A photo of a centuries-old tree on the back of a truck being driven through the centre of Hobart has prompted fresh calls for laws to be changed to protect Tasmania’s native forests from logging.
The image of the logging truck on Macquarie Street, the city’s main south-north thoroughfare, was posted online by the Bob Brown Foundation, an environment group. It is the latest in a series of pictures of large trees being hauled on the state’s roads in recent months.
Protesters have blocked logging in an area near Kermandie, south of Hobart, that scientists say has large trees that could be used for nesting by the critically endangered swift parrot, a migratory species that breeds in Tasmania.
They locked themselves to a gate entering the logging area on Friday and Monday, temporarily forcing preventing work at the site. One person was arrested on Monday.
Jenny Weber, the Bob Brown Foundation’s campaign manager, said it was legal under state and national law to fell the tree pictured on the truck, believed to be Eucalyptus regnans and estimated to be approaching 3 metres in diameter at breast height and at least 200 years old.
2023 in Tasmania. Another ancient tree killed & carried through Hobart two nights ago. Native forest logging must end now so these trees & their surrounding ecosystems stay intact. Taxpayers fund this destruction + logging causes global heating + extinction rates soar. #politas pic.twitter.com/VMyCzTneDN
— Bob Brown Foundation (@BobBrownFndn) October 26, 2023
Environmentalists have called on the Tasmanian government to follow Western Australia and Victoria in announcing an end to native forest logging, and the federal government to strengthen protection of threatened species habitat as part of a promised overhaul of national conservation laws.
“The problem with Tasmanian logging is that it is completely sanctioned by the state and federal governments,” Weber said. “We suffer from not having the same laws that Victoria has that are enabling an end to native forest logging.”
Both the Tasmanian Liberal government and Labor opposition support ongoing native forest logging. The premier, Jeremy Rockliff, has acknowledged there were giant trees of “national and international significance” in both protected forests and “public production forests”, and argued the state had well-developed procedures to protect the latter.
The government has invited Victorian companies affected by the incoming native forest logging ban in that state to apply for haulage contracts. The truck pictured carrying the tree on Macquarie Street had Victorian number plates.
The state-owned agency formerly known as Forestry Tasmania, now called Sustainable Timber Tasmania (STT), defines giant trees as being at least 85 metres tall or at least 280 cubic metres in estimated stem volume. These trees typically have a diameter of about 5 metres and are required to be protected by a 100-metre buffer.
Jen Sanger, a forest ecologist and the co-founder of the conservation group Tree Projects, has described this definition as “completely arbitrary”.
Protesters have targeted a logging area that STT has named KD022C. In an Instagram post earlier this month, the agency said it had begun a “small 20-hectare forest harvesting operation” at the site. It posted a picture of the area, which it described as a regrowth native forest coupe.
STT said in the post it had detected swift parrots flying overhead during surveys of the area but found no foraging or nesting activity. It said three potential nesting trees would be excluded from logging.
In a statement on Monday afternoon, STT’s general manager for conservation and land management, Suzette Weeding, confirmed the tree pictured on the truck was from coupe KD022C. She said it was photographed while it was being transported from the forest to a Tasmanian customer and would be used in “high-quality appearance-grade products such as Tasmanian oak flooring or in housing”.
She said the agency had an important responsibility to manage forests “for multiple values, including timber production and conservation”.
Matt Webb, a conservation biologist, said he saw swift parrots in the coupe two weeks ago, that it was early in the breeding season and that retaining only three trees in the area was inadequate. “It’s in the middle of a swift parrot important breeding area and coupes have been proposed there before and knocked back. The logging of swift parrot habitat in that area is something I’d really hoped was largely going to stop,” he said.
Scientists say the swift parrot could be extinct in a decade and logging is the biggest threat it faces.
Nearly 90% of Australian timber comes from plantations and just 12% from native forests. A recent report by the Labor Environment Action Network said few tree farms had been planted since 2010 and that the total plantation area was in decline. It called for the creation of a state-owned national plantation estate to allow an end to native forest logging.
