Tasmanian Forest Agreement - Letter to Parliamentarians

Dear <<  >> MLC

I write to encourage you to support the continuation of the Tasmanian Forest Agreement.

I lived in the Ouse district as a young child. At that time there were seven saw mills within a short drive of one-another in the district. Now there are none. There have been no significant lock-ups of forest in the Ouse district. From 1983 to the early 2000’s the amount of logging in Tasmania increased exponentially and the amount of woodchip exports increased exponentially but the mills closed.

While it is convenient to blame the greenies (as the locals often do) the material reality is that forestry pulped and burned vast quantities of saw log and special species timbers because it was just easier to make money from bulk chip exports given negligible royalties, favourable political treatment, and removal from any form of public accountability.

 

At 17 I joined the Wilderness Society after seeing a cable logging operation at Hellyer. It was 1991. At that time it was established in the literature that old growth woodchips would be uncompetitive against planation pulp within 20 years. The (then) Forestry Commission knew that. Industry chiefs knew that. Academics knew that. As a 17 year old TWS activist I knew that. The Liberal and Labor parties pretended not to know.

The wilderness movement worked hard to lock up as much high conservation forest as possible over the next 20 years before the inevitable industry collapse happened.

Forestry Tasmania and their industry allies worked hard to undermine any attempts at industry reform, conservation, or accountability over the next 20 years before the inevitable industry collapse happened. They didn’t fail to plan – they planned to fail; but a lot of money got made in the mean-time. Meanwhile the Tasmanian forest industry has been handed millions of dollars to not log forests that were never theirs.

 

Faced with unsustainable losses the Tasmanian forest industry approached the conservation movement to make an agreement. An agreement was freely made between the parties without any external interference. All signatories made significant compromises. Facing similar circumstances in Canada, conservationists and industry formed the Canadian Boreal Forest Agreement which can serve as a model for Tasmania. We are not the first.

The agreement was substantially modified by the Legislative Council. The environmental signatories agreed to these changes even though this required further compromise. The conditions of the agreement have been adhered to. While much has been made of some protests by Still Threatened Still Wild and the Huon Environment Centre, these need to be kept in perspective. The activist community in Tasmania has accepted the agreement. The two organisations above are so lacking in local support that they had to import protestors from Victoria who have no background in the Tasmanian scene. While they have made a nuisance of themselves and drawn some flack this hardly qualifies as substantial protest activity or market interference. Industry can shrug off these protests.

If you vote down the agreement we are back in the trenches. There is no good outcome to this for Tasmania. If the Liberal party and their MLC colleagues trample their own tradition of civil freedoms and outlaw protest activity in Tasmania the campaign will simply move elsewhere. Industry cannot shrug off a concerted international boycott and divestment campaign. For more on this see my blog posts here: http://www.findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2013_05_01_archive.html  and here: http://www.findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2013_04_01_archive.html

This conflict has been going on for too long. I turn 40 in October and I have been protesting since I was eleven. Recently I attended a celebration of the extension of the WHA. I asked Bob Graham when this all began for him and he said “we started the forest campaign in 1973”. That’s the year I was born. Actually some areas have been campaigned for since the 1940’s.

The agreement represents the only viable way forward for resolution of the forest conflict and long term management of the forest estate. The agreement leaves regrowth forest, plantation estates, and uncontested old growth forest as the basis of a future industry. In a rational universe the State would also be vigorously pursuing industrial hemp as an allied industry.

Ultimately I would like to live in a State where forest workers can go about their jobs with dignity and broad community support, and where some of the most amazing forest and wilderness on the planet gets the protection it deserves.

It is now up to you to decide whether to be part of the future or condemn us to the past.

Yours sincerely

 

Erik Peacock

 Tag line: Tasmanian Forest Agreement, Canadian Forest Agreement, Gunns, Old Growth Forest Conservation

 

 

Logging to the edge of the World Heritage Boundary. The boundary was drawn to exclude loggable forest. Photo taken from www.ForestryTasmania.com 

Disclaimer:  this blogspot does not support all the content on the www.ForestryTasmania.com website but notes that the images contained therein are an authentic representation of Tasmanian forestry practices.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Global Financial Crisis, Biblical Capitalism, and the case for What Works

OK so the GFC isn’t all that bad. Granted real unemployment is over 20 per cent in many countries, an entire generation have lost their life savings, hundreds of banks have collapsed, one in seven Americans is living on food stamps, bankruptcies, suicides and broken dreams stalk the land, and the social fabric is unravelling, but it could be worse. For starters the richest one per cent of North Americans have more than doubled their wealth. US Congress can still afford to spend US$300 billion plus plus on a fighter plane that doesn’t work …and then there is the historical perspective.

The last time we had a financial melt-down on this scale was 1929. Millions starved. In Germany the majority voted for a centre left government but austerity forced by the banks and by the treaty of Versailles created the conditions for extremism. In Germany, Italy and Spain it was the Nazi’s who won out. The rest is history.

What is astounding about this round of global financial rorting isn’t that it happened, or that no one has gone to jail, or that there has been no real financial reform, or that the people who created the crisis profited from it, or that the rest of us are paying. What is astounding is that there has been very little critique of system itself among the mainstream commentariate, and even less advocacy of an alternative system. After-all, three simple laws would stop these events and associated wars both now and forever. They are:

1.      ban derivative financial instruments;

2.      all contracts must be non-transferable and non-saleable to a third party; and

3.      restrict futures contracts to agricultural products (where they actually help farmers).

This is not to say that there are no other useful measures such as a Tobin tax, or that these three measures alone would stop economic bubbles or inflation – these are facts of economic life. However they would have stopped the Great Depression, World War Two in Europe, GFC 1 in the USA and GFC 2 in Europe. Oh, and the sharks haven’t finished feeding yet. GFC 3 is on its way…

On the one hand this sort of regulation would stop women dying in child birth because they can’t afford privatised medicine. On the other hand it would force speculators to make a living by actually producing something. For that reason it is not a policy option in any OECD country.

So what is the alternative? Despite the obvious and demonstrable failure of the free market / endless consumption / endless economic growth / exponential population growth model, it appears immune because there is no alternative meta narrative. Nazism is an unfortunate memory. Communism is discredited. State cronyism is facing hard limits in China, Russia and Iran. Social democracies in which the State distributes some of the wealth and provides for social goods like education and health care have fared the best. This has been Australia's story but it is hardly an 'ism' and we remain exposed through a free trade policy, high levels of foreign ownership and a floating currency.

 

Environmentalism sounds the alarm but you have to look a long way to find a comprehensive alternative global economic model or transition strategy. The Other Economic Summit (TOES) was an attempt at this. So is the moneyless economy. The anti-globalist movement has much to say but sometimes forgets that capitalism isn’t just an evil conspiracy – its’ how normal people actually behave. Trade is good and there is simply nothing wrong with a person who has two cows selling one and buying a bull.

 

The current system has failed because the monetary economy became de-linked from the real economy. When you have a fractional reserve lending system that allows banks to lend ten times what is deposited with them, and then a shadow financial system based on derivative contracts which is over twenty times bigger than the money system (some estimates go as high as 100 times), you have an inverted pyramid with the real economy at the bottom dwarfed by the imaginary economy of obscure financial instruments at the top. Inverted pyramids are inherently unstable and so the current monetary system has proved to be.

Those with an eye to what works have noticed two groups/sectors that have both weathered the storm with equanimity and prospered. They are the Islamic banking sector and the Amish, and lesser known groups that adopt similar principles.

These groups come with their own baggage of course. This includes misogyny, patriarchy, homophobia, harsh conformity and anti-intellectualism. OK, so headscarves, unrestrained fecundity and literal six day creationism may not be your thing, but can we learn something from these people? Is there a case for Biblical capitalism? I think there is. I intend to explore this in my next post.

Note: any irony you detected in this post was intentional.

 

Tag Line: GFC, Global Financial Crisis, Islamic Banking, Amish, Amish Banking, The Other Economic Summit TOES, EU Financial Crisis, Moneyless Manifesto, self reliance, self sufficiency

Biblical Capitalism, the Amish, and the GFC

        

Once upon a time people used to swap things. It was called trade. Some people were better at swapping things than others. Some people were able to make more things and store more food than others. They had more than they needed so they did more swapping, that is, they traded surplus. This was great but people wanted to be able to swap with people they might only meet once, or might never meet at all. This was made possible by a substitute from of exchange called “money”.

The creation of currency led to a great leap forward in human development. People began to trust money so much that they would give goods to someone who promised to pay them what the goods were worth plus some more, if they didn’t have to pay until later. That was called credit. If they couldn’t pay, they had to return the goods. These kinds of arrangements gradually kept getting more and more complicated. Governments started issuing sovereign bond for example, someone invented insurance, and people could invest in enterprises for a share of the profit.

As complicated as these developments became they had something in common with our very first swappers. There were two parties, an agreement, and a good or service was provided. Money was generated from surplus wealth and then re-invested. Money was simply a way of helping us honour our agreements between ourselves to exchange goods and services.

Because credit was based on the lender having a surplus it encouraged enterprise, thrift, saving, and productivity in order to generate a surplus. You either did this yourself, or you owned the means of production, such as land, slaves, serfs etc. In Biblical times this was how money was understood. The main issues of controversy were providing for the poor (through gleanings for example), allowing fair (though not always equal) wages, not extorting, respecting private property and inheritance, and not charging excessive interest or taxation. The Biblical prophets were quick to condemn what trade law today calls ‘unconscionable conduct’ with respect to the vulnerable – widows and orphans. This is what might broadly be termed ‘Biblical capitalism’. It was as fair as it could be in pre-literate societies, and it worked. The church however never established a clear set of economic rules that could give modern expression to ancient principles so things drifted along.

Now we have a fractional reserve lending system which allows private bodies to create money out of thin air and lend at interest. Agreements between two parties can be bought and sold electronically in seconds. Money and certain contracts have become tradeable commodities in themselves. In this way the financial system has become de-linked from the real economy. Money no longer serves us, the economy, or the community, we serve it - except the Amish and their Mennonite cousins don’t. 

They continue to trade and bank as they have done for three hundred years based on what they consider to be Biblical principles. None of them is spectacularly wealthy but their communities are prosperous and no one is hungry. It’s pretty simple:

·        You work hard from a young age;

·        You don’t buy stuff you don’t need (no consumerism);

·        You don’t try and keep up with anyone (no marketing propaganda);

·        You look after your family first (they are your cause and your security);

·        You generate a surplus through saving (no credit cards);

·        You use that surplus to invest in the means of production: land, plant and equipment etc. (No parties and drinking saves a lot of money);

·        You make more money;

·        You have more children;

·        You leave an inheritance (like your parents did for you, rather than having to borrow to get a start in life, then pay for your family, then fund your parent’s retirement, then fund yours);

·        You don’t owe much (because you don’t spend much), you pay what you owe fast, and to delay payment of any debt is stealing;

·        You sleep well at night and everyone goes to your funeral. Chances are you or a close friend builds your coffin.

There are now a plethora of books about the Amish, some of them quite misty eyed. I don’t think I could be Amish. I like art, music, travel and science too much, but I have to give them credit. The Amish/Mennonite have never had a financial crisis, a great depression, a war, austerity, or handed over control of their lives to the State. Banks that mostly lend to the Amish have weathered the GFC just fine. If nothing else the Amish are living proof that credit driven consumerism and highly leveraged debts are choices, not as it were, ‘acts of God’, and there are other ways of living.

On a personal note I have not used a credit card since 2001 when I had to use one to travel on our honeymoon. We are a middle income single income family. We have a home mortgage but apart from that if I can’t afford stuff I don’t buy it. We have the same television we were given in 2001 and I have never bought one. I ride the same bicycle I had when I was 17 but I am now considering electric bike options as an alternative to driving. I’m a consumer to be sure but I like to save and I hate debt…

Next post: Islamic banking

 

Tag line: GFC, Global Financial Crisis, Amish, Amish Banking, Amish Businesss, Mennonite, alternative economics, Biblical capitalism, monetarism, fractional lending, investment

Why Foresters are from Mars and Forest Activists are From Jupiter

Forest "regeneration burns" following clearfelling in Tasmanian Oldgrowth. Photo credit Beth Heap. 

 

Introduction

It is fair to say that professional foresters and environmental activists inhabit different planets; or at least they see this one very differently. That people have different worldviews is not a bad thing, but it can be extraordinarily difficult for any of us to see past our worldview even if the evidence to the contrary is glaring.

Example:

• Some people continue to believe in communism even after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the exposure of the utter failure of the communist project;
• You can tell some Christians that you are gay, you love Jesus with all your heart, you practice an exemplary Christian life, you have prayed and fasted for healing, sought rights of deliverance, contemplated suicide, and ended up on anti-depressants, and they will tell you to pray harder for healing;
• If you an evolutionary biologist speciation proves evolution, irreducible complexity proves evolution, gaps in the fossil record prove evolution, entropy proves evolution, extinction proves evolution;
• If you are a forester and you log a forest that is seventy per cent rainforest species by canopy cover, napalm it, and plant rows of eucalyptus in its place, this will be sustainable in your eyes.

The Conservationist’s View

So on to forestry. I argued in a previous blog (http://findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2013/03/quest-for-holy-grail-ecosystem.html) that full ecosystem management is a distant, and in most if not all instances, unattainable goal. It follows that a comprehensive, adequate and representative reserve (CAR) system for the target ecosystems is essential:

• as an ecological benchmark;
• to give effect to the precautionary principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle); and
• to maintain ecosystem resilience in the face of environmental change (climate change, pollution, etc).

It also follows that extractive activities with big environmental impacts like mining, clearfelling, or demersal trawl, are inherently destructive.

This is essentially the world view of environmentalists. Within that world view, activists peg themselves on a spectrum from, on the one hand, a fairly pragmatic appreciation of the challenges of natural resource management, to a mystical invocation of the sacredness of mother earth on the other.

The Forester’s View

Foresters deeply oppose these concepts. That’s a big thing to say, but it is in effect what they do say. In this alternate world view, sustainable forestry makes otiose any form of preservation because best ‘practice forest management’ ensures that the environment is not harmed in any way. In this view, all issues such as landscape values, water quality, karst, biodiversity, ground water, and soil structure, are adequately addressed through management. Any form of conservation is therefore unnecessary at best and counter productive at worst. This view was put forcefully to the Legislative Council by former forester Geoff Wilkinson. You can view Mr Wilkinson’s submission here (http://www.parliament.tas.gov.au/ctee/Council/Submissions/Sub%20121%20-%20Geoff%20Wilkinson.pdf). On a personal note I once suggested to a former district forester for Geeveston that we should have a buffer zone to prevent logging to the boundary of the World Heritage Area (WHA). He said that current management provided a buffer i.e. logging World Heritage value forests is a form of conservation. He was sincere in this statement.

Some History

Let’s start with a trip down memory lane. Tasmania’s first anti logging blockade happened at Farmhouse Creek in Southwest Tasmania in 1986.  Following this action the Forestry Commission argued before the Helsham Royal Commission that protection of the Farmhouse Creek (and Lemonthyme) forests was unnecessary. They got protected anyway.

Then in 1989 conservationists and foresters sat around a table to find a way forward but were unable, or perhaps unwilling, to overcome their world view differences. At that time, and at any time since, the Forestry Commission could have advocated formation of a comprehensive and representative reserve system, and begun work to that end. Had they done so, they could have prevented considerable environmental damage, saved the community the worst of 25 years of social conflict, and undercut both the green movement and the Green Party. Instead they went to the government of the day with a proposal for a law that locked in destruction of all the old growth forests that were not then in secure reserves. That was pretty much all the old growth on Crown (public) land. This destroyed the fist Labor/Green government and locked in community conflict to the present time.

Since then the official line has changed from ‘we don’t want forest conservation in Tasmania’ to ‘we have enough forest reserved from logging that conservation values are already protected’. Industry said that in relation to the Recommended Areas for Protection under the Grey government, proposals for WHA extensions, formation of the Douglas Apsley National Park, the Regional Forest Agreements (RFA #1 and #2), the Community Forest Agreement, and now the Forest Peace Agreement; in other words, every forest conservation proposal for the last quarter century.

Nevertheless we have the Regional Forest Agreement? Isn’t this enough?

The extent to which the RFA provides adequate forest protection is a complex question. What I will say here is that I was a Wilderness Society Activist for the five years preceding the RFA. Industry fought against the proposal that became the RFA tooth and nail. Foresters were rather silent. In other words it didn’t come about through the conscience of enlightened forest managers. It came about because of a national groundswell of protest in which tens of thousands of people marched in the streets in cities around the nation and hundreds of activists went to jail (or at least remand) for forest conservation. These were at the time the largest protests since the moratorium marches of the Vietnam war. Prime Minister Keating needed to diffuse the issue before the next Federal Election. The Regional Forest Agreements with the States was his compromise solution at that time.

Put bluntly, if it were up to foresters, there would be no Tasmanian forests reserved from logging at all.

Trust and plausibility?

 

It is always dangerous to make broad brush statements (and hard not to in short blog essays)! The ‘forest management’ argument is certainly more plausible in some circumstances than others. For example, when applied to forest that has been extensively selectively logged and burned, forest management may in some instances improve the forest. The argument is stronger for logging in dry forest types if there are small coupes, careful selection of replacement species, adherence to the Forest Practices Code, long rotations, and adjoining un-logged forest. The argument becomes steadily less convincing as you progress into pristine old growth, wet forest types, and rainforest. It becomes absurd when replacing one forest ecosystem with another, such as plantation, and when there are systemic breaches of professional standards.

Even if you accept the forest management argument in some instances there is still an issue of trust. Foresters occupy a strange position . They both inform policy and implement policy. They are forced to respond to public demands that forest be taken out of production but must also honour supply contracts. They both determine forest practices, implement forest practices, and police forest practices all at the same time.

Despite the best professional efforts of many in industry, it is hard for informed observers to take foresters seriously when, for example, they:

• want to log glacial refugia rainforest communities;
• find the largest living thing in the southern hemisphere (El Grande http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Grande_(tree ) and set fire to it;
• use cable loggers on precipitous slopes and only stop when embarrassed by publicity stemming from a blockade by The Wilderness Society (at Hellyer);
• obtain exemptions from planning laws, freedom of information laws, and laws concerning threatened species;
• self regulate; and
• ostracise whistle blowers.

One forester who broke the unofficial code of silence that surrounds forestry mismanagement in Tasmania is Bill Manning. Never a greeny, Mr Manning confirmed what many had suspected or had actually observed. 

 

To quote: “…the forest industry has become so woefully negligent in its practices that it has been forced to be exempted from all other state environmental, planning and land management legislation for the simple reason that were it to be judged by the legislation that other Tasmanians have to abide by, it would be found to be comprehensively in breach of Tasmanian law. From my extensive in the forest industry, I believe that corruption of forest management in Tasmania [is] such that there is no enforcement of this weakened code of forest practice, and no silvicultural outcome other than the clearfelling of native forest for plantation…the decimation of habitat for endangered species…and finally a culture within the Tasmanian forest industry of bullying, cronyism, secrecy and lies.” (Quote from Senate Hansard, Rural and Regional Affairs and Transport References Committee, Plantation Forests Industry, 8 October 2003, at page 501).

Mr Manning documented over 100 alleged breaches of the Forest Practices Code, including alleged serious corruption and criminal activity. A profession as diligent as that suggested by Mr Wilkinson’s submission might be expected to support a full enquiry, rally behind their colleague, and press the authorities to investigate thoroughly these allegations. Instead Mr Manning was ostracised, sacked, vilified, and when I last heard, was unemployed and suffering depression.

 

There was no investigation, and there have been no prosecutions. Mr Manning’s notes are presumably sitting at the bottom of someone’s filing cabinet. Is there any reason to suppose that ten years later anything has changed?

 

Cable Logging in World Heritage value forests, Florentine Valley Tasmania

 

Readers may be interested in my earlier post on the forest peace deal here: http://findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2012/12/tasmanian-forestry-peace-deal-should-we.html

Tag line 1: forest peace talks, silviculture, forest practices code, florentine valley, world heritage, forest protest, Ta Ann, old growth forest logging, clearfelling, El Grande, World Heritage Area, RFA, Regional Forest Agreement, corruption, Legislative Council.

Tag line 2: forest peace deal, Christine Milne, Terry Edwards, Vica Bailey, Bob Brown, Dr Pullinger, old growth forests, high conservation value forests, The Wilderness Society, Tony Burke, Michael Hodgeman.

The Extremely Greedy Forty Percent Extra Party

Anybody ever heard of politicians downsizing Parliament to save money then voting themselves a 40 per cent pay rise in the middle of a recession?  Well, it happens in Tasmania.  At the time unions were pushing for pay parity with other States but the government said there wasn’t enough money, but they found enough to fund their own pay rise.  Chris Kelly put out the idea of founding a political party to protest the pay rise and push for Parliamentary reform.  Chris, a small group of friends and I formed and registered the ‘Extremely Greedy Forty Per Cent Extra Party’ with a pink pig as the party logo.  Within weeks our party had 300 members and attracted serious and comic commentary in the press. 

Wouldn't YOU vote for these lovely people?

We ran candidates in each electorate – out polling the National Party in Franklin. My running mate Peter Heading and I got 384 primary votes from the good people of Launceston.  If we had campaigned in Launceston we would have got more!  What creative political parties are out there that you know of?  Note: I am not interested in the far far right!

Australian Defence Force Reform and the RAAF

From 'Lost International Soldiers' photo collection. 

Debates about buying things for Defence to blow people up with tend to fall into two camps.  There is the “war is bad so we need to stop funding it, fighting for peace is like procreating for virginity, all wars are the fault if the West so if we spend more money on foreign aid we wouldn’t need a defence force because all the nice people over there wouldn’t come over here and invade” camp.  Then there is the “what the fig are smoking, international relations works by the law of the jungle, you only own what you can defend, there were lots of nice Germans in the 1930’s but WWII still happened, we need lots and lots of shiny new weapons to scare the bad guys with” camp.  Then there are lots of people who understand international relations and geo-strategic policy quite well but lack the technical knowledge to understand practical military things, such as why the Chinese J-20 stealth fighter/bomber/interceptor is a strategic game changer that eats the US Joint Strike Fighter for breakfast and has the Superhornet for desert.

Remember the Somme?  Lots of propaganda, lots of theory, not much empirical

analysis. There are a very small number of people who actually do real analysis – like Dr John Stillion of Rand Corp (at that time) who told them the truth about the Joint Strike Fighter – center piece of a defence ponzi scheme that is now threatening not just Western budgets, but Australia’s future existence as a nation.  The Australian Defence Force bureaucracy ignored him and every other analyst who didn’t sing along to the JSF song.  The fact is, if more people had understood what military technology meant for strategic policy WWII would not have happened.  The fact is, history is repeating. 

In subsequent posts I have added my submissions and correspondence and a number of opinion pieces based on research done over nearly a decade. See for example here:

http://findinghomebookspace.blogspot.com.au/2013/09/defence-force-pornography-meets-real.html

You will note that all my predictions have come to pass and none of the issues I raised were addressed. Read more analysis from ‘down under’ in the book and here:
 

http://elpdefensenews.blogspot.com.au/

http://www.ausairpower.net/

Saving the Tarkine Wilderness

True wilderness still exists on planet earth – within driving distance of a domestic airport.  The Tarkine is named after the Tarkinener Aboriginal people who inhabited a large expanse of North West Tasmania at least since the land bridge to mainland Australia was flooded circa 6000BCE.  It’s an incredible primordial and still largely unspoiled place.  It is also a stronghold of the new threatened Tasmanian Devil.  Stands of tall Eucalyptus forest give way to pure temperate rainforest that wash up against rolling grassy hills interspersed with woodland, rivers and streams that find their way to a wild coastline. 

This should have been made national park along with Yellowstone but instead the Tasmanian government spent scarce public funds bulldozing a road through the middle of it.  It was calculated vandalism.  I joined the fight against the road, eventually suing the Government in the Supreme Court.  Largely as a result of that campaign eco-tourism is flourishing in the Tarkine and the world’s largest tract of temperate rainforest is protected from logging.  However it is now threatened by mining. Given the size of the area some small scale or underground operations could be managed without doing great violence to the integrity of the area.  Unfortunately we are talking ‘open cut,’ lots of mines and lots of roads.  

 

This is not my video, is was shared on youtube by user jeffdjtube. It shows some of the gorgeous scenery in the Tarkine region.

This is a call for help.   

See more here: http://www.wilderness.org.au/regions/tasmania/tarkine-indigenous-heritage-under-threat

A Little More About The Book

This recently released autobiography deals extensively with matters of faith, activism, and creation care. 

This story relates the experience of emigrating from Britain to rural Australia as a young child.  It chronicles my family’s faith journey after leaving the church and their adventures in home education and natural learning.  It tells a story of discovery in the Australian wilderness; of finding faith, and subsequent journeys through environmental activism, evangelism, and relationships. 

Follow the author’s journey as he takes you into the wilderness, helps found a political reform party, trains in non-violent direct action, and stands in the dock in the Supreme Court as a litigant against the State.  Travel with him back to the British Isles, to Indonesia under dictatorship, to the Cronulla race riots in Australia, and then back to his mountain cabin in Tasmania.

This is both a very personal story and an insider’s view of public life.  It chronicles and critiques religious and other fundamentalisms as they encounter the real world of human passions, greed, and real politic.

Often humorous, sometimes tragic, this is a very personal story of engaging with public life, about finding the divine in odd places, about social conflict, and about finding in the end those things that hold us together. It is about the strange ways that love finds us. It is a story of finding home.

Finding Home is available from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and all good e-book sellers.

It can also be puchased from the publisher Authorhouse UK.

Alternatively, your local book store can order it by quoting the following ISBN: 978-1-4670-0136-6