Autumn in Tasmania is sublime, the days are still warm, the nights are cool and the light is beautiful. Autumn in Tasmania is also burning season, when government logging agency Sustainable Timber Tasmania send intensive burns through all the native forest logging coupes they cut in the previous year, filling our skies with smoke and carbon pollution to steralise the soil in readiness to plant even aged eucalyptus tree crops. This is the final stage of the process of logging and burning that transforms native forests into even aged, high oil tree crops (usually eucalyptus obliqua) that make our landscapes drier and our communities more fire prone.

That Tasmania still undertakes such archaic logging practices more commonly associated with the logging and burning of the Amazon and Indonesia's forests for cropping is criminal. We know that logging and burning our forests is a massive source of carbon emissions, creates serious health issues for communities living in the pall of smoke, pollutes our waterways and destroys our soil biodiversity. 

If you are in Tasmania during the burning season keep your cameras on hand and photograph any of the telltale mushroom clouds you will see bursting into the skies. Normally half an hour or so after you hear a helicopter. Send those images to us via our Instagram or Facebook pages @bluederbywild or email them through to us (bluederbywild@gmail.com) as we follow the 200 planned burns to take place across Tasmania from mid March (that’s next week!).