Island on Fire: Tasmania's Origami Forests

It is a systematic process: first, able-bodied man and steel-jowled machines violently comb the groves, hacking away ancient Tasmanian eucalyptus regnans with chainsaws and skidders. Next, eerily reminiscent of the American-Vietnam War, Tasmanian forests are nothing short of napalmed—helicopters fly over the massive, dismembered groves, dropping jellied petroleum onto the wooden carcasses. Soon, ash is all that is left of the ancient groves of eucalyptus, often called the "King of Trees." This process, called clearfelling, has been practiced in Tasmania for decades. Before the modern implementation of helicopters and petroleum jelly, the foolproof "slash and burn" did the job. In any case, deforestation has been occurring on the island since European colonizers set foot ashore and smelled the sweet and tangy aroma of eucalyptus—an unmistakable smell that, to the logging and agriculture industry, became synonymous with money. And it's not just the eucalyptus—although these populations have been hit especially hard with over 85% of Tasmania's ancient old-growth groves obliterated. It's sassafras, celery-top pine, leatherwood, myrtle: exotic rainforest varieties that often don't exist anywhere else on earth. The smoke from the monstrous burn off has, in the past, been so thick that Tasmanian schools have been put on temporary close, residents encouraged to stay inside and away from the poor air quality. Humans, however, are likely the least endangered by clearfelling. Because this is the natural world and because everything in the natural world is interwoven in a web so complex it rivals that of a CIA cyber-security wall, of course the natural world is affected to a degree we might never understand. To list every one of the organisms killed or detrimentally affected by this process would be a mammoth list. And where, you might ask, does all of this eucalypstus go? Most trees, brutally dismembered and shipped halfway across the world, end up as Japanese paper. Their only hope of becoming organically beautiful, or somehow natural once again, lies only in chance. Perhaps, a practiced hand takes up that paper, folding, shaping, and bending the reconstituted, dried eucalyptus fibers that are so far from home, turning them once again into a tree. This time, however, it can only be origami. -Jordan (Jory) Huelskamp 01/06/2015