Names like Terania Creek, Chaelundi and Big Scrub spring to mind, where courageous people risked fines, imprisonment and their safety fighting.

Writing in 1991, Frank Zeller said that at Chaelundi the 7000ha forest had the highest density of tree-dwelling mammals in Australia, and was home to 12 endangered species, including the powerful owl, the koala and the Hastings River mouse.

Nearly all protests run by activists defending forests are non-violent and in the end are vindicated in court.

At Chaelundi “they tied and superglued themselves to eight-metre tripods, and even wire-held monopods, kryptonite- locked their necks and limbs to cars, buried themselves to the neck in the Broadmeadows Rd (also known as Blockade), and shivered for long hours in part-buried, cold, claustrophobia-causing concrete pipes”.

According to Aidan Rickets, the protesters’ energy comes from their spirit: “It’s to do with the fact that we get our spirit from the earth that we’re protecting.

“We get our spirit from the love that we share as people in the knowledge that what we do is right. We’re drawing our power from Gaia, the planet.”

That battle is now going on all across NSW, but particularly in the Riverina with the river red gum forests.

Protesters have had to go to extreme lengths, getting arrested but having the cases thrown out of court.

A government study has shown the river red gum forests desperately need protection and in his last hours the previous premier, Nathan Rees, gave us an assurance that two new National Parks would protect the most precious remnants.

According to Ian Cohen MLC: “The Riverina region is one of the most heavily cultivated and poorly reserved bioregions in Australia, with only 1.9 per cent of the region included in reserves.

“River red gum wetlands are an ecosystem now threatened with total and irreversible collapse as a result of changes in river flows. This has caused the widespread death and decline of 75 per cent of trees along the Murray and associated rivers.”

Professor Mackey of the Australian National University, on the ABC 7.30 Report, recently said that ceasing the logging of native forests in Victoria and Tasmania would automatically reduce Australia’s greenhouse emissions by 20 per cent.

Judith Ajani in her book Forest Wars claims there are already enough plantations in southern Australia to satisfy all Australia’s timber needs.

The battle too for the cultural and spiritual heritage of the aboriginal people of Pandora also has its equivalent locally in the book “Baal Belbora” (They Dance No More), which is an account of the Aboriginal people and their struggle to survive white settlement on the Macleay. Try to borrow a copy from the local library.

This is a book every adult on the Macleay should read. It will open your eyes.

In the meantime the fictional Avatar will begin that awakening and it seems appropriate that the movie is headed to overtake Titanic’s attendance record in this particular year, the International Year of Biodiversity.

I wonder how much of that profit by James Cameron and the movie industry will go towards forest protection?

I wonder too if Avatar will cause millions of people around our own Pandora to reassess where we are going and what each of us should do about it.