Aboriginal Australia practised a form of forestry which powerfully shaped the distribution and ecology of the continent's woodlands and native forests (Boutland 1989, Pyne 1988, 1990). The historical extent of claim and counter-claim over ownership and use of the forests in Aboriginal societies is unknown. After the European invasion, all the land and its forests became the property of the British Crown and Aboriginal land use practice, especially the use of fire, was progressively banned.

Great parts of this Crown land were turned over by gift, sale or lease, to the requirements of settler capitalists. Native forests became subject to radically different perceptions and use. These forests were initially viewed as both abundant and "...obstructions to grass and grain" (Dargavel 1987c:5). Forests were used unsustainably, often being cut-out near markets for timbers, or cleared and converted to agriculture and grazing.

The state of Australia's native forests became a public concern when it was realised that their destruction and depletion could lead to shortages of timber. From the 1870s "Colonial governments began to see the hardwood forests as valuable resources of timber to be conserved" (Dargavel 1987c:5). Such concern lead to the reservation of vast tracts of native forests for long term wood production. From the 1870s, under the influence of European forestry science, colonial government forest agencies were established to control and manage the reserved crown forests.

Overwhelmingly, wood production in these State native forest reserves was undertaken by private capital which obtained wood property rights under various `resource regimes' (Young 1982), negotiated with State governments:

Numerous types of resource regimes were developed to allocate State forest reserves to Australian private capital (RAC Vol 2:Z1-19 1991). Under these resource regimes with their different logging techniques driven by products and markets, the forests were shaped, "...each used or abused the forests in its own way and constructed a layer in the present landscape, much like European cities are constructed by stratas of past industrial eras" (Dargavel 1994:81).

On the basis of these resource regimes, private wood industries and their dependent working communities were established using public lands in rural Australia. To the extent that there was claim and counter-claim over native forest use and management, disputes were generally confined to the relationship between private wood industries and the state, and between labor and capital. Until the late 1960s it was relatively easy for the state to provide the level of political and practical demand for other public uses of the forests. As Dargavel has argued:

From occupying a relatively non-conflictual place in public policy until the end of the 1960s, native forests have become a highly contested political issue in Australian politics and public discourse over the past quarter century. The forest politics of East Gippsland in eastern Victoria, the case study in this dissertation, forms one part of a series of recent conflicts over Australian native forests.

These forest conflicts correlate with the advent of modern environmentalism in Australia and with substantial trends toward greater commercialisation and industrialisation of native forests. Australia's agenda of environmental politics - its `Green' agenda - has been dominated by bitter and protracted conflicts over the conservation and preservation versus development of `natural' environments. Native forests represent one, if not the most, significant sites of these conflicts.

As the icons of Australian environmental politics, native forests and wilderness have represented the central issues on which the Australian environment movement has built itself (throughout this dissertation, the phrase `environment movement' is used in a very general sense to describe a broad popular cultural and political movement, involving organisations, which has arisen in the West since the 1960s and which promotes a new discourse on `nature'). The Australian environment movement, in common with environmentalism and other reputed new social movements throughout the advanced industrial societies, has shown itself to be part of an historically new form of social protest and political conflict (Brand 1986).

The environmental challenge has concerned the generation of a potent discourse dealing with non-commercial values and spirituality of native forests. It has challenged and disrupted the previously orderly conduct of wood production forestry and its connection between private capital and the state. However, this environmental challenge and its claims over the forests has met powerful resistance and counter-discourses from the wood industry, the trade union movement, and counter-movements in numerous timber towns of rural Australia. The resultant conflict over native forests has been protracted and bitter. As Hay has commented, recent conflicts have been dominated by fundamentally rival forces and discourses (Hay 1987:7). Described by Kirkpatick as a `ritualised environmental conflict' (cited in Hay 1987:7), native forest politics has developed into a major problem for governments.

Recent Australain forest politics and conflict is underpinned by two elite but fundamentally opposed forces. First the wood industries, particularly the pulp and paper and the export woodchip companies, who seek to maintain their extraction rights over native forests, and who use the threat of jobs and investment loss as their form of political leverage. Second, a mostly urban-based and middle class environment movement which has pursued the preservation and total de-industrialisation of native forests, and which increasingly uses party political election preferences and direct action as its form of political leverage.

With reference to the annual woodchip licence renewals, the former Prime Minister Paul Keating, in 1995 remarked that the conflict between these two oppositional forces produces "ritual incantations". Much of the ongoing conflict concerns annual broader raids by environmentalists and counter-defense by industry forces, over which forest area will be preserved or exploited for wood fibre. The conflict has been constructed around drawing lines on maps of the forests representing the spoils each force in the conflict gained. There has been little consensual development of a sustainable and socially benefical wood products industry. Solutions have not been based on equitable and ecologically sensitive trade-offs between wood production and preservation.

The environment movement has generally devalued the voices of timber workers and their families. This has led to its failure to build alliances with the industrial working class. The environment movement in the East Gippsland case and I suspect more generally, has failed to research the micro-historical details of past patterns of native forest logging and consequently has been unable or unwilling to advocate employment rich forest restoration opportunities. These failings can be located within the class origins and support-base of the environmentalists, and the dominance of an often elitist and ahistorical ecological philosophy of `naturalism'.

The wood industry has in the main treated native forests as a `quarry'. Its often nomadic `cut-out and get-out' logging practices have been assisted by compliant governments and forest agencies. It is almost impossible to find anywhere in Australia, a regionally sustainable log cutting regime (RAC 1991:Vol 1). The industry has been built on high-volume resource extraction and raw commodity export with minimal value-adding. The industry has been unwilling to invest in technological development, sustainable logging, high value-added import replacement and export. The industry has also failed to respond to changes within the Pacific-rim wood economy and faces eventual substantial decline. Since its inception, the export woodchip sector has continued to expand. This is despite substantial transfers of forest from commercial wood production to preservation status. In fact since the advent of environmental challenge over the forests, the actual rate of wood removals for export woodchips has increased. Sawlog removals have declined by 2% each year during the 1980s, and pulpwood/woodchip removals have increased by 4%). By the end of the 1980s pulpwood constituted 55% of all removals from native forests, compared to only 14% in 1970 (Clark 1992:2).

The imperatives of both the environment movement (forestry without wood production) and industry (quick, high-volume extraction) are leading to regional de-industrialisation and unemployment in the native forest sector. Neither the wood industry nor the environment movement will bear the social and ecological costs of their claims and practices in the forests.

The main thesis addressed in this dissertation is that Australian native forest politics has established itself as a new `problematic of government', something which has been "...rendered practicable and amenable to intervention" (Miller and Rose 1990:5) and has developed its own specially constructed policy and administrative apparatus. While the claims and counter-claims over the changing ecological realities of our native forests are important factors and have influenced the various outcomes, the prolonged conflict over native forests has been constituted by complex socio-political, economic and cultural forces. This environmental conflict is best understood as a power struggle for the control of discourse which in turn installs a particular `regime of truth' over the forests.

Such struggles have ecological impacts, raising environmental justice questions. They also have social class effects, involving substantial distributional and consequent social justice implications. The class location of environmentalists and their post-distributional (in the conventional sense) discourses and demands will be theoretically and empirically explored in this research study.

The first subsidiary thesis is that there is a `new class' basis to modern environmental politics and that there are immense dangers in the neglect and retreat, in theory and action, from the material and class basis of social and political conflict and change.

Recently constituted environmental protest and action is regarded by many as offering democratic, emancipatory, and progressive social and ecological change. However, it has been argued that the recent prominence of `nature', environmental problems and the environment movement, contains two contradictory tendencies or possibilities. These two tendencies or possiblities have been identified by Rutherford as:

It is Rutherford's view that the second of these tendencies or possiblities has the greater potency and hold over current political discourse on the question of `nature'. The extent to which either the (1) liberatory, or the (2) repressive; trajectories sketched above is persuasive is a question for critical research and cannot simply be assumed. The case study of forest conflict in East Gippsland, presented in this dissertation, will demonstrate the extent to which the state, pushed by the environment movement and associated `knowledge' providers, has come to `police' the forests, and in doing so has added the problematic of forests to the domain of governmentality.

The second subsidiary thesis therefore, is that the second tendency indicated by Rutherford, that is the move towards take-over, co-optation and institutionalisation of critical and oppositional discourses and movements, and towards intervention and policing of these new issue areas by the state (the repressive trajectory), characterises the trajectory Australian native forest conflict and politics has taken over the past quarter of a century.

This research study is concerned with recently-constituted environmental conflict and politics. Environmental conflict indicates the emergence of a historically new discourse on `nature'. (Discourse refers to the constitution of a domain of inquiry and action). This new `nature' discourse is radically different from, and challenging to, traditional discourses that have underwritten social development, based on resourcism, industrialism and the capital-labor relationship. I contend that this conflictual politics over `nature' is constructing a new arena of class conflict, producing new relations of power and constituting new domains of governmentality.

Of the many substantive questions thrown up by recent environmental politics, my concern is with the environmental justice agenda underlying radical environmental politics. That agenda, essentially post-distributional (in the conventional sense), contests with claims based on social justice and therefore has formed a critical part in recent environmental conflicts. This historical tension between two types or objects of justice is a crucial question of the present, with implications for ethical political practice. In the case of decisions politically constructed in terms of timber workers' jobs versus the future of old-growth forests, how do we decide? How do we proceed?

My argument is that recent environmental conflict and politics are about class, power and governmentality. My approach is that an analysis of environmental conflict requires particular theoretical tools drawn from class analysis and an analytics of power. These will be advanced in the proposed theoretical framework and will guide my attempt to illustrate environmental conflict with a historical case study of an Australian forest conflict. The study will attempt to empirically demonstrate the critical operations and effects of class, power, and governmentality and take on the task of considering an approach to the social justice/environmental justice dilemma and a way to proceed.

Taking class, power, governmentality and the justice issue as the central questions in this study of environmental conflict suggests a range of possible approaches. However, this dissertation will not conduct the research along either conventional social science nor classical Marxist approaches to power which see power as a quantitative capacity held by actors and institutions.

Conventional approaches are about the relative strength of an individual or group's power capacity which determines decisions, or the ability to determine non-decisions. This would look like a locational analysis of individuals, groups or classes, and institutions correlated against positions of power; where power is seen as a capacity over concrete decisions or a capacity over non-decisions which we can locate using a comparative method (these are discussed in Chapter 4). The more radical perspective of Marxist analysis regards power as a capacity to determine, as directly linked to classes, hence identifying a dominant class and a dominated class. Here one would examine the monopoly control of state power by a ruling class operating its power capacity through social control via a dominant cultural hegemony or by a dominant class ideology (Chapter 4 discusses this approach as found in Luke's thesis of `power over people's consciousness' and Whitt's empirical class-dialectic study of power).

For what is foundational and often unquestioned in these approaches are the following propositions; that social actors are constituted prior to the event of social conflict (the natural existence of class); that social actors operate from subjective intentions and have pre-existing `objective' interests; or that history proceeds by a set logic determined by social structure, which in turn determines class interests; and that power is a capacity to realise those interests. A consequence of these views (the capacity view of power) applied to environmental conflict would be to ask who or which class held power over whose interests. Working within this framework one either locates determinancy/causality in `agency' which assumes that interests are transparent to the actors, or locates the formation of interests in an external and imposed system or `structure' (as in ideology).

In the review of the literature (Chapter 3) concerning environmental conflict as a `new class politics', one can see the influence of these propositions where agency or structural accounts divide interpretations in a search for a framework of determinacy (the classical debate betweem hermeneutics and structuralism). These positions also operate in conventional approaches to power as a `capacity' as critically reviewed in Chapter Four.

Not accepting these propositions and conclusions, the intention is to conduct this study of environmental conflict from a different direction based on the following propositions: (1) Rather than a capacity, power is a productive technique which is exercised from multiple sources rather than from a fixed location. (2) Power is intentional in that it involves strategy and calculation but it is nonsubjective, where aims and objectives do not "result from the choice or decision of an individual subject" (Foucault 1978:95). (This is part of Foucault's view of power more fully discussed in Chapter Four). (3) On this view of power, conflictual definitions and hence rival positions of the social world are set up within the processes of social conflict and are not found inside individual motivations or intentions (an agency/determinist view of power and action) or inside their social-structural determinants (a structural/determinist view of power and action). (4) The identity of social actors is constituted through collective actions and does not preceed the event; (5) Interests are not seen as a priori given, but are produced as an effect of strategic struggle. (6) Fields of class conflict and new arenas of class conflict are not pre-given but are produced through the social practices making up conflictual events; and it is within these social practices that collectives and classes are constructed (actors constitute themselves as a class through their collective actions).

These propositions are largely drawn from the work of Michel Foucault on power and governmentality. His position is that power is exercised and produces effects as events. Power is an active, mobile, and productive mechanism. Power is exercised from multiple sites where it is dispersed through discourses which produce knowledge as power through regimes of `truth'. Foucault's concept of `discourse' will be central in our study. My reading of Foucault's theoretical and methodological contributions is discussed in Chapter Four.

This will be a discursive study of environmental conflict in which I approach these conflicts as events. I will employ Foucault's methodological concept of `eventualisation' in this empirical discourse analysis of a particular forest conflict. This will involve description and interpretation of the "multiple processes that constitute" (Foucault 1991b:76) the case. Using a narrative historical method I attempt to show the events in terms of the operation of power/discourse, the effects and outcomes (what power and discourse produced). I place no attention on a single site of causality (neither intention nor ideology).

This dissertation attempts to be an `effective' history of forest conflict, a history of the effects of power and discursive conflict. It also attempts to be a `history of the present', written from questions of the present with a particular political purpose (the political tension between contemporary constructions of social justice and environmental justice). I will attempt to detect and elaborate alternative possibilities. In terms of this study of forest conflict I develop a proposal for change within the heterogeneity of events of the case study. This proposal attempts to address the social justice/environmental justice question. I will not show who had power; rather the material effects of power and discourse, what power produced and what power denied. Writing a history is itself an act of power. It attempts intervention around things denied or ignored.

The objectives of the research study are:

I recognise three major limitations to this dissertation. First, a single case study, as opposed to multiple or cross-case studies means there is no direct way to conduct empirical or quantifiable comparison or testing of cases; however, the selection of one case does provide the opportunity for indepth investigation and analysis. Other case studies may serve as theoretical and methodological counterpoints and interpretive comparison to the East Gippsland case. Second, only limited use is made of the growing body of research dealing with the ecological processes and changes in Australian native forests. When drawn on, this literature is used as part of the analysis of socio-political and discursive struggle. This neglect is the result of the author's lack of disciplinary expertise in the ecological sciences, but more importantly this dissertation does not aim to assess the ecological data and arguments. Finally, there are possible biases flowing from the author's political involvement in forest conflicts and an ongoing working association with a timber company during the conduct of this research. On the other hand, this involvement did provide opportunities for gaining information and insights beyond what is published. As well it also enabled a form of participant observation (a legitimate sociological methodology).

The dissertation is divided into four parts. Chapter 2, together with this chapter form Part I. Chapter 2 reviews explanations of why forestry and wilderness issues have dominated recent environmental politics in Australia and examines the origins and major discourses of modern environmentalism; the history and structure of commercial wood production in native forests is outlined, issues raised by contestory discourses over Aboriginal use and transformation of Australia's `nature' are examined and the question of environmental politics and social justice is introduced.

Part II is concerned with the development of a theoretical framework for the study and analysis of environmental conflict. Chapter 3 locates environmental conflict as part of the `new politics' associated with advanced capitalism. Varying theories explaining the `new politics' and associated new social movements are reviewed. These include the processess of translating concerns and issues into demands and public discourses. Comments on the political character of social movements are made. The `new politics' and new social movements are then considered in the light of complex debates concerning the nature of class structure, class struggle and the relevance of class analysis to environmental conflict. Chapter 4 deals with theories of political power, where Lukes' (1974) perspectives are used to illustrate conventional theories of power. Foucault's alternative theory of power is introduced as the preferred approach. Foucault's theory of `governmentality' and the work of Rose and Miller on `problematics of government' are then discussed in the context of the recent `government of nature'. The chapter sets out the methodological approach used in the case study.

Part III presents a case study of forest conflict in East Gippsland, Victoria. Chapter 5 sets the context of the history and the political economy of native forest wood production in East Gippsland and briefly explores the rise of environmental protest. Chapters 6, 7 and 8 are broken into chronological periods. Chapter 6 deals with the progressive shaping of rival forces and discourses in East Gippsland from 1968, when export woodchipping was approved in Australia, to the election of the Cain Labor Government in Victoria in 1982. Chapter 7 covers the period 1982 to 1986 and deals with the advent of direct action protests by environmentalists, the early responses of the Government, resource estimates produced by Government, the Timber Industry Inquiry and the Lands Conservation Council's land review of East Gippsland. Chapter 8 covers a broad period, from 1986 to April 1996, it examines the contents and political strategy of the Government's official discourses, both policy statements and interpreted bureaucratic decisions and implementations. The chapter looks at the Environmental Effects Statement on woodchip production, corporate resource politics and the ongoing environmental campaigns. This chapter thematically concludes by describing the development of a national forests politics.

Part IV deals with summary of the case study and prescription. Chapter 9 provides a summary of outcomes and an assessment of the current prospects for the East Gippsland timber industry and the timber workers and their families. It also contains a proposal for change in East Gippsland. Chapter 10 offers a conclusion to this dissertation.