A drive around Tasmania is breathtaking. And heartbreaking. Surrounded by cathedral-like forests, the visitor feels inspired and humbled. Then suddenly the sight sharpens. 'Managed by Forestry Tasmania'. It’s easy to miss those signs. Managed. A tricky word. Particularly in Tasmania, where the stunning trees that peer down on the visitor are often just a façade, forestry rarely means looking after forests. The façade cheers and appeases the tourist. But behind lies a battlefield.
'Look carefully behind the tree line', the bus driver advised me. A field of ruins just a few metres from the glorious canopy on the side of the road. Logging roads pierced the forest, and it was then that I also noticed the logging trucks. One, two, three of them. 'Sixty, seventy of them, every day!', the driver was outraged. Yes, they were taking the forest away.
'They normally don’t touch the trees close to the highways', an officer explained at a visitors’ centre, with a smile that was half embarrassment and half revelation. 'Yes', confirmed a parks officer, 'In the Styx Valley you see 400 year-old trees, up to 80 metres high, being felled. It’s heartbreaking'.
'And what about the Northern forests, those that are threatened by the pulp mill in the Tamar Valley?' I ask him. 'The Northern forests are stunning … so much beauty,' he sighed. Tasmania’s forests are being eaten away.
A thought started to haunt me. Tasmania is like Soviet Siberia. The comparison might prompt a smile. And yet there is a deep and utterly disturbing truth about it. For Tasmania today is a land without politics. No real left or right, no Liberal or Labor parties. What one finds in Tasmania is a powerful economic bureaucracy that lives off the destruction of unique and priceless natural treasures. Apparatchiks are called politicians. A careless administration with no vision and no mission is engaged in politics. Short-sighted greed can be called public interest.
And so we are told Tasmania needs a huge pulp mill. A timber giant has been pushing for it. The Government has hastily approved it. The apparatchiks know best. And those who disagree are enemies of the people. 'A bunch of millionaires' — that’s how the Premier of Tasmania dismissed the organisers of a campaign in Sydney to pressure the Federal Minister for the Environment, Malcolm Turnbull, to seriously assess the pulp mill, before bowing to economic pressures. How disgraceful to speak the language of Stalinism, in 2007, in Australia. Welcome to the past.
Tasmania is like Siberia. The latter was an ancient land too, where the wilderness ruled. It had a natural wealth so humbling it seemed sacred. But the sacred was erased from the land of the Soviets, and was replaced by Stalinism, and the battle to subjugate nature. Siberia quickly became a target. Its forests were plundered, its natural resources given away in the name of "development". Siberia was the remote province of a rapacious empire. Sustainability was not in the vocabulary back then.
The land was “managed” by two all-powerful Leviathans — Minvodkhoz and Lespromkhoz. For these, read Hydro and Forestry. The same disregard for beauty pertains. The same lack of a strategic vision.
Siberia is vast, and Tasmania is tiny. Russia’s old growth forests, the largest portion of which is to be found in Siberia, comprise 289 million hectares — and this is still just 25 per cent of the country’s forested area. Tasmania’s native forests stretch for approximately 3.3 million hectares. The whole of Tasmania is but an invisible dot on the map of Siberia. And yet, Tasmania is called to produce more pulp than Siberia.
Siberia awoke and rebelled. It dared to do so while in the grip of a totalitarian regime, in which people had no power, no vote, no voice. Siberians spoke out. Against the plight of their land. Against the theft of their future. They managed to save Lake Bajkal, the jewel of Siberia. The threat was, interestingly enough, a pulp mill on the shores of the lake.
The people of Siberia mobilized. They did what they could do — wrote letters and protested. After saving Lake Bajkal they saved their rivers. The Soviet Hydro wanted to reverse their flow. It proudly called its scheme 'the Project of the Century'. But the people, again, said no. Lake Bajkal today is a World Heritage site. Like much of Tasmania. Siberia has been scarred, but it is alive because people saved it. This makes the fate of Tasmania even more shameful.
So is Tasmania worse than Siberia? I hope not. There is no excuse for pillaging Tasmania. One can only hope that Tasmanians too will awaken and reject the pulp mill. But time is running out. They might well awaken one day, only to discover that someone robbed Tasmania of its future.