River Red Gums face new threat
Will Mooney
The ancient river red gum forests that line Australia's iconic Murray River have faced more than their fair share of pressures in 200 years of white occupation. Now Friends of the Earth is taking action to counteract a new threat with an unlikely label: 'ecological thinning'.
The Barmah-Millewa forest − situated near Echuca, on both sides of the NSW/Victorian border − is the largest red gum forest on earth. It is a unique wetland forest ecosystem that shelters many threatened species and sustains important Indigenous cultural values. It is also an internationally significant Ramsar-listed wetland. Since European occupation of the Murray region, this forest has been fragmented and degraded. Logging and cattle grazing have altered the ecological character of the forest, introduced weeds and damaged soils. Drought and over-allocation of water has changed the natural flood regimes that nourished its plants and animals. Climate change has added further urgency to the problem.
Environmentalists, Traditional Owners, scientists and concerned locals fought hard to protect the priceless remaining tracts of red gum forest in NSW and Victoria. In 2009, new National Parks were created. In Victoria, 160,000 hectares were protected in conservation reserves along Victoria's Murray, Goulburn and Ovens Rivers corridor. Declaring that "we have to take action to protect this precious heritage", then Victorian Premier John Brumby ruled out further commercial timber harvesting in the new parks.
Today, in a frightening flashback, the Victorian and NSW governments have decided to send commercial logging machinery back into the National Parks, to conduct a kind of scientific experiment called 'ecological thinning'. The plan is to 'thin' around 400 hectares of forest in 22 nine-hectare plots. Mechanical harvesting machines will churn into the forest, felling trees below 40 cm in diameter. Just like a commercial logging operation, this 'thinning' has the potential to impact on threatened species, contaminate waterways, compact soils and spread pests and diseases.
The proponents of the trial aim to test the hypothesis that thinning will 'improve' the forests by reducing competition between stressed red gums and fostering habitat trees. However, Andrew Robinson, an independent scientist commissioned to review the plan, has admitted that the overall effect of the treatment is unknown.
What these forests really need is a return to natural flood conditions, which limit the growth of young saplings and allow the bigger trees to thrive. The trial involves subjecting a site of known national environmental significance to a disruptive experiment with no guaranteed ecological benefits.
Not only will the 'ecological thinning' program threaten those forests; it represents a foot in the door for commercial logging and exploitation of Australia's National Parks. Coalition State governments in Victoria, NSW and Queensland have all recently announced plans to open Parks to grazing, logging, hunting and commercial development. These plans are part of an ideologically driven attack to appease the National's pro-development support base.
The Barmah-Millewa Collective of Friends of the Earth is responding to this new threat facing our precious red gum forests. While the Victorian and NSW State governments push ahead, Friends of the Earth has targeted Federal Environment Minister Tony Burke. We are running an online petition on change.org asking Minister Burke to keep the loggers out of Red Gum National Parks. Following lobbying and submissions from a range of NGOs, the project was recently declared a 'controlled action' under the Federal Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act. It must now be assessed by public environmental report, ensuring a more rigorous evaluation of potential impacts on threatened and migratory species and the Ramsar listed wetland. This is a small but significant victory, yet there is more work to do.
River Red Gum forests have been through hard times, but these tenacious ecosystems have held up and flourished despite a litany of threats. Please help us to ensure they flourish on into the future. You can sign and share our online petition by visiting www.ourdarlingmurray.org and viewing the latest blog post. Sign onto our mailing list to receive campaign updates or consider donating to the campaign.
Will Mooney is Community Campaigner with the Barmah-Millewa Collective, Friends of the Earth Melbourne.