‘Loin-cloth' view of forestry

Press, Volume CXV, Issue 33815, 11 April 1975, Page 14

‘Loin-cloth' view of forestry

The Forest Service was this country's “tribe of shifting cultivators” said Air T. M. C. Hay, a former chairman of the Canterbury branch of the Royal Forest and Bird Protection Society last evening.

Mr Hay, a vigorous opponent of proposals to mill West Coast native beech, yvas speaking at a meeting of the society.

The chairman (Cr P. D. Dunbar) told the committee the city solicitor had

He said that when the! Forest Service was estab-p lished about 1922, the Gov-]’ eminent accepted the ideal] that the native bush was too; difficult to perpetuate. The forestry department; “busied itself instead with; pines which could be grown; in neat rows and mashed into; pulp in a few years. This is; known by the rest of the; world’s foresters as Radiatal roulette,” Mr Hay said. Its sobering new contribution to wise bush-husbandry was “skilfully” to cut down and burn the bush, and plant perhaps three crops of pine trees in the ashes if the nutrients held out. , “This is called progress and is done, they say, to keep; the West Coasters employed, the railways running, and to avoid wastel “With the best of machin-l ery, the worst of intentions] and a loin-cloth psychology, this primitive group is pre-' paring the ways and means of erasing the last of our: accessible bush — not to sell; potatoes to the English as; did the old-time Maori, but pine chips and pulp to the; Japanese.’’ From the point of view of; tourism, ('“ugly business, but. it would save the bush”) Mr. Hay said, the native forest was an asset. People visited, a country like New Zealand to see bush and wildnerness,: not pine forests. Seventy per cent of New' Zealand had originally been bush-covered, he said. By' 1825 this had dropped to 30 million acres, and by the time: the Forest Service was established in 1922. another 17 million acres had been destroyed. The figure was still declining. Conservation bodies in New Zealand needed to unite to gain strength; they were too fragmented, he said. The Forest Serivce should be swapped for a forest conservancy, similar to the system in use in Britain, which was answerable only to the | Prime Minister, said Mr Hay.