Cooperation takes root in Australian forest

On maps, the low rolling mountains east of Melbourne are titled the Strzeleckis. Locally, they're known as the "Heartbreak Hills." Their steep slopes, fragile soils, and heavy rainfall have conspired to defeat nearly every effort to scratch a living from them.

One industry has survived, however: logging. The mountains are home to towering eucalyptus trees, prized for their hard wood. These trees once soared to heights that would have left California redwoods green with envy.

Now, the Strzeleckis are the target of an ambitious effort to preserve the mountains' patches of old native forest and their unique mix of plants and animals, while still allowing the timber industry to fell trees in a sustainable way.

Last fall, the company that owns the rights to log the range and two environmental groups signed an agreement to work together to manage the land in ways that put biodiversity on a par with its timber resources. Signing a "memorandum of understanding" (MOU) to cooperate, rather than inking a clear long-term conservation plan, may seem almost trivial. But it's a major step for Australia and comes at a time of heightened global concerns over legal and illegal logging to meet skyrocketing demand - especially in Australia's backyard, Asia.

Forests in the region face increasing pressure. For example: While China has made significant strides in protecting some forests and replanting others, its demand for wood is so great that within five years it will be unable to supply even half its industrial demand, says a report released by World Wildlife Fund International earlier this month. Yet China's largest suppliers - Indonesia, Malaysia, and Russia - are countries in which illegal logging in ecologically significant forests is a big problem. The WWF claims much of that illegal wood is finding its way to China.

In Australia, "this is a very important case study," says Kevin Roberts, manager of sustainability and environment for Latrobe, one of several cities in the region interested in the Strzeleckis' economic and ecological future. If replacing confrontation with cooperation on forestry issues works here, he says, "it will be a model for how we move forward elsewhere. We are being watched."

"This is an exciting project," agrees Malcolm Tonkin, environmental services manager for Hancock Victorian Plantations, the timber firm involved in the MOU.

For Australia, Asia is a huge market for forest products. And the island-continent is facing its own internal demand. Some 160,000 homes are rising in the country each year - a small number by United States standards, but large compared with the country's population of 10 million people.

The key questions: Can logging and additional conservation coexist here? And is it possible to design an agreement that will last if Hancock decides to sell its interest in the land? The broad answer the parties seem to have reached is yes. The devil is in the details.

"It's a matter of looking at how boundaries are defined, and how appropriate they are," says Michael Looker, director of Australia's Trust for Nature, which - with advice from the US-based Nature Conservancy - is trying to seal the deal. "We also need to figure out how to go about funding the value Hancock is giving up" for land that any final agreement might take out of production.

The MOU covers a varied landscape. Along the logging roads, tracts of fallen timber are interspersed with stands of replacement trees. Some patches contain pines originally imported from coastal California; others consist of relatively fast growing blue gum, one type of eucalyptus.

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