“When the decade of Landcare started in 1990 one of the programs was called the One Billion Trees program. The funding went to an organisation called Greening Australia and in NSW they used the funding to employ 6 regional coordinators, working in different areas of the state to facilitate community reforestation activity. I got the North Coast area, a paid position with a car, a phone, fax, computer etc. I was working with community groups from the QLD border to Newcastle and up the Hunter Valley.
In that time I continued lobbying to get unemployed people the opportunity to work on environmental projects and through friends I got to stay at The Lodge and have private conversations with Hazel Hawke, and Bob to a lesser extent. It was a great opportunity to have that link into the Hawke family. I had also stayed friends with a bloke called Rick Farley who I moved to Nimbin with in 1973. He had become the Executive Director of the National Farmers Federation by then, a brilliant man. He called the pair of us ‘value-added hippies.’
In the 1992 budget the Hawke government funded 2,000 places of part-time paid work experience for people to work on community and environmental projects. The union movement added a couple of days of training to it and eventually it was announced as the Jobskills program with 10,000 places for people to work on community projects, of which half were earmarked for environmental and Landcare projects.
So by now I’m working for Greening Australia and I have a smallish office in Lismore. I started with a project that had 32 Jobskills participants working on about 8 projects scattered through the North Coast and Tablelands and that was successful so I then wrote a proposal to get 300 participants of all ages working on regional environmental projects on a much larger scale. A lot of reforestation but others in environmental information technology, building, office work and so on. We had people working with Katia Nursery in Byron which provided supported employment to people with disabilities. That is also where I met Mandy Nolan who I ended up in a relationship with for a wild and splendid year. Jyllie and I had split up by then, in 1984 or thereabouts. Nearly all my relationships have been with strong, kind feminist women.
A relationship in the late eighties had produced another beautiful, funny and clever girl, now a beautiful, funny and clever Mum. I tend to get choked up trying to describe just how fine my children all are. I went on to have 2 more gorgeous and good hearted daughters with another partner and the youngest lives with me full time now. She is 12 and has a cognitive disability, is on the Autism spectrum, has mild Cerebral Palsy and in the last few years she has three life-threatening epileptic seizures. Still, she’s been on long, slow trajectory of healthy growth and improvement in her sociability and security since coming into my sole care four years ago. I am very proud of her.
Anyway, by 1996 the environmental work programs had funding for 30,000 people to work on environmental projects each year. Then Howard won the ’96 election and I moved to Canberra to lobby better, because I could see the programs I had pioneered might be axed. By then I’d transferred the North Coast Office of Greening Australia, with about 30 staff and hundreds of trainees, to the management of a newly created body with a regionally-based management committee. We called the new organisation Environmental Training and Employment (Northern Rivers) Inc, or more simply, EnviTE.
When I left the North Coast I walked away from the Greening Australia job with 2 weeks’ pay and lived on stale bread and Salvos handouts for a few months in a Canberra winter. I was also spectacularly unsuccessful in persuading the Coalition to retain and value add any of the environmental work programs. I had meetings with Vanstone and her advisors and also met with Tony Abbott who was Parliamentary Secretary to Vanstone. He was the most blatantly self-interested person I have ever met. He didn’t bother to hide it. They axed the 30,000 environmental work places for a budget saving of a bit over a billion dollars and replaced it with 200 places in the first year of the Green Corps which built up to 2,000 places over the next few years. This was at the same time that they leveraged the sale of Telstra by committing a billion dollars to the Natural Heritage Trust.
I ended up getting a job with the Greenhouse Challenge in the Department of Primary Industries and Energy and over time I worked on emission reduction strategies for the hospitals, hotels and metals sectors. Eventually I persuaded my boss we needed to do something about forestry and ended up being the office expert on using reforestation and protecting forests as part of greenhouse response. Carbon credits from forestry became a principal area of expertise, and I have worked in this area ever since. Among other things during that time I was an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC Special Report on Land Use and Forestry and project managed the first workbook produced by a national government on scientifically calculating carbon storage on forests.
In 1999 I left the Commonwealth Public Service, with two weeks’ pay again, and moved to Melbourne to live on stale bread and Salvos handouts, again. At least the bread was sourdough this time and to be honest it wasn’t always stale, and I ended up working for the Victorian Environmental Defenders Office on a project to reduce violence against forest protestors at blockades and so on. I lived in Melbourne for two years. I remember lots of warehouse parties, hip hop, miserable weather and learning tree-climbing with ropes and climbing gear. It took two years to get over nearly four years living in Canberra.
At the end of 2001 I moved back to Lismore and I’ve been here ever since. I ran for the Greens in the seat of Page in the 2004 Federal election. The reason I left the Commonwealth job was promote the policy idea that to get a carbon credit from forestry you had to make a credible, legally binding commitment to keep the carbon stored for a minimum of 100 years, so in a permanent forest. That policy idea has had some success including in California funnily enough but has been dramatically corrupted by our current government who now allow these ridiculous credits where you only have to keep a project going for 25 years.
When I left Canberra I started a private company called The Carbon Store and a second company called The Carbon Pool. In 2006 The Carbon Pool paid 6 Queensland landowners who collectively had clearing permits on nearly 13,000 hectares of remnant forest and woodland to not clear their land. We were effectively standing in front of the bull dozers waving alarge cheque instead of a placard which worked really well. I physically wrote one cheque for a farmer for just over a million dollars not to clear 6,500 hectares of Poplar Box Woodland. That project was one among a few global forerunners for avoided deforestation projects and I was invited by the Australian Government to do presentations at two intergovernmental conferences that were convened under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Forest protection and regeneration have since become a significant part of the UN climate change dialogue. It’s called REDD which stands for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, and it’s probably one part of the framework everyone agrees on. There’s still issues that need to be addressed…how we make sure that indigenous people get a seat at the table and benefit from projects, how we make sure that the storage of the carbon is permanent and others. But to the extent that we save forest from being cleared, emissions are reduced. Some of the cool, temperate forests in Victoria and Tasmania store in the order of 6-700 hundred tons of carbon per hectare. If they’re cleared and burned or turned into paper to decay quickly, you are releasing up to a couple of thousand tons of carbon dioxide per hectare into the atmosphere. Similarly, growing a new, sustainably managed forest on cleared land can absorb hundreds of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over a few decades. It gets me going because reversing tree decline has been my mission from the time I wanted to make a dulcimer, and carbon markets provide a financial incentive to do this.
More recently I have been working for a company doing projects in Queensland where landowners are paid to regrow areas of forests rather than continue clearing cycles. Right now what I want to do is basically bring it all together and integrate carbon crediting, timber production, biodiversity conservation, landscape protection and catchment protection outcomes into diverse portfolios of projects which are funded by building a financial pipeline from the Australian superannuation industry. For this to occur we need to demonstrate it as a long term, viable financial investment. I think by realising the environmental, climate change and resource production and protection
benefits we can do this and with others I am making a start. The vision that drives me is reforestation, forest regeneration and forest conservation at a scale where, for example we could have a conservation corridor from Cape York down to the Otways in Victoria, following the spine of the Great Dividing Range, to assist species to migrate as climate change really kicks in.
So I have two missions at the moment. One is to see if I can make any more impact around the stuff I’ve been working on my whole life. I feel a bit at risk of dying with Covid 19 around. I was a smoker until 12 years ago and I have three different degenerative lung diseases. Although I need to be around for another couple of decades I could easily get cleaned up so it makes you think what is important to you. I should mention in passing that mountain bikes have saved my sanity over the past few years and could save my life.
I ride pretty much every day and love it. I love working on them too. But anyway the important things to me are to try and make an impact around reversing tree decline and fostering green employment and the other thing is getting my youngest girl to a point where she is pretty sociable, reasonably happy and reasonably co-operative which is still a daily struggle, so she will get properly looked after by people who care about her for the rest of her life because I won’t be around for most of it. I’d also like to write a screenplay.”
In that time I continued lobbying to get unemployed people the opportunity to work on environmental projects and through friends I got to stay at The Lodge and have private conversations with Hazel Hawke, and Bob to a lesser extent. It was a great opportunity to have that link into the Hawke family. I had also stayed friends with a bloke called Rick Farley who I moved to Nimbin with in 1973. He had become the Executive Director of the National Farmers Federation by then, a brilliant man. He called the pair of us ‘value-added hippies.’
In the 1992 budget the Hawke government funded 2,000 places of part-time paid work experience for people to work on community and environmental projects. The union movement added a couple of days of training to it and eventually it was announced as the Jobskills program with 10,000 places for people to work on community projects, of which half were earmarked for environmental and Landcare projects.
So by now I’m working for Greening Australia and I have a smallish office in Lismore. I started with a project that had 32 Jobskills participants working on about 8 projects scattered through the North Coast and Tablelands and that was successful so I then wrote a proposal to get 300 participants of all ages working on regional environmental projects on a much larger scale. A lot of reforestation but others in environmental information technology, building, office work and so on. We had people working with Katia Nursery in Byron which provided supported employment to people with disabilities. That is also where I met Mandy Nolan who I ended up in a relationship with for a wild and splendid year. Jyllie and I had split up by then, in 1984 or thereabouts. Nearly all my relationships have been with strong, kind feminist women.
A relationship in the late eighties had produced another beautiful, funny and clever girl, now a beautiful, funny and clever Mum. I tend to get choked up trying to describe just how fine my children all are. I went on to have 2 more gorgeous and good hearted daughters with another partner and the youngest lives with me full time now. She is 12 and has a cognitive disability, is on the Autism spectrum, has mild Cerebral Palsy and in the last few years she has three life-threatening epileptic seizures. Still, she’s been on long, slow trajectory of healthy growth and improvement in her sociability and security since coming into my sole care four years ago. I am very proud of her.
Anyway, by 1996 the environmental work programs had funding for 30,000 people to work on environmental projects each year. Then Howard won the ’96 election and I moved to Canberra to lobby better, because I could see the programs I had pioneered might be axed. By then I’d transferred the North Coast Office of Greening Australia, with about 30 staff and hundreds of trainees, to the management of a newly created body with a regionally-based management committee. We called the new organisation Environmental Training and Employment (Northern Rivers) Inc, or more simply, EnviTE.
When I left the North Coast I walked away from the Greening Australia job with 2 weeks’ pay and lived on stale bread and Salvos handouts for a few months in a Canberra winter. I was also spectacularly unsuccessful in persuading the Coalition to retain and value add any of the environmental work programs. I had meetings with Vanstone and her advisors and also met with Tony Abbott who was Parliamentary Secretary to Vanstone. He was the most blatantly self-interested person I have ever met. He didn’t bother to hide it. They axed the 30,000 environmental work places for a budget saving of a bit over a billion dollars and replaced it with 200 places in the first year of the Green Corps which built up to 2,000 places over the next few years. This was at the same time that they leveraged the sale of Telstra by committing a billion dollars to the Natural Heritage Trust.
I ended up getting a job with the Greenhouse Challenge in the Department of Primary Industries and Energy and over time I worked on emission reduction strategies for the hospitals, hotels and metals sectors. Eventually I persuaded my boss we needed to do something about forestry and ended up being the office expert on using reforestation and protecting forests as part of greenhouse response. Carbon credits from forestry became a principal area of expertise, and I have worked in this area ever since. Among other things during that time I was an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC Special Report on Land Use and Forestry and project managed the first workbook produced by a national government on scientifically calculating carbon storage on forests.
In 1999 I left the Commonwealth Public Service, with two weeks’ pay again, and moved to Melbourne to live on stale bread and Salvos handouts, again. At least the bread was sourdough this time and to be honest it wasn’t always stale, and I ended up working for the Victorian Environmental Defenders Office on a project to reduce violence against forest protestors at blockades and so on. I lived in Melbourne for two years. I remember lots of warehouse parties, hip hop, miserable weather and learning tree-climbing with ropes and climbing gear. It took two years to get over nearly four years living in Canberra.
At the end of 2001 I moved back to Lismore and I’ve been here ever since. I ran for the Greens in the seat of Page in the 2004 Federal election. The reason I left the Commonwealth job was promote the policy idea that to get a carbon credit from forestry you had to make a credible, legally binding commitment to keep the carbon stored for a minimum of 100 years, so in a permanent forest. That policy idea has had some success including in California funnily enough but has been dramatically corrupted by our current government who now allow these ridiculous credits where you only have to keep a project going for 25 years.
When I left Canberra I started a private company called The Carbon Store and a second company called The Carbon Pool. In 2006 The Carbon Pool paid 6 Queensland landowners who collectively had clearing permits on nearly 13,000 hectares of remnant forest and woodland to not clear their land. We were effectively standing in front of the bull dozers waving alarge cheque instead of a placard which worked really well. I physically wrote one cheque for a farmer for just over a million dollars not to clear 6,500 hectares of Poplar Box Woodland. That project was one among a few global forerunners for avoided deforestation projects and I was invited by the Australian Government to do presentations at two intergovernmental conferences that were convened under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
Forest protection and regeneration have since become a significant part of the UN climate change dialogue. It’s called REDD which stands for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, and it’s probably one part of the framework everyone agrees on. There’s still issues that need to be addressed…how we make sure that indigenous people get a seat at the table and benefit from projects, how we make sure that the storage of the carbon is permanent and others. But to the extent that we save forest from being cleared, emissions are reduced. Some of the cool, temperate forests in Victoria and Tasmania store in the order of 6-700 hundred tons of carbon per hectare. If they’re cleared and burned or turned into paper to decay quickly, you are releasing up to a couple of thousand tons of carbon dioxide per hectare into the atmosphere. Similarly, growing a new, sustainably managed forest on cleared land can absorb hundreds of tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere over a few decades. It gets me going because reversing tree decline has been my mission from the time I wanted to make a dulcimer, and carbon markets provide a financial incentive to do this.
More recently I have been working for a company doing projects in Queensland where landowners are paid to regrow areas of forests rather than continue clearing cycles. Right now what I want to do is basically bring it all together and integrate carbon crediting, timber production, biodiversity conservation, landscape protection and catchment protection outcomes into diverse portfolios of projects which are funded by building a financial pipeline from the Australian superannuation industry. For this to occur we need to demonstrate it as a long term, viable financial investment. I think by realising the environmental, climate change and resource production and protection
benefits we can do this and with others I am making a start. The vision that drives me is reforestation, forest regeneration and forest conservation at a scale where, for example we could have a conservation corridor from Cape York down to the Otways in Victoria, following the spine of the Great Dividing Range, to assist species to migrate as climate change really kicks in.
So I have two missions at the moment. One is to see if I can make any more impact around the stuff I’ve been working on my whole life. I feel a bit at risk of dying with Covid 19 around. I was a smoker until 12 years ago and I have three different degenerative lung diseases. Although I need to be around for another couple of decades I could easily get cleaned up so it makes you think what is important to you. I should mention in passing that mountain bikes have saved my sanity over the past few years and could save my life.
I ride pretty much every day and love it. I love working on them too. But anyway the important things to me are to try and make an impact around reversing tree decline and fostering green employment and the other thing is getting my youngest girl to a point where she is pretty sociable, reasonably happy and reasonably co-operative which is still a daily struggle, so she will get properly looked after by people who care about her for the rest of her life because I won’t be around for most of it. I’d also like to write a screenplay.”