Deforestation in Australia

The destruction of ancient forests is one of the most polluting, harmful and unnecessary things we do. Ancient forests typically store many times the biodiversity and carbon content of regrowth or plantation forests, as well as generally being more difficult to harvest for timber than plantations. In Australia, with the growth of overseas and local timber plantations, there is an ever decreasing market for the logging of old growth regions.

A national poll commissioned by The Greens and conducted by Galaxy this week discovered that there is strong public support for ending logging in native forests.

• 90% of Australians are in favour of protecting remaining high conservation value forests in Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales in national parks.
• 77% agree that the Rudd Government should stop the logging of native forests, which contain large amounts of carbon that would be stored by ending forest clearance
• 72% are in favour of the Federal Government assisting logging contractors to take redundancies, retrain or move permanently to a plantation based industry.

What do you think: are there any good reasons to continue logging of old growth forests in Australia?
Image by Celia Carroll.