The community of the Bulga Plateau, west of Port Macquarie, turned out again on January 9 to block logging in the Bulga State Forest.
The forests of the Bulga Plateau are the water catchment for Port Macquarie, Wauchope, Taree and Wingham.
Forest protector 21-year-old Isla Lamont blocked access to the logging area on a tripod. Born in Taree, she said the Bulga Plateau’s waterfalls, forests and secret swimming holes “has always had a special place in my heart … I couldn’t stand idly by knowing that the bulldozers were destroying Bulga forest. If not me, then who?”
Lamont said she was protesting because she wants to protect the greater gliders, sooty owls, spotted-tailed quolls and koalas for future generations.
She was supported by dozens of people holding colourful banners and signs, many with koala masks, and chanting “Save our forest home!”
Greens MP Sue Higginson, who was at the camp, said industrial logging in public native forests needed to end. “Report after report tells us we are absolutely stupid for doing this, that we are causing irreversible harm now and to the future.”
Even the New South Wales government’s Natural Resources Commission report “Insights and new opportunities for forest management”, released last November, said forests could become carbon stores rather than carbon emitters with better management.
“We need ‘major intervention’,” Higginson said. “Industrial-scale logging of our precious public native forests doesn’t even make money — it costs us money to destroy them.”
The community set up a “forest support camp” at the Ellenborough Falls campground to provide support for the protesters.
[For more information visit Save Bulga Forest.]