Forest Chaplain the Rev. Dr Jason John recently attended the Restorative Justice process which forms part of the prosecution of the Forestry Corporation of NSW (FCNSW) for trees illegally destroyed in Wild Cattle Creek State Forest.
Following blunt, powerful and gracious testimony from the three Gumbaynggirr leaders present throughout this process, Rev. Dr John has now written an open letter to Premier Chris Minns, Minister for the Environment Penny Sharpe MLC, and Minister for Agriculture Tara Moriarty MLC, in which he echoed the Custodians’ calls for an immediate halt to logging on Gumbaynggirr Country.
Last week, Rev. Dr John was arrested for joining 40 other protesters at Orara East State Forest, where vital habitat within the Great Koala National Park (GKNP) assessment area is being destroyed by harvesters right now, as is the forest in Wild Cattle Creek.
He stated, “It is imperative that all logging within the GKNP assessment area is halted immediately, along with all logging on Gumbaynggirr Country, so that by the time the GKNP and the Indigenous Protected Area across our Shire are implemented, there is still some healthy forest left to protect!”
Rev. Dr John drew attention to the incompatibility between current timber quotas on the one hand, and First Nations Sovereignty and the ecological health of hardwood forests on the other.
He also pointed out other impacts on the community of the repeated breaching of the rules that govern native forestry operations in NSW, the Coastal Integrated Forestry Operations Approvals (CIFOA). “Because FCNSW and their contractors have repeatedly committed criminal breaches, the public rightly has no confidence in their ability or willingness to comply even with the very weak CIFOA we have,” he wrote.
Rev. Dr John called for the suspension of forest closures after hours and on weekends to allow ecologists and citizen scientists to monitor logging operations and for stronger conditions to be “applied to all native forest logging, until this industrial-scale destruction of our forests comes to a complete halt.”
“Premier and Ministers, now that the Federal election is behind us, the last of your excuses to delay the proclamation of the full GKNP are gone,” he wrote.
The Forest Chaplain role supports people engaged in defending the forests within the GKNP area. It is funded by the Jan de Voogd Peace Fund (a Quaker bequest) and the Uniting Church Synod of NSW and the ACT.
See the open letter to Premier Minns and ministers Sharpe and Moriarty.