Bellingen area stripped bare?
Bellingen council is in the process of producing a CBD Master Plan for Bellingen, Dorrigo and Urunga. “A long-term vision and implementation strategy will be outlined for guiding growth and change in an area." The plan will be used to implement “ land use, building density, public spaces, mobility, sustainability, and heritage.”
These long-term 'visions' and actions will have implications for settlers, Indigenous peoples, visitors and more-than-human lifeforms. Stakeholders were asked to ‘share their ideas’ (consultation) with consultants and council. Biodiversity was rendered voiceless.
A strategy for growth (business as usual) and change (unspecified) ”will influence the future appearance, atmosphere, and functionality of the town centres”
Bellingen is a small town, located on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales. It has a long history of (rainforest) timber extraction. Like most other Australian sprawling towns it is (totally) fossil fuel/ car dependent. Users of the CBD obtain their stuff there and drive to their homes or short term accommodation. All roads are congested and constantly have to be rebuilt to accommodate the increasing traffic.
The idyllic scenery
A drive in the scenic countryside used to be a big drawcard for visitors and boosted the income for the service industry. The cruise past forest canopy from the coast to mountain rivers and waterfalls funneled money into town.
It is these surroundings, the ambient milieu, that gave the small town its charm. Showcasing its physical (rich biodiversity) or social settings (some non mainstream culture) put the place ‘on the map'. It is not a few shops, but the setting, the relational context that gives a 'thing' its value.
Stripped bare - Native forest governance
The NSW state government’s Forestry Corporation has made the decision now to log and clear-fell vast areas of forests surrounding the area before some are declared a Great Koala National Park. Bellingen/ Gleniffer is now surrounded and locked in by industrial forest logging sites for years.
The degradation and destruction of Bellingen’s 'frame' will have impacts on the “the future appearance, atmosphere, and functionality of the town centres.”
The habitats of plants and animals are being stripped bare while timber is being extracted with the aid of fossil fuel machinery and tax dollars to subsidise these destructive projects. Untold living creatures lose their homes and are being pushed onto the newly updated logging roads to become 'roadkill'. Diverse and endemic remnant flora and fauna are wiped out to make way for a monoculture plantation with the aid of pesticides and lingering fires and smoke pollution.
Residents, visitors and businesses that have chosen this country location find themselves next to industrial sites with mega industrial machine pollution, eroded, dangerous extraction roads and stranded assets. This invasion disrupts and absorbs the lifetime of the residents and carers who are committed to refraining from degrading Australia any further.
The violent destruction of bulldozing ecosystems entails noise, dust clouds, pollution and expulsion. It is the offloading of the externalities, so that the native forests can be sent overseas in the form of wood chips. Voiceless nature undergoes 'dispersal'.
Forest logging robs Australian animals of food, shelter, and breeding areas and threatens their survival. Unique endemic plants and remnant vegetation ‘get under the wheels’ of logging machinery.
Even in 'normal times’ forest-dependent biodiversity is threatened by out of control land clearing, invasive species, cars, pets, pollution, disease and weather extremes due to climate disruption cause by burning fossils.
Native forest logging makes bushfires worse and renders bushfires harder to control. Out of control fires hasten ecosystem collapse.
Wipe out
The industrial extraction of the 'stuff' called timber is torn out of the heart of a complex web of life. The irretrievable evolutionary process of 3.7 billion of years which appears to us as imperceptibly slow motion is just wiped out.
Our present (perception) has an endless past incorporated in it. The bureaucrats/loggers are only able to see the thing called ‘wood' for export income and votes. With this mind frame an open future is foreclosed and the future takes on a necessary trajectory.
Land use vs Country care
Country was managed for 65.000 years (long-termism) with Indigenous knowledge systems of relationality and connectivity. Settler-colonial society encountered a 'pristine' environment. In a very short time of 236 years since European settlement the 'state of the environment' can be summed up as one of degradation and extinction. "More than half of NSW forests were lost since 1750 and logging ‘locking in’ species extinction". (source)
“Our inability to adequately manage pressures will continue to result in species extinctions and deteriorating ecosystem condition, which are reducing the environmental capital on which current and future economies depend. Social, environmental and economic impacts are already apparent.” (source)
The entire Australian environment is deteriorating due to pressures from rapid resource extraction and expansion, climate disruption, habitat destruction, invasive species and pollution.
To squander one’s own environmental capital is maladaptive behaviour, that prevents one from making adjustments that are in one’s own best interest. To destroy the basis of existence is suicidal, unless there is more ‘new found land’ or another planet waiting around the corner.
The speed of exploitation and its associated expansion in spacetime are escalated by the ubiquitous economic dictates. It is an out of control system without functioning guardrails.
“That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe.”
― Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project
Polycrisis
Ruthless extraction and degradation of one's own existential basis is taking place in the context of an emerging polycrisis, the simultaneous occurrence of several catastrophic events.
Global warming from fossil fuels, putting the chain saw to the tree of life (biodiversity) and pollution of the biosphere are just a few of the intersecting global environmental crises of the collective impacts of one species.
The ongoing ecological depletion on local, regional, and global scales, is seen as normal. The next generations of living entities will just have to deal with this ‘shifting baseline’ of a scorched, barren Earth, devoid of any life as far as the eye can see.
This project is threatening the fabric of complex life on Earth. A 'long-term vision' of a 'master plan', even of a local area, must take the existential risks to humanity and life into account.
It is essential to invoke the precautionary principle to do no social harm and environmental damage in the light of an avalanche of scientific reports and pledges.
Growth, intensification of extraction and expansion of living space constitute the script and the mental landscape of the settler.
The 'superior land use' argument has been used to justify the genocidal violence and ecocide of the colonised diversity of life, replacing it with a monoculture of livestock, plantation crops and pets.
The “logic of elimination”, (Patrick Wolfe, 2006) of the expanding colonial scheme goes hand in hand with the denial of existence (e.g. Indigenous peoples, referendum, forest surveys, data sparsity etc) and imperial governmentality.
The state of the planet demands attention and care. A facing up to the unsettling 'long present' of denial. Ending the undisturbed slumber of collective amnesia.
“Australians haven’t actually started living on this continent like they are from here and they have a responsibility of custodianship.” Richard Swain
As we are sliding into creeping collapse at an accelerated speed the presuppositions of the global governance of the biosphere have to be interrogated to produce strategies of bare survival possible in a post-democratic society where regulatory capture is the norm.
The council, Bellingen Chamber of Commerce, the tourism industry, the short stay lobby and all the other ‘stakeholders’ could position themselves to keep Bellingen’s ecosystems in a healthy state. Eradicating forests around Bellingen/ Gleniffer will not foster place identity.
Bellingen placemaking without the buffer of healthy forests and ecosystems would just be another bare drive-though town ‘in the middle of nowhere'.
"First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works” Jan Gehl
Links:
M.Ward et al., 2023, The impacts of contemporary logging after 250 years of deforestation and degradation on forest-dependent threatened species
DOI:10.1101/2023.02.22.529603
Patrick Miner et al., 2024, Car harm: A global review of automobility's harm to people and the environment, Journal of Transport Geography, Volume 115, February 2024
Patrick Wolfe, 2006, Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native, Journal of Genocide Research Volume 8, 2006 - Issue 4
