{"id":54784,"date":"2021-02-15T21:16:40","date_gmt":"2021-02-15T10:16:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nofibs.com.au\/?p=54784"},"modified":"2021-02-15T22:09:13","modified_gmt":"2021-02-15T11:09:13","slug":"environmental-activism-2021-an-act-of-love-margokingston1-comments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/environmental-activism-2021-an-act-of-love-margokingston1-comments\/","title":{"rendered":"Environmental activism 2021: An act of love by @margokingston1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

First published on\u00a0Echo NETDAILY<\/a>\u00a0February 11, 2021.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Locked on at the Leard Blockade.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A long time ago, maybe 20 years, I mentioned climate change in conversation with Professor David Flint, a man who proclaims his deep conservatism and convened Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy. He laughed, saying a stray meteorite would blow up the planet someday, so we may as well do what we liked till then. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I blanked. A joke? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A few years later I met Jan Barham, who said conservationists were true conservatives because they wanted to preserve the environment and believed in taking precautions to address the risk of catastrophic climate change. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

These memories flashed as I watched Wild Things<\/a> at the movies last weekend, a history of direct action for the environment in Australia grounded in three frontline struggles, <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Binbee camp in Adani country, the camp to slow down old growth logging of Tasmania\u2019s Tarkine forest and the girls from Castlemaine who began Australia\u2019s school strike for climate movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I experienced the feeling of it in 2014, when I Twitter reported the Leard Blockade <\/a>from a camp on a Maules Creek farm on the Liverpool Plains, food bowl. Protesters from all over Australia joined local farmers and the Gomeroi people to try to stop the felling of an endangered state forest the the Whitehaven coal mine. It was Australia\u2019s first coal mine blockade, and the organisers knew they\u2019d lose. It was preparation for coal mine blockades to come.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I drove to the camp with Lock the Gate activist George Woods when Whitehaven broke its promise of no winter clearing (to protect hibernating animals) and made myself run through the forest at 2am in the rain and photograph the clear fell as George looked for survivors till we had to get out or get arrested. I\u2019ve never felt life more intensely, or felt more desolate.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

George recited a bit of Shakespeare\u2019s Battle of Agincourt \u201cwe few, we band of brothers\u201d speech to the skeleton camp crew to lift their spirits and told me she tried to live ardent (burning, glowing), that old fashioned state of mind favoured by Dorothea Brooks in Middlemarch.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

All the young faces in Wild Things are ardent – fervent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The activists I know believe the fight to prevent catastrophe is lost, and the challenge now is to adapt to climate change. George is one of them<\/a>. \u201cSustaining protest now is about trying to stop something of your own spirit from dying, that would die if you acquiesced. When you fight for beautiful and precious things like the biodiversity of this planet you\u2019re not really doing it because you think it\u2019s going to be OK. You\u2019re doing it out of love. If someone you love has fallen off a jetty and is struggling in the water you don\u2019t dive in thinking you\u2019re going to get there. You do it as an act of love.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Seeing the wide-eyed, hopeful young people in Wild Things was radically confronting, because my generation failed them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Wild things flashbacks – the Green bans in the historic Rocks precinct, the Terania Creek and Franklin blockades, preventing uranium mining in Kakadu National Park – all were conservative actions and all proved financially advantageous to Australia in the long term. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conservationists – true conservatives – have gifted special places to their descendants for generations. In the region I live in now, the Manning, locals saved and restored a pocket of old growth rain forest called Wingham Bush<\/a> for free for love, now home to rare bats and the town\u2019s top tourist attraction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m a politics junkie who turned off Oz politics after the 2019 election. The bushfires had to flick the switch, yes? No, a big dip in emission due to the virus gave Australia the a chance to change, yes? Nope, just Morrison\u2019s chance to ram through Santos fracking in the Pilliga after activists thought they\u2019d beaten off the project after a decade of struggle. I turned off 2021\u2019s first Insiders<\/em> show after a deadening taste of Labor crumbling on climate change and another leadership spectacle. Last week the Federal Government released a devastating indictment of our environment laws <\/a>by the former head of the competition watchdog Graeme Samuels after sitting on it for 3 months, no pledge to act. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grassroots action is all that\u2019s left, and in federal and State politics, it\u2019s up to red, blue, green and yellow voters who demand action to find and elect independents in safe seats. Indi, Wentworth and Warringah show it can be done. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s joy, and purpose, in joining \u2018a band of brothers\u2019, and it\u2019s more life-affirming way to live than nihilism or closing eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Where I live now, a few friends got together Monday afternoons last year to fund and make \u2018prayers for the planet flags<\/a>\u2019, 100 percent of proceeds to frontline, non-tax deductible direct action campaigns to save our precious natural places. The group has doubled in size and will expand their project this year. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The virus has asked us all to decide where \u2018home\u2019 is and many of us have discovered that the parks, the trees, and the bush helped keep us sane. I\u2019ve started researching who the conservationists were in the region I\u2019ve just moved to and how they saved and preserved the places I walk and sit in for pleasure and peace. I\u2019m gunna join the current crop this year, and begin by helping to make those flags.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Full #LeardBlockade archive of posts<\/a>

This slideshow requires JavaScript.<\/p>

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First published on\u00a0Echo NETDAILY\u00a0February 11, 2021. A long time ago, maybe 20 years, I mentioned climate change in conversation with Professor David Flint, a man who proclaims his deep conservatism and convened Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy. He laughed, saying a stray meteorite would blow up the planet someday, so we may as well do […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":54785,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[3434,3404,3480,3347,3402,1584,514,585,26],"tags":[802,3477,3485,2674,2610],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/wildthings.png?fit=800%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3t0mw-efC","jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54784"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=54784"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54784\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":56342,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54784\/revisions\/56342"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/54785"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=54784"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=54784"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.nofibs.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=54784"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}