we have to shout CONSERVATION and say land management in a whisper. Superficiality rules. Appearances are everything.
Ah well, I still have a pseudonym to hide behind, a wonderful family, good health (for an old bastard) and a modicum of sanity. And I don’t have to hunt for liverworts that don’t need protecting from a threat that doesn’t exist.
Thanks for your post Roger.
The sanctity of the liverwort is not the sole obsession of avant-garde CAlm bureaucrats.
In the Daintree, the clubmosses, lichens and liverworts that constitute the epiphylls (plants that live on the leaves of other plants in a non-parasitic sense) are portrayed as microscopic forests with a tremendous biodiversity in their own right.
According to departmental propaganda, the diversity and distribution of the mciroflora is diminishing at an alarming rate on vegetation bordering the earthen trails at Mossman Gorge, which attracts over 600,000 visitors per year and particularly during the dry period, inferring the displacement of dust onto leaves by visitor impact.
This then provides the EVIDENTIAL requirement for the application of the precautionary principle, of serious or irreversible environmental damage requiring measures to prevent the environmental degradation.
It also forms the evidentiary basis for the subsequent grant application to construct a boardwalk and in all my years in conservation management, the construction of boardwalks (which is secondary only to the acquisition of lands) is the single most important obsession of senior staff, as if a testament to the greatness of their part in nature’s magnificent design.
It helps that governments are paranoid about litigation and boardwalks seem to fulfil a reasonable duty of care. I am amazed though, how visitors never stop to consider that the illusion of protection provided by the boardwalk has come at the expense of protection for the entire footprint of the boardwalk.
This is exactly the sort of case where the principles of;
1 proper examination of all relevant matters, and
2 Cost effective measures, and
3 Measures that are in proper proportion to the nature of the threat,
to which the Precautionary Principle is subordinate too, must be made subject to a compliance regime under the Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment.
Lets face it, Roger, you and all the other people who created your forest all deserve a beautiful forest like that. But the rest of the scumocracy don’t deserve a single tree.
The saddest thing of all is that it will all have to get a lot worse before there is any hope of it getting better.
Ian I’d like to suggest a modification to yr pt 3:
Measures that are in proper proportion to the magnitude/scale of the threat x the probability of its occurrence
Then I think you have a balanced approach that incorporates the precautionary principle.
A telling piece of common sense, Roger, with a sound historical perspective. The next CEO of CALM should be an historian (or a forester?).
May I suggest a mischievous application of the holy “Precautionary Principle”? I believe (no proof mind you) that liverworts are set to take over the karri forest. Any attempt to conserve them is simply aiding their cause – wall to wall brown slime. The Precautionary Principle says that we should avoid any aid or comfort to liverworts, until it can be proven that they are innocent and harmless.
What did that French lawyer say about the Precautionary Principle vanishing up its own logical backside?
On 30 May 2005 Senator Brown (Greens) personally launched a daring bid in the Federal Court to protect the endangered Swift Parrot, Wedge-tailed Eagle and Wielangta (Broad-toothed) Stag Beetle.
According to RH Green of the Queen Victoria Museum in his book the Fauna of Tasmania – Birds “Like other small parrots the Swift Parrot has also greatly declined in numbers during the twentieth century. Various reasons for this have been postulated, one of which is the reduction of available food trees, in particular of the Blue Gum Eucalyptus globulus. Essential as such a resource most certainly is, it seems unlikely to be the only cause. This parrot may be another species which has suffered from a lack of available nesting hollows, as a result of competition from the introduced Starling.”
I am waiting to see the humble starling in the dock!
The numbers and confirmed nests are increasing for the Wedge Tailed Eagle, thanks to the pre operational surveys of the forest industry and protection zones under the forest practices code. Again according to RH Green it used to be “killed at every opportunity” in the mistaken belief that it preyed upon lambs it is now wholly protected and “in no immediate danger of decline”.
Who will be sued?
The third little bug is the Broad toothed Stag beetle. The DPIWE web site claims
“It is threatened because it is so rare and is only recorded from a few locations. These locations are all subject to threatening processes such as clearing. The beetle larvae feed in rotting logs on the ground. Too frequent firing means these logs get consumed by fires. Another threat to the beetle’s log supply is from forestry practises in which whole coups are clearfelled and then re-sown. It takes another 40 or 50 years before there are suitable fallen logs available. Unfortunately some sites in Weilangta Forest are subject to firewood concessions, which means fallen logs are collected.
Another threat to the beetle’s survival is their attractiveness. They are much sought after by beetle collectors. In the past logs were smashed during beetle hunts, which makes logs dry out rapidly, reducing the beetle’s food supply. They are very slow growers because of their poor diet of rotting wood, and they remain larvae for several years.”
As we have all seen the wilderness society picture of a clear felled coupe with plenty of rotten logs, and if we haven’t, we might have a good idea that under the Forest Practice code there are stream side reserves and habitat reserves for threatened species, who will be in court?
Will it be the firewood collectors or the well meaning beetle collectors?
Just like the WA situation has the Precautionary Principle gone mad, or is it a weapon to pursue a political agenda?
The use of 1080 might be making tassie devils’ weakened immune systems more vulnerable to cancer. There’s no decisive proof, but there may be a causal link. Just taking this info on its own merits, what response would you guys recommend?
I agree to the inclusion of scale and realistic probability, into the application of the precautionary Principle, Thinksy.
But how very apt that, of all the available choices for a tribal totem, the cognoscenti at CALM should choose a green slime.
Thinksy,
I would recommend more research into cancer in Tassie Devils before any precipitate action. After all, instant coffee might cause stomach cancer, and mobile phones might cause brain tumours. Blogging may cause atrophy of the brain, especially in my case. Anything is possible. Let’s act on reasonable evidence, not conjecture.
Still using this idea for an exchange (nothing more – I should have chosen something more loosely hypothetical, less contentious)..
What *if*: the evidence was strong but an absolute causal link difficult to prove; the risks are seemingly severe (let’s say the devils were genuinely endangered); but tighter restrictions on the use of the poison would have a delay before they benefited the devils via the foodchain. At what point is the evidence and the risk stong enough to justify action? (Do we wait forever?)
Hypothetically, declining health and abundance of Tassie devils through cancer is all the evidence that the precautionary principle would require. The lack of an absolute causal link should not be used as a reason to postpone measures to prevent the decline.
The decision to apply the precautionary principle, however, whilst supposedly a binding statutory obligation on all states and territories, is in contrast applied at the disretion of bureaucracy.
In another example (unfortunately not hypothetical) after years of effort attempting to obtain a commercial activity permit for small group guided access into the wilderness portion of the Daintree NP, I was ultimately denied authority on application of the precautionary principle.
The land management agency had an inordinate body of scientific argument to justify application of the precautionary principle, but in my day in court I put it to the witnesses for the respondent that the application was merely that, an application, that the activity itself had not occurred becuase without the permit it was not permissible, so in an absence of access, what was the nature and extent of the evidence of serious and irreversible environmental damage that justified the application of the precautionary principle.
And of course there was none, just an abundance of doom and gloom speculative scenarios. In response to questions that sought to understand why the same land management agency had not applied the precautionary principle to the abundantly quantified 10,000 strong feral pig population in extactly the same super-sensitive estate, there was merely side-stepping and objections of irrelevance.
The court ruled in favour of the respondent.
thinksy,
Before commenting on your speculatin of some causal link between 1080 and DFTD perhaps we should consider the following.
The first instances of the DFTD was from a National Park in NE Tas, where 1080 is not used.
1080 to control browsing herbivores is mixed with carrots and is not attractive to carnivores.
Meat based 1080 for fox eradication is only a very recent innovation.
1080 LD50 rates are very low for devils and they would need to consume a lot of poisoned dead animals even for a sub lethal effect to be apparent, difficult to do when a permit condition is that carcases be collected, whilst the odd one might be missed, there is not a lot of poisoned feed.
DFTD appears to be onlly present in adults not juveniles which virtually eliminates poison, or lower immune system.
Latest research on transmission indicates transfer during fights where claws teeth are creating open wounds.
A map of known DFTD locations compared to a rainfall map shows incidences coinciding with low rainfall, mainly north east, central and east coast of Tassie, pointing to better habitat, better food, and therefore greater population density, and greater possibility of fights over food, territory and mates.
In the NW with its high concentration of farms and plantations and therefore 1080 use, there has been little if any DFTD recorded.
So to comment on your speculation of causal link, my opinion is no, extremely unlikely.
cinders thanks for the reply. Kindly note that I wasn’t actually speculating about a causal link. I was suggesting a set of what-if circumstances to explore (hence “Just taking this info on its own merits”, “hypothetical” and “using this idea for an exchange nothing more”)
Re: yr 1st few points: the animals are mobile, and a potential causal influence is indirect ie devils eat carcasses of animals that are prone to the odd carrot. Are they all collected in time? indirect ingestion may weaken immune system, may make devil more vulnerable to development of cancer. But other factors are connected, so more substantial proof would be required, fair enough.
How about a more hypothetical situation? certainty is hard to establish: There is strong suggestive (not conclusive) evidence that the widely-loved creature the ‘Globb’ is suffering accelerated mortality due to substance QQ that is used in the production of car tyres and released into the Globb’s habitat as warm tyres wear on the road. The Globb is now vulnerable. Proving the link with more certainty is difficult/ time-consuming /costly. What to do?
But perhaps this attempt at an exchange was stupid given Neil’s curmudgeonly reply – the same reason Motty has his head in the oven with the gas on and everyone else is tired and cynical: there is no learning opportunity here, forget it, the future is set in stone – useless idiotic bureaucracy that has its ears painted on and is overrun by deep-green fanatics will ensure that the worst possible decision is made.
the precautionary principle may get manipulated by particular agendas or narrow outlooks, but so do all instruments, science is politicised & polarised etc. It’s not a basis on which to dismiss the precautionary principle altogether.
Neil what is being done about the feral pig popns?
Thinksy, on the National Park portion of the WHA, they are being provided with the very same legislative protection as the Endangered Southern Cassowary, but with the competitive population advantages of two-hundred pigs/per cassowary and a more versatile foraging repertoire.
About $2million per year is directed into providing the public with the illusion of responsiveness, but fewer pigs are trapped than are born in the same period.
Thinksy
I admire your persistence. I don’t have the energy to go onto other blogs and take on people who might be my natural opponents in debate.
I think in your Globbs and tyres example, given the “strong suggestive evidence” of a causal link, there would be good grounds to apply the precautionary principle because “The Globb is now vulnerable”.
Where to now? I’ve stuck my head in the slipknot snare.
No snare.
I believe that zinc is a very important element for skin healing. Where fire has been excluded from a low nutrient system for decades, might not zinc be locked up in dead wood etc? Wounds that are slow to heal, and suffer repeated insults from fighting and infection, could well turn cancerous. I remember reading about North West Aboriginal women eating termite mud. They didn’t know why, but it was found to be high in zinc. Nyoongar people of the south-west were noted doing the same. Are Tassie Devils getting enough zinc? Just hypothesising. Does the Precautionary Principle say Tasmanian bush should be burnt more often?
Thinksy, the precautionary Principle may not apply if the rate of decline in Globb numbers is sufficiently slow to enable further investigation.
And Neil, you should have argued, not against the principle but, rather, that the probability of the harm presented by your activities was neither serious nor irreparable. The PC was only ever devised for serious or irreparable harm so in your case you could argue that the kind of harm, if any, could be identified and responded to by conditions attached to the approval.
This would have switched the burden of proof back onto the forces of darkness to show why the damage from a foot trail could not be;
1 stopped at any specific location by moving the trail, and
2 restored at any specific location by a suitable time interval in association with minor remedial works, or
3 dispersed in impact by a rotation system using some trails only some of the time.
This would get them into the specifics of exactly how much harm to how much forest and how long the repair phase would be.
Ian, I agued valiantly to the very points you identified, however, it is very difficult to describe the full extent to which the Daintree rainforest (proper) is quarantined from public access.
Perhaps, to reveal a new dimension of environmental impropriety, you might consider the local Council’s resolution to address unauthorised development on privately-owned lands that have very recently been designated for conservation in the draft planning scheme.
“Current unlawful residents/owners in the green zones be allowed to remain subject to the following:
• Sell their land for inclusion in a conservation regime (EPA, ARF, DRF);
• Lease it back (from government to current owner‐occupant) for an amount equivalent to the rates for as long as the occupant chooses to live there;
• Upgraded buildings to meet standards but with limited expansion opportunities;
• Full rehabilitation of the site once it is vacated;
• Current owner‐occupant to be compensated for existing onsite infrastructure when they vacate (buildings roads, clearings etc).”
Having taken the unprecedented step to compulsorily expropriate the existing-use-right to establsih a dwelling house on privately-owned lands, the Council is now proposing to reinstate these removed rights on the condition that the land is sold into public ownership and then leased for the extent of the occupancy.
That is, conservation is important, but not as important as public ownership.
Never mind that public ownership is valued higher than conservation, when it comes to the reiteration of the private-owners right to the very same priority, a reciprocal policy applies.
Neil Hewett’s mention of the abundant wild pigs in the Daintree reminded me of an interesting bit of information published last year.
Larson et al., (Worldwide Phylogeography of Wild Boar Reveals Multiple Centers of Pig Domestication, Science 307 (5715): pp. 1618 – 1621) found that pigs from the west coast of Cape York have a haplotype that falls within a cluster of differentiated wild boar from Burma and Thailand. They also mentioned that the presence of an exotic nematode and a Melanesian tick on the pigs suggests that some pigs in Cape York are of Southeast Asian stock and that there was no historical evidence for the introduction of Southeast Asian wild boar to Northern Australia.
It looks like feral pigs in northern Australia were probably already here long before Europeans arrived. If they were introduced by indigenous people or perhaps even made their own way here during the last ice age we may have to revise their eco-status. If they weren’t introduced by Europeans we will probably discover that they play an important role in seed dispersal, topsoil condition, and who knows what else.
Thanks to Roger Underwood and Boxer for these insights into the actual operation of WA Govt in native forests. There is nothing new in Govts taking concern for species to an extent where common sense is hard to detect. I recall circa 1990 a proposal to improve the little port of San Remo on Phillip Island near Melbourne was killed out of fears that it might make extinct certain molluscs.
A concept just as attenuated as the notion that some patches of logging might threaten the SW liverworts.
Some of what you have said re CALM recent history helps me to understand why Perth water supply policies have taken such a disastrous turn post 2001.
Spending $500Mill per desal plant to produce 45GL of water PA that could be recovered vastly cheaper by low impact managing of existing dam catchments is truly bizarre.
More desal plants look just as inevitable as they are unnecessary.
The cost to taxpayers of over concern for species is enormous and growing.
I have waited patiently for proof that I am wrong in asserting that Green Slime is taking over the karri forest. Also, the absence of Tasmanian Devils from the karri forest is clear evidence that they have been wiped out, or at least are endangered, by not enough burning to release zinc. Assuming that I am right, the Precautionary Principle says that we must burn more often, QED. Will somebody inform the media, the minister, the eco-commissars, and Dr. Beth Schultz of the WA Conservation Council? Having a PhD in medieval French literature, or whatever, I am sure she will grasp the situation immediately.
Oh, I forgot to inform CALM. I assume Dr. Schultz will inform all her members an affiliates by group email. Also Mr. Paul Llewellyn, Greens MP, who has a very clear policy on fire management.