AS IT IS WITH NATURE, FIRST THERE IS A NEED, THEN A FACILITY.

The 1988 ratification of Australia’s wet-tropical rainforests onto the World Heritage List, which compulsorily inscribed a modicum of freehold Daintree Rainforest property within its proposed area, launched the resident human inhabitants into unchartered waters.  With a clearly regulated management obligation and an effectively neutralised development entitlement, cost-recovery would be an ongoing challenge.

A great many travellers over the years have expressed a desire to further contribute their support through a dedicated environmental foundation.  What makes Daintree Rainforest Foundation Ltd. starkly different to almost every other environmental organisation, is the inclusion of human inhabitants at the centrepiece of both its management obligation and potential.

CHARITABLE ENVIRONMENTAL ORGANISATIONS HAVE CONVENTIONALLY EXCLUDED INHABITANT HUMAN BENEFICIARIES.

With human inhabitants upon the Land, developing a Not-For-Profit organisation that is listed on the Australian Register of Environmental Organisations, was not an easy achievement.  For the most part, the national approach to nature conservation presumes that the removal of humans is necessary.  This is great news to feral pests that take up the generosity of the vast and numerous human-free reserves.

Daintree Rainforest
Daintree Rainforest
Daintree Rainforest
Daintree Rainforest

Aboriginal Australians were forcibly removed from their traditional cultural landscapes and interred into declared reserves, under the legislative intent of providing for their urgent protection.  This formalised eviction removed the apex predator from each of the evacuated ecosystems, causing consequential trophic cascade.  Unless human repatriation is supported back into these impoverished natural landscapes, ecological health and productivity cannot be restored.

“For all the remarkable advantages of human sensitivity, severing an ecosystem of its human inhabitants inflicts the greatest injury upon the interests of life. Nothing can capture the complex breadth of communication that binds organisms to their own interests, to members of their own kind and across species, as extensively and comprehensively as the human organism. Neither can any other organism utilise the power of such a capability to decipher, order and extrapolate those messages into language and then utilise that language, via an internal monologue, to enhance and organise cognition.”
NEIL HEWETT

Sixty-thousand-years of accrued memory remains reposited within natural landscapes, but without its human custodians, the value of that memory and its ecological purpose, remains unvalued and unempowered.