BY JOHN SEED
LISMORE — The Lismore-based Rainforest Information Centre (RIC) has been struggling to protect the world's rainforests since 1981. Formed by veterans of the 1979 actions to defend Terania Creek in northern NSW, RIC was the first organisation in the world dedicated to rainforest conservation.
With a series of international rainforest road shows in the early 1980s, the RIC was instrumental in initiating the rainforest conservation movement in the United States and Europe. Working closely with indigenous organisations around the world, RIC projects have protected literally millions of hectares of rainforests, from Papua New Guinea to Ecuador, from India to Malaysia.
The RIC's main overseas work at present is in Ecuador where several Australian volunteers have initiated seven projects since 1987, when they were invited to intervene by the Awa, a hunter-gatherer group living on the Columbian border. Along with our local partners, Centro de Investigacion de los Bosques Tropicales (CIBT), the RIC is engaged in the protection of the Panacocha Reserve in the Ecuadorian headwaters of the Amazon. A wonderland of jungle and waterways, Panacocha supports nine species of monkeys, 500 species of birds, jaguars, ocelots, and the Amazon River dolphin.
In 1994, after four years of effort, the RIC and CIBT succeeded in having 56,000 hectares declared "protected forest" by Ecuador's government. This area forms a corridor joining Ecuador's two largest national parks for a total of 1.6 million hectares of reserved land.
The RIC and CIBT are now completing a management plan for the Panacocha Reserve, offering community development projects to impoverished indigenous neighbours and initiating an eco-tourist project on the banks of the Panacocha Lagoon. The Ecuadorian government and local Quichua people have entrusted the CIBT with designing and implementing this plan, which is needed to prevent further incursions by the Occidental oil company, poaching and illegal colonisation.
From 1989 until the Howard coalition government's first budget axed the non-government organisation environment initiative funding category, the RIC's projects were generously funded by AusAID. Funding is now secured mainly from foundations in the US and Europe.
The RIC administers a small grants fund which supports cutting-edge groups around the world in all manner of nature conservation activities. Often a "grant of last resort", a few hundred to 1000 dollars regularly primes the pump for important, front-line projects in scores of countries which would have difficulty in finding funding from conventional sources.
Most recently, this fund has supported: a Siberian group opposing a road and oil pipeline construction through pristine World Heritage snow-leopard habitat; emergency legal action to prevent the corrupt dismembering of the Los Cedros Biological Reserve in Ecuador; university students in Ghana holding a series of educational events around the country to inform people about the environmental and socio-economic effects of surface mining; and Thai Buddhist clergy who have been ordaining old-growth trees as monks and frightening off the loggers.
The RIC has also sought funds for the Environmental Legal Assistance Center in the Philippines to empower its partner communities to perform "swift environmental justice": citizens arrests of illegal loggers by indigenous communities who confiscate equipment and lumber where the authorities fail to act.
The RIC has always been run entirely by volunteers and more help is needed. Interns work at RIC's share-house in Lismore, in the office, in the huge organic garden and planting and tending trees along the nearby riverbank. Occasionally, skilled volunteers are needed at overseas projects.
The RIC can always use help from cyber volunteers with a few hours or more each week to put towards RIC projects from a computer anywhere.
For more information about the RIC projects, visit <http://forests.org/ric/projects>. Donations to the centre are tax deductible and can be sent to Box 368 Lismore, NSW 2480. The centre can be contacted by email via <johnseed@ozemail.com.au>.