Wrapping up as National Campaigns Director

After more than two decades with the Wilderness Society, I will be finishing up as National Campaigns Director later this year.

It’s been a wild ride campaigning for nature with the Wilderness Society, working with brilliant colleagues to secure strategic wins for forests, rivers, oceans, and cultural landscapes.

In the late 1990s, I worked alongside the Wilderness Society campaigning to protect the cool temperate rainforests and mighty stands of Mountain Ash in the Otway Ranges, along the Surf Coast on Gadubanud and Eastern Maar Country. Then, with a young daughter, I volunteered as a governor as the Wilderness Society Victoria rebuilt. In 2007 I returned to campaigning, joining Wilderness Society staff for the Federal election campaign, when Howard had a vision for a nuclear Australia. More than a decade of forest, rivers and northern savanna campaigning followed, with highlights including the protection of the significant parts of the largest river red gum forest on Earth, involving joint management with Traditional Owners. Leading negotiations with the native forest logging industry was a genuine challenge, but critically that effort shone a light on the unsustainability of the sector. Those negotiations, coupled with visionary conservation economy proposals, helped usher in significant changes for forests.

I was asked to become the organisation’s National Campaigns Director at the end of 2019. Just a few weeks later, everything changed: millions of hectares burnt in the Black Summer bushfires, then the world encountered COVID. Like others, we had to find ways of working differently. I seized the opportunity to do important cultural and strategic work with the Wilderness Society’ crack team of campaigners. Together we restored a culture of teamwork, trust, and ambition. We did the hard collaborative work of developing the organisation’s first aligned Organisational Campaign Plan, which has underpinned multiple campaign successes. We dug deep and reset community organising, underpinned by the organisational value of the ‘power of people to make change’. As National Campaigns Director, I have worked with commitment and diligence to re-centre how the Wilderness Society works with First Peoples in pursuit of our purpose, as a key part of everyone’s role, and to prioritise active listening across the org, so that we are the ally the Wilderness Society can and must be. 

Working with allies across the movement, the business sector, Traditional Owners and regional communities has been a highlight of my time with the organisation. The Wilderness Society is formidable and gutsy, dedicated to solving some of the biggest challenges facing the planet. We’re not afraid to be clear about what the problems are, and we revel in finding ways to solve them. My two decades with the Wilderness Society have taken me to blockades, boardrooms, fireside yarns, courthouses, sacred sites and community town halls. I’ve visited more clearfells, parliament houses, and underwhelming business briefings than I care to remember, and I remain inspired by the political and industry negotiations, field trips, and community events I’ve been so fortunate to be part of.

Building on a strong and colourful legacy of over four decades, the organisation has delivered critical progress in recent times: from securing protections in the Channel Country, advancing First Nations-led conservation in the Kimberley and the Bight, protecting another 39,000 hectares of Lutruwita / Tasmania’s native forest reserves, ending industrial native forest logging in Victoria, stopping new coal mines next to the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area, delivering the Great Koala National Park, scrutinising and scandalising bauxite deforestation in the jarrah forests of south-west WA, as well as holding corporations and regulators to account for environmental harm. We’re currently suing the offshore regulator (NOPSEMA) and Santos around fossil fuel company decommissioning liabilities.  And just this week, we’ve successfully challenged the Environment Minister over legal duties in the national environment law to protect threatened species. 

All this takes focus, determination, persistence and creativity. I am proud of having grown the Wilderness Society’s ability to campaign with strength and integrity, leveraging our continental presence, and keeping the campaign tactic toolbox up to date and well stocked: from strengthening our deforestation campaigns that are shifting company policies, establishing the universally-recognised community rights in environmental decisions as necessary for Australia, to expanding community mobilisation for stronger nature laws, and championing citizen science platforms like Watch on Nature, which is now used across the country by dozens of community and conservation groups to track and defend threatened ecosystems. Bringing people together, with strategic intent, clarity of focus, system consciousness, and with joy has been a hallmark of this era of the Wilderness Society.

Next year, the Wilderness Society turns fifty. Whilst I won’t be continuing as National Campaigns Director into this significant anniversary year, the organisation, and the work, will and must continue. 

At its heart, the Wilderness Society knows—clearly and with conviction—what its business is. And protecting wilderness and natural ecosystems remains vital, for the ongoing evolution of life on Earth. How we do that well, requires ongoing collaboration, adaptation, and imagination.

These last several years have been a joyful and impactful period of campaigning for the Wilderness Society. I’m so grateful to the Society’s members and supporters, who provide so much to ensure the organisation can campaign—and campaign to win—for nature. The opportunity to be of service to planet Earth, by governing, organising, and campaigning with the Wilderness Society has been an incredible honour, and a privilege. 

There’ll be more news soon about what’s next for campaign leadership at the Wilderness Society.