Your gift today will help to defend Nature. Not just in courtrooms or council meetings, but in the soil, with seedlings, with trees and on the land.

Nature Is Not a Commodity

We’ve all seen it: A mountain traded for a mine. A forest turned into toilet paper. A wild valley bulldozed for a resort. A rainforest makes way for sugarcane.
The list is long. Sadly, it grows daily.

Too often humanity’s abusive and extractive regard of Nature means that the ‘profits’ and short-term gains come at a very steep cost to biodiversity, climate, and local communities. The land we fight to protect and restore is treated like property, not as the living ecosystem it truly is.

We believe there is and must be another way.

We have a very special and rather unusual request; and we’re not asking for your help to protect more precious rainforest. It is to help us navigate the unexpected operational intricacies we’ve uncovered— challenges that only occur when you are ‘breaking new ground’ for Nature.

This restoration journey is demanding more from us than we ever expected: more time, more due diligence, more determination, more rigour. It challenged us in ways we didn’t foresee, and it’s even taken our closest allies by surprise.

The Douglas Shire Council’s planning scheme states that restored rainforest, which is defined as a ‘permanent plantation’, is an inconsistent use of Rural zoned land.

As a result, we are having to submit a very detailed impact assessable development application to the Douglas Shire Council Planning Team for the restoration of 110 Cape Tribulation Road. Despite our previous successes, outdated council zoning laws now threaten to block our progress.

This requirement and the volume of work associated with the impact assessable development application (DA) process was a very big surprise to us considering the land at 110 Cape Tribulation Road has not been farmed for ten years. We are working with other land holders and taking this opportunity to include a number of other properties in this DA at the same time to expand our restoration area around a Nationally significant Oxbow Wetland at the gateway to the Daintree.

What we want—what you want—is for the rainforest we grow to be a ‘permanent plantation.’ As we’ve also been restoring ‘NightWings’ for almost ten years, the red tape requirements for 110 Cape Tribulation Road are totally unexpected.

Despite this, there is hope.

Recently, local councillors visited our nursery. What was meant to be a one-hour meeting turned into three. They planted trees, asked questions, and one of them said: “This just makes sense.” Now, we need to bring the rest of the council—and the planning department—along with us.