I wonder if anything has filtered through into other regions about a proposed new network of National Parks on the Murray River. I went along to a protest meeting on the banks of the River this week, where 250 people expressed their dismay at a proposal from VEAC (Victorian Environmental Assessment Council) to close up the red gum forests where many of our town earn their living and make them national parks. I got a copy of the report –it’s on the VEAC website, and I read the summary. It literally says that any benefits from the change will accrue to people outside the area, namely in Melbourne, and any losses will be borne by the local communities of Koondrook, Cohuna, etc. The goal is to restore the health of the forests and conserve biodiversity. Everyone knows the forest is suffering – it badly needs a drink like all the rest of the land, and VEAC proposes to take farmers’ stored irrigation water and flood the forest with it every few years. I can’t for the life of me see how stopping the loggers and firewood collectors from using God’s wonderful forest will improve the health or conserve biodiversity within the forest. God gave us this planet to live on and off not to shut it up like a museum or a zoo. I love nature and know more about the trees, plants, birds and insects than most people in the district, and I believe a living working forest is better than a sterile system of plantations which lack biodiversity. We selectively log, here, taking only a certain number of trees and then adding value to them with our mills, our veneering processes, our furniture making, kiln drying, finger-jointing, etc. Some of the logging coupes are now being revisited for the 4th time in 150 years by the grandchildren of woodcutters early last century. The use of the forest is good and right, provided it is managed with high conservation values and strict enforcement of appropriate regulation. And if it needs a flood at a time when God is not sending rain, and it can be engineered, that would be terrific (for the forest, not the starving farmers watching their precious resource used in that way). But it doesn’t need to be locked up for that to happen. Wood is a far more sustainable product than concrete or steel and we consume too much of it. I urge city Christians not to swallow feel-good environmentalist pushes without considering their economic and social effects. We import 2 billion dollars of forest products each year in Australia, many of them from unregulated forestry practices. The most environmentally responsible course of action is to manage our forests well not lock them up while we benefit from the rape of the third world.

Geoff Leslie

September 6, 2007