The Chair of Wilderness Australia and former Minister for the Environment in NSW, Bob Debus, has welcomed the move by Australia’s environment groups to join together in a campaign to protect forests and to end native forest logging around the nation.
Over the last three years, our team at Wilderness Australia has been undertaking pioneering citizen science work. That project’s purpose is to identify and protect the habitat of the nationally endangered Greater Glider in areas of State Forest that are slated for logging. This work has grown into a wider collaboration with other conservation groups and members of the community spread across the eastern ranges of NSW. This little-known species is now at the forefront of the protection of high conservation value forests across NSW.
The strategy is working, and its success has been far greater than we imagined. It demonstrates something that has always been true: when a large group of people from advocacy organisations and the wider community work together on a common cause, outcomes can be achieved that would be otherwise impossible.
That idea has been central to the most successful efforts to protect nature for most of Australia’s modern history. Decades ago I was part of a government that managed a forest industry restructuring program that was larger in scale than the process needed now to complete the transition to a 100% plantation-based industry in NSW.
I believe that my task was made easier and not harder by the particularly strong, united and determined environment movement that existed at that time. Things have always worked best when that kind of circumstance exists. It is said that you can't bat well against bad bowling!
Very recently a similar idea has come together again, but at a far greater scale and on a national level. More than fifty environmental organisations have joined in signing a letter spelling out principles for forest protection. This humble document represents a resur
gence of something missing for twenty five years: a united advocacy movement willing to engage with a community that is hungry for collaborative action on our nation’s forests.
The ultimate outcome will be up to the ambulations of Parliament and the present government but, whatever that final circumstance is, it will be improved by the presence of healthy, collaborative and vigorous input from civil society.
I congratulate Australian Conservation Foundation, Bob Brown Foundation, The Wilderness Society and Wilderness Australia for taking the initiative to bring people together again, in a great national cause.
