Explosive Growth of Secondary Roads from Industrial Logging

Forest loss - (Secondary) roads from industrial logging fragment ecosystems (ChatGPT)

New roads in forest frontiers enable secondary roads that amplify human impacts. Roads are key proximate drivers of environmental impacts, including forest fragmentation.

"Tropical forests face widespread environmental threats from road expansion. Previous research established that roads enable human incursion, break up ecosystems, and intensify deforestation through land clearing, fires, and illegal resource extraction. The role of secondary roads in amplifying these effects has remained poorly quantified, leading to gaps in environmental impact assessments and conservation strategies.
Environmental impact assessments failed to account for the full scale of road-induced deforestation. " (source)

"In the tropics and beyond, roads are key proximate drivers of environmental impacts, including forest fragmentation. These secondary roads in turn can dramatically elevate forest and biodiversity losses."

Jayden E. Engert et al, Explosive growth of secondary roads is linked to widespread tropical deforestation, Current Biology (2025). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2025.02.017

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.

The Western Genre and The Settler Society Narrative

Some readings about the latest Western the entertainment industry has to offer: Killers of The Flower Moon, Martin Scorsese.

The western genre convention usually depicts the 'unbounded freedom' of the individual, the 'Lone Cow-boy' trope on horseback set in a 'wide and open spaces' narrative. The 'hero' operates outside the law on Indigenous landscapes and in frontier towns.

"Unlike the visions of unbounded freedom found in traditional westerns, Martin Scorsese’s new film is a study of a West bounded by the vertical geometry of oil rigs and the violent conspiracies of powerful men.” (source)

It is an “epic about the bloody birth of modern America... An epic of creeping, existential horror about the birth of the American century, a macabre tale of quasi-genocidal serial killings" (source)

The film is “an epic story of greed and betrayal in its examination of Osage life in Oklahoma circa 1920, and the mass murders of the Indigenous community at the hands of their white neighbors.” (source)

Leonardo DiCaprio: “It's still happening...The more work that I've done, certainly in the environmental space, you realise the systematic persecution of Indigenous cultures all throughout the world...It's happening all over the world, in Australia. It's happening in Africa, it's happening in South America...And I keep saying this quote over and over again, those places that are most rich in resources are those that are often most drenched in blood." (source)

The BBC mentions that the zeitgeist how Indigenous peoples are treated might be changing in the 21^st Century: "The film is making a strong statement that it's no longer acceptable to extract valuable assets from Indigenous communities without our consent and input.” (source)

Interesting times when Hollywood actors and their products problematise past massacres of settler colonialism and present day injustices against Indigenous peoples.

As Patrick Wolfe said: Settler colonialism is a “structure not an event” (source)

Update:

Revealing reading regarding mineral and petroleum royalties: For the Osage Nation, the betrayal of the murders depicted in ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’ still lingers, Conservation