27th August 2011, 06:08 PM
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| Moderator - Previously known as JayD
Join Date: Feb 2007 Location: TreeWorld, Sydney Australia
Posts: 2,059
|  Sacking tree scientists wastes huge expertise
What a waste of expertise and time, did I mention time ? only a hundred years... maybe ?  August 27 Quote:
Public forests were founded neither to earn money for state governments nor to create a system of parks. Over large areas of Australia and the USA in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, forests that were being roughly exploited and burned, and, much worse, made into grazing paddocks, were consolidated into state forests. The names of the foresters who fought off generations of politicians and farmers and graziers to reserve these forests are long forgotten by all but a few of us.
In the last two years a dozen or so top-notch scientists working for Forests NSW in Coffs Harbour were sacked. It has been announced that another lot of researchers, based in Sydney, will be made redundant. These people were building upon nearly 100 years of research, including many long-term experiments in native forest, more than 500 plantation trials, as well as genetics work, particularly on eucalypt germplasm, much of it a component of the 20 million hectares of eucalypt plantations in the world. If and when someone decides to start planting trees again - the public agencies are not doing it, and the dodgy managed investment schemes mostly have gone down - will the findings of this hard-won research be considered? Or will those doing the planting consider themselves to be doing something new and insist on reinventing the wheel?
As a forestry scientist, I believe the right wing wants to privatise everything and have the public forests make as big a profit as possible. The left wing wants the public forests, that have been managed productively over a long period of time for multiple benefits including timber, to be converted into parks and has tantrums every time a tree is cut down on public land. We risk losing a group of internationally respected scientists. We also risk losing a well-managed forest estate because it is being abandoned for short-term profit. The misguided notion that there is no ecological value in native forests where tree harvesting is allowed is also a threat to this estate.
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