Aussies Call In Against Old Growth Cutting

An excellent protest took place yesterday in Australia on the steps of Parliament. Here are the protesters:

Those people aren’t carrying signs, but they aren’t standing idle. They’re all making a telephone call to the same office at once – the office of someone named Premier Brumby. They are literally calling upon Premier Brumby to stop the logging of old growth forest on Brown Mountain in East Gippsland the border of Errinundra National Park, about 150 miles from the city of Melbourne, as the kookaburra flies.

I’m telling you about this protest from just about all the way around the world from where these events took place yesterday. I’m in the northeastern United States, but it matters to me that the old growth forest in Australia is under attack. It matters to me because the problem of ecological degradation is a global one both in cause and in effect.

In order to combat this problem, we need a stronger global grassroots media. That grassroots media needs to call attention to the incidents of ecological collapse, such as the old growth forest logging on Brown Mountain in remote Victoria, Australia. The grassroots media also needs to call attention to the work of people to solve the problems – work such as the cell phone protest on the steps of Parliament in Melbourne.

CNN didn’t report on the protest. Neither did any large media organization outside of Australia. They’re all too busy covering the same few stories over and over again, because they’re trying to make a profit, and they’ve fired most of their reporters in order to do that.

An activist site called Melbourne Protests did report on the protest. I wouldn’t have found the information if they hadn’t written about the protest. To those people who say that blogging doesn’t make a difference, I ask if it doesn’t make a difference to spread the word about this protest. Does that kind of independent news not matter? Bull. Of course it matters.

I also ask if it won’t make a difference for you to help make this protest’s impact grow. People who read Irregular Times now know about the protest. Many of those people write for their own blogs. If they write their own articles about this protest, even more people will discover what’s happening to the old growth forest in East Gippsland – maybe just a few more people, but more nonetheless.

Some people, writing from the establishment centers of power, say that blogging doesn’t matter. They say that blogging is dead. I say that blogging is dead only when we give it up for dead. I say that the blogging that the people at Melbourne Protests are doing matters a great deal to me because it helps me to see the truth of what’s happening in places where establishment journalism doesn’t bother to look.

People have become accustomed these days to looking for big people with big power to solve problems. Here in the USA, a lot of people have given up their own activism this year to contribute to the work of Barack Obama. Barack Obama may work for good, or not – we’ll have to wait to see about that. However, I can say for sure that there are many problems that Barack Obama will not do thing one about.

Barack Obama, for example, has not and will not do jack to confront the problem of the destruction of old growth forest on Brown Mountain down in Australia. It’s not in his jurisdiction as President of the United States. Obama’s got other things to deal with. He’s busy. The activists who are written about by Melbourne Protests are on the job – and you can be on the job too.

All over the world, there are places and problems and people who never make the pages of USA Today or the airwaves of Air America or the channels of your cable television service. There are small activist networks trying to get the word out, and you can help. Search for them and then make it easier for other people to find them.

The alternative is for you to stand back and watch what everyone else is watching. Aren’t you a bit tired of that?