Welcome

From ACT GreenGuide

We acknowledge that this Guide was written on Ngunnawal land.

We are infants on this continent. The immigrants to Australia over the last 215 years, who now comprise more than 99 percent of the population, are still new arrivals. Compared to the indigenous people of this land, we are still boat people, wet from the voyage. We don’t yet understand this land. Each time another drought or flood or bushfire arrives, we are surprised. When our introduced wheat and sheep die in the sun, the newspapers panic as if it’s the first time it’s happened. When we cut a ten thousand-year-old forest down to the last sapling, if we think at all, we assume it will spring up, like magic, just the same as before.

We need to grow up fast, into adults who know the land well enough so we can keep living here in ten, a hundred, a thousand years’ time. It’s been done before. From ancient times until only a few breaths ago, a few hundred Ngunnawal people lived in this place, nomadic people taking what they needed from the land leaving enough for themselves in the future - for many, many thousands of years, through bushfires, droughts and all. We have a lot to learn.

But we can’t live their way any more. Instead of hundreds, there are hundreds of thousands here now. And everything here is new: the growing population, the technology, the building materials, and even the city itself. We can’t turn to our elders to ask them how to live in Canberra in harmony with the land, because they haven’t been here for long either.

It’s up to us to work it out. Canberrans right now don’t really even live in Canberra. Sure our houses are here, but we bring food from Sydney in diesel trucks, our water comes from two dammed rivers that supply us with the rainfall of 137020 hectares of land, much of which isn’t even in the ACT, our electricity comes from coalfields in NSW and Victoria, or from other dams on the Snowy River. We live in a city of 9000 hectares but use the land of 1.3 millions hectares to feed and clothe ourselves – about 60 house blocks per person. Really, we just sleep here, and take and borrow everything we need to live from somewhere else.1

We hope this green guide will be one part of learning how to live responsibly. This guide and all the projects that have inspired it are ways for us to learn what we need to know. In the absence of adults to tell us what to do, we are going to have to work it out for ourselves. We would like to invite all interested residents of Canberra to use this guide to share your ideas for putting Canberra onto a sustainable course. Maybe between all that all of us know - Ngunnawal, scientists, farmers, businesses, government, the whole community - we’ll be some of the way there. Or at least, we’ll know what we need to find out next.

And maybe when we’re all grown-up, we’ll be able to pass it on to our children.

1 For more facts about how much land we really use, see CSIRO Resource Futures Working Document 98/12: Canberra’s Ecological Footprint © 1998, http://www.cse.csiro.au/publications/1998/canberraecofoot-98-12-1.pdf (Part 1) http://www.cse.csiro.au/publications/1998/canberraecofoot-98-12-2.pdf (Part 2)