242

Geographical Research

•

June 2008

•

46(2):237–244

© 2008 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2008 Institute of Australian Geographers

which these issues are dealt with means thatthey come across as throw away lines that borderon being motherhood statements. This analysisneeds to be expanded on and its complexitiesmore thoroughly examined if it is to add to thedebates around sustainable development andcontribute to understanding what a more sustain-able future might look like. The result was thatin places this was more of an introductory textbook than it needed to be.

This short-coming, however, does not solelycome from it just being an introductory textbookbut also results from the fact that the book quiteheavily draws on a first edition that was writtenin a fundamentally different international context.The global setting in which sustainable develop-ment first emerged has changed dramaticallyover the last decade and a half – the substantialexpansion and globalisation of trade, financeand investment have fundamentally changed thecontext in which international sustainable devel-opment debates occur. No longer are states theprimary actors in the development of nations buttrade and foreign direct investment (FDI) nowplay a dramatically increased role. For exampleFDI is estimated to be worth up to $US500billion per year compared with about $US70billion in aid transfers from North to South.

Another key shift between 1993 and thepresent is that in 2008 the debate is now moreabout how the world ought to deal with therecent successes in international developmentwhich have resulted in rapid economic growthin large parts of Asia and unprecedented reduc-tions of poverty. This is in contrast to the early1990s when the failure of development and stag-nating economies was the overarching theme.China and India have taken 300 million and 500million people out of poverty respectively overthe last decade as their economies continue togrow at close to 10% per year. The implicationsof this are profound as these rapidly developingnations demand huge quantities of raw resourcesfrom the rest of the world. For example, theWorldwatch Institute has estimated that five outof every ten tropical hardwood logs shippedfrom the world’s threatened rainforests are head-ing for China. This important development isonly lightly addressed.

Similarly, the book gives only cursory regardto climate change, perhaps again reflecting itsearly 1990s origins. For example, it is critical ofthe Global Environment Facility for giving 24%of its funds to projects focused on climate changeissues arguing that this is not a key environmental

concern of developing countries (p. 105). Sucha view might have been accepted in the mid1990s but is less appropriate in 2007. Theincreased certainty around anthropogenic globalwarming and its likely effects on the world’spoor has finally seen international developmentorganisations acknowledge that global environ-mental issues are intrinsically linked to develop-ment and poverty reduction. Despite the evidencethat tackling climate change needs to be centralto sustainable development strategies this issueis not as well integrated into the book as onemight hope.

Despite these criticisms this remains an excel-lent book. This book is both an excellent startingpoint for students wanting to understand sustain-able development from a global perspective andfor academics wanting a quick refresher on theevolution of the rapidly emerging discipline ofsustainability. It will leave you wanting more asit leaves open what strategies we might use totackle both poverty reduction and environmentalprotection on a global scale. In other words, thereader is left with as many questions as answers.But perhaps that is the right place to start at theend of an introduction to sustainable development.

Brad

Pettitt

Murdoch UniversityAustralia

The Forest Wars

Judith Ajani, Melbourne University Press,Carlton, 2007, 362 pp, ISBN 978 0 52285 4190 (paperback) A$34.95.

This book explores the dynamics of contempo-rary debates over forest futures in Australia. Thecentral question is: ‘Given Australia’s plantationresources, why does the forest conflict persist?’(p. 5). It argues that there is no need for this asplantation resources can meet national timberand paper needs, and supply an export woodchipindustry. A flourishing forest industry can there-fore exist side-by-side with programs to endnative forest logging, as is already the case inQueensland and Western Australia. That this hasnot occurred in the south eastern States seemsextraordinary from a New Zealand perspective,where forest conflicts were largely resolvedthrough the market two decades ago, and those

Reviews

243

© 2008 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2008 Institute of Australian Geographers

remaining, on the West Coast of the SouthIsland, all but eliminated by government actionat the millennium. It is clearly also extraordi-nary to the author, a forest researcher of longstanding, who challenges the governments ofthese States to respond to her argument.

The book’s main value is its exploration ofthe power of vested interests, fear and misunder-standings in explaining why forests continue tobe so political. Although published before the2007 election, it anticipates issues like the TamarValley pulp mill proposal in Tasmania. It beginsa decade earlier with the forestry problems thatbeset the closing period of the Keating govern-ment, exposing Labor’s internal clashes betweenenvironmental and union interests, which culmi-nated in a week-long loggers’ blockade of Par-liament House in 1995. Thereafter it is dividedinto four parts, whose content and logic, likemany of the chapters, is not apparent from theirabbreviated titles.

Part I focuses on the origins of exotic soft-wood plantings which, as in New Zealand, haverelied heavily on the Californian native,

Pinusradiata

. This was first grown with commercialsuccess in South Australia. The politics of theeventual commitment of Federal funding to soft-wood plantation expansion in the States in the1960s is explored in some detail. The argumentwas always that this expansion was for importsubstitution, competition with native foresthardwoods not featuring in the debate. The out-come, explored in two succeeding chapters, wasthat by 2000, Australia had one million hectaresof exotic plantations, yielding the log supplyplanned more than thirty years before. What itdid not have was the projected demand. Due tofalling prices of timber substitutes, and shiftswithin the housing market to, for example,apartment construction, demand has stayed flatsince the 1950s. The consequence, outlined in arevealing graph (p. 63), is that the plantationshave supplanted native forest sawn timber pro-duction, and native forests are now chipped forexport.

The manner in which Japanese paper produc-ers became involved in driving the woodchiptrade from 1970 is one of the themes of the firsttwo chapters of Part II, which focuses on nativeforests. It is argued that these producers havepaid so well, in order to secure long-term sup-plies, and that State stumpage rates have been solow, that the Australian woodchip exporters had‘three decades of extraordinary profits [which]overwhelmed forestry agendas in Australia’

(p. 113). Yet many foresters have seen their roleas one of ‘improving’ ‘depauperate’ native forests(p. 106) ‘by converting them into productivesoftwood tree crops’ (p. 81). Another theme isthe role of the forestry unions working withState governments, and increasingly with com-panies, to maintain ‘a continued, viable nativetimber industry’, which was also the Howardgovernment’s position (p. 150). One of the mostinteresting chapters of the book, conciselyentitled ‘Beattie’s Solution’, shows how a forestrycompromise could still be achieved in one State,Queensland, to deliver an end to native loggingon public land, albeit with a 25 year adjustmentperiod. An important factor however was that itwas free of chip exporters.

A key chapter in Part III covers the highlypolitical regional forest agreements signed since1997. It shows how small increases in nativeforest reserves have been traded off againstfreedom from federal woodchip controls, with aresulting dramatic increase in woodchip exportsfrom Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales.Further analysis of this topic is contained inPart IV. There is also an illuminating chapter,‘Eliminating key information’, detailing theauthor’s role in compiling a national plantationstudy in the mid 1990s, which sought to under-score the argument, central to this book, thatplantation resources were sufficient to provideAustralia’s timber and paper needs. She is criti-cal of two ANU foresters who, commissioned towrite what she describes as a ‘rebuttal’ (p. 213),based it on State forest agency data. But shedoes not ponder the irony that her own reportunderwent ‘peer review’ from ‘visionary man-agers of major plantation-processing businesses’(pp. 205–206).

As is almost inevitable, this book is thereforean agent in the very debate that it seeks to ana-lyse. This does not stop it from making somevery astute observations, although the reader hasto work hard to get them. At one point, Ajaniwrites that ‘For a logical scientifically trainedmind, Australia’s forest industry seems animpenetrable mess’ (p. 141). The danger of herdensely written text is that it will remain so. Sheswings between explaining in great detail thethings that she deems significant – clashes ofpersonalities and policy formation – and a cryp-tic approach to basic descriptions and dynamics.It is necessary to search for simple things likedata on market trends and employment (p. 145criticises an industry set of such statistics butdoes not provide an alternative). There are few

244

Geographical Research

•

June 2008

•

46(2):237–244

© 2008 The AuthorsJournal compilation © 2008 Institute of Australian Geographers

photographs and no maps. One is supposed toknow where places are, and to understand allu-sions, such as what ‘Prime Minister Hawke didfor the Franklin River’ (p. 152), which does nototherwise feature in the text or index. Thisapproach is unfortunate as the multi-layered

contests that Ajani seeks to unravel could be ofabsorbing interest.

Eric

Pawson

University of CanterburyNew Zealand

Blackwell Publishing AsiaMelbourne, AustraliaAGESGeographical Research1745-58631745-5871© 2008 The Author Journal compilation © 2008 Institute of Australian GeographersXXX

Original ActicleCorrigendumGeographical Research • June 2008 • 46(2):xx–xx

Corrigendum

The Journal draws the readers’ attention to a mistake in the following article:

Measham, T.G., Kelly, G.J. and Smith, F.P. Best Management Practice for Complex Problems: a CaseStudy of Defining BMP for Dryland Salinity.

Geographical Research

45, 262–272.

The author affiliations should have read as follows:

THOMAS G. MEASHAM

1

, GAIL J. KELLY

2

and F. PATRICK SMITH

1

1

CSIRO Sustainable Ecosystems, GPO Box 284, ACT 2601, Australia.

2

Bureau of Rural Sciences, GPO Box 858, Canberra, ACT 2601, Australia.

The Journal apologises for any inconvenience caused.