Community groups are planting seedlings and revegetating our lost native bushes and grasslands. Why not join a group and do your bit for the environment?

The Australian landscape has dramatically suffered from the arrival of European farming and our clear-fell domination of the native environment. This decline continues, even though we know it leads to salinity, soil acidification and erosion. It's time to heal what previous generations have harmed. Now it is our responsibility to start fixing the environment. Membership and involvement in a not-for-profit community revegetation group will fund and support the planting of hundreds of native seedlings each year.

How to do it now!

Find a revegetation group in your community. Here's a start to get you going:

• Greening Australia (National)

• Landcare (National)

• Bush Heritage Australia (National)

• Tree Project (VIC)

• Trees for Life (SA)

• The Understorey Network (TAS)

Many local councils run community based Bushcare programs, so check your local council website for more information.

To access amazing information and data on flora and vegetation for land management, visit the Centre for Australian National Biodiversity Research, or try the Australian Association of Bush Regenerators, which promotes the study and practice of ecological restoration, and fosters and encourages effective management of natural areas by qualified people, based on sound ecological principles.

Why is this action important?

Natural Resource Management (NRM) is the critical battleground for Australia over the next 50 years. We face a declining natural environment as a result of almost 200 years of mismanagement of our landscape, however well-intentioned some of the actions have been. As a result, we have dying river systems, salinity, soil acidification, invasive species and soil loss. To add to these problems is the emerging issue of climate change, including increasingly higher temperatures and scarce, yet heavy rainfall due to global warming. As a result we are trying to overcome human inertia and politics to revive a dying continent in a changing climate. The time has come to join up and help out those frontline groups implementing appropriate NRM practices across the country.

Environmental benefit

To stabilise and reverse the declining Australian landscape and avoid the continued reduction of our productive agricultural capacity and natural systems we need to revitalise NRM practices in this country. Put simply, the drought we are witnessing with the accompanying expansion of deserts, decline of farm productivity and death of natural systems, is a direct result of our failure to implement appropriate Natural Resource Management practices in the place of those natural systems we have devastated over the past 200 years.

Wellbeing benefit

No one likes to pay for things they have used when they used them thinking they were free. But, when we pay for items we use that come from the environment and we contemplate what happened we taste honour and sense what redemption must feel like. So with this action there is lots of hard work which will benefit the body (ho hum) but interestingly there is honour and redemption at stake which will allow us to look our grandkids in the eye without shame as we hand this big brown land over to them.