Last Friday dozens of armed police officers from New South Wales attacked a camp near Sydney and arrested two environmentalists. One was Aunt Caroline Kirk, an elderly Aboriginal woman. She was accused of “deliberately obstructing and intimidating the police.”
“I can’t run, I can’t climb,” he said. “All I can do … is teach my culture. Why do they do that?”
The answer lies in the confrontation of our time between greed and green.
At the heart of this is greenophobia, the fear of green things, including environmentalists. It implies the shattered idea that people should be prevented from taking action to defend the environment, especially if this is an obstacle to making money.
It has infected the world with natural resource extractors and they have found that established political parties around the world are more useful. Thus, in this year’s Queen’s speech, Boris Johnson announced a bill to imprison peaceful protesters in the UK for up to 10 years. The proposal for such measures was one of the triggers that drew 400 alarmed scientists to support environmental activists last year.
The president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, is a greenophobic who is letting the Amazon rainforest and its indigenous cultures be destroyed. His nation has fallen into environmental illegality in which two rainforest defenders, British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenous lawyer Bruno Pereira, were killed this month. Globally, 220 environmentalists were killed last year and thousands more were injured, terrorized or imprisoned. Most of the perpetrators have not been arrested or charged.
My foundation’s campaign to defend the Takayna / Tarkine rainforest in northwestern Tasmania has clashed with the Chinese Communist Party mining corporation MMG. More than 80 people (nurses, teachers, students, environmentalists, footballers and farmers) have been arrested for peacefully obstructing MMG machines invading the Tarkine rainforest to build a landfill for toxic waste from its Rosebery heavy metal mine . There are options for waste disposal outside of Tarkine.
The MMG lobby helped influence the Tasmanian parliament to vote last week in favor of tougher sanctions for Tarkine’s defenders and their giant masked owls. A clear majority of Tasmanian lawmakers want MMG to dump its toxic waste dump at Tarkine and Tasmania’s nature advocates to get a cell in Risdon prison.
Tasmanian laws coincide with those in NSW, with fines of up to $ 11,000 for peaceful environmental protest and double, or two and a half years in prison, for a second felony. If these laws had been in place in other jurisdictions at other times, the Franklin River would have been dammed, the Daintree rainforest devastated, and much of Kakadu National Park would have been exploited.
Victoria has also introduced legislation, one of which is to deter scientists who have previously gone to the highlands and found forests with protected species, such as the main glider and the critically endangered state wildlife emblem, the opossum. of lead. This is illegal. Although the loggers did not face any charges, the intent of the new laws is to stop or arrest these scientists next time.
Last year in Newcastle, a young man was sentenced to one year in prison for delaying a coal train. The court did not hear the assessment of the former chief scientist of NASA who told the US Congress that, in this world of dangerous global warming, transporting coal is a criminal activity.
Greenophobia is leaking. On Monday before Aunt Caroline’s arrest, about 100 officers attacked the Blockade Australia camp to peacefully protest in Colo, near Sydney, after four undercover officers did not identify themselves “fearing for their lives”, all and that the police had the weapons and the people of The camp, including the children, had none.
Corporate public relations machines, with the right-wing media ready, are developing greenophobia to divert attention from their business well-being and move away from the more serious threat of the collapse of the biosphere. Earth, even through global warming and species extinctions. As NSW Attorney General Mark Speakman said, “What we are stopping, or further criminalizing, are protests that are shutting down major economic activity.” It’s money before the planet.
The new federal Minister for the Environment, Tanya Plibersek, is now Australia’s most powerful environmentalist. She will decide whether MMG should treat its toxic waste inside or outside the Tarkine rainforest. In doing so, it will also decide whether Tasmanian environmentalists will face the new draconian rulings there. These sanctions, for peaceful environmental action, are now the same as for aggravated aggression or for threatening neighbors with a shotgun.
These laws can be tried in the high court as previous laws did, after I was among those arrested in the Lapoinya rainforest of Tasmania in 2017. The court found these laws to be unconstitutional because they took away my right. to peaceful protest. Meanwhile, the Lapoinya forest was flattened and burned, along with its rare wildlife. No one was arrested for it.
If MMG’s unnecessary waste landfill is approved, I, for example, will help defend this vital forest, its owls, kingfishers, and Tasmanian devils. They can get us out of nature, but they can’t get us out.
As for the “terrifying” Aunt Caroline, I would like to meet her and thank her. He may not be able to run or climb, but he is an inspiration.