Two excellent resources for visitors to (and residents in) Murrindindi in the Winter Guide for 2017:
Post and tweet to encourage visitors!
VicForests' analysis of 'available' ash by decade of origin (here) shows:
Matt Ruchel, member of the Forest Industry Task Force and executive director of the Victorian National Parks Association, explains why sawmills and the pulp and paper industry don’t understand how forests work.
Forests are living ecosystems, not magic puddings, and cannot supply something that doesn’t exist.
The recent declaration by VicForests, the state government’s logging agency, that there is insufficient wood to supply Gippsland sawmills, is hardly surprising – the writing has been on the wall for decades, made worse by the Black Saturday fires.
THE people of the Latrobe Valley are right to be dismayed by the looming fate of the Australian Sustainable Hardwoods mill at Heyfield.
Gippsland has long been the centre of the hardwood timber industry in Victoria, and the hardwood timber industry has long played a major part in Gippsland’s development and in its prosperity.
The jobs that the ASH mill and the value-added downstream industries provide are a huge asset in farming communities subject to the vagaries of world markets and of the weather.
The closure of Hazelwood makes such jobs even more valuable.
Another log on the ire won’t help
NICK LEGGE, The Age, 30 March 2017
Panicking over job losses in the timber industry is not a sustainable strategy.
ABC News (2 Mar 2017) by Stephanie Anderson
Media Release by Ken Deacon, Convenor of Rubicon Forest Protection Group - 16 March 2017
Jill Sanguinetti remembers Black Saturday (The Age, Jan 13, 2017):
"We did not know it was coming until a spot fire blazed red a hundred metres away. Flames crackled through wattle and blackberry thickets; gum trees exploded with a woomph; and a dog and a black mountain possum dashed towards us in terror."
Full piece here
In a new hard hitting research report the RFPG has outlined the key threats facing the ash forests of the Central Highlands: overcutting, code breaches, fire risk, water yield, and destruction of tourism assets.
Read full report (10 March 2017) here.
While millions of dollars are handed out in grants to a dying timber industry, our forests are dying with them. This video footage was taken by WOTCH over Melbourne's local forests and speaks for itself. Over the ridges or hidden behind small buffers it's happening on a large scale. It's not Indonesia, it's Victoria in 2017!
