Lawless loggers
December 8, 2021 5:00 PM   Subscribe

This report from the redoubtable Australian Broadcasting Corporation uses some really nice data visualization to reveal the extent to which the Victorian State Government's own logging company has been illegally logging steep slopes in Melbourne's water catchment.

VicForests is a clear object lesson in the dangers of privatizing public services.
posted by flabdablet (8 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Charging a regulatory agency with regulating a corporation owned by the same government truly is setting the inmates in charge of the asylum.
posted by dg at 5:45 PM on December 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


The truly tragic aspect of this whole fiasco is that VicForests is a profit-making corporation that has never turned a profit. We're paying these clowns to trash our forests.
posted by flabdablet at 5:49 PM on December 8, 2021 [17 favorites]


Oh, that part doesn't surprise me at all. Government-owned corporations, in general, run at a loss. But they also, in general, operate essential functions like power and water supply. In this case, it's a shame nobody thought to ask 'what if we just stopped doing this instead of creating a corporation'? Other than maybe upsetting some 'friend of the government' that's getting cheap timber and re-selling it at a huge profit, just not doing it seems like a win for everyone.
posted by dg at 6:27 PM on December 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


Meanwhile, back in the USA, Tree DNA thwarts black market lumber — How the genetic code of flora helped catch timber thieves., High Country News (Paonia, Colorado), Jessica Kutz, Aug. 4, 2021:
Poachers began to target bigleaf maple trees in the Pacific Northwest in the early 2000s for the beautiful three-dimensional patterns found in some specimens’ grain. In Washington’s Gifford Pinchot National Forest, thieves often felled trees in the middle of the night and covered their stumps with moss to hide the damage (“Busting the Tree Ring,” 3/20/17). Then, in 2012, a U.S Forest Service officer learned about extracting tree DNA in order help track down black market lumber.

In July, for the first time, tree DNA was used in a federal criminal trial as evidence that illegally harvested timber had been sold to local mills, according to The Washington Post [*]. “The DNA analysis was so precise that it found the probability of the match being coincidental was approximately 1 in 1 undecillion” prosecutors told jurors — “undecillion” being a very large number consisting of 1 followed by 36 zeroes. The defendant, Justin Andrew Wilke, was convicted as a result, and could face 10 years in prison.
*More details in this July 12, 2021 WaPo article by Jaclyn Peiser, They stole prized lumber from a national forest. The trees’ DNA proved it, feds say.
posted by cenoxo at 8:08 PM on December 8, 2021 [4 favorites]


Why do these jerks do this?

We've cut down plenty of trees already and turned land that used to be forests into tree farms, more or less. (ask me about my erstwhile career as a treeplanter) There are lots of places to get wood, for lumber or paper or whatever.

Also, as someone who makes furniture, I can't imagine that the profit margins for trees that can make veneer or wide boards are that great. I'm sure there's a luxury market for fancy wood but it's gotta be vanishingly small compared to, like, fucking Ikea or Weyerhaeuser or whatever.

And it's not like we need these big trees for masts so we can efficiently murder and displace brown people*. I mean heck, we have cross-laminated timber/vaccine-withholding/drones.

Snark aside why, for real, would someone do this?

*my bad I misspelled 'explore'
posted by rhooke at 9:00 PM on December 8, 2021 [2 favorites]


Other than maybe upsetting some 'friend of the government' that's getting cheap timber and re-selling it at a huge profit, just not doing it seems like a win for everyone.

It's precisely because not doing it represents a loss of potential profit for that "friend of the government" that it always can, and does happen. That corporation, or mogul, or whatever, has more sway due to their outsized influence, wealth, or whathaveyou that all the rest of "everyone." That sway determines who gets listened to, and "everyone" doesn't have it, and the friends of the government not only have it, but they've mastered the art of convincing the government to keep giving them more of it, and have encouraged passing of laws and gutting of regulations to ensure that they'll always be getting more of it.

If they could find a way to keep the rising tide from raising everyone else's boats, they'd be on the phone suggesting legislation to codify it seconds later.
posted by Ghidorah at 9:16 PM on December 8, 2021 [3 favorites]


Ash is a popular timber for furniture, both in the form of veneers for cheaper furniture and solid timber for more expensive furniture. There's very little structural hardwood used in construction in Australia these days and either treated pine or laminated pine beams are the most common. These can be and are harvested from plantations and pine is common and quickly grown, unlike hardwood. So there's still a market for hardwoods, although dark timbers like merbau are more commonly used here and, allegedly, come from sustainable plantations (I have my doubts on this). Even then, it's rare and incredibly expensive in large sizes and is mostly used as decking over treated pine frames. When you can buy large hardwood sizes, it's almost certainly laminated.

While the actual removal of the trees is a Very Bad Thing, the key issue here and the focus of the story is that those trees are what provide Australia's second-largest city with 60% of its clean water. Every single tree cut down has an impact on that and, at some point, the reservoir that the areas being logged are the catchment for will no longer contain clean water. At best, this will require significant costly and environmentally damaging treatment plants to solve a problem caused by doing something that costs public money and contributes nothing of real import.

The idea of using DNA to prove where trees came from is an interesting one, if a bit 'after the fact' and I wonder if trees close together would be unique enough to identify that logs came from such a specific area (showing my ignorance here). It's not so simple in a situation where it's OK to cut down tree A, but not tree B that may be only a few feet away and is otherwise indistinguishable. Stop cutting the fucking trees down is a much better idea.
posted by dg at 9:20 PM on December 8, 2021 [3 favorites]


Why do these jerks do this?

Follow the money (at one level or another). Per the Wapo "The trees’ DNA proved it" article:
Tree poaching is a growing issue in the Pacific Northwest. Thieves have consistently targeted public lands and national forests in Washington, California and Oregon, High Country News reported in 2017. The thefts cost the U.S. Forest Service about $100 million per year.

With the strict rules in mind, Wilke, 39, and Williams, 49, often scouted for trees at night, according to the indictment. From April to August of 2018, the men ventured into the forest, used an ax to peel back the bark and inspected the patterned wood underneath.

“After identifying maples with figured wood, Wilke and others used a chain saw to fell the targeted maples,” court documents said. “Wilke and others cut the trees into smaller rounds or blocks, which they removed from the national forest.” The group would take the wood to a private property nearby and prepare it for sale to a mill in Tumwater, Wash. They’d then present the business with forged paperwork showing that they harvested the maples from private land.

Wilke made $400 to $7,000 on the sales, court documents showed.
And the prices go up from there. From Plant DNA evidence supports landmark Lacey Act conviction of BigLeaf Maple theft, DoubleHelix News, July 1, 2019:
According to the complaint, one of the four defendants, Harold Clause Kupers, 48, of J&L Tonewoods, helped the other three learn how to identify and harvest figured bigleaf maple, and eventually sold more than $800,000 worth of illegally possessed bigleaf maple wood to guitar companies inside and outside the state.
...
Cases of bigleaf maple theft in the region have also been linked with methamphetamine use, giving illegally procured wood the nickname “meth maple”. Anne Minden, a retired U.S. Forest Service officer with 27 years of experience in forest law enforcement, was brought in as a technical expert for this case. She estimates that at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of US dollars’ worth of bigleaf maple wood is stolen every year from both public and private lands in the State of Washington.
That's enough zeroes tree rings to be concerned about.
posted by cenoxo at 10:37 PM on December 8, 2021


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