Te Tairāwhiti petition a call to reason

Richard Rennie Senior reporter

THE devastating flood events of late January in Te Tairāwhiti prompted communities to prepare a petition calling for changes to how forests are harvested and managed. Whanau and community members presented it to their council with heavy hearts and mixed emotions. One petition organiser described her whanau’s connections to forestry as akin to being in an abusive relationship.

Her family, like one in eight households in Te Tairāwhiti, is tied to the industry for income.

Yet many come home from their forest jobs to witness their work laying waste on iwi land, wiping out fences and damaging crops.

Clearly, anger simmers in the coast’s communities. But there is also recognition of the sector’s value, both in keeping food on the table and, when practised correctly, soil on the hills.

With that has come a considered and comprehensive call to address forest waste and harvesting. It is far from the knee-jerk “just stop” response that communities with more choices on land use may have the luxury of.

Rather, the petition is a call for a broadbased examination of the impact of land use practices on the region’s fragile soils and steep slopes, underpinned by an official, independent inquiry.

It is telling that in the event’s aftermath, industry and the forestry minister have shifted their initial opposition to an inquiry to one of support in only a short week.

They misread the depth of feeling these repeated, destructive events have stirred up, and which were only exacerbated by the tragic death of a young boy hit by a floating log on Gisborne’s Waikanae Beach.

The blame has swung firmly to today’s forestry companies.

But they also suffer the challenges of trying to manage legacy forests planted in the wake of Cyclone Bola, done with good intentions to stabilise highly damaged land, but not always in the best manner.

Perhaps the finger could be pointed further back in time, at the wholesale torching of native bush for pasture up until the 1960s, but this is even less helpful.

It is important that any inquiry is seen as truly independent.

Emotions are high and at least communities and the industry agree on the need for some solid, science-based evidence to determine the best practices for existing forest harvest, and future “right tree, right place” planting.

That collaborative view from the get-go is an encouraging place to begin a fulsome, honest review of land use practices, one rarely accomplished anywhere else in recent years.

With that has come a considered and comprehensive call to address forest waste and harvesting. It is far from the knee-jerk “just stop” response that communities with more choices on land use may have the luxury of.

Te Tairāwhiti is New Zealand’s most isolated region, bound by its geology, geography and isolation to forestry and pasture on its hills. The community is a tight, caring one that acknowledges its reliance on trees.

The concern those communities, as forestry employees, have for their land may yet be the strongest voice that compels companies to step up and deliver a more sustainable opportunity for their whanau and region.

Claims far-fetched

Lindsay Brown Outram

I AM getting heartily sick of Mr Luddington’s letters, which are full of unproven assertions and far-fetched simile, “This attitude will sink us” (January 30).

Instead of rubbishing Groundswell, perhaps he might try refuting some of their arguments. Much of the legislation we are facing right now is ill thought out, impractical, unscientific, unfair, and will not achieve the result we all need. I doubt that the British motorcycle industry would have been saved by mindlessly following lot of stupid policy changes such as we are faced with now.

On the subject of consumers demanding more sustainably produced food, in my experience the bulk of us buy the cheapest option to spread our dollars as far as possible and to hell with the planet.

We have exactly the same attitude to driving our cars with the CO2 they emit.

Changing people’s choices is not easy, and less so when food has suddenly become much more expensive. There is already a discernible move to cheaper proteins irrespective of their effect on the planet.

If the survival of our agricultural industries means embracing a bunch of changes designed by bureaucrats to deceive consumers with a load of meaningless greenwashing, then pity help us all.

In my view