Memo for a Saner World  written by Bob Brown.  I finished reading my *signed* copy just now - yay

For those who don't know Senator Bob Brown is the leader of the Greens party in Australia, and the book was about the endless fighting that greenies have to do to save the natural environment from development. 

We have it tough.

I can't believe how much animosity people have towards greenies.  Politicians - namely our beloved John Howard -  and major developing companies find us such a disruption to their work.  They just don't care about anything except for money.

Many times they are violent towards us.  At Farmhouse Creek in Southwest Tasmania a group of protestors were shot at by loggers, yet the loggers got only a hundred dollar fine for "shooting on a Sunday"!

People are beaten up, sometimes in front of the media.

Mt Etna in Queensland, protestors in a remote cave, teething with four metre stalactites - attractive to miners for limestone - were forced out of the cave when developers set sirens off.  The sound was so loud that protestors were emerging to the surface with bleeding ears.  This was before the miners blew the caves up by dynamite, killing the hundreds of ghost bats inhabiting the caves - the only carnivorous bat in Australia.

Some places overseas like the Amazon, Rwanda, Columbia, greenies have been kidnapped, tortured, murdered.  In many cases - even in Australia - protestor's cars are blown up.  Greenpeace's ships were sabotaged by French nuclear testers. 

The list goes on.

Antarctica is the only place on Earth that remains untouched by commercial development; however, there are plans to start mining on it.

The Siberian Tiger is facing extinction.  The attitude there is, 'Let them die out.  They don't mean anything to us.'

Hyundai Engineering and Construction is building a dyke on the Saemangeum, where hundreds of thousands of water birds fly to migrate there.

On a more local scale in Australia, the beaches are under threat.  Too many people are moving to the coast and destroying what attracts them to the locations in the first place.

The Styx Valley and the Tarkine Rainforest of Tasmania continue to be logged at an alarming rate.  The world's tallest hardwood trees grow in these areas.  They are four centuries old, and yet only a tiny section is protected.  They haven't been declared National Parks.  Will they ever?  The Government just doesn't realise that tourism brings far far more money than the profits from logging.  While the owner of Gunns Limited, Australia's largest logging company, is swimming in millions of dollars, his workers are underpaid and working huge hours.  The more trees that are felled, the bigger the pay cheque.  They sell woodchips at an extremely low cost to Japanese paper mills, as if they can put a cost to the destruction of Eucalyptus regnans.  And overseas people have been put off coming to Tassie because of logging. 

These trees are being logged at a rate of 10,000 football sized fields per year in Tasmania.  They can exceed 80 metres!  They are not protected.

We're always fighting for something.  It never ends, but that's fine because we won't.  I only hope my readers who don't know much about this sort of thing will some day.  I'll be continually writing letters, signing petitions, making tax deductible donations, joining rallies and whatever else is needed to stop developments, mining, logging etc.

One person makes a difference, and if one person can then so can YOU.  Look at the Franklin River campaign, the wild rivers in Queensland, Southwest Tasmania World Heritage Listing. It works sometimes.  But there's work to be done.

Talk to me about it.  Because here's a thought: 

German researchers estimated that the world's natural resources are worth US$61 trillion per year!!!!!!

Show this to the treasurer.  I pray some day they'll listen.