Gary Nairn: In setting up the Mulloon Institute, Tony wanted to really take this a lot broader, and that’s the role of the Institute. In the first instance, the Institute is embarking on a whole of catchment project. While the Mulloon Creek project was about three kilometers of creek covering part of the Mulloon Creek natural farms, the whole catchment is a 23,000 hectare project. There’s about twenty landowners that are involved and fully supporting this work, and there’s about 40 kilometers of creek that’s going to need work done on it and repaired.
But this project has been selected by the UN, under the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network as one of five demonstration projects in the world of environment creating an agricultural strong positive, and therefore a wonderful result for the community. Linking those three things together from the environment to agriculture and the community, it’s caught the eye of the UN under the UN Sustainable Goals and how you might implement … There’s a lot being said and done in that area, but at the end of the day we can talk a lot about all that sort of stuff and have all sorts of wonderful ideas, but if it doesn’t get put into implementation and actually people can see and benefit from it, those words aren’t worth much.
So part of the UN in finding ways to implement some of these issues was the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Through that, our project was seen as an ideal project and as a demonstration of how you do implement some of these goals actually on the ground and show how it improves a community. We’re pretty excited about that. My wife, Rose who chairs the Development Council for the Institute, which is really going to help us raise a lot of money to do this work, and I were in the UK just recently, the other demonstration project which was occurring around the world: one is in the UK, one is in China, one in Uruguay, and one in Tanzania.
