Old growth wilderness: no country for veteran environmentalists

Before it was cool — when they focused on the environment — Chris Kenny was a ‘bit of a greenie’, right down to the ‘no dams’ car sticker. Now, the Greens are lost in a wilderness of ideological causes.

Bob Brown, left, at the height of the Franklin Dam protests, and Vhris Kenny, right, back when he was "a bit of a greenie". Pictures: News Corp/Supplied

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Before it became fashionable, I was a bit of a greenie. But that was when they focused on the environment – you would not want to identify as green now.

In the early 1980s I wore bib and brace overalls, a homespun woollen beanie and sturdy hiking boots as I surveyed plant and animal species in the Mount Lofty, Flinders and Gawler Ranges. Back before he founded his political party, I was a fan of Bob Brown and had a “No Dams” sticker on my little four-wheel-drive.

Obsessed with the bush and Australiana as a boy, I read widely not only about the early explorers but also the 20th-century legends such as Bill Harney and Douglas Lockwood. Thinking back this week, a favourite book about exploring the Northern Territory loomed large in my mind but I could not remember the title or author until some rummaging in my bookshelves turned it up, a Christmas gift from Mum and Dad in 1973 – Quest under Capricorn, by none other than David Attenborough.

The wonders of the Australian natural environment were endless and still being discovered in the post-war decades, usually with help from local Indigenous communities.

Nearing the end of my school years I was aimless and uninterested, scoffing at teachers who suggested I might study law. Then I heard about a course in wildlife and park management, a career pathway to park ranger, and I had my goal.

The course included field trips of various types to wilderness areas and it led to short-term contract work for national parks in the Adelaide Hills, including as a fire-spotter over summer.

We students convinced the then Liberal state government’s environment minister, David Wotton, to visit us for a formal question and answer session, and given the lack of attention on environmental issues I asked why it would not be in his own political interests to elevate the importance of his portfolio.

Bob Brown, the face of the campaign to block the Franklin River dam in Tasmania, addresses a protest rally. On July 1, 1983, the High Court overturned a Tasmanian government decision to build the dam. Picture: News Corp

This was the Franklin Dam era, and we felt we were part of a wider awakening about the importance of the environment, especially habitat preservation, native species protection and conservation of rivers.

Still, full-time park ranger jobs were few and far between (what with the environment being such a low priority) and I decided to scratch my news junkie itch, returning to university to study journalism.

Despite serving as an adviser for state and federal Liberal politicians and working as a generally right-of-centre commentator, I still regard myself as an environmentalist. The critical importance of conserving the environment, native species and special places remains – it is just that the so-called environmentalists hardly ever focus on this stuff.

All they blather on about is climate change. Every environmental issue is linked to global warming, all aspects of climate are exaggerated in alarmist ways and the only solutions proposed, such as the renewable energy transition, will be unworkable, wildly expensive and ineffectual.

Former Treasury secretary Ken Henry, a committed environmentalist, demonstrated the point when he spoke at the National Press Club last week.

“Instead of affording protection from wild weather events, the natural environment is now their accelerator,” he warned. “We’ve turned nature against us.” This is shrill, emotive and nonsensical – anthropomorphising nature. “Our destruction of the natural environment now poses an existential threat to everything that we value” – this stuff is indistinguishable from Greta Thunberg’s teenage rantings.

Chair of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Foundation, Ken Henry, at the National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: AAP

Henry was speaking as chairman of the Australian Climate and Biodiversity Council and, to be fair, he did mention some of those critical issues such as land clearing and habitat preservation. But it was overshadowed by climate fearmongering: “We are passing to future generations a legacy of unsustainable plunder compounded by the impacts of a rapidly changing climate.”

If you read the science on climate carefully you will be concerned about possible trends but overwhelmed by the uncertainty. And given the climate is always warming or cooling, we can never be certain about the extent of any human impact on global climate, beneficial or deleterious.

Our position on all this should be governed by scientific scepticism, honest examination of empirical facts and sensible caution about those things we can control, such as carbon emissions and deforestation. Instead, we get catastrophism and the subsuming of all environmental challenges to the climate cause.

Henry demonstrated this when discussing South Australia’s algal bloom, a terrible but natural occurrence. “It’s well past time that we and others in the world dealt properly with the threats of climate change and the warming of the oceans,” he said, “which I think from what I’ve read lies at the heart of the catastrophe that’s occurring there.”

Sir John's Falls near the Gordon River on the 25th Anniversary of the Franklin River dam protest in Tasmania. Picture: News Corp

Predictably, he and others take a leap of faith to blame a natural disaster on climate change. This is speculation at best and, as we have seen with previous claims about “unprecedented” bushfires, floods and cyclones, it can often be simply wrong and misleading.

Even if we assumed Henry was right and algal blooms occurred more often with warming oceans, exactly how would spending $1 trillion on switching our national grid to renewables help? Australian emissions reductions are portrayed as the panacea to fires, floods, droughts, cyclones, sea levels and now algal blooms; soon we will be told they will win us The Ashes.

On current projections our renewables transition will only impoverish us, create more environmental destruction as solar factories, wind farms and transmission lines alienate vast areas of agricultural and bush land, and it will have no impact on the climate because global emissions continue to rise by vastly greater amounts than our meagre 1 per cent share.

When environmentalists lurch immediately to climate change as the problem and emissions reductions as the solution, they really offer nothing beyond ideological posturing. Even if the world went net zero tomorrow, the climate still might warm and, regardless, we still will have algal blooms, droughts, floods and fires anyway.

We had best learn to deal with natural threats in ways that involve science and logic. On algal blooms we might consider factors such as the management of the Murray-Darling Basin and the possible impact of fertilisers and other nutrients washing into the ocean at the Murray mouth.

Former fire chief and now Climate Council activist Greg Mullins warns before every summer that climate change could deliver severe bushfires – that is always a safe prediction. We have always had catastrophic bushfires and we always will – and no firefighters or water bombers will stop them.

Suggesting that lowering emissions will reduce the threat is ludicrous. It is a sure-fire way to distract from meaningful and achievable protections such as fuel reduction, sensible planning and diligent hazard management.

Likewise with flooding; we know where the risks are and how to avoid them but we repeatedly build out the flood plains and hope for the best. It is best we deal with the perpetual threat of natural disasters rationally, and not through the political prism of climate posturing.

When was the last time you heard environmentalists or Greens politicians talking about what was needed to preserve our small native mammals and their habitat? When have you heard their ideas for tackling the scourge of feral cats, foxes, goats and pigs? Do they care about our wild rivers any more, or do they want to follow up Bob Hawke’s pledge to plant a billion trees?

Instead of blocking hydro dams in the wilderness, greenies now use climate scares over dams never filling and rivers running dry to push governments into wasting billions of dollars on electricity-guzzling, superfluous desalination plants. And they cheer the billions wasted and the landscapes despoiled by Snowy 2.0 and its transmission links, while raising nary a whisper about wind farms on pristine ridgetops or solar farms on rangelands.

Brown’s political party has now lost its way. Co-founder Drew Hutton declared in The Australian this week that a “transgender and queer cult” has taken over the party after he was expelled for supporting debate on women’s rights. On Sky News he told me that “right around Australia trans activists, zealots and extremists have taken over the key committees in the Greens”.

He expanded on how the party’s mission was being lost. “When Bob (Brown) and I were working back in the early 1990s setting up the party we felt we had an historic mission to help the planet to move to a position of ecological sustainability,” he said.

Hutton said a lot of people in important positions in the party did not have that same vision. “Their vision is one where particular identities prevail, and the rights of those particular identities are far more important than any other issue that the party addresses,” he said.

Apart from being preoccupied with climate at the expense of all other environmental concerns, and obsessed with trans activism, the Greens also have become a hotbed of rabid anti-Israeli activism. Their deputy leader, senator Mehreen Faruqi, was censured by the Senate this week for disrupting the Governor-General’s speech with a placard demanding sanctions against Israel.

The Greens have been unwilling to condemn Hamas, repeatedly accused Israel of genocide and supported ugly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian protests. One protest in Canberra this week paraded a poster of deceased Hamas terrorist leader Yahya Sinwar, who orchestrated the October 7 atrocities.

All this is a far cry from protecting the Tasmanian wilderness and, worryingly, the Albanese Labor government needs to Greens to pass its agenda through the Senate. In parliament, as in the bush, ferals can do a lot of damage.