Gum: The Story of Eucalypts and Their Champions by Ashley Hay

Author:Ashley Hay [Hay, Ashley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742237534
Google: Oo2OzgEACAAJ
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2021-11-15T23:33:04.500969+00:00

As the profession of forestry split between social foresters and industrial or commercial foresters, the division was even wider between foresters in general and conservationists, who decried the wholesale removal of gums in Australia, and their wholesale introduction everywhere else. While Bob Hawke won a federal victory for Labor in 1983 with the help of promises to save the forests along Tasmania’s Franklin River and not build a very large dam, farmers overseas were increasingly looking for leaders who would get rid of as many eucalypts as possible as quickly as possible. In India, a book on its ‘eucalyptus craze’ was called, tellingly, The God That Failed. In Spain and Portugal, where huge terraces had been bulldozed out of native forests for the gums, farmers led protests against the symmetrical grids of seedlings, equating them with the rightwing politics of Franco’s era.

Grow this crop, country after country had been told, and make fast money from it – and the social costs of introducing rows and rows of eucalypts had disappeared under the hunger for everything the ‘miracle trees’ would deliver. By the mid-1980s, a review of the ecological effects of planting gums was saying diplomatically that there could be ‘no universal answer, either favourable or unfavourable, to the planting of eucalypts. Nor should there be any universal answer: each case should be examined on its own merits’.

Nine years after Jacobs finished his revision of Eucalypts for Planting, the FAO released another publication exploring its championed trees: The Eucalypt Dilemma. With large type and big pictures, the pros and cons of the gums were reduced to point form in 26 pages. True, it said, no other tree had been so widely propagated. And true, eucalypts could provide quick benefits. But they might affect the soil. And the water supply. And wildlife. And they might ‘upset local values or traditions’. In the end, if you lived somewhere that wasn’t Australia, and you were thinking of putting in a stand of gums, the new FAO advice was this: ‘each judgment will be specific. In some areas eucalypts will not be appropriate; in some areas eucalypts will be very useful. Such decisions are complex, and no one knows all the right answers …’

The era of the unquestioned promotion of these trees was at an end.

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