“The brilliant allies of our grave-diggers” — reflections on Australian environmentalism
It is no coincidence that accelerated social, cultural and economic upheaval is occurring in concert with non-linear change in global, regional and local physical systems: the Gulf Stream, the monsoon, the Antarctic overturning, are all breaking. Formerly reliable weather patterns are unpredictable as global disorder spills into complex irreversible change for bioregions, ecosystems and every living creature. These causes spiral out into polarising effects: very hot! very wet! biggest storm ever (yet)! They are continuous with politics and society, which are likewise polarising. In Australian public life, however, “the environment” tends to be regarded as either wholly decorative (look at this adorable animal!) or a radical threat to our way of life (protecting the environment will wreck our economy!).
The connection between profound environmental dislocation and loss and its social, cultural and political reverberations eludes us, despite fifty years of environmental advocacy, law-making and policy. There is a centuries-long story to be told about why this is the case, but in the last half century, there has also been a cohort of citizens self-defining as redressers of environmental harm. The environment movement’s successes and its failures, its values and its practices over the decades warrant examination, given that the crises they seek to mend are material to every aspect of our country’s past, present and future.
Just how crucial these questions are is apparently not clear to those Australians who see the environment as a static backdrop to the more captivating dramas of politics and commerce. Events are now overtaking them. In the blistering summer of 2015–16, the adoption of the Paris climate agreement was followed in Australia by a leap in temperatures that seemed to augur profound and irreversible alteration. It felt as if we had lost the battle to prevent runaway climate change. A year later, the Great Barrier Reef suffered unprecedented bleaching for a second year running. In 2020, it bleached again, then again in 2022, and again in 2024. It is unlikely to survive 1.5 degrees of global average warming. One of the key risks for the Australasian region identified by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change is that with global average warming over 1.5 degrees, climate change hazards may “overwhelm the capacity” of institutions and systems to provide services, support, leadership and resources to the public. Though climate change is now our dominant environmental concern, there are ongoing processes that are likewise profound. The Australian continent has the highest rate of mammal extinction in the world. In NSW, a government assessment found that half the species listed as threatened in that state are not expected to survive the next century. Iconic species like the koala may be among them. There is still a crisis of depauperate soils, erosion, and dying rivers; of food production that is reliant on fossil fuels. There are suburban food deserts in the midst of fertile productive land. There is plastic in our bloodstreams and persistent carcinogens in our water. These are the contexts against which environmental policy and advocacy fall consistently short in twenty-first century Australia, but they are treated, in the main, as isolated baubles of information floating on our current of affairs.
In the quarter of a century during which I have been an environmental advocate, the movement has become more professionalised, and this has played its part in eroding the moral sincerity of its cause. When I was a young activist, it was common for an unpaid citizen living in a regional area to be leading a successful environmental campaign, drawing together people, politics, research and direct action to secure major change in policy, legislation or industry with no participation by professional advocacy organisations. This is rare now. After fifteen years of paid work in environmental advocacy following ten years of unpaid grassroots campaigning, I have witnessed and lived this profound change. The success of grassroots conservation campaigns is rooted in place and community. Though many from outside the regions joined and assisted in those campaigns, the locus of struggle was the place itself and the people who personally cared for it. Like so much of Australian public life, that locus has shifted to the capitals. One of the structural challenges environmentalism faces in Australia is that the money and people that dominate environmental discourse are in capital cities but they’re tackling environmental challenges that are located in the regions. In turn, much of what is happening in those regions is geared towards feeding the demands of cities. This dislocated pattern prevails globally: the money and people that dominate are laying waste to landscapes and people they will never encounter, in places like the Congo, Bangladesh, Kalimantan and Kiribati. There are people in regions of production both here and globally who know how their communities think and feel, who know about the land, water, wildlife and histories of their place and about local culture and politics. The locus of successful environmental strategies is grounded in this material connection to place and production, and in localised processes of decision-making and care-taking.
Detached from the complexity and materiality of the regions where environmental conflicts have their roots, a professional and urban environmental sector is always at risk of running aground in the shallows of short-term political currents. Environmentalism is more vulnerable to this risk than the political struggles between labour and capital because, though the Earth itself provides the material basis for all economic activity, its champions, the environmentalists, do not have economic power. For this reason, environmental campaigning has been fundamentally reformist, even when people get arrested doing it. Compared to unions and capitalists, Australian environmentalists lack a systemic story about our purpose. (Settler environmentalists, that is, First Nations Australians understand their story and its environmental character.) Have a beer with a unionist, even one in their early twenties, and before long they will speak to you of the role of organised labour in social relations, in Australia’s history, in the future conditions they are fighting to achieve. When working people unite in solidarity, the story goes, they change society, because workers make the human world turn. That struggle has won popular political representation, care for the sick and needy and leisure time when we are free to not work. Capitalists tell a different story, about innovation, heroic individuality and “unlocking potential.” Capital changes society by taking risks that elevate the whole of humanity with inventions and investments, they aver: that’s why we have medicine, telephones, micro-fleeces and instant noodles. Both accounts largely ignore the material processes of natural production and artistry in which our society lives. This story urgently needs telling, but Australian environmentalism is not offering a shared account of its role in society and the nature of the change it seeks. At times, the work appears to be about the preservation of islands of great beauty or diversity, discrete locations separate from society, places to visit. Otherwise, perhaps “sustainability,” tweaking the rules of exploitation such that it can carry on indefinitely. Missing from both of these is a necessary conceptual leap to radically reorient our understanding of the world we inhabit.
Unlike organised workers, environmentalists do not, in most instances, wield the kind of serious clout that can engender fundamental structural change because we are, as a group, not part of “the economy.” It is instructive that one of the greatest and most enduring of Australia’s environmental campaign victories, protecting the Great Barrier Reef from oil mining, was decisively won because of a union black ban. The Earth herself does wield structural economic power: it is she that yields up the material that makes energy, wealth and every gadget, knick-knack and appliance that passes through our hands. It is she that recycles our water, bequeaths our oxygen, pollinates our food crops and makes the material that makes us. Moreover, Earth produces the beauty that makes our lives marvellous — filtered sunlight, moving water, foliage, plumage, dance and song. When Earth goes on strike, as she appears increasingly inclined to do, she will bring to its knees the system that abuses both the earth and its people. We who advocate for Earth are at best second-hand rapporteurs of this power.
In most cases, to make change, environmentalism has to convince someone else who does have power. The range of tactics available to environmental campaigners reflects these limits. We can intervene physically in an activity that is local, or marginal to the industrial-capitalist machine and halt it with disruption, civil disobedience and campaign ingenuity. This is how we have won the freedom of forests and rivers in the past. But the outcomes sought by environmental campaigns have tended to be bureaucratic and regulatory. In the absence of a deeper focus on values, that turns out to have been a grave mistake. We have sought to develop relationships with people who wield power and win them over, or to conduct outreach and communications campaigns that “make the environment an election issue” but have failed to transform the underlying social values that drive environmental degradation. We have opted, in short, to create “green tape” — gazetting rules and regulations but leaving Australia’s misunderstood and broken relationship with itself unhealed. The technique of “campaigning” is narrowing, directing the focus of attention and political action to a highly specific goal: ban mining on the Reef, make this forest into a National Park, prohibit landclearing. When the NSW government repealed that state’s landclearing laws in 2017, fourteen years after they were created, I began to properly understand that this is a losing strategy. Banning landclearing without transforming colonial Australia’s relationship to trees and real estate was a campaign win doomed to be contingent, tenuous and temporary. For as long as Australian society views the land as a commodity, drawing imaginary lines of titles and zones on it from which individuals may profit, it will continue to clear that land and drive Australia’s wildlife to extinction, its own society into unremitting strife.
Forty years ago, fundamental social change was on the agenda on the Australian environment movement. The movement’s origins and history are captured in historical records like the Green Alliance Newsletter, an Australian missive of the 1980’s that disseminated radical and emerging ideas about social ecology, environmental struggle, Aboriginal land rights and alternative social and political relations. The newsletter gathered articles and snippets from international journals, published transcripts of workshops, conferences and interviews and records of correspondence. It is a rich archive of debate in the alternative Australian and international movements of that era, as environmentalism burgeoned, blockades were in the national spotlight, land rights were demanded and formal “Green” political parties were emerging. Plural arguments about green politics and ways of living populate its pages. The radical environmental movement was articulating a vision and talking excitedly about transformation and how to manifest it.
A vivid contest of ideas explored the roots of the problem and the means through which to tackle it. Some argued that the fundamentally exploitative, hierarchical structures of contemporary society and the primacy of power as a mode of relationship among people could not be challenged from within. Power and morality, they declared, are antithetical. The good they sought — peace, ecological sustainability, social justice, loving and non-coercive familial and neighbourly relations — could not be achieved within social and political structures that are based on power relations. There was likewise a clear articulation that the means and scale of human organisation are directly related to the drivers of environmental degradation. Ecological consciousness was radically altering people’s understanding of their relationship to the means and modes of production. Ecology was “the only non-entropic force known.” A bioregional society modelled on social ecology could be generative, mutual and plural. People opted out of the mainstream to create alternative communities in the bush, leaving a vacancy where the impact of these ideas was deeply needed, in suburbia, where roughly 70% of Australian people live. Some of those communities are still working, some have faltered, but few people in the environment movement are looking at them as examples of the future we envisage. The work of radically altering existing relationships between neighbours and between mainstream Australian society and the productive processes of the country is still before us. In the main current of Australian life, the economy has become less cooperative, less connected and less sustainable. In the summer of 2019/20, alternative communities established in regional areas decades ago had to contend with the violent consequences of the unsustainable society they left behind, as bushfires and flooding razed homes, killed people and devastated landscapes.
There were vigorous debates, too, about the role of political representation in social change. Starting in Tasmania, in a world first, local activists ran for parliament on platforms of peace, disarmament and ecological sustainability. As the political movement consolidated and called itself “Green,” it embedded within its founding vision core principles of grassroots democracy and consensus, reflecting a recurring theme of 1980’s environmentalism: the processes by which decisions are made prefigure the consequences of those decisions. Activists of the time foresaw how inimical engagement with the political system could be. They argued that mass society by its very nature cannot operate on a consensus basis, which requires an intimacy of relationship not pervasive in the mainstream of society in the early 1980s and even less conceivable now. Power is corrosive of the kind of ideals that initiated the Green parties. Our system of government and economics diminishes people, subordinating their unique qualities to its abstract conformities. There are committed people in parliament and the public service who see no clear means by which they can translate their desire to prevent runaway climate change into action. They strive to achieve positions of power only to find, once there, that the system still holds them in thrall. They can no more prevent Australia from letting the Great Barrier Reef spiral into extinction from within government or parliament than an activist can outside of it, marching up and down the street. Elections do not create change, but rather test and reveal the desires of a populace. In the absence of a widely-shared ecological orientation in the broader public, Green political representation coalesced the environmental concerns of the body politic into a representative party without expanding it. This had the unhelpful side-effect of draining much of the rest of politics of a basic environmental consciousness that was mainstream three decades ago, when pivotal environmental decisions were more commonly made by leaders of the major political parties.
Meanwhile, the urgency and anguish of environmental loss continued to inspire people to take up public interest advocacy campaigning against particular environmental harms. If an old-growth forest you love is being logged down the road, someone needs to advocate to decision makers, muster a blockade, take the government to court and generally stick their fingers in the dyke while social and political transformation is underway. The heady campaigns to protect the Great Barrier Reef from mining, the Daintree and northern New South Wales rainforests from roading, development and logging and the Franklin River from damming were not just won with protest. We retell the stories of the big blockades of the Franklin and Terania Creek, but few know how much of Australia’s extraordinary natural heritage survives now thanks to the slog of research and report writing, submissions, letters and bureaucratic and political lobbying. The people involved were not chiefly professional advocates but farmers, scientists, teachers, birdwatchers, artists, foresters, doctors, tradespeople. They took up the task and formed nascent organisations like the Queensland Wildlife Preservation Society, Australian Conservation Foundation, The Wilderness Society, the Queensland and NSW Conservation Councils. The environmental scholar Peter Hay observed that the impetus to environmental activism tends to be instinctive, rather than intellectual. It was never, in Australia, programmatic. People learned as they worked and passed on skills, building organisations out of grassroots movements. The histories of these early campaign efforts — written in Judith Wright’s The Coral Battleground, James Somerville’s account of the rainforest campaigns, Ian Cohen’s Green Fire and Drew Hutton and Libby Connor’s History of the Australian Environment Movement — glow with a sincerity of purpose that has become attenuated in the decades since.
The inter-governmental science body for nature is the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. In its recent global assessment, IPBES came to the conclusion that,
“Goals for conserving and sustainably using nature and achieving sustainability cannot be met by current trajectories, and goals for 2030 and beyond may only be achieved through transformative changes across economic, social, political and technological factors.”
This transformation, the assessment notes, means, “A fundamental, system-wide reorganization across technological, economic and social factors, including paradigms, goals and values.” It speaks of strengthening laws, and of data collection and resources, but more fundamentally, it describes a crisis brought about by a civilisation with deeply perverse values reflected in our knowledge systems, governance arrangements, and orientation to the world: no amount of data collection is going to alter that.
Far from transforming values and paradigms, the last decade of feverish and impatient campaigning for environmental protection has been fought on shrinking ground. Tens of millions of dollars are spent every year designing and distributing materials, paying lobbyists, strategists, communications professionals, fundraisers and organisers (not to mention senior managers and executives) to drum up support for a series of changing and narrowly-conceived goals. Year after year, the old campaign pattern of trying to short-cut radical and fundamental change by engaging the electoral influence of one or two political parties, people, or seats, to ban some things, mandate other things and force this society to transform against its will, depletes the well of environmental consciousness in the broader public. Furthermore, having regulations, guidelines and policies as the goals of environmental campaigns makes environmentalists the natural enemy of anyone who hates filling out forms and being told what to do (which is basically everyone). It saps the passion and commitment of the engaged citizens who already feel the intuitive tug of environmental passion, and who show up to march, protest and write letters. Environmental advocates squander what little power we have when we recoil from confronting the illusions and lies at the heart of Australian society.
Campaigns against the causes of climate change in particular have been wandering in circles because we have shied away from challenging the underlying drivers of environmental exploitation. Climate change cannot be addressed in one election cycle, nor can it be stopped with rules or machines. It is not an environmental “issue.” It is a manifestation of a fundamental error that characterises our lives: we are alienated from the ground we walk on and contemptuous of the teeming natural world we inhabit. To be effective, climate change advocacy must bring to the surface the contradictions and fragilities that modernity disguises beneath its shiny surface, its technological and bureaucratic confidence. In Australia, this also means confronting the ongoing process of colonisation, since the two are historically and conceptually linked.
The crisis is now compounding because the need to move quickly to stop mangling the climate with greenhouse gases is assumed to come hand in hand with a “need” to accelerate mining of toxic metals, quadruple the amount of electricity we produce and bulldoze wildlife habitat for transmission lines. All this is “necessary” only to prevent or delay the myths of industrial modernity from unravelling. It is a myth that we can cushion ourselves forever against want with excessive wealth and technology. In any case, a system that values workers, children, rivers, marsupials and coral reefs only as far as they are productive economic units is not a system that should command our loyalty. To the extent that environmental advocates actively participate in upholding the illusions of industrial modernity with enthusiasm for renewable energy giantism, private electric cars and accelerated development, they become, in Milan Kundera’s words, “the brilliant allies of their gravediggers.” If the next stage of environmentalism in Australia sides with wealth and power to enable more industrial exploitation and community disenfranchisement in the name of this wrongful life, if it fails to articulate and manifest an ecologically grounded vision of society and the good life, we will keep losing.
It is unfair to blame environmental advocates for all of this, but only in the same way that it is unfair to blame coal miners, journalists and beef farmers. I write this not to shame my colleagues but to bring a fundamental truth to the surface: the industrial civilisation into which we were born is coming into its reckoning. The luxury of consumer capitalism cannot be backfilled by renewable energy without perpetuating environmental and social exploitation because that exploitation is fundamental to its functioning. When we come face to face with modernity’s false promises, the story and purpose of environmentalism at last becomes clear. The question for those of us who choose to champion the material world, the world that makes us, is whether we continue to delay this reckoning, playing along with the disembodied dream that we can, without consequence, consume, destroy and devalue the world that holds us. There is an opportunity, now, as the Earth reasserts herself in our lives, to break ranks with civilisation, and show our society that what is “human” is far more plural, creative and cooperative, far more “natural” than the narrow limits of commodity capitalism have allowed us to believe. For contemporary environmentalism, it was a fatal mistake to accept and perpetuate the terms of industrial capitalism, rationalism and bureaucracy. These terms from the outset excluded value, spirit, creativity and beauty from decision-making and calculation. They required us to behave as if ends and means were separable in any meaningful way.
The alternative is to encourage people together to shape creative lives of solidarity in and with place and become self-determined, free and responsible for their place in ecology. The ideas and concepts that underpin environmental consciousness are locally grounded. People want and need to be connected meaningfully to each other and to the local world they inhabit, its wildlife, landforms and waterways. Large environmental organisations have a lot to offer regional and suburban people in the form of resources, skills, political access and a national platform. They could revive debate about what constitutes a good life and pursue the systemic change the IPBES and others have urged. This would mean bringing locally-led and plural activities to the fore. In the words of Dorion Sagan, “to bring local actions into alignment with the sensuous anarchies of the biosphere itself, rather than abetting the slow-motion train wreck of the increasingly globalized, human-focused economy.” In the era of climate disruption and re-emergent authoritarianism, such work would offer communities the skills, agency and means to act locally to prepare and respond to the impacts of climate change, as well as to participate in reducing its severity and restoring local ecology.
The desires of suburban Australia and of regional communities are not at odds with the transformations we actually need. What people want is security, love, a little beauty, and the time and space to have meaningful relationships with the people and landscapes where they live. We don’t need excessive wealth to have these things. We don’t need to bring the natural world to ruin to have these things. We don’t need more waste, plastic, concrete and speed. Precisely the opposite.
