Forest campaigners have renewed efforts to stop the New South Wales Forestry Corporation logging in Bulga State Forest since October 4.
Susie Russell from the North East Forest Alliance was arrested on October 9, the 12th person arrested trying to save trees and endangered animals, such as the greater glider and koala.
They have been arrested for attaching themselves to logging machinery to slow the destruction.
“Every hour those machines don’t work is 50 trees saved,” Russell said. “Our community will throw itself at the machines for as long as we can.”
She said the science and all the experts say that planet repair starts by not doing more damage.
“Removing hundreds of thousands of trees from the top of the catchment is insanity. The trees hold the land together. When the intense rain events come and the soil washes downstream and the rivers silt up and the floods are extreme.
“No doubt those currently overseeing the destruction will wring their hands and lament.”
The forests of the Bulga Plateau are the water catchment for Port Macquarie, Wauchope, Taree and Wingham.
“I am sickened at the inertia of the environment departments and their ministers,” she continued. “They are keeping their seats warm while their support base evaporates and the damage intensifies.”
Russell defended the protesters’ actions, saying they would “much rather be planting trees or running youth programs or removing weeds”.
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Five representatives of Save Bulga Forest (SBF), including Councillor Dheera Smith from the MidCoast Council, met with the NSW Forestry Corporation’s regional and area managers on October 3.
They want an end to native forest logging in Compartments 41 and 43 of Bulga State Forest.
SBF’s Chris Sheed said they had successfully halted logging in Bulga State Forest in December 2022 and for the last 20 months it had been asking Forestry for a meeting to discuss the logging.
“All our requests were initially ignored and then became conditional on SBF giving certain undertakings,” he said.
On September 26, four days before logging was to start and with machinery already in the forest, SBF was finally invited to an unconditional meeting on October 3.
Sheed said SBF raised concerns about the impact of industrial logging on endangered species. The greater glider and the koala are dependent on this critical remnant forest that escaped the 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires.
Russell said Forestry’s harvest plans are incomplete and non-compliant because of its misleading mapping of Greater Glider den tree exclusions as well as its failure to lodge plans for dump locations, den tree exclusions and its failure to keep the publicly accessible harvest plan up to date.
Sheed said the meeting was “very disappointing”, with Forestry rejecting all its concerns and “categorically” refusing to halt its logging.