Environmental Limerick: Tasmanian Wilderness areas saved

The Threat!

From Tasmania I like the news
For its wildness has such great views
And will not now be felled
For the plans have been shelved
As the wild life they cannot abuse.

The Tasmanian Wilderness covers about a fifth of the island and is one of the world's last big temperate forests. The BBC news has reported that owing to protests from Unesco the plans to open the area up to logging have been abandoned,

Find out more

My interest is that in 1991 I was working on a short term contract with CSIRO in Sydney and was asked to help set up a data base on a small area of the Tasmanian forest to demonstrate to Australian Heritage the advantage of digitising their records. Unfortunately it was considered unnecessary for me to actually visit the area I was documenting as I was "only a computer  expert." However in my own time I visited the Tasmanian section of the Botanical Gardens at Canberra and stopped off for a short time on the edge of the Great Otway National Park in Victoria, which is about the biggest bit of surviving temperate rain forest in mainland Australia. Should I ever have the chance to visit Australia again I would love to visit parts of the Tasmanian wilderness.

Environmental Limerick: The Albatross

I admire the old man albatross
For he knows that his wife is the boss
So he waits on the nest
As she flies East and West
To catch fish 'neath the old Southern Cross

Albatross nesting on the Falkland Islands
A Barry Mead Photograph

Environmental Limericks

On the FutureLearn site there's a course
(New South Wales is a source I endorse)
It's environmental
With  humanities (gentle)
Put over with plenty of force.

I  have recently been doing a number of FutureLearn courses, as they encourage me to think outside the box and the current one is on Environmental Humanities, put on by the University of New South Wales. As scientist with little formal training in the humanities I have found the discussion so far interesting- and the comments between the students on the course stimulating.

We are all trapped on a planet where the climate is changing and part of the course involved students suggesting a task area and relating it to the discussions. I though about how, through this blog, I could introduce more environmental posts to alert people of the issues by linking simple poetry to a topic - by resurrecting my limerick posts - although I do not promise one a week, which was the original idea.