Bimblebox is under imminent threat.
Your help is needed!
Hi Bimblebox Supporters,
Scientists tell us that hundreds of thousands of native birds and animals will not survive the clearing of more than 4,000 ha of Bimblebox Nature Refuge and the massive landscape changes from underground mining in the remaining 4,000 ha. Bimblebox cannot be replaced or offset. Yet Waratah Coal wants their Galilee Coal Project to proceed there. It is either Nature or Coal; it cannot be both.
This is a landmark case because nature refuges like Bimblebox are gazetted by the state government to be protected from threatening processes for perpetuity. They should be ‘No Go’ areas for mining, as they cannot be offset and therefore would be a “net loss” for the state and nation’s biodiversity if they are mined.
Bimblebox Nature Refuge also represents a considerable investment of money and time by ourselves to manage the nation’s biodiversity for present and future generations. We need certainty that the government will stand by its contracted agreements to protect this public good.
On Monday 2nd December, The Bimblebox Alliance will lodge our objections in the Queensland Land Court to Waratah Coal’s Mining Lease and Environmental Authority. We object to the destruction of the Bimblebox Nature Refuge from Clive Palmer’s coal mine.
This David and Goliath battle will be expensive, but it must be fought. Donate and find more information on our website at https://bimblebox.org. We need all sorts of help, so if you have administration, communication, digital, or fundraising skills, please email us at bimblebox@gmail.com.
Check our website https://bimblebox.org for details on our major fundraiser, our 2020 Calendar, a glorious photographic celebration of Bimblebox. It will be available soon for ordering via our website. You’ll have all next year to enjoy it!
From Paola
Nothing was posted to you for years – because nothing happened on the ‘mining Bimblebox’ front for years. We almost forgot that sinking feeling of human and animal rights being trampled on. Then in late September I received a phone call from a representative of Waratah Coal.
It takes time to comprehend unexpected bad news. In essence, the person was saying – Waratah Coal is issuing a Notice of Entry to amend the pegs to all landholders; some part of properties will be excluded, as we are restricting our ML. Your place will still be in the mining tenement, but not to worry, we will find an offset for your reserve. Public notices will be out soon for draft EA and ML; you will have a chance to object of course…
In a nutshell, that’s all there is to it. Waratah Coal wants to start up the Galilee Coal mine, and Bimblebox friends, now incorporated in The Bimblebox Alliance Inc. (TBA), will be trying to stop this absurdity from going ahead. In the 21st century, how can we still be thinking of clearing, massacring and dispersing hundreds of thousands of native animals for thermal coal mining?
But it has to be tested in the Courts in the hope that our environmental legislation is stronger than government views sympathetic to and supportive of the mining industry. In doing so, we hope we can provide science with a large enough soapbox to accommodate all the experts needed to demonstrate what is obvious to us.
There would be no need to defend the value of Nature if our laws would recognize that biodiversity is an essential part of our own genome – it gives us ‘life’ – and to trade it for coal will be detrimental to our species.
Bimblebox is the first case where the owners of a Nature Refuge are opposing the mining development, taking the injustice to the ultimate umpire to decide the fate of Nature on our Refuge. And Bimblebox is but one of several nature refuges in the same predicament! Are our signed legal contracts with both State and Federal Governments for ‘protection in perpetuity’ of acknowledged high biodiversity values worth the paper they were written on in the early 2000s?
Please support us in this critical climactic phase of our story, which started almost 10 years ago with the exploratory drilling for coal on Bimblebox.
Donate at https://bimblebox.org/donate/
Together we will do our very best to save Bimblebox!
Paola Cassoni, TBA President,
Bimblebox Nature Refuge
Alpha QLD 4724
+61 7 49853474
bimblebox@gmail.com
https://bimblebox.org