Why community-based landcare?

Within ML we recently asked ourselves why community-based landcare was important. The responses were strong, inspired and worth sharing.

Why community-based landcare?

• Community based Landcare delivers community based outcomes without politically driven goals and agendas. Whilst whole of catchment outcomes is important, the dis-infranchising of community structures and services to larger regional centre's leads only to the destruction of smaller communities that makes up the fabric of our rural existence. For there to be improvement of environmental, economic and societal issues across a catchment there needs to be people actively engaged right across the catchment. Community based Landcare serves this purpose with the support of government and professional agencies.

• Community-based means (implies) the community "takes ownership" of the issues and the solution, it's accepted by peers, and communicated widely.

• Enviromental improvement will be sustainable and widely supported only when it is genuinely community led and based on intrinsic motivation, ie people want it to happen for its own sake because they have understood that all life depends on the continuing successful functioning of natural systems - extrinsic motivation works only while the bribes flow.

• I still want to run and have a say in my own life.

• We all need to breathe. To ensure our future we all need to be aware and start putting something back into the environment. Community Landcare gives us a positive way to contribute to a cleaner healthier environment

• We who live and work here have a physical, financial and spiritual attachment to the land. Who better to supervise the building and the healing than us

• Community-based landcare projects enhance community whereas individual funding fragments community. Individual projects cannot concentrate skills, resources and funding and encourage community capacity in a particular area and therefore outcomes both financial, community and environmental cannot be as great.

  You need community to desseminate information and skills effectively. If you have an individual doing a project then the network is broken and therefore information, skills, etc are not effectively transferred throughout the area.

• Who else is going to organize local affairs, future planning, community projects, local field days, guest speakers and attract funding for whole of catchment/sub catchment approach?

• We all hate feeling like we are being dictated to by bureaucracy, and the community is where we live and what helps make us who we are, so taking some ownership in the decisions about how our community works and the projects it undertakes is a great way create a place where we would all like to live.

• We are all part of the community and we can all work together for good natural resource outcomes whether in the town or country.