Should we be logging our Indigenous forests?

Forest and Bird, Volume 22, Issue 1, 1 February 1991, Page 16

Should we be logging our Indigenous forests?

by Professor

John Morton

The following article by Professor John Morton, one of New Zealand’s most eminent ecologists and a Distinguished Life Member of Forest and Bird, was first published in New Zealand Environment. It provides an important individual perspective on our indigenous forests and is reproduced as a contribution to the development of an Indigenous Forest Policy. Here he criticises the former Labour Government's proposals for the "sustainable" logging for export of native trees. National supports these proposals, but at its post-election conference Labour came out in support of a total and permanent ban on the export of native woodchips, logs and timber.

ODAY, IT COULD have been realistic for all our indigenous forests — publicly and privately owned — to be reprieved from logging. New Zealand could have shown such an example of forbearance at far less sacrifice than our near-Pacific neighbours. Under the former Labour Government's forestry policy it isn’t yet going to happen. Not that the whole policy is to be scoffed at. Their first statement has been strengthened by an interim ban on all exports of native timber, chip or saw-log. Announced, significantly, by then-Deputy Prime Minister Helen Clark, this took some political courage. It was clearly intended as a principled stand. Probably it was touched off by the wanton massacre of beech in Southland by owners trying to beat the new policy. The pity is that the new policy, when its details emerge, is not likely to halt damage to our indigenous forests. It may create pressures to increase it. The Government has accepted bad ecological advice. If their policy comes into force it would offer a loophole through which timber products can be exported, if they are certified to have been ° logged under an approved regime of sustained yield management.

Preserved intact

What does the Government intend this formula to mean? For there's an immense difference between a natural resource, like a hay paddock or a snapper fishery or a pine forest, that can be harvested for ongoing return; and a heritage forest, scarce, wonderful, slow-growing, that may cry out to be preserved intact. Under "sustained yield management", anything taken out from the mature end of a population is replaced continuously by something almost as mature, coming on. This can happen with pines, and in European deciduous forests. No one with any knowledge believes that it could be done with 5-8 century-old rimu or totara. These have the wrong-shaped population curve: an ‘inverseJ’. There are two or three centuries of age gap, with nothing middle-aged, until, centuries ahead, today’s striplings begin to mature. If they ever do, neither we nor any people like us will be around to see the result. The Government has now been persuaded

(and the Maruia Society alone among conservation bodies insists on going along with them) that sustained yield management is possible with beech. Here is a tree coveted for chipping and pulping to make a paper of special quality they like in Japan. It has a maturing age of only about a century. It’s curve is not J-shaped. And it's perfectly true that when you cut down a beech you can get more to grow. It is a long way from this to talk about sustaining an old and mature forest in the form we have come to value and love. We don’t know yet what the sustained yield protocol would look like. It is likely to allow a much heavier take than the "selection logging" that we had by now thought altogether discredited for North Island podocarp forests. What some of the industry have in mind would hardly preserve the integrity of an old mature forest. L S King, Executive Director of Wood Export Tokanui Ltd, wrote (New Zealand Listener 11 June, 1990) that although the present proportion of chip logs from Southland is about three times that of saw logs, this is only because virgin beech forests are "very over mature". "Managed stands will reverse this ratio to four to one in favour of saw-logs. Thus the wood quality of managed beech is vastly improved and in time the volume of low grade material available for woodchip production could decline dramatically. Conversely a much greater proportion of timber will be available for high quality uses such as furniture and veneer.’ This could dangerously mislead. Today, there seems to be no market calling out for beech in furniture and veneers that other timbers (perhaps innovative exotic hardwoods) could not satisfy. This despite the repeated encouraging words from some in favour of small industries from beech.

Forest’s Chief Glory

By the Company statement, management would eliminate "over mature" (that word again!) old trees which are the forest’s chief glory today. Sustained management under Government rules might allow the clearfelling of selected bits, so long as new forests were adjudged capable of growing up. Not much would remain of the old forest profile. New adolescent production forests would be there

instead. Even at such a level, matching mature felling by new growth, the crunch question is not could sustained yield management be done, but would it? Who would ensure it continued over the years needed to bring back a forest, when none of us today will be any longer around? What sort of scientific consensus would be sought for the new rules? What bureaucracy would be needed to monitor it? The industry's own people? Or who else would pay for it? And would every sustained yield log reach the wharf embossed with a certificate of bona

fides, like the watermark in a bank-note? Some are assuming, and Maruia among them, that the chipmills at Invercargill and Nelson must now close. They judge the small private and Maori holdings insufficient to make sustained yield management economic. But increasing pressures on beech may come as prices from Japan get higher, export needs more exigent, or chipmills hungrier. A future Government — on economic or local employment grounds — might find it hard to resist clamour for a bigger cut. Having conceded that beech can be up for logging at all, we'd have to be joking to believe most

owners or exporters would willingly forego the maximum yield for reasons of green conscience. One holding that won't be held too small for sustained yield management is the 77,000 ha of West Coast beech, controlled by West Coast Timberlands. Japanese companies may look to the West Coast for their future resource of New Zealand hardwood. The plan is to take out 170,000 m3 annually, most of it in chips. Bill Gilbertson, of West Coast Forest and Bird, is alarmed: "The way foresters practise beech management means the forest is progressively clear-felled. The wildlife values

plummet and the landscape is marred by an ugly patchwork of forest clearance." Just as disturbing is the Government's new forest policy as it touches podocarps. They plan to allow export of sustained yield managed podocarp logs (though mercifully not kauri). The whole allowed cut of totara, matai, rimu and kahikatea might thus go to high-paying overseas markets. The prestigious value and increasing scarcity of such timbers would make helicopter logging viable. It could give the incentive to move into isolated private stands at present untouched. Angel Harvest — a would-be log export com-

pany on the West Coast — already wants to send to Japan the entire sustained yield cut of rimu.

Renewed pressures

It is distressing to see these renewed pressures for podocarp logging. Faithful to their 1984 manifesto, the Labour Government had virtually put all North Island podocarp under protection. In 1978 Maruia director Guy Salmon and I stumped the trail together with the arguments against "sustained yield" for podocarps. In the book To Save a Forest: Whirinaki (1984) they are carefully set out. I still believe these arguments, and that they apply — if with less dramatic force — to beech. Guy — if I understand him aright — is telling us we conservationists must not fall too completely for our own propaganda. | don't say this is disingenous; I'd hold it to be an honest difference by a conservationist entitled from his proud record to high respect. Never a philosophical hard-liner (in the 1979s such ultimate positions didn’t arise), Guy Salmon — as I see it — earnestly believes it possible to make accommodation today, with Government and industry, by allowing them to take some reduced amounts of timber, especially beech and perhaps — if they'd accept it — tawa. He would no doubt point to some improved attitudes we've seen from industry in the Tasman Forestry Accord that saved some 40,000 ha mainly in the North Island. Where I'd part company is in wanting -at this stage of the argument — still be to an advocate, rather than joining with Government in patching up solutions time may show to be insufficient. Thus, I take it hard today to be told that — after the 1986 West Coast Accord — the conservation movement is now precluded in good faith from a total opposition to the logging or export of beech. One argument Maruia would advance, and that it is entitled to weigh, is that export bans will deprive Maori owners of the ‘tino rangatiratanga’ or true right of chieftainship over their own forests. This wasn’t the view Guy or I took when the fine rimu of Waitutu were under threat of logging. But I was also in 1982 one of those willing for the Waitutu owners to have cutting royalties from stateowned Southland beech. It seemed then the best that could be done to achieve the greater good. In view of the later withdrawal by the would-be loggers Feltex, it was a concession that arguably was not necessary. But it does remind us today of the big question still remaining: the need so to arrange our economy and employment openings that the cost of conservation doesn't fall disproportionately upon an already disadvantaged class. I am thinking here much more about employment than lucrative investment or exploitation gains. Today Government is considering a landexchange policy whereby land of high conservation value in Maori hands could be swapped for other holdings. Rather than exchange (with the inference that Maori owners cannot be trusted to look after a forest heritage), I’d want to return to my old suggestion of ‘augmentation’. In this way, existing Maori land would be added to, where possible in the near vicinity, with areas that could be farmed for production. A few years ago, this might easily have been done from our public store of lands held by the-then

Lands and Survey Department. It would have made some historic reparation for land loss, as well as good conservation and economic sense. With that old Department's demise, and Landcorp’s holdings likely to be sold off privately, such a creative opportunity may have gone for the foreseeable future. Across the board, and keeping local economic justice in mind, I'd find it hard to accept exemption of one of the races of Aotearoa from the obligation to safeguard our forest heritage. To be mindful of the ‘forests of the Treaty’ would seem to require that they go on standing. Nor do I hear much Maori dissent from this. When the great waka were carved for the celebrations of 1990, it was not by raiding the few hundred giant totara left standing, but by using the forest's latest bounty in the shape of fallen trees.

Vaunted Right

As a nationwide policy, I'd also view with distrust proposals for a fund to compensate owners prevented from logging. It would be full of pitfalls to enshrine a right of compensation wherever ecological constraints made it necessary to leave a piece of pristine environment unexploited. The economy could not afford, nor would taxpayers agree to go on buying off every assertion of the vaunted right to "do what | like with my own land". This is a right — if it ever truly existed — that public policy and planning has much eroded. When the owners were prevented from draining the Whangamarino wetlands, Cooke P — in the judgement of the Court of Appeal — held that they had lost not a compensable ‘right’ but a ‘privilege’, to which the ownership did not indefeasibly entitle them. In planning lawyer's terms, New Zealand has never extracted payment of ‘betterment’ from

those whose property values public action has improved; nor is it time today to pay ‘worsenment’ wherever conservation may have reduced the exploitative yield. Perhaps every title to land will one day be held subject to such a "green equity". Our real danger today is that acceptance of indigenous cutting anywhere — as it need not be — will make the conservation principle everywhere so much harder to apply. To bring ourselves back to beech forests, the real question is not could sustained yield management be done, nor even the more realistic would it, but should beech be logged at all? Even if they have never caught the northerm conscience like podocarps, Nothafagus forests are superb. We share them today only with Chile. With parkland vistas, open floor, and fine horizontal branching tiers, they are a ‘classic’ forest; in such contrast with the high Gothic drama of podocarps. They are Hadyn, not Wagner. Or to change the simile, the light reflects in high points from a million small leaves as in a Seurat painting. Let us be thankful we do have a little more beech forest left than podocarps. But we don’t have enough to start realising the cash value in pulp and chips. That way, beech would in its turn be reduced to a few remnants and reserves. Remember, if beech forests could regenerate, they would not be adult for long before a new logging round started. A steady trade, in and out, could leave not much to gaze and wonder at, in the shop window. I want to see these forests in my lifetime, not trade them for an adolescent production line.

Never safe

Even if this would not happen to all beech, while politicians have caught this virus about the continued exploiting of indigenous species, our whole forest heritage can never be regarded as safe for our time. Over beech, it is now being argued that conservationists should keep faith with the 1986 West Coast Accord. With the late Charles Fleming | at first opposed the Accord for its allowance of beech cutting. I was then persuaded this could put at risk the shaky adherence of the West Coast United Council to the Accord, or the Government's delivery of the concessions hanging on it. So — as an Executive Member of Forest and Bird (who supported the Accord) — I came into line. In retrospect I had lost credibility with both sides. And I believe today that the Accord was unwise, in making compacts or final settlements that would seal us off from future freedom of advocacy. Should beech logging be done, then? I believe profoundly NO. And can we not, as people of conscience, see why? When, as children, we used to persist "Why can’t we?", for some breach of old or decent behaviour, my father would answer, shortly but quite sufficiently, "Some things simply aren’t done".

Postscript

Since Professor Morton wrote the above article, we have seen a change of government and a renewal of beech chipping in Southland for a further 12 years.