Help stop forests being sold off to private companies
 

As part of the measures to try and reduce spending, the government is planning to sell large areas of nationally-run forest to private business... :facepalm:

Petition: 38 Degrees | Save Our Forests

To put what this means in perspective - the Avatar bluray launch had over 1 million trees planted, while this puts 30 million at risk.

Signed.

damn i tried to sign it but it said invalid postcode...i guess you have to be a resident of whatever country this is happening in. anyway, it's too bad that this is happening, to turn forests into hotels or golf courses is just ****ing stupid. i guess people now days prefer to get away from the city life....and enjoy peace and quiet in a hotel rather than actual natural peace and quiet -_-

Hmh. I couldn't sign it but will pass this on.

Signed.

For those outside the UK just put "A9A 9AA" in the postal code.

Signed :war:

NO TREES FOR YOU!

Signed! >:D

Good call! That was really starting to piss me off. I'll fight this damn private and corporate development to my last breath, whatever I can do. :war:

I asked my friends on Facebook to sign it as well.

Yeah, do this - it's like typing some random digits as a US postcode - it doesn't actually make sense but automated systems accept it.

Thanks for the support, everyone :)

Both illegal and unethical.


And why internet petitions usually accomplish nothing. Because half the signatures are bots or don't even live in the same country.

As has become my "theme" of sorts lately, I'm going to suggest that you actually spend some time writing a letter/email to a member of your government, expressing dissatisfaction, if enough people actually took the time to do this, something might actually get accomplished.

So a forest isn't worth one little white lie? IMO what would really be unethical is letting the corporatists get there hands on these forests and do god-knows-what to them. Wow, you really are one for the status quo. C'mon, don't be such a stiff.

And for some weird reason I had a feeling you'd be coming to this thread.

You're still lying. You can try to spin yourself a cloak of righteousness regarding your cause, but you're still a liar. This is just another reason I dislike the far left, anything goes if its "for the cause".

It's all about weighing the consequences of lying vs the consequences of not lying. If a small lie will save a forest, then by god I'm going to lie. I might be a liar, but I'm a liar that has saved thousands of trees and animals. Are you telling me you will never lie to protect life?

Moral absolutism is just self-righteous mental masturbation.

It's called having standards.


Hate all you want, but I'm not the one betraying my ethics.

Eh.

I have standards too, but I'm not afraid to swallow my pride and break them if it's for the greater good. Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Huzzah, the 200,000 goal has been reached. Apparently a ton of 'stars' are also resisting this blatant desecration of our beautiful woodland. Anything just to save a few pounds eh :(

What makes you think I haven't already or or aren't going to? (I haven't yet but do plan to).

I have 'standards' too, it's just that for me, helping people in other countries is consistent with them - I've done such on MANY petitions aimed at other countries, primarily the US.

Hey!!:( I try to sign this petition but they said that my Zip code is incorrect, but it is me real ZIP code ????

Will private companies necessarily destroy forests? I don't think we have rampant RDA-like corporations whose sole purpose is to destroy the environment. As it stands right now, I'm neutral in this matter until I have firm evidence that compels me to a decision.

Which is why internet petitions do nothing thank god.

You want a say? Get citizenship.

I'd say they have a better chance of doing it than a government, especially a democratic one. The government would be more likely to see the forest's innate value, because the populace that elects them sees the forest as such (hopefully). The business would probably just see it as a resource. There's no garuantee it will destroy the forests, but better safe than sorry I say. The forests are part of the commons, they belong to everybody in the country.

Here in the US, the Wall Street cadres have a tendency to take perfectly good things in, chew them up, and spit them back out for us to have to deal with trying to fix. Then they bitch when we won't let them get their hands on something.

hahaha, definitely not.

You want other people to stop telling your government how to do things? Then make your government stop acting like it's the world police - not to mention that both the environment and basic human rights are worldwide things and if one country damages those, it has a global effect.

Sorry for correcting mistakes we made in the past. (Iraq) We'll be sure to let the UN clean up all future failings on our part. Well, let them pass a resolution to clean up the mess and write angry letters to us for said mess. And maybe the mess will just sort itself out while they're shaking their collective fists.


Again, internet petition have as much success as they have credibility.

Ah . Another troll thread with Isard. I think Isard, you like globalization and such, right? Free trade and all that - theability to go anywhere, do business with anyone in the world without national governments interfering. Why is it then that you think it should be required for a citizen of the world to be a citizen of a nation state to have a say on something that is not owned by that country in the first place because it is nature?
Or take the opposite standpoint if you like - if local interests rank higher than global ones, then the people who live right next to the forest should have a say, not the much larger nation state, right?
So what shall it be - a global decision in which case I should be able to sign, or a local decision in which case probably not even 50000 voices would have to be heard.
The concept of the nation state is soooo obsolete.

And writing a personal letter to a politician? Seriously? I mean, if it is the major of your community, he may actually read it, if it is the major of a million people city or a member of the parliament for a 80 million people country - do you really think he even gets that letter? Maybe if he is not as popular. I guess, if I write a letter to the member of the pirate party that got into city council of Berlin, he will read it - and if I write a letter to someone not very well known in the socialist party of the national parliament, there is a chance that she will do so, too, but anyone who really has a lot of power has "better things to do" than reading 1000 letters a day from citizens. Sadly. Which is why democracy is not working on the scale it is attempted now.

Well this story was on the front page of the Los Angeles Times this morning. The story talks about other similar land sales going on in other parts of Europe as well.

Europe real estate: European countries put iconic properties up for sale - latimes.com

It won't make a difference, because you won't write one.


And as soon as we're under a global government, there will be no issue with people in the UK adding their voices to US decisions and vice versa.

If you are expecting one letter standing alone to make a substantial difference, then yes you are correct. You are also correct that the actual decision maker will likely not read the letter. However, don't think that they do not make a difference. They are actually very powerful means of getting the message across. You see only a very tiny minority ever are motivated enough to write a letter. The masses are apathetic. Those letters are read by staff and they are noticed.

Form letters and internet petitions really don't count when compared to actual letters.

Ok, so despite the outrage this has caused and the fact that the vast majority disagree, the 2 cretins in charge still plan to go through with this. Who's for a little re-enactment of the student protests? ;)

Who are they actually selling to?



EDIT: And I'm sure beating on police officers will change everybody's minds. Might even solve world hunger while you're at it.

Why not try flooding the Parliamentary phone system? I know people do that here in the US sometimes to protest.

Yet again, you prove how little you know about politics. Maybe you should heed your own advice and stick to your own country.

Ok, so one individual letter makes no difference, but organizing many people to make a petition or write the identical letter l does not count either.
According to thisogic, a campaign that would work would have to tell people to all write letters with the same content but a slightly different form and that then would count? Do you really think so? That simply because the letters are a little different makes all the difference? I am highly doubtful about it, but maybe it works - I have not seen such a campaign yet, I guess if it is a novel idea, it should be started then.
My take would be that the people who read the mail will file all these letters under the same topic and put them in the same box - same as with form letters.
The question that really matters is, if the person who is in charge thinks his decision is right or if he is doubtful, if he gives a rats arse about the opinion of the people or if he has the economy, the "greater good of civilization" or the money from the lobbyists in his mind. If he is a truely democratic person, it does not matter if it is a petition or form letters or individual letter - he will get the message in any case, that a certain number of people oppose this kind of project. Assigning an identity to each signature on the list however makes it a lot more credible of course than anything that someone with a valid email adress can sign. So form letters or petitions with full adresses would be a lot better than anonymous lists like this one, but in the end, all of this roots in the belief that the person doing the decisions acts upon the input of people. If he does, a petition signed by a lot of people would tell him to maybe make a public poll before the decision is made, if he does not, personal letters will not change his mind either.

Lets look at it this way...


One person spends an hour writing a letter, and 500 people spend 20 seconds signing it. Read dedication there.

Consider that next to 500 people spending an hour each writing their own letters. Which are you going to consider the more serious group?





If you're referring to the beating police comment, sorry, but not all governments are run by brawlers.

If its on the "Who are they selling to?" comment, perfectly reasonable question. Not every person or corporation is going to bulldoze or destroy them. (crazy as it seems, some companies actually do preserve areas of land)

Again - the question is not so much what the people want, the question is if or if not the person in charge has any interest in what the people want to hear. If he wants to hear, he will consider the 500 signatures (usually it is more like 10000 in such actions) and maybe do a poll. If he does not he also won't care for 500 handwritten and wax-sealed letters. And that is the big fallacy of representative democracy - what kind of democracy is that if the people, the ones who are supposed to be the ones in power (literally) have to crawl in the dust in front of the ones who really have the power? Who am I to be forced to organize hundreds of people to write personal letters, to manage to put up as much work as it would take to build a small house in terms of cumulative work - just to make a voice of the publich heard? It is the obligation(!) of the people who have been voted into positions of decisionmakers to listen to the ones they represent - and not only every 4 years, but on the decisions that have enough importance.

It is not perfect, but we have a system here locally that comes a lot closer to it. The system works like this - if there is a big decision ahead that is controversial, citizens can collect a certain amount of signatures and file a poll request that has to be granted. Then there will be a public poll or vote on that issue and that is binding. It still has the problems of regular majority democracy, but it is a hell lot more democratic than people begging their representatives to actually represent them.

BBC News - Why are we a nation of tree-huggers?

:)

The amount of opposition to this plan is getting huge now, hopefully it should be enough to make the government see reason. Sign if you haven't already :)

Yup, perfect example of biophilia. :)

Way to go! I think, people living in an area that is by its climate and setting originally a forest will expect that subconsciously there "should be a forest" here. Same for people living on the dry plains or in the savannah. I think there is a certain expectation of how the landscape would look like naturally - England used to be full of temperate (rain)forests - people still feel that... But that is just a theory of course ;)

Oh and I was thinking about that "write a letter to your representative" thing... I wonder - who would be "my representative" in a government that I did not vote for?

England was never as heavily forested as Europe - although there did used to be more than there is now. Still, even more of an excuse to keep what we have...

Yes. i have no real good history about britain, but it seems that the highlands were above tree line and the lowlands were heavily forested:
(Simmons 2004 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/0305-4403(75)90043-6)

BBC News - Cameron 'to abandon plans to change forest ownership'

This is by no means the end, but it's still a significant improvement :)