LegCo Ices Forestry Peace/Surrender Deal - Updated

UPDATE:  This is an old article with a now dated title that has been updated.  For the updates scroll to the bottom.

(Admin notes: 1. Thanks to readers who voted in the jump breaks poll; poll has closed and preferences have been distributed!  2.  On or about 1 January 2013 this site will award the inaugural Ehrlich to the maker of the most wrong prediction in or relating to the year 2012 in any field that interests me.  The winner has been decided already, but nominations are welcome!  3. This article concerns (i) my views of the Tasmanian forest "peace deal" (ii) my comments about the voting behaviour that occurred during the LegCo vote on it and the (iii) possible future electoral and reform impacts.  As there are some out there who may not be interested in (i) and only wish to read (ii) and (iii), I advise them to scroll down to the point marked "It is safe to come out now".)

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In the beginning, there was the Acronym, and the Acronym was HCV.

And HCV stood for "High Conservation Value", and was a term employed to imply that certain forests were objectively so important that it would be unconscionable to log them.

In fact, HCV is a term with no objective scientific standing, since there are many different conservation-related properties that different people think are important, and valuation is a subjective process.  One person might think the forests that are most important are those that are the most scenic, another might most prefer those that shelter rare animals, and still another might prefer those that they believe best capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  Any forest might be found very valuable by someone who in some sense cares about "conservation", and of little value by someone else who meets the same description.

The term, however, formally derives from its use by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), an international forest certification agency.  At the time of writing Wikipedia has what appears to be a sound coverage of this term and if you fancy a detailed look at implementation possibilities the High Conservation Value Forest Toolkit is also worth a look.

Negotiations between environmental groups known collectively as the ENGOs (Wilderness Society, the umbrella group Environment Tasmania and the Australian Conservation Foundation) and industry bodies began in 2010, against a backdrop of the desire by the now under-administration Gunns Limited to get out of native forest logging in order to obtain a social licence for its proposed Bell Bay Pulp Mill, one of an endless series of pie in the sky development proposals for the state, most of which never eventuate.