Shades of Green: Finding a middle path through the Forest 
By Chrissy Sharp

A book review by David Holmgren

As my home state of WA and my adopted state of Victoria both begin 2024 with an end to all logging in public native forests, I have reason to reflect on half a century of observation and activism around forests, both natural and planted. While a diversity of broader and more immediate issues also compete for my attention, it was serendipitous when a local colleague, similarly passionate and active in ecological forestry, gave me this book to read. While many people (including authors and publishers) give me books to read, reflect on and/or review, I am not the greatest or fastest reader and many times I do little more than scan-read bits before passing on. However Chrissy Sharp’s posthumously published Shades of Green (2022) struck an immediate chord.

A brief encounter with her and husband Andrew Thamo at their Small Tree Farm during a rare visit back to the West in 1999 was memorable. On various occasions I have recounted how Chrissy told me about her Greens (WA) parliamentary colleague’s willingness to support her passion for reform of WA forest management along ecological principles, after decades of her being on the front lines of activism to conserve old growth and ecologically critical forests in national parks and reserves. Her optimism about using the balance of power in the WA Upper House to bring forward realistic solutions to the entrenched positions around native forests perhaps dented my own long-standing scepticism about parliamentary politics as a forum to save our forests from the twin ravages of industrial forestry and environmental extremism.

In the preface, Andrew Thamo suggests Shades of Green is really three books, one each about politics, forests and finally a life memoir (although only 200 pages, including appendices and references). I was delighted to find these threads beautifully brought together. I loved Chrissy’s mix of forest science, political intrigue, environmental philosophy and personal journey that make this book an essential read for any aspiring environmental activist, those navigating communication and compromise in organisations, students of land use policy and politics and, in fact, anyone struggling to find an ethical and effective life path in times of challenge and change.

Shades of Green explains how ecological thinning is the most essential action urgently needed to protect our dense regrowth forests from the ravages of wildfire, release their potential for restorative growth and hedge against drying climate futures. It gets the non-expert reader up to speed without excessive depth of silvicultural science. The book reinforces the observations of indigenous fire practitioners and experienced forest managers around Australia as well as in California that thinning is a prerequisite for a revival of indigenous cultural burning practices to work. The lessons learnt from ecological thinning trials in the Jarrah forests of WA confirm our own and other local experience over the last 30 years in managing both the mid-rainfall messmate gum forests and the drier box forests in central Victoria.

The book includes many references to indigenous, scientific and philosophical sources and influences on evolution of Chrissy’s thinking on forests including the ProSilva nature-based forestry network that originated in Slovenia, which I also used in my own articulation of ecological forestry on Permaculture Design Courses, Permaculture Forestry Courses and the forest management guidelines and practices we developed for the Fryers Forest Ecovillage in the mid-1990s.

I was slightly surprised that Chrissy Sharp made no mention of permaculture as one thread of local and global environmentalism that focuses on integrated design solutions providing for human needs in harmony with nature, nor that permaculture provides a notable exception to her discussion about the inherently oppositional nature of environmental activism.

There is some overlap between permaculture and the wider networks of farm tree planting in the SW of WA, in which she and Andrew were active pioneers and participants.¹ For example Fair Harvest permaculture demonstration and education centre in Margaret River has included substantial areas of reafforestation with mixed eastern states eucalypts. However I imagine that most permies in her region adopted the standard lock-up native forests orthodoxy of the wider environmental movement, and in any case, mostly showed less enthusiasm for the slow processes of political and policy reform that consumed so much of Chrissy’s prodigious energy over the years. Even with the authority granted to me as co-originator of permaculture, my influence in moderating the ‘lock-it-up’ mentality within our movement has been modest to say the least.

As early as 1983, after a decade of awareness and trying to influence forest activism from within, I refocused my energies in more rewarding directions and saw that our great public forest estates were probably doomed to more cycles of intensive industrial forestry as bits were hived off in reserves where nature was given no assistance in the restoration process. I imagined back then that a generation of farm foresters planting trees would bring new perspectives and knowledge necessary for the management of our radically degraded public forest estates. Chrissy Sharp and Andrew Thamo are examples of the very people and process I imagined.

Shades of Green confirms the strong parallels between what was happening in the West Australian Jarrah forests under the infamous WA Inc Burke Labour government, and the Kennett Liberal government in Victoria. The latter was responsible for a second rape of our local Wombat Forest following the devastation of the goldrush logging documented in the “Ruined Forest” Royal Commission of the late 1890s. As in WA, we had elements of restoration forestry, especially in the 1930s. Our efforts to bring about reform of the forest management system in the Wombat Forest eventually succumbed to the green activism formula of lock-it-up, despite the case for high conservation old growth forests being weaker here than in many other places in Victoria.

It seems that in the West, even with the unique political opportunities afforded by holding the balance of power in the upper house, Chrissy Sharp’s great knowledge, passion and negotiation skills were not enough to tip the balance away from expanded industrial logging of Jarrah forests. Under the free market ideology of WA Inc. Jarrah forest sawlog pulpwood and charcoal royalties had to fully fund public land conservation management across the whole of WA (one third of the continent). This drive toward more intensive extractivism created very strong and broad-based environmentalism to lock up forests in reserves and national parks.

As those still committed to ecological forest management attempt to pick up the pieces in the aftermath of the end to logging in WA and Victoria, my own scathing judgements about the half century “Fight for the Forests” are unlikely to get a sympathetic hearing among my Green colleagues. But if any voice can still turn that tide in favour of a harmonious stewardship of our forests it is that of Chrissy Sharp, even if she never got to see the results in her lifetime.

David Holmgren
Permaculture Co-originator
Melliodora
February 2024