The woodchipping threat to the Tarkine

By Renay Albert I have just returned from a trip to the Tarkine rainforest in Tasmania to see for myself what is happening to Australia's wilderness areas. What I found was shocking and heartbreaking. One minute you are walking through fairytale scenes of moss covered trees and towering canopies, and the next you're confronting the desolate wasteland of a clear-felled coupe. The Tarkine is a large temperate rainforest just in from the west coast. The area consists of thick rainforest vegetation and a myriad of diverse and spectacular animal life. Within the forest, trees such as myrtle beech, myrtle and eucalypts grow, which is where the problem starts. These are the trees used for woodchips in this part of Tasmania. Under federal legislation, the Tarkine is National Estate land and so cannot be cut down and exported as woodchips. This fact has led many people to believe that the rainforest is safe from the woodchipping threat. However, without seeking federal permission, Tasmanian forestry can contract loggers to clear-fell (cut down all trees) or "selectively log" (cut down all but a few trees) the Tarkine and stockpile the logs until a woodchipping permit is granted. From the federal point of view, a forest cannot be used for woodchipping until the area is degraded below a certain standard. When logging by the forestry industry has degraded a forest sufficiently, the woodchipping permit is granted. The areas being logged are called coupes, groups of one kilometre square pockets of rainforest. In practice there seem to be no set coupe boundaries (or little attention is paid to them), as several coupes I visited spread for kilometres on end. Once the woodchipping permit is granted and the logs are sent to the Burnie mill, these magnificent trees are chipped down and spewed out, creating four-storey piles of woodchips. Myrtle is used for fax paper and other woods for general paper products. All the woodchips are exported at the ridiculous price of $5 per tonne — for how much rainforest? Until now the coupes being logged have skirted around the edges of the Tarkine, but the recent development of the road has opened access to the heart of the forest. Because the logging schedules and other information being given to the public are usually incorrect in order to foil direct actions and other activities to save the area, environmentalists have been continuously entering the forest to find out first hand what is happening. The information collected in this way is recorded by each crew with the aid of a global positioning system which enables the crews to record exact positions. With this first-hand information and ongoing actions, we hope to uncover and halt the multinational handshake that one day soon, if not stopped, will take our forests forever.