It is too soon to say whether such hopes will be realised. Since May, a series of closed-door talks have been under way between industry players and environment groups. In part, the warring parties have been brought together by economic circumstance. In global markets, native forest woodchips are being displaced by woodchips from plantations because, as Anna Krien explains in Into the Woods, ‘pulp and paper producers see native-forest woodchips as an inferior product, preferring single-species pulp from trees of a uniform age’. Add to this the environment movement’s success in persuading Japanese firms, which buy the vast bulk of Tasmania’s woodchips, to insist that suppliers are certified sustainable by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). Australia’s timber industry refused to sign up to the FSC process, creating a rival home-grown certification scheme that never gained international recognition. In announcing the shift to plantation, Gunns’s CEO, Greg L’Estrange, acknowledged that his industry had been ‘out thought and outplayed’ by the environment movement to the extent that native forest loggers had ‘lost the public debate and the support of the broader community’.

L’Estrange also acknowledged the human cost of the conflict over native forest logging, telling an industry conference in Melbourne that ‘too many people have been financially and emotionally injured in the Australian Forest Wars’. This is also the fundamental message of Krien’s engaging new book.

A Melbourne-based writer, Krien is drawn to Tasmania by a friend who has spent three years participating in a ‘live-in protest’: the Upper Florentine blockade in south-west Tasmania. In October 2008 the blockade hit the headlines when two activists were bashed by timber workers. Miranda Gibson and Nishant Datt were in a ‘dragon’, a car with wheels removed that was deliberately positioned to prevent heavy machinery from gaining access to the forest. The protesters lay in the vehicle with their arms extended through the floor and ‘locked’ to a pipe concreted into the ground. Three loggers attacked the car with a sledgehammer, showering Gibson and Datt with broken glass and torrents of abuse, before dragging the activists from the vehicle, kicking Datt in the head as they did so. The loggers did not realise that their actions were being captured on video. When the footage duly circulated worldwide, the real body blow was to the reputation of Tasmania’s forest industry. (The loggers were recently found guilty of ‘common assault’ in the Hobart Magistrates Court.)

The attack prompted Krien to book a ticket on the ferry to Tasmania to visit her friend at the blockade. Two days before she arrived, three carloads of men paid a midnight visit to the Upper Florentine, smashing up the camp and dousing it with petrol before flicking ‘a handful of lit matches into the dark’ and driving off. Luckily no one was hurt; the protesters had fled into the forest. They emerged from hiding to form a huddle and watch their campsite burn: ‘jumping each time something – the fuel tanks, gas cooker, bottles of cheap cider – exploded in the heat.’

In opening with this story, Krien indicates where her sympathies lie, although the articulation of her standpoint can be rather inchoate. This is not meant as a criticism. Rather, I see it as evidence of Krien’s genuine striving to be honest with her readers. When challenged by a logger to declare her position, Krien answers ‘I like nature. I like creatures. I think they deserve more rights than they have now.’ Many people would share her sense that Tasmania’s forests deserve protection, without having a detailed understanding of the issues involved. As Krien says, once you step inside the forest ‘it is difficult to be objective’. Into the Woods might have benefited from some disinterested environmental expertise – an ecologist’s view on the disputed potential for native forest to regrow after clear-felling, for example – but this is not the real thrust of her book. Krien depicts the beauty of the wilderness and provides a critical evaluation of the changing economics of the timber industry, but her writing comes alive when it engages with the foot soldiers who continue to do battle in the forest wars and with veterans who have left the field to nurse their injuries.

Social relations are at the heart of Krien’s investigation and her journey around Tasmania becomes an attempt to answer a simple question: ‘How can so many people all be looking at the same thing and see it so differently?’ She finds that forestry ‘has to do with absolutely everything’ in Tasmania, and that the key players are all ‘closely connected’. But far from making the state’s forest wars easier to understand, ‘this closeness makes things harder to untangle’. She finds herself on ‘a journey through selective truths’.

Like the award-winning books of Anna Funder (Stasiland, 2002) and Chloe Hooper (The Tall Man, 2008), Into the Woods is narrative non-fiction, what might have been called New Journalism in the United States in the 1960s or reportagein pre-war Europe.Krien uses literary devices and acknowledges her own place in the story, sharing her personal views and responses. Poorly executed, this kind of writing can be irritating, when a ‘look-at-me, look-at-me’ author dominates the subject matter. But Krien gets the balance about right, and her subjective approach provides a useful lever on the issues. For example, she finds herself irritated by the ‘ferals’ who occupy the front line at protests such as the Florentine Blockade, even though she has come to Tasmania in sympathy with their cause and with a degree of admiration for their bravery. By worrying away at her emotional responses and seeking to understand what it is that irks her, Krien throws critical light on the protesters’ motivations and reveals an element of thrill-seeking. As one self-proclaimed ratbag admits in a moment of candour, the ‘heroic stuff’ of putting his body on the line provides ‘instant gratification’.

It is Krien’s dialogue with loggers rather than protesters that makes for the most engaging and surprising reading. Without surrendering her pro-environment position, she is able to present the forest wars from a range of viewpoints and to engender considerable sympathy for the men and women whose livelihoods have been built on felling trees. She also acknowledges the complexity of the issues. The forestry industry has long presented woodchipping as the by-product of extracting valuable saw logs, as a resource that is sold for pulp, since it would otherwise go to waste. As Krien shows, this is a disingenuous and self-serving argument. In Tasmania, at least eighty per cent of the timber extracted from the forests goes to pulp, and the woodchipping tail has long wagged the logging dog. But Krien acknowledges that without the revenue from woodchips, there will be no saw logs either. The move to clear-felling, with small islands of retained forest left to assist in regrowth, has stripped the industry of jobs, since a few men in bulldozers can haul out more timber in a few hours than a gang of workers with chainsaws could retrieve in a week. But clear-felling has also made the industry safer and helped to keep it competitive. There is no returning to the old days of selective logging, when a few large trees might be extracted while leaving the surrounding forest largely intact.

Those who have followed the Tasmanian story will be familiar with some of the extraordinary events that Krien details, such as the brutal bashing of a young Bob Brown with a wheel brace; the bribe of $110,000 offered to a government minister to cross the floor and bring down the first Labor–Green accord; the deliberate public humiliation of professional forester Bill Manning, who blew the whistle on lax regulation by the Forest Practices Board; or the sordid tale of government interference in the approval process for Gunns’s proposed pulp mill. Those who do not know these stories will be shocked at the corruption of due process involved. Into the Woods places these events in a sustained narrative that demonstrates emphatically why the forest wars have gone on too long. The toll on individual lives and on the basic fabric of Tasmanian society has been too great. Even with an end to native forest logging, there is no easy route out of the woods of conflict, since plantations are also fraught with environmental and financial problems. Nevertheless, Krien’s book is a spur towards finding a more peaceful path.