Our first $1000 in donations

We just hit our first $1000 in donations from the proceeds of sticker & ticketed RTNR event sales and we’re pretty stoked about it!

We celebrated the milestone by donating to Wilsons River Landcare – a community Landcare group that focuses on the Wilson’s River in Lismore.

People still alive today can tell you when they could see the bottom of the Wilsons River as it meandered through the CBD. Accounts and research tell us that at one point the Wilsons at Lismore was 5m wide and 25m deep! Those days have passed but there’s no reason why we can’t get back to that reality in the future. And the easiest way to do it is planting trees!

Trees are particularly valuable for river health in the riparian zone across the Northern Rivers. Riparian basically just means “river” and the trees that grow in this area are vitally important for a number of reasons. The obvious reason, and one you probably all know, is that they absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. But they also serve a number of other functions too.

Trees in riparian zones help massively with riverbank stability. If you think about all those roots underground that we don’t see, they’re all helping to hold that bank in place and prevent boat-wash or flooding from removing the bank and further widening the river. Trees and native shrubs like lomandra also help to capture excess water during rain events and hold that water in the soil instead of allowing it to runoff into our waterways. As you can probably imagine, a lot of the water runoff in the Northern Rivers isn’t as clean or chemical-free as we’d like – trees and other plants help to filter this water and prevent the rivers from becoming too polluted or subject to very high nutrient loads.

Thanks to everyone who’s supported us so far. It’s thanks to you all that we can continue to make donations. We’d also like to recognise all the hard work undertaken by community via Wilsons River Landcare. It’s not too late to revive our waterways!

Here’s a list of total donations by RTNR so far:

$200 – Big Scrub Landcare, for their Science Saving Rainforests Program

$200 – Australian Seabird Rescue, providing food for animals undergoing rehabilitation

$200 – Clarence Catchment Alliance, to help with their #nominesclarencevalley campaign in NSW parliament

$200 – Wildlife bnb Habitat, to fund their nesting boxes program

$200 – Wilsons River Landcare, covering the cost of trees for an upcoming planting