The role of doctors in campaigns to protect WA’s forests should not be forgotten, argues retired surgeon Bill Castleden.
In September last year, the Premier, the Minister for the Environment and the Minister for Forests issued a joint statement announcing that all logging of native forests in WA would cease in 2024, at the end of the current Forest Management Plan.
This announcement suggests that the nearly 50 years of campaigning to preserve WA’s native forests is nearly at its end.
Although I am sure doctors were involved well before me, what follows are my imperfect memories of the doctors’ contributions to saving the forests from 1998 when I first became fully involved.
At the time, Richard Court’s government was compiling the State’s first Regional Forest Agreement, which was meant to ensure that sustainability and environmental care were enshrined in the forestry operations that had caused so much dissent over the previous
25 years.
Recently retired from surgery and living in the South-West as an avocado grower, I became incensed at the way the debate was being handled by CALM, aided by Bunnings, both of whom profited from logging as much forest as possible. The destruction and waste in the forests was heart-wrenching for those who cared to look.
Encouraged by the Conservation Council, I set up an organisation which became known as Doctors for the Preservation of Old Growth Forests, or DFPOGF.
The initial 28 doctor-members who put their names to and paid for the first full-page advertisement in The West Australian, rapidly swelled to more than 150 doctors whose names appeared in the last of the series of the ads that appeared before the State election at the end of 2000 at which Geoff Gallop was elected.
I found the unwavering support of John Hanrahan, WA’s first president of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons, vital. He garnered support from the profession and spoke at rallies, and we ran the campaign from his West Perth office once the debate hotted up, and I felt I had to be in Perth to run it.
Another doctor who emerged from the first advertisement was Keith Woollard who had been active in medical politics through his presidency of the AMA, which also reinforced the campaign. He became so fed up with the conservative party’s apparent support for the logging industry that he formed a controversial new political party Liberals for Forests.
DFPOGF was but one of a number of new groups and well-known supporters whose voices entered the forest debate as it gathered momentum between 1988 and 2000. All had important parts to play, and perhaps groups of doctors were seen to add independence and credibility to the issue.
Another doctor, Dr Judy Edwards, who was Minister for the Environment, placed the old growth forests into reserves and parks.
From 2001, as a result of my campaigning in WA, I became involved in the formation of the national organisation, Doctors for the Environment, Australia (DEA) which has always had a core group of members with forest preservation as a key focus. I was aware that all was not sweet in the South-West forests of WA.
From time to time, the WA Forest Alliance (WAFA) was having to campaign all over again to try to protect important pieces of unprotected old growth forest from logging operations.
DEA has always asserted that unchecked climate change is the most important threat to good health, so once it became apparent that standing unlogged forest stores more carbon than young regrowing forest after logging, it became a top priority for concerned doctors that all logging in WA’s native forests should cease.
I became reinvigorated and part of Margaret River’s contributions to the recent WAFA forest preservation campaign in which the film Cry of the Forests and the emergence of Nannas for Forests have been important facets. The State branch of DEA, and Dr Ann Ward in particular, has been very active and an important contributor to WAFA’s successful result announced last September.
Doctors, as a group, can feel proud to have been cogs in the wheel of a very long forest campaign in WA. I encourage environmentally and climate-concerned doctors who are unaware of DEA to join up via www.dea.org.au.