Truly amazing and depressing images. Hard to think what the forestry spin will be when more people see these.

Truly amazing in the sense that they seem to benefit only the pro-Forestry lobby, yet aim to do the opposite.  The original post at Sprol contained pictures towards the end of the post that provided some sort of scale of the area discussed.

This area was probably over 95% dark green, with patches of brown which we take at face value as having been cleared.  Hardly depressing to the balanced mind I would have thought?

I suggest that you download the NASA world-wind program and have a look at what satellites can see in the hills around you.

In Tasmania you can zoom through the hills up the forestry roads into the coupes to look for yourself. Those fully loaded log trucks have to come from somewhere, and in the north of the state it is plainly obvious from the satellite images where they come from, the extensiveness and haste our forests are being woodchipped is as clear as the large areas on the images.

Not much sellective logging going on just a lot of clearfelling.

“95%” typical pro-forestry precision, probably including the roads, National parks in the distance, farms, and SKY!!

Firstly, I’ve seen far denser logging on air photos of parts of the state than this ... and those air photos were taken in around the 1950s! 

Secondly, although the claim is that these images show “clear-cut logging of the oldest growth rainforest in the world.” this is immediately contradicted by “In Tasmania, the largest of the 600 species of Eucalyptus trees found in Australia, and some of the tallest standing hardwood trees in the world, are being felled.” By definition a forest dominated by eucalypts is not a rainforest, so it sounds like while this “god” may be all-seeing, it is also a bigger fibber than the Old Testament variant was when it instructed Abraham that it wished him to slaughter his son. As an aside, the heading “godlike views” is another example of the non-neutral editorial packaging I referred to elsewhere, because what we are really getting is “god’s eye” views with a side serve of unfactual gibberish.

Indeed, by tracing the cluster through the pictures it can be seen that the cluster occurs in a portion of the Picton Valley that is overwhelmingly dominated by Eucalyptus obliqua and E. regnans forests (source: Vegetation of Tasmania 1:500,000 map) without large stands of pure rainforest.  It is true that these eucalypt forests frequently have rainforest understoreys making them ecologically similar to rainforests in some regards, but if such mixed forests are given conservation status on this grounds then the proportion of “rainforest” increases greatly and the conservation arguments for saving very high proportions of it are reduced.  Furthermore, mixed forests are typically younger than old-growth temperate rainforests, which are the next successional stage (barring fire) after the eucalypts keel over, so the claim that this is the “oldest growth rainforest” becomes doubly false.

The misuse of the word “rainforest” is very significant because rainforests, like whales, have a sentimental popularity with the public that makes them a trump card for many.

The claim “So far, over 75% of Tasmanian old-growth forests of these trees have been felled, the majority being made into woodchips for shipment to Asian markets.” is unsourced and seems extremely dubious.  Even if this is the current majority usage (which, in the case of oldgrowth, I greatly doubt) it would be extremely surprising if it accounted for the majority of the historical clearing of oldgrowth of this type.  Also no mention is made of the portion of this oldgrowth regenerated to native forest. 

The comment about the trendline is gibberish - the trendline goes at worst to the limit of what is reserved, barring revocation.  And so on.

They should have just stuck with the pictures - but even then it’s obvious that the images highlight one clump that’s being heavily cleared at the moment and, as Geoff Rollins says, look at other areas under industry management as you zoom out and it could just about be a paid ad for the forest industry.  Jonathan Kilpatrick, if these images really make you depressed, may I seriously suggest professional psychiatric help, ideally from someone who is not a member of Doctors For Forests?