Luke Chamberlain from the Wilderness Society discusses the greenhouse gas emissions caused by logging Australia's native forests

Beyond Zero speaks to Luke Chamberlain, Forest Campaigner at The Wilderness Society (Australia) about Victoria’s tragic bush fires of February 2009 and the role of Victoria’s forests in reducing the impact of global warming.

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Scott Bilby: As listeners will know, there was a large-scale, intense and tragic series of fires that occurred throughout the period of early February (2009). February the 7th in particular was known as Black Saturday. Some people, including foresters, quickly laid the blame at the feet of the environment movement because the environment movement they say is supposedly against what is known as 'controlled burning', and have supposedly influenced the Victorian state government to reduce 'controlled burning' in public forests.

This morning on Beyond Zero we're speaking to Luke Chamberlain, forest campaigner for the Wilderness Society, Australia. His knowledge of Victoria's forests is impressive to say the least. He knows about the ecological imperative of it's preservation, the economic and political drivers of it's destruction, and a lot more. He'll being telling us about the fires, the scientific evidence as to why these fired occurred and the role that Victoria's forests can play in helping the world avoid runaway global warming.

And I will reveal at this point that I work for the Wilderness Society.

Hello Luke, are you there?

Luke Chamberlain: Good morning Scott, how are you?

Scott: Good to talk you mate.

Luke: Thank you, thanks for having me.

Scott: Now, do you want to start off by just telling us how you became a forest campaigner; how you became interested in the natural environment?

Luke: Oh sure, you may not have enough time on your program. Look, I used to work in the corporate world for many years in I.T. consulting for companies such as IBM and Price Waterhouse Coopers. But it was actually, I worked over in the States for a while and had the, I was very, very lucky to be able to travel to central Africa many years ago and I guess saw both the cost of environmental degradation to not just the wildlife, but also to the people, of places like Rwanda and The Congo and Uganda. And I came back to Australia after going walking through the Rwandan jungle and running into a family of mountain gorillas, as a lot of people get the privilege to do, and then came back to Australia and saw we're doing the same things here as on the other side of the world.

And we constantly hear that all the problems are out there in the world. The problem of chopping down vast areas of forest is only is in Indonesia and tropical countries, but we came back here, I went out to East Gippsland and could not believe my eyes at what I saw. So, basically joined every environment group I could here and for the next many years still continued to work in I.T. but slowly weaned myself off that system, and I was a volunteer with environment groups for about ten years and slowly got my head around the absurdity of the logging industry in Australia. What's good for the goose is good for the gander, and if it's that bad overseas then our governments need to be looking in our own backyards; to looking at the problems we are causing here.

Matthew Wright: It's a common story, the I.T. conversion to a climate campaigner.

Luke: Well, I'm not sure, maybe staring at a computer screen your whole life you start to clash with your own internal values. Although, I think I wear a suit more these days than when I was working at IBM.

Scott: Now Luke, it's kind of a common story isn't it? You don't know what's happening in your own backyard. I guess governments and business like to keep a lid on that type of stuff but they're not too concerned if you're concerned about somewhere far, far away, but they don't want (you) to know about your own backyard.

And, I guess more recently Australians, as they're becoming more aware, they keep going on about Tasmania's forests, which is a huge problem obviously, but Victorians in particular still remain very ignorant as to their own magnificent forests, the huge stands of forests out in eastern Victoria.

Luke: Absolutely, and Victoria was the great forested state. It is the most land-cleared, by a percentage of area, state in the country. As we've seen with some recent science that has been published by the Australian National University, (ANU) that our forests here in Victoria are some of the most carbon dense and that the Australian government and international protocols vastly underestimate the amount of carbon stored in our forests.

So, it's sort of like one of those things where you can't make good decisions unless you have the good data. So, we know that upwards of 20%, by very, very conservative estimates, of global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by deforestation and degradation, ie: logging of forests. If that was actually measured properly those figures are going to increase. And we have some of these most carbon dense forests here in Victoria.

Scott: And we also, obviously, need to start reducing greenhouse gas emissions right across many sectors because if we don't the horror could be that those forests, that are potentially a lifeline, could actually start emitting greenhouse gases if they start to get too stressed out as heat increases.

Matthew: So, going from a sink to a source. Can you tell us a bit about the impacts on the global climate system from forest degradation.

Luke: Sure. There are certainly a lot of commentators that are saying that forests will go from a sink to a source, and we're seeing with withdrawing(?) forest, that may be the case.

Forests, globally, have developed over millennia and been here for billions of years so we must be asking the question of, 'what's changing now?' And what's changing now, as you guys know a lot more than I do, but for the last 650,000, perhaps many more hundreds of thousands of years, that global greenhouse gas concentrations have been at certain levels. We exceeded those levels many, many years ago, and are on a trajectory through the roof and once we hit the tipping points then who knows what the future's going to look for life on this Earth.

So, basically a lot of the focus and emphasis has been on reducing emissions from fossil fuels, a very important and absolutely necessary task. We absolutely need to wean ourselves off that addiction and into renewables. Australia is placed with a high degree of intellectual capital, a high degree of democracy and vast renewable resources which remain untapped. We're in the perfect position to lead that revolution, as we absolutely need.

The other part of that equation, Matt as you mentioned, is the role that forests play and degradation. Probably your listeners have heard the term deforestation where we go and basically clear a forested landscape for another use such as palm oil or cleared land for beef, etc., soy beans, etc., but degradation is another term where we actually go and log a forest and allow it to regrow, but sometimes as a plantation that's not covered under Kyoto (The Kyoto Protocol) as a deforested process.

But, what the scientists are now saying is that degradation, could be, if measured, equally as potent to the atmosphere as deforestation. And that's why the international negotiations are looking at the protection of forests, and not looking at it just from deforestation, but also degradation. And that's the main problem we have here in Australia; vast areas of incredibly carbon dense forest being completely clearfelled, and with the vast majority of that carbon being released into the atmosphere.

Very different to wild fires, even intense wild fires. The very tragic fire that we've recently seen; very, very different and complex carbon differences into the atmosphere when you log a forest than when a forest actually burns (due to wild fire).

Scott: Ok. So, when you're logging a forest, because of all the disruption, the burning, the disruption to the soil in particular, there's so much more carbon released into the atmosphere than just a wild fire. And as we know in Australia, I think people often they'll go somewhere not long after a (wild) fire has happened and are always startled at how much the trees have grown back, and how much new life has appeared so very quickly.

So, the idea that once a fire has gone through, a wild fire, that they're all damaged and have to be cut down because they're no use, they might as well just be logged, is a bit of a furphy (furphy = Australian slang for a 'lie' or a 'myth'), isn't it?

Luke: Well, that's absolutely right. Australia's forests have basically evolved through millennia of very major fires. There has been, I mean this fire (Feb 7th 2009), the fire scientists have been studying fire behaviour looking at all sorts of carbon and soil samples and they can go back in time and look at fire. They basically say that this fire was absolutely unprecedented. This fire broke all the rules. It broke every single fire-behaviour model that we've looked at, and something has changed from the past.

You can't absolutely attribute this to climate change, but certainly it is consistent with the messages that we have been getting from climate scientists the world over for decades now, and that is in a climate changing scenario, especially in south eastern Australia and south western Australia, two of the most fire-prone places on planet Earth, that we will get more intense fires and more frequency of these intense fires as human induced climate change continues.

So, this is a fire of the future. It broke all the rules, and if we are serious about protecting peoples' lives in the future, which I assume we all are, we really need to throw away the old rule book and look at the absolute evidence, and not the opinions being thrown around, but the evidence of this fire and do not rule anything out. As the Brumby government very sanely mentioned recently, 'we're not ruling anything out'. We really hope that the Royal Commission is not politicised and it does look at empirical evidence.

Because what the science tells us is that the more you mess with your forests, our foresters knew this 150 years ago when they went to protect our water catchments, they absolutely kept fire out of there, they keep prescribed burning out of there, because the more you burn your forests, there's a thing called the pyrogenic shift, the more you actually remove vegetation that is resistant to fire and you replace it with vegetation that actually likes fire.

So, we're asking the Royal Commission to absolutely look at prescribed burning. Have a look at the intensity of fire through areas that were prescribed-burned through areas of young forests that have been logged in the past, comparing those to older, more mature, wetter forests and look at the intensity of those fires. Now that said, again, in the drier forests, and these are forests which have been probably some of the most 'managed' forests as far as logging and fuel-reduction burning goes, have a look at the intensity of those fires. (NB: The younger, drier, 'managed' forests burn more readily than wetter, mature, un-managed forests).

But look, on this day, this fire was going to burn through anything and that's what we need to look at. We need to look at everything, that's why (we need to look at) building materials, dugouts, where people live, planning, all those sorts of things, but one thing we can categorically say is that if there is now a further assault on nature, ie: further massive clearing of forest, this is only going to make things worse for the future.

There's a very direct correlation between having native vegetation on the land and rain. The more we our forests, the more we clear our native vegetation, western Victoria's pretty much been, there's less than half of one percent of its grasslands left, most of its forests and woodlands are gone (and) we don't get rain anymore. This is a global phenomenon. The more we remove the Earth's capacity to make rain, ie: remove its vegetation, the less rain we'll get and the worse these fires are going to become.

Matthew: Now Luke, have you had any preliminary look at what sort of landscapes the fire went through, because I watched this Wandong, what was described as a fireball, but it was a wind-backed fire racing up sort of a hill at a fair pace, but it was on an open paddock so there wasn't even a forest involved, but what sort of landscapes did the fires affect?

Luke: Well, the analysis that we've done which we're going to release to the media very soon, and just to comment on that, the impacts of these fires are absolutely tragic, absolutely horrendous for these local communities. We've lost supporters and members of The Wilderness Society, we've lost conservation colleagues.

Nobody is unaffected by these fires and that one of the reasons why, I mean I was up on Sunday helping a friend protect their house after the fire had turned, but there was still a lot of ashes and a lot of flames in the trees right above their house. So, I came back on that Sunday, and I actually have chosen not to go up there and I think this is in respect to a lot of the people on the ground. We've seen images from the media and that sort of thing; these communities have literally been wiped off the planet.

So, that said, I actually haven't personally gone and had a look at these, but we certainly have done some analysis through all of our GIS systems of land tenure and ecological vegetation classes and the two of the most tragic fires to human life both started on cleared land, burnt through cleared paddocks and then burnt through huge plantation estates and heavily logged forests well before any national parks or protected areas were burned. So, there's already been some calls out there blaming national parks and it's an absurd opinion that's not going to help anyone in the future.

Sixty five percent of the Kinglake fire burnt on mainly cleared, private land. So, where not going to save people by bringing out these opinions that actually blames protected areas. It's just an absurd concept.

And, we need to look at the sources of the fires; both the Churchill fire and the Murrundindi fire, according to the media, were both deliberately lit, both on private lands, and the Kinglake fire was allegedly started by a snapped overhead wire or a sparking transformer box.

We just need to look at all of these things. There's a history of blame. We can look back through the 1851 fires, the 1898 fires, the 1939 Black Friday fires, the 2003 fires, the major fires in history, and immediately there's always a human reaction to blame. And that's just not going to help anybody in the future. So, what we're asking the Royal Commission to do is look at different land tenures, look at different activities that have historically occurred on those lands, and look at the (corresponding) intensity of fire.

We know from the scientists flying over the old growth forest in the O'Shannassy Catchment for instance, if you look at a map the entire northern part of the catchment was burnt but certainly the forest has survived, and these forests were burnt in 1939 as well, the difference is they haven't been actively 'managed' by human beings, they haven't been clearfell logged whereby you replace an older, less-flammable forest with a younger, more-flammable forest.

It's a very complicated thing. It's something that the media has not done justice to, allowing the Royal Commission, to allow the evidence to be analysed and investigated to put in place what management we need across state government, local government, federal government, to look at the reasons why this has happened.

As the representative representing 13,000 fire fighters (the Country Fire Authority) is calling on the federal government to address climate change. He doesn't want his members, the people he represents in his job, to be continually, if the climate scientists are right, to continually have to face more ferocious and more deadly fires.

Matthew: We're speaking to Luke Chamberlain, forest campaigner for the Wilderness Society, just making some interesting points there about the kind of landscapes that were most affected by the fires. In fact, I've been watching this one closely, Luke, and I've felt that perhaps certain interests have sort of used the fires as a an excuse to sort of claim that the antidote to these fires is to run a huge firebreak through East Gippsland where nobody lives, when in fact the communities with their housing sort of are clustered in different areas. Do you feel that opening up land where nobody lives seems to be the agenda of some people?

Luke: It certainly does, and I mean as I mentioned before, choosing where we live, and people should have a right to choose where we live, where it's approved to do so, and what we need to ensure that what does not get mixed up is what kind of management we need around peoples' homes, and what kind of management we need in more remote areas where we are protecting the ecological values that give us storage of carbon, that give us water, that provides us with oxygen, and provides homes for magnificent endangered species.

These are two very different types of, I guess, tenure of land that need two very different types of management. And the Wilderness Society, for instance supports scientifically-based, active forest management around peoples' homes; to protect homes and property is an absolute priority. But that's very different to the management that's needed in remote, forested locations, and we know that if we continue to apply a broad, prescribed burning regime, a single regime, across the entire landscape we're only going to dry out our forest, make it worse, completely and utterly drive our species to extinction, and only make future fires even worse because we're only going to be replacing wet forests with dry forests.

Now, firebreaks, as have been shown, and this will be part of our submission and hopefully, certainly, part of the submissions by scientists as well, firebreaks in these wet forest only make things worse. Firebreaks are applicable in some dry forest, in some certain locations, but putting firebreaks up on ridges in wet forests will:
A./ It will actually cause much greater threat to peoples' lives who are in those firebreaks trying to fight those fires, it will actually dry out the landscape; opening up the forest to firebreaks actually allows the wind to come in so low to the ground the wind can get much closer into the ground with firebreaks, and as we've seen in these fires, with the fires spotting fifteen kilometres ahead of the fires, that these firebreaks are absolutely of no use.

And when we're seeing that the large woodchipping companies are going and being handed the wood for these to send overseas as export woodchips for nothing, and are continuing to advocate for this behaviour; those vested interests are really coming to the fore and it's a completely inappropriate response after fires.

And what where seeing now is the industry calling for 'salvage logging' of these areas. A couple of points on that, firstly that the last salvage logging operation, and their justification for that is that their going to support the local community.

A./ As we've seen from the new building standards we actually don't want to be building these areas out of exposed timber; B./ Most of our housing is not made out of native forest wood, and C./ After the last 'salvage logging' operation, 90% of the 'salvage logged' forest went straight to woodchip mills and export companies to send our forests overseas to Japan to make paper.

Now, this is not a situation we want to get into because forests recover after fire, as you mentioned before Matt, and if we actually care about biodiversity, if we care about actually decreasing the flammability of our forests, by going in and logging them we are absolutely doing everything opposite to that intent.

So, forests need to recover after fire. They do recover after fire. I took a whole bunch of people up after the 2003 fires, about two years after, to show them the area, that was 1.1 million hectares in Victoria, and they could not spot where the fires were when we were standing right in the middle of where the fire went through.

So, again, we are calling for the opinions to be left aside, for vested interests to be left aside, and for the Royal Commission to look at empirical, evidence-based science to actually guide us forward and for the Brumby government, or whoever's in government after the Royal Commission, after the next election, to actually show absolute leadership on this, to enact any kind of management that will prevent this from happening in the future.

Scott: Luke, I just want to say to it's made me think of some of the perverse logging regimes we have in Australia. If you look at those states where it seems to be really perverse, really bad, it seems to be those places where they're doing this woodchipping, in particular export woodchipping, it's because in those states (where woodchipping has ended) they seem to have phased it out and they seem to have better outcomes, don't they, as far as logging their forests?

Luke: Absolutely. I mean, Queensland's ended woodchipping, Western Australia's ended woodchipping, they (still) have problems certainly in their Jarrah forests, and some of the gap logging going on over here, but in New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania about 90% of what comes out of our forests ends up as woodchips to make paper either here in Australia at a couple of mills or the majority is sent overseas. So, it's just a shocking situation.

As the ANU science show, these are some of the most carbon dense forests on Earth. By logging them we are sending huge amounts of emissions into the sky. Our calculations show that just Victoria is about 2.3 million extra cars on the road per year, just in the logging here. And then you go down to Tasmania you double that, and New South Wales the same again.

So, whilst the Australian government and state governments are saying, 'we need to stop deforestation in Indonesia', we are residing over a woodchipping regime that has enormous climate change impacts. We're looking for our government to be taking to the international negotiations in Copenhagen at the end of this year leadership, because the message that I got when I was over at United Nations meetings last year when I was talking to a representative of the Indonesian government, 'Yes, we need to do this, but look at what you guys are doing as well'. And it's fair cop. As I said before, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. We need to clean up our own backyard first. We still have massive problems in Victoria, Tasmania and New South Wales.

Matthew: We seem to be consistent in our inconsistency.

Luke: Well, you're absolutely right.

Scott: And now Luke, we haven't got much time so I want to get some idea of what the Wilderness Society would like to see come out of the Royal Commission.

Luke: Look, as I mentioned before, we're looking for science to be the number one driver of policy out of the Royal Commission. So, obviously the priority is to protect peoples' lives and property. So, the priority is to enact measures that are going to protect peoples' lives and property after this.

What we know is that a broad scale attack on nature is only going to make things worse. As we've seen from the Royal Commission from 1939, I've actually got if I can find it here, I'm just reading from the Royal Commission, a lot of the witnesses basically said, 'the land existed to be exploited, the forest to be cleared or logged, the native animals to be eliminated as pests and vermin'. So, words like this were regularly seen in the post-1939 Royal Commission.

So, what we want to see is science being the driver behind protection of peoples' lives and property because that science is going to say whatever we do, do not have a broad scale attack on nature. We want a very detailed, comprehensive analysis done on the intensity of the fire through different landscapes, and that includes private land and public land and national parks and state forests, and looking at the human activities that have occurred in those forests including prescribed burning, and logging and clearing and firebreaks, etc. to actually come up with the evidence of how the fire behaved in different landscapes, because without understanding that we're just going to stick our heads further into the sand and this will continue to happen in the future.

As we know from the science, the older a forest it is, the less flammable it is. So, the more that you intensively log forest, the more flammable those forests become. So, hopefully that will be part of that evidence-based enquiry as well.

And we're hoping that there's an interim report out of the Royal Commission on this, and we hope that if the federal government's serious about this as well, that they will take whatever comes out of that interim report into consideration for when they take Australia to Copenhagen to what many international commentators are saying is the most important ever gathering of international governments, which is the Copenhagen post-Kyoto climate change agreement at the end of this year.

Scott: And just quickly Luke, before we go, if people listening want to help out are there any actions or anything they can do?

Luke: Absolutely…we have a volunteer action group that meets here every Tuesday night at 6.30, at 288 Brunswick Street in Fitzroy, so people can come to that. Anyone can just walk into our office here and find out all the different activities that we're doing. I can tell you right now our days are pretty packed, so there's no lack of things to be done here. But obviously the Royal Commission is a very, very important activity that people of Victoria, who care about these fires and care about peoples' lives, need to be getting involved in.

Matthew: And the website of course which…

Scott: …is www.wilderness.org.au. Thanks very much for talking to us Luke.

Luke: Thanks Matt, thanks Scott.

Transcript by Beyond Zero Emissions