Two cutblocks deferred, eleven still standing on the schedule

The deferral was announced as a pause. Read the order and it is a pause on two of thirteen blocks, with the remaining eleven unchanged and three of them scheduled inside the year.

That is not nothing. The two blocks carry the oldest stands in the licence area, and the deferral is indefinite rather than dated — a stronger instrument than the ones used in the last round.

It is also the third time this valley has been through a process that pauses part of a schedule and leaves the rest running. The council has asked three times for the full schedule to be tabled at the planning table. It has not yet been.

The licensee points out, fairly, that it has met every requirement and that the deferral was voluntary. Both things are true. The question the council keeps asking is not whether the process was followed but why a process that produces a thirteen-block schedule can only be argued with two blocks at a time.

There is a planning table. It has met twice this year. Neither meeting had the schedule on the agenda, and both had the deferral on it — which is a way of discussing the exception without discussing the rule.

The stands in the two deferred blocks are between two and four hundred years old. That is the number that made them deferrable, and it is also the number that makes the other eleven blocks look like an accounting exercise: younger timber, faster approval, same watershed.

The council's position has been consistent through three rounds. It is not that no tree may be cut. It is that a schedule assembled by one party and negotiated one exception at a time is not a plan, and that being asked to celebrate each exception is a way of never discussing the plan.

The next planning table sits in November. The schedule is not yet on the agenda.