Monday 15 June 2009

Carol, Commons, Community and the Castlemaine Forest


Picture from here

Brisbane Dateline

Networker Carol McDonough of Castlemaine in Victoria drew this site to my attention. Carol and I, along with Mikael Smith and Elyse Rider are, on behalf of GreenFaith Australia, doing a panel presentation at the Oceania Conference of the International Association of Community Development in Brisbane.

Our presentation is titled Taking Down The Fences. We will be discussing communally held resources and their protection by bringing to them modern economic, community, and resource management techniques.

Carol was doing some local research about the Lodden River when she came across the Forestwatch site and Hancock's role in destroying our forest and making its own unique contribution to climate change.

Common Pool Resources (CPRs), to give The Commons a more up-to-date nomenclature, are land, water, air, roads and routes, oceans, fisheries, wildlife, beaches and coastlines, forests and - some people would add - mainframe computers and the internet. All can be easily lost if we, as communities, do not value them and manage them well for our communal benefit. Lost? Yes, lost to people like Hancock's: lost for privatised, corporate profit, lost from community enjoyment and benefit, lost from communal regulation.

It is the destruction of the forest which is at the heart of global warming and carbon emissions which we struggle to control without forests. Major de-forestation has taken place across the world - and particularly in the tropical rainfoests of the Amazon, Indonesia, Melanesia which are to the Earth as lungs and kidneys are to our bodies.

Re-afforestation and forest restoration are not high on humanity's agenda - and they need to be.
More on this later.

And if you want to to meet the GreenFaith Australia crew and hear about The Commons and Common Pool Resources, please be at the IACD Conference next Saturday afternoon 20 June at the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre.
racism-free

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