Mark and Flannagan should get together over a few beers and sort out a more reasonable position that acknowledges our ongoing need for timber products but includes some kind of logistic and commercial timetable to move to a fully sustainable forestry future. They're both bright men with passion enough to see it through and continuing to lob existential grenades at one another in the media only serves to cement the opposing positions in place and denies kraft : 24 Nov 2008 3:29:42pm The State of the Forests report that is mentioned in this article is published by the Bureau of Rural Science on their web site. It shows that the area of Australia's native forest in formal nature conservation reserves is increasing. In the five years to 2005-06 it grew by about 1.5 million hectares to 23 million hectares, or to 16% of native forests. At the same time, the area of multiple-use public forests, in which wood production is an objective, declined to 9.4 million hectares The report also shows that commercial forests and the products they produce are helping to offset Australia's total yearly greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 10%. The Commonwealth acknowledge that the state governments have formal processes, backed by legislation or codes of forest practice, to calculate sustainable yield for high quality sawlog and veneer production in multiple-use public forests. Yet these facts have not stopped the environmental movement in using a large number of celebrities to promote their cause. Much like we see TV