Beaten Leadbeater's?

[Heather]

I remember the first time I ever saw clear felling. We'd been going to a remote place on the NSW coast south of Eden for our Christmas holidays. On the second or third time there the forest driving in was all clear felled. I was about 11 or 12 at the time and could not believe the devastation. It was awful. Never forgot the impact it had on me.

[Stephen Whiteside]

No, I think you make a fair point, Marty. I've wrestled with the same questions myself over the years.

The point about the Leadbeater's specifically is that even if we stopped all logging in its habitat right now, it is probably already too late. I think I'm right in saying that the 2009 fires roughly halved its numbers. I have heard suggestions that the nature of our logging practices has changed the nature of our fires, but that's another argument.

I think, though, that biodiversity is an important principal to strive for. Losing a possum here or a fish there, as you say, probably doesn't make any difference - and I do wonder about the wisdom of spending millions of dollars trying to preserve the remaining hundred or so specimens of the northern hairy-nosed wombat - but once you lose 100 or 1,000 species, it does start to matter.

I don't regard myself as an expert on the subject, but I can't understand how, given the history of species extinction in this country since European colonisation, anybody can continue to defend the logging of old growth forests. A lot of the forests around Toolangi do not qualify as 'old growth' strictly speaking, in the sense that they probably have been damaged by fire, but it was a very long time ago, when the fire records weren't very well kept anyway. And a lot of those forests were last logged in the 19th century, which makes them pretty old!

Driving through the recently logged areas, you see occasional 'habitat' trees left standing in a sea of waste. Who's kidding who? How can anybody really believe this achieves anything? The trees themselves will probably not survive, let alone any animals that might be living in them.

Again, I've seen small pockets of rainforest on TV that have been left, while all the surrounding sclerophyl forest has been removed. How can anybody believe this is fair and sound policy?

I saw a government logging spokesman talking about what they did if they found a koala in a tree. They either left a few trees, or 'came back later', presumably hoping the koala had by then moved on, and they could remove the tree 'behind its back'. Meanwhile, koala numbers have dropped to perilously low levels - and even then, the numbers are deceiving, because, again, I think, most of the koalas in the wild now have been reconstituted from the French Island population, which means they possess very little genetic diversity.