John Seed and the Council of All Beings Part III
(Page 3 of 10)
May/June 1989
By Pat Stone
Seed: Yes, we'd had quite a lot of success, especially using civil disobedience as a kind of theater of social change. By burying ourselves in the paths of bulldozers and such, we were able to get media coverage whenever we wanted. Gradually, the ecological message would sink in, an opinion poll would show that people agreed with us, and the government would finally act. Consequently, the better part of Australia's rain forests are now legally protected.
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But after a while, we began to realize that these issues were global, not merely national. The earth's rain forests are our planet's Noah's ark-they are home to half of the world's 10 million species. They're incredibly useful to us for foods, medicines, industrial products, cooling the earth by absorbing carbon dioxide-you name it. Yet they're being destroyed so rapidly, at the rate of 50 million acres or more a year, that less than a single lifetime remains before they could all be utterly annihilated.
I am Raven. I ask you to join us birds in our song when the sun rises and the sun sets. Live in the moment. Keep your life simple. Get rid of all those things that make life on this planet hard for us. Live simply, as we always have.
Scientists around the world were wringing their hands about this situation, but no one was doing anything to change it. So we realized that, as activists from the only developed country that contains significant amounts of rain forest, it was obviously up to us. We formed the Rainforest Information Centre and have been working on international rainforest issues ever since. I've been to much of the world trying to protect rain forests-to the Solomon Islands, Malaysia, India, New Guinea. In 1984 1 took a road show to the U.S., which led to the creation of your country's Rainforest Action Network (RAN), an organization that now has groups in 50 different cities.
INDEED, SEED WAS DOING MORE this past summer than leading the Council of All Beings. Between those weekend ceremonies he traveled the country, raising concern and money for the Penan, a threatened tribe that since time immemorial has lived in the rain forests of Borneo. With the help of Bruno Manser, a Swiss anthropologist (now hiding out in the jungle), these barefoot, barechested forest people have built bamboowall road blockades to try to stop Malaysian loggers. More than 100 Penan have been arrested and jailed and will go on trial sometime this year. The Rainforest Information Centre has found an international lawyer to represent the blockaders, created networks to send them food and supplies, and organized demonstrations and petition drives against the Malaysian government.
Another remarkable effort is the Tobar Donoso Project in Ecuador. Illegal logging and colonization threaten this 300,000-acre rain-forest preserve, the home of 10,000 Awa Indians. The Awa have slashed a 150mile-perimeter border, and the RIC is starting fruit tree nurseries to develop sustainable agriculture along this border in an attempt to provide sources of food and income and thus relieve some of the economic pressure on the forest. This concept, if successful, might then be used to buffer other preserved rain forests.
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