Forest campaigners have accused the federal government of hypocrisy for hosting a global nature-positive summit in Sydney while logging resumed in public forest 400km away in mid-north New South Wales.
The NSW Forestry Corporation has started its harvesting operations in Bulga state forest, inland from Port Macquarie. The area is a stronghold for threatened species including endangered koalas and the endangered greater glider – Australia’s largest gliding possum.
Campaigners said logging had begun in an area of the forest about 200m from a site where Guardian Australia photographed a greater glider emerging from its den in July.
Susie Russell, vice-president of the North East Forest Alliance and a resident who has spent decades advocating for the protection of the Bulga region’s forests, said 11 campaigners had been arrested so far.
She said it included two people on Tuesday – one who locked on to logging machinery and another on to a structure that had been erected on a locked gate – as the nature-positive summit got under way at the International Convention Centre in Sydney.
The summit has brought together about 1,000 delegates to talk about nature protection and ways to drive private investment in conservation.
“I feel sick,” Russell said. “The hypocrisy and the greenwashing is just beyond belief. That they [the government] could stand on the global stage and proclaim themselves environmental protectors and as playing some kind of leadership role – it’s just bullshit.”
Russell said even if exclusion zones were retained around greater glider den trees, harvesting would still occur within the gliders’ home range and within the habitat of numerous other endangered species.
The NSW Greens environment spokesperson, Sue Higginson, told the protest that campaigners at Bulga were “literally on their knees begging for their government to hear them and to really understand what the people who know what nature-positive looks like are doing today”.
“We know the environment minister [Tanya Plibersek]thinks nature-positive is heading to Taronga Zoo, holding animals in cages and telling the world we’ve got it sorted. Well, she’s wrong, and it’s time for the truth, for all of us to stand up in the face of this madness,” she said.
The logging operations at Bulga state forest are expected to continue for several weeks.