The Australian Forests and Climate Alliance, (AFCA), condemns the koala deaths in a Victorian private plantation clearing operation recently but says the public need to know that wildlife carnage is business as usual in public native forests.
AFCA spokeswoman, Frances Pike says “The industrial logging machinery of native forest logging crushes, maims, kills, or buries alive native animals of public native forests.”
It’s an ongoing slaughter, continuing even though bushfire has now reduced degraded native forests to a perilous state. It is sanctioned by both the Federal and the State Governments of New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia.
Wombats can be buried alive in burrows. Reptiles, amphibians, ground dwelling birds – anything that can’t run or fly away fast enough – can be crushed beneath the wheels and tracks of forest roading and harvest machinery or toppled from its tree shelter. The wheels and tracks of these machines are two metres high; industrial harvesters can clear 200 hectares of forest a month.
Despite paper policies used as a screen, the reality is this logging kills animals and Koalas are included. Yet the direct mortalities from logging native forests pales in comparison with the indirect impacts as the animals, deprived of habitat, starve, or perish from exposure.
And people marvel at our extinction crisis. This season I witnessed logging in rainforest ongoing even as helicopters were flying above my head to try to stop fire in rainforest 500 metres away. People in the regions who know what’s going on have been calling for this to stop for decades, but no matter how degraded our forests, it’s ‘business as usual’ for the logging industry.
This industry continues intensive lobbying for access to even more native forests, including national parks, and is now calling for this under the name of ‘salvage’ logging or hazard reduction.’
Logging for ‘salvage’ can dangerously delay or prevent a forest ecosystem’s chance of full recovery; thinning or burning forests as a means of ‘hazard reduction’ is often ineffectual or increases forest flammability.
Neither the Federal government nor one of the four states with Regional Forest Agreements has the courage to stand up to the logging industry and say:
With 12 million hectares burnt, much of it native forest, the priority now has to be the recovery and the restoration of the native forest estate
AFCA calls on governments to immediately halt any logging in native forests, or at least pending an informed assessment of the reality of the situation.
Shocking Koala Deaths In Bluegum Plantations