Richard Flanagan address to the inaugural PPP Network event

I am sorry I cannot be with you today at the inaugural FSC Publishers, Printers and Paper network event, as I believe strongly in the necessity and worth of the FSC's work.

When we feel overwhelmed by the large, seemingly uncontrollable forces that seem to conspire to destroy what we value most, it is so very important to be reminded that the world also does change for the better. This tends to
happen not because of one or two powerful people, but because countless millions of people dismissed as everyday find extraordinary ways in their working and daily lives to do something that is good rather than bad.

The FSC has a very important and positive role to play both in protecting one of Australia's great natural treasures, our old growth forests, the native forests of other countries, and in ensuring that plantation forestry
is managed for maximum environmental good, rather than as sometimes presently happens, at ongoing environmental cost.

But it can only succeed if all of us in the paper trade-be we publishers or printers or even tawdry scribblers - recognise we must do what we can to persuade our colleagues to insist on FSC approved paper. We don't have to chain ourselves to a bulldozer, or speak at a rally. We just have to hold to a powerful idea whose time has come - that we use paper to celebrate the world, not destroy it, to make a living now but not deny a living to those who come in the future, and to insist on an economy that reflects our
values, and not have our values insisted on by an economy.

We can do it, and using the FSC's model, I believe we will do it.

Richard Flanagan.