I want to take up a few points Lester Brien made in his letter, ‘What constitutes pristine rainforest’, published yesterday.
Lester, I have a disability that prevents my walking far these days but I have done the Minyon Loop walk previously about 20 years ago. Your inference that anybody that has not done the walk doesn’t know what they are talking about or deserve a say on forestry or threatened species management is ridiculous. You don’t have to be able bodied to have an opinion do you?
The concept that native forests are for our utilisation in any way we see fit, and if they are not visited and enjoyed that they are valueless, is equally misinformed. Google ‘Environmental Services’ and you will see forests are important for landscape health. In addition the Australian Bureau of Statistics will inform you of Australia’s terrible record for mammal extinctions and the need to change how forests are managed. Without seeing the harvest plan I would say their are probably 20 or so threatened fauna species not being considered at all but known in that ecosystem.
FCNSW would never have planted the Bopple Nuts or the flattened Bangalow Palms (rainforest sp). I don’t know how you define rainforest but there are eucalypt species such as Tallowood that are rainforest plants. Regardless, as a threatened species they need to be considered in surveys and and prescriptions applied to minimise impact to that species. As in this case the real problem lies with inadequate flora/fauna surveys and legally required prescriptions that are not applied.
Glen Little, Diploma in Applied Science Wildness, Reserves & Wildlife
Glen Little is reading a lot into my letter which simply isn’t there. He has crafted a reply to a letter he has extrapolated. There are plenty of drives in this region which will take you through original rainforest & are thus available to the mobility challenged , the nightcap range drive for one. The point of my letter is that the logging going on in the Whian Whian ( or the property adjacent ) is not of ” pristine rainforest ” nor even of ” old growth blackbutt forest ” . I am simply trying to encourage the editor of this paper to require his journalists to be more accurate in their terminology otherwise he’s falling into the same journalistic bog of the press he so frequently complains, the Murdoch Press. I have no desire to press the case of the NSW Forestry Commission , even though they have so spectacularly failed to press it themselves but if you keep crying wolf then you will eventually become irrelevant & that is what is happening to the green movement in Australia today.