Steve Hopper

Just like pine plantations in Australia.

If you look at the understory, the eucalypt leaves secrete chemicals to which native flora is not adapted.

And so they're like biological deserts underneath.

So go to a bluegum plantation, even in Australia, if you move bluegums from Tasmania and Victoria over to Western Australia, it's the same story.

Very few of the native plants will grow under them.

And so you're really hammering local biodiversity.

And blue gums and the like grow incredibly fast if they're removed from the predators and pathogens that do affect them.

And they grow so fast that the wood splits and twists and goes gnarly.

So, you know, the wood isn't ideal.

It doesn't compare at all to oil growth eucalypts from Australia.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's universal.

Wherever there are eucalypts, they will burn and they will burn fiercely if the populations aren't managed very carefully.

So that was another downside to it.

And the third downside was, I mentioned, you know, the 1800s, the time of colonial expansion.

When I visited Madagascar 20 years ago now, and there the French government had colonial control over most of the 1800s, 1900s.

It decreed that every native adult, male and female, in the local population would devote a quarter of their year to planting eucalypts, basically enforced labour to establish plantations.

It was primarily for wood.

Paper pulp has become a modern use as well.

And, you know, wood for construction as well as for furniture and all that sort of thing.