Summary

For more than twenty years, Australia's forests have been the subject of angry controversy. Industry groups, timber towns, professional foresters, trade unions, economists, developers and environmentalists have all voiced different proposals, based on mutually exclusive values.The major forest contests-the Gordon and the Daintree, wilderness and World Heritage, rainforests and woodchipping, pulp mills and pine plantations-have aroused intense passions and influenced elections. But this book is more than a survey of recent events. It reviews forest management from Aboriginal times, demonstrating that both the forests themselves, and our conceptions of them, are socially constructed.Dr Dargavel weaves together the story of industrial development and forest use with the slow acceptance of the case for forest conservancy. He shows how various 'resource regimes' evolved, and how they fashioned the forests in different ways-ecologically, spatially and socially. He then describes the challenges to these established patterns since the 1970s-industrial restructuring, woodchip exports, unsustainable harvesting, and the rise of the environmental movement.Fashioning Australia's Forests concludes with a chapter on the prospects for the forests, their industries and workers, in a highly uncertain future. Australians have to choose: to be pushed along a 'low road' of apathetic submission to market forces, ignorance, and continuing acrimony between environmentalists and developers; or to take a long, hard 'high road' towards sustainable development in which both social and environmental needs are taken seriously.