Content Warning: this column was written without the assistance of ChatGPT. It includes strong environmental themes, over-used metaphors, and a large dose of shameless positivity.
Many readers will already know the joy of planting trees to help regenerate the region’s lost forests. Few will know that more and more local school students are being offered a chance to connect directly with this most positive of narratives.
Late last year, I helped co-ordinate a series of short hands-on workshops in public primary schools across the Byron Shire, where kids got to propagate and nurture native seeds and seedlings. Banksias, black beans and Davidson plums were among the favourites.
The responses from students, schools and principals were overwhelmingly positive, with surveys finding over 80 per cent of kids wanted more.
‘I loved how we got dirty and planted seedlings’, said a Year Three student from Main Arm.
‘The workshop was awesome’, said a Year Four student from Mullumbimby. ‘I would love it if this happened every Friday’, said a Year Six student from Byron Bay.
The seed workshops were followed by a multi-school tree-planting on Council land in Mullumbimby. Again, close to 80 per cent of students reported they wanted to do more. One teacher proclaimed he wanted a student tree-planting ‘once a month.’
There are so many positives it’s hard to know where to start. Alongside the ecological benefits of bringing back forests and habitat, from carbon capture to biodiversity, these plantings are off-line hands-on fun for kids, far away from screens and social media.
‘Engaging our students in tree planting helps foster a sense of responsibility towards the environment, empowering them to fight climate change and to make a difference locally’, said Main Arm Principal, Virginia Pavlovitch, who enthusiastically joined her students in their planting.
The big picture vision here is to enable every school student in this region to engage with the positivity of ecological restoration, routinely, in a seamless annual cycle of propagation and tree-plantings, changing their life narrative, fundamentally, forever, as the new forests grow.
My nine year old, and the many children already engaged in these workshops and plantings, will be able to say, for the rest of their lives: ‘We helped plant that forest.’
The great news is that the Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy, with support from the local Rekindle Foundation, has just decided to fund more of these workshops, with more school plantings, reaching bigger numbers of kids, and this time with guided rainforest walks.
While there’s a great hunger for this now, none of it is new. It grows from existing environmental education, and from all the fights to save and restore the forests over the past 50 years. Most importantly, it builds on tens of thousands of years of the wisdom and practice of the Bundjalung nation, who witnessed Country decimated over a few short decades of 19th century colonisation.
Regeneration is such a positive story, because it’s something we can do together to right past wrongs. As one author of the State of the Environment Report, Dr Ian Creswell, said recently, one of the best responses to a degraded environment is to join others and fix it. ‘We have amazing organisations already existing in Australia, like Landcare, like wildlife rescuers… and I’d encourage everybody to participate.’
This region boasts many Landcare groups, including Brunswick Valley Landcare and the Big Scrub Rainforest Conservancy, and millions of trees have been planted by them. The local Banyula farm project – with Re-Forest Now – is currently planting a staggering 300,000 trees. In addition to its bush regeneration work, Byron Shire Council has mapped critically important wildlife corridors, and the state government is funding repair of local creeks and rivers.
But along with all the positive news, there are, of course, challenges and controversies. There’s a debate about whether too many eucalypts are being planted for koalas on land that was rainforest, contrary to principles of ecological restoration. There’s simmering concern about too much chemical use in the weed control that follows tree-plantings. And in this state, the obscenity of land clearing and native forest logging continues.
Nationally, the Nature Repair Market Bill is before a Senate committee. Some hope the proposed market-based scheme will fund genuine restoration. Others argue it’s recycled Morrison government legislation that won’t work, and should be replaced with direct large-scale government investment.
There’s little doubt we need much more coordinated and fewer piecemeal responses to the climate crisis and massive infrastructure-type regeneration, in this, the United Nations Decade of Ecosystem Restoration, 2021–2030.
But as always, the inspiring words of British thinker Raymond Williams seem salient: ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing.’
With new generations of children getting their hands dirty and helping regenerate our lost forests, I reckon there’s good reason to be hopeful.
♦ Dr Ray Moynihan is coordinating school workshops and plantings with colleagues and Firewheel nursery. Author and journalist, he’s an honorary assistant professor at Bond University, and former Harkness fellow at Harvard University.
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