‘I found I was more comfortable in the forest’: The scientist who took on the logging industry

Everything else was going well. I managed to get there on time and Professor David Lindenmayer was waiting out the front with a cheery grin. He had suggested we go for fish, but not too fancy. I had proposed Fich, which I’d heard was good – a takeaway joint adjoining a smart seafood restaurant in Sydney’s inner west.

Tasmanian salmon is admired by conservationists about as much wood chipping is. The problem is, Lindenmayer explains with the sort of detail you’d expect from a scientist that the salmon are raised in great big floating pens in places like Macquarie Harbour. Lindenmayer might be famous as the nation’s single most-cited scientist for his work on forests and regenerative farming, but he began his career in the water, and before that, he began to explore the natural world with his father, Bruce.The old man worked as a rocket scientist at the Woomera missile range and in Melbourne, helping to develop rockets and the propellant that would drive missiles into space or between continents.

Lindenmayer’s was not. “I found that I was more comfortable in the forest rather than in the water. I learnt I could see more in the forest than I could underwater,” he explains. “I didn’t have to concentrate on breathing.”Our mains have arrived. Lindenmayer has ordered fish and chips and I have opted for a fish skewer. His plate lands like proper fish and chips should. The batter has erupted volcanically around the flesh, and the chips are holding up in the heat.

They sat in silence, watching the animals they had carefully caught, radio-tagged and released – birds, gliders and possums – return time and again to the same hollows high in the bows of the old mountain trees.He explains that those hollows take 150 to 200 years to develop, and they provide homes for the forest creatures not just for the tree’s 400-500-year life, should it not be burnt or felled, but for another 100 or so after the tree dies and stands still in place.

“I still remember the day when I realised that there were deep structural problems in the industry. It was the 13th of April in 2009 at about 9.30.”

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‘I found I was more comfortable in the forest’: The scientist who took on the logging industryProfessor David Lindenmeyer looked neater than you’d expect for a man who has spent years in Australia’s oldest forests, locked in political battles with the industries that depend on cutting them down.
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