Found only in Australia, the Greater Gliders reside in old-growth forest habitats in southern Queensland, eastern Australia, southeastern New South Wales, and the forests of the Victorian central highlands. The flying possum is nocturnal and quiet, and that out-of-sight, out-of-mind human mindset is driving many Australian marsupials to the edge of extinction.
There are always heroes that fight governments and corporations for the earth's biosphere and all her species' right to life. And Australians are no exception to the rule. The powers that be are not easily defeated, and the lies they tell would put the Great Lie to shame in Victoria, where state elections are underway.
Victorian Premier Andrew’s government declared in October the creation of “special protection zones” in the critical forests across Gippsland and the Central Highlands. A total of about 61,776 acres were to be preserved for the survival of the greater glider and other endangered species. Hell, I would vote for that. Who wouldn’t?
But the management of these forests is the responsibility of VicForest, a Victoria state-owned entity that favors deforestation over the preservation of the forests. Vic Forests is required to regenerate deforested lands and return them to the Australian people. Instead, the lands are just weed-filled lots.
Sections of logged state forests have been classified as ‘regenerated’ despite not being so — and have been handed back to the public as little more than weed-infested fields.
Others, once majestic and carbon-dense mountain ash forests, are now thickets of wattle with hardly a eucalypt in sight.
Sarah Bekessy, a professor of sustainability at RMIT University says without growing back the eucalypts that were once there, the endangered animals that depend on them will suffer.
“Failing to regrow the forests and deliver those characteristics to species that depend on them will mean they’ll continue to decline,” she says.
The ABC can also reveal an official government investigation concluded that forests had not been regrown as required by the law — but decided it couldn’t take any action.
Who could have predicted this, though:
But community environment groups say they were shocked to discover a number of forest sites within the new protected zones had been logged within the past 24 months. According to the Victorian Forest Alliance, around 17 areas were logged.
The alliance’s spokesperson, Chris Schuringa, said that when she met with staff from the Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning’s biodiversity team to ask why the department had protected recently harvested areas, they were unaware it had been logged.
The department’s staff told Schuringa they used “the best available science” to protect high-quality glider habitat, she said.
The Mirage expands on the story.
Some areas protected do contain quality greater glider habitat, particularly in the Bendoc forest area, but others include recently clear-felled forests, many with a number of greater glider detections found. It’s very likely these animals will have perished from the direct impacts of logging operations, or following logging from lack of suitable habitat and food sources. The Department claims to have used ‘the best available science’ to protect high-quality glider habitat.
Photographs and footage gathered on the ground, plus recent satellite imagery indicates that protection areas in Swifts Creek, Nunniong and the Colquhoun in East Gippsland, plus areas in Mansfield and Baw Baw in the Central Highlands were logged – some as recently as six months ago.
Chris Schuringa states, “Why is the government protecting recently logged areas, and still destroying prime greater glider habitat? It’s no wonder the species has gone from common to endangered in the last six years under this government.”
Just a few weeks ago the Supreme Court ruled that the state-owned logging company VicForests has been illegally logging in forests containing greater gliders and yellow-bellied gliders. The judge said VicForests had failed to survey for, find, and adequately protect the species in the Central Highlands and East Gippsland areas.
The whistle was blown on the Australian government by Darcy Watchorn, Ph.D. candidate, Deakin University, and Luke Emerson, Ph.D. candidate, Deakin university, who wrote in The Conversation:
In 2016, before we knew three species existed, the greater glider was listed as “vulnerable” under Australia’s key environment law: the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act.
The conservation advice back then stated that stopping their decline required a recovery plan, and “existing mechanisms are not adequate to address these needs”. However, no such plan has ever been developed and implemented.
Logging and land clearing continued unabated. In fact, our recent study found that after this listing, destruction of greater glider habitat actually increased in Queensland and NSW, and remained consistently high in Victoria.
Then, in the summer of 2019 and 2020, the catastrophic Black Summer bushfires struck, razing around 30% of greater glider habitat. Still, logging and land clearing continued.
A NSW government report revealed that in 2020, 51,400 hectares of woody vegetation was cleared.
So, it’s not terribly surprising that only six years on from the 2016 “vulnerable” listing, central and southern greater gliders have been nationally listed as endangered.
Logging, booming human populations, and brush fires, flooding are all extreme threats to Australia’s biodiversity. Not to mention looming climate-supercharged La Nina and El Nino events are now threatening the habitability of Australia.