Clive Jenkins goes bush

Press, 25 January 1989, Page 17

Clive Jenkins goes bush

By

MARK BENDEICH,

of the Australian Associated

Press, in Hobart.

About 250 bushwalkers spotted a curious and rare species one night recently at their camp site in hinterland forest on Tasmania’s east coast.

Warming his hands round their campfire, wearing a cream safari suit and a gold British Trade Union Congress badge was one of the world’s leading trade unionists, Clive Jenkins. Trade unionists are rarely seen in the company of such large groups of active conservationists, yet the 62-year-old Welshman was relaxed and cut a distinguished profile among the colourful crowd of backpackers. “I have been deeply interested in environmental questions for many years,’.’ Jenkins told them.

“I first came to Tasmania about four years ago and I’ve been here several times since. “I was enormously impressed with the natural beauty of the country. And also the struggle that is going on to maintain its natural beauty. I look upon Tasmania with Brazil as two of the great battle grounds of the world to keep the natural environment for people to see in the future.” Clive Jenkins is a life member of the Wilderness Society. He had been invited to the campsite from his new coastal home at nearby Bicheno to open the society’s Douglas River Reserve. His credentials as a trade unionist and an environmentalist are impeccable: British Trade Union Congress (TUC) president in 1987, Manufacturing, Science and Finance Union joint general secretary, former Friends of the Earth Trust chairman, Greenpeace and Wilderness Society activist and author.

He moved to Bicheno, a small fishing town midway along the east coast, last month from his home in Britain to become a "foot soldier” for the environmental movement here, to write his memoirs, and to take up a fellowship with the Federal Government from March. .»

Clive Jenkins has chosen to live on the front line of the "battle ground” to save the (•

Douglas-Apsley from logging. The hills and mountains behind Bicheno have a variety of endemic plant species, including 14 species of eucalypts, but about 5000 hectares are planned for logging. “I have come really to say I would like to help. I’m willing to be a foot soldier to help in any way I can. Tasmania is of world

importance, and I think the Tasmanians still perhaps — and I say this with all temerity — haven’t realised how important this great island state is. “I think logging is obscene. I would have thought that once you cut down a great tree and that you have pulped it for foreign wood-chippers to turn into pulp or into chopsticks you

are losing jobs all the time. “I would have thought that if we had logging into the DouglasApsley, and I live near here, it will destroy Tasmanian jobs.”

The future for the Tasmanian labour force is in service industries, he says. “It would appear to me that the future of many young people in Tasmania is going to be in the

service industry. Tasmania is so deeply impressive to people who come here from Europe — from dirty, polluted Europe.”

His view differs from the traditional Tasmanian trade union support for both “responsible logging” and conservation. “Once a hundred-foot-high tree has gone it has gone forever because you don’t live long enough to see anything to replace it.”

Clive Jenkins first became actively involved in the environmental movement when he became conscious as a trade unionist of the issue of nuclear energy in Britain.

“Most of our nuclear energy power stations in the U.K. are all too old and are being phased out. (But) no-one has phased out and dismantled peacefully a power station yet.

“Chernobyl went out in a bloody way. There will be generations of work actually taking these horrible things to pieces. So you will have enormous pyramids in the English countryside with 30-foot levels of concrete over them.

“If you wanted to give advice to your children to give to their children to give to their children: (tell them) ‘don’t be an archaeologist’.”

Jenkins casts himself in an interesting and perhaps glamorous role in the environmental movement in Tasmania. He will join the society’s growing list of notable overseas supporters, including popular British botanist David Bellamy, who was arrested during the Franklin Dam blockade in 1983.

But Jenkins is unlikely to be lying down in front of any bulldozers this summer. The state Government has delayed the beginning of forestry operations in the Douglas-Apsley until at least the 1989-90 season. In the meantime, Clive Jenkins will be busy writing his memoirs, “All Against the Collar,” and travelling round Australia giving public speeches and attending seminars as part of his fellowship.