Trees are very good friends. Firm friends. My five year old’s tree could be relied upon to be there next day, uncritical and protective. And think of trees’ contribution to our lives. They provide boats, buildings, paper, furniture and, for clog-wearers, footwear. As well as contributing toothpicks and chopsticks they give little birdies somewhere comfy to sit. Best of all, they help produce breathable air and lock up that naughty carbon. Why is why I am talking to the Greens about giving trees the vote.

When you stand looking down on the Freycinet Peninsula, it’s a bit like life really – its beauty, ruggedness and ageless power have the ability to overpower, inspire or make you feel as though you’ve really just come home. Like a life well lived it has a sense of real and tragic history and a genuine hope for an exciting future for yourself
and those who will follow.

The Earth and its magnificent gift of life deserve the best efforts of every human.

We need help nature by looking after the planet’s ecosystems. We must do something about the three major things that affect our demand on our planet: what we consume, how we produce things and the size of the population.

Earth Overshoot Day will occur this year (2012). This is the day when we have used up all the resources that our planet produces for the year, when we begin living beyond our ecological means. All resources used for the rest of the year will eat into the Earth’s savings. This means that we need 1.4 planets to support us… Our use of nature’s resources has risen from using 50% of Earth’s resources in 1961 to over 125% in 2007 to more than 130% in 2008. Next year we will use even more.

All business and banking people will tell you that the last thing that you want to do in business or life is eat into your savings; you must live off the interest and hand onto your savings at all costs. So why is it that we are chewing through our Earth’s resources (savings) each year? It’s official – we are living on credit that we will not be paying back. Just like an overdue loan against our pocket money, the day will come when we will have to clear our debt.

Never was a continent naturally so clean, and made so dirty, as Australia. There was not an animal pest, scarcely a vegetable pest; fools and the old world supplied them all.

Behind us lay the great Antarctic Land; snow peaks rising beyond one another until by distance they dwindled away into insignificancy. The silence and immobility of the scene was impressive; not the slightest animation or vitality anywhere. It was like a mental image of our globe in its primitive state – a spectacle of Chaos. Around is ice and snow and the remnants of internal fires; above, a sinister sky; below the sombre sea; and over all, the silence of the sepulchre!

We save paradise by an intense education program where you get people that you can trust to talk sanely about the environment and hope that the message will get through.

First, agriculture still has an important niche role in the economy; it still feeds us, with around 93% of Australia’s food grown here. Second, the one-third of Australians who live in regional Australia are our fellow citizens, and they should not suffer inferior services because of the expenses of distance. Third, there is our obligation to inhabit the land in order to care for it. Indigenous Australians have always known this, and so do many others who live on the land… The promise of federation was a nation for a continent.