Stuff: Forestry slash a perfect emblem of modern capitalism’s failings
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Logs everywhere. Logs up the river, where they converge against a bridge and sweep away its foundations; logs down the river, where they roll onto a beach and kill a child paddling in the shallows. Logs in the estuaries, logs on the roads. Logs covering fields in a prickly blanket of branches; logs breaking every fence on the farm; logs as far as the eye can see.*
Such have been the scenes on the East Coast after Cyclone Gabrielle – and after Cyclone Hale, and after the 2018 floods, and after countless such events. Each time, piles of forestry slash – the industry’s discarded logs, branches and offcuts – have been swept off plantations and into other people’s lives, with devastating consequences. And if it isn’t logs, it’s house-high piles of silt washing off the plantations where, once the pines are felled, the bare soil just sits, waiting to be driven into town.
It is, as Tolaga Bay farmer Bridget Parker put it, “total f......g carnage”. She told RNZ slash had destroyed her farm multiple times. “We don't farm logs. Their [forestry companies’] logs and their friggin' silt needs to stay inside their friggin' estate gates."
Even National Party leader Christopher Luxon has lashed the industry, calling it “the only sector I know that gets to internalise the benefit and to socialise the cost”. He’s wrong, of course: farmers have done it for decades. But the latter have at least begun cleaning up their act, and may eventually pay for their carbon pollution. What about forestry’s waterborne pollution, though: how has it so long escaped serious sanction?
Slash, it turns out, is a perfect emblem of modern capitalism’s failings. Many forestry owners are massive overseas conglomerates, insulated from local public pressure. The regulations governing their activities, and the penalties for their misbehaviour, have both been weak.
Meanwhile, their outsourcing of operations to a fragmented mess of non-unionised sub-contractors drives a race to the bottom for wages and working conditions. Forestry is a lucrative industry, having recorded $15bn in underlying profit since 2013, but it shares little of that lucre with its workers, some of whom have earned barely above minimum wage despite decades spent among the pines.
The industry has also had an appalling death rate. It took the late Helen Kelly, as CTU president, to raise the alarm about the fatigued men dying on dark and slippery hillsides, killed ostensibly by falling logs but, more fundamentally, by their employers’ unsafe practices.
All this, though, was out of sight, out of mind for millions of metropolitan New Zealanders. After slash destroyed houses and roads in the 2018 East Coast floods, forestry firms were fined $1.2m, but even that didn’t greatly raise their profile.
Now climate change has swept away their relative anonymity, and with it the social licence to let their offcuts and their silt keep wreaking havoc. They have a problem of sediment, but also sentiment.
An official inquiry, launched this week, may ultimately require firms to strengthen riparian planting or dispose of slash safely. They may also be forced to bear the costs of slash damage, through far higher penalties, good behaviour bonds, or some other mechanism.
Deeper reform may be needed, though. The unpleasant irony is that many pine forests were planted after 1988’s Cyclone Bola to stabilise steep land inappropriate for farming. But clear-felling destroys that stability. Our forestry firms may have to copy their European counterparts, and fell smaller blocks at a time.
Ultimately, some land may not even be suitable for commercial pine, given the inevitable erosion risk between harvest and re-growth, and may be better replanted as permanent native forest. As AUT’s David Hall argues, forestry’s private assets could serve as public infrastructure, delivering climate, anti-flooding and erosion-prevention benefits.
Where pine plantations remain, their slash could – according to last year’s forestry industry transformation plan – be converted into something useful, be it biofuels, bioplastics, or weed-suppressant mats for vineyards. A large bio-refinery, or mobile onsite ‘mini-factories’, could perform the alchemy.
Even if such re-use isn’t yet commercially viable, it might become so, especially with a public subsidy that recognised the collective benefit in reducing pollution and shifting to a circular economy. Meanwhile, a Fair Pay Agreement for forestry would help stop the race to the bottom on wages. A path opens up, away from an extractive industry and towards an inclusive one.
Forestry firms, after all, can change. Following Helen Kelly’s campaigning, deaths have fallen from 10 a year to around three: still too high, but sharply reduced. We now need similar – indeed better – progress on pollution.
As climate change wreaks ever-greater havoc, we’ll have to invest more in our public assets. That means building, or strengthening, the good things, like community centres and telecommunication towers. But it also means protecting the public realm from bad actors.