I know what we did that summer Part 2 - Wood making pretty

Every act of colonialism has started with the cutting and shipping of timber. Caribbean mahogany filled the palaces of the Iberian kingdoms, then came British expansion into Central and South America. 

The forests of North America were felled, displacing the First Nations peoples there. And so often by slaves as in the Caribbean. Such a British disease. India, the forests of South East Asia and Africa, the forests reduced to ballast in the hull of ship after ship, transporting the ruined ecologies of the new colonies back to the merchants, the taste makers, the cabinetmakers of Europe.

The forests of Australia and New Zealand were commodified as ruthlessly, in NSW and Tasmania on the literal backs of convict slavery. Cedar was a passable substitute for mahogany, used so profligately in the first decades after 1788, it not only trimmed the homes of the new Austral masters, it paved the streets in the Rocks. Blackwood, huon pine, celery top, myrtle, rosewood, coachwood, hoop pine and sassafras, cut again and again from virgin forests with nary a care for the forest or its future.

Hardwood sleepers would be shipped to Africa for a great British adventure of cross-continental rail building, to Britain itself for the Underground. But so often a nuisance in the scramble to claim land they were ringbarked and left to slowly die and rot. 

A dizzying trade of timber across oceans, between continents. Kauri from New Zealand for the floors of gold rush cities, then oregon from the western Canada and the United States. Boat after boat after boat. Sydney Harbour’s shores were once dotted with timber yards, where slings of the shattered remains of the planet’s largest trees were dropped onto barges and then carted around the city.

If only this was a history lesson. Forestry practices are still based on some Victorian notion of godly abundance, that Nature is still ripe for subjugation and pillage by those willing to work hard doing so. The last stands of Gondwana forests in Western and North Eastern Tasmania are being picked at, coupe by coupe, certified as meeting a forestry practice standard that means nothing scientifically to forests whose cycles measure in millennia. 

The wet sclerophyll forests of the Victorian Central Highlands are illegally logged by the state government’s own authority. The hydrology and climate patterns of southern Victoria are changing in response - more frequent fires, less rain. Less rain filling the catchment for a city of 5 million. 

Post fire logging in South East NSW, pulling out logs which have no value as dressed timber, but are mulched, pulped and shipped to China or Japan to make paper which we then buy back to wipe our pampered arses on. Frankly hemp paper is softer but hey, let’s not quibble about a bit of scratchy cheap toilet paper if it can be used as a polarising rally cry in marginal seats with timber workers. 

We label timber for building and making as sustainably harvested. It isn’t. Almost nothing coming out of tropical, subtropical or temperate primary growth forests could be described as anything other than ecological vandalism. Usually its exploitation fattens the accounts of whichever ruthless junta, elite or corrupt business holds the reins.

One Australian native species operation processing solid timber holds current FSC certification. One. Instead Australian timber industry bodies have come up with mickey mouse versions to greenwash their practices and products. 

Yes, each timber object is a carbon sink, but the living tree as part of a forest was a much more successful ongoing carbon sink as well as anchoring ecosystems, hydrological cycles and biodiversity.

Every maker, whatever our medium, has a responsibility to know the provenance of our materials, its supply chain impacts and what ecological consequences we can avoid or minimise. Our impacts on the environment have been so profound and wide ranging, making things that might be beautiful or astonishingly well crafted no longer absolves us of responsibility.