14 September, 2010

Hardly a danger

Max Rheese, Victorian Lands Alliance, Benalla
The Age (letter), 14 September 2010 

Sarah Rees and Jill Redwood (Letters, 11/9) ignore that native timber harvesting occurs on less than one tenth of 1 per cent of public forest in Victoria by claiming this contributes to the decline of species such as Leadbeater's possum. Get real.

Asserting any species is in danger from such a minuscule activity, thinly dispersed over thousands of square kilometres of bush, is really drawing a long bow, particularly when the once-thought-extinct Leadbeater's possum was rediscovered in 1966 in regrowth forest from the 1939 fires.

The small area of timber harvesting occurring in Victoria does not result in any net loss of forest, as all areas harvested are required to be regenerated. Rees and Redwood cannot see the forest for the trees as the ultimate determinant of forest structure in Australia is bushfire, not timber harvesting.

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