Editorial: Beehive took far too long to tackle East Coast forestry waste trauma

Forestry Minister Stuart Nash. Photo / NZME

EDITORIAL:

If Stuart Nash is feeling under pressure over the forestry debris scandal on the East Coast then it’s about time.

The Minister of Forestry oversees a $6 billion industry that many storm-battered and exhausted people in the Tairawhiti-Gisborne region would say lost its social licence to operate there some years ago.

It has possibly also lost its economic licence, says Professor Dame Anne Salmond, a prominent environmentalist who today in the Herald raises further questions about the industry’s practices in a region that has some of the world’s most fragile, erodible soils.

More particularly, its pine plantation forestry waste handling practices. They were laid bare once again by Cyclone Gabrielle.

Images of the destruction in the Hawke’s Bay and Tairāwhiti indicate that “slash”, the industry’s word for forest trimmings and waste wood, is too gentle for the power and heft of avalanches of logs and branches that have again hurtled down hillsides on flood water, scouring out land and riverbeds, smashing bridges, roads and private property, endangering lives, cutting off communities and wrecking infrastructure.

The damage is horrendous and most of the repair bills will have to be picked up by property owners, ratepayers and taxpayers.

Dame Anne has pointed out to New Zealand what long-suffering East Coast residents have long known: that “slash” contains an alarming volume of whole logs, which act as battering rams when they hit a bridge or building. Environmental Defence Society chief executive Gary Taylor has also been educational, claiming the reason for the devastation isn’t just flooding, it’s the industry’s harvesting method of clear felling - cutting to ground zero huge swathes of forest all at once.

Dame Anne contends clear felling is illegal in Europe which has extensive forestry. New Zealand’s harvesting practices, while perfectly legal under New Zealand (some critics would say Jurassic-era) law, are “third world”, she says.

Today, up and down the country, communities, landscapes and marine life near extensive plantation forestry appear to be paying the price of last century’s forestry thinking. Those baying for law change say foresters are clinging stubbornly to doing things much as they always have because, a) they legally can, and b) reforming to new ways would hit their pockets.

Critics suggest the sector, much of it foreign-owned, has got away with it for so long because it works “out of sight, out of mind” and because it has deep pockets to lobby the Beehive and local authority politicians.

That it’s taken a post-cyclone community revolt in Tairawhiti in January and then Cyclone Gabrielle to get Government action, suggests maybe they’re not wrong. (In the aftermath of Cyclone Hale on January 16, Nash told RNZ there was no need for an inquiry into forestry practices.) Yesterday Prime Minister Chris Hipkins announced a ministerial inquiry into forestry slash.

As Dame Anne tells the Herald’s Andrea Fox (see A24) the question is no longer whether forestry in the region has lost its social licence, but has it also forfeited its economic licence?