Tasmanian Public and Environmental Health Network today calls on the main environment organisations to seriously rethink future strategies in environmental activism.
Healthy, sustainable ecosystems are directly linked to healthy humans and animals – this is fundamental to the One Health approach taken by TPEHN in our activism.
With vast tracts of Tasmania’s catchments now converted into industrially managed timber monoculture plantations – developed as feedstock for a non-existent but ´potential´ mill – it is urgent that we declare that enough is enough!
This ‘business first’ model must stop or it will irretrievably damage Tasmania and our children’s future.
It was naïve folly for three environmental groups to embark on a complex set of forests and forestry negotiations with the pretext that they were truly representative or that they could advocate effectively. For many decades Tasmania’s peak organisations have taken strategic decisions based on reactions to Government actions.
Ten months of talks between three peak e-NGOs and seven peak forestry interest groups culminated in the signed ´statement of principles´.
Yet, as we are now understand, the document binds no organisation or government.
There are two strongly contested principles – one makes reference to ‘a pulp mill’ and the other to the beginning a moratorium on logging of all high conservation value forests by 15 March 2011.
The leaking to media outlets in October 2010 of a draft ´statement of principles´ referring to ‘a pulp mill’ and then the very recent political misrepresentation of that principle by the new Tasmanian Premier Lara Giddings is evidence of attempts to undermine and corrupt this delicate negotiation process.
For community groups in the Tamar Valley, outside the roundtable talks, these blatant actions naturally lead to community anger and distrust directed at the e-NGOs.
Now the roundtable forestry groups with tacit agreement from the State Government have introduced confusion over the interpretation of the principle on the moratorium for cessation of logging native forest by 15 March 2011.
This is latest example of the way powerful interests ensure important negotiation processes are undermined allowing local communities and natural environments to continue to be eroded and destroyed.
In the 21st Century with a human population pushing towards 7,000 million, the degradation of ecosystems and depletion of natural resources accelerates.
These types of dysfunctional and undemocratic incidents directly feed into the political system effectively crowding out and wearing down any effective opposition.
Important public processes requiring ‘community consultation and engagement’ must not be treated as ‘divide and conquer’ exercises.
TPEHN considers that it is futile for ET or other eNGO’s to hold any discussions as proposed by Gunns for later this week.
Our call is for all communities, organisations and individuals to regroup and rethink how to be inclusive, democratic and above all effective.
What Dr Alison Bleaney told Greg L’Estrange:
break o’day catchment risk group
Mr G. L’Estrange,
CEO Gunns Ltd,
78 Lindsay St., Box 572
Launceston, Tasmania 7250
15 February 2011
Dear Mr L’Estrange,
This is in reply to your letter of 25 January 2011.
I appreciate your offer to be appraised of Gunn Ltd’s strategic direction in the global forestry and wood products market. However, as long as these plans include a pulp mill for Tasmania with eucalypt plantations as its feedstock, then the following points need to be explicitly addressed:
· the problems associated with pesticide use in plantations including surface water and groundwater contamination and the harmful effects of aerial spraying toxic pesticides. FSC certification of plantations will not address these problems.
· the impact of the toxic products released by large acreages of monoculture exotic eucalypt plantations on ecosystem health and water quality.
Perhaps you may like to contact us again when these points have been addressed and some headway is made with solutions to these problems.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Alison Bleaney OBE
MB ChB FACRRM
Spokesperson for the Break O’Day Catchment management Group
Earlier on Tasmanian Times: Dear Mr L’Estrange
