Australia: John Seed on Direct Action and Deep Ecology
“I was living on Bodhi Farm at The Channon and thought I was going to
spend the rest of my life organising meditation retreats and growing
organic food when somehow I found myself involved in the direct action
at Terania Creek,” he said.
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His passion for rainforests can be traced back to the Terania Creek
protests in 1979 when the so-called “new settlers” in the area clashed
with police, loggers and the Forestry Commission in what became a
pivotal moment for the environment movement in Australia and the
world. “It turned out to be the first direct action in defence of
rainforest anywhere in the world, though we didn’t realise that until
many years later. I knew nothing about rainforests at the time but in
the process of protecting Terania Creek we learnt lots…
That rainforests are the very womb of life, home to more than half of the
species of plants and animals in the world.” John said satellite
photographs that showed the rate of rainforest destruction at the time
led to predictions that they would be wiped from the face of the Earth
within a human lifetime. “There wasn’t a single environment
organisation in the world that had the rainforests on their agenda at
the time and so we decided to sound the alarm and started the
Rainforest Information Centre as a vehicle for doing that. At first we
were involved in communicating to groups all around the world about
the importance of rainforests while doing direct actions in Australia.
We went from Terania Creek to Mt Nardi, down to the Franklin River and
then up to the Daintree with all kinds of less memorable actions in
between, just getting arrested at each place.”
John said the battle for Terania and the 1982 ‘Rainforest Decision’, when Premier Neville Wran agreed to protect 900,000 hectares of native forests in NSW, was “the highlight of rainforest conservation worldwide”. But after several years of direct action and training others in non-violent tactics such as digging themselves into the ground in the path of oncoming machinery, John realised he was never going to be able to save the planet one forest at a time. “The whole idea that we only have to protect representative areas is based on a complete misunderstanding of the nature of ecology and life…
Vast areas of wild nature need to remain in order that the so-called free ecosystem services can maintain the balance of gasses in the atmosphere, the maintenance of the water cycle, the maintenance of soils and so on. These things are created by wild nature and if we think we can just have a little national park here and a little national park there, we’ve go another thing coming,” he said. “I began to look at the underlying psychological disease that inflicts modern humans that allows us to imagine that we can profit from the destruction of our own life support systems.
“Paul Urlich, the American ecologist, said, ‘We are sawing off the branch that we are sitting on’, which clearly indicates some kind of psychological problem… I began to wonder if there was a way of addressing that, rather than rushing from one kind of crisis to another trying to put out the flames.” John said it was in this context that he came across the concept of Deep Ecology, a philosophy formulated by Arne Naess, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Oslo University.
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Fro more info on Deep Ecology: Arne Naess founder and Deep Ecology