I like to thank Mt Oak Community Association and the IDEAS Cooperative Society Ltd for their ongoing and fulsome support.

Veronica Martin, Shane Coghill, Di Connolly, Dave Beckwith, Wayne Cameron, Greg Spilsbury, Edward Fensom, Gidja Walker, Susanna Vall, Strider and Peter Berg for their support and inspiration.

As a bioregional and catchment organiser what I do is give people new eyes to see and feel the world around them and also to help them understand where and when they are. This leads to people identifying more closely with the place they live and its nature, and taking greater action on their part to protect, conserve and look after that place.

This booklet is my story of how and why I have worked, for over the last twenty years in the South East of Queensland in Australia, to give people "new eyes" to see their local environment. This story is not unique: there are thousands of people doing similar actions around the planet. Every catchment is different, the actors and methods are varied and reflect local situations. The story of local people understanding and caring for their environment, however, stays the same. A lot of the ideas in this booklet come from people I have worked with and places I have travelled. I am grateful that I have been able to hear about those ideas, principles and methods and apply them in my local catchments.

The catchment organisations I will talk about in this booklet are NOT catchment management boards or committees set up by governments under legislation. The catchment organisations I am talking about are community organisations independent of government or a legislative mandate; they are people's organisations.

In Australia we have a landcare movement involving over 100,000 people on a regular basis. We have bushcare, coastcare and catchment-care groups. We have waterwatch, streamwatch and coast watch groups. We have Clean Up Australia days that involve millions of people. People do care, and will put their heads, hands and bodies towards good works. However, they won't care if they feel powerless and disconnected.

There is a great thirst in people to know more about where they live and to reconnect themselves with its nature. Catchment organisations can help quench this thirst and empower people to act and to build their own better future.

Ecological 3 Rs - Battery Analogy.

Planetary systems, ecosystems and catchments need to be healthy which means they need to be resistant, resilient and robust.

Resilience How quickly the battery charges up again.

Resistance How long before the battery voltage drops under load.

Robustness How many times a battery can be used and recharged before failing.

A wise friend of mine was of the opinion that for humanity to survive and thrive it needed to master a basic ecological vocabulary. We all need to understand the earth and its ecology, that means you!

The earth has the only breathable atmosphere of any planet we can yet detect anywhere in all of space. There are no backups, no life rafts, it’s the only planet we have.

Our planet is a rock in orbit around a star called Sol. It has a thin (less than 100km) layer of air and water clinging to it. This thin layer is home to more than two million life forms. This assembly of living things is called the biosphere, the air above them is the atmosphere, the ground under them is the lithosphere and the water around them is the hydrosphere. Care of the earth involves working within all four of these spheres of existence. The bionomy, or natural economy, is the sum of these spheres and their interactions. The integrity and health of these spheres is necessary to the functioning of the bionomy, and thus to human existence. The air we breathe is not stable in itself, but is continually replenished by the biosphere. The biosphere is organised into zones, biomes, communities and niches.

The way the earth is organised offers useful models for catchment organisers to copy and a fuller discussion of these patterns can be found in the appendices.

Humans have become a special case in the bionomy. We are a species that makes constant withdrawals of useful materials and additions of "non-useful" materials to our bionomy. In the western world, even in death, we humans lock our nutrients up in coffins, to keep them from returning to the common pool. Our relationship with the bionomy is usually a one way, exploitative one. We are not content to leave something alone if we cannot use it. We try to turn so-called non-productive systems into productive systems. Our behaviour of non-cooperation and non- coexistence goes against the processes found in the bionomy. In fact our behaviour goes beyond non-cooperation and borders on hostility, as humans have reversed the onus of proof towards other life. We say, prove that you’re useful to us or we will destroy you!

We are just one species among many others, but we are not the same as other species. In fact, every form of life has unique characteristics. Many people say that because we invent and plan we are not an animal and our societies are insulated from the rest of life. We still eat, breathe, excrete and reproduce like any other animal. Look between your feet to find the common ground between yourself and the rest of the environment. We and all our works are the result of a natural process.

Our natural ability to invent and to adapt, to either the present or an imagined future, inevitably has consequences for the rest of our ecosystem. Our species can become more aware of the consequences of our natural behaviour and can invent a society that is in harmony with the rest of our environments.

Why Care About Catchments

What is a catchment?

A catchment, watershed or drainage basin is an area of land from which water will drain to collect into a common channel. A catchments’ boundary is determined by its highest ground and by its lowest point. Most catchments drain to the sea, although some like Lake Eyre in Australia, drain inland. A catchment can be defined at many levels from oceans down to little creeks but its edges are always the highest ground at that scale.

The waterways we see are a product of their catchment. So, to understand a waterway we must understand its entire catchment from the ridges down to the banks. We must understand it from its source to its mouth. We must understand it from the top of the soil down to its bedrock.

Water is a vital resource in maintaining life and the processes that support it. An understanding of water is fundamental for a catchment organiser. To have a continuing supply of clean water we rely on our water catchments remaining healthy. Some Australian water catchments have crossed the line and are unable to maintain clean water, other catchments are on the edge but very few are free of negative human impacts.

For one millimetre of rain you get one litre of water per square metre of ground.

For one inch of rain you get six gallons of water per square yard

Three times the amount of rain comes from evaporation from the oceans as comes from the land.

There is forty times the amount of freshwater in the soil as there is in all the rivers and lakes.

Water is driven by gravity and/or pressure to find the lowest point or pressure.

Water is organised into atmospheric, surface and underground catchments, water bodies and waterways.

Bioregionalism is a system which uses identifiable natural regions as the basis for self-managed political units. Bioregionalists believe that our political structure should reflect natural patterns and that we should reinhabit our life spaces using the bioregion concept. The demarcation of bioregions takes into account climate, soils, drainage, vegetation, mineral resources, and importantly, the cultures and societies that occur in these regions. A bioregion is thus an identifiable unit that integrates the human systems with non-human systems.

A bioregion can vary in size and shape depending on circumstances. Initially, people can think of their bioregion as their local catchment. We can also think about our bioregions’ groundwater connections, or we can think about a whole ocean basin as a bioregion. For a catchment organiser, a bioregion is a way of grouping similar watersheds or catchments together into a multi-catchment structure.

Any given catchment or sub-catchment has people in it with connections, involvement or experience spanning most sectors in society. Working for the benefit of that catchment is a purpose that will mobilise those people, connections, involvement and experience. The catchment literally is the common ground we share. A catchment organisation should be fundamentally based on people or organisations grouped by sub catchments. Thematic or special purpose groupings are also used when nurturing new sub catchments or as the catchment organisation matures. Everyone needs freshwater every day, everyone has a stake in keeping our waters fresh and clean. A catchment organisation relies on the fact that no one escapes waters' inexorable connections and influences. Everyone lives in a watershed/catchment.

Aside from the whole planet itself, oceans are the largest scale of catchment organisation that needs to be thought about. Why does a catchment organisation need to think about oceans anyway? Firstly, a majority of rainfall comes from the oceans. It is both the ultimate source and sink for water. Secondly the oceans both drive and help make the atmosphere and weather.

The health of the oceans is fundamental for our long-term survival. The ocean currents determine inland climate, rainfall and temperature. Furthermore, the presence of diatoms and the elements such as calcium and silicon which they regulate in the oceans, seem to play a vital role in keeping the earth’s air temperature generally above freezing. The ocean also plays a role in the production of a wide range of gases that help clean the atmosphere to make new fresh air.

When ocean systems are destroyed or disrupted, the effects are profound and long lasting. One clear example of this comes from ancient history. Some 220 million years ago oxygen levels plummeted, probably caused by some drastic disruption to ocean life. The ocean took many thousands of years to recover from this disruption and resulted in the deaths of most species over a couple of hundred grams in body weight through lack of oxygen. Recent research seems to indicate that pollution coming from the land into the oceans after asteroid impacts also drastically interrupts the oxygen generation the ocean provides. This shows one way in which the land can alter the seas around it for the worse.

In many ways the air that we breathe and the rain we enjoy relies on the actions of tiny plants, the food chains they support and the oceans where they live.

When rain falls in a catchment, a certain amount will run off over the surface and find its way directly into streams, while some is stored within the catchment. In colder climates with high mountains water can be stored in snow and released in the warmer months. Another amount of water finds it way into the soils and rocks in the catchment: in fact there is forty times the amount of freshwater stored in the soil than in lakes and rivers. Some of the water is also stored in the living tissues of plants in the catchment.

Of the water that finds it way into waterways, some is pushed (during floods) into the soils and gravel in the floodplains. This water will slowly be released as the water level falls over time.

The water which finds its way into the soils and floodplains makes the water table that trees and grasses rely on in dry times.

A lot of the water that finds its way into the soil in coastal areas flows into the sea without going into a waterway. The Newcastle University of Technology in NSW found that in some river deltas twenty times more water comes directly out of the coastlines in "submarine flows" than comes out of rivers and lakes!

These facts have profound implications for catchment organisers working on water quality and water source issues. If your water quality strategy isn't looking at soil and groundwater quality you are missing out most of the water in your thinking. Likewise coastal organisers working on water quality need to be very aware of the large role played by "submarine flows" on their coastal waters.

"Organisers organise organisations!" is one view of this issue. My view is that organisers organise ideas, information, people, groups, coalitions, cultures and societies if that is what is required to get the job done. Organising involves giving purpose to actions. As well as giving purpose, organisers ensure the mechanics of those actions happen more or less according to plan, using known methods. For example an organiser gets some information about a local problem and uses methods to get that information to people and groups likely to act on it. These methods can include visits, networking, talks, tours, posters, pamphlets, and stunts. When some action arises from that information like a meeting, working bee, rally or fundraiser etc. a different set of methods is used. For example timelines, rosters, phone-trees, transport pools, role allocations, project charts, coordination offices, and project officers.

Firstly, the scale and nature of the problems faced means that no one government, one sector or group of people has the resources to tackle them alone. Secondly, the catchment is one thing that everyone shares in common with his or her neighbours. This common interest can help form disparate interests into a recognisable community where everyone has a place and a role. Thirdly, it takes a whole of community coalition to induce changes in political realities against powerful vested interests. Political leaders are capable of doing good and even great things, if they are empowered by their community.

Catchments are a fundamental unit of the water cycle and wider landscape ecology. All life needs access to freshwater. Water is the transport medium for most of the materials and nutrients which keep natural systems functioning.

One of the critical problems we face is the impact we are having on ecological systems and people. Another problem that flows from the first one is our society's inability to be sensitive to, or integrate with, those ecological systems.

Tied with these two problems we have the global problem of disempowerment and alienation felt by people and communities buffeted by change decided in far away places by remote sometimes faceless individuals or groups.

Catchments and Bioregions provide multi-scale place based whole of community organising tools to try to address some of these problems.

For our societies to be ecologically sustainable, we must understand the processes within and between catchments as though our lives depend on it. Our economic, social and cultural systems have to be aware of the ecological processes. We have to protect and nurture those systems in order to sustain life.

Currently we have few cultural practices that make us aware of the world around us and how it works. The stock market gets no reports on phosphorous, water and other ecological cycles. Government policy only weakly defines food webs and food chains, evolution, materials and energy cycles, let alone provides for their protection.

The process of catchment organising has as one of its goals making each catchment awake and self-aware through its peoples.

An organiser needs to respect an individual or community's right to be involved in decision making. An organiser must also respect an individual, group or community’s wish not to be involved, or to hold a different position/perspective. An organiser should as a matter of social justice, respect the first nations and traditional owners of the area where they operate. An organiser should also respect the land itself.

Respect doesn't mean backing down or agreeing with everyone. Respect is based on understanding and a realisation that all sides in a relationship have their own values, beliefs and priorities.

Traditional owner involvement is achieved through following proper protocols and by engaging their interest.

Each traditional owner ancestral estate should be regarded as a sovereign nation. The elders are the equivalent of cabinet ministers. The senior elders, male and female, are the equivalent of the heads of state. The next circle of men and women around the elders are the equivalent of department heads. Each traditional owner group can only speak on behalf of their own homeland estate. Each traditional owner group is comprised of extended families. Traditional owners all have ongoing responsibilities for country and creatures even in an area where formal native title has been extinguished. Within these nations and families there are also people, in addition to the elders, who are knowledge holders about practices, animals, plants or places.

The traditional owner involvement process is the equivalent of establishing diplomatic relations with another country, with all its risks and benefits.

Diplomats talk about confidence building measures, and given the history of Australia these measures have to be undertaken in a step by step process, to help breakdown centuries of exploitation and mistrust.

As a start as many of the elders of the traditional owners should be contacted in the preliminary round to gauge their interest and any involvement opportunities. Commitments should NOT be sought at this stage as it is designed to let the traditional owners get to know you and what you are on about. This should include all known elders not just those with native title claims.

After initial contact and responses have been favourable you can move further into the confidence building stage, This should be undertaken in a series of reciprocal steps. Usually the elders will provide some guidance on what they need you to do first. After that you could also request an initial small task or information from them. The process is repeated with the nature of the tasks and process getting more complex.

Pauses and delays will always be a feature of this growing relationship.

Cross -cultural awareness training by local traditional owners is often a good early step to take. Memorandums Of Understanding and written agreements will come later. Some traditional owners believe that you must do something first and then put it into a written agreement, rather than write it first and then do it.

If the traditional owners decide to become involved , funding is then required to facilitate family meetings and the appointment of accountable family representatives. This funding should assist with phone calls and transport costs. The elders should then be assisted to meet together and focus on your requests. Elders should be paid sitting fees for attending meetings.

As early as possible aboriginal people, male and female, should be employed to facilitate the involvement process, making sure that they are able to connect with all the families, not just one.

Some further principles about traditional owners involvement in natural resource management and planning are outlined below adapted from the SEQ Regional Framework for Growth Management 2000 and other expert advice;

NB Under the terms of the MOU between M. Petter and the South Queensland Traditional Owners Federation this advice was reviewed by a panel of traditional owners and approved for use in this handbook.

A catchment organisation needs to be driven by the needs of its members and strategic priorities. A catchment organisation that can address its members immediate needs will have a more credible voice when encouraging them to take action about the bigger issues. The organisation must be attentive to its members needs and continually seek to nourish its members and allies.

Patience is a virtue especially for a catchment organiser. As an organiser you have to have an in-depth understanding of the issues, as well as an idea of where you are going, what the solutions are.

The community you are working with may not have that perspective and understanding initially. So you have to wait until the right person or issue that will allow you to progress your strategy comes along.

You have to take opportunities when they arise and be able to weave that opportunity into your strategy.

A catchment organisation or organiser needs to be prepared for a long haul. This means having a realistic sense of timeframes and pacing themselves accordingly. Sustainability is a long-term project whose success can only be really measured over thousands of years! Building a self-aware catchment is a generational project, it won’t happen next week. This awareness doesn’t mean you can just kick back and watch it happen. It also doesn’t mean you can expect to be finished in a year or two. It means that you have to pace yourself, have to keep reserves and pay attention to who will follow you in your role.

Just as an animal is made up of cells organised into organs and networks, a catchment organisation is made up of groups, networks, task groups and individuals. A catchment organisation should always seek to devolve or retain power in its constituents. It shouldn't try to replace those roles but instead should nurture its members to do those roles better.

It should constantly try to give its members higher and larger purposes. If a catchment organisation tries to do things by itself alone, and takes power away from its members, it will become a shell that is an end in itself rather than fulfilling its true organising role.

Like in a body the mind can't replace the organs and hope to survive.

A catchment organiser or organisation needs to demonstrate commitment and loyalty to its community.

Some organisations fall into the trap of only supporting issues they think they can win. Local communities don't have that choice. They must struggle to defend their place and live with any consequences day in and day out.

An organiser can be strategic in the level of support they offer and should always seek to empower a local group rather than do everything for them. However an organiser must support the members, the local communities and their issues, win, lose or draw. An organiser doesn't have to win to have credibility, but they do have to at least try.

A catchment organisation or organiser can't pretend to know about a catchment. They must do the creek walks, ridge walks and other research before starting to organise. They should visit as much of the catchment as possible. They should make contact with local people and groups, read local newspapers and notice boards.

This will give the organiser the background they need to organise and netweave.

These things can't be fudged or subjected to short cuts.

Why is a sense of place important? How can it make things better by having this sense? One of the major causes of the degradation in catchments is the lack of connection people have with them. If you don't even know you are driving past a local stream how can you care about its health?

People need to reconnect with their local environment. People want to know about where they live. People want to feel that they have power in their lives and local communities. I believe that he more people know about where they live the more they will take action to fix that place’s problems or enhance its strengths. The opportunities to understand and help the natural world can bring people and groups together and give social cohesion. Knowing more about the bigger natural systems we rely on can give us a broader perspective that can get us through adversity. Finally, the more you become aware of and meshed with your local environment, the more grounded you feel, more at home, more settled. This positively reinforcing process of discovery can also be channelled into greater personal action to fix problems when they are encountered.

There is power in naming things. A concrete drain is seen to have no value, but if you name it as a local stream it will be valued. A hill on a road is insignificant. but if it is signed as a catchment boundary it acquires significance. A road cutting can be just a blur passing by, but if you know the name of the rocks and the soils each cutting can be a window to understanding. A tree is just a tree but if you know it is a fir tree or an ironbark or an important habitat for your favourite bird species it starts to be real thing of value.

One of the first chores of a catchment organisation is to name things in the catchment. Name the creeks and streams, name the ridges. Print a brochure with pictures and names of local plants and animals. Discover who the traditional owners of the catchment are and what their tribes’ names are. Take people on walks and name the places and things you see.

It is this basic awareness that will lead to other changes in attitudes and actions.

History is a very important tool in growing a sense of place. It provides the "when you are" to fill in other information about where you are. History maps the human story of your catchment and how people related to it. In one catchment we asked some 60,70 and 80- year old people to reminisce about the local creeks when they were young and answer questions from a small audience. Current activists came away with a different sense of the catchment : knowing what it was like in the past.

Historical sources are also used to find names of now buried or altered streams, waterholes and wetlands. They can also give some guidance to rehabilitation efforts by providing information about local plants and animals. History is an important part of coming to understand and respect the first nations and their traditional connections to the catchment.

If a person finds out an interesting fact or perspective they will invariably try to pass this on to other people. If those other people find interest in that fact or perspective it will continue to spread. That fact that other people are interested will reinforce with the first person that they should find out more.

This "bush telegraph" effect is the mainstay of catchment organising. The key is that a catchment organiser needs to find out which things about a catchment t a particular local community finds interesting.

Some of the tools used by organisers such as the "Where are you test" are self-reinforcing. Once people acquire a new way of seeing their catchment, they will see more every time they go into it. Once they know the name of a tree or animal they will notice it more and become aware of where it is and where it isn't.

Where information comes from is important. If you hear something from a relative or friend it carries more weight than news or advertising. Recent studies in election outcomes have reaffirmed the importance and relevance of personal communication.

A catchment organisation should design its messages and communications to be easily absorbed, assimilated and replicated by its members. In doing this, information will spread through networks and families, person to person, with a high degree of credibility.

While media and publicity are important for talking to people you don't know, it is personal communication that has the real power to change attitudes and actions.

I have found that you can start the process of growing an activist with whatever interests them and you can grow that interest to cover a catchment. The first step is to listen to what some one is saying and find out what they are interested in. You can then work out what common starting point can be used. For example, someone interested in gardening can be encouraged to work with a local bush rehabilitation group. This will grow their awareness of the bigger issues. Someone interested in opposing a property development can have their awareness of planning issues upstream or downstream increased.

Every contact offers a possibility to deal with the person's immediate concerns and needs first, and then to grow their awareness of the bigger catchment issues. A catchment organisation must invest in growing people’s skills and knowledge to achieve its aims. It should try to grow their awareness of the whole catchment and what's happening in it.

Looking after a local catchment is something everyone, including local business, can get involved in. Businesses are there to make money, but their owners have to live somewhere and like most people they want its environment to be protected. Most businesses in the catchment carry out their activity without many direct impacts.

In a catchment organisation there has to be place for business. They can be involved in one on one discussions, special meetings and briefings, workplace bushcare schemes, local waterways activities and lastly through seeking in-kind support for local and catchment wide activities. Even with very damaging industries such as road construction and housing development, there have occasionally been opportunities for jointly beneficial projects.

In areas were the catchment organisation has worked well, you can get a majority of small local businesses displaying a message about local issues such as the "Clean Ocean" campaign on the Mornington Peninsula in coastal Victoria. There, it is obvious to local business people that the tourist trade survives because of the area’s natural features and a clean ocean. They are aware of the widespread support the campaign receives and are happy to attract custom by displaying the Clean Ocean sign.

In Bulimba Creek in Brisbane we have received support from local business in the form of office space, native plants, designing and building a customised bush rehabilitation trailer, use of car parks for sausage sizzles and other fundraisers, discount equipment and use of business equipment. We have also received financial support from a number of local and national firms. Such support is for specific outcomes at the discretion of the catchment organisation and has not stopped the organisation publicly criticising such corporate partners when needed.

Cars are both a boon and bane to modern society. It is difficult to live without them. However, while offering mobility and increased distance of activities, cars can destroy our sense of geography if used too much. It is easy to ignore hills, ridges and creeks if all you notice of them is how much pressure you put on the accelerator or brake.

Cars can be used to explore catchments, but walking, skating or cycling is best for regaining a feel for the "lay of the land". Waterways are best explored in human powered watercraft such as canoes and rafts.

As any biker can tell you, a car is as much a mobile cage as a mobile room.

I believe that the community should always be able to lead the government. Often a government can't take up an issue until a broad public mandate is created to do something about it. Governments are often very bad at doing this. A community organisation can float ideas and solutions ahead of public thinking and build up a consensus that the ideas have merit. An elected official who runs ahead of public opinion is taking political risks: something they are often loath to do. A community organisation can transcend political affiliations, which allows it to build a whole- of-community consensus. When confronted by a united community, local power and other structures can be made to change their tune rather than come up with reasons why something shouldn't be done.

Organising a whole community within a catchment involves engaging with politicians and other public elected officials. These officials often feel threatened by a broad-based geographic entity because it superficially resembles their own power structure. A catchment organisation needs to address these fears in two main ways. It must be visibly non-party political and it must give elected officials positive opportunities to work with the organisation.

It is these positive opportunities that will keep some sort of relationship going, in between the fights that will happen.

In catchment organisations I have been involved in establishing, politicians and other local elected officials can only be non-voting members. They are encouraged to access or address the organisation when they need to. The elected officials will, over time, understand that the organisation can deliver to them the political imperative or mandate to propose positive change.

A healthy civil society needs people who dare to be different. It needs people to challenge conventions, to say no and to thumb their noses at local power structures. The dissident plays an important role in providing unpalatable advice and inventing new futures.

Dissidents need support from other dissidents to retain their vigour. They need support to avoid dilution through peer pressure from the conventional people around them.

Within an organisation or network, dissidents are required to avoid "group think" problems. They can stop unreality bubbles forming within the organisation if it starts to acquire too many "yes people".

They say the squeaky wheel gets the oil, so a people's organisation must nurture its dissidents least it squeaks too softly.

This occurs when an agency or organisation responsible for monitoring or regulating something starts to rely on the opinions of those it is trying to regulate to judge its performance, and not on what the wider community thinks. This can lead to weak and ineffective regulation of these activities.

The antidote is that someone has to maintain the public watchdog role to keep the matter in the public eye. A trained, informed and active civil society is the only long-term antidote to this problem.

The essence of this tactic is to publicly expose, or bear witness to, that which others would prefer to hide or ignore. One example of this that I recently heard about was to put up a sign in front of houses, where foreshore trees had been illegally cut down to enhance the view, "tree vandals operating in this area".

Using web sites to document and expose bad practices is another tool. It is important however to avoid litigation when doing so. Qualifying words such as "appears to", "we believe", "could be" are essential. Avoid naming names directly because it’s the issue and its solution that is important, not the individuals.

Another tactic is put a caption that means the opposite of what is shown in the picture. For example, a picture of environmental devastation could be captioned "Best Practice".

Legitimacy, Competency & Accountability.

Legitimacy and credibility.

Elected officials will often ask, "Why should an organisation not elected by universal mandate have the power to shadow government?" I will often reply "Why can't we?"

A community catchment organisation's power comes from its legitimacy and credibility. Its legitimacy relies on the fidelity, integrity and accuracy of its representation of its members. Its accountability has to be demonstrated through annual reports and annual election of office bearers. Its credibility derives from the ability to deliver accurate, practical and constructive advice; to mobilise community action and its ability to deliver support and advice to members. It must have transparent and open operating processes and must be operated for genuine not-for-profit public benefits. It must be a non-party political entity.

If it can't maintain credibility and legitimacy, a catchment organisation will never develop the power it needs to change things for the better.

It is important for community catchment organisers to establish that they are there for public benefit and not for pure self-interest. Most communities are suspicious of flim flam sales people and oily politicians and political operatives or even ‘enlightened’ do-gooders.

Catchment organisers need to transcend political and corporate allegiances to be effective. This allows them to organise disparate, sometimes warring, groups and people by being seen as a trustworthy non-aligned person.

If this trust can be achieved, communities can be organised to get what they want from any government. They can be organised to make any corporation change its ways because the whole of the community can be mobilised.

A catchment organisation needs to be prepared, when necessary, to aggressively defend vital catchment interests. This must be done even if it involves criticising or taking legal action against powerful interests, member groups, partners and funding sources.

If a catchment organisation fails to defend catchment interests and relies solely on not rocking the boat, it will fail to gain sufficient credibility to achieve its objects.

It's more effective to be sparing in praise and to wield a big stick, but to always be constructive in its uses.

Members of catchment organisations will not always see eye to eye and will sometimes feud with each other. The organisation and organisers should be aware of this and have formal and informal dispute resolution processes and mechanisms in place and active.

Growing Alliances and Power

Netweaving, Networking.

Before a net can work it must be woven. Netweaving is the initial steps in setting up a network. Directories, gatherings and small one-to-one meetings are some of the tools used to weave a net.

You can have someone's name and phone number, but unless you have had some prior contact with them you will be reluctant to ring it. Something or someone needs to bring you and that person together. An organiser can be a gluon, that is someone who sticks people and/or different organisations together.

A network, by definition, is made of nodes and links. Networking can be grass roots or trunk networking. Grass roots networking is peer to peer from node to node with little structure. Trunk networking is organised in trees that then feed out into grass roots networks. A catchment organisation needs to promote capacity for grass roots networks as well as playing a role in trunk networking from wider information sources.

Current power structures are vertically organised or siloed. A catchment organisation with broad membership can play a vital role in cross-linking vertical government or corporate structures.

Cross linking ideas, information and policy is the only practical way of achieving the integrated and coordinated policies and actions required to address catchment issues.

This cross linkage is a role that can't be done by governments or business but can be done by a community organisation.

Volunteer field staff are a natural resource that exists in every community. They are usually to be found bucking the status quo. They are usually contrary, wilful and somewhat driven people. They are the ones who say no more often. They are the doorknockers, the last one at an action, the first to lend a hand and the first to spot issues on the ground. These volunteer field staff are not all the same and no one method exists for dealing with them.

A catchment organisation needs to find and assist these people. Field staff are the fizz in the organisation. Organising volunteer field staff has been described as like herding cats. Volunteers like this can't be ordered, but they can be cajoled and enticed to all head in roughly the same direction, albeit with wild digressions.

Recruiting and organising these people is a frustrating, stressful but a very rewarding job for a catchment organiser.

A catchment organisation should strive to increase understanding of the catchment in local communities. It is this understanding which will motivate action to fix catchment problems.

This growth in understanding has two main streams: growing understanding in the wider community and growing understanding in local activists/dissidents.

The first stream of action is done through events and actions such as catchment days, catchment walks and rehabilitation actions such as bushcare groups and clean-up days. The use of catchment signs, brochures and pamphlets showing local plants and animals and "Know your Catchment" displays are other important tools.

The second stream of action is growing the understanding of local activists about their catchment. This stream involves intensive tours, workshops, forums, gatherings and small group briefings. Mentoring is another very important method of growing local activists’ understanding.

Catchment organising has the aim of involving an informed and active community in addressing catchment issues. Maps, charts, data and information of all kinds is a key ingredient in this process. A catchment organisation should be dripping with information and data. You can't fix what you don't know about. You can't plan without basic tools like maps and other data.

Early priorities of basic information about catchments, waterways, local plants and animals grow into individual field guides, site plans and maps, corridors plans, rehabilitation reports, water monitoring reports, town planning maps, pollutant inventories and whole of catchment strategies and reports. The member groups of the catchment organisation have their own sources of information and expertise that can be networked on an "as needs" basis.

Having a good "data wrangler", someone who can keep the information up too date and accessible, is essential for a catchment organisation. Having someone who can interpret and explain the information is also essential, good science is nothing if no-one knows about it. A lot of the information can be condensed into public "Know Your Catchment" booklets, displays, maps and brochures.

Getting information out of most Australian governments is like pulling teeth. A catchment organisation will spend a fair amount of time dealing with DDR(difficult data recovery). This involves using "freedom of information", legal objections to planning decisions, and other statutory third party rights. Then there are leaks and inside contacts. Sometimes individual agencies will try to cooperate and their support is always welcome. It is always best to ask the agency involved about access to the information you need in the first instance. Local governments have often been more forthcoming in providing information support to catchment organisations.

A catchment organisation should try to grow its planning organically. Backyard plans can grow into creek plans. Creek plans can grow into corridor plans. Corridor plans can grow into river plans. River plans with bushland plans can grow into catchment plans. Catchment plans can grow into bioregional plans.

Planning can't get ahead of its grassroots capacity. Before a plan can be grown up to the next level the base has to be built. Planning often has to move at the speed of its slowest member. Understanding and organisations have to be grown. Activists have to be found and nurtured. A catchment organisation has to be patient, do its weaving, building and growing well. Once there is a solid foundation, it can truly begin planning a better future for its members and the local environment.

The essence of an alliance is a common interest or purpose. Allies can be long-term or short-term. They can be close or distant allies.

Some allies will only share a single common interest, others will share many interests. Alliances covering many groups and people with many common interests are rare but very influential.

For a catchment organisation allies can also be local governments; separate units within governments or corporations; or individual dissidents in the system or landscape.

A catchment organisation itself should be built as an alliance of its members and member groups.

It is a catchment organisation’s responsibility to look at all the individual issues in the catchment, find the common threads, and weave an alliance to coordinate an effective response. Start small and build up, the people appear one by one in connection to local issues. When you have enough people with similar underlying problems, you can start growing mutual actions.

The first step is to build mutual awareness and to bring them together face to face. A friend of mine joked that in addition to the World Wide Web we needed a world wide deck for activists and organisers. It’s good to have a small informal space for activists to gather and discuss common problems. A deck is the perfect inside/outside small space for face to face small gatherings.

Having grown understanding and networks, coordinated actions can be initiated. Small bushcare groups can be bought together to rehabilitate a larger area of important land. Local water watch groups can be bought together to watch and monitor a bigger part of the waterway. Local birdwatchers can be bought together to survey and plan the rehabilitation of a bigger piece of habitat. The same groups can write letters to their local and state politicians urging greater protection and resources for their local natural areas.

Catchment days can provide a good focus for groups to come together, united by a common interest in publicity for their group or cause. While there, the individuals and groups can get to know each other and help hatch mutual actions.

For larger actions we have used small working groups of allies to kick-start actions through a brochure or report for media release. Using this kick-start we have gone on to organise a public summit on the issue. Media coverage about the summit encouraged local groups to start local actions and campaigns to work towards the common aims we had grown.

There comes a time when a catchment organisation needs a full-time person to help it do its job. This person should be employed as a coordinator, not a CEO.

A coordinator is not a superhero who can be everywhere and do everything for everyone. A coordinator is just another node in the network , not the whole network. A coordinator is there to grow local capacity and to give it a common purpose. A coordinator, unlike a CEO, can't order anyone to do anything.

A coordinator’s tools are to understand, to assist, to share, to bind and when required, to lead. What they do can't be a secret to members: they must act openly, cooperatively and accountably. They must acquire an overview of the catchment, and its issues, and share that with members to bind them to a common purpose.

A coordinator with the respect of members, talent, good training and support will acquire the influence they need to coordinate planning and actions.

A property of groups, alliances and coalitions is that they change. Sometimes conditions are right for them to grow. When aims have been achieved, or stalled, organisations need to become smaller and occasionally they will have to contract to a ‘mere’ caretaking role. An organiser needs to realise this and have plans for both growth and contraction. The role of caretaker for dormant issues/groups is an important one, as that person needs to nurse ideas and information until the next opportunity. Growing smaller can be a deliberate act. Growing smaller is not a disbanding, its more like a sports team in the off season. People and groups stay in contact and skills are retained till they are needed again. Sometimes alliances disperse into smaller alliances that keep working on smaller issues and actions.

In general a catchment organisation should be outward looking and seeking to broaden and deepen is networks and groups. Sometimes however it is wise to pause, contract slightly, and marshal the groups' power and resources until the next window of opportunity opens.

As a geographic entity, a catchment organisation should aim to be able to take action or influence the whole of the catchment, or any part of it. This is why it must be organised sub catchment by sub catchment.

It must build groups, activate individuals and make allies across the whole catchment. If it does this respectfully in a credible and practical way it will build a network that allows it to know what is going on. If it has the trust of its members and allies it will resist most standard "divide and conquer" challenges by vested interests.

Catchment organisations and groups grow gradually and an organiser needs be aware of how they grow. It takes three people to form a core group. It takes five people to give that core outreach capacity. If you have five groups in an area you could form a sub catchment group/network. If you have ten groups in a small-medium catchment you can form an interim catchment committee. If you have three groups in a majority of sub catchments you can form a formal catchment-wide coordinating committee or alliance.

These numbers are only guides but indicate how you can go about building up your catchment organisation. See also appendix four "The Howe Strategy"

While many grassroots activities are invisible to local power structures there comes a time when they have to hook-up with formal processes.

An organiser has to build local capacity to a sufficient level first. When there are a number of local groups an organiser has to weave them into bigger groupings. With these larger alliances sub catchment and catchment plans can be developed. When enough local groups, alliances and community strategies are in place, its time to hook-up with top down processes. Using the catchment organisations democratic processes and the political muscle of its member groups, mandated and accountable representatives can be inserted into the formal planning processes.

When engaging with governments, corporations or institutions a catchment organisation needs to be aware of the potential for co-option or silencing as a result. The best way to avoid co-option is to always have an inside and an outside strategy. Yes put members on committees, but no don't stop doing what you were doing before. Support the person on the inside and maintain regular contact and debriefing to help them avoid being co-opted through groupthink and other co-option techniques. Sometimes the representatives inside the process are relying on outside pressure to keep it from turning into a stalemate or talkfest. To avoid being silenced, insist that all the information has to be referred back to the catchment organisation to allow proper canvassing of members views. Don't agree to any process that insists on absolute confidentiality.

When linking with existing processes or institutions a catchment organisation has to ask itself some fundamental questions. The question of whether an institution wants to, or can, change has to be asked. Some institutions, such as the World Bank, are not their own masters. Governments can change it but it can't really change itself. In these situations any engagement is likely to be aimed at co-option or silencing critics, so a catchment organisation should avoid engagement and focus on the real point of change: the governments involved. Some corporations and institutions have such a poor track record of co-option and deceit that it is best to just say no and focus on marshalling outside pressure to effect changes, rather than risk co-option.

Someone once told me the Chinese have a saying "If you trust me put it in writing". The traditional owners of my area have another twist to this one, they say " Before we put our agreement in writing, do it first!"

Catchment organisers and organisations need protocols and rules of engagement to keep them honest. But a written protocol isn't worth much if you aren't already doing it.

Sometimes the rules apply to members and sometimes they apply to other independent bodies. A simple example of one of these rules of engagement is "Don’t take action or even hold discussions about an area, without contacting or involving members or allies in that area".

Other important rules cover relations with corporations, elected officials, traditional owners/first nations, state-based and national groups.

The reason for these rules is:

• To make relationships vaguely predictable and consistent,
• To preserve your independence,
• To respect others,
• To help with training and skills transfer,
• To avoid continually reinventing the wheel or endless "I thought we agreed on…." moments in meetings,
• To clarify roles and obligations,
• To deflect pressure tactics from "salespeople" or lobbyists eg "That’s interesting, but I have to consult first and I'll get back to you".

Sometimes it is appropriate for rules of engagement to be expressed in written charters, protocols and memorandums of understanding to make the underlying assumptions and protocols clear to all parties. Charters are useful for crystallising a common purpose to bind a group or alliance together.

Written MOUs are generally between organisations and are usually a time- or purpose-limited form of alliance. The main organisation I work for "The Web Incorporated" has an ethical charter that sets out our broad aims and aspirations. It also has an MOU with the traditional owners of the region we operate in, which details how we will carry out joint activities with them. MOUs can also be used to help with specific projects an example of which is provided below.

• Creating and maintaining clean water, clean air and an unpoisoned land.

• Supporting the variety and abundance of life.

• Adopting and promoting ecologically sound technologies and sustainable use of resources.

Expressed as:

• Creating lifestyles which fulfil basic needs and which promote self-expression, self-empowerment, social equity and health.

• Involving all people affected by the decision in the decision making process.

• Encouraging equal opportunity for all to their own livelihood, regardless of age, race, marital status, disability, religion or gender.

Expressed as:

• Promoting the local community as the central basis of the economy and society.

• Caring for aged, ill, disabled and poor people with a respect, which enables them to maintain their integrity as human beings.

• Minimising the separation between workplace and lifestyle.

• Recognising and promoting co-operative enterprise as an integral part of community.

* Participation is by active involvement and cooperation

* All participants retain autonomy

* The regional bid will bring together bid components from community based natural resource management groups in the South East Queensland Natural Resource Management Strategy Region

* Components will only be amalgamated with the agreement of all affected groups

Individual groups will be responsible for developing their component of the regional bid

* The bid will require funding to be allocated directly to participating groups

* Participating groups will be responsible for their own project reporting

* The bid will be signed-off by all participants

* Groups may cease participation at any time by ceasing their active involvement and cooperation.

We would like to participate in the South East Queensland Integrated Natural Resource Consortium Regional Funding Bid in accordance with the above vision and ground rules

Signed by Office bearers

When struggling with a catchment issue or campaign it is important to leave your opposition an escape hatch. If your opposition has no escape hatch it has no option but to resist until the bitter end.

When planning a campaign, design escape hatches to take the opposition where you want them to go. There are at least three main types of escape hatches. The honey hatch offers a win-win end for the conflict. The vortex hatch is designed to be initially attractive and then, suck them where you want them to go through the inexorable consequences of the first decision. The last resort hatch implies they must force a change on someone else to escape the conflict. They must be forced to do what they don't want to do.

Once a catchment organisation identifies and area of interest such as a piece of bushland, lake or river it should try to ring it with local activists and groups. Every reserve or waterway needs a "friends of" group with a name like the Friends of Bulimba Ck or Friends of Our Local Reserve to protect its interests.

Initiating these groups can involve door knocking surrounding residences to gauge interest in local rehabilitation work next to their backyard. It can also involve producing and distributing leaflets outlining the values and opportunities of the area. Tours and walks of the area also increase local knowledge about it.

If you are successful in encouraging local action and the number of surrounding groups grows you can attempt to bring these groups together to think about an overall plan for that whole area. A working group could then be established to draft a community action plan about local desires for that area of interest.

In doing this the catchment organisation will enclose the ground and provide a solid base for future planning and action to protect and restore that area. In one local catchment we did this and set up many small bushcare groups around a local bushland reserve who came together and developed a community plan. When the bushland was threatened by inappropriate use, the local politician received hundreds of letters in just a couple of days and the planned use was scrapped.

In wider catchment organising you can begin by getting people to work on a patch next to their backyard. By starting where people are and working outwards from there a catchment organisation can help people understand their whole catchment with immediate local benefits.

For a large project or area, giving each group a patch to look after breaks the job into easy parts. When groups each adopt a patch you maximise involvement while requiring a smaller commitment from each group. It gives groups a clear autonomous path of action. It allows them to work within their skills and strengths and to share these with others.

It brings groups together for a common purpose, which helps with netweaving and alliance building.

Companies and governments often have high turnover in staff. Local community often have a slower turnover and have more memory. The local community has often been through many consultations while the consultants are often first timers in that area. Local groups and activists often have extensive archives of reports, manuals and brochures. The local community has local knowledge about old proposals and issues. These archives and experience are useful for what's worked in the past and for "training" new bureaucrats about past studies, policies and actions.

A catchment organisation should use community memory to act against the corporate alzheimers in government and to keep a consistency of purpose and policies over the long term.

Some people complain all the time, but not all of these could be called dissidents in the way I am using the word. To my mind dissidents are activists/thinkers who dare to be different to the mainstream or seek changes in the way things are. When the change is achieved they often bow out from their dissident role. It’s their genuine constructive desire and consistency of purpose that makes them different from just whingers.

Power comes in many forms, from structural to peoples power.

Structural power comes from a person's or organisation’s position, like a department head or elected official.

People power is a diffuse form of power that relies on building alliances, mobilising the community and achieving community influence.

People's power is usually time-limited and need-driven. The level of agreement reached by that alliance/coalition determines its strength.

An organisation's enduring form of diffuse power is influence. Maintaining this form of power relies on its representativeness, legitimacy, credibility and accountability.

People power can vary in its strength and duration. As a basic rule, the amount of power is limited by the level of agreement between members of an alliance. The broader the agreement across sectors and areas is, the more power. This broad and powerful form is very transient, as large coalitions are hard to keep together. Another form of people power is where the focus is much tighter in the issues or area of land covered. This form is very common among most non-government lobby groups and will last as long as the issue is unresolved.

A catchment organisation can span both these forms of people power but should aim to be a broad geographically focussed alliance. This will put the organisation into a good position to coordinate long term special interest groups as well as being able to build larger coalitions on specific short term common issues as they arise.

Catchment issues are so broad and so complex that they are beyond the resources of governments to understand or resolve. To address the issues requires the mobilisation of the whole of community's expertise, goodwill and resources. A broad community organisation can access far more innovation, experience and expertise than any organisation that has to pay for its advice. Governments are under-resourced to address the issues both financially and intellectually. It is up to community organisations to access the required resources and then to have enough clout to change government policies and actions. Not only governments can be influenced by catchment organisations: individuals, groups and corporations can also be motivated to change their policies and actions in ways that the governments cannot achieve. Indeed catchment organisations have to play a role in changing our very culture if true environmental change is to happen.

A catchment organisation should seek not only to find funding for itself, but also for its member groups. This applies not only to funding but also to publicity, exposure and acknowledgment.

By nourishing its members, a catchment organisation will build a solid base for achieving its aims. Alliances receive as much as they give to their members both in power and ideas.

The more resourced, trained and confident its members are, the better they can work to achieve their local aims. The more empowered they are locally the more likely they are to buy into bigger issues and campaigns. Working with members to build up their skills in publicity, organising and fundraising will strengthen the catchment organisation and help bind it together. It will allow members to see real and tangible benefits from working together on a common purpose.

The strength of a whole of community catchment group is that it doesn't have to wait for the government. There is no law that says a community can't do what the government is not doing, or can't think about things the government isn’t or won't think about. For that matter, there is no law that says the community can't shadow or parallel government activities. The community must lead if the government isn't. If your local government doesn't have catchment policies write them and put them on the World Wide Web. If there is no water quality monitoring, set up a group to do so and publish your result in a local newspaper. If your government doesn't have a conservation plan for an area, put together an alliance and write one. Don’t wait. There are few limits to what you can do if a need to do something exists.

Structural power is power gained through constitutions, laws, policy, political judgement and legal precedent. This form of power can also be created by tenure, job description, articles of association, policy, statute, corporations' laws and management. Some structural power is place limited, like a local or state government, and this works against thinking about whole catchments.

The essence of structural power, as different from peoples power, is that it exists by virtue of a position or structure that will disappear if the person or group is no longer in that position or structure.

A catchment organisation needs to focus on building peoples power not structural power. A well-organised catchment organisation can achieve a measure of structural power by sitting on committees and advisory boards. This structural power should be viewed as temporary and not the real power the catchment organisation has. Its real power lies in building enduring influence in the wider community.

Elected power is a form of structural power where the power is up for grabs every 3-4 years. Elected public officials, like it or not, are the ones who get to set most of the rules we all have to live by. Having grown up under a corrupt right-wing government I share the widespread public distrust of the electoral process and who ends up with the jobs. But working with elected officials is something that has to be done if you want to improve catchments or change government policy. An elected official is after all a person who lives somewhere and who might do the "right thing" if the opportunity presents itself.

Elected power has a number of properties that work against catchment organisations. The first is the three to four year election timeframe, which leads to short term thinking and a culture of instant results. The second is that to get elected power you must answer to many stakeholders with competing and conflicting interests and it is often safer to do nothing than to disrupt the balance of interests and risk electoral loss.

A catchment organisation should have a relationship with all the elected public officials in its catchment and should assume that those people could help them if required. A catchment organisation should also be aware of the limits and features of elected power so it can apply political pressure if required.

A catchment organisation can play a vital role in linking between citizens and government. It can't achieve this aim if it is seen as anyone's pet to be trotted out when greenwash is needed.

A catchment organisation must see itself as an equal partner in any process. It should be prepared to use its power and to bite the hands that feed it. To be a valued partner, it needs practical ideas on how to solve issues. If it can demonstrate its power and its usefulness, a catchment organisation can be a powerful partner to other groups and governments.

The Norman Creek catchment is a small very urbanised one in the middle of the city of Brisbane. Most of the tributaries have been concreted, piped or put underground. However, the lower catchment still has intact floodplains and mangrove wetlands, thanks to the work of the Norman Creek Flood Action Group. The upper catchment still has some forested lands thanks to the tireless efforts of local residents and the Toohey Forest Protection Committee.

The hidden nature of the catchment’s streams meant the catchment committee had to spend a lot of energy making people aware that the creek still existed and was worth protecting. The catchment committee was started as a project of the then Residents Action Group for the Environment (RAGE) after I made a presentation to them about using catchments as a tool for sustainable development. RAGE successfully applied for a grant from the Brisbane River Management Group to develop a ‘know your catchment’ display to tour schools and shopping centres. The display included both historical and recent maps of the catchment to show its general features and the issues. It had colour drawings of some local animals and plants, a local history of the catchment, and information about problems such as pollution and vegetation clearing. RAGE also received a small grant from the Geographical Society to assist a volunteer to laboriously construct a awesome plywood 3D model of the catchment. This model tours schools and shopping centres and people are asked to locate where they live just using geographic landmarks such as hills, ridges and creeks rather than streets.

RAGE also organised Know ‘n Grow days at local schools. The days were focussed on bringing school environment groups from around the catchment to a host school. Each school group was encouraged to give a presentation about their activities to the other groups. We also had specialist people with skills in water quality and conservation, soil erosion, wildlife and plant communities to share their skills with the students on the day. The students were then encouraged to trace a local stream through its pipes to where the water reached the open air. They would stencil signs on local gutters saying "Dump No Waste. Flows to Local Creek" to raise local awareness. They would do hands-on water quality testing and observe amounts of pollution, litter and remnant vegetation. A newsletter would be written up and distributed to the students which recorded the day’s activities and presentations.

After RAGE did this for about two years, established a number of rehabilitation sites and campaigned on local issues, the local government agreed to help develop a Norman Creek Catchment Plan. When the plan was released RAGE established the Norman Creek Catchment Coordinating Committee (N4C) to help with the plan’s implementation and to carry on awareness raising work. The N4C is still operating and its website is www.n4c.org.au

Community plans can mobilise expertise far more effectively than formal government plans. They can move in the community without the resistance a government process attracts. With trust and credibility established, people will give their time and expertise to their local catchment organisation in a way they won’t for the government.

The plan develops a high degree of local ownership, which can mobilise community members to defend it and campaign ceaselessly for its implementation, regardless of who is in power politically.

Every piece of land can be managed to the benefit of the catchment. By designing our yards, paddocks and pastures well, we can save water, minimise erosion, maintain infiltration, control runoff and provide habitat for native plants and animals. A catchment organisation can help people by providing expertise to help plan their property with the catchment in mind. The catchment organisation can also link these property plans into existing sub-catchment community corridor plans. In the Bulimba Creek for example, we have a "1/3 For Nature" program where the catchment group provides advice and shares the costs of some materials with property owners in the catchment who agree, in writing, to keep at least 1/3 of their property for natural purposes. Priority is given to land in strategic areas as mapped in the Bulimba Creek Vegetation Strategy. Every yard or property that controls its runoff, saves water, uses native plants and has appropriate habitat helps the catchment.

Each large bushland area needs a plan before any rehabilitation work is done. These community bushland plans should be developed in conjunction with surrounding residents and other interested community groups. In the Whites Hill bushland in Brisbane, the catchment organisation and a regional environment group worked with the local community to describe the bushland’s animals and plants, map different parts of the reserve, and to make recommendations about acceptable uses: managing tracks and domestic animals among other things. This plan was then printed, distributed to the public and governments, and published on a website. The community’s plan was used to change the local Governments plan for the area and to guide rehabilitation and recovery efforts. The plan has helped the local community attract funds for bushland rehabilitation and threatened species research. The bushland now enjoys a higher level of environmental protection in local government planning.

As the number of sites a catchment organisation is working in grows, it needs to sit back and think about how these areas are connected. By bringing people from the different areas and local groups together, along with relevant local experts, they can develop a common plan for restoring and enhancing local waterways and bushlands. This plan can guide the groups in building a network of core natural areas and connecting links of vegetation across and down the sub-catchments and waterways. The catchment organisation could organise the meeting, provide the venue, the maps and other information required.

This level of community planning should be the 3-5 year goal of most catchment organisations. It is wise to have an interim plan from day one, to guide your actions in a strategic way, but it takes time to fully appreciate the detail, and the information grows richer the more you organise local groups.

Community catchment plans allow the organisation, its members and allies to amalgamate all the smaller plans and actions they have done into one plan where they can think about the catchment as a whole. This plan should detail the next phases of the activities to fill strategic gaps in knowledge or on-ground action. It should give a common purpose to local groups and help them coordinate with each other. The plan needs to be credible and practical if you want wider support. It needs to take into account actions by others as well as government plans. It needs to have a way of measuring its progress and giving positive feedback. The plan needs to cover the whole catchment’s water cycle, water quality, animals and plants, human health and enhancing the community’s ability to act positively on those features. The plan should exist to guide community action primarily, but should also seek to involve governments and agencies in supporting the plan. The quality of the plan and the public support it enjoys will determine its impact on formal government planning.

Governments normally do regional planning. These plans generally focus on government needs and desires. They are also generally done in an unintegrated way ie the transport plan is done in isolation from the conservation strategy and so on.

A catchment organisation can help correct these plans. A catchment organisation can build up from site plans, native vegetation plans and catchment plans and its work in empowering local communities to develop alternate regional or bioregional plans. This gives local communities and groups an avenue to articulate their own needs and desires in an integrated way.

These community regional plans can help guide local actions and projects. They can also be a platform to beneficially change existing government regional plans.

It represents local communities taking power to define their own future and to work towards that future unencumbered by party political constraints.

Having developed a local, catchment or regional plan the next step is implementation. A well -crafted plan will contain actions that can be done by individuals, groups, industry and governments. A plan that only relies on corporate or government implementation, without an active role for the wider community, will stall in a mire of procrastination, bureaucratic deliberations and evasions. I call this the gunnamirra syndrome (gunna look into it).

A catchment organisation can avoid this by moving ahead with local and catchment wide community based actions. The organisation can also help mobilise local communities to press corporations and governments to keep progressing their part of the plan.

Look at each of the actions in your plan and find out what it would take to do it. Look at your resources and identify the things you can do now. Find out what you don't have and make a plan of how to get it. Be patient, some actions will have to wait till the right opportunity. Funding can be a piecemeal affair, with a bit from here and a bit from there, and often a mixture of cash and in-kind support.

I guess the summary of implementation is - do a realistic plan, get going, do what you can, go around roadblocks and find common cause with allies and funders when the opportunity arises.

If the catchment organisation and local community are out there publicly doing their bit of the plan the political pressure is great for governments and corporations to do their bit.

Money is only one means to an end, if you can get what you need without cash it is even better.

For things you need occasionally it is better to borrow than to buy. Skills and resource lists of members are one tool that you can use to assess what you can borrow if you need to.

When cash is needed, the local community should be looked to first. Asking for money directly is generally more effective than stalls or other fundraising events.

Grant funding is also useful, but can make a catchment organisation dependant on outside groups and their aims if used too much.

In-kind support is one way many companies and people will help, even if they can't or won’t help with cash or personal effort.

The funding base for a catchment organisation should be based in the local catchment community with other sources of funding used sparingly and strategically. A funding base should also be developed for the organisation’s member groups (see What's in the Soup?).

Government Funding: this is sometimes available to catchment organisations but has the feature of changing its criteria in response to political or managerial fads. This can distract a catchment organisation from its mission as it tries to follow changing guidelines. This sort of funding is generally suitable for short-term 1-3 year projects.

Local government funding and In-Kind support has proved very useful for nourishing smaller groups.

Philanthropic Funding: this is more available in some countries than others. The criteria and guidelines tend to change more slowly than government programs. Philanthropic sources of funding are often better for slightly longer-term projects. They are often very narrow in their focus so it’s a bit of pot luck if your issue matches their criteria.

Both government and philanthropic funding sources require relatively high levels of administrative compliance and regulation.

Corporate Funding: Most funds for community projects DO NOT come from this source. Corporate funding also brings the possibility of co-option or greenwash. Support, both funding and in-kind, can be available for specific activities or events. This is generally done on a fee for service basis in that they are in effect paying you to advertise them to a particular audience.

Community Funding: This is done through a direct appeal to potential donors or to the public. A public appeal normally involves extra administration and legal compliance costs. Groups can also try their hands at hosting events and hopefully making a profit. A community organisation can often get discounts, or network the goods and services it needs, from supporters. Groups should also consider having a commercial arm which can provide specialist environmental services. Commercial activities should also be at arms length ie a subsidiary.

I have used all of the sorts of funding over the years and they all have their strengths and weaknesses. The mix I have relied on more than any other is a small amount of seed funding from local governments and a base of community funding. The strength of catchment organisations and community funding is that you can deliver tangible benefits to donors and supporters, right before their eyes, and in their local catchment. Remember that if you don't have money you can still get what you want by asking to borrow what you need through community networks. Research has confirmed that in the e-mail age you are only five people away from anything.

Example Boggy Creek -Getting Bigger Getting Smaller

The Boggy Creek catchment is a very industrial catchment on the mouth of the Brisbane River, ringed by airports, seaports, industry and oil refineries. For a number of years the local community who lived in the small village of Pinkenba struggled to have a say and to stop inappropriate industry. They established a local group called "Bayside Residents Against Toxic Sites (BRATS)" which successfully fought off a hazardous waste treatment facility being foisted on them. When confronted by a welter of industrial developments as the port was expanded, they approached me/BREC? for help in coordinating a response. Together we established a catchment committee involving the local government, environment groups, local residents and local industry to develop a common plan to protect natural areas and address water and air quality issues. BRATS continued to play its very active opposition role while the catchment committee worked on seeking cooperative solutions. The catchment committee used a community plan (the Boggy Ck Ecological protection plan) as its strategic guide. It also worked to gain industry agreement for some form of joint air and water quality monitoring projects. It found that the larger industries such as the refinery were very supportive of restricting development around them on safety grounds. Other industries were also very receptive because a large number of their workforce either lived in Pinkenba or nearby. After successfully protecting most of the river banks, mangroves and some wetland areas the need for the committee waned. While I thought there was still more scope for work on water and air quality, the immediate needs of the community were addressed and without the support of the local residents things could have become counter productive. The Boggy Ck committee was scaled back and eventually wound up before any damage to goodwill was done. The work it did is still available and I suspect as air quality worsens there may be a desire to restart it and I hope the local community won’t hesitate to ask for outside support again. The Pinkenba ecological protection plan can be viewed at brec.ozecol.org/pinkEPR.html.

Bulimba Creek is medium sized urban catchment with large forests in its upper catchment and extensive floodplains and wetlands in its lower catchment. The area is rapidly changing from semi rural to almost fully urban. The catchment committee got its start when a local activist contacted me about saving some bushland near their home in a new housing development in the middle catchment. I advised them on tactics and encouraged them to start a local bushland rehabilitation group using in-kind funding from the local government. The activist was so enthusiastic and skilful that they established not one but three groups, and this was followed quickly by another three, all in the surrounds of the WhitesHill-PineMountain bushland reserve. These groups were involved in lobbying the city council to increase the protection of the reserve and add more threatened patches of bushland to the reserve. They realised that this bushland wasn't the only one threatened and the animals they were trying to protect followed local creeks and waterways to Bulimba creek and on to other larger forests on the eastern and southern sides of the catchment. With some advice on strategy and technical support, they started a two pronged campaign. Firstly, they organised the local resident and bushcare groups along with the WhitesHill-PineMountain Community group into a committee to develop an ecological protection plan for the reserve and change how the local government managed the reserve and its key linkages. Secondly, they formed a group called Save Care and Regenerate Urban Bushland (SCRUB) to establish more community bushcare groups from the reserve and other forests to the Bulimba Creek following identified key linkages. Having developed the reserve and corridor plan they encouraged all the groups to write or visit local politicians to get the plans recommendations adopted. The city council responded by releasing the Whites Hill management plan, starting the Bulimba Creek waterways management plan and published the Bulimba Creek - Know Your Creek Booklet. Building an alliance between the now numerous bushcare groups, SCRUB, the existing Belmont Hills Group, the Karawatha Forest Protection Society, the Brisbane Region Environment Council and the Rivermouth Action Group, the interim catchment coordinating committee was established. This group successfully applied for funds to develop a Bulimba Creek strategic vegetation plan for the whole catchment. Further funds where sought from local and federal governments to implement this plan. The Bulimba Creek Catchment Coordinating Committee (B4C) was then established and continues to campaign for protection of bushlands and waterways as well as carrying out on-ground rehabilitation actions. Eventually the B4C established over twenty bushcare groups and assisted with forming a number of local action groups to campaign for specific sites. A waterwatch program was established and a schools program was launched. The B4C lobbied to make sure these smaller groups were funded and supported in these activities. The B4C has a commercial arm that carries out the mid-week bushcare program and supports SCRUB with its weekend volunteer activities. It has an office donated by a local firm and enjoys wide support from local residents and businesses. The Whites Hill ecological protection plan can be viewed at brec.ozecol.org/news/current/WHPMREC2.html. The B4C is going strong and its website can be viewed at www.bulimbacreek.org.au.

Well that seems to very briefly cover the basics of organising catchments. This handbook should have just enough in it to get you going and provide some help in working out what you are supposed to be doing.

Every catchment is different and every organiser has a different style. I have included a list of books and websites at the end of the handbook. I have also tried to link you to real examples which you can study in detail.

The appendices contain some of the more technical theory and principles about the earth, ecodevelopment and organising I rely on in my work. These appendices were written in the early 1990s and I have only slightly updated them for this book so they might show their age a bit. I hope they give a feel for where I think we should be heading.

Its been good to have some time off to write this handbook but I hear the ridges, creeks and roads calling me again, so I’d better get out there and get back on the job.

If you feel motivated to get into catchment organising you might run in to me "round the ridges".

Michael Petter

Brisbane, Australia

December 2003

A wise friend of mine was of the opinion that for humanity to survive and thrive it needed to master a basic ecological vocabulary. We need to understand the earth and its ecology, and that means you! So here is my attempt from 10 years ago to share this vocabulary.

The earth has the only breathable atmosphere of any planet we can yet detect anywhere in all of space there are no backups, no life rafts, it’s the only planet we have.

Our planet is a rock in orbit around a star called Sol. It has a thin (less than 100km) layer of air and water clinging to it. This thin layer is home to more than two million life-forms. This assembly of living things is called the biosphere, the air above them is the atmosphere, the ground under them is the lithosphere and the water around them is the hydrosphere. Care of the earth involves working within all four of these spheres of existence. Their integrity and health is necessary to the functioning of the bionomy and thus too human existence.

The thin layer of gas covering our planet is the atmosphere. It provides the air needed by most organisms for respiration as well as insulating them from harmful solar and cosmic radiation. The combination of gases in the atmosphere has changed dramatically since the earth was formed. Research by James Lovelock has shown that in recent times the composition of the atmosphere has stayed in relative equilibrium. This equilibrium is created and maintained by living things. If the micro-organisms in the coastal waters and soil are disturbed or destroyed, our atmosphere may become hostile to our form of life. The protection of these life-forms and the quality of their environment are thus critical to the quality of the atmosphere.

The lithosphere is the core of rock, the molten mantle, and the thin skin of rocks and soil on the surface of the planet. The skin on top, the continental and seafloor plates, moves around much like a piece of bark in a boiling billy.

The continents are submerged at the edges to form shallow seas, home to most of the life in the ocean. On the surface of these continents is a thin skin that contains life, the soil. The soil is a product of the decomposition of the rocks underneath it and the deposition of organisms and their wastes on top of it. The soil is a living system made up of minerals and millions of living micro-organisms, other animals and plants. It is the major source of nutrients for plants and hence the animals which feed on them. Agricultural practices, particularly pesticide and herbicide use, can destroy the life in the soil. Landclearing can lead to erosion and salting. Soil forms very slowly and is very costly to replace once eroded away.

The hydrosphere covers most of the surface of the earth as seas. Water circulates through the atmosphere in clouds, over and through the lithosphere as rivers and groundwater, and then drains back to the seas. The oceans receive the nutrient outflows from the continents and return some of them to the western sides of continents many thousands of years later. The organisms, which help to maintain our atmosphere, inhabit the continental edges of the oceans. The oceans also drive the weather and are crucial in maintaining the temperature of the bionomy.

Water is stored in the oceans, artesian basins, lakes and icecaps as well as within the soil. It is critical to the maintenance of life. As most life-forms are up to 90% water, they need clean unpolluted water to survive.

The biosphere occurs in the lower parts of the atmosphere, the upper parts of the lithosphere, and in the hydrosphere. Life occurs mainly in the top 30cm of the soil, the top 20m of the seas and the bottom 7 000m of the air.

The biosphere consists of two main sorts of life forms, those which produce living material using the sun’s energy directly (autotrophs) and those which produce it by consuming other living things or their by-products (heterotrophs). Plants are the primary solar collectors of the biosphere and other life-forms depend on them for their energy.

Life does not occur uniformly across the face of the planet but varies with the major climatic zones such as the artic, temperate, sub-tropical and tropical zones. The number and type of organisms occurring within these climatic zones varies due to the variation in soils, landform and history. The interactions between these factors of climate, resources available and the organisms define the broad groupings of life into biomes such as wet forest, dry forest, tundra, swamp, and estuaries.

Within these biomes, life is organised into communities. A community is a recognisable and self-maintaining assemblage of life forms in a given environment. For example, we can speak about coastal communities such as mangrove swamps. The mangrove swamp community is not only the various types of mangroves themselves, but also the fish, shellfish, birds, fruit bats and insects, which live among them. Natural communities rarely have distinct edges, but merge from one to the other to create mosaics of different communities within each region.

Each community is many different life-forms, each within it’s own niche. A niche is the area of time and space in which a life-form lives. One organism may occupy the same space at a different time to another, for example when different animals use the same waterhole at different times of day. The waterhole is part of the niche of every animal that uses it.

The biosphere is thus classified into climatic zones, biomes, communities and niches.

Having briefly introduced some basic features of our planet and its four spheres we will look at how the whole bionomic system works..

The interactions within the biosphere, and between the biosphere and the atmosphere, lithosphere and hydrosphere, make up the bionomy. In the following discussions about the bionomy we will examine how the general features of living systems influence the bionomy.

We can make some general observations about the bionomy from the limited evidence available. Four of the major features of living systems are as follows:

" Living nature is essentially dynamic... All biological systems are open and unstable, since life is a process and nothing would happen in life if living systems were completely closed and stable." (Sjors 1980)

"Global change is the most natural thing on Earth and our planet has been in a state of perpetual change since it began some 4.6 billion years ago." (Quilty 1989)

Everything comes from somewhere and goes somewhere, things or energy don’t disappear, they just change. The presence of change is a vital feature of the bionomy. Life processes create change and species are created and destroyed by it. Confronted by ever changing circumstances, organisms and the species they make up are required to make genetic, behavioural and conscious choices in order to accommodate themselves to each new environment. As they make these adaptations, they affect other organisms within their environment. Organisms also affect, or change, their environment by consuming resources to grow and maintain themselves. They return most of these resources to their environment when they die.

Each time something changes it provides a potential habitat for a life-form. Variety in the bionomy is a reflection of the variety of habitats for life. This variety allows living systems to explore the possibilities of their time and place.

The variety of life-forms and their relationships assist communities and species to survive in the face of change. This is because there always seem to be a few individuals who can cope with the change. Most species show variety either within the species as a whole, such as different behaviours in different circumstances; or within their populations, such as size variations. Sexual reproduction is a popular strategy with organisms as it promotes variation within species. Without this diversity, species would be less able to colonise new habitats or develop new behaviours to cope with changes in the environment.

Changes in the environment can also destroy habitats and in so doing destroy whole species or ecosystems. When these changes are widespread and too rapid or profound to allow adaptation by the species affected, they cause extinction. The rise of oxygen-emitting organisms for example, changed the composition of the atmosphere and caused the extinction of the previously existing anaerobic organisms over most of the planet.

There are recognisable global cycles in the bionomy. These include the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and other nutrients. Each of these larger, global cycles is the made up of smaller cycles in the regional or local bionomies. Over time, life on earth has colonised most available niches and has organised itself into cycles of material and energy. These cycles have persisted for some time and can be said to have achieved a persistent and dynamic equilibrium. The amounts of material cycled and the pathways of the cycle have varied over time but the overall pattern of cyclic change persists.

In addition to global cycling of nutrients, there is cyclic behaviour in weather and climate, such as the seasonal cycles. The study of climate and weather cycles has given us a useful insight into all global cycles. Although these cycles appear to be regular and predictable, similar from year to year or day to day, they are not exactly the same each time and can sometimes vary wildly from what we expect. The timing of these variations in cyclic patterns can now be mathematically predicted, but not the exact form of the variations. This chaotic behaviour can appear and disappear unexpectedly even in the most apparently regular of things. Studies have shown that seemingly regular events such as heartbeats and revolutions of waterwheels can suddenly behave in a chaotic fashion.

The implication of the chaotic nature of the universe is that any life-form should expect the unexpected and will survive if it is sufficiently flexible. There is no way to ensure that any species or individual will survive, prosper or be happy for ever. Evolution of life is an open, unstable and essentially unpredictable process. It is going nowhere in particular, it is a journey without a destination. Organisms are not more highly evolved, they are merely adapted to their present circumstances.

The results of any change or action are very difficult to fully predict. As the study of influence and change in the bionomy indicates, the factors that directly affect an organism are the result of many thousands of cumulative, often distant, effects such as winds, rains, land movements, erosion and the activities of other organisms. A web of influence extends through time and space around an organism. No human, or any other organism, is an island.

The tendency of organisms to colonise available living space has resulted in the complex webs of mutual support we find in the bionomy. The organism has to become part of a community to be able to create a niche within it. As a simple example, the leaves of a tree provide food for the organisms in the soil underneath it when they fall. These organisms enrich the soil with nutrients that are then used by the tree to create more leaves. The soil organisms and the plant are mutually supportive.

Not all relationships in the bionomy are as close or as obvious as those described above. The soil organisms also affect the birds. They support the growth of trees that provide nesting sites and food for birds. This food includes fruit, nectar, or insects that live on the trees. In turn the birds prevent insects defoliating the trees and thus starving the soil organisms. If the soil can no longer support the trees, then the birds will also disappear. Put another way, soil erosion and the removal of soil organisms can cause extinction of bird species. Further, the absence of insectivorous birds can result in dieback, through insect attack, of any trees planted to prevent that erosion.

The web of relationships extends beyond those immediately obvious, so that a small change can greatly affect organisms far away in space or time. The unintended consequences of an action can thus far outweigh the intended ones.

Life, and thus the bionomy, is a process that organises and conserves materials and energy. It collects, forms and recycles water, nutrients and the other requirements to sustain its processes. Individual organisms will die but the system will persist as long as it is in balance. Balanced living systems regulate their losses and conserve their imports of nutrients and energy. The amount of materials in circulation in the bionomy is small compared to the available reserves in the soil and vegetation. The major source of energy driving the bionomy is the sun. This energy is captured and converted by plants. This solar economy, in good years, makes a small gain through tight conservation and extensive reuse of materials.

Living systems exhibit growth in pulses, that is, growth in any area or organism is not continuous but episodic. They grow rapidly and use many resources while they are colonising a niche. They reach a balance with their environment and then use only the resources necessary to maintain that position. Eventually they die or some external factor changes so that a new balance becomes necessary and a new growth phase begins. Organisms such as algal blooms that consume resources rapidly lead spectacular but short lives.

There are three main types of ecosystems in the bionomy. These types of growth curves are illustrated in Figure 1.The first is a system that has a slow episodic growth and persists for long periods of time, for example the wet forests(fig 1d). Secondly, there are those systems that establish and grow rapidly and then maintain themselves in a steady state, for example the savannas (fig 1c and 1d). Thirdly, there is a group that colonise and progress to a peak production and then decline over time, such as sand dune ecosystems and some high latitude forests (fig 1a and 1b). The natural wealth affects the type of bionomy possible in each region. Some regions are poor in natural wealth or have critical limiting factors and thus can only have a low level of productivity. These "poor" regions are characterised by stress tolerant and opportunistic species. The stress tolerators have low growth rates, intermittent reproduction and a capacity to lie dormant when times are hard. The opportunistic species have resistant seeds, high growth rates and short life cycles, so they can complete their life cycle in one good season. They have episodic and often short-lived growth spurts, the classic boom-bust cycle.

The bionomy is also characterised by seasonal production peaks for its various sectors. Withdrawals from the bank of stored resources are not ever growing; they are high in the start-up phase and lower as the system matures. Each organism within the system also consumes more while it is growing than during the rest of its lifecycle. If inputs are reasonable and reliable and conservation is high, net gains of energy and materials can be made every year. These gains are the natural wage and become the pool of nutrients and energy available for use within the ecosystem during that time. By investing this wage in living things (the biomass) and nutrient savings in the soil, the bionomy builds up its natural wealth.

Systems with a strict budget cannot sustain withdrawals of natural wealth. For example, a rainforest relies on minimal loss of biomass and high recycling to maintain itself on its infertile tropical soils. If its reserves of biomass are removed, there is little nutrient left in the soil and the same ecosystem will not regenerate. It is difficult to get re-financing if you deplete your savings in the bionomy.

No system can completely stop outflow. Sustainable communities operate to conserve their resources and to minimise outflow of their natural wealth by recycling the nutrients in their system. The conservative budget of a mature plant community is an example. The proportion of material in circulation compared to the material held in fixed reserves is small. The proportion of nutrients entering the system almost balances those leaving.

Eventually even the most conservative ecosystem uses up its natural wealth, or circumstances change, and it dies. Death is a natural and necessary feature of bionomic systems. Decomposers occupy a large and important niche in the bionomy because they return the resources locked up in infrastructure to the pool of natural wealth. While plants are the major income earners in the bionomy, decomposers are the liquidators, they are the conservers and redistributors of natural wealth. For example, in some woodlands the weight of decomposer organisms below the soil can equal the weight of material above the soil. The bionomy as we know it would fail without decomposers because they allow resources to be used again and again. They allow the community of organisms to live in balance with the natural wealth of their system.

Communities are systems of species in the bionomy. They conserve resources and tend to create the conditions for an increase in the variety and abundance of life, in balance with their surroundings. In the mosaic of non-human communities, each community will usually conserve, recycle and form its own requirements. Most land communities are based in a particular locality and are reliant on the resources available in that locality, because they are dependent on immobile plants as their primary energy source. This doesn’t imply that non-human communities are completely self-reliant. The relationships between communities are important for the movement of life’s requirements around the biosphere. When each community receives these requirements it conserves them for as long as possible by circulating them through their system. Non- human communities have a solar economy that is in fact economical in the sense of being thrifty, frugal and non-wasteful.

The relationships between the organisms within communities rely on a balance of power between the species. No one species can irrevocably destroy the environment of the other species in its community and survive itself. Species such as algae that have population explosions in response to improved food sources, also have rapid declines in population as their food sources become depleted. When predator species start to build up greater numbers than their prey, the system will be rebalanced by a famine reducing predator numbers. In environments with a variety of predators and p