An Environmental History of the Timber Industry: The Social Constructions of Forest and Identity

Some remarks on the Social Constructions of Forest and Identity: An Environmental History of Timber Industry Authorities in the Forests of Southeast Victoria, Australia,  Claire Waddell-Wood, La Trobe University, Victoria, 2024 (source)

 

One wonders why the degradation of Australia seems unstoppable.
Why are the forests and biodiversity being wiped out, eradicating a future for complex living beings?
What is the nexus between settler society and the extractive relationship to their surrounding country?


Claire Waddell-Wood, is an environmental historian who investigates the Victorian timber industry. Light is thrown on the extractive relationships of settler-colonial interactions with the landscapes they colonise. The conceptual framing foregrounds resource extraction/forestry labour and masculinity constructions against the background of a more-than-human world. 

The metabolism between European modes of production/ consumption took the form of “rape and pillage disasters.”  The resulting ecological crisis does not only take place in the timber industry alone, but is a way of life and work in all the extractive industries.


Victoria officially ceased logging operations recently. But in other states such as NSW (The proposed Great Koala Park) forests and their remaining biodiversity are still being denuded and erased. Elsewhere in the Big Quarry, “dualistic ontologies still guide human behaviour.” 

An acknowledgment and a change of ways of the mainstream structures, institutions and mindsets, as well as in environmental movements could harbour the possibilities for a fundamental transition of socio-ecological relations.

The ‘history of degradation’ traces the (southeast Victorian) forest industry’s  extractive work, masculinities and landscape degradation. p. 202

A “deep time forest culture (which) shaped and was shaped by long histories of interactions” (by Wurundjeri, Boonwurrung, Taungurung, Gunnai Kurnai, Jaitmatang, Bidwell, and Ngarigo people) encountered male dominated European settler culture that conceptualises “those forests through the resource imaginary”.

“The social metabolisms of invasion clashed with deep time forest cultures, and ecosystems became disturbed and damaged. The interactions between settlers and forests led to the escalation of fire frequency in forests.” p. 200

European agricultural ideals of plantation monocultures and short term crop yields constitutes a violent othering of Nature. Ancient Indigenous knowledges about forest ecology and ‘the region’s deep time fire culture’ were ignored. The result were intensified extraction and megafires.


From now on “the only true forest knowledge-holders were those trained in the forestry sciences.”  A move from bare rural masculinity in primary industries with boots on the ground to a ‘technoscience of colonial forestry’ operated at arms length via assemblages of machinery and from a top floor of a distant city.

The administration of the ‘stuff’ becomes ‘spatially alienated from the forests’. Hierarchies of (male) staff control the ‘output’ of the biophysical forest factory. Forestry and science experts with exclusionary language and procedures take control from head office over the landscape. Here “the construction masculinity through work” and the production of “wasted landscape" and “waste peoples” takes place.  p.197 

Waddell-Wood's thesis “can aid in untangling the myths of capitalism and colonialism from our everyday lives and help us to live with the biophysical world rather than against it.” p 203

Yet another stepping stone on the path to truth telling.

A Master Plan for Bellingen Placemaking and its Surrounding Forests

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

The Existence of Koalas

 

Can data gathering and the courts save the koala and biodiversity from clear felling?

The koala is an endangered species that is predicted to become functionally extinct in NSW by 2050. The NSW government plans to create The Great Koala National Park, which includes publicly-owned state forests, to halt the extinction trajectory of the marsupial. At the same time the government owned state Forestry Corporation of NSW on the Mid North Coast is planning and actively clear-felling the habitat of this endemic species.

One of the first actions for the 'world leader in mammal extinctions' would have to be to refrain from 'business as usual'. The prime reason for the marsupial's demise is the destruction of its habitat through land clearing, deforestation, logging and rapid urbanisation. The associated road designs, car crashes, mauling by roaming pet dogs shrink and degrade the already fragmented habitat even further. Fossil fuel fanned bushfires further cause death and injuries.

Ecological data is essential for the understanding and the protection of species. The quantification and simplification of ecological complexity can inform decision-makers in government and law to ensure the resilience of ecosystems and genetic diversity.

To establish the existence, distribution and population size of an endangered animal, an array of spotting and monitoring techniques are available. Wildlife monitoring can take the form of spotlighting with 'boots on the ground', searching for koala sightings (image capture), sound (recordings) or scat surveys (poo) collecting around dawn and dusk. Passionate non-expert citizen scientists and consultancy services are involved in this biodiversity data gathering and database collating. Due to resource constraints, data gathering tends to get outsourced to technological techniques that require it to be cost-effective and rapid. The monitoring methods need to be reliable and cause the least harm to wildlife and its ecosystem. Good ethical practice should prevent the risk of unintended consequences.

“Boots on the ground” and spotting koalas in food trees in the daytime is one way. Images (GIS) and searching for scat (poo) is a daytime activity. Nocturnal animals can be spotlighted at night and sound recording can be made. Marsupials can be sensitive to any human disturbance.

Motion sensor high-resolution camera traps can be installed or drones fitted with infrared cameras that buzz an area in a 'lawnmower' pattern to capture the free roaming animals. Sound encroachment by the UAVs tends to cause stress in wildlife.

To fit radio-collars on koalas can be invasive to the animals due to handling.

One of the presently favoured local methods is scent detection by sniffer dogs. Fresh scat can also be used for genetic testing of populations in fragmented habitats. Wildlife perceives introduced dogs as predators leading to stress and negative impacts. Pet dogs will leave their scent in the bush which in turn disrupts the normal cycles of wildlife. Some endemic animals can avoid the area altogether after the presence of dogs.

One less invasive monitoring method of wildlife seems to be bio-acoustics. Soundscape monitoring can detect koala bellows continuously between 8pm and 2am. Low-cost, open source recorders can be used in microphone arrays. Computer algorithms can rapidly analyse thousands of hours of audio recordings to identify specific species' occurrences. Collating the data could also be done with open software under creative commons. Biophony approaches go beyond the 'decontextualized single-species model'.

AudioMoth is such a low-cost acoustic device for monitoring biodiversity. It comes as a small recorder about the size of a credit card and has ‘hearing’ up to 190 kHz.

The urgent need to establish the existence of Australian flora and fauna through expert consultants and their technology is in the light of the continuous assault on Country.

The gathering and collating of this data verifying the existence of ecosystems has the potential to be instrumental in halting the extinction trajectory of biodiversity.

Australia is built on the imaginary foundation of 'terra nullius', an 'empty' land without Indigenous peoples. Today, the 'blind spot' takes the form of an absence or manufactured sparsity of data on Australian native plants and wildlife and justifies the continuous defaunation and eradication of endemic flora.

The sheer existence of threatened species and biodiversity conservation laws appear as an obstacle to the 'business as usual' modus. Extractivism and the financialisation of nature continue to drive the Australian ecosystems into degradation and extinctions.

Reports by scientists and data by citizen scientists are often disregarded. A huge PR industry greenwashes the central issues with 'glossy papers' and 'raises awareness' in the mainstream media channels. A busy and stressed out public is in willful ignorance about the existential issues of their home.

The 'democratic debate' of a concerned public is now replaced by pre-framed issues that have migrated from the arena of political participation into the court rooms. The dialogues of controversial political processes have been shifted from the political arena into the courts (expensive and time consuming litigation). The new terrain for dispute resolution is no longer based on a democratic participatory process, but it is confined to the legal system.

"Ultimately, peaceful political protest should be addressed by politicians. The current government has decided, by making disruption of ‘everyday life’ a criminal act, that it is a matter not of politics but for the police and criminal law. This will have serious implications for society, and for freedom of speech, whether or not you believe it is the right approach."
(source)

In this milieu political protest is forced to take the form of civil disobedience and is viewed as yet another disruption to the flow of a perfect global supply chain. Criminal law takes care of the 'spanners in the works'. It is the criminalisation of voicing dissent to a catastrophic normality.

The actors involved in this sphere are lawyers, judges and (private) ecological consultants. The public has the freedom to participate in this system via user-pays access. There, the experts deliberate about the more-than-human world and its human advocates. The ecology of this social subsystem of environmental justice is made up of ecological justice and social justice.

Constitutional law and courts have to ensure that justice is done towards the past, the present and a future. The process must ensure intergenerational equity, the rights of nature and compliance with international agreements. An array of national law/s written in the past might not be able to take account of the global poly-crisis the planet is facing today.

When human 'developments' replace other species, custodians and their institutions have to decide whether that being exists at all or will be granted the right to continue to exist at all.

Expertise is manufactured by scientists in their field, the validity is established by a community of practice and the law of the time. 500 years of global extractivism history and neo-extractivism have established a clear value system and mindsets of what are the priorities of settler societies.

Under the Myanmar military junta or Amazonian right wing governments for example, the rich and unique biodiverse rainforests of their countries cease to exist and are then transformed into simple timber, crops and cash for a few. Justifying the unjustifiable becomes superfluous.

In the west, the market steers the curating of ecological data and the decision making into the hands of external consultants that are expected to provide accurate and valid data to the courts. Third-party consultants can 'cut corners' and resort to rapid surveys and 'box checking' of bio-diverse assemblages. Problems of reliability and validity remain. Western science is the knowledge system of that very system.

In a recent reproducibility trial for example 246 biologists got widely divergent results from the same data sets. (source)

James J.A.Blair  argues that the 

“practices of accountability prioritize mining interests and enable corporations to define the standards of performance that governments will use to establish compliance”

"In the late petro-capitalist normative order, private purchasing power for short-term profit gains continues to capture data infrastructure and yield influence over public resource management...."

"Environmental “sensing practices” may serve diverse political goals and objectives for humans and more-than-human subjects..., but their ethical and social origins lie in imperial hunting, domestication and policing, rather than principles of reciprocity common to Indigenous hunting and trapping." (source)

It is said that the essential feature of capitalism is the profit motive. The destruction of native forests by the state forest corporation has to be subsidised by the taxpayers. “Over 90% of native forest that is logged in NSW is pulped and sent overseas to be used in wood chips... “ (source)

As an economic project this rationality can only be explained by short-term political gains. Would decision-makers sacrifice a highly interrelated pattern and processes of flora, fauna and ecosystems? Would they exchange highly valuable, irretrievable, unique life forms for a quick 'multiplier effect'?

Could it be that the decision makers sacrifice native forests, (‘collateral damage’) plants and animals to keep a few timber workers and fossil fuel machinery owners in work for just another while longer?

60+ % of settler society recently confirmed a clear 'NO' to the existence and participation of the Indigenous peoples in this country. Australian endemic animals and plants are still largely unknown and can hardly be named by the general public. (Knowledge of the living', Canguilhem) Numerous reports attest to the degradation of the living in settler Australia.

The state of the environment on this continent has been ‘going in the wrong direction’ (Dr Ken Henry) for the last 235 years. (source)

The denial and lack of care for Country in mind, on paper and 'out there' is overwhelming. Only by refusing to acknowledge the existence of Country can the continuing destruction be rationalised.

 

Links:

AudioMoth: A low-cost acoustic device for monitoring biodiversity and the environment
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468067219300306

Audio similarity search on the Australian Acoustic Observatory media archive. Users can upload audio recordings of an animal species, find similar sounds across the database, filter by location and date, and download the results. Open Source
https://search.acousticobservatory.org/

 
Four-legged friend or foe? Dog walking displaces native birds from natural areas
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/6055768_Four-legged_friend_or_foe_Dog_walking_displaces_native_birds_from_natural_areas

 
(In) tolerance to Civil Disobedience in the UK
https://verfassungsblog.de/civil-disobedience-in-the-uk/

Reproducibility trial: 246 biologists get different results from same data sets
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03177-1

Salvaging Empire: Sovereignty, Natural Resources, and Environmental Science in the South Atlantic, James J. A. Blair, 2023 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv2zmkbzx?typeAccessWorkflow=login

https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501771545/salvaging-empire/#bookTabs=1

 
Tracking penguins, sensing petroleum: “Data gaps” and the politics of marine ecology in the South Atlantic
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7591/j.ctv2zmkbzx?typeAccessWorkflow=login

Worth more standing: As NSW’s debt mounts, NCC calls for an end to subsidies for the logging industry.
https://www.nature.org.au/as_nsw_s_debt_mounts_ncc_calls_for_an_end_to_subsidies_for_the_logging_industry

Australia’s environment must be given legal priority over land-clearing and logging to survive, Ken Henry says
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/25/dr-ken-henry-environment-land-clearing-logging

Updates:

What is the admissibility of expert versus citizen evidence in court? Illawarra housing developer denies presence of platypus despite 'citizen science'. Outraged by the developer's refusal to acknowledge the animal's existence.
https://mastodon.au/@Bellingen/111411065583426641 

Outsourcing koala monitoring to AI (soundscape) sensors, at Western Sydney University, 4.12.2023
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-12-04/biodiversity-monitoring-services-ai-track-male-koala-mating-call/103183972