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A forest
saved
Marina Skinner looks at the success of Whirinaki Forest Park a quarter of a century after the chainsaws stopped, and revisits the battle to save it.
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n Whirinaki Forest Park, you’re always looking towards the sky. The treetops are up there somewhere. At Whirinaki are some of New Zealand’s tallest trees – magnificent, mature rimu, totara, matai, miro and kahikatea. They have thrived on the fertile valley floors since the great Taupo eruption almost 2000 years ago. Some of these giants were saplings when the Normans were hatching battle plans on one side of the English Channel. During the 1970s and 1980s Whirinaki became a battleground as conservationists fought to protect New Zealand’s finest remaining giant podocarp forest from Forest Service logging. “Whirinaki is one of the great forests of the world,” wrote John Morton, John Ogden and Tony Hughes in their 1984 book To Save a Forest: Whirinaki. “Whirinaki’s appeal is not only in its antiquity and complexity, but in its virtual uniqueness.” The forests were relatively undisturbed for centuries – until the 1930s when clear felling began. By the 1970s this had been scaled back to “selective” logging. The Forest Service justified this practice by saying it was cutting down just the odd tree without damaging the forest – much like the “surgical mining” that Prime Minster John Key has in mind for our prime conservation land today.
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| Forest & Bird
The loggers – led by local Forest Service staff – tried to make an ecological case for logging, arguing that the podocarp forest was in its death throes. Judicious logging of trees near the end of their natural lives would allow seedlings to be planted in the gaps. The Forest Service tried to reinvent itself as a kindly doctor to native forests, gently euthanising the oldest members and nurturing a new generation. Ecologists pointed out the fallacy of the loggers’ arguments. Forest & Bird advocacy manager Kevin Hackwell – in the late 1970s working for the DSIR’s ecology division – did research that disproved the Forest Service theories. “It was just a convenient excuse for the Forest Service to justify logging,” he says. His work revealed the natural cycle of podocarp forests and how the deepest deposits of volcanic ash supported the most dense stands of forest. Academics, including zoology professor John Morton, botany senior lecturer John Ogden and biology researcher Tony Hughes – all from the University of Auckland – and Auckland Museum Herbarium curator Ewen Cameron spoke up for Whirinaki’s native forest. As conservationists started bringing visitors to see Whirinaki’s wonders and the damage the loggers were