Locals up and down the coast of NSW are standing up to protect koalas, wildlife and forests and are putting themselves on the line. A ‘watch camp’ is now being set up by locals at Doubleduke State Forest, between Grafton and Casino.
Regardless of the draconian state laws that have been put in place to deter non-violet peaceful action by the coalition government and supported by NSW Labor, locals are taking action. From the Bulga State Forest on the mid-north which inspired locals to take action at Lorne State Forest to Yarratt Forest north of Taree they are seeking to protect their forests from logging and the damage to koalas and other native animals.
Join the call
Australia recognised as a ‘global deforestation hotspot’ and the NSW Government was warned in 2021 by their own Natural Resources Commission that the combination of logging with the impact of the 2019/20 fires presents a ‘serious and irreversible’ risk to the environmental values of NSW forests. But it is once again locals on the ground who are taking action to preserve their local forests.
‘In Doubleduke Forest this morning northern rivers koala protectors are gathered in a community camp to end native forest logging,’ said spokesperson for Save Banyabba Koalas Sean O’Shannessy.
‘They are calling on everyone concerned about our endangered species, climate and economy to join them in bearing witness and alerting fellow citizens to the rip off of our assets in progress in our forests.’
Community representatives from conservation organisations from Grafton, Kyogle, Lismore, Nimbin and Malanganee took time out of their busy lives to help establish the watch camp on Glencoe Rd next to Doubleduke State Forest yesterday.
‘Doubleduke Forest is a vitally important patch of endangered koala habitat that is still recovering from being burnt in 2019 and 2020. It is home to a long list of threatened species including koalas, phascogales, gliders, owls, frogs and plants. It contains nationally significant wetlands, is essential to a stable climate and is a tourist destination for bike riders. All of these irreplacable values are threatened by logging corporations ripping off our public assets.’ said Mr O’Shannessy.
‘Our community are appalled by what is being done to our forests so we are gathering in numbers too big to be ignored and calling on all concerned citizens to join us in ending logging of public native forests.’
There goes the last of the big trees. Hardly anything left after decades of over logging and the 2019 Black Summer Fires.
Forestry Corp. is hitting it hard. They know the writing is on the wall. Thanks to all the forest protectors!
Koala populations cannot be protected without taking on the hypocrites with the big carbon footprints, because the number one threat to koalas, the forests, and most of the species within them, is climate change making the forests unviable as habitats (which the bushfires demonstrated).
Start with taking on Bob Brown, Peter Garrett, Benny Zable and other notable / high profile hypocrites for flying everywhere in planes in a climate emergency.
Further, this hypocritical Greenie community should start doing what it was too lazy to do for the last fifty years (instead turning dairy-quality farmland into mostly Lantana deserts) – planting out significant areas of the lands they bought throughout the northern rivers with Eucalyptus plantations for timber production. When they do this, and only when they do this (or can convince other landholders to do this), can our community begin on the pathway to turning more of the state forests into national parks
Wood plantations would have been a simply solution, but there’s a good chance that when you go to harvest, the greenies would opine about the trees and try to use the govt as a weapon to make you loose your long term investment. So why bother planting them in the first place. Best just to farm the land instead.
Biodiversity is the measure of Climate Action, no politician can say they care about Climate Change if they do nothing to stop this destruction of old habitat trees. They’ve got hollows in them, homes to birds, reptiles, mammals.
What are they being used for? Nothing as important as the ecosystem.
Seriously, stump people, can’t be that dumb to not realise the length of time it takes a tree to grow, it wasn’t meant for the use of one generation.