Day 073 - 13 Jan 95 - Page 34
1 entitled: "Raiders of the Lost Rotten Snag".
2
3 Q. Which page are we on?
4 A. This is page 11. I will just define the word "snag".
5 It might not be familiar to the court. A "snag" is a
6 standing dead tree, and you will see a photograph
7 opposite. You might not have that one, my Lord.
8
9 MR. JUSTICE BELL: No, it does not appear in my copy but you
10 tell us about that if it is important.
11 A. Yes, it is very important because, first of all, it is
12 written by WWF, Finland, a very respectable body. They did
13 a tour through the country seeing if the forest industry
14 was complying with the guidelines on leaving dead and
15 rotting timber. The methodology is put briefly, that they
16 drove around, every 40 to 50 kilometres they turned off up
17 a logging road and took a note of what they saw and then
18 went on for another 40 or 50 kilometres and took another
19 turn up a logging route and took what they saw. That was
20 their methodology.
21
22 "The findings of our expedition were shocking. Of all 79
23 clear cuts examined (310 hectares) there were 40 in which
24 the scenery resembled the surface of the moon rather than
25 anything else - no single rotting snag had been left after
26 the logging operation". What I want to emphasise here is
27 they should have been left. "According to our data, the
28 size of an average" -----
29
30 Q. It should have been left because of?
31 A. Because of wildlife conservation.
32
33 Q. Are there regulations about that now?
34 A. These were the guidelines. Well, I do not know if
35 there is regulations now, but I will come on to that in a
36 moment, Mr. Morris, if I can. There are guidelines which is
37 different than regulations. "No single rotten snag had
38 been left after the logging operation". I really think
39 that says what I want to say there, but they also say in
40 another paragraph: "There were no clear cuttings in which
41 conservation guidelines were strictly followed".
42
43 Now, I will say I had a communication by electronic mail
44 just before Christmas from a gentleman called Martti
45 Ikkonen of a group called Youth and Nature in Finland. He
46 had been up in Finland in some clear cuts in old growth,
47 legally felled old growth, up in the Kareila region, near
48 the Russian border. He said he was horrified to see that
49 even now in old growth forests (about which there has been
50 a lot of controversy) the timber industry had not left
51 rotten snags as they should have.
52
53 Q. But the study that was done that was quoted before, that
54 was on general plantations, was it?
55 A. No. This is, well, it is in existing forests which
56 would not necessarily at this stage be plantations. They
57 would be sort of natural forests, not virgin forest, but
58 kind of naturally regenerated forests because they would
59 have been cut about. They would have regenerated maybe 100
60 years ago or started regenerating 100 years ago in
