2nd November 2008-11-02
Before I begin, I would like to pay my respects to the custodians of this land.
This journey was greatly spurred by the enormity of the looming threat of the proposed Tasmanian pulpmill – not just to Tasmanian forests, but also to other Australian mainland forests, as more and more woodchips would be required to feed it, and almost certainly sent, from other chipmills, not just to pulp, but to fuel it as well. Bass Strait would also be affected, by 64,000 tonnes of dioxin effluent poured into it, everyday, and the Tamar valley itself, the proposed site of the factory, smothered in carbon emissions, the equivalent of which is estimated to be 2.3 million new cars on the roads, every year.
But last week, Gunns, the massive woodchip company which would like to own such a factory, and already does own the rights to export Tasmania’s forests, announced to its stakeholders that the project would have to be put on hold indefinitely as financing cannot be found and the state of the world’s economy makes it uncertain whether it ever will be.
Our journey though, continues. We will still visit the site of the proposed pulpmill in Bell Bay near Launceston, and conduct another Log truck count and vigil, as we did in Eden at the chipmill, where about 200 trucks were counted. Apparently about 8 times this amount can be counted in Tasmania.
We are now about 800 kilometres down the road from Canberra and it has never been more apparent to me that our species, people, are making the world rotten, and that we need to change our ways, immediately and dramatically.
The reason I never learnt to drive a car was the same reason I became a vegetarian: because it seemed to me that too many animals suffered. How many dead kangaroos, not to mention wombats, eagles, snakes, bandicoots, etc that I have smelt and stepped over on this journey, I do not know. I have attempted to check pouches for joeys, as they can live for 72 hours after the mother dies, but often the animal is so mangled it’s impossible. I don’t know how many countless insects and big beautiful moths die each typical car ride, but I have heard that about 300 birds are killed each international flight.
There are still people around the world who don’t live with cars and machinery. These groups of people probably become less and less in number every day. I think 0.0001% of the world’s population are considered traditional hunter/gatherer nomads. There are also people like the Amish Mennonites in America, and hopefully some hippy communes still, who choose to do without machines driven by fuel and maintain the old ways. The original Mr. Ludd, who overturned his new weaving frame in disgust, to try and preserve his job, (the act of which was then declared punishable by death), was the man responsible for the term ‘Luddite’. Perhaps a modern Luddite is someone still who recognises the connection between unemployment and mechanization.
Machines, the factories that make them, the ruthless war machines, the machines that make mincemeat out of forests and cows and the lackluster, spiritless, idle, meaningless, unhealthy lives of those who use them, and by this I mean all of us, is the reason (I believe), that climate change is upon us. The simplest solution to our woes could be to gradually cease producing and using the machines. This would entail moving away from Globalisation and using the concepts embodied in the Permaculture ideals of staying local and keeping technologies simple.
I can’t pretend that my life is an exemplary one, unblemished by washing machines (though I did for many years do without one), but I now think that the first and most important change we could try to make, to solve the climate change scenario which we now face, is to look to the past, to the time before the industrialization of the world and to do things more by hand.
This may sound overly simplistic or extremist or crazy, but only 200 years ago our great grandparents were walking or using horse and cart and no one knew any differently. Only 40 years ago, no one had heard of woodchips –how did we make paper 400 years ago? And how much more valued were the products we did make? 400 years ago the agricultural revolution had not taken place – there was nothing but ‘organic’ food and obesity was something only the king suffered.
There are still people around the world to whom we could look for direction and help in getting started going backwards. Can we go backwards? Or is it not backwards at all, but just growth and change? Just because civilization made a mistake (as I see it), doesn’t mean we have to be irredeemably bound to follow that path to self-destruction.
Lots of people along the way have asked – why carry the Aboriginal flag? And whether it might confuse the issues of wood chipping and forests… I have wondered about that too, but for many reasons carrying the flag seems the right thing to do. The flag is immediately recognisable from a passing car, as a worded message would not be, and it serves to remind of a time when people lived in harmony with the land. Did we become unsustainable when, all those moons ago, we became sedentary rather than nomadic?
We left Canberra from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy where there was a sacred fire ceremony to see us on our way. Many of the people who have walked with us are involved also in Aboriginal Rights working groups, as am I in Canberra.
It seems to me not co-incidental that currently many remote Aboriginal communities are fighting for the right to stay put, and for the freedom also of self-determination – to teach their children in their own languages; to keep their children from boarding schools and with them at home; to receive welfare in dollars, not Woolworths’ cards that need spending hundreds of kilometres away; from complete assimilation into white society.
To enact the Northern Territory intervention, the Government had to repeal the racial discrimination act, and still has not signed the U.N declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples – which would of course make sure that the communities held the rights to their own lands.
The permit system that allowed Aboriginal people their own lands has been revoked as part of the intervention. Many have speculated that the intervention exists primarily to open up those lands to exploration and exploitation by the mining companies. World over, Indigenous peoples are being swept from their homelands so that mining companies can make huge profits at the expense of the Earth – the Kalahari bushmen, Papua New Guinea Tribespeople, and the list goes on.
This has also been suggested as the reason why we are so determined to clear the forests – as a measure to make the land less valuable to Native Title claimants and also to open it up for exploration.
And now the Government has announced that, contrary to their pre-election promise, the much debated Nuclear waste dump is to go ahead at Muckaty station in the Northern Territory where Aboriginal people still live. (Along with this, the Beverley Uranium mine is to expand 6 fold and at least 2 new proposed Uranium mines await approval. The Nuclear threat is upon us once more.
I am not a scientist, and can tell you no more than you all already know about being ‘green’, the environment, the problems, the changes that need to happen, and the need for us all to nurture community, ourselves, to network, to be the voice for the people and the earth and the animals. I embarked on this journey as an attempt to do that. I’m not sure that it will, but nor am I sure will politics, the law, or anything alone.
Sometimes on this journey, especially in the places where the local people are involved in these industries, when their lives depend on it, their families depend on it, the towns themselves depend on it, I have found it hard to imagine us making it better, of slowing ourselves down so that homosapiens can survive a little longer, along with the forests and the whales.
I don’t know what the future holds, and whether I even want to be a part of it. If I have to always wear a mask when I’m outside because of the pollution, or buy shots of oxygen to get clean air, or my water in bottles because all the rivers are dry and dirty, or live in a world that’s just one big grey city of machinery…I don’t think I do really.
That vision is enough impetus to speak up and try hard to make change, even when it’s scary and not what people want to hear. For:
“What would the world be once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left ,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
Gerald Hopkins
That was Gerald Hopkins’ words, and now to say goodnight, an Invocation of peace by Fiona Mcleod:
Deep peace, pure white of the moon to you;
Deep peace, pure green of the grass to you;
Deep peace, pure brown of the earth to you;
Deep peace, pure grey of the dew to you;
Deep peace, pure blue of the sky to you;
Deep peace of the running wave to you,
Deep peace of the flowing air to you,
Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.
