I was also happy to see the use of plantation timbers, "135,000 tonnes of mainly radiata pine annually".

I was not glad to see Ian McArthur, now owner of Farm Forestry Consulting, with what I hope is not just another get-rich-quick scheme by logging native forest and woodland in our region.

Mr McArthur was quoted saying there was "3000 to 4000 ha of private native forest, reaping about one million tonnes, within a 120km radius of Goulburn".

I hope this will only involve plantations rather than the logging of high conservation value forest remnants.

His last attempt in our region involved a plan that would see "1.5 million hectares of native forest on private lands in the Southern Tablelands" and "approximately 350,00 hectares of private native forest in the Upper Lachlan Shire (700,000 tonnes of wood products annually)" used to supply commercial firewood to Sydney, Canberra and South Coast markets: in other words, most of our remaining native bushland.

This unwise plan fell at its first hurdle, when Mount Rae forest was used as Mr McArthur's test case for turning the forests and woodlands of our region into firewood. Mr McArthur saw funding of the Southern Tablelands Farm Forestry Network (STFFN) cease.

It couldn't have helped his cause when it was shown he had supplied both State and Local Governments with incorrect information. He and others from STFFN stated repeatedly (and falsely) that the area was a Western Tablelands Dry Forest and not endangered, claiming this was proven "unequivocally" with "copious science".

It was alleged that threatened species known to exist here were "imaginary". NSW State Government officers, a string of NSW Environment Ministers and Upper Lachlan Shire Council planners didn't bother to check such claims and accepted the false information. It took many years of providing hard scientific evidence before a genuine independent botanical survey was performed. As a result, these and other such claims were exposed as false.

Firewood logging continues in Mount Rae forest and it may be too late for some of the forest's trees and threatened species. I sincerely hope that the return of Mr McArthur's logging schemes will not result again in the targeting of century-old forest of high conservation for a quick buck.

Current legislation is shoddy and allows industrial scale logging under the pretence of thinning with no requirement for on-ground surveys. Notions of selling commercial scale firewood to the cities or logging trees to send to China (the latest alarming idea) betray the far greater value to us all of our existing native forests when left in the ground filtering water and air, maintaining biodiversity, protecting us against erosion and salinity or helping store carbon while providing shade, shelter and a stabilising effect at a time of changing climate.

Mark Selmes, Mount Rae Forest via Taralga.