John Linton
......and may the new year be the happiest, most fulfilling and productive of your life so far.
We finished up the year, those of us who hadn't left for a well earned vacation already, at lunch timish yesterday with a few glasses of champagne and some finger food with our diligent AAPT rep dropping in to pick up the last of the business service orders (AAPT must join the information age soon and not require actual signed paperwork to process simple agreements between a carrier and a wholesaler) - but it was nice to see her anyway. My last 'business' act was, on behalf of Exetel's board, to sign the contract to supply support to an environmentalist group in Sri Lanka to fund a far seeing new project to reduce the ongoing shooting of Elephants in that country.
I have talked about this ambitious project before in terms of how sensible it was in terms of 'third generation' species protection and how, if it is in fact possible to make it successful it will result in a much better chance for the survival of elephants in the wild and not just in Sri Lanka. The program is, in simple terms, to change the eons old practices of the villagers in remote country areas of Sri Lanka to reduce the conflict between them and the elephants in their competing needs to stay alive. This is proposed to be done by showing the villagers how, and then assisting them implement, changing from growing crops that are like the proverbial 'lolly shop' to an elephant (sugar cane, bananas and pineapples) to modifying the soil's ph balance and constitution to grow sustainable grass for grazing dairy cattle so that when wild elephants are driven out of their natural habitats by clear fell logging and begin to starve they don't come across a banana plantation and satisfy their hunger by destroying a village's yearly income in the blink of an eye consigning the villagers from living in poverty to, literally, starving to death.
So the theory is that Elephants and the dairy cattle co-exist so will not be subject to stampede or panic of any kind and while elephants will eat grass if they are really hungry they only crop it and don't trample it to destruction (as with bananas etc). So the elephants might eat some of the grass but they will move on to look for something more palatable and not use their fabled memory to come back regularly to the 'lolly shop' for future sugar hits. In the mean time the villagers will remain protected by a few hectares of fields between them, their homes and the elephants and will not suffer destruction of their domicile or injury or loss of life.
The first two benefits of this scheme are that the elephants don't have any temptation to eat the crops and wreck the villages and therefore the villagers don't feel inclined to shoot the elephants as a matter of basic survival. Milk production also gives the village a daily revenue stream rather
than a yearly crop which is subject to failure, weather damage and elephant destruction. The third benefit is that Sri Lanka imports 75% of the milk its population consumes and is a very poor country in terms of foreign exchange so that if this pilot project works and is widely adopted it will address a third need which makes the country less dependent on other countries and will go some way to alleviating rural poverty across Sri Lanka as a side benefit from the program to reduce the shooting of elephants.
That's the plan and Exetel Sri Lanka will contribute $US300,000 over the next 30 months or so to allow dedicated conservationists in that country to attempt to bring this about.
So as undoubtedly all of us will eat too much today (me included) it may be vaguely comforting to know that by using an Exetel data or voice communication service (that hopefully costs you less than any equivalent service) you are part of the reason that almost $A500,000 will be given to various endangered species protection programs around Australia and this one in Sri Lanka in 2010 rather than lining the pockets of an ISP's shareholders and managers simply because there are data communications companies (at least one) that put profits a long way down the list of why they are in business.
Together we may not be able to 'save the planet' but we can make a much bigger contribution through Exetel's existence than we, or anyone we might know, can do as private individuals.
Have a great Christmas day with your family and/or friends.