Unchopping a Tree

Watch this:

Maya Lin – Unchopping a Tree from What is Missing? Foundation on Vimeo.

I saw this video in a post at Treehugger.com, where they’ve gathered some interesting facts about deforestation. Currently 90 acres of rainforest worldwide are being destroyed every minute. That’s an amazingly fast rate. The video shows how quickly some famous parks around the world could be deforested.

I wanted to try it with an example of a place I’ve seen for myself. You might be familiar with Kings Park in Perth. It’s 1000 acres of bushland and botannical gardens full of native and endangered species, with minimal roadways, a little bit of parkland, and a beautiful view, just out of the city centre.

I love it, and I think it’s one of Perth’s loveliest places to have a picnic, take a walk, or just relax. If someone decided it wasn’t worth protecting, it’d only take 11 minutes to leave it completely bare, no plants, no animals left. That’s just how easy it is to destroy such a valuable eco-system.

What parks or protected forests are there near you? At a rate of 90 acres a minute, how long would it take for them to disappear? Now think about how that’s happening in the Amazon, across South-East Asia, and in other places around the world.

As a society, we seriously need to cut back on the amount of paper products we use. And we need to do more to protect the world’s forests.

What happened on Easter Island?

Credit: Aurbina, Wikimedia Commons

One of the most interesting books I’ve read that talks about environmental issues is Jared Diamond’s Collapse. It’s about societies around the world, and the differences between the ones that thrive and the ones that fail. Diamond wants to know if there’s anything we can learn from societies that collapsed, because those who don’t know their history are doomed to repeat it. He believes that one of the key factors for a successful society is for it to have a controlled and measured approach to environmental resources.

He looks into several ancient societies that collapsed, like the Easter Islanders, the Vikings in Greenland (but very successful in Iceland and Norway), and the Mayans in South America. He also looks into collapsed societies in modern times, like Haiti and Rwanda. Then he looks at two societies with environmental futures in the balance: China and Australia.

The Easter Island, or Rapa Nui, case is the most haunting, in my opinion. When the rest of the world came to their doorstep in the 1800s, the Islanders were struggling – their land was nearly barren, and they had very few resources. Their farms had problems with erosion, and the largest animals on the island were their chickens. Their skill at boat- and house-building crafts was much less than in other Polynesian islands. But then there were hundreds of the now-famous stone statues, evidence of a much larger and more prosperous society. Archeological remains show that in a previous time, the Islanders had a sophisticated and complex culture that’s now just a legend.

What happened to these people? Diamond thinks that the Islanders cut down all of their trees. All of them! There are currently no forests on the island, although similar islands all have them, and there is evidence that Easter used to have them. Only small shrubs and bushes remain now, with more trees being planted in recent years. Without their forests, the people had no source of wood for building houses or fires to cook their food. The soil erodes easily without trees to anchor it, makeing farming difficult for them. The animals that would have lived in the forests and been a source of food are long gone.

But why would anyone cut down all of their trees? We will never know. Perhaps the chiefs of the tribes demanded it, to create the logs and rope used to haul the statues into place. Perhaps it was just the usual demands of everyday living – too many people wanting bigger houses or boats. But after the trees were gone, life got very difficult for the Islanders: less food, less warmth, less shelter. During the wars in the centuries that followed, many of the statues were thrown down. Others were half-buried by the shifting sands.

It’s not all their own fault. Easter Island’s environment is uniquely susceptible to deforestation – it doesn’t get much rainfall, and has less fertile soil than other islands. So after they’d reached a certain point, there was no going back to the richly forested lands they first inhabited. And there was no way they could have known this, without the kinds of research we can easily do in our modern age. Diamond says:

I have often asked myself, “What did the Easter Islander who cut down the last palm tree say while he was doing it?”. Like modern loggers, did he shout “Jobs, not trees!”? Or: “Technology will solve our problems, never fear, we’ll find a substitute for wood!”? Or: “We don’t have proof that there aren’t palms elsewhere on Easter, we need more research, your proposed ban on logging is premature and driven by fear-mongering”? Similar questions arise for every society that has inadvertently damaged its environment.

The Easter Islanders may have known that they were cutting down their last tree, or maybe they thought there were still more left. But what’s our excuse? As we keep replacing our forests with urban development and sterile plantations, we already know the consequences, and what must be done to prevent them. What will we tell our children when our forests are no longer enough to absorb our pollution, or provide shelter for our unique wildlife? Or will we be able to tell them how we stopped the logging, and grew back our future? I hope so.

Gunns gets the go-ahead

Turnbull has approved the Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania. After rigorous scientific assessment, he’s increased the number of conditions imposed on the mill from 24 to 48. This’d be great if they were actually going to monitor any of those conditions after the mill is built. Since Gunns has always ignored regulations in Tasmania, the extra conditions will make any difference at all.

Turnbull says the mill will be “world’s best practice”, but this is a lie – chlorine bleaching has been discontinued by the pulp industry elsewhere in the world because it’s too toxic, but Gunns wants to use it for this mill. Meanwhile, they’re still allowed to chop down the native old-growth forests of Tasmania to feed to the mill to make pulp. Those native forests are the only home for many native animals facing extinction; now they’ll be halved in size, from 11% to 5% of the original forest that remains.

The good news is that just because Turnbull has approved it, it doesn’t mean it’ll get built.

• The Tasmanian Greens are still going to fight against it and say there are grounds for a possible High Court challenge to Turnbull’s decision
• Federal Liberal MP Ben Quin has resigned from the Liberal party over the issue and will contest his Tasmanian seat as an independent because the mill approval represents a “fundamental failure of democracy”
• Geoff Cousins is campaigning to ask the ANZ to refuse finance to the project

Some YouTube links

• Greens Senator Christine Milne explains why they won’t give up
• The Chaser: Premier Lennon and Pulp Millsy – since Lennon likes mills in his backyard, they visit his house with Millsy from Season 1 of Australian Idol

Extension on pulp mill decision

Federal Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull, has given himself a 6-week extension to decide on the Gunns’ pulp mill in Tasmania. He says he’s going to use this time to get a scientific assessment (something Gunns has tried to avoid) and go through the public submissions from activist groups.

The way I see it, he’s got 3 choices from here:

1. override Tasmania’s state government and prevent the mill from being built because it doesn’t meet Federal environment guidelines;
2. allow the pulp mill to go ahead because they think the economic/electoral benefits outweigh the damage to the environment;
3. stall until after the election because then they’ll either be able to do whatever they like, or it will be Labor’s problem instead; this works best if Howard calls the election right after the APEC summit finishes.

Each of these options means something different for the Liberal government in terms of which seats they might win or lose at the election. Insiders (video) on ABC and Larvatus Prodeo discuss this in detail. I realise that politics rather than good environmental management will probably decide the fate of the mill, but it’d be nice if *someone* were to discuss whether or not the mill is actually a good idea. Although 1 would be the best outcome in my opinion, I’m guessing they’ll go for 3. My fingers are crossed, anyway.

Federal Labor’s position on the mill is opaque, at best, or spineless, at worst. Peter Garrett (Shadow Minister for the Environment) has been questioned by Crikey and Insiders (video and transcript) but it’s a strictly non-committal party line all the way. I suspect (and again, fingers crossed) that they’re simply not being drawn on an issue they currently have no control over. As long as they’re in Opposition, there’s no gain for them in committing either way. This is frustrating, but unless they win the election later this year I doubt we’ll find out any more from them.

Also: I’ve previously mentioned Richard Flanagan’s excellent articles on the Gunns’ situation in Tasmania. You can read his article in May’s issue of The Monthly here (no direct link available, look for the link Richard Flanagan, Out of Control, May 2007).

Gunns’ protests

A few places you can register a protest against the Gunns pulp mill in Tasmania:

The Australian Conservation Foundation sends an email for you to the Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull.

GetUp’s email comment camapign sends either a prepared email or your own comment.

Turnbull is accepting public comment until this Friday, 31st August. He’s probably going to approve the pulp mill, since he’s already given interim approval. However, there’s been a celebrity campaign against it recently, and it’s starting to become an election issue, so it may be possible to get stricter environmental standards applied to the mill than are currently proposed.