Republished from Just Community No.8
Our BIG news is the launch of our website. Thanks to the smart and hard-working Elizabeth Collins and her team, PACA now has its own home on the internet at www.promareaclimateaction.org. Please visit and see what we are up to, join in whatever takes your fancy, become a member, and listen to our previous webinars at your leisure.
On July 21st, the monthly webinar featured Fish Creek resident and PACA member Madelaine Moore, who spoke about water across the globe, the topic of her recently completed PhD. Madelaine said the move to privatise residential water provision and establish water trading markets in the commercial arena has severely limited access to clean drinking water and forced farmers, particularly in Australia, to compete with large speculative investors for access to agricultural water.
Our speaker this month is Waratah resident Bryan Watterson, who will speak on creating a forest. Bryan is a long-standing Landcare member and enthusiastic conservationist. He escaped from Carlton in the late 1970s to the southern foothills of the Strzeleckis. His initial property straddled the Little Franklin River, encompassing ancient ash, huge blackwoods and slender tree ferns and lyrebirds. In his [own] words he had “landed in paradise”. This lush, raw mix of healthy forest quickly developed into an ingrained essence.
Bryan’s next property at Toora North, a degraded, denuded dairy block provided an enormous challenge. Sixty-thousand trees and 20 years later a young forest is filling eroded steep gullies and creating corridors linked to the Agnes River. He will tell us aspects of this journey and how it rolls into the bigger picture of catchment restoration. What an amazing legacy. Can you imagine leaving a forest as your contribution to healing the damage we have done to Mother Earth?
The author is from Walkerville
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