Bob Brown Foundation promises to expose burning of ‘beautiful ancient forest’ in real-time website

The Bob Brown Foundation has promised to expose “the destruction that Forestry Tasmania is hiding” by revealing which native forests are currently being logged and burned.

Forestry Tasmania burns behind Dover and Geeveston in the Huon Valley in April 2024. Picture: Bob Brown Foundation

The Bob Brown Foundation has promised to expose “the destruction that Forestry Tasmania is hiding” by revealing which native forests are currently being logged and burned.

The environmental group has launched a website – Forest Watch – that monitors and gives real-time updates on the various forest coupes being logged and burnt across Tasmania.

The foundation says it’s about bringing transparency and accountability to what the Tasmanian government-run logger is doing – with calls to ban burns due to impacts on the climate, human health and wildlife.

Sustainable Timber Tasmania says clear-felling followed by regenerative burning is the best, safest and most cost-effective way of harvesting and regenerating wet eucalypt forest.

It says its planned burn program began this year in mid-2024, with about 180 burns planned for this year.

The organisation said it notified neighbours and stakeholders about planned burns, and that each burn was “carefully planned” for safety, to minimise smoke dispersal and to reduce impacts.

But Bob Brown Foundation campaign manager Jenny Weber said the burns were dangerous and destructive.

She said while the burns were listed online, people generally didn’t know what the forests looked like beforehand, what threatened species lived there, or what health or climate risks they posed.

Ms Weber said sometimes coupes were not burned until a year or more after they were logged – giving Tasmanian devils, quolls and other native species time to resettle back in the rubble.

Forestry Tasmania burns behind Dover and Geeveston in the Huon Valley in April 2024. Picture: Bob Brown Foundation

She said they didn’t have time to disperse once the helicopters came in and dropped a “napalm-like substance” on the clear-felled coupes – meaning the animals had “no hope”.

Ms Weber said last year’s harrowing images of an incinerated Tasmanian devil was “stark” evidence of the carnage that took place each autumn.

This week, Ms Weber said a number of burns were causing concern to environmentalists, including areas of the Lower Florentine.

She said that included coupes at Maydena, including the controversial area where a giant felled native tree on the back of a truck sparked national outrage last year.

“That was an area of beautiful old-growth ancient forest that was logged last year and has been burnt in the past week,” Ms Weber said.

She also said recently, the DN009G coupe near Lonnavale – where she said critically endangered swift parrots were known for breeding – had also been burnt.

Other areas of concern currently being burnt, Ms Weber said, were swift parrot breeding forests at Kermandie behind Geeveston, and the old-growth forest of Wentworth Hills, near Lake St Clair.

She said the website was compiled using publicly-available information, plus information from the foundation’s campaign scientists and citizen scientists, as well as data from a satellite surveillance expert the organisation employed.

The website is available at forestwatch.org.au

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Originally published as Bob Brown Foundation promises to expose burning of ‘beautiful ancient forest’ in real-time website