A large group of residents heard from one the state’s leading ecological experts at National Parks Association event last week at Mollymook Beach Bowling Club.
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On Wednesday, more than 70 residents listened to experts explain the negative impacts the latest New South Wales Government’s logging proposals are expected to have on the Shoalhaven.
Coastwatchers president Noel Plumb and NPA Senior Ecologist, Dr Oisin Sweeney described how the South Coast area will see logging operations increase by 50 per cent more than current levels.
Dr Sweeney, one of the NSW’s best recognised ecological experts, has made a detailed three-year study into logging and its impacts across NSW.
He said that the new proposals will result in the conversion of many public native forests into monoculture plantations, a substantial increase in clear-felling to prop up unsustainable wood supply agreements, the remapping and rezoning of protected old growth forest areas for logging, the logging of giant hollow trees with some more than 150 years old, exclusion areas around streams and headwaters being reduced to enable the logging of areas that have been protected for the past 20 years and native wildlife being driven into extinction in both local and regional areas.
“These new proposals, if implemented, will have devastating impacts on our forestry systems, water supplies, carbon stargaze and wildlife,” Dr Sweeney said.
A lively Q and A floor discussion highlighted the strong views of most at the meeting that the NSW Government was being both commercially and environmentally short-sighted if it decided to go down this route, NPA Milton convenor and seminar chairman Barry Tomkinson said.
“It was pointed out that fewer than 200 local jobs from Nowra south to the border are now directly related to forestry wood extraction, and that most of the wood now being harvested was being sent overseas as wood chips, with new proposals to also feed our logs into Chinese power stations.”
Mr Tomkinson suggested that future jobs and growth opportunities for the South Coast laid in the area of eco-tourism and the new logging proposals were economically counterproductive.
“No-one wants to visit a moon-scaped monoculture plantation,” he said.
“The economic tourism opportunities for the South Coast lie in preserving and protecting our best asset, which is our exciting natural environment.”
The seminar unanimously passed a motion calling on the NSW State Government to recognise that the benefits of non-timber forest values are vital for the future of our regional economies and ecosystems and to provide for a just transition out of native forest logging on public land and the transfer of public forests to protected areas over time.
