Even wrapped in a hooded rain jacket, there is no mistaking the man who is god to the environmental movement across the nation. Dr Bob Brown is walking up a freshly cut road in Tasmania’s Styx Valley towards a pocket of native forest scheduled to be clearfelled and the people who want to stop that happening.

Cold and drizzly, it is less than ideal weather for a public open day. If the conservation groups organising the Sunday, August 16, event at Coupe TN 034G are disappointed by the modest turnout of about 150 people, they are not letting on. Good cheer abounds in the flurry of greetings before the 12.30pm speeches.

The unexpected arrival of the legendary campaigner and former Australian Greens leader ripples through the crowd. At 75, the man nominated as the greatest living Tasmanian in the Mercury’s December Big Issues Survey can still fire up a crowd. His attendance is an endorsement and a balm on a rainy day in a way that the dancing of the Extinction Rebellion crew is perhaps not, but their antics are welcome, too; this outdoor ­cathedral is a broad church.

Down the hill, tree sitters Steve Pearce and Rahul “Raz” Carroll scuttle up and down the wide trunk of a towering eucalypt. Dozens of women and men clad in winter woollies, raincoats and — in some cases — babies in pouches huddle to chat and drink tea served under a tarp tied to an old troop carrier. Families and pairs of friends head off to explore the threatened coupe, disappearing into a dripping rainforest understorey below eucalyptus regnans, also known as giant ash.

All want native-forest logging in Tasmania to end.

on believe that if more Tasmanians see for themselves what is scheduled to be harvested in the Styx Valley in coupes like this 24ha lot, opposition to the activity of the state government’s wholly owned Sustainable Timber Tasmania (STT, formerly Forestry Tasmania) will skyrocket.

As Pearce, of the Tree Projects educational group and Forestry Watch conservation, says, Tasmanians know they have big trees, but many people do not know where they are, or how simple it is to visit them.

Lack of public scrutiny concerns him so much he recently launched a big trees register at thetreesproject.com

“I’ll tell you how easy it is to get here,” Pearce says, jumping a ditch to stand on the high bank of the new forestry road.

“Look at these marvellous roads. They go right to the base of some of these trees.”

He is being sardonic, but he is right. We are an easy 20-minute drive on from Maydena (90km from Hobart), which is beyond New Norfolk and Bushy Park in the Derwent Valley. Getting here is a breeze and, apart from its sloppiness underfoot, so is exploring Coupe TN 034G. For a start STT has marked the perimeter with blue tape tied to trees. And within, event organisers have plotted a 10-minute walk in pink tape, passing huge man-ferns, myrtle beech, southern sassafras, mossy glades and some huge-girthed old eucalyptus regnans. All of it lies within Permanent Timber Production Zone land and all is scheduled for clearfelling before August 31, 2021.

I squelch along the track with Wilderness Society volunteer Graham Furness, who took Charles Wooley, photographer Eddie Safarik, broadcast journalist Helene Thomas and me into the World Heritage Area of the Styx on July 8 to walk the short and spectacular Carbon Circuit.

A harpist, violinist and didgeridoo player play haunting homage to a forest giant beneath which they sit. What will happen to this tree, I wonder, if the coupe meets its proposed fate of cable-logging. Will she be felled, too?

Stripped of context, the line from the Premier’s office that it harvests “less than 1 per cent of PTPZ land in a given year” sounds reasonable. Notwithstanding the climate change and biodiversity implications of the practice in 2020, it would be easy enough to imagine sight unseen that the coupe is relatively low-value regrowth. There’s more than enough of that scrappy, damaged sapling forest in Tasmania to fill in the blanks, and paradise it ain’t.

Up here, I feel more troubled every muddy step I take.

Try as I might to come to every story without preconceptions, I realise I am unprepared for the depth of this coupe’s beauty, the richness of its plant life and the sheer living energy of it all. Some part of me was expecting the green groups to be ­exaggerating its high conservation value. They are not.

For days afterwards, I grapple with how to approach this story in a way that is true to my experience, true to the science and stays above the fray, but I can’t stop thinking ‘who in their right mind would kill this’?

Giving the Premier the benefit of the doubt, I try to find out whether he has been up here to see what he is signing off on, but I am shut down by a senior adviser who declines to put the question to him. In an earlier email, the adviser says the BBF is wrong about various matters relating to coupe.

Coupe TN 034G is a great example, he says, of how timber can be harvested over a 60-70 year rotation and then regenerated.

“It was done so well that the Bob Brown Foundation refer to it as oldgrowth when it is well-managed regrowth — surely the perfect example of sustainable timber.”

“Time is up,” says Bob Brown, leaping across the slippery bank to address the crowd. “Time is up for simply accepting this is part of a legitimate operation. This is a criminal operation in terms of the nature of this planet and the rights of our children and fellow creatures.

“Whether you look at the economic or the environmental — or just the spiritual — component of who we are, these forests are a lot more important to us as forest than going to a woodchip operation …

“We have all our wood needs met from plantations. We don’t need to cut a single tree from native forests again in any place in Australia.

“This campaign is not just on to stop this piece of logging on the mountainside in the Styx Valley but to stop all native forest logging in Australia, as New Zealand did 20 years ago …

“Protecting this coupe in this forest is extraordinarily important as a litmus for protecting forests and woodlands right around this country.”

Four days later, the Bob Brown Foundation launches a Federal Court action challenging the legitimacy of the Tasmanian Regional Forest Agreement under which native logging falls.

In the Great Forest Case, as he dubs it, lawyers will aim to show that the agreement is invalid.

In essence, the agreement exempts forestry activity from some environmental assessments that apply to other industries and land users through the Commonwealth Environmental Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act.

A government spokesman later tells TasWeekend it has full confidence in the Regional Forest Agreement, which was renewed by former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull and former Tasmanian premier Will Hodgman in 2017.

Concurrently, but perhaps not coincidentally, a scathing ­interim report of an EPBC review describes the Act as ineffective and unfit to address current or future environmental challenges.

Legally enforceable environmental standards are a priority reform, and standards need to focus on outcomes not process, independent reviewer Professor Graeme Samuel AC says.

Already the federal Environment Minister has rejected the call for an independent watchdog, and appears to be actively trying to further devolve responsibility to the states.

Swirling around legal and regulatory manoeuvres is a broadish acknowledgment that the 20-plus-year-old Act relies on “old science”.

Prof Samuel’s final report is due at the end of October.

Wilderness Society Tasmania campaign manager Tom Allen is next to speak. He draws attention to the state government’s announcement two days before that STT has again failed to achieve full Forestry Stewardship Certification, an endorsement recognised as the gold standard of forest management globally.

“Failing it massively cuts through the government’s spin about forestry in Tasmania being the best in the world,” Allen says.

Reading the audit report later, I note how easy it is to cherrypick data from the same report to support various positions.

Allen highlights noncompliance relating to continuing logging of old-growth forests, logging and mismanagement of the habitat for the critically endangered swift parrot, and
failure to manage high-conservation values in the landscape.

The STT response to the audit emphasises its 93 per cent compliance and an undertaking to do better next time, describing the journey to full certification as a process.

That “process” is the approach to conservation that Prof Samuel questions, advising in his interim report on the importance of embedding measurable-outcome accountability.

Meet forest ecologist Dr Jennifer Sanger, who learnt to climb trees when researching her PhD on treetop epiphytes, or air plants, a group of non-parasitic plants that grow on others for physical support. Think ferns and orchids.

Sanger says she senses a groundswell of community concern emerging over native forest logging’s climate change and extinction impacts. She also sees old wedge politics at play.

“The [catastrophic previous two Australian summers of] bushfire are a real sign of climate change and I think a lot of people are waking up to the idea that it is on our doorstep,” she says.

“A lot of people are demanding change, but our governments are too tied up with fossil fuel industries and big business to take it seriously.”

Sanger’s concern is in line with Mercury’s Big Issues survey responses, with 79 per cent of responders saying they are worried about ­climate change and want governments to do more to combat it. As a scientist, Sanger feels the imperative to act now.

Comparing slow climate action with our rapid response to the immediate threat of COVID-19, she says “human beings are really great at ignoring future threats”.

60 Minutes reporter and Mercury columnist Charles Wooley also addresses the gathering. He is disappointed with the turnout. “I wanted to see many more of you up here,” he says, citing a 10,000 protester head count as an appropriate base number.

“I don’t want to be putting my head up and getting it kicked in for a handful of people. I want numbers. I want ratings.”

Wooley stomps off in frustration when a wooden flute-playing storyteller shares a long traditional fable with the group.

Conversely, the Hungarian folklorist has intrigued me, so I ­invite him into the forest afterwards for pictures and a one-on-one chat. I appreciate the middle-European sensibility of Tomas Oszvald, of Roamingtrees.com, who is also involved with Mona First Lady Kirsha Kaechele’s 24 Carrots community garden.

I think about the woodsmen in children’s stories, those hardworking lumbering fathers who only occasionally sacrificed their children to the forest and almost certainly never clearfelled it, at least until The Lorax came along. I see here today, too, the nooks in stumps made by old Tasmanian forestry men, who axed and sawed the trees they needed and left the rest in peace.

Oh dear, I’ve spent too long in the rainforest with Oszvald and I have missed Brown before my proposed harvesting of a letter from his back pocket. It is a printout of an email, he says, that STT sent recently to Parks and Wildlife, advising of its ­intention to close Styx Rd in August for forestry activity.

I need to see that letter. Its contents would disprove the government line about potential closures of Styx Rd, on which a host of already COVID-smashed local tourism operators rely for access to the World Heritage Area.

In early August, the Premier’s office said that “environmental extremists’ false claims that STT plan to harvest Giant Trees and shut the Styx Rd in mid-August were ‘a new low’.”

In a statement, it said it routinely worked with tourism operators before harvesting operations to minimise impacts on regional businesses. The “completely baseless” claims from the Bob Brown Foundation and the Wilderness Society were “nothing more than scaremongering and a desperate bid to mislead the public and drive their revenue streams”.

Broadscale clearance and conversion of native forest, it said, ceased on public land more than a decade ago.

Brown may have gone home to warm up, but local tourism operator Fiona Weaver, of Tassie Bound Adventure Tours, is still here. Weaver leads lobbying from local tourism to stop Styx Rd closures for forestry activity without consultation.

She says the town of Maydena was abandoned after forestry fortunes plummeted in the wake of the global financial crisis 12 years ago.

“Maydena School closed, we lost jobs, residents and vital ­infrastructure and services. In the past decade the community has pulled together and rebuilt and attracted major tourism investment.”

In 2016 local operators formed the Derwent Valley Tasmania community group to support local tourism and agribusinesses.

Weaver says many local businesses supported the Liberal government for its election commitment to regional tourism, but it was an empty promise.

“Sustainable Timber Tasmania, supported by this government, continues to work in opposition to regional tourism, operating without consultation with local operators and locking operators out of vital tourism assets,” Weaver says.

She tells me about the time in 2016 when she arrived to a locked gate, with paying visitors to the World Heritage Area in tow, and the months of lost access that followed. Hearing on Bob Brown Foundation social media that there was a plan for it to happen again without consultation was “a kick in the guts”.

“We have put our heart and soul into our business for 10 years and this is what we are up against. It is frustrating and ­exhausting and I am almost lost for words.

“There is no government transparency,” she says. “Our small owner-operator business needs over 20 government accreditations and processes to operate legally and to adhere to all the green and red tape, but STT gets free licence.

“I don’t understand how we have to adhere to strict environmental protocols in putting kayaks on a lake when they can bomb hectares of our native forest without any consultation with anybody.”

e keep in touch over the next two weeks as Weaver and her husband Liam try to get reliable reassurance from STT via the industry organisation chartered with representing member concerns, the Tourism Industry Council of Tasmania.

Weaver and Primary Industries, Energy and Resources Minister Guy Barnett both say a Tourism and Forestry Protocol Agreement is supposed to provide framework for the tourism and forestry industries to work together to ensure mutually beneficial outcomes.

Does it, though? I receive a statement from Barnett painting a rosy picture of collaboration between “our valuable tourism ­industry and our world-class, renewable forestry industry”.

STT was “extensively involved with the development of some of our world-class experiences, including the Blue Tier mountain bike experience, Tahune Adventures and the Giant trees reserved in the Styx Valley”.

Weaver’s experience is in stark contrast.

“The integrity of both the forestry and tourism industries are at stake,” she says. “They were obliged to inform us 12 months in advance of any road closures.

“What they say and what they do are completely different things. The pictures we send out across the world to promote Tasmania and what happens here are two very different things. I have lived that. Liam has lived that. It’s hard to make sense of.

“How can we have integrity when our leadership doesn’t have it. It has a flow-on effect. Here we are taking people to the World Heritage Area and turning up to a locked gate. How can you run a business like that?”

I’ve interviewed the nature lover before about her extensive network, Wild Women Tasmania, for females looking for outdoor adventure opportunities that involve communing rather than conquering. She is privy to the voices of many concerned women through the closed Facebook group she administers.

Weaver says native forest logging does not align with the Tasmanian brand and is unsustainable. “I don’t know of any regional tourism operator who supports native clearfelling anymore.”

“Scraped is an evocative word,” says Sustainable Timber Tasmania engagement and land management manager Dion McKenzie when I ring him for a forestry perspective on the plan for the coupe I visited.

I’m using the language I heard on the day to describe the cable-harvesting method stipulated for the coupe.

“In a cable-harvest operation, trees are cut down, they fall on to a lot of forest floor material and there is no soil impact,” ­McKenzie says.

“The harvested logs are winched back through the air.”

I share my confusion with him over prior activity on a burnt-out coupe I drove past on Styx Rd on my way up to Coupe TN 034G. If broadscale clearing of native forest on public land ceased more than a decade ago, then what was that?

From my sketchy description of its whereabouts McKenzie is unable to identify the exact area, but he assures me there is nothing to worry about.

He says that after harvest and burn, the land can look “dramatic”, with soil exposed and ash spread about.

“It may look black and bare now,” he says. “But if you had walked in, you would have seen that it was germinating.”

I don’t say that I did walk in and that the acrid smell repelled me back to the edge, where I stood on an extraordinarily wide hollowed-out stump to gaze upon the razed hillside.

McKenzie metaphorically walks me through the usual STT post-harvest regenerative process for native forest. In the autumn following harvest, the site is set alight tto stimulate growth then sown by chopper with a variety of strains.

“Go back in a year and you will see trees at ankle height,” McKenzie says. “In two to three years, the trees will be a person’s height and the understorey species will be returning.”

The plan for Coupe TN 034G is to regenerate it to ­native forest after clearfelling, he says.

There’s native forest and there’s native forest, though, I suggest. Does he take on board conservation concerns of high-ecological value forest, even if it lies outside the Wilderness World Heritage Area?

“If environmental groups think what’s in place in the Forest Practices Code isn’t enough for those values, that is not an argument for us,” McKenzie says. “That’s an argument for others to have.”

The forest will grow back, he says.

“It can, it does, it is time. It’s a hard concept for people to get, how productive the forest is, how much things constantly change in there …

“You could have a rainforest there in a couple of hundred years.”

A few days later, Brown emails the STT letter to me, which confirms STT’s August road closure plan. He asks me to ensure I don’t identify the STT sender or the Parks recipient or their positions. It begins: “Hi X, A plantation thinning operations at TN 052K on Styx Rd is scheduled to commence in early August, and for safety reasons, we would like to close the road for a period of approximately five weeks while the harvesting is being done.”

At the weekend, I gaze out from bed over a tall stand of eucalypts that would reveal Hartz Mountain if secretly ringbarked and felled. Banish the thought.

I draw my gaze back to the bed, strewn with books about trees, forests and ecological ethics in the 21st century, including The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate, by Peter Wohlleben. Each bears the same message.

As Jay Parini writes in an introduction to Poems for a Small Planet, “Nature is no longer the rustic retreat of the Wordsworthian poet … it is now a pressing political question, a question of survival.” Not in Tasmania, I think, where preserving the status quo and the “jobs at all costs” mentality often seem more highly valued than conservation.

On Monday, I snap back to business. In 2018, Tasmanian economist and public policy analyst John Lawrence number-crunched STT/Forestry Tasmania’s performance over the 20 years to 2017, drawing on its annual reports and a 2008 Tasmanian auditor general report in his calculations.

Over those two decades, operating by dint of a Regional Forest Agreement covering the period, Lawrence estimates the ­operating loss at a staggering $454 million. With a $751 million writedown on forestry estates over the same period, cash and non-cash losses amount to about $1.3 billion.

I try to square this information with a statement the government sends me, which states that forestry “injects more than $1.2 billion into our economy and supports regional communities and families”.

Over what period? To what tune? Really? I need a second opinion for someone with a good head for numbers.

I ring Saul Eslake, former ANZ chief economist and a regular commentator on Tasmania’s economic fortunes since returning to live in the state last decade. Eslake decided 20 years ago to stay out of forestry debate, but he is less circumspect now.

While he has no STT figures to hand, he says he has been thinking about the forestry situation lately. He ­likens the unravelling of the Tasmanian Forestry Agreement of 2012 to the more recent Brexiteer attack on the Good Friday Agreement credited with bringing peace to Northern Ireland.

“Somehow they managed to get a position that didn’t satisfy anyone but that most people could live with,” says Eslake of the Tasmanian situation.

The historic accord known colloquially as the Forest Peace Deal was an “it’s not perfect but why let the perfect be the enemy of the good kind of thing”. The ink had not long dried when the Hodgman Liberals promised to unpick the agreement if elected in 2014.

“The Libs are good at keeping their promises,” Eslake says wryly.

It would have been preferable, though, to let sleeping dogs lie, he says. The economic cost of the deal was certainly high, but we had borne it and recovered, as subsequent employment data tracking “innocent victims”, namely ­redundant forestry workers, attested — with most successfully redeploying, finding work interstate or retiring at the usual age.

“So you wonder what the employment argument is, really, with native forest logging,” Eslake says.

He describes the practice as fraught with market risk.

“Continuing to log native forests has cost the STT its FSC certification, which seems to be important to win the acceptance of buyers,” he says.

“If we want to sell to regimes that don’t care — to Russia, the Congo, China or other countries that don’t give a stuff about the environment — maybe. Sophisticated products sold to discerning customers at premium prices is supposed to be what the Tasmanian brand is about these days.”

Why persist then, when the reputational risk is so high to the forestry industry and beyond it?

And why persist if we are serious about building our reputation and capacity as a renewable energy powerhouse? (On that front it is worth noting that while our electricity generation is 90 per cent ­renewable, our overall emissions profile would have soared over the past decade had it not been offset by a slightly higher emissions reduction largely attributable to a reduction in logging.)

Eslake says it is indeed hard to understand economically.

“The only way to understand ongoing native forest logging is through a political, not economic, lens,” he says.

I put this to University of Tasmania political scientist Professor Richard Eccleston, who positions the latest flashpoint partly in the context of a recent end to a moratorium, which has exposed more native forest to potential harvest sooner.

Broadly, he says long-running political debates and conflict covering a wider range of issues tend to persist even when the underlying issues are resolved or less significant than before.

“This, as American democratic theorist EE Schattschneider argued in the 1960s, is because conflicts define political issues and energise political parties and groups, creating a perverse disincentive to compromise and resolve long-running disputes.”

We need a circuitbreaker, but what might work?

“Ideally, communities still reliant on income from native forest logging need new industries that can provide sustainable employment and a sense of purpose and dignity,” he says.

“This is easier said than done, but there are options in ­regional Tasmania, even in a post-COVID world, including agriculture, renewable energy-related construction and the managing of fire-risk in our forests.”

After all this, I feel the weight of the “loggerheads” mindset that persists in Tasmania; it may not be as destructive as it was, but it perpetuates a stalemate we can ill afford.

It is a brave new world, but are we ready for it?

GETTING THERE:

Visit clearfell-listed Coupe TN 034G and decide for yourself if it and other places like it should be logged. Head to Maydena 90km from Hobart via New Norfolk and Bushy Park. At Maydena, take Gordon River Rd then turn right at the sign for Styx Big Tree Reserve, veer right, and drive through the underpass onto Styx Rd. Continue past the clearfelled and burnt coupe on your left up to the junction with Mueller Rd. A left-hand turn just past a quarry entrance will lead you up a steep gravel road to the coupe. Google their names to to visit the Carbon Circuit and Big Tree Reserve. For more, visit parks.tas.gov.au/explore-our-parks/styx-tall-trees-conservation-area and the big tree register at thetreeprojects.com/tas-giant-trees

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