Our Woods, Our trees, Our Lives & Local Agenda 21

national | environment | opinion/analysis Wednesday October 26, 2005 13:48 by Niall Harnett

The Natural Environment can't be saved by law alone. It's protectors must be the citizens themselves

The greater the diversity of life in a woodland, the greater the health of the woodland as a whole and the greater the health of all the individuals in the wood.
Nature takes care of itself and will generate balance. The 'Woodsman' or the 'Hand in the Woods', to translate correctly, can help nature, can concertina time to a certain extent and can create a symbiosis with nature, with an ecosystem, with a woodland.
Or the hand of man can destroy nature and destroy itself.

The leaves on the trees are turning to their true colours now before they fall. The acorns fall among their own leaves, this years leaves and generations of leaves. The trees make their own soil, and they love to grow in it. The Oak tree is the true king of Ireland and all of Ireland was once an Oak forest. Not just Oak, but Ash and Hazel, Holly and Yew, Alder and Willow, Fruit trees and Thorny trees, Pine and Birch etc. The Birch is called the sentinel tree, because it guards the edge of the forest and colonises new ground, sweetening any soil for the other trees to move into. The trees clean our air, they draw and clean our water and they make our earth. We make fire with trees and we make shelter with trees to protect our fires and ourselves from the elements. Woodlands and Forests sustain all life happily. "A house is just something you build around to protect your fire", Del says.

So it makes sense to cut them down doesn't it. It makes sense to put pipelines through them, roads through them, superdumps on top of them, or to make a sterile monoculture out of them by growing only Sitka Spruce in them, like Coillte are doing. It makes sense to pretend to protect them and then to secretly sell them to private companies and developers for refineries, incinerators and hotel & apartment developments.

It actually did make a lot of sense to hold the World Conference in Rio in 1992 on the 'Environment' and 'Sustainability'. Recognising that economic interests were destroying our environment and ultimately our ability to survive, we decided to move into a new era of 'Sustainable Development', defined in the Rio Declaration 1992 and planned in Agenda 21.

Agenda 21 is 'the blueprint for Sustainability' and gives ordinary people, citizens, local people and communites, the right to have a say in how our environment is managed and protected. It gives meaning to the terms 'local democracy' and 'local government' .To quote from our own Department of the Environment, Heritage and Local Government's 'Sustainable Development, A Strategy for Ireland', published in 1997:

"Local Agenda 21 is a process which facilitates sustainable development at community level. It is an approach, based on participation which respects the social, cultural, economic and environmental needs of the present and future citizens of a community in all its diversity and which relates that community and its future to the regional, national and international community of which it is a part.

- It will take into account the well being and quality of life of the entire community in the long term
- It will include a high level of participation at local level, giving particular attention to participation by minority or under-represented groups, and
- While it may focus on a particular social, economic, cultural or environmental issue it will present an integrated vision of how the other aspects of community life will be affected."

Although this State and our Government are signed up to Agenda 21, we know that they have no intention to live up to it and are fighting citizens who are actively trying to use it to protect their environment. They are determined to drive this country into the dust, and concrete dust at that. We the people, encouraged nowadays by a survival instinct to a large extent I think, are learning about our rights and the laws that protect those rights. We're finding a will and a strategy to fight against this State and the destruction it wants to impose on us. 'The thief cometh not but for to steal, to kill and to destroy'.

"The Natural Environment cannot be saved by law and the courts alone. It's protectors must be the citizens themselves"... is a quote from 'The Law of Sustainable Development, Local Agenda 21the 12th principle"', by Michael Decleris, pdf linked below, a very important document and a tool we should all familiarise ourselves with.

The trees are threatened and constantly under attack, yet they persevere steadfastly in throwing out their seeds, looking always to germinate, striving to grow, in spite of all that's put in their path. They know their potential, they know what they can do, they look forward to the life they can sustain.
We're like the trees, let's be like the trees.

Okay let's not get tree huggy about it, let's get real about it, let's make a real choice to make sacrifices in our lives to work to fight against these fuckers who are trying to destroy us. Let's work hard at trying to create something better together. And let's spend more time in the woods.

All pics taken around Clare and Galway this summer.

Into the woods.

By the lake.

A young Oak by a fence.

Oak, Ash & Holly leaves reach for the light.