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  • Hi

    This is just to say hi to everyone. These days I work as a serious research anthropologist and environmental data analyst doing corporate TBL reporting here in the South West of Western Australia.

    In an earlier incarnation I spent 20 years in the motor game, doing a lot of large fleet management on farming properties and big pastoral stations, which later turned into land management and sustainable farming practice post-University.

    It turns out I was the only Western Australian to have been invited to participate in the GRI Oceania Round Table on uniform reporting standards in Melbourne in January 2004, which was disappointing, but there you go. From some of the profiles here I expect we should nonetheless be able to exchange views and swap expertise quite well.

    Currently we are carrying out fuel emission audits toward converting to biodiesel and reducing eco-footprints.

    Happy to accept advice and in return offer what I can.

    Nothing else for now,

    Gil
    Gil Hardwick
    Biofuels Forum Newbie
    Last edited by Gil Hardwick; 12 October 2006, 06:24 PM.

  • #2
    Re: Hi

    Hi Gil,

    Good to have you along. I'm sure we'll all benefit from any info you have to share. I'm looking forward to hearing about your emission audits. Real Australian data on this sort of thing is scarce at the moment, so I'm sure we'd all like to hear about yours.

    Cheers,
    Robert.
    Site Admin.

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    • #3
      Re: Hi

      Hi Gil,

      Bio fuels are an important part of our children's future, what do you think?

      Comment


      • #4
        Re: Hi

        Biofuels are important, period, but to fully appreciate that we need to stop thinking in terms of past and future, and learn to live more fully in the present, and understand that our children are now.

        Then we will stop interminably putting things off.

        I will tell you a story, ok?

        In my mind the greatest governor Australia ever had was Governor Bourke. He was the first one to start thinking sustainably, back in the 1830s.

        He was the first to instruct the British Government not to send any more convicts out here. In their place he began to sell crown land into freehold title, and used the money to bring skilled farmers out, who knew how to husband livestock and grow crops and make the land productive.

        I can tell you that as fact, because my great-great grandfather was on one of the first ships out, the Orient in 1840, whose passengers comprised half Irish and half West Country farmers and their families, all skilled in managing the land and creating a substantial rural economy.

        Those people and that economy have been the mainstay of Australia ever since, until recently when iron ore, oil and gas, and minerals came to dominate. Without them we would not even have had schools and universities, much less industry and productivity.

        Yes, you might argue that a lot of damage has been done, but when you consider the vast wealth produced by it, you will see that it was worth it. It was a good investment, the best anyone could have made.

        Even then his effort was not enough. The very first report to government on land degradation and erosion was made in 1855. There were too many others here by then, with other interests.

        Governments never allowed the re-investment back into keeping the land in good condition that we needed, and the wealth was gradually bit by bit sucked off into the big cities.

        Instead of bringing more people out from Central and Eastern Europe, and from Italy and Greece and the Balkans and all those places where people knew how to farm the land, they brought people out from the big English industrial cities instead.

        No offence intended. They are just nor farmers is all, and like the rest of them sit there in the big coastal cities scared to venture inland and work and try their luck like we did.

        So everything has been fobbed off, and fobbed off and fobbed off, and substitutes introduced and the land sucked dry, and farmers made out to be ignorant peasants; 'reactionaries', 'conservatives', except for some of us who know the truth of it and wear the badge with pride.

        So, you see, people like us do not think about the past or the future.

        Everything is too uncertain. We think about the weather and the seasons, and the markets, and the economy, and our families and communities, and the state of the land.

        That has always been so.

        If you want to understand the importance of biofuels, that is how you must learn to think. You must think like a farmer, yes?

        Else you will never get anything done.

        Gil

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