Forestry Slash.
A scar on Aotearoa.
Forestry is a big part of provincial New Zealand. When I was a kid growing up in Rotorua we lived in an old wooden house. It was set well back from the road, but in the early morning when the logging trucks went by you could feel the whole place shake, as if it were an earthquake.
Hiking on school camps you would inevitably pass through logging areas, I can still vividly recall the smell of those freshly cut wet (it was always wet) logs. The men on the chainsaws in their swandris, their enormous boots, a rollie on the lips – the sound of those chainsaws, the powerful machine that dragged the logs onto the trucks. The men would look a bit bemused at our party of kids in bright yellow skellerup raincoats, our non grip gumboots, as we struggled to climb through the mud.
There were field trips to sawmills or the Forestry Research Institute. Football fundraising would involve driving out to the forest and filling sacks with pine cones to sell. When I was a little older my mates and I would jump in a car with an axe at Christmas time and liberate one of the surplus trees to stick in the lounge.
A few years later my first wife and I bought a house in Mamaku, a logging settlement 15 minutes out of Rotorua. One shop, a cossie club, a takeaway caravan two nights a week, and a stonking great sawmill where many of the locals worked. Some years earlier that little town had had seven sawmills! That last mill closed in 2015.
There have always been a large number of workplace deaths in forestry. Far too many people have not returned to their families after a day of work. But something new has been becoming more and more of a problem in recent decades, something that affects many, regardless of whether they’re involved in forestry. We call it slash.
Back at the start of this year, on the evening of January the 25th, a 12 year old child died playing on Waikanae beach, which was covered in slash. The dangerous waste caused by our forestry industry.
“Witnesses told local media the child had fallen off a floating log and was then hit by it while standing in the shallows.”
Can you imagine losing a child, who was just playing at the beach, being a kid? No family should have to go through that pain and loss.
A petition demanded an inquiry into the rules on land use in Tairāwhiti “with a focus on activities (and lack of activity) contributing to erosion, sedimentation and woody debris deposits in waterways and the marine coastal environment.”
One of the organisers, Manu Caddie, said “the rules needed to be tightened urgently to keep forestry and farming from creating ecological damage and dangers that affect the community, and that would take action on several levels.”
To give you some context on the Friday of that week a major storm hit the North Island which killed four people and caused the mayor of our largest city to miss a tennis game. A week after that Cyclone Gabrielle would cause large scale devastation to the East Coast, and the deaths of a further eleven people.
As I understand it much of the problem results from land that was previously used for agriculture having been planted in timber back in the 1980s. Land that wasn’t necessarily very well suited for such a purpose. There have been calls for years to do something about it, and these have grown louder of course in the wake of the damage caused by Cyclone Gabrielle.
You might remember that during the recent Newshub leaders debate, hosted by Paddy Gower, there was a couple in the audience from the East Coast, Mike and Bridget Parker from Tolaga Bay.
