Native forests are worth more unlogged, so why are we still cutting them down?

Illustration: John Shakespeare

I spent the first four years of my life living in the middle of the forest in south-eastern NSW.

Our log cabin was at the end of a dirt road, surrounded by stringybark, spotted gum and the sounds of kookaburras and lyre birds.

Wombat holes and lichen-covered boulders dotted the hillside and the creek ran cold and clear, steeped red-brown with tea tree.

After we moved to the city, we returned most years to visit family. Every trip more and more of the surrounding bushland was cleared and replanted with radiata pine.

Now most of the native forest near my childhood home is gone, clearfelled and sold to the Japanese for woodchip.

It still upsets me greatly. As a child I blamed greed, but as an adult I realise the truth is even more galling, because there is nothing economically rational about it.

Read Caitlin Fitzsimmons comment in today’s Melbourne Age - “Native forests are worth more unlogged, so why are we still cutting them down?”