Help Protect Helms Forest

Assuming the respect of social distancing (in the forest!), just bringing to people's attention what is still going on unabated in the forests of the southwest of Western Australia. See here regarding those who are still trying to save what's left of the native forests. And for an 'industry' view look at this incredibly propagandistic piece of pseudo-journalism in a trade publication. I will let readers unravel its contradictions and misleadings: it speaks for itself. I might point to the irony of dieback spread when the 'industry'/government nexus was responsible for a road being put through the forest to a new coupe which would have been horrific in terms of pathogen dispersal, let alone other devastations.

Below is a poem that speaks, I hope, for the forests, the wildlife, their peoples, and those who act as protectors and guardians against this unnecessary destruction of habitat which is not replaceable, for all the claims of 'sustainability'. Species extinctions are accelerated in such 'industry' situations, whether they are regrowth old forests or 'intact' old growth forests. All native forest that remains needs protecting and plantation should be the way, if there is to be a way, and should only be on already cleared land, not on land deliberately cleared for 'timber products'! Jobs? Protection rather than exploitation; planting and genuine renewables rather than devastation. So little of the pre-colonial forest cover remains: this form of forestry is ongoing colonialism through and through. 

Villanelle to Help Protect Helms Forest (near Nannup, Western Australia),

            August 2020: an address from the biotic to the abiotic

 

 Remember that road the industry pushed through a dieback area to open the ‘coupe’

and now have the gall to claim ‘strict hygiene management practices’ and resilience,

as they log the diminishing forest and claim sustainability regen recoup.

 

And the dystopic irony of calling protesters ‘vandals’ in the face of swoops

and lock-ons to stop deletions of tree-stands to arrest the erasure of species —

remember the road the industry pushed through a dieback area to open the ‘coupe’.

 

On land managed by a government acronym and surveyed by officers who stoop

to a worn-out low of ‘conservation’, a ‘family-owned business’ suffers an inconvenience,

lost days as they log the diminishing forest and claim sustainability regen recoup.

 

This entangling of biospheric fate with an industry that predates on biota-scapes

of forests and whose workers could be supported via plantings on damaged places,

remember the road the industry pushed through a dieback area to open the ‘coupe’.

 

Little thought is given to the country-knowing families who lived in or near the loops

of these forests for millennia, beyond ‘products’ — rather ‘family’ is equated with business

as they log the diminishing ‘merchantable’ forest and claim sustainability regen recoup.

 

Not far away the Jamarri Black Cockatoo Rehabilitation Centre near Nannup

is closing down and endangered birds will flock into an agitprop stress of ‘forest industries’,

calling, Remember the road the industry pushed through a dieback area to open a ‘coupe’?

Well, now the industry logs a diminishing forest and claims sustainability regen recoup.

 

 

            John Kinsella