About 80 people gathered at Bellingen’s Memorial Hall on Sunday afternoon to hear about proposed changes to logging regulations that environmentalists say will destroy thousands of hectares of diverse forest on the Mid North Coast.
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The crowd watched a short film from the North East Forest Alliance about current logging practices and the proposals, which NEFA says are designed to help make up shortfalls in Forestry Corporation’s timber export contracts.
"The logging industry has almost denuded the public forests allocated to them 20 years ago of sawlogs,” NEFA spokesperson Dailan Pugh said earlier in a media release. “This is all about making more trees available by opening up areas protected over the past 20 years as habitat of threatened species, Koalas, old growth forest, and stream buffers for logging, while increasing logging intensity and legalising clearfell logging along the coast.”
At the Bellingen meeting, environmentalist and academic Dr Tim Cadman spoke about concepts related to resource depletion and sustainability dating back decades that underpin current forestry management regulations, suggesting that battles fought 20 years ago to preserve old growth forests and protect wildlife would now need to be fought again.
Ashley Love from the Bellingen Environment Centre presented the local context, showing maps indicating that if the proposals go ahead, 45-hectare clearfelling would be allowed in forests such as Gladstone and Newry and there would be a doubling of logging intensity in forests like Pine Creek, Tuckers Nob, Never Never and Scotchmans.
“Intensive logging denudes our forests of their carbon sinks, destroys our unique wildlife, affects local rainfall and causes pollution of our rivers and streams,” he said.
As at the other public meetings held in Sydney and up and down the NSW coast over the last fortnight, attendees supported a motion calling on the state government to:
- Recognise that the Regional Forest Agreements have failed to deliver environmental protection or industry security;
- Recognise that the benefits of non-timber forest values are vital for the future of regional economies and ecosystems;
- Establish the Great Koala National Park as an immediate priority; and
- Commit to a just transition out of native forest logging on public land and the transfer of public forests to protected areas when the RFAs expire.
A similar meeting will be held at Coffs Harbour’s Cavanbah Centre on Thursday June 14, from 6.30pm.
Janene Carey
Janene Carey is the senior journalist for the Bellingen Shire Courier-Sun
Janene Carey is the senior journalist for the Bellingen Shire Courier-Sun
