Global Shame Forum Archive

Rainforests of Tasmania - destroyed for woodchips

Author Topic
Julie

Australia
14 Posts
Posted - 05 Dec 2004 : 10:55:36 AM
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Tasmania has some of the most wild and beautiful rainforests on this planet. They are full of life and diversity, the home for endangered species and national icons - tasmanian tigers, tasmanian devils.
The rainforest oxygenates the air, contributes to the weather system, feeds countless species of animals, plants and fungi. It is a self managing eco-system with magnificent trees, some ancient and in excess of 80m high.
It has been in existence for longer than man has been on the planet. It is such a wonderful living resource, that you would think it would be preserved, cultivated and enjoyed for generations to come.
NO, it is being destroyed, cut down, erased in large chunks, in order to make WOODCHIPS.

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Edited by - Julie on 05 Dec 2004 12:56:06 PM

admin

86 Posts
Posted - 14 Dec 2004 : 9:35:47 PM
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It gets worse - now it seems that if you speak out and protest you get sued - what happened to freedom of speech? - read more about this at http://www.wilderness.org.au/campaigns/corporate/gunns_media_release/


CMarie

USA
6 Posts
Posted - 11 Jan 2005 : 08:03:38 AM
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Amazing how people see dollar signs instead of a resource if left unused. Amazing that we get fresh air and natural wildlife from such places among other things but all people see are dollar signs.

My children took me to Zoos this summer. The Cleveland Zoo had the rainforest exhibit and when you walked in you were in awe of the plushness of how a forest acutally looks. The feel, the smell and wildlife that currently lives in the rainforest. A true adventure and as you go out of the exhibit there is a huge computerized banner spitting out numbers of how much damage has been done in just the amount of time you have stood their gazing at the exhibit. It was a wake up call of how we are destroying all things good for us and how we should take better care of each and every precious resource.

The St.Louis Zoo and Minnesota Zoo had exceptional exhibits but nothing compared to the dead in the face numbers of destruction for the rainforest. Although I have to admit the Sea Lions were able to let us all know that plastic in our Oceans are killing them. So precious these animals are and we are destroying what God has given us all.

We have an exceptional gift when we realize how important each and every soul interacts to help each other out, even when they don't realize it!

The wave of destruction just took so many lives and they were not even given a phone call. How trite life seems sometimes when we complain because someone might have overlooked us, or we didn't get that job we wanted, house or we didn't have the right parents so we were stunted in our education. Everyone should have "Life is fragile, handle with care" at the moment they are born tattoed on their forehead.

Precious moments give us precious time to express our love for others, don't waste that time because that moment is now.

Cathy


admin

86 Posts
Posted - 03 Mar 2005 : 08:30:15 AM
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You can read more about the Gunns 20 case at their web site www.gunns20.org

Threats to Freedom of Speech

Author Topic
admin

86 Posts
Posted - 03 Mar 2005 : 08:28:06 AM
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20 people - private individuals and members of conservation groups - are being sued for protesting against the logging practices of Gunns in Tasmania, where large areas of wilderness forest are being logged.

The "Gunns 20" as they have been named, have banded together to defend their case and are attracting widescale support, because this has become a bigger issue than just the protection of wilderness forests in Tasmania. If Gunns are successful in silencing protesters against their forest practices, then what will be next? What rights will the ordinary person have to raise issues or complain when they see something wrong in society. Where will be the checks and balances to make sure that large corporations don't have carte blanche to do whatever they like?

You can read more about the Gunns 20 case at their web site www.gunns20.org

An Unsurpassed Legacy

Author Topic
RonPrice

Australia
9 Posts
Posted - 17 Jan 2005 : 3:14:52 PM
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AN UNSURPASSED LEGACY

The words of the dead
Are modified in the guts of the living.
-W.H. Auden, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”, Collected Shorter Poems: 1927-1957, Faber and Faber, London, 1969(1966), p.141.

These illustrious dead,
this reservoir of culture,
this especial cemetary,
where no tears of useless passion
fall down my cheeks,
only some mysterious yearning,
burning wish to hasten to those places
like some consolation prize,
reminder of some goal
I would pursue, some laurel.

And so I do sing of thee, to thee,
with this pipe, this flute, these sounds,
these consoling, surviving powers,
reluctantly submitting to this world of words,
some pure life instinct, immortal life,
irrepressible life, indestructible life,
very simplified life, helping me with death,
with my wish for death, my identification
with the dead and as we grasp over our years,
our Daphne, Who turns into that Tree, Anisa,
Life, sign of poethood---now immortalized
in this architectural, ceremonial dramatization,
metaphorical performance of Their Days.

We, the privileged survivors, in motion,
progress, egress, traverse great distances,
figurative and otherwise, pioneering overseas,
crucial to our successful mourning,
our clear distancing from and nearness to
your holy place, seed. The catelogues
of our offerings, their meaning and obeisance,
their gestures, demarcate and guard our separation
in time and space. Do we mourn Your loss, or our own,
or our sins of omission and commission
before Your throne? Do we grieve
the operation of processes on which we depend,
like a child’s game and its rhythm of loss and retrieval,
some archaic ritual? We try to set free, through
our mourning, our questioning, our grief,
our rage, our sadness, as an expression
of our ignorance, a voicing of our protest, our love.

Perhaps I mourn for some unconscious loss,
some melancholy, and I must continue to mourn,
as in autumn I mourn the loss of life and colour
as cold and grey set in, again and again,
like some echoing language of the dead,
like some clinging to special beauties
of the highest kind, some things,
agents of action and passion.
For how can there be any inheriting
if there be no mourning,
we who are the inheritors, the heirs,
of an unsurpassed legacy.

Ron Price
2 June 1996

One Eye For The Sun's Light

Author Topic
RonPrice

Australia
9 Posts
Posted - 17 Jan 2005 : 3:10:42 PM
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ONE EYE FOR THE SUN’S LIGHT

The utopian impulse surfaced in the 1960s; it belonged to a general renewal of a form of utopian thinking-not the education but the learning of desire-which has been significant among Western radicals since the struggles and also the defeats of the 1960s. -Raymond Williams, Problems of Materialism and Culture, London, Verso, 1980, p.221.

In these unsettling, confused,
bewildering times, while
I have been on the pioneering road,
on this journey of hope,
eyes lifted far beyond
these short-term subsidiary adjustments
toward incredible changes,
this utopian impulse, no restful stasis,
a challenge to all orthodoxies
and their vast irrelevance,
a learning of desire, finding some desire
to make the sea boil, the honey flow
in a new sweetness, often tasted,
as that old poet did here:

......the unity of man
One spirit over ignorance and vice
Predominant, in good and evil hearts
One sense for moral judgements, as one eye
For the sun’s light.1

Ron Price
3 November 1996

1 William Wordsworth, Prelude.