Politics

Fact one: Nearly all of the immensely tall old growth mountain ash forests in Australia, the eucalyptus regnans, have been logged away. Most of the last remaining virgin stands are in Tasmania, but the trees here are being chipped up, turned to pulp and used for products like toilet paper. The fact that the biodiversity of these forests—as seen from the ground—is being destroyed has been known for some time. However, what is only now being discovered is the rich diversity of life in the forest canopy—that top portion of the trees rarely, if ever, visited by humans.

Fact two: Humans are the only primates that do not spend time in trees. Even gorillas, the largest primate, spend up to 20 percent of their day in trees.

In the fascinating book, The Wild Trees, Richard Preston describes in great biographical, emotional and scientific detail, the new breed of human tree walkers that ascend the tallest trees of the world in their efforts to save them.

The forest canopies of the earth are realms of unfathomed nature, and they are vanishing. The earth’s forests are being logged off, burned away, turned into patches, and reduced to small fragments. We know very little about the forests or about what is happening to them, as little, possibly, as we know about the oceans that surround the continents. We do know that whatever happens to the great systems of nature will also be what happens to us.

The species that live in forest canopies are largely unknown. The forest canopies of the earth are believed to hold roughly half of all species in nature. The forest canopy is the earth’s secret ocean, and it is inhabited by many living things that don’t have names, and are vanishing before they have ever been seen by human eyes.

Kevin Rudd and the Australian Labor party won the federal election this past weekend partially by promising to sign the Kyoto agreement on greenhouse gas emissions. This, in and of itself, is good news and most of the international news media talk about Rudd heralding in a new era of progressive environmental legislation.

I should be happy with this election win, but I am not. As John Howard gave his televised concession speech on election night admitting defeat, I was certainly relieved that he and his nefarious cronies didn’t get back in, but I did not feel jubilant that Rudd and his cronies got in. Why? Because both the Liberal and Labor parties have supported—with a billion dollars of tax payer’s money—the forestry industry in Tasmania and the construction of Gunns Pulp mill.

Kevin Rudd talks about Kyoto and the need to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions, yet he backs a pulp mill that will increase Australia’s CO2 emissions by 2% per year or the equivalent of putting an additional 2 million cars on the road. And, more importantly, the pulp mill will double the amount of trees cut down (80% from native forests) increasing the total yearly tonnage of wood chips to nearly 8 million.

In Preston’s book, tall tree climber and canopy voyager Steve Sillett speaks about the redwood forests in America, but he could be equally talking about Tasmania’s forests when he states:

They were reduced to scraps by us. Our society—and I don’t mean just American society; I mean Chinese, Brazilian, European society, all of us as humans—we are homogenizing the earth’s biosphere. We don’t know what will happen to the biosphere or to the forests. I’m afraid that our work trying to understand the redwood forest might just turn out to be documenting something magnificent before it winks out. This forest gives us a glimpse of what the world was like a very long time ago, before humans came into existence. We are in one of the last great rain forests remaining in the temperate zone. These tiny little pockets are all that’s left of it. We can talk about conserving biodiversity, conserving species, but that isn’t enough. We could keep the redwood species alive as a bunch of little redwood trees, but this forest and all that it shows us would be gone.

If I have one wish about this election it is that Kevin Rudd will go out on a limb and with the force of an angry gorilla losing his tree home sideline the powerful forestry union in Tasmania and preserve what is left of our natural heritage. The original, intact forests in Tasmania were among the most beautiful forests on earth, and they’re almost totally gone. Our human fate rests with the fate of these trees.

…..And if, in the end, all other avenues are denied us, if it takes standing on the road to the pulp mill site and placing our bodies between their machines and our home, we will stand there, in peace and with pride, united against hate and greed, joined in our love for our island. And if we are arrested and thrown in jail, then we will go to jail in our tens, we will go to jail in our hundreds, we will go to jail in our thousands, and Paul Lennon will have to build seven new prisons to house all the people who will come and who will keep on coming before they even attempt to pour the foundations of one new pulp mill.

If it must be, I will stand on that road to the pulp mill. Raise your hand if you will stand there with me, raise your hands so Kevin Rudd can see he was wrong, raise your hand so Peter Garrett can see that people care, raise your hand so John Howard can see this matters, raise your hand so that ANZ, Perpetual, AMP and the Commonwealth Bank can see that will have to deal with the fallout of the biggest civil disobedience campaign in Australian history since the Franklin River blockade if they do not take action now.

Now is the time for turning, now is the season for our change, now must come that moment when we no longer are cowed, when we cease to be silent, when we speak the truth to power and say no to this pulp mill and yes to a future in which we are governed in the spirit in which we live: with goodness, with the interests of others in our heart and not the leash of greed tearing at our throat. Now is that hour, now is our future. The journey is long, the road is dark and frightening, but together we can reach our destination: the Tasmania of which we all dream, where all are welcome and all prosper, made no longer of lies but truth, built not of rich men’s hate but our love for our island and for each other. Our love. Our Tasmania. Let’s take it back.

….Richard Flanagan in a speech to 15,000 people at a Anti-Pulp mill rally in Hobart last Saturday

And when Richard asked the rally crowd of 15,000 people to raise their hands if they would commit themselves to block the construction of the pulp mill, we all did. Such a beautiful thing to witness: all those hands waving in the air.

photo: Matt Newton

Witness

I want to tell what the forests
were like

I will have to speak
in a forgotten language

W.S. Merwin

Still fuming after writing last week’s blog entry about the Labor Party in Australia giving short shift to their traditional allies, the environment movement, I wrote an article for the widely read Australian online political news journal, Crikey. This was published yesterday (Monday) and is posted beneath today’s photo shown below.

But first, for any American readers and others not familiar with the Australian system of voting, let me point out, in an overly simplistic way, a couple of things.

1. There is in Australia a system of voting that is “preferential”. Under this style of voting, the voter will vote for all the candidates on the ballot sheet by numbering them from “one” to “five” (if there are five candidates).  If their first choice doesn’t have enough votes to win, then their vote goes to their second choice, etc. Back in 2000, if America had such a system, then Gore would have become president as the Ralph Nader vote would have eventually gone over to Gore (assuming that the Green vote “preferenced” Gore ahead of Bush).

2. Of the two major political parties, the present Liberal Party is similar to the Republican Party and very much aligned with the worst of the Bush policies. The Labor Party is somewhat similar to the Democrats, but is becoming increasingly more right wing. Scary.

It’s tough being in a minor political party like the Greens, but it is all the more tough when one feels that our views are being ignored at the expense of the health of the planet. Despite climate change coming off the back burner and now front and centre of a lot of debate, the people who for years have constantly led the debate—the environmental movement— are effectively being shunted aside by the major political parties who only see them as a threat to their power base rather than talented people who just might have some answers to the perplexing questions of how to address the myriad of problems presented by climate change.

Make no mistake about it. Although in the article below I talk about forestry issues, these same issues are intimately linked to the climate change debate. As far as I am concerned, neither major political party understands what is at stake. They just don’t get it. When the next federal election takes place and I have to decide on how to preference my votes, I will most certainly feel as though I’m between a rock and a hard spot as to what decision to make. It sucks.

A Green preference vote to the Liberal Party?

Since becoming an Australian citizen in 1996 I have exercised my right to vote ticking either the Green or Labor boxes and preferencing accordingly. Never did I give the Liberal candidates a second thought, nor imagine that I ever would. Now, though, with Rudd’s extremely regressive forest policy, this looks to be the year that the Liberal team gets preferenced ahead of Labor.

Being spit in the face by Rudd and Garrett would generally not be enough to force a change of thinking as the Labor Party traditionally has been more “liberal” in its platforms and more “voter friendly” than the Liberal Party. But, pride aside, and as unfathomable as it seems (even to myself), I’ve become increasingly scared that Rudd and his team will be more ruinous on Tasmania than Howard ever was.

All my philosophical arguments for world peace, social and environmental justice, and economic sanity, are based around the simple Thoreau dictum: “In wildness is the preservation of the world”. With a solid majority of the world’s climate scientists understanding this, with more and more economists and corporate leaders understanding this, with the public increasingly aware of the importance of the environment in the health and wealth generation of our local and global societies, and, with even the more conservative, Weekend Australian, publishing a long article on Tasmania titled: “Logging itself into oblivion”, it is astounding to have Rudd and the Federal Labor policy makers give the environment (hence, jobs) a total write off. To say that this is insulting to every progressive thinker in Australia is an understatement.

Yes, I am very well aware of the Liberal Party’s social and environmental policies and how mean spirited they have been for the past ten years. However, with Rudd at the helm of a team of anti-environmentalists headed by Julia Gillard, Michael O’Connor, Kerry O’Brien and Dick Adams in Canberra along with the mendacious CFMEU, Paul Lennon, Gunns and the pro-logging mob down in Tasmania, I fear the worst for those of us left down here trying to protect, not only our fast diminishing native forests and prime agricultural farmlands, but any semblance of what remains of ethical democracy. And it is this latter component—erosion of democracy—that I worry about most.

Michael O’Connor of the CFMEU (construction, forestry, mining and electrical union) is on Labor’s national executive and is best mate with Julia Gillard, Premier Lennon and Gunns’ John Gay. If Federal Labor teams up with State Labor and O’Connor’s “hate the Greenie” union, any hope of an economic renaissance in Tasmania based upon the brand of “clean, green and intelligent” will be bulldozed into oblivion. The further entrenchment of a Lennon style bad boy’s government will spell disaster for enlightened governance.

There is no questioning that Howard, along with Eric Abetz in Tasmania, has been a nightmare. But to vote Labor just because one wants to get rid of one form of cancer, will only serve to replace within the body politic a more aggressive form of cancer. This I can’t stomach.

Call it tough love, or whatever, but I would rather have four more years of the little sh_t Howard, than a possible ten years being dictated to and governed by a union whose understanding of democracy and global climate change is limited to something out of the brutal dark ages. To get my vote back, Labor has to either dump the CFMEU or bring in those leaders and policy makers who truly, truly understand the total importance of a healthy environment in the making of a wealthy, just society.

My advice to the follower of Christ, Peter Garrett (opposition minister for the environment): “Get out of the Labor Party while you still have half a chance of obtaining a pass at the pearly gates.”

My advice to Rudd and Gillard is to put fridge magnets everywhere with this quote from global explorer, Peter Matthiessen:

In the forgetting that we, too, are animals, a part of nature, as dependent on its health and balance as any other mammal, we foolishly permit the unrestrained industrial erosion and poisoning of our Earth habitat that promises to leave mankind as desolate and bereft of hope as a turtle stripped live from its shell.

In the forgetting that we, too, are animals, a part of nature, as dependent on its health and balance as any other mammal, we foolishly permit the unrestrained industrial erosion and poisoning of our Earth habitat that promises to leave mankind as desolate and bereft of hope as a turtle stripped live from its shell.

Peter Matthiessen, from “End of the Earth”

I had just read this passage from Matthiessen’s book on the Antarctic when I heard on the radio Kevin Rudd, the federal leader of the Labor Party, make a promise to the pro-logging forestry industry, that if elected Prime Minister of Australia at the upcoming election, he would not protect any more of Tasmania’s old growth rain forests.

I couldn’t believe my ears. After so much has been written about the importance of preserving what is left in the world of wild habitat, here was the leader of a major political party completely refuting the gathered scientific, economic, social and cultural evidence and caving into the bully tactics of a very small, yet powerful union of greedy retards (I use “retard” here in the sense of someone stupidly holding back growth towards a compassionate awareness). Just this past weekend there was an article about Tasmania in the national newspaper, The Australian, where the title, in big, bold letters proclaimed: Logging itself into oblivion. One sentence from the article conveys its essence: “The short-sighted trashing of what makes Tasmania attractive is economic and environmental vandalism.”

Rudd’s trip down to Tasmania yesterday to cement his cosy relationship with the corrupted state political leader, Paul Lennon, and his myrmidons in the logging union, has left those of us who care about this world scared that Rudd will be no different than Howard if he becomes Prime Minister of Australia. Such a shame. I hate to think that all the good work people everywhere have been doing to unseat John Howard (George Bush’s friend in creating even more world terror) will only be to put at the top of the trash pile just another charlatan with only the barest of credentials above the weasel Howard.

It’s terribly sad to be going to the polls to be voting for just “the lesser of two evils”. In a twisted demonic way, I almost wish Howard will win so that there might be, at least, a squiggle of hope that Labor’s next leader will truly understand the importance of the environment in protecting the wealth and health of this nation. With Rudd at the helm, the possibility of choice will be greatly diminished.

Still recovering from the pain of my recent hernia operation, I gaze out the window and am doubly pained by the sight of an empty bench that, although seemingly in the shadows, is floodlit with a radiant light. It speaks to me of the folly of humans and the possible slow demise of the human species because of this folly. All the world’s focus is, certainly, now upon us; we are at stage centre. Yet, in this global council of all beings, human beings seem forever willing to forfeit their right and obligation to be present at this council. We do this at our peril.

I want my torn body to heal and I want the torn relationship between humans and the rest of the living world to heal as well.

Like Peter Matthiessen:

Therefore I seek to understand phenomena that might help our self-destroying species to appreciate the shimmering web of bio-diversity in the Earth process, the common miracles, fleeting as ocean birds, which present themselves endlessly to all our senses, to be tasted, experienced, and fiercely defended for our innocent inheritors against the rape and dreadful wasting of this beautiful and fragile biosphere and its resources.

With the type of politicians and corporate CEOs that currently make up the power structure of the world, this is a daunting task. Still, even though I respect that suffering is a condition of being human, misery is a choice. A choice I choose not to make. Remaining faithful to goodness is a better option. Out of this continuous struggle, hope is earned. The turtle may yet retain its shell.