Greens leader Christine Milne and many of her colleagues have done little to enhance their reputations with gloating displays of victory. If environmentalism involves celebrating the loss of jobs and livelihoods then the Greens have clearly lost their way.

The Examiner has received dozens of letters which are extremely critical of Senator Milne and her colleagues over their reaction to the collapse of Gunns.

Perception is reality and the perception of many is that saving trees means more to the Greens that saving families.

Senator Milne appears to have caused irreparable damage to the Greens' brand, which may well affect the ballot box in 10 months.

The irony of the situation is that two scenarios now exist.

There is strong speculation that a Finnish-Chinese consortium will snap up the pulp mill site and permits now that the financially burdened Gunns has been sidelined. If it is a Chinese company then opponents will be whistling into the wind with any argument of a social licence.

The other prospect is that an international company, again probably the Chinese, will buy up the rights to the 300,000 hectares of plantation forests, harvest and chip them in Tasmania and then ship the chips to an Asian pulp mill.

Tasmania would then be back to being a grower of woodchip trees with a tenfold increase in jobs and profits moved off- shore.

It was also a bit rich for new Greens Senator Peter Whish-Wilson to tell the Australian Financial Review on Wednesday: "The Tasmanian landscape is now littered with hundreds of thousands of hectares of seemingly unwanted Eucalyptus nitens thanks to the now totally discredited . . . vision of the managed investment schemes."

Perhaps Senator Whish-Wilson was overseas at the time, but using marginal farming land for plantations was also the preferred and recommended position of the Greens for about a decade in their bid to save old growth forests - conveniently that view appears to have changed.

Earlier this week we had the middle- class greens - The Wilderness Society and the Australian Conservation Foundation - bagged by the feral greens - Peg Putt's Markets for Change and the Huon Valley Environment Centre - for not being radical enough. Ms Putt accused her former colleagues of suffering from Stockholm syndrome in reference to the forestry IGA peace deal and said that "they have been captured by the industry". One suspects that Ms Putt is suffering from ABC relevancy syndrome and missing her once regular 7.10pm spot on television news.

But the real gem was the reaction by state Greens leader Nick McKim, who has consistently failed to take a stand against the extreme environmentalists who are destroying the Tasmanian brand. When asked by The Examiner about the split in the Greens' ranks, Mr McKim said he would "refuse to take sides".

By any definition that fails the most basic leadership test.