Thin Green Line
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Thin Green Line

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“The rhino horn is highly valued in Asia [and because of this] the rhinos are being decimated as well,” explains Willmore passionately. “Elephants, rhinos, and tigers — really everything is getting [poached] and our last line of defence [against this] is our rangers. If we don’t support our rangers, who are on the frontline of conservation, then that won’t happen.”

TRAFFIC: The Wildlife Trade Monitoring Network, which was created in 1976 to monitor and prevent the illegal wildlife trade, says that illegal wildlife trade is responsible for the endangerment of many of our native species worldwide, including white rhinoceroses, Bengal tigers, Amur leopard, and the Annam Pond turtle of Vietnam, which became endangered during the ‘90s due to extensive food trade between Vietnam and China. Each year, approximately 100 park rangers die protecting these creatures from harm. That’s 1,000 rangers every ten years.

“A thousand rangers, that we know of, [have been] killed worldwide and that figure is probably double that,” laments Willmore, stressing that these rangers are only doing good in the world. “Most of them are murdered by poachers while the rangers are trying to defend the animals. We look after the widows and the orphans of those rangers [when this happens], but we proactively try to train the rangers so they can protect the areas [safely] and work with their community as well. In simple words: we try to protect nature’s protectors.

“A good example is we recently sent $10,000 to Borneo to help rangers looking after orang-utans and tigers. Now they have mosquito nets and boots, which they didn’t have before. It’s really practical support.” This practical support impacted the rangers incredibly — it reduced their contraction of malaria dramatically. “We also gave $15,000 to Kenya for equipment for rangers to help them with their patrols as well, and we recently donated $21,000 to train 21 rangers in a military style so they can protect the elephants from the poachers. In Africa, the current rate of ivory poaching [is exponential],” causing the African elephant to become an endangered species and, “at the current rate, there’ll be no elephants alive in Africa in the next ten years.”

These statistics are horrifying, and consequentially, it means that we need to support our park rangers in their conservation efforts in any way we can, hence Green Line Grooves, an album that features the music contributions of Mia Dyson, Clare Bowditch, Goyte, Tin Pan Orange and many more. The album will launched at The Retreat Hotel this December with the money made during the event being donated to Thin Green Line Foundation to support rangers here and overseas. All the staff of The Retreat Hotel will be working for free that afternoon to help maximise the donation total for Thin Green Line, a foundation the staff have been huge supporters of.

“They’re probably our official [representative] pub in Melbourne right now,” jokes Willmore, elaborating how thankful and flattered he is by their ongoing support. “They’ve donated money [before] and they [let us use] the place for our CD launch with Gotye, who came along and signed CDs for everybody, and that had a big response. This was the next step for them: donating the whole place for this [Thin Green Line].”

BY AVRILLE BYLOK-COLLARD