¹ JANIS - Joint ANZECC/MCFFA National Forest Policy Statement Implementation Sub-committee. Published in 1997 as the Nationally Agreed Criteria for the Establishment of a Comprehensive, Adequate and Representative Reserve System for Forests in Australia (the JANIS criteria).
² Government of Western Australia
Forest Industry Statement
January 2004
³ Agroforestry is an integrated approach of using the interactive benefits from combining trees and shrubs with crops and/or livestock. It combines agricultural and forestry technologies to create more diverse, productive, profitable, healthy and sustainable land-use systems. (Wikipedia)
Regrettably, there are a few members of the forest conservation movement in Western Australia who still naively boast that all Old Growth Forest (OGF) in WA was saved back in 2001.
During that period there was no clear mapping of exactly where this OGF was located, and the environment movement itself had no idea of the exact definition of OGF.
Back then conservationists relied on a handful of people in Perth to provide the best information and set the guidelines for the campaign to save the forest. Unfortunately, these people decided that the best approach was to run with a campaign of “Save Our Old Growth Forest” and convincingly persuaded most forest campaigners to adopt this concept.
Their Save Our Old Growth Forest campaign strategy stated that only 10% of the native forest in Western Australia was Old Growth and that only half of that was in conservation reserves. However, there were various grassroots campaigners who were convinced that a campaign that only sought the protection of a further 5% of the forest was totally inadequate. Unfortunately the Save Our Old Growth Forest message monopolised media coverage and public sentiment.
Labor under Geoff Gallop agreed that; should they win the State election (14 February 2001), they would place all OGF into conservation reserves. And in return for this policy promise, they achieved considerable backing from the forest conservation movement, which helped them achieve power.
However, after Gallop’s victory conservationists were horrified to find that vast areas of what they considered to be OGF were still being logged and even clearfelled. When they checked with the then Government Department in charge of logging (CALM), they learnt that these areas did not qualify as OGF under the Commonwealth definition known as the ‘JANIS Criteria’.¹
As it turns out, the JANIS Criteria is somewhat complicated, but in essence it means that OGF is regarded officially as areas within the native forest estate that have virtually never been exploited post European settlement. Considering that WA’s forest has been intensively logged for over 150 years, this means only areas that have been of little or no interest to the logging industry can be considered as OGF.
And while around half of WA’s forest estate is in some form of conservation reserve, most of the tall hardwood forest is still available for logging and clearfelling.
Despite the State Government’s $164 million grant² to the logging industry to help them restructure after the protection of this tiny area of native forest, little has changed in the logging industry with business as usual in the forest.
To add insult to injury, the Labor Government boasted of other areas of forest that had been added to the conservation estate since they had been elected. In reality most of these areas had been nominated for protection under the (National) Regional Forest Agreement before Labor was even elected (as far back as 1987) and therefore, would have been reserved regardless of which political party was in power.
It took nearly a decade after Labor supposedly saved the OGF, for the original supporters of the OGF campaign to realise the outcome of their disastrous decision and for them to now join those pushing for the protection of all native forest.
However, there are still some within the WA forest conservation movement who insist that the OGF campaign was a great success. Unfortunately, this is also the impression that most Australians have been led to believe. Not only has this resulted in a huge loss of support for the further protection of WA’s native forest (which is still being intensively logged and clearfelled on a large scale), but has many forest activists around Australia promoting WA style OGF campaigns.
The Global Warming Forest Group is urging all forest activists around Australia to drop the deceptive ‘Old Growth Forest’ terminology once and for all, and to unite in a National campaign to protect all our remaining native forest and source our timber needs from responsibly managed tree farms and in particular agroforestry³.
