Project Description
Grassland Resurrection – Connecting Knowledge, Research & Management Forum
8 May, 2026. Fitzroy Town Hall , Melbourne, Victoria
Presenters: Indi Jennings, Billie Eyers, Matthew Kneller
Basalt Buddies is a loose collective of people advocating for grassland conversation in the inner-west and inner-north of Naarm. growing locally-native plants and trying to get young and marginalized people involved in caring about their local remnant areas and planting local provenance plants in their yards.
Grasslands ecocide and the avenues for grassroots community militancy
An outsider-community and Indigenous perspective on current grassland destruction and its alternatives.
Questions from the Forum
Offsets, are generally crap and underwhelming…. How do you mitigate the shitness of offsets ?
I don’t think we’re qualified to answer other than to say we don’t think there is a logically-sound answer, from what we see most in-tact protected grasslands barely receive enough funding to avoid decline. I think if you were to do the math on what it would cost to completely restore a barren or completely degraded site to a truly healthy in-tact grassland (even ignoring the millennia it would take to reform the subterranean aspects) it would be more than the whole cost of the original land sold that only paid a slithery tithe to the offset pool. In saying that they are still living ecosystems once the deal is done, there is a bigger conversation around what their function might be in a distant future when we are all long gone. Should they be designed as slightly-less functional lookalikes of modern grasslands or should we view them as deep-time Seed Production Areas that might give indigenous species the hope of repopulating the volcanic plains in some far-distant future where humans have “evacuated” the planet, for better or worse. As always the answer is probably somewhere in the middle.
what are the most common barriers in engaging different communities and how do we make the space feel more culturally safe?
Collaboration. Invite people in by giving them a seat at the table, regardless of experience. Cultural safety in the corporate world focuses on “Not saying things that might offend someone” in grassroots and volunteer spaces it’s about seeing people who’s lives and experiences reflect your own already being safe and uplifted in those spaces. To oversimplify it a bit – if you are trying to get more young people involved in your group, start by focusing on just getting 2 young people involved and nurturing and uplifting them, if you play your cards right they will do the net-casting for you.
Basalt buddies – do you get requests for assistance with natures trips?
Not 100% sure if the typo was “nature strips” or “nature trips” so we’ll answer both. We have a couple nature strip projects lined up but they were organised as a reward for people contributing a certain amount to separate mutual aid campaigns. Not a big focus for us currently but we love that more and more are popping up around the suburbs and if people want to message us about contributing plants to their nature strip we can dig through the nursery and pull out some older unsold stock to contribute. Nature trips – we have at least one planned that we’ll post on our instagram and in the newsletter when the details are locked in
People fight hard to stop loggers, why don’t we have the same on-ground activism to protect grasslands?
The easier answer is that aesthetics and education are a major factor, there is a very different feeling standing in an old-growth forest to an old-growth grassland. It takes education to help people understand that they are two wings of the same bird, there is likely a good metaphor to make that grasslands are agricultural pastures that contribute in to feeding every non-human species across country and the harsh reality is we don’t really know how just badly their destruction will effect all those other ecosystems in the long-term. The Butterfly Golden Sun Moth Effect.
The harder answer is logistics and networks of organising/communication. If we look to the successes of the movement to end native logging, we could lump their tactics into categories like People, Purpose and Place. Everyone that’s visited or stayed at a camp set up to protest a logging coupe will have met people that inspired them, made them laugh and feel welcome, gave them hope, maybe made life-long friends. We’ve met enough people through our short time in grassland advocacy that we know the people invested in our fight tick all those same boxes. Where we need to dream up solutions together are the next two points, we know there are countless people that want to do more and be more involved. We need to collectively decide where to put that energy that directly challenges grassland destruction and satisfies Purpose. Place is even harder still, how do we match that feeling of turning up to a direct-action forest camp knowing there will be a familiar face, an old friend, a new friend, a warm meal, a fire burning and plenty of work to be done regardless of your experience or risk-aversion. We don’t know the answer but we think it starts with sticking our necks out a bit further and saying “there is too much at stake to not do more than we are currently doing, keep coming together and meeting and talking, drum up slogans and paint some big banners, create networks and groupchats around specific issues like grassland defense and monitoring for at-risk sites, remind yourself that the pool of people outside of the industry is much bigger than the insular one. Ask yourself what you are willing to put on-hold, how far you are willing to push outside your comfort-zone and what you are willing to risk to protect the living world. Know your enemies”
