Saving Tasmania’s environment

This video is called Tasmanian forests.

Review by Susan Austin in Australia:

Lessons from the campaign that saved the Franklin

14 August 2008

The River Runs Free: Exploring & Defending Tasmania’s Wilderness
By Geoff Law
Viking, 2008
292 pages, $32.95

The victorious campaign to save the Franklin River in Tasmania’s south-west wilderness has gone down in history as one of the greatest environmental campaigns in Australia, and 25 years on it still serves to demonstrate the power of mass action to people young and old.

Geoff Law’s book The River Runs Free provides an exciting personal account of his involvement in this ground-breaking campaign.

As a young bushwalker growing up in Victoria, Law, who is now a prominent campaigner for the Wilderness Society in Tasmania, realised that “wilderness refreshed the human spirit”, but felt powerless to save the forests of the Victorian Alps from logging and development.

His similarly fatalistic attitude that the destruction of the Franklin River in Tasmania would be impossible to stop, was soon challenged by others, and he was drawn into the campaign.

Law describes media stunts, like floating a giant platypus on the Yarra river and parading sheep dressed like politicians on the lawns outside Parliament House in Hobart, along with national information tours by Bob Brown. Brown, now a Greens senator, helped to found the Tasmanian Wilderness Society and gave up his medical practice to focus on saving the Franklin after being one of the first people to successfully raft down it in 1976.

See also here. And here.

New evidence backs claims that pioneering Tasmanian eco-warrior Brenda Hean’s plane was sabotaged. Kathy Marks reports: here. And here.