Bulga Forest and Lorne State Forest

Forest action spreads to Lorne Forest

Media Release January 12, 2022

At 5am this morning, access to the logging machines that have been actively munching their way through Lorne State Forest, on the mid north coast, was blocked by a forest protector on a tree platform suspended over the road.

Barry, a Lorne local, doesn’t want to give his surname, but his neighbour, Jane McIntyre, was the spokesperson for the action. She said there was a growing concern among Lorne locals about the destruction happening in the forests, and that she could no longer stand by and see their local forest and water catchment security, heading down the road on trucks.

Jane McIntyre has lived in Lorne for 14 years. She has lived adjacent to state forests since 1980, and has witnessed the escalating industrialisation of the logging industry, and the simultaneous degradation of the forests to young regrowth without habitat trees to support wildlife.

Now retired, Jane has worked as a science educator and community development coordinator. This grandmother of 3 small children fears that they will grow up in a world without healthy forests that shelter wildlife such as quolls, gliders and koalas.

She is determined to do all she can to prevent that. “Yes, of course we need wood “, she says, “but instead of clearfelling our remaining native forests, we should be leaving them alone and growing genuine plantation on marginal farmland. These forests have been hit by unprecedented droughts, fires and floods- and now the survivors are being intensively logged. Trees are the best known way of drawing down carbon in our climate emergency. Even the NSW Government’s own Natural Resources Commission states that native forest logging is uneconomical and unsustainable. It’s time to stop now, before we lose more species.”

“Inspired by the action of the Elands community standing up for the Bulga Forest, we reached out for some assistance to enable us to do the same, and make a public statement that we will no longer stand idly by and watch the daily destruction.

“We know that a majority of people in NSW, think that the ongoing logging of our publicly owned forests is sheer madness. The time is now. It has to stop.