The following letter was published in one of Australia’s broadsheet newspapers The Sydney Morning Herald on June 17, 2006. The Sydney Morning Herald could claim to have a more educated and influential readership than any other newspaper in Australia.
“Fellers not fellows
During my long and interesting life, and my travels around the world, I have observed that there are only two kinds of people: civilised people who plant and look after trees, and uncivilised humans who chop them down.
Moray MacDonald
Franz, Lane Cove”
The letter is perhaps indicative of the extent to which our elite is being swept along by environmental fundamentalism.
And I can’t help but wonder whether Moray MacDonald knows where his toilet paper comes from:
“Here’s to a logger
Who fills a need
From houses to paper
From one little seedFor those of you who
Wish to disagreeTry wiping your arse
without felling a tree.”
The poem was on my stubbie holder at the TCA Conference last year.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
It’s the type of simplistic nonsense ( tree carers good/tree fellers bad )that makes debate on so many environmental issues pretty tiresome.
I’m quite sure that the average Joe Blow accepts the legitimacy and necessity of a viable timber industry but also wants to protect as much non-plantation forest as possible.
It should be the case that humainity is becoming MORE rational and reasonable not less.
During my short and boring life I have observed not two categories of people but one. A human need to define everyone as them and us or civilised/uncivilised or tree planter/tree cutter greenie /redneck.
The greatest offenders would appear to be the self appointed defenders of the environment who invariably see writer, journalist, adman, office worker as good and woodchipper, forester, logger as evil.
The idea that there might be a connection (paper) between the two never seems to cross their minds. Neither does the idea that the ones doing the cutting might also be the ones also doing the planting and caring. That would be too complicated in a black and white world occupied by most environmentalists which is sad because they do their cause no good at all.
The complexity of the environment does not easily reduce to simple dichotomies of good and evil but we’re not really talking about nature here but politics and populism.
I think that life is interesting and too short to drink bad wine.
Dude needs a nitram and diesel enema.
What bugs me most is that these morons get to cast a vote in the same election as me. Is there any serious doubt that living under a mandate from this sort of drop kick is a “cruel and arbitrary” punishment?
Wooo, another attack of bimbophobia, get me a new state boundary before I barf.
A veritable feeding frenzy of tree-felling philes.
A sample size of one person from Lang Cove – who says they’re elite – maybe they’re just visting from Oxford Street ?
And how many rolls of loo paper does one get for the average tree? We could make an estimate of course – so we have x grams per roll x number of sheets per session per average size butt x frequency of attendance per day x dietary index x 365 days x the average lifetime – minus the bidet effect factor – divide that into the mass of the average Tasmanian forest icon specimen – so is botty wiping a major factor in tree felling? How many trees are consumed in national wiping. Is bottom wiping overrated anyway?
And responsible greenies I can vouch have unwiped butts as a sign of solidarity.
Did Lenin have a spotless bott when running the revolution. No ! – there is no time for such things.
So Jennfier’s analysis does not stand up to demographic or statistical scrutiny.
I thought greenies recycled their toilet paper? – waste not want not – no doubt members of Brown’s Revolution will be probing the matter for further “analysis”
Luke, it’s not Jennifer who labels him elite
the letter writer claims to be elite by claiming to be well travelled and experienced. Thus he feels qualified to confer status (surely the attribute of an elite) on those who plant trees and denigrates those who cut them down.
The whole thing would be too silly for words except that by letting it go unchallenged it becomes simply one more plank in a villification program that would be unacceptable if slanted at any other minority.
Personally I’ve planted hundreds if not thousands of trees but tree felling is what pays the mortgage and feeds the kids. So what does that make us civilised or uncivilised?
The important thing is how do you ever get to talk sensibly about any environmental issue but particualrly forestry when it is now so laden with emotional language and preconceptions like these which go unquestioned by most people even relatively well educated ones?
i’ve written more about the elite including quoting Jared Diamond here :
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=64
and with Robyn Williams here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/science/ockham/stories/s1509193.htm
I find that print-outs of Jennifers blog make the best dunny paper. Not very elite, but the most satisfying wipe you’ll ever get.
you can make paper from all sorts of stuff OTHER than tree fibers, depends what grade paper you need for what purpose.
(disclosure: I don’t think loggers are uncivilised or evil)
Having only newly discovered this site and this blog thing I find some of this stuff incredible. This Moray peanut has forgotten that trees and other vegetation once stood where his house now stands! Uncivilized drongo
Checking the Jared Diamond article above I find these lines:
“” I’m a member of that elite and I live in the leafy Brisbane electorate of Indooroopilly. The junk mail from the Wilderness Society on the issue of tree clearing in the lead up to the last state election was relentless. A clear impression was given that the last bit of scrub (expressed in football fields) was about to be bulldozed in western Queensland. Yet the hard data indicates that even during the height of clearing, during the 1990s, there was a net increase in forest cover of 5 million hectares in western Queensland. In fact, there is more tree cover in Queensland today than when Europeans arrived 200 years ago.
In short, Australia’s elite are repeatedly being fed “cods-wallop” and academics like Jared Diamond who are paid to determine the truth, keep repeating the propaganda. As a result decisions are made which are not in the interests of the environment or Australia as whole and huge amounts of taxpayer’s money is wasted.””
Well this is as much codswallop as Diamond who also talks his share of shit – A vast swath of the original vegetation cover is gone. The vegetation that the greenies are trying to save are remaining pockets in the main cropping/grazing zone which is always up for the chop. There might be heaps of trees growing like weeds elsewhere but not where they used to be; and not the same botanical types as there was in the area felled (Mulga excluded). Agriculture would cut everything down for the plough or the cow if it got the chance. And if elites don’t understand this they’re gullible.
Jennifer (PhD) being as elite as any…
I was educated with the elite and by the elite, and now I live in their neighbourhood, socialize with them, count them amongst my best friends, and work with them. You could easily categorize me as a member of the elite.
Toilet paper isn’t the ideal issue to raise when protesting against cutting trees. That is because trees are not cut down for the sake of producing toilet paper.
Toilet paper is made from the by-products of lumber production. If these by-products were not made into toilet paper, they would have to be incinerated, carted to landfills, etc.
Since the elite are often found in buildings made of steel, concrete and glass, perhaps these are their favored building material and humble hovels made of wood are for lower-class louts.
Schiller.
Why be trapped in a binary world of either growing or cutting trees? Join me in the third way and do both… it’s ever so sustainable!
The poet in question very clearly acknowledges that we wipe our bums with felled trees. Why the fuss? Was it a slow news day?
Dear Lord,
Please free me from the bonds of labor and grant me an income to blog, kinda like Jenny. Amen.
Steve Munn (corporate sponsorhip welcome)
Of course Steve Munn is unhappy we use paper/trees for toilet paper. Munn thinks driving a car and riding in planes is selfish.
Be careful, he checks typos as well.
Munn lives the life of any person living in a city but resents the comforts of modern lifes offerings. The one thing he hate more is other people taking advantage of these creature comforts. Steve votes Green because, because he.. really cares.
Steve’s on a roll, any luck he might get sponsored by VISY as quality control officer of the lunch room.
Hey Mary, how successful has this blog post been in promoting sensible talk without emotionally laden language?
Luke has obviously had his head in a paper bag for the past 30 years as encroachment regrowth onto previously cleared agricultural land is widespread and easily proven by examining any set of historical aerial photographs.
Large swathes of the Brisbane Valley have so much regrowth and woody weeds that it is producing new remnant forest at 16 to 20 times the annual rate of remnant clearing over the past decade.
And despite requesting access to the detailed data, that is readily available to the department, on the area of both remnant and non-remnant native vegetation in each catchment, no such data has been provided. So we are unable to estimate the real rate of new remnant formation.
All we ever get is the total amount being cleared with no mention of the proportion that was partial clearing and no mention of even the possibility that young seedlings can actually grow to remnant status.
So where do you get the 16 to 20 times numbers? What’s a large swathe? And if the regrowth is a sea of saplings it won’t look anything like the original vegetation. And if there’s so much regrowth as you assert – who needs to clear any more old growth remnants.
Sounds like landholders (not greenies) are doing a bad job of land management. i.e. having overcleared it in the first place they then let it go the pack. Perhaps they need the pyrotechnical ream out.
As a very well travelled person, I have noted that Africans wipe their bottoms on old maize cobs, and Afghans use a stick. However, there are few trees left in Afghanistan, and Africans are busily chopping down their forests for firewood and charcoal, and allowing their goats to eat the rest. So non-toilet paper users are not necessarily tree lovers, but may be goat or camel lovers. What on earth that proves, I don’t know, but it is, possibly, food for thought.
A nice start Steve would be some sort of agreement on definitions. For starters -What is old growth? What is regrowth? What is a woody weed? what is remnant vegetation?
Maybe if everyone was really talking about the same thing …
Best comment on the Orwellian transformation of the term elite was when Prof. Flint called his book “Twilght of the Elites” and omitted himself (where is he now).
Old growth is…y’know, older than the younger growth….really, do Afghans use a stick? remind to stay away from Afghan toothpicks
Those “civilised people who plant and look after trees” should not wipe their arse with toilet paper. They should use hankies. Hankies can wipe mouths, hands and other body parts as well. Hankies are washable and re-usable. Hankies are so much more environmental-friendly.
Hey Davey Gam Esq,
That’s why when you are out in the “bush” having a cup of ‘billy tea’ you should always use a crooked stick to stir in your sugar if you have not got a spoon….
Nobody would use a bent stick to wipe their arse!.
Aila doesn’t need toilet paper, she has whole departments of minions to lick her proverbial “ask your mother for sixpence”.
And Luke, I got the data for Brisbane Valley regrowth during the drafting of the SEQ Regional Vegetation Management Plan. And when I asked for the whole state data set the ‘minders’ realised the implications and shut the whole process down.
Myself and many other well intentioned delegates had our pockets pissed in with bodgy science and outright spin for more than 3 years of outrageously manipulated debate on veg management, only to see it all thrown out for a total ban that had not even been raised, let alone discussed in a proper and detailed manner.
I forgot to mention that Afghans also use stones (held in the left hand naturally) for toilet purposes. Smooth ones, of course – totally re-useable, if you are not too fussy, as decadent western infidels may be.
Mary, you raise an interesting one about ‘old growth forest’. I have seen a daft attempt at definition – forest over a hundred years of age. What about ninety-nine? I think the truth is that science has become polluted with political slogans as a substitute for clear thought. For example, I read a supposedly scientific paper in which ‘biodiversity’ was defined as ‘the variety of living things’. I think the shorter word ‘biota’, being plural, automatically implies that there is a variety of living things. What do think?
99 why not 29? because if you wait 71 years then you’ve got to your 100. And of course with some species 100 is middle aged and others may be dead and gone before they ever reach 100.
As for biota – when I was at university many decades ago it meant all living things plants, animals – mammals to microbes in a particular area.
Biodiversity seems to be a more recent term certainly since I did biol 101 – my understanding is that it is bigger than biota in that it encompasses diversity within each of the species present as well as diversity of species. Does any one know the history/ derivation? It certainly seems to pack an emotional punch, just like old growth.
Mary – Origin of term biodiversity:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiversity
http://www.forestbiodiversityinbc.ca/what.asp
Mary and Luke,
Last year I commented on a submission to the West Australian EPA about ‘biodiversity conservation’. In it, the authors used the word over fifty times in a few pages, which irritated me. It reminded me of Orwell’s sheep, only instead of ‘four legs good’ they were chanting ‘biodiversity good’.
Over the past few decades ‘biodiversity’ has become a popular word (Goldstein 1999, Nobis & Wohlgemuth 2004). However, its widespread use by journalists, politicians, environmental lobbyists, or even by scientists is no guarantee that it is a defined, operational, fully measurable, scientific parameter. There is an extensive review on this topic (Doherty et al. 2000) in which it is suggested that “science cannot determine the existential value of biodiversity per se since there is ultimately no endpoint to ecosystem development … there is therefore some debate within the scientific community as to the utility of the term biodiversity.”
The word was popularised in the early 1990s by Edward O. Wilson, an American biologist with a talent for rhetoric. In fact, Wilson merely shortened the term ‘biological diversity’ usually accredited to the English biologist, Sir Arthur Tansley (1935). However, the Russian academician Ghilarov claimed a much older history for the concept, and astutely questioned the status of biodiversity as a precise scientific parameter. He suggested that its liberal use in scientific writing is often simply a bid for status or funding (hear!hear!). Gaston (1996) suggested that “Biodiversity is an interdisciplinary concept, appearing in various guises as a biological concept, a measurable entity, and a social/political construct.” Most often the latter, I suspect.
References:
Doherty et al. (2000) The interaction between habitat conditions, ecosystem processes and terestrial biodiversity – a review. Dept. of Environment and Heritage, Canberra.
Gaston, K.J. (1996) What is biodiversity? In Biodiversity: a biology of numbers and difference. Blackwell Science, Oxford.
Ghilarov, A. (1996) What does ‘biodiversity’ mean – scientific problem or convenient myth. Trends in Ecology & Evolution 11:304-6
Goldstein, P.Z. (1999) Functional ecosystems and biodiversity buzzwords. Conservation Biology 13(2): 247-255
Nobis, M. & Wohlgemuth, T. (2004) Trend words in ecological core journals over the last 25 years (1978-2002). Oikos 106(2): 411-421.
Tansley, A.G. (1935) The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms. Ecology 16: 284-307.
Hope this helps. I still think that the word ‘biota’, being plural, implies the obvious fact that there is a variety of life forms, both between, and within species. If you want to consider the variety of potential interactions between n life forms, consider the sum of the nth row of Pascal’s Triangle. Oooer! Perhaps that was what Doherty had in mind. Having peered into the abyss, he withdrew.
What if an area A had 30 bird species, 5 mammals, 8 reptiles, 573 invertebrates, 100 vascular plants, and 1 tonne of bacteria per hectare, whereas area B had 10 birds species, 12 mammals, 9 reptiles, 328 invertebrates, 74 vascular plants, and 3 tonnes of bacteria per hectare. Which is more ‘biodiverse’? Should we count species? Which species? Biomass? How many interactions should we include? This is getting too long – I’d better shut up before Jen censors me.
Alice, perhaps you have forgotten, handkies are made of cotton.
Surely, they must be “bad”.
ok thanks most informative – so it means different things to different people ( public, scientists of varying breeds, policy makers, media etc) and is not really measurable. Not very useful I would have thought either to science or to political debate.
So how do you measure a healthy environment or for that matter a degraded one? And how do you get it to stand still long enough to take a sample?
Davey Gam Esq. has nailed it. Biodiversity, like “sustainable development” is a term so imprecise as to be of no utility. If one has to define a term every time it is used so as not to be accused of misuse, then the term is useless. Except to those who want to blather.
Don’t be too quick to reach for the “eject” button on biodiversity. The Wiki article explains it in considerable detail and is worth a read at least.
And after development e.g. clearing rainforest to pasture -in the Amazon – the system is obviously much less “biodiverse”.
Similarly with revegetation in sand mining areas – often the revegetated result is less biodiverse.
And in most agricultural developments.
So the species richess (which there are mathematical measures of) is said to be “less biodiverse”.
Of course if you want to argue if more biodiverse is “better”, whether biodiversity means “more stable” or whether biodiversity is better for “ecological services” that’s another matter.
So I think biodiversity is a measureable, useful and descriptive term. Why fret it ?
The problem with sustainable development is that it often isn’t. And for how long a time period does it have to be sustainable – 100 years? – 1000 years ? over the inter-glacials? How much impact on the world around it is counted etc. What about climate change ?
Obviously at the gross end one can see a system is clearly not sustainable. However in the more “moderate” end of the spectrum the devil is in the details.
Thanks Luke,
We have wandered far from the thread topic, but wandering is a useful pastime. Yes, the word ‘biodiversity’ has a place in broad discussion, at dinner parties etc. A scientific parameter it is not. Most biologists use ‘species richness’, so why not call it just that? Yet even that is not entirely clear. A study in tropical forest (Knight 1975) suggested that different answers may arise depending on whether you count tree species per unit area, or tree species per fixed number of trees. A third possibility would be to count tree species intersecting a transect line of a fixed length. Suppose one of these methods showed increasing species richness, one no change, and the other a decrease? What then?
Due, I surmise, to the influence of Charlie Krebs’ well known (and mainly excellent) text book, the Shannon-Wiener Index has been glibly used by ecologists without understanding its history, mathematics, and original intent. I suspect Claude and Norbert might turn in their graves if they knew what ecologists get up to, and publish.
Ref: Knight, D.H.(1975) A phytosociological analysis of species rich tropical forest on Barro Colorado Island, Panama. Ecol. Monog. 45:259-284.
Davey – Wasn’t the Shannon index from Information Theory?
Of course we can get worse as there is alpha, beta and gamma biodiversity.
I thought you only had alpha males? Does Jen approve of gamma biodiversity? It’s all too much.
Does the woody weed patch have too low a beta rating?
http://www.okstate.edu/artsci/botany/bisc3034/lnotes/biodiver.htm
http://www.uwsp.edu/geO/faculty/heywood/Geog358/Diversity/Biodiversity.htm
Perhaps a few things have changed since BIOL101
Anyway – the question unanswered for me is whether forestry as practiced in Australia reduce biodiversity from a remnant old growth forest? How – would it recover. Does it need to?
Thanks Davey, thanks Luke.
I still have a problem with biodiversity Luke mainly because it seems that implicit in the definition is a value judgement. It would seem that higher biodiversity equals greater value – so that some tropical islands with high biodiversity are somehow better than say a farm or a desert or dare I say it a suburb because there is more life forms present. I think when you talk about it being measurable you are really talking about Davey’s biota.
As for biodiversity after rehabilitation following mining – are you talking immediately after, 5 yrs later, 10 yrs later? Surely it isn’t static?
Thanks Davey, thanks Luke.
I still have a problem with biodiversity Luke mainly because it seems that implicit in the definition is a value judgement. It would seem that higher biodiversity equals greater value – so that some tropical islands with high biodiversity are somehow better than say a farm or a desert or dare I say it a suburb because there is more life forms present. I think when you talk about it being measurable you are really talking about Davey’s biota.
As for biodiversity after rehabilitation following mining – are you talking immediately after, 5 yrs later, 10 yrs later? Surely it isn’t static?
Mary – greater biodiversity (now called micro and macro distribution of biota in the landscape or MMDBL) may or may not be a good thing. Reefs, rainforests and some heaths are very diverse. But simple rangeland and desert systems that are not as diverse may be very natural and stable too.
On sand mining – my observation is that in many cases the Wallum associations and diversity of heath plants do not return in some situation. You can have a replanted Tristania thicket – no birds, few ants and nothing much else grows. So the biodiversity is very low compared to the original – looks green and won’t blow away but nothing like natural. Much coal mine spoil is too chemically nasty to revegetate properley.
Similarly you can clear bushland and seed wonderful pasture. Very stable – even sustainable – but very little biodiversity as such.
I think if you value species for intrinsic value or consider ecological services (pollinators, ability of wetlands to absorb wastes etc)biodiversity may count. But if you don’t care about such things blaze and chop away I guess.
Many of us would like to think we could have it both ways – clear some, utilise some and leave some. That we would have native wildlife and native plants in our agricultural areas. And that we could make such a system “sustainable” – at least for 100 years to start.
But what if you don’t want to leave any and clear wall to wall ?
When people recreate outdoors – do they want to sit or walk in a cropped paddock or a tree laden national park. Haven’t seen too may sitting in cleared paddocks myself.
Luke,
Oddly enough, some decades ago the Forests Department of WA (then responsible for forest recreation) did a survey to find out where people liked best to picnic. The answer, by a clear margin, was not in native forest (too prickly, bull ants etc.) but in pine plantations, with gas barbeques. Nice and open, can kick a footy etc.
Also, I don’t know much about pasture, but remember reading once that it can be very diverse, in the sense of a rich small scale mixture of species, even if not in number of species.
That’s one of the problems I have with ‘diversity’ (with or without ‘bio’ on the front). Thinking about tile mosaics reveals that ‘diversity’ is a very diverse concept. How many colours, how many different tile sizes and shapes, how rapid a cycling of colours along a transect, how much clumping of colours, shapes, or sizes, etc? When you start looking at living things interacting it blows your mind away (well, mine anyway). By the way, I think it is the sum of the (n-1)th row of Pascal’s Triangle, not the nth as I said before. Makes no real difference – 2 raised to the (n-1)th power is just as potent. Shouldn’t ecologists just lie back and enjoy it, without succumbing to physics envy? Anyway, I think the physicists long ago gave up on being able to explain everything. Mystery rules, okay? And that means endless employment for ecologists, heh! heh!
Luke, this is exactly what I’m talking about –
“I think if you value species for intrinsic value or consider ecological services (pollinators, ability of wetlands to absorb wastes etc)biodiversity may count. But if you don’t care about such things blaze and chop away I guess”
Language of the argument. Just because I am a little suss about a term like biodiversity because I think it is too general, too emotive and possibly not truly measurable doesn’t mean I don’t value the natural world and want instead “to blaze and chop away.” Believe it or not I do value biodiversity in the real I’m just not happy about the use (or should that be abuse?) of the word.
According to Tim Low, in “the new nature – winners and losers in wild Australia” transects taken from CBDs to forested national parks etc show the greatest number of species, the greatest density and the largest populations of those species will be found on the variegated forest and farmland landscapes on the edge of cities. The lowest values were recorded at each end of the transect, the CBDs and the national parks.
It seems that the true experts in “biodiversity”, the wildlife themselves, have a preference for sharing their habitat with humans. Their partial clearing and their crops, provided they are in a mosaic of native forest regrowth and paddock trees, are where the biodiversity experts prefer to live. They have voted with their feet.
Interestingly, the places where green voters are most prevalent, the inner city electorates, are shunned by the very wildlife that greenies claim to be representing. And the same applies to the national parks where the urban greens have full control of management. The wildlife have also made their views on “green wisdom” (now there’s an oxymoron) very clear there as well.
Lets face it, if a Goanna would rather spend a day feasting on the rotting carcass of a dead cow than hang out with a greenie, then why should anyone else hang out with them?
Seems like the habitats frequented by “Homo sapiens greenus horribilus are also the home to Homo sapiens richus BMW-ensis var lawyer and var banker. Indeed quantitative surveys (unlike above) put their numbers at high densities than greenus horribilus.
My observation that the increasing urbanisation surrounding our cities seems to be a sure fire way of getting rid of native birds, wallabies, echidnas and native fish – and replacing them with possums, Asian Mynahs and silt.
Mary (just above) has misrepresented my book, The New Nature. I won’t bother explaining why because I am not convinced that blogs like these serve a useful purpose.