Forest Fundraiser Spectacular, Saturday December 4, Corroborree Park, Canberra

FOREST FUNDRAISER SPECTACULAR

Saturday December 4, 12pm-12am, Corroborree Park, Canberra

$20 waged, $10 unwaged, families are negotiable!

Come and enjoy a wonderful day in support of the beautiful Tassie Forests! All proceeds go towards the grassroots campaigns to save both NSW’s South-Eastern forests and Tasmania’s Southern forests. Organised by Canberra Forest Alliance.

Thanks to Paul Summerfield for the Canberra Forest Alliance logo: http://www.ageofwonder.org

For more info, contact Canberra Forest Alliance on 0402 486647, or check out our facebook page http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=159937884018387

MEDIA RELEASE
21.04.2009
Police Raid on Camp Florentine in Progress
“10 Police have raided Camp Florentine, arresting one protestor. Details are unclear however it appears that police are still in attendance,” said Still Wild Still Threatened spokesperson Ali Alishah.
“Last Tuesday Police Rescue, Forestry Tasmania and other police raided Camp Florentine, removing a tunnel and breaking the leg of a tripod, endangering the life of a tree sitter,” Ali Alishah.
“Camp Florentine activists will continue their defence of the World Heritage valued forests of the Upper Florentine,” said Ali Alisha.
“Why are Tasmania Police raiding a non-violent protest camp while those who destroyed logging machinery in the Lower Florentine remain at large? Surely this is an abuse of police resources. Police should stop targeting those who are defending ancient forests from destruction and work as hard as possible to catch those responsible for yesterday’s arson,” said Ali Alishah.
“There are at least ten police at Camp Florentine right now. How many police are working on catching the culprits of yesterday’s vandalism?” said Ali Alishah.
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WRITE TO THE POLLIES AND THE NEWSPAPERS. CALL UP YOUR LOCAL MP AND TALKBACK RADIO STATION.

Politicians need to know about your serious concerns with the destruction of the globally significant forests of the Upper Florentine Valley. Become an active citizen and exercise your democratic right to let the government know that old growth logging and the destruction of ancient ecosystems is unacceptable, and that serious changes to legislation and policy need to happen now!

Write a letter (every hand written letter is viewed as representing the opinions of 100 voters, so it’s certainly worth making the extra effort) or send an email to your local federal member and any (or all!) of the following members of parliament. Make an appointment with your local MPs … they are your employees and need to listen to your concerns.

Write letters to the editor of your local newspaper and call up talk back radio. Get the word out in the media!

The Tasmanian Government.

THE PREMIER OF TASMANIA
David Bartlett, MHA
Level 11. 15 Murray St. Hobart, TAS 7000
david.bartlett@education.tas.gov.au

THE LEADER OF THE LIBERAL PARTY, TASMANIAN DIVISION
Will Hodgman, MHA
Parliament House, Hobart, TAS 7000
will.hodgman@parliament.tas.gov.au

The Australian Government

THE PRIME MINISTER
The Hon. Kevin Rudd MP
PO Box 6022, House of Representatives
Parliament House, Canberra ACT 2600
Email via the PM.s website . www.pm.gov.au

THE LEADER OF THE OPPOSITION
The Hon Malcolm Turnbull MP
PO Box 6022, House of Representatives
Parliament House, Canberra ACT 2600
Malcolm.Turnbull.MP@aph.gov.au

MINISTER FOR THE ENVIRONMENT, HERITAGE & THE ARTS
The Hon. Peter Garrett
PO Box 6022, House of Representatives
Parliament House, Canberra ACT 2600
Peter.garrett.MP@aph.gov.au
tellpeter@petergarrett.com.au

MINISTER FOR CLIMATE CHANGE AND WATER
Senator The Hon. Penny Wong
PO Box 6237
Halifax Street, Adelaide SA 5000
Senator.wong@aph.gov.au

MINISTER FOR AGRICULTURE, FISHERIES AND FORESTRY
The Hon Tony Burke MP
PO Box 6022, House of Representatives
Parliament House, Canberra ACT 2600
Tony.Burke.MP@aph.gov.au

SHADOW MINISTER FOR CLIMATE CHANGE, ENVIRONMENT & WATER
Mr Greg Hunt
PO Box 6022, House of Representatives
Parliament House, Canberra ACT 2600
Greg.Hunt.MP@aph.gov.au

Please contact us at stillwildstillthreatened@gmail.com for more info on what you can do to help us save the outstanding forests of the Upper Florentine Valley.

NEW BANKS ACCOUNT DETAILS-
Donate online or at any Westpac Bank to help the campaign to save these precious forests.
Account name: Tasmanias Southern Forests
BSB #: 737001 AC#: 715846
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Sunday 23rd November- Sunday 7th December in Northern Tasmania

Keri James and her home-schooled 6yr old daughter, Clover, have undertaken
the biggest journey of their lives. Enraged at Gunn’s proposed pulp mill and
the woodchipping industry in Tasmania they decided to do something huge and
inspring…walk from Canberra to Tasmania. They’ve walked through other
communities affected by logging, woodchipping and huge timber companies in
NSW and Victoria and they are about to arrive in Tasmania.

Keri and Clover arrive in Tasmania on Sunday the 23rd of November and will
walk for two weeks from Devonport to Deloraine to Launceston and they are
finishing the walk with a celebration at Rowella near the Bell Bay woodchip
mill.

Walk against woodchips Tasmania itinery

Walk against Woodchips in Devonport
Join Keri and Clover for a breakfast gathering and give them a warm Tassie
welcome when they arrive on the Spirit of Tasmania.
Where: Breakfast in Pioneer Park on Thomas St, East Devonport
When: 7am Sunday 23rd November
It would be great to have some people join Keri and Clover for the first leg
of their walk along Bass Highway from Devonport to Deloraine.
You can join them for a few hours or the first day or for the whole.
Support vehicles can return people to their cars.

Walk against Woodchips in Deloraine
Join the walkers for afternoon Tea in Deloraine.
Where: Rotary Park, Deloraine
When: Wed 26th November, 3:30pm
Walk out of Deloraine on Thursday 27th along the Meander Highway at 9am. It
would be great to have some people join them for the leg of their walk along
the Meander Highway from Deloraine. Support vehicles can return people to
their cars.

Walk Against woodchips in Launceston
Join all the walkers for Picnic lunch in Princes Square
When: Wednesday 3rd December, 12:30-2:30
Where: Princes Square, Charles Street, Launceston

Walk against woodchips ends in Rowella
When: 11:30am Sunday 7th December
Where: Maluna Malaka Farm 11 Waterton Hall Rd, (off Rowella Rd, off the West
Tamar Highway, south of Batman’s Bridge) Bring your own lunch and come and
enjoy home-made organic lemonade, live music, stalls, an afternoon swim and
a leisurely walk through bushland to a special spot overlooking the Tamar
River. Please bring your friends and family and help celebrate the the end
of this epic journey. $15 suggested donation – All money goes to the Pulp
Mill Assesment Act Court Challenge.Thanks!

How you can help?

Join the walk against woodchips as a walker or support vehicle for a day or
two or the whole 2 weeks!

Help organise the events in Deloraine, Launceston or the Tamar Valley

Help to put up posters or spread the word about the walk against woodchips

Make a banner – we need one that says “walk against woodchips, No Pulp
mill!”

If you can help please contact Nat the Tasmanian leg co-ordinator on
0407249589 or natalie.keene at gmail.com
Contact Keri and Clover on 0458507083. They would appreciate any phonecalls
and text messages of support.
Contact them via email on walkagainstwoodchipping at gmail.com Visit their
blog www.woodchipwalk.com

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.

Please join Keri, Clover and other walkers from 10am at the Cafe near the Observatory, in the Botanical Gardens next to the Shrine of Remembrance.

more bands added

Madelaine Hudson
Dire Tribe
Kids Sam Band

For further details or if you would like to come and play contact Ken on 0416 516 458 or kenneven@yahoo.com.au

Before November 10th, please follow the links to the politicians below and tell them that you are urging them to put a moratorium on logging and roading in old growth and high conservation value areas in Tasmania’s Southern Forests and enter into urgent negotiations to secure the future of these forests as well as an equitable outcome for forest logging contractors.

The Australian (4/11/08) reports

In Tasmania, hard-hit forest contractors are seeking a federally funded exit package to allow them to leave the industry “with dignity”.

The time is right to secure the future of our forests and forest workers.

There are great examples where stakeholder discussions between conservationists, industry and government have delivered win-win solutions to long-running forest conflicts.

PLEAE EMAIL OUR LEADERS TODAY!!!!
Let them know that the Australian and Tasmanian communities are ready to see this long running debate solved.
Encourage our leaders to sit down at the table with Tasmanian forest campaigners and work out an environmentally, economically and socially responsible solution!

We need you to put the pressure on, showing them that not only direct activists care about saving our Southern Forests.

Sincere thanks,
Nat – Still Wild Still Threatened

Tassie Premier Bartlett

http://www.premier.tas.gov.au/contact

Prime Minister RUDD

http://www.pm.gov.au/contact/index.cfm

Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong

http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/senators/homepages/contact.asp?id=00AOU

Minister for the Environment, Peter Garrett

http://www.aph.gov.au/house/members/memfeedback.asp?id=HV4

David Llewellyn – powerful here in Tassie – Minister for Primary Industries and Water, for energy and resources;
David.Llewellyn@dpiw.tas.gov.au

Michelle O’Byrne; minister for envronment, parks, heritage and the arts;
Michelle.O’Byrne@parliament.tas.gov.au