This story stopped me in my tracks. It gave me an insight into the Tasmanian forestry issue that is that the positions – Anti forestry vs. Pro Forestry- is like our race issue. Too look at the issue as pro and anti forestry or industry vs Greenies is a lazy analysis of a situation that is more complex and really about values. To see it through the old for and against lens and characterise people like that is to miss the complexity of what lies behind peoples’ actions.
A PARABLE of the broken community that found a way to mend itself.

I’m going to draw on a story tonight I first heard told to me a few years ago by a bloke called Don. Don is a big loud Texan. Don told me and about a dozen other people about the story of a broken community that had been split down the middle, that had seen systematic violence, jailings, public debate characterised by hatred, murder and bloodshed. It was a community that despite all this had found a way forward – improbably, against the odds, it has emerged, shakily, but nevertheless emerged and is now finding its way in the world.

That place is South Africa.

It struck me that the story was a parable, teaching us how we might think about our own island and its divisions, a parable for our place, our island and what it is and what it could be. As I listened to Don tell the story of what happened in South Africa and how I saw in it parallels to Tasmania and the forestry issue. Don Beck is a psychologist who had trained in conflict resolution. Late in his career he came across the work of another psychologist called Graves.

Graves’ work focussed on looking at people and society through the lens of values they held and how these changed as individuals and groups and even societies adapt culturally in response to our life circumstances and challenges—what Don calls Life Conditions. Graves and Beck talk of 8 stages. These are helpful in allowing people to see behind positions to underpinning values. It’s important to remember that frameworks like this are just frameworks. They help us see reality but are themselves just that a tool not reality. With that caveat in mind let’s look at their thinking and then I’ll come back
to Tasmania.

Graves actually described an ever widening spiral – like a helix – they gave the stages colours to make them easier to talk about in South Africa – and get away from the black and white notion:

• The first is about Survival; satisfying instinctive urges.

• The second I heard Don call Tribal. Concerns with the spirit, ancestors; protection from harm; family bonds.

• The third is about the self -Power/action; asserting self to dominate others; control; sensory pleasure.

• The fourth is about Stability/order; obedience to earn reward later; meaning; purpose; certainty.

• The fifth is about Opportunity and entrepreneurialism /success; competing to achieve results; influence; autonomy.

• The sixth is about Harmony; joining together for mutual growth; awareness; belonging.

• The sixth is about Independence/self-worth; fitting a living system; knowing; good questions.

• The final level they described is about Global community; survival of life on Earth; consciousness.

Importantly too, it’s not that people, groups or communities move “up” and leave behind what’s “below”, it stays with them in their cultural DNA. That explains why I can be worried about global climate change, be entrepreneurial and ridiculously “tribal” in my longsuffering, irrational support of St Kilda Football Club. It’s all part of my cultural DNA. What the idea of the Spiral is always focusing on are the causative dynamics created by the Life Conditions and then the kinds of coping mechanisms and collective intelligences that are forged in response to those conditions.

Beck took this thinking to South Africa – off his own bat – and by various means found himself advising three players – Buthelezi, De Klerk and Mandela. His advice to them was simple and profound. He said the issue in South Africa was not about race, about black and white but about different cultural values. It was a new lens.

One piece of advice to Mandela was to stop talking about black and white, and that if he kept doing that the Afrikaners would never come peacefully to the table. Instead they had a deep-seated cultural DNA that was about entrepreneurialism and improvement – the next step for them in the framework Graves and Beck were using was about broader community and concensus – Mandela had to frame the
conversation with them about the value of moving to that next stage. Mandela had to talk to where the Afrikaners were at – about economic security of the new South Africa. This Mandela did and it was no accident that Don was personally thanked in the new South African parliament.

This story stopped me in my tracks. It gave me an insight into the Tasmanian forestry issue that is that the positions – Anti forestry vs. Pro Forestry- is like our race issue. Too look at the issue as pro and anti forestry or industry vs Greenies is a lazy analysis of a situation that is more complex and really about values. To see it through the old for and against lens and characterise people like that is to miss the complexity of what lies behind peoples’ actions.

I asked Don what he did in South Africa and he talked about a number of initiatives – some independent and some overlapping that were taken in South Africa. I want to talk about those in the hope of
prompting a discussion of what it might mean in Tasmania. The first is to map and understand the values that are being played out. What is really behind what people are saying? What is the cultural map of the issue – what’s likely to cause a person or group to shift from where to where? This is interesting for us – what’s really happening when a contractor talks about forestry or the bush. What’s behind the views of the Still Wild Still Threatened people in the Florentine?

His second insight was that you have to find ways to bring the middle together. He said in South Africa (or read Tasmania) you could see people as being at every position from irreconcilable adversaries (the flame throwers) all the way to people who are only a hairs breadth apart. Beck said the middle was where change came from but they would be attacked viciously by their own if they moved to find middle ground. He said they had to come together, in safety and if necessary in secret to map society and create a future. A story here is worth telling. I once met a young NW Coast Forester on a while we were both camped in SW Tasmania under the walls of Federation Peak. We spent hours talking. He told me of his concerns with forestry. He also told me that if he said anything inside Forestry
Tasmania he’d be finished. Likewise, I heard a member of the environment movement once say that he could not be seen to be moving towards a compromise on forestry or his position would be under threat.

His third insight is that you need to create an irresistible future that people hold in common. Again this is simple but powerful. The thinking is not new that when you bring that middle together they will have far far more in common than they hold different and those differences or tensions can be lived with.

His fourth insight was the need to then reframe the conversation and initiatives around values not positions. Two things are important here – language and where you start.

• IN South Africa Mandela talked to Afrikaners about their ability to get on and succeed in a new South Africa. IN Tasmania we have two discussions one about forests and one about the bush. It strikes me as interesting. Growing up on a farm on the NW Coast we talked about Bushies and never the forest.

• On the second issue of where you start, Beck points to a law. People don’t skip levels. They move one stage from where they are – My uncle Mafeking Carter (named for the relief of Mafeking interestingly) was a poacher, trapper, footballer and legendary bushman. He was mates with Ossie Ellis and knew Weindorfer. He built one of the first trapping huts on the vale of Belvoir. He mined for tin. He was famous for his love of the birds and bush. I reckon he might have hated greenies. There would have been no point talking to Maf about Green issues, but talk about the bush and his grandkids and I reckon he might have been there with you.

A final insight Don talked about was that the people in South Africa needed to be “inoculated” against the language of division. As the move towards coming together starts to happen and threaten power balances then those with a vested interest in the division use language to frighten people and sustain a divide. They need to be educated about this, what the words really mean. The word greenie has come to be a pejorative that is wielded with terrible precision. Similarly red neck and Bogan are thrown around with abandon but belittle the reality of where people are at that are characterised in that way.

Our community needs to understand what people are doing when they use those words. That they are seeking to divide, to obscure.

So, this I believe is our challenge. To find a way to bring our community to a new place, to find the future we want, to find the common ground that is there already and with that forge a New Deal that can underpin the way we use our forest resource and live in the bush. All it will take is for people of good will, courage and wisdom to start the journey.

Gerard Castles
University of Tasmania
November 3, 2009