The Forest Wars: the ugly truth behind what’s happening in our tall forests
Author: David Lindenmayer
Publisher: Allen&Unwin 2024
Review by Helen Wilson for NPA book club
We don’t very often read a book that’s as timely and as closely related to our core goals as The Forest Wars. Professor David Lindenmayer from ANU lists 37 myths about forest logging and demolishes every one of them to mount an unassailable case to end native forest logging. This is an invaluable service to an organisation such as NPA campaigning in this space.
Protecting forests has always been a very large part of our work. Our members have been involved in countless campaigns to save particular patches of forest from being logged and to bring them into the conservation estate, for example the Styx River State Forest and the Pilliga forest. A major campaign in recent years has been for a Great Koala National Park and other koala parks, even as the necessary state forests in the area are logged.
Following the model of the GKNP, NPA’s newest big campaign will be to save the southern forests, where high profile forest action goes back many decades. The forests here are of the same type as the tall, wet forests of Victoria that Lindenmayer concentrates on. Indeed, the project plans to use him for peer review.
We’re all familiar with myths from the forestry industry, workers and politicians about why we should keep logging, but we may not always have ready responses. This book gives us some handy facts and figures to use as ammunition when we’re confronted by one of them.
- The forest will grow back.
WRONG Logging radically alters plant diversity, soils and capacity to hold water.
18. Most wood cut in a logging coupe gets milled for sawn timber.
WRONG Only 4% of the biomass in a logged forest ends up as sawn timber. The rest becomes waste, paper products or pallets.
22. Logging is good business.
WRONG Unlike the plantation industry, native forest logging loses money and survives through taxpayer subsidies.
24. Native forest logging employs tens of thousands of people
WRONG As with mining, the industry fudges the number of jobs it provides but actual numbers are very small.
The book club got very passionate about the book as the cause is close to many of our hearts. We had a question about only one of Lindenmayer’s myths:
16. Tall, wet forests were open and park-like at the time of the British invasion.
Perhaps Bill Gammage in The Biggest Estate on Earth did generalise too much from his abundance of sources, but we’d love to know what his response would have been.
The battlelines are very clear in the wars this book is about. Last year The Greens introduced an Ending Native Forest Logging Bill 2023 into federal parliament which involved repealing the infamous Regional Forest Agreements. NPA campaigned hard against the 2018 renewal of these agreements exempting the native forest industry from the federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999. The speeches from all other parties including Labor politicians appealed to one or more of Lindenmayer’s myths. In September this year Labor and the opposition combined to reject a second reading of the bill. As Lindenmayer explains, our politicians have been won over by numerous unregulated lobbyists. If only they’d all read this book instead.