Rob de Fégely

AUSTRALIA — The forester who advised successive Australian governments on forest policy for eight years has argued that a country cannot stop making the wood it uses without importing the environmental cost along with the timber. That is according to Rob de Fégely, whose column ran in the Australian Financial Review on Thursday, twelve days before the Senate votes on whether to disallow the Improved Native Forest Management method behind the Great Koala National Park. “Ending native forest harvesting is not environmental leadership,” de Fégely wrote. …“The demand does not disappear,” de Fégely wrote of what follows when a country stops making its own wood, an effect economists call leakage, which moves the harvest rather than ending it. Australia already runs a wood trade deficit, buying $6.9 billion in wood products a year and selling $2.8 billion. …“Harvesting changes forests, but it does not destroy them,” de Fégely wrote.