Our Native Forests are worth more standing

For today’s #FloraAndFaunaFriday, the iconic species isn’t a single animal or plant. It's the entire forest. Spotted gums rising like pale columns above an ancient under-storey of burrawangs. Between and among them are hollows, fallen timber, leaf litter, fungi, insects, orchids, birds, bats and marsupials. Beneath them, roots and soil organisms hold water, store carbon and keep the whole living system functioning.

This isn't simply a collection of trees waiting to become timber. It's a community. Many NSW State Forests contain extraordinary remnants of native biodiversity - places that would unquestionably be celebrated and protected if a different government department controlled them.

The State Forests assessed for the Great Koala National Park, for example, contain at least 66 threatened fauna species and 37 threatened plants, as well as old-growth trees, important water catchments and areas that can provide refuge as the climate changes.

I really love greater gliders. Who wouldn’t? They're Australia’s largest gliding marsupial. They sail between trees in State Forests, feeding almost entirely on eucalypt leaves and relying on multiple different hollows. But Greater Gliders are endangered because the large old trees they need are disappearing. Chopped down for toilet paper and woodchips!

I mention the Greater Glider here not because it matters more than everything else, but because its survival tells us whether the forest is still functioning. Protect its home and we also protect powerful owls, glossy black-cockatoos, forest bats, frogs, pollinators, cycads, fungi and countless less celebrated species. We protect the hollow and the tree that carries it, the creek below it and the soil from which the next forest must grow.

An ABC news story on Glenbog State Forest shows how precarious that protection can be. The NSW Forestry Corporation removed 1,000 trees under the excuse of “road maintenance”. Truckloads of timber were taken, including clearing within 50 metres of nine known greater glider dens. The NSW Environment Protection Authority is assessing this incident. And it might seem ostensibly about just one road. But the real issue is a system that values Australia's forests according to what can be removed from them, while treating everything left standing as incidental.

Australia's native forests are worth far more alive than they are dead. They're natural water infrastructure. Their vegetation slows rainfall, protects soils, filters runoff and safeguards the creeks and rivers on which wildlife, farms, towns and estuaries depend. They're climate infrastructure. Mature forests hold vast stores of carbon, continue accumulating it and provide cooler, moister refuges during heatwaves, drought and fire. The Federal Government now even recognises the climate value of allowing forests scheduled for logging to keep growing through its Improved Native Forest Management carbon method.

And these forests are important cultural landscapes on Aboriginal Country. Protecting them creates opportunities for Traditional Owner management, cultural fire, restoration and caring-for-Country employment. And they should be major tourism assets. Walking, cycling, wildlife watching and nature-based tourism can provide enduring regional income, but that potential remains stunted while visitors encounter logging trucks, damaged roads and massive harvesting areas where the forests have been ripped bare.

An analysis of the NSW North Coast found protecting native forests for carbon and tourism could produce a $45 million net benefit, even after the transition costs. Meanwhile, the NSW Forestry Corporation’s Hardwood Forests Division regularly records losses of over $30 million per annum. Taxpayers are thus subsidising destruction of public forests whose water, carbon, biodiversity and tourism values belong to all of us.

A forest that takes centuries to create is surely worth more than toilet paper and woodchips. The barriers to ending this native forest destruction are largely political. The LNP reflexively treats nature as a resoruce for extraction. Labor has shown it can do better - Victoria and Western Australia have ended commercial logging in their state-owned native forests. But NSW remains constrained by its Forestry Corporation, industry contracts and forestry-union politics. For decades, federal governments have also turned away and exempted native forest logging from federal environment law. That's finally due to end in 2027. But the forests need protection now.

Imagine if we treated our public native forests as the living infrastructure they are: protected, restored and jointly managed; supporting wildlife, clean water, climate resilience, culture, employment and joyful human encounters with the natural world.

The greater glider is an icon. So are the spotted gum and the burrawang. But the greater wonder, and the thing we must save, is the whole forest.

Spotted gum and burrawang forest, NSW South Coast. Photo: author.