hink of it all - of the life that is! Study your friends and foes!
Study the past! And answer this: "Are these times better than those?" The life-long quarrel, the paltry spite, the sting of your poisoned pride! No matter who fell it were better to fight as they did when the world was wide.
Tasmanian Premier vs Old-Growth Forests
"Mr Bartlett told The Australian that calls by the conservation movement to suspend old-growth logging, because of evidence they might be more valuable as carbon sinks, were nonsense."If you burn a tree, obviously the carbon is [released]. If you turn it into a coffee table, that carbon is sequestered for life or for a very bloody long time."
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Sure, any carbon stored by a tree in its lifetime is not somehow automatically released into the atmosphere when it is simply cut from the ground. However when you cut down some of the oldest and tallest trees in the world, like the ones in Tasmania's old growth forests, you loose some big carbon sequesterers. Replacing them with new smaller and younger trees is obviously not going to be the same.
However not all environmental issues relate back to climate change. The validity of conservation of any sort, flora or fauna, should not simply rest on whether it helps the fight against climate change. Old growth forests in Tasmania represent a beautiful part of our national history and are areas of wilderness that, remarkably these days, still stand. Why not conserve them when so much of our floura has been removed? It's a question of balance. Here are some stats from the Australian Conservation Foundation that are relevant:
"Since European settlement half of Australia's forests and three quarters of its rainforests have been cleared and over 90% of old growth forests have been logged.
113 species of vertebrate forest animals found in forests are formally listed as threatened species on State or Commonwealth threatened species lists. This is over one twentieth of Australia's terrestrial animal species.
Every year the equivalent to 85% of the size of the Australian Capital Territory is logged in Australia's native forests. That's 200,000 hectares, or the equivalent of two million quarter acre suburban household blocks."
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