Day 073 - 13 Jan 95 - Page 17
1 their forests do have problems. Previous to this sort of
2 date they were saying: "Everything was wonderful", and
3 partly because of international pressure and international
4 spotlight falling on them, instead of running away,
5 saying: "Everything is wonderful", they have addressed the
6 situation and at least in their rhetoric they are doing
7 something about it and on the ground they are doing
8 something about it as well.
9
10 MR. JUSTICE BELL: How does that statement tie in with the words
11 which immediately follow it, Mr. Hopkins?
12 A. Right, the words that immediately follow it?
13
14 Q. Just read them out.
15 A. "'At the same time, however, we are firmly convinced
16 that effective and efficient forestry operations can
17 successfully -- can be successfully combined with highly
18 demanding nature conservation goals'." They seem to be in
19 conflict, and I think maybe you need to consider nature
20 conservation as something different than the biological
21 qualities. In a way they seem to want their cake and eat
22 it here.
23
24 I think you have to take the first paragraph as the one
25 which really puts the situation, and what they are saying
26 is: "Yes, we can do something about it". Nature
27 conservation might be something different than preserving
28 biodiversity. Nature conservation tends to be seen more in
29 terms of preserving, you might say, the more charismatic
30 animals, the moose, the deer, the fluffy ones, the pretty
31 birds, and biological conservation; biodiversity is more
32 about the entire range of animal and plant species,
33 including the ugly ones like slugs, fungi, worms, and
34 beetles, the things people do not find very attractive and
35 might often step on it as they were going past them. I
36 think that is often the situation. Nature conservation is
37 about the prettier animals.
38
39 Q. It occurred to me a possible construction is that you have
40 the words which you first quoted about a "cultivated and
41 tended forest cannot contain all the biological", and
42 I stress "all" -- that is my stress -- "the biological
43 qualities and variations that are to be found in the
44 natural forest". But then it is going on to say: "We
45 cannot have perfection unless we abandon forestry
46 altogether, but we can meet the highly demanding nature
47 conservation goals". In other words: "We can meet
48 standards which are high enough for most
49 conservationists".
50
51 The reason I raise that now is that (and I am not going to
52 ask you about it, but Mr. Morris or Ms. Steel may) if one,
53 for instance, looks at the bottom of page 28 of your
54 statement, paragraph 7.4.2, you say, "Paper sourced from
55 the USA" -- I have picked that because the First Plaintiff
56 has incorporated in one of the States of the United States
57 of America -- "is thus damaging to the environment".
58
59 What may help me is whether, even in your own terms, it is
60 damaging to the environment in the sense that a cultivated
