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

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