One darkening dusk as I sat quietly in the forest on Budawang, Yuin, country, I heard a swoop no louder than a breath.

I had that feeling of being stared at.

I looked up. On the branch above me, a powerfully built Brown Goshawk looked back at me with fierce yellow eyes.

Then the Goshawk flew west, fast and silent, without a wing flap, shooting between the trees of the darkening forest.

My heart beat hard. For some time, my skin and hair tingled with the feeling of the Goshawk’s eyes on me, even though it was gone.

It’s hard to imagine what it must be like to see like a Goshawk.

They can probably see at least one million colours, 100 times as many as what you can see. They are tetrachromats, which means they have four types of colour receptors in their retinas. They might even have five.

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Most people have three kinds of cone cells, but some humans have an extra one, like Sydney-born artist Concetta Antico. She describes growing up with hyper-charged colour perception, “high on life and the beauty that’s around.” She can tell when her daughter is sick because her skin colour changes. She sees an extraordinary range of hues within a single colour like green, or in drops of rain.

Birds, like most animals, can perceive UV light. They see UV patterns on flower petals. They see a wild variety of colours in other birds’ plumage. Some raptors can see the trails of urine left by their prey. Migrating birds have quantum vision that can perceive the Earth’s magnetic field and the stars’ celestial patterns, helping them navigate.

Raptors have the highest achromatic (seeing greys) and chromatic (seeing hues) spatial resolution of all animals – meaning they are able to sharply see the smallest thing, even if it is blended into the background.

Brown Goshawks are swift, precise, and deadly hunters.

They fly fast through the edge of a forest, dashing suddenly out into pasture to seize small rabbits. They snatch Crimson Rosellas out of the air. They wait on a perch, then plummet to grab starlings, swallows or lizards. They pounce on grasshoppers on the ground.

A third, or even half, of the time they attack, they succeed.

They can see fast. As they fly fast, they can manoeuvre and see visual details in vivid colour, with great accuracy, quickly through space and time, with no blur.

That’s how my Goshawk was able to fly west so fast through the twilight forest without hitting a branch.

The same night I saw the Goshawk, around the same time, my friend, who was sitting in another place in the forest, also got a visit.

That bird was onto us.

Thank you to my friend Erik Petersen who reminded me this week that climate campaigning is only sustainable if you stop often to appreciate birds!

Kathryn

A handful of politicians, billionaire media moguls and fossil fuel industry-seeded ideologues like to argue that Australia makes no real difference to global climate damage.

But two gobsmacking new reports released this week by the Australian Climate Accountability Project and Climate Analytics blow that fantasy right up.

Hold onto your seat and read the next sentence twice.

Big multinational corporations export more fossil fuel pollution from Australia than from any country except Russia.

That’s right. Coal and gas giants make Australia the second largest export polluter in the world.

The new analysis reveals that these companies make Australia a bigger exporter of pollution than Saudi Arabia, the United States and every OPEC country. And Australia’s exported pollution is between three and four times larger than its domestic pollution.

That’s why First Nations and Pacific leaders and flood and fire survivors sat down in the lobby of Parliament House this week to call for a “climate trigger” law to assess new coal and gas projects.

Community members can see the obvious truth that whichever way you add it up, the impact of corporate fossil fuel pollution from Australia is massive.

Climate Analytics also calculates total lifecycle pollution of all fossil fuel production (not just exports), revealing that the five worst polluters by this measure are China, USA, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Australia, in that order. Every other country in the world pollutes less, including India.

The corporations profiting from exporting coal and gas from Australia are large multinationals that employ relatively few people and pay barely any tax. Teachers pay more tax than the oil and gas industry.

The silver lining to this dark, polluting cloud is that Australia has incredible capacity and wealth to lead a transition. There are no excuses. If only our elected representatives can stand up to the fossil fuel lobby.

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No policy to phase out fossil fuel exports

Right now, the Australian Government has no policy to restrict, cap or limit corporations’ fossil fuel exports. They are still approving major new coal and gas projects, almost entirely for export, with no limits on production.

“Incredibly, Australia has no plan for limiting or reducing the exports that are escalating dangerous climate change for its own population,” says Australian Climate Accountability Project lead, Gillian Moon.

“We need to urgently develop our plan for a managed national phase-out of the exports – just as we’re doing for our domestic emissions.”

The Federal Government is giving giant gas corporations like Woodside and Santos and coal behemoths like Glencore and Whitehaven open playing fields, free uniforms, free kicks, and publicly funded sausages at halftime.

These policies give an assurance to the world that Australia’s coal and gas supply is abundant and unconstrained. They help maintain lower coal and gas prices globally, encouraging ongoing consumption. And they send a cogent signal to the world that Australia intends to produce as much coal and gas as it can sell, for as long as possible. Coming from a stable, major fossil fuel-exporting country like Australia, such reliable assurances weaken climate ambition throughout the world during this critical decade.

Under current government policies, Climate Analytics says pollution from fossil fuels from Australia would increase by 50% over the next decade. This is incompatible with the Paris Agreement goal of limiting heating to 2°C, and preferably to 1.5°C.

There is a painful and obvious disconnect between loudly trumpeted policies to promote clean energy and non-existent policies to rein in fossil fuel exports.

Wherever they’re burned, fossil fuels harm people

For too long, fossil fuel CEOs and a handful of politicians in high-polluting countries like Australia have divided people with lies about the possibility for change, while they push business as usual.

The analysis released this week shows the truth about the extent of damage fossil fuel exports from Australia cause to our air and oceans, to climate ambition globally, and to people.

It doesn’t matter which country burns the coal and gas, because here on Gaia, we all share the same atmosphere. Exports from Australia burned in Japan still harm people in Australia. Climate pollution harms people everywhere.

The systems we rely on for everyday life – like hospitals, roads, housing, food and water – are exposed to escalating and compounding unnatural weather. And people who have contributed least to the problem pay the highest price.

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Australia’s actions matter globally

Almost two-thirds of Australia’s fossil fuel exports go to Japan, Korea and Taiwan – which are wealthy, developed countries with strong technological capacity.

Japan funds Australian export projects with public money and on-sells Australian gas to other countries, undermining the transition to clean energy in Asia.

The Albanese government urgently needs a national plan to phase-out fossil fuel exports in an orderly, cooperative, fast, fair, and inclusive way. Unless they begin this process, Australia’s actions and policies will not be consistent with the Paris Agreement’s temperature goal.

“That’s not asking Australia to abruptly stop the exports,” says Gillan Moon. “It’s asking for Australia to have a concrete and ambitious plan where we work cooperatively with affected communities and our overseas buyers towards an orderly and just phase-out of these massively polluting exports.”

“Australia is one of only a small handful of countries with the combination of huge fossil fuel resources, obvious alternatives from enviable renewables and outsized ‘soft power’ that could trigger change…”

As a social movement in the world’s second worst fossil fuel exporter, the power, creativity and persistence of the Australian climate movement matters for the whole world.

It’s our job to push our Government to have more courage and vision.

People at the front lines of climate harms, like the Indigenous and community leaders protesting in Parliament this week, are showing us how.

Back in groups speaking out for accountability on fossil fuel exports and protecting their communities from climate disasters.

• Pacific Climate Warriors

• Wangan and Jagalingou

• Move Beyond Coal

• Gomeroi Ngaarr

• Community Disaster Action Group

• 350.org

Take care. And I’ll see you next week,

Kathryn

Cooking a campfire breakfast makes me feel happy and lucky. It’s fun to play with the fire. There’s anticipation, pleasure, and an edge of hunger. Cooking alone, I relax into birdsong and dawn. In company, I laugh and banter.

I am overcome with a steely determination to time everything perfectly so I have a full, hot cup of coffee at exactly the same time as all the food is ready. This takes more focus than at home.

There’s stress from copping a face full of smoke, danger of dropping stuff in the ash, and risk of food burnt one side and raw the other. But it’s low stakes, and makes me even more absurdly grateful when I finally take the first bite.

Here are three of my favourite outdoor breakfasts.

1. A giant cast iron fry up at Budawang camp

A lightly oiled cast iron fry pan or grill plate is robust enough to survive any campfire, and the chargrilled, smoky flavours mix divinely. I keep a small pan in my camp kit at all times, along with a small bottle of olive oil.

Here’s my deluxe breakfast while I’m mentoring at rewild camp on Budawang country. Scrape out a few hot coals to heat the pan. I like to cook two, three, or all of these ingredients, adding them to the pan in this rough order:

• Mushrooms. Break them up and toss them in. Bonus points for a sprig of rosemary or a crush of garlic.

• Tomato. For a hot, red, juicy burst to breakfast, it’s easy to carry a few little cherry tomatoes and let them char in the pan. No chopping required.

• Pine nuts. Shake and shuffle a handful around the pan until they’re toasted so their nutty crunch can contrast sloppy tomato or eggs.

• Eggs. Balance your pan flat on some logs before cracking them in, and watch closely so they cook just so.

• Cheese. Melt it on top of the eggs just before you scrape them out.

• Toast. Stick a stick in your bread and toast it dry near the radiant heat of the coals. Or fry the bread in the pan with some butter.

• Kale. Break it up and toss it about in some hot oil so it’s a bit crispy. Enjoy the refreshing palate contrast of those green power micronutrients.

• Salt. A sprinkle.

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I also cook many of these things in a jaffle iron on the fire, making a tight-packed, way-too-hot sandwich bundle. I have an uncanny ability to time the eggs so they’re perfectly cooked, even though I can’t see inside. Strong, square bread is required.

Avocado, basil and garlic in a jaffle with an egg and plenty of butter will make you the Queen, King or Divine Being of all campers.

2. Brussels sprouts and bacon by an alpine river

Brussels sprouts are marginally edible, but if you add a free range bacon, and char them together, they become next level tasty – healthy and wicked. Here’s a batch I cooked on the stony bank of the flowing mountain river Howqua on Taungurung country.

Add boiled eggs and hot coffee for an epic meal. Boiling eggs is the least messy way to get them ready in a lightweight camp pot.

For perfect soft boiled eggs:

• Boil the water.

• Lower eggs in slowly on a spoon so they don’t crack.

• Set a timer for six minutes and pull them out exactly then.

• Cool them off in cold water.

• Crack and peel.

• Voila! Firm whites with soft yolks.

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3. Butterscotch apple crumble with a mountain view

If you’re hiking and cast iron and eggs are too heavy, here’s a super lightweight breakfast to die for.

Most dehydrated camp meals you can buy are horrendous, but Tasmanian outfit Strive Foods are an exception. (I get no kick backs for saying this!) They make a decent laksa. The spicy tomato gnocchi is seriously tasty. I pack a couple when travelling in case of emergency. They also do dessert.

These incredible butterscotch apples were supposed to be dessert, but we ate them for breakfast one sun-soaked morning while gazing north to the Pilot Wilderness from the Cobberas. Next time, I’ll bring a pack of that expensive paleo muesli to throw on top for a breakfast crumble.

Simple pleasures, hey?

I’m taking a break from climate this week to wander outside, because appreciating our beautiful world is just as important as advocating for it. Who else likes eating outside? Tell me your hot camp cook tips or your favourite campfire meal memory.

Kathryn

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Imagine radically different energy systems powering our lives.

In the fossil fuel system, every day corporations dig and drill and frack for coal, oil and gas, ship it around the world, then burn it. They build a coal-burning power station - a giant furnace, and then day after day, decade after decade, shovel coal in and burn it. Every day the hungry beast needs more coal in its belly.

In the renewable system, once the turbine or panel is built, there’s nothing to ship, nothing to burn, and barely any fucks to give. The sun shines day after day for free. The wind blows without us needing to drive it around in a truck. If it’s cloudy in one place, it’s sunny somewhere else. If the wind lulls, it starts again. Electrons are created when the turbines spin and when sun shines on solar panels and they can be stored in batteries. Don’t ask me how. I’m a campaigner, not an engineer. It’s pretty much magic.

There is a colossal difference between these two systems when it comes to impacts on the Earth. And this time I’m not even talking about atmospheric pollution.

I don’t believe in a techno-fix. I think creativity, connection and collaboration are as critical as technology in solving the climate crisis. But there are a few stats that recently blew my mind and I thought you might be curious about them too. Here’s the first.

A new, renewable energy system would use 360 times less material from the Earth than the polluting fossil fuel system.

It’s all laid out in this hyped report from Rocky Mountain Institute, The Renewable Revolution: It’s exponential, global, and this decade. They cite International Energy Agency figures that a renewables system will need 43 million tonnes of minerals by 2040. That’s a lot? Well, not compared to the 15 billion tonnes of fossil fuels that corporations dig out of the earth every year.

It’s true that we’ll need more of certain minerals to build out the renewables system. But according to Rocky Mountain Institute, it’s less than you might think.

“Battery minerals are not the new oil,” they say. “Even as battery demand surges, the combined forces of efficiency, innovation, and circularity will drive peak demand for mined minerals within a decade — and may even avoid mineral extraction altogether by 2050. These advancements enable us to transition from linear extraction to a circular loop, with compounding benefits for our climate, security, equity, health, and wealth.”

Fossil fuel transport needs oil, oil, oil, oil, oil every year. Efficient, electric transport will need a one-off surge of mineral demand – which is still 17 times less than just a single year of oil – and then transport can move to a largely circular economy into the future.

There are a few different ways to calculate the stats about overall resource use, but the upshot of it all is that we can live lighter on this beautiful planet and enjoy our hot showers and cold beers at the same time, especially if we get smart about design, efficiency and recycling.

“The total amount of mining that’s going to be needed for wind, water, solar, compared to [the] fossil fuel system, is much less than 1% in terms of the mass of materials,” says Stanford Professor Mark Jacobson.

All mining, no matter which system it supports, should meet strong standards for environment, labour, cultural heritage and consent. And with renewables, there will be way fewer giant, gaping holes in the ground. For people and country, that matters.

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A sacred fire of resistance

Last year I travelled to the Adani coal mine in central Queensland. Standing on an embankment at night, on my right I could see a sacred fire burning in a ceremonial bora ring. People danced barefoot on the red sand, their gentle, human voices laughing, singing and calling to each other.

On my left was the mine. I was shocked by its massive floodlights and rumbling machines. I don’t know why I had expected the mine to be dark and quiet in the middle of the night. Of course they dig coal 24 hours. I couldn’t fully see into the mine, but I could see the tops of multistory machines lurching about and hear the rumbling, screeching, crashing and booming as they dug rocks and earth.

On 26th August 2021, Wangan and Jagalingou cultural custodians had lit the fire, beginning a ceremony, Waddananggu, that lasts until this day. The fire has never gone out. It is a flame of resistance. Their ongoing presence signifies their care for their ancestral homelands, the strength of their culture, and their rejection of the mine.

I’d seen a coal mine before, at Hazelwood. It was just a huge hole in the ground, right by the highway in Morwell. I saw it burning like actual hell, when it caught fire and polluted the lungs of the local community for 45 days. But I’d never seen a remote coal mine like this. The scale was gob-smacking.

Excavators at the Adani Carmichael mine are more than three times the weight of a Boeing 747. Three dozen people could stand in the bucket claw. There was a literal mountain of overburden. Not a pile, but a mountain.

Standing on the embankment watching this scene, with the violence of the mine on one side, and the beautiful humans dancing on the other, made me howl into the wind and sob.

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The heart of the land

Wangan and Jagalingou people say the mine tears the heart out of the land:

The scale of this mine means it would have devastating impacts on our native title, ancestral lands and waters, our totemic plants and animals, and our environmental and cultural heritage. It would pollute and drain billions of litres of groundwater, and obliterate important springs systems. It would potentially wipe out threatened and endangered species. It would literally leave a huge black hole, monumental in proportions, where there were once our homelands. These effects are irreversible. Our land will be “disappeared”.

Adani claim to “manage cultural heritage” on the mine site, but how do you manage sacred waterholes, stone knapping sites, and ancient birthing trees when machines that big turn country inside out?

Country is not impacted. It’s obliterated. The people who are most connected to the land are its last line of defence.

And if Adani had their way, the mine would have been six times bigger. It was originally planned to be the largest coal mine in Australia, and one of the largest in the world, exporting 60 million tonnes of coal every year, for a hundred years.

We campaigned for years to stop the mine, mobilising groups all over the country, running legal cases, stopping a one billion dollar public handout right before the Queensland election, and targeting government decision makers, banks, contractors and insurers. Dozens of companies disassociated themselves from the project. It was delayed by years. Adani were forced to scale back the mine to 10 million tonnes a year.

I guess that counts for something. We won a lot in that campaign. But we lost. One day the machines will go silent, the sacred springs will breathe a sigh of relief, and the birds will realise they don’t have to shout any more. When, I don’t know. But change is coming. And maybe it will be faster than any of us realise.

The dinosaurs and all that rubbish

When I was a little kid, I was mesmerised by the book, The Dinosaurs and All That Rubbish. A man stands on a polluted Earth and dreams of going to a star he can see in the sky. He cuts trees, burns coal and makes piles of waste to build a rocket. He flies to the star.

While he’s away, the dinosaurs wake up. They are disgusted by the mess. They stomp on all the roads and factories and slag-heaps and chuck them into volcanoes. The Earth becomes green and beautiful again, full of wondrous creatures. The man arrives at the star and finds it barren (just like Apollo astronauts when they finally arrived at the moon).

The man sees a beautiful planet and decides to go there. When he arrives, he is astounded, not realising this gorgeous place is the same Earth he left. The dinosaurs give him a stern, but compassionate, talking to. This time, they say, the Earth belongs to everyone.

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Compounding lightness

If the renewable system means we don’t need to dig up fossil fuels anymore, we also don’t need to ship them around. And here’s the second gob-smacking statistic that might make you hopeful that when change kicks in, it can compound in positive ways.

Bill McKibben first alerted me to the fact that forty percent of global shipping is shipping fossil fuels around.

As coal, oil and gas use reduces, and the sun and wind just come through the air without the need for pipes, trucks and containers, we simply won’t need all of these ships, or the fuel that powers them.

“A further 15% of bulk [shipping is]… raw iron ore, steaming to the same global ports, especially ones in China, where the coal ships are running,” writes Michael Barnard. As new technologies to process iron ore into new steel with green electricity scale up, this shipping will reduce too.

Steel is the most recycled material in the world. It stays strong when recycled. Barnard says we can hugely increase steel recycling using scrap metal, powered by electric furnaces running on renewable energy.

“Right now the USA happens to be leading in using scrap steel to meet new demand with 70% penetration of electric arc furnace. Europe is only at 40%. Other countries will rise to the level of the USA. Fossil fuel infrastructure will increasingly be fed into scrap steel furnaces.”

We are moving from heavy, fiery molecules to light, obedient electrons; from hunting fossil fuels to farming the sun. The renewable revolution continues the long arc of energy history: efficiency beats waste, technologies beat commodities, and economics beats ideology.

– Rocky Mountain Institute

It's a fundamental change in how we interact with our planet. Renewables can leave the ancient forests of stored sunlight safe under the ground, protecting the heart of the land.

The transition to renewable energy is not just a shift from polluting power to cleaner sources, but a shift from digging up stuff that is expensive, heavy, scarce and hoarded by a monstrously rich minority to capturing flows that are free, light, abundant, and accessible to 90% of the world.

Instead of digging up rocks and earth, let’s harvest light and air.

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When I was pregnant with my first baby I lived next to a Shell oil refinery. From the front door I could see a tall smokestack with a gas flare burning 24/7, like the eye of Sauron.

It released gaseous pressure from the bowels of a colossal tangle of pipes, tanks and boilers. Sometimes it was a gassy blue cough. Or acrid black smoke. And sometimes it exploded into a terrifying orange column ten stories high.

“A flame is good,” a refinery worker told me. “No flame is very bad.”

Then there was the stink. I would cover my mouth with my t-shirt as I walked past from the train station.

A local doctor asked the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) to set up a database to monitor respiratory problems in the community. “If it's an easterly (from Shell), they lock themselves in their houses all day and don't go out," he said.

Benzene is a carcinogenic hydrocarbon linked to leukaemia, cancer of the body's blood-forming tissues, including bone marrow, white blood cells and the lymphatic system.

Environmental pollution has disproportionate impacts on people and communities who already experience racism or inequality.

In the US, fence-line communities are badly exposed. An unusually high number of oil refinery workers will end up with leukaemia, according to Chicago lawyer and benzene specialist Andrew Hughes. A study of Australian petroleum industry workers found the same thing. Hughes says at the point where you can smell benzene (the “odour threshold”), you are inhaling unsafe levels of the chemical.

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Shell shock

One night as I settled to sleep, my dreaming blood circling through the unborn child in my womb, the refinery siren blared. I startled.

I felt my baby kick.

Maybe I was already on edge. I’d been reading a report by renowned climate scientist James Hansen saying fossil fuel burning must stop urgently to prevent irreversible melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets causing several metres of sea level rise in coming decades and centuries.

“I suggest that the highest prudent level of additional global warming is not more than about 1°C,” he said.

My brain couldn’t fit what he was saying into my life decisions.

During the time I was pregnant, the Shell refinery breached their licence conditions almost 100 times. They were fined 11 times by the EPA for discharging oil into the bay. When my belly just started to show, there was a “systems breakdown” at the fifty-year-old refinery. They did not explain to the community what that meant.

In the few years prior, Shell had been fined $53,000 for a gas leak after the EPA took them to court. There were fuel spills, acid spills, and failed containment ditches, but without court action, the fines were tiny. In those few years, Shell racked up 28 $5000 fines and three $800 fines.

It was chump change for a global oil corporation. America had just invaded Iraq, and Shell had doubled their earnings, joining other oil giants reaping billions in profit. That year Shell, globally, was responsible for 40,674 million tonnes of climate pollution.

The refinery alarms blared often. A fridge magnet had arrived in the mail, explaining that a constant siren means, “the incident is contained on site.” An up and down siren means, “an incident has occurred which may affect other areas.”

Was the siren I heard that night constant, or up and down? It was wailing and I wasn’t sure. But as I contemplated my baby’s future, it was becoming clear to me that when it comes to fossil fuel pollution, no incident is contained onsite.

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Up close to environmental pollution

Within minutes of exposure to benzene vapour, around 50% of the dose is absorbed by the lungs. It passes to the placenta and the foetus straight away. Within a couple of hours, levels in blood and bone marrow are elevated. It spreads to the brain, liver bile, and fat – and into high fat breast milk. Umbilical cord blood may hold higher concentrations than maternal blood. Benzene is gradually eliminated, mainly through breath and pee.

An air monitoring station near my house clocked benzene, toluene, xylenes, ethylbenzene, 1,3-butadiene, nitrogen dioxide and sulfur dioxide. One EPA report stated they held, “significant doubt in the accuracy of benzene data being generated by Shell.”

Some studies suggest childhood leukaemia can be associated with exposure of the mother - and even the father pre-conception – to solvents, petroleum products, car pollution, benzene, or plastic.

Twice while I was pregnant with Archie, the benzene levels outside the refinery spiked to more than five times the EPA's intervention level. They said most of the time the air quality was similar to Melbourne.

If I passed the refinery mid-morning, I would see a woman in a white coat park her ute by the stream that flowed out of the refinery grounds directly into the bay. Sometimes the water steamed it was so hot. She climbed down and took a sample.

Pelicans and plovers congregated on the piers where pipelines pumped oil from berthed tankers to the refinery. Barbed wire fences kept people out, making it peaceful for the birds. When my belly was large and Archie was kicking hard, there was another spill from a cracked pipe on the jetty.

Men in tinnies fished nearby, catching pinky snapper which swam near the warm water at dawn and dusk. At low tide, the mud barrier of the lagoon exposed, they pulled in trevally, whiting and flathead. I wasn’t keen to share their catch.

I was not afraid for myself. But my baby was another thing. It wasn’t analytical. My pregnant nose reacted to strong chemical smells like a chained wildcat sensing a mortal enemy.

And cancer was personal.

Twelve years earlier, my mum was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer. She had defied the odds and was still there to support me, with her joy and sunshine, in my pregnancy. She loved 11 precious years with my son Archie, and eight with Lachie, before the cancer came back.

But my dad would never meet his beautiful grandsons. Four years before my first son was born, my father, Peter, had died of bowel cancer.

And when dad was a young child, his older brother, Dougal, died at just 13 years old. He had leukaemia.

The pulse of life

I found pregnancy astounding. A new human was growing inside me. My blood and my heart pumped strong. My breasts grew full. At the slightest sniff of dodgy food, a massive alarm bell would ring. I left nuts and blueberries on my bedside table to grab, ravenous at 3AM.

My intense climate alarm was partly about fear for my baby’s future. But it was more than that. Holding newborn Archie, and three years and three days later, his brother, Lachie, meant feeling a ferocity of love, not just for them, but for everyone’s children, and for the creative force of life itself.

No one I know embodies this kind of love more than my beautiful friend, Gina Chick, who writes,

“In 350 thousand years of wisdom that lives, dancing, in our hunter gatherer skeletons, women held the hearth, and the heart, of the village. Matriarchy is about relationship with rather than power over. It’s about deep receptivity and an intuitive understanding that we’re all connected. Every action tugs on the web of life, and consequences ripple out further than we can comprehend… Matriarchy understands what’s needed for healthy culture, belly to bone.”

It was time to step into action

I’d been working as a journalist. I’d woven climate change into my stories, but back then editors weren’t very interested. I was telling stories to people I would never meet. And I couldn’t openly advocate for change.

I knew it wasn’t enough. Being an observer would not cut it. I needed to step into collective action. And I needed to step into community.

So that’s how I came to meet ten strangers in a Geelong living room who all shared my question – how do we talk about climate change in a town full of smelters and refineries? The group we formed that night is still active two decades later.

And that was the beginning of 20 years of full-time climate activism to hold big polluters accountable with some of the best campaign groups in the country, like the Australian Conservation Foundation, GetUp, and now Climate Action Network Australia.

I have tried to talk to my boys honestly about the climate crisis, but I haven’t gone into depth on how dire the climate science is, or explicitly about what it means for their lives.

I think very young children should be free to climb trees, stare at wallabies, maybe go find frogs, and think about looking after a local waterhole, before they are expected to grapple with global pollution.

And as they got older, I figured they would absorb a lot from witnessing my work, and make their own choices about their passions. Now we have lots of conversations about who does and does not have power and how change happens. They seem curious about this.

I wish for them all the creativity, collaboration and determination we can muster.

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All the Apollo astronauts wanted to do was go to the moon. Sixty-nine hours, 8 minutes and 16 seconds after the launch of Apollo 8, the crew tucked their spaceship into its orbit.

The Moon is tidally locked to the Earth, rotating in exactly the time it takes to orbit Earth, so the moon only shows us one side of her face.

The astronauts described seeing more stars than you can imagine. Then the hair rose on the backs of their necks as the stars gave way to a big, black void. It was the dark side of the moon.

“Space is black. Ink black. Velvet black,” Jim Lovell remembered. “There is no colour to space. Just as there is no colour to the moon.”

“The back side looks like a sand pile my kids have played in for some time,” said astronaut Bill Anders. “It's all beat up, no definition, just a lot of bumps and holes.”

The moon he’d dreamed of for so long felt stark, vast and lonely. After an hour of photographing craters as planned, he was bored. Then as the spaceship continued around the moon, they were startled by an extraordinary sight.

There it was, small enough to cover with a thumbnail, but shining, bright and brilliant. Earth – a stunning blue ball against the vast blackness.

In their extensive preparation and during the flight, no-one had discussed taking photos of Earth.

That beautiful blue planet held the brightness of all of life. It was sanctuary for everything they loved and held sacred. It was an oasis, united with no borders. They were awestruck.

“Wow, isn’t that pretty,” gasped Anders. “Hand me a roll of colour, quick!”

“Here we came all this way to the Moon, and yet the most significant thing we’re seeing is our own home planet, the Earth,” thought Anders as he snapped a photo of the Earth rising over the moon. The iconic 1968 shot came to be known as Earthrise.

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“…They should have sent poets because I don’t think we captured, in its entirety, the grandeur of what we had seen.” – Apollo 8 astronaut Frank Borman.

A few years later, the Apollo 17 crew took a second iconic photo, dubbed “Blue Marble.” Five hours into the flight, the Earth was brightly lit with its full face illuminated. The ship was far enough out to capture the full globe, and close enough to see the lands, clouds and oceans. It was the perfect moment.

Back in 1948, the British physicist Fred Hoyle had said, “Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available… a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.”

Blue Marble was the first – and remains the only – photo of the whole planet Earth fully illuminated by the sun taken by human hands. Will there ever be another? Whole Earth photos you see now are digitally manipulated images stitched together from multiple satellites.

The photos made their way into public consciousness when I was a baby, transforming our awareness of the spectacular beauty and interconnectedness of our biosphere. They are among the most widely distributed photos in history. I am of the first generation who grew up with this archetype of planet Earth in perfect clarity in my imagination. The photos became icons of the environmental movement.

But they could so easily never have happened.

Why haven't we seen a whole Earth photo?

In 1966, Stewart Brand dropped some LSD on his San Francisco rooftop. A hippie photographer who later founded the Whole Earth Catalogue, Brand noticed that from three stories up, the buildings didn’t look straight. He imagined rising so high he could see the curve of the Earth. His mind was blown.

Within a week, Brand had printed badges that said "Why haven't we seen a photograph of the whole Earth yet?" He hitch-hiked across the country, selling them for 25 cents. Some of the badges made it to NASA.

Despite the vast expense of Project Apollo – which cost the equivalent of $257 billion, employed 400,000 people and engaged 20,000 industrial firms and universities – taking photographs of the Earth was never part of the plan.

NASA leaders “were against the astronauts taking what they sneeringly called ‘tourist’ photographs of the Earth,” writes Christopher Potter. The first American to orbit Earth bought his own camera from a local drugstore for $19.95. His shots were bad.

A 1966 lunar mission had power for only 211 pictures and NASA’s photographic adviser was told Earth snaps would waste film. He argued. One grainy black and white shot of a shadowy Earth made it back. Public fanfare focused on the moon, and the image was largely ignored.

In 1967, automated cameras captured the first colour images of an illuminated Earth. The NASA press release failed to mention them, but Brand finally got his photo, and stuck it on the cover of his new magazine.

It wasn’t until the Apollo missions that Earthrise and Blue Marble finally showed the full glory of the globe.

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The overview effect

Many returning astronauts described witnessing the biosphere as transcendent, an "explosion of awareness"and a sense of interdependence and oneness which profoundly changed their lives. This cognitive shift was dubbed the overview effect.

In space programs driven by nationalist, colonialist and capitalist imperatives, many returning astronauts seem unfocused on empire, some taking up environmental causes.

“You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch!” – Edgar Mitchell, Apollo 14

"I think you start out with this idea of what's going to be like,” “And then, when you do finally look at the Earth for the first time, you are overwhelmed by how much more beautiful it really is when you see it for real. It's just this dynamic alive place that you see glowing all the time." – Nicole Stott, International Space Station

Astronauts describe gazing out the windows for hours at an oasis with dancing multi-coloured auroras overlaid on swirling clouds, punctuated by lightning flashes as thunderstorms rip, sparkling city lights, and the ever-moving line of shadow separating day from night. It’s a multilayered firework show of colours, beauty and motion with a celestial backdrop of shooting stars, infinity and beyond.

Overview to overlord

Yet the overview effect idea is a hop and a skip away from a problematic colonial mindset akin to manifest destiny, justifying America’s right to colonise the universe. Space historian Jordan Bimm called this hubris “the overlord effect.”

People now want to go to space expecting to feel transcendence. They fail to read the disconcerting stories from high altitude military pilots, dubbed the break-off phenomenon, of escalating anxiety, loneliness and depression as they perceived themselves dislocated from their world.

James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis, Richard Buckminster Fuller’s concept of “spaceship Earth,” and the iconic Blue Marble image were emblematic of new total system, cybernetic visions. Building cabin systems for astronauts became a metaphor for the ecology of living on Earth. Melding human and machine into a single closed system was originally a military project.

When Earthrise and Blue Marble came out, maverick scientist James Lovelock was working for NASA on detecting life on Mars. He went on to develop the Gaia hypothesis with biologist Lynn Margulis. It posits that the biological life, atmosphere, rocks and water of Earth co-evolved, interacting with each other and the planet to regulate it at conditions that are favourable to life.

American author Frank White, who coined the term overview effect, used the Gaia concept to argue for political action, not to rein in pollution here on Earth, but to support space science and planetary colonisation.

I take the opposite lesson from the astronaut’s stories. Maybe I lack imagination, but I think it’s an illusion to believe humans can replicate or displace our complex interdependencies with squillions of other creatures with some clever dudes and fancy 3D printers – even if they were backed by hundreds of billions of dollars.

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Connecting to Earth awe right here

I don’t need to go to space to feel connected to Earth and in awe.

Sometimes I sit for a long time in one place out in wild nature. After quite a while, I begin to feel like I belong and am cared for deeply. Lying with my heart on the Earth, I know that she has already forgiven us for everything.

As Thich Nhat Hanh says, her stability, patience, and inclusiveness is infinite. She is immeasurably kind. And with time, she transforms and recycles everything.

“I bow my head before you as I look deeply and recognise that you are present in me and that I’m a part of you. I was born from you and you are always present, offering me everything I need for my nourishment and growth. My mother, my father, and all my ancestors are also your children. We breathe your fresh air. We drink your clear water. We eat your nourishing food. Your herbs heal us when we’re sick.

You are the mother of all beings. I call you by the human name Mother and yet I know your mothering nature is more vast and ancient than humankind.”

Thich Nhat Hanh, Love letters to the Earth

The thin blue line

Only 24 human beings – all part of the Apollo missions – have seen the Earth from far away in space against a cosmic backdrop of stars. For astronauts in low orbit, the planet takes up most of the view. Many report being struck by how fragile Earth’s atmosphere looks – a thin blue line hugging the surface of the globe.

In November, I’ll go to Baku, Azerbaijan for my second global climate conference, where countries will discuss how to take care of this beautiful, blue protective blanket that we all share. A handful of rich countries and around 100 corporations have caused the problem, and now must be accountable to everyone else.

Corporations export more fossil fuels from Australia than from any country except Saudi Arabia and Russia. Whether they burn coal and gas here, or burn it overseas, they are changing the heat balance of that thin blue line faster than Gaia can balance it out to support life.

Hold your longing precious

So if you look at the whole Earth picture, like I do, and feel an overwhelming longing for that blue orb to remain vibrant with life, including our flawed and beautiful species, then hold your longing precious.

Don’t abandon it, burying it, sending it to the unconscious where it will warp into mindless distractions and addictions. And don't collapse it into helpless despair. Know you are one of many who hold this love.

The intelligence and creativity of evolution courses through our veins and DNA. We may be made of stardust, but we are born of this Earth and only the Earth, and that 4.5 billion-year legacy gives us the creative power of life itself. We are each a genius, descended from a line of Earth people who were genius enough to survive long enough to pass on our genes.

We are the generation tasked with solving the climate crisis, whether we like it or not.

Elon Musk can go to Mars and take his wrecked social network with him. If Bill Anders’ heart dropped when he saw the reality of the moon after a 69 hour flight, imagine arriving on Mars after six months. We’ll see how Musk’s people skills work out trapped in a close quarters bubble sucking on nutrient gel with a 95 percent carbon dioxide atmosphere and radioactive rocks outside. Good luck to him.

I’ll stay here with you, dear reader. On this beautiful ground I take my stand.

See you next week.

Kathryn

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A powerful heist pulled by corporations that benefit from destroying the earth is that the climate crisis is everyone’s fault. It’s convenient for them. If people dwell in pessimism about the state of humanity, they won’t be out voting and organising to replace national energy systems that burn coal, oil and gas with clean power from sun, wind and batteries.

And if people are incapacitated by shame, they might not notice that just 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the toxic pollution driving unnatural disasters.

I find this shocking statistic weirdly inspiring because it sounds like a problem that with an ounce of will, we most certainly can solve.

But these same companies have run decades-long campaigns to recast blame onto individuals in the community. And they know very well the emotional impact of those campaigns.

Oil CEO says climate change is your fault

In February, ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods had the gall to blame the public for the world being off track on pollution reduction. But this is not a recent deception. A linguistic analysis of 50 years of ExxonMobil company documents by Naomi Oreskes and Geoffrey Supan concluded the company uses subtle rhetoric to shift the blame for climate change away from itself and onto individuals, depicting “oil companies as innocent, trustworthy innovators simply giving the people what they demand.”

“[D]emand for energy is conflated with demand for fossil fuels, gaslighting the public into thinking that there is no alternative to our status quo, fossil-fuelled society and that we, the public, are responsible,” says Supan.

“So while their outright denial has tapered off, their propaganda hasn’t stopped. It’s in fact shifted into high gear and is now operating with a sophistication that we’ve never seen before.”

People want hot showers, cold beers, and an easy way to get across town to visit an old friend. They don’t want or need these things to be powered by burning coal, oil and gas. And with 40% of the Australian electricity grid already powered by clean energy, fossil fuel corporations know the alternatives are very real.

Coal mining giant Adani launched a campaign asking individuals to blame themselves for climate change. “If climate change concerns you,” they say, “ask yourself what you have done to mitigate its impact.”

Adani’s “I can” campaign suggests piecemeal actions that do nothing to challenge their right to profit from pollution. Click “Be inspired” on their website and read how you can shop vintage, carpool and eat organic – forgetting how a coal mine controlled by the $260 billion conglomerate is eating an entire Indian village.

Adani suggests people calculate their “carbon footprint.” They forget to mention how oil giant BP hired public relations giant Ogilvy & Mather to invent the idea of the carbon footprint in the first place. From 2004, BP then spent $100 million a year marketing the idea.

It’s an old strategy. Back in 1953, Coca-Cola and bottle manufacturers created litter bug campaigns to displace the problem of plastic waste away from their production, and onto the moral failings of people who supposedly choose to litter.

And of course, Big Tobacco ran the same playbook for decades.

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Here’s the data on who is causing the problem

Global data attributing pollution to specific companies is now quite sophisticated. A handful of big companies are driving the problem and laughing all the way to the bank. And there are mountains of evidence on how the same corporations have blocked political action and systematically spread bullshit.

“Richard Heede's landmark Carbon Majors research transformed the landscape of climate accountability by using the fossil fuel industry's own reported production and operation figures to calculate and expose the true scale of its role in the climate crisis,” says Carroll Muffet, CEO of the Center for International Environmental Law.

For Australians, it is interesting to see the relative pollution from different sectors in this fabulous graphic from Rewiring Australia. The grey at the top is pollution from fossil fuels exported by multinational corporations to other countries. The blue section represents pollution from households.

The "trade emissions" section shows pollution burned in Australia to make exported products. The biggest domestic user of gas is the gas industry itself.

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Guilt demobilises. Outrage sparks action

Legendary community organiser Marshall Ganz taught me that our values inspire us to take action through emotion. Some emotions inhibit action – like feelings of inertia, apathy, fear, isolation and self-doubt. And some emotions motivate action – like urgency, outrage, hope, solidarity and a sense of efficacy.

The fossil fuel industry knows full well that a public feeling emotionally overwhelmed by climate issues presents no threat to their business model. At least one study has found that when people hear messages that advocate personal behavioural changes to combat climate change, it reduces their willingness to take action, decreases support for pro-climate candidates, decreases belief in the scientific consensus, and lowers trust in climate scientists.

No wonder oil giants love the “carbon footprint”.

Building power to solve the climate crisis does not look like schoolchildren entering colouring competitions run by coal corporations. Building power means collective action in civic spaces. It means schoolchildren schooling politicians on 101 climate science.

The Greta Thunberg Effect is real. People who are more familiar with Greta Thunberg have a stronger sense of collective efficacy – the belief that, by working together with like-minded others, they can have a positive impact on global heating – and they also have higher intentions of taking collective action. The “Greta Thunberg Effect” raises collective action intentions for people across all age groups and across the political spectrum.

Collective action is the pathway out of despair and towards power to protect our living world. It’s always taken small groups of thoughtful, committed citizens to change the world. And when they are woven together in huge movements for change, we can create unstoppable power.

I’m not saying individual actions don’t matter. They do. Living thoughtfully on the Earth is a care-taking practice that can create a reciprocal mindset and look after land, water and air. And small actions can add up.

So many Australian households have installed rooftop solar to power their homes, they’ve changed the nature of the energy grid, driving old coal-burning power stations to close. Rooftop solar is so cheap in the middle of the day, at times coal plants can’t afford to run.

But taking on the fossil fuel industry means pulling on the biggest levers we have – laws, policies, regulation, and social norms, and those will be driven by activism, investigation, litigation, elections, community organising and a mobilised civic society.

So live thoughtfully on the planet, but don’t feel guilty for using the energy systems forced on you by 50 years of corporate delay. Together, we can – and must – change the system for everyone.

• If you’re an artist or creative, join the Clean Creatives campaign with more than 1000 creative, advertising and PR firms who have pledged not to work with fossil fuel polluters. Or join the communicators and creatives at CommsDeclare.

• Fossil fuels are the new tobacco. Tell politicians to ban fossil fuel ads and sponsorships.

• Check out the 160 member groups of the Climate Action Network Australia and find a group that matches your location or interests. Or leave a comment and I’ll share ideas for you!

I started this newsletter. Then I got a new job and left you, my precious EarthCrew subscribers, wondering why I stopped writing for you. My job is amazing. I am the Director of Strategy with Climate Action Network Australia, helping 160 kick-arse campaign groups collaborate. It’s busy, but we just started a four-day workweek trial. So today I have time to write! Welcome back. You were my first followers, and I am forever grateful.

I promise not to wait a year before writing again.

Kathryn McCallum

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Yesterday I spoke at the Williamson Community Leadership Program, where the topic was agency in our democracy. I took a wild ride through ten years of losing – and occasionally winning – climate campaigns. If you’d rather listen than read, you can play the talk!

Taking democracy back from the polluters

The hottest day ever recorded by humans on Earth was a week ago, Tuesday 4th July.

The most polluting fossil fuel corporations are currently posting record profits totalling hundreds of billions of dollars.

They make Australia the third-largest exporter of coal and gas in the world. They have huge marketing budgets for "sustainability and net zero" – and huge expansion plans for coal, oil and gas.

They have essentially unlimited political lobbying budgets.

They pay little or no tax here.

And they’ve had Australian politics in a death grip for a decade.

It’s been a wild ride.

The Clean Energy Future package

Rewind to 2011. I was a baby climate campaigner and after a massive all-in campaign – complete with huge community Canberra lobby days and hot air balloon stunts – we celebrated as the Clean Energy Future package passed through the federal Parliament.

It was a law with two parts. The first part made the biggest polluting corporations pay for their pollution, and that money was redistributed to households, and to invest in clean energy.

The second part established a Clean Energy Finance Corporation to help fund the transition and get wind and solar projects off the ground all over the country.

It was my first major campaign and I was pretty pleased with us.

Little did I know that the regulations on polluters that we had just won would soon be destroyed, and I would spend the next ten years, not winning more progress, but defending the clean energy laws from destruction too.

It’s lucky I didn’t know, or I might have chosen a different career.

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Polluters pay and pollution drops – for a while

The polluter pays law worked to steadily reduce pollution for two years. The sky did not fall in.

The Australian National University estimated it cut climate pollution by up to 17 million tonnes, and if it had stayed in place, it would have continued to work. But it was rebranded "the carbon tax" by Tony Abbott and when Abbott became Prime Minister in 2013, he eventually succeeded in repealing it.

Pollution immediately started going back up.

A senior public servant described his reaction to the celebrations in the parliament that day. "Honestly, I thought it was grotesque. It didn't even look like a high school schoolyard. It looked like a primary school schoolyard. Terrible."

The repeal of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation was blocked in the Senate. (Ironically, by coal magnate Clive Palmer, but that is a whole other story!)

Fast forward back to this month. Just before the hottest day on record, a newly defined law to regulate polluters came into force. The “safeguards mechanism” will make 200 of the biggest polluters – like coal power stations, gas export facilities and smelters – reduce pollution by around five per cent a year.

A brutal assessment of this decade of work is that it took us ten years to win back regulations on climate pollution that are not as good as the 2011 polluter plays law.

Did anything change?

But by other measures, everything has changed.

Social movements create change by building collective power to win an agenda that serves the common interest. Change lasts when it becomes embedded as social norms valued by a majority of the public, and in institutional, financial and political systems.

When the heart-breaking Black Summer mega fires raged, then Prime Minister Scott Morrison famously explained his holiday in Hawaii by saying, “I don’t hold a hose mate.”

A couple of years later, mega-floods hit, and people had to cut tin rooves to rescue their neighbours who took refuge in roof cavities as the water rose quickly inside their homes. Morrison hid from community members on a visit to Lismore. These incidents became symbolic of his term and his character.

The 2022 federal election was a landslide vote for climate action that did not follow strict party political lines.

A political party with a rubbish climate policy is now arguably unelectable in Australia.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation survived multiple attempts to repeal it or change its mandate to subsidise fossil fuels – protected by a mobilised social movement and various minor party and independent Senators with deciding votes.

It has become the world’s largest green bank, catalysing tens of billions in investment in clean energy on behalf of the public and accelerating the transition away from fossil fuels.

We have the largest uptake of household rooftop solar in the world, creating some of the cheapest energy on the planet. The community has led the renewables revolution, fundamentally changing the grid so that now old expensive coal-burning power plants sometimes can’t afford to run.

The fossil fuel industry knows that it has largely lost the social license to operate, and its only remaining strategy is to pretend it is “working to net zero” and hope the confusion buys it a few more years – or decades if they have their way – of profits. So far, this strategy is uncontested by a vague financial press and an army of “sustainability” leads from consulting firms.

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To progress the collective good we must transform power

When you work on it every single day and track all the players you see very clearly that there is nothing random or organic in the way the climate issue plays out in the public sphere.

You see that NewsCorp is a campaigning organisation consistently pushing an anti-climate action agenda. You see the fossil fuel corporation talking points come out in government press releases. You see coal executives become Prime Ministerial advisers.

There is a revolving door of employment between political parties and fossil fuel and mining corporations. At least 180 lobbyists, senior executives, spin doctors and consultants have gone on to work as politicians, political advisors and bureaucrats – or vice versa – over the past decade.

So to make change in the democratic process and to advance the collective good we need to confront and transform power. We need to expose invisible forms of power that exclude certain issues or groups from even being heard.

And we need to transform the tendency of people to think of themselves as powerless.

The fossil fuel industry’s power is born of profits, and the narrow self-interest of hoarding more. It’s enabled by histories of colonisation and patterns of displacing people from land and avoiding responsibility for pollution.

The collective good needs collective power. It means listening and following people who are on the frontlines of climate impacts and fossil fuel extraction. And it means deep, sustained and creative collaboration.

Movements are transformational. They don't provide a service, sell a product or market a worldview. They transform people’s understanding of who they are, how they are connected, their agency,  and what it is possible to demand.

“Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes.

In this sense power is not only desirable but necessary in order to implement the demands of love and justice.

One of the greatest problems of history is that the concepts of love and power are usually contrasted as polar opposites. Love is identified with a resignation of power and power with a denial of love.

What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.

Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice. Justice at its best is love correcting everything that stands against love.”

― Martin Luther King Jr

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So how has change happened?

Despite the stranglehold the fossil fuel industry has on politics and media, the vast majority of the public is concerned or alarmed about climate change. Only a tiny percentage actively dismiss it. Culturally and linguistically diverse people are even more concerned than the average punter.

We build people power

On top of this broad support, we have a large, organised and mobilised social movement of active people who have spoken out for climate action, organised in their communities, called out greenwashing, held corporations accountable and pushed elected representatives.

In the movement ecosystem, small and large organisations fill different niches and play to their strengths.

Traditional Owners have led campaigns against fossil fuel extraction on their country with a deep commitment to protecting water, country, the life of places and their cultural heritage.

School students have led huge mobilisations in our cities.

Large, national membership groups – and I’ve been lucky to work for two of them – have mobilised hundreds of thousands of people to take millions of actions.

We strategise and tell powerful stories

As the movement regrouped after multiple losses, we collectively settled into a loosely coordinated strategy.

We were clear and united on our demands – cut coal and gas pollution this decade and replace it with clean energy.

We mapped the constituencies we needed to influence and we set up multi-year efforts to do this.

We got our story straight. We had allowed Tony Abbott to reframe a sensible and effective policy that would protect people and ecosystems from serious, sustained harm and untold costs, as a “great big new tax.” But this time we stuck to the powerful and persuasive messaging that we knew engaged the public with the values they cared about.

We act, over and over again

And we had plans of action. Here is just one snapshot of one part of this diverse movement effort.

During the 2019 federal election, when I worked with the Australian Conservation Foundation, 1,732 volunteers led an incredible 1,178 community events, talking to people about why they cared and would be asking political parties to step up on climate to win their votes.

We made 145,122 phone calls to voters and knocked on 15,367 doors in three key electorates. And more than 615 volunteers handed out 185,360 climate policy scorecards at pre-poll and on polling day, in 32 electorates.

Generous donors powered everything by giving 6,473 donations to the campaign.

After a conversation, seven out of every 10 people we asked committed to being climate voters.

Our organising and mobilising programs were integrated, with 34 local Member of Parliament and candidate meetings, 12 candidate forums and 34,611 personal letters and phone calls.

By pointing our people power in the right places, we backed our inside track campaigners to lock in dozens of policy commitments from multiple political parties to protect climate and nature.

The climate election?

The #ClimateElection hashtag was picked up by key politicians and journalists. Our environment was the #1 issue on ABC Vote Compass. Climate change was the political issue most searched on Google.

And yet the outcome of that election was a disaster for climate action.

With the Morrison Government, we got three more years of policy inertia and billions more in fossil fuel subsidies to enable massive new gas projects – the fastest way to heat our planet and harm more people.

I went out dancing with a few hardy and bewildered colleagues after an end-of-campaign party, because what else can you do?

Our t-shirts said “Climate damage stops with us” and our badges said, “I’m a climate voter.” Random strangers came up to hug us, saying sorry and thank you for all you did.

It would take three more years for the wish on our campaign signs to fully land into reality, that, “This is the climate election.”

What’s next?

So now the Albanese Government holds power with a big program to accelerate clean energy. And yet they still approve massive new coal and gas projects – with the full knowledge that these decisions will harm people.

The gas lobby just launched a new ad campaign trying to convince us we need them.

So the work goes on. Complacency threatens.

And sometimes we need to take a break and sit by a campfire for a while.

We need to centre ourselves and understand the past decade is no guide at all to the next.

We will breathe smoke again. People will make painful decisions to abandon homes that were once full of dreams, love and laughter.

Things will get wild – and that will bring risk and opportunity for change faster than anything we’re used to.

In 2023, we need a movement full of groups who are vibrant with the kind of power that gets stronger, not when it’s hoarded, but when it’s shared.

Businesses must follow community leadership, bringing innovation and scale, without getting lost on the fossil fuel industry’s false trails.

This is not a story with a lone hero who prevails against all odds. It’s all of us. We need ordinary people to step into being visionary, connected, compassionate and above all, active.

People who show up, speak out and act are the democracy.

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Thanks for reading! I’m curious about your journey grappling with the climate issues over the past ten years. What’s changed for you?

Kathryn McCallum

PS – I've changed this blog’s name from SkyKeepers to EarthCrew to match a new thing I'm cooking up.

As a mentor at a Bluegum Bushcraft rewild camp, most of the time I feel like I’m not doing much.

I am just being an edge in a human container of present adults that allow the land and the river to unravel the children and put them back together again, different – more joyful, more sparky, more wild.

I am grateful to be back on Budawang country, in southern NSW, under the watchful eye of Byangee mountain.

Our magnificent “Camp Mama”, Gina Chick, is newly famous, starring on Alone Australia on SBS. Around the campfires, people joke about selling her autograph. She confesses she prepared for the survival challenge by putting on 24 kilograms.

Curiosity

The kids pepper Gigi with questions.

“What were your ten survival items?”

“Did your possum skin coat keep you warm enough?”

“Did you win?”

Gina is sworn to secrecy on the survival show’s outcome, but she tells the stories she can. Like the time she licked something she found in the sea and her tongue filled with barbs.

She challenges the kids to build a smokeless fire so they could be invisible. The first step, she says, is to build a tiny fire the size of their hand and keep it alight for 30 minutes.

I feel my lazy adult scepticism that they would be interested in doing this, but I’m wrong.

The idea lights a spark in their brains, and several kids run straight to the woodpile, even though it’s raining.

Every morning, we take the kids from their parents for four hours to secret places in the bush. The next day out at “bush camp,” a frenzy of children strike ferro rods, sparking sparks into bundles of scrunched-up stringy bark they’ve harvested from a tree.

Kids focus on the stringy bark like a dog on a ball it wants you to throw, willing it to transform.

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Fire

When the stringy bark ignites into a fierce baby fire, they pile on wet twigs, killing their new flame. Or they realise they forgot to gather twigs and run off to get them, leaving their bark to smoulder and vanish.

Undeterred by dozens of failed fires, they collaborate on who will strike and who will get smaller twigs and how to gently breathe the fire into life.

A tiny fire gets going. Four kids squat around it, intently feeding in little twigs, restocking, tending and chattering. As 30 minutes approaches, they shout for a countdown.

Who says kids can’t concentrate?

A quiet group of girls keep their small fire alight for two hours and 15 minutes.

Inspired by their focus, I become captivated by a spinning bow drill. Friction and leverage make smoke and dust, but there’s no ember yet to place in a tinder bundle.

I remember the half-made bow drill kit from last camp in my backpack. I conspire with a ten-year-old boy to find the right kind of tree to harvest a bow.

By now, I’m getting used to the cycle of passion and disappointment when I don’t get it done, but a few months later I know I’ll come back and try again.

Presence

Gigi teaches us her song inspired by Byangee. It’s an earworm. I wake every morning under the mountain’s cliffs, singing hommage.

I feel its stability and presence in the background all week – and the powerful line of mountains from Bulgan to Byangee to Cooyoyo. A tiny fraction of their energy feels like it’s running through me – more timeless and grounded than I can ever hope to be.

Slowly, everyone unravels into the trees and stones and mist and mud and circles of humans. The parents, who arrived looking slightly stunned, their cars packed full, begin to break up and ease into their cups of tea.

There’s no internet or phone coverage.

In the crucible of nature, kids and teens came alive. Their eyes look vibrant and clear.

Abundance

I sit up in the forest where I can see both a mob of eleven-year-olds throwing rocks in the river and the girl who’d rather be alone sitting quietly on the edge, listening to the magical sound of a whip bird.

The abundance of stones, sticks, nooks, crannies, paths, trees and flowing water give every child millions of options. They make up the rules of their games.

No fights are triggered by a scarcity of toys. For every beautiful stone with miraculous ochre, there are hundreds more just a fossick away. For every perfect flat skimming rock, there is another five if you look hard enough.

With one mentor for every two or three kids, the usual sad scarcity of attention is transformed into a connected container where everyone can get their needs met. For every random idea a kid blurts out, there is someone nearby with ears to hear it, and laugh or nod or comment gently.

It’s magic. And after a while you start to wonder what’s really going on.

A large group of five and six-year-olds arrive at our stony river beach, and the eleven-year-olds adjust, absorbing them in. In half an hour there’s a full day spa operation, with little girls scooping up mud packs, and rubbing colour off wet stones to paint the older girls’ faces.

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Shelter

Kids build a shelter. The dream of being sheltered and having the power to build a home takes a fierce hold of two boys. They lean big sticks against the ridgeline created by a tree that has fallen against another tree, making an A-frame.

I feel that yearning too. It’s so deep, like we will literally die if the shelter is not built. I’m shocked how intense it feels. Then it gets all mingled with some foolish thread of heartbreak about who I might share my shelter with.

The kids scurry back and forth dragging sticks and bracken to fill in the shelter roof. They make a thick bed of leaves and ferns. They want to sleep out all night. I wish so hard for the shelter to be cosy and dry. I fret about the holes.

I ask the boys if they think it’s ready yet to keep out the rain.

Flow

It rains for two days. The boys sleep in their tents with their parents. The river rises.

I leap into the cold, swift-flowing Bhundoo with a gaggle of freshly disintegrated, giggling people. Ecstatic, we gasp and shout.

We count down from ten, then let go of each other and the trees.

We’re all swept swiftly downstream, shrieking. The cold water sucks out our tension and stuckness and worry. We emerge into the flowing, deep pools, floating on our backs as the sunset sky colours break through the grey clouds, all yellow and peachy peach.

Freezing from the river, we stand, jiggling and chattering incoherently, way too close to a massive fire. We shiver with cold and cover our legs which sting red from the heat at the same time.

Connection

I sink into the daily circles of people sharing where, again, it seems like not much is happening. The mentor meeting. The village morning circle. The mentor debrief. The nighttime fireside catching and telling of stories.

And somehow out of the circles emerges coherence, wholeness, insight and support. Tears. Love. 

And achy-cheek laughter. 

I’m astounded, as I am every time, as eventually, the mentor circle drops in deep. Something about the basket woven here means people start to feel things.

When you start to feel maybe you belong and it’s safe and this culture is healthy, it’s just two more breaths to feel the heartbreak that maybe you don’t actually belong, or it’s all lost, and that you have to go home now and maybe it will never happen again.

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Sanctuary

And as the evening becomes dark, the melatonin kicks in hard. The resonant sound of campfire songs fades out. My eyelids blink closed as I stare at the fire.

The chaotic rabble of children, spun into a trance by Lee’s wandering stories, are suddenly silent in their tents.

The teens try hard to stay awake until the adults leave the fire, talking in low voices near the glowing coals, fighting the irresistible urge to curl into sleep even though it’s barely nine.

I give up and walk across the dark, wet field to my tent.

I let the soft insect chorus sing me to sleep, cradled in the dark for dreaming hours, until the 360-degree surround-sound bird orchestra eases me back out into dawn. 

I acknowledge the sovereignty, knowledge and care of the Budawang people of the Yuin nation, Traditional Owners of the land.

Where do you get to experience connection, shelter, abundance or flow? What makes you feel alive and curious? Leave a comment.

Kathryn

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Listen to the audio version of the article!

Iquitos, in north-eastern Peru is the largest city in the world with no road access. You must fly or travel days up the Amazon River to get there.

The river is gob-smacking. It flows in huge serpentine curves from west to east, from where I stood in Iquitos to the Atlantic Ocean, draining parts of Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. Globally, it releases 20 per cent of all freshwater that flows from rivers to the sea. No bridges cross it.

President Pedro Castillo was thrown in jail the day we arrived and protests erupted around the country led by rural people. Many felt Castillo, the son of farmers, represented them. Others demanded new elections and a constituent assembly. The new president, Dina Boluarte, declared a state of emergency.

On Saturday night, the Iquitos Plaza de Armas filled up with couples sprawling on benches scrolling their phones, and families throwing fluoro light toys into the sky, which somehow magically returned to their hands. I watched a small, peaceful protest with teachers union banners and candles.

As I tried to translate their chants, I noticed the Christmas tree in the Plaza de Armas was sponsored by a Canadian oil company – itself the subject of protests and river blockades by local Indigenous communities, including Kukama Kukamiria people, who say the corporation is polluting the river and forest and their drinking water and crops with oil spills, and that they enjoy no benefits from the wealth extracted from their forests.

Being from Australia, the third largest exporter of fossil fuels in the world, I’m no stranger to the corporate capture of politics and public spaces, but I was still a little shocked to see the PetroTal sign among the twinkling lights.

PetroTal is typical of fossil fuel industries that are headquartered in wealthy countries, while their impacts are felt the most acutely by people in places on the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction.

The benefits go one way, and the burdens go another.

But after five decades of pollution, oil spills and buck-passing, in the forests of the Peruvian Amazon, patience is wearing thin.

Two weeks before we arrived, a PetroTal barge carrying oil to Brazil was seized for 48 hours, part of a river blockade that continued while I was there, severely disrupting PetroTal’s production.

This astounding Amazon city is surrounded by green forest, but choked by pollution

Despite Iquitos being in the middle of the Amazon forest, the pollution feels thick and grimy. It stinks as soon as you walk out the door, thanks to thousands of three-wheeled moto-taxis burning dirty fuel and whirring like agitated mosquitos.

The city of over half a million people also runs on electricity generated by burning heavy fuel oil and diesel. It’s not connected to a national power grid. The cost of Iquitos electricity is among the highest in Peru.

My friend wanted pink glittery nails before we headed into the jungle, so we got our nails done at the Aldany Salon and Spa, which was where the cool kids were early on Saturday night in Iquitos. (It was actually the first time in my life I’ve had my nails done.)

Scrolling local news with my one free hand, I was relieved to learn a renewables company has signed a 20-year deal with the state-owned power distribution company to provide Iquitos with clean electricity cheaper than diesel by 2026. A microgrid on solar and batteries will replace half of the dirty fossil fuel generation.

To really breathe cleaner air, Iquitos will also need electric motorbikes and a battery-swapping network like the one now taking off in Nairobi. Rising fossil fuel prices driven by Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine are hurting Peruvians, so a shift to cheaper energy would make a huge difference in people’s lives.

Peru’s largest Amazonian city may be on the cusp of change, but the rising prices also mean oil companies see an opportunity to eke out more profits from the forest and pocket the spoils of war. And that’s bad news for the Amazon.

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The frontlines of fossil fuel extraction – and the movement rising up against it

The toxic legacy of fifty years of pollution from oil extraction in the forests around Iquitos is documented in devastating detail by Earth Island Journal – pipelines and platforms rusting and abandoned, heavy metals from oil spills, and children poisoned.

State-owned and private oil companies dumped polluted water directly into rivers and wetlands people rely on for drinking, fishing and hunting, taking advantage of Peru’s lack of legislated environmental protections. When regulations were made, they were not enforced.

When communities demanded clean-up and remediation, oil companies passed the buck, blaming each other, delaying, and even blaming the community for “sabotaging” pipelines the companies failed to maintain, according to Oxfam.

This is the frontlines of fossil fuel extraction. As always, it’s complicated, as oil sporadically brings income to some people, and communities find themselves forced to trade off basic services like electricity and healthcare for a corporation’s right to trash their ancestral lands.

Oil companies may pay for a cheap banner on the plaza Christmas tree, but they have not paid to clean up the heavy metal contamination of forests and rivers that Amnesty International says have left a majority of people in some Indigenous communities with elevated lead, arsenic and mercury in their bloodstreams.

PetroTal was singled out in a report by Civicus that found as the climate crisis intensifies, so does the crackdown on environmental activism. Environmental protests are being criminalised and met with repression on all continents, and state authorities and private companies are common perpetrators of violations to civic freedoms. The report cites the three Indigenous people killed and 11 injured in protests against PetroTal on the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples in October 2020.

Communities are fighting back. Here, as in other parts of the Amazon, Indigenous peoples are organising and leading campaigns to defend the sovereignty of their ancestral lands.

People are winning important victories, as the Civicus report also notes, and there’s a new wave of successful climate litigation, much of it led by Indigenous peoples.

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Can rivers have rights?

We walk down the steep ramp from the fancy new Iquitos dock to board a long, battered metal boat with green vinyl seats like an old bus that will take us to the Heliconia Amazon River Lodge. The river is mighty, huge, gushing with brown water. I’ve never seen so much water in a river before. It’s more like a brown sea flowing all one way.

Our skipper expertly dodges branches and logs floating in random places. The rusting barges and littered riverbanks of Iquitos give way to tall green trees lining both banks, and I stare, longing to walk out into the forest and explore. Occasional clusters of small wooden buildings appear, with steps and ramps down the steep muddy bank. Our guide tells us in places the river is seven kilometres wide.

The main source of the Amazon is the Marañón River. Kukama women have filed a legal action asking the Peruvian government to recognise the river’s intrinsic rights.

They assert that the river has the right to exist, to flow, to live free from contamination, to feed and be fed by its tributaries, and to be protected, preserved, and restored. They also want the Peruvian government to recognise Indigenous organisations as guardians, defenders, and representatives of the Marañón River.

Another coalition, the National Organization of Indigenous, Andean and Amazonian Women of Peru (ONAMIAP), is campaigning for the Peruvian government to recognize the rights of nature in national legislation.

“We demand nature be recognized as a living entity because it is a living entity. Everything that exists on the planet has life. All that exists on Mother Earth is alive. That is why we humans are alive. We are part of nature.”

– Melania Canales Poma, president of ONAMIAP, in Inside Climate News.

They’re part of a hot trend of Indigenous-led legal cases to recognise the rights of nature and rivers – notably the Whanganui River in Aotearoa / New Zealand and the Muteshekau Shipu (Magpie River) in Québec.

“The Indigenous movement in Peru is strong and well organised and has a track record of fearless activism,” according to the Rainforest Foundation. “Indigenous forest monitoring also has a long tradition in the country and has succeeded in denouncing illegal activities, tackling forest destruction and defending rights.”

For people who live far away from the Amazon, there are things we can do so that the forest communities don’t have to face this alone.

How we can protect the Amazon from oil corporations

Support Indigenous land rights and self-determination

Lands under the stewardship of Indigenous peoples contain 80% of the world’s remaining biodiversity. In the Amazon, Indigenous Territories are santuaries for intact forest, preserving it even better than Protected Areas. Yet Indigenous Territories do not have budget allocations from their governments.

Respecting traditional knowledge systems is key to creating a future where life thrives – and this means respecting and supporting land rights, self-determination, consent, and listening deeply.

The people and leaders of Sarayaku do not want to be left behind in a static conformist way just waiting for solutions. On the contrary, we have decided to be part of the global solution by contributing with our experience, thought, knowledge and philosophy of life from the belly of the living forest.

The peoples of the native communities of the Amazon are those in closest contact with the earth and communion with the beings of the Living Jungle, and the Sarayaku are among those peoples.

Climate change will only be resolved if we actively seek solutions. Global citizens must undertake a long road to resistance and peaceful struggle, towards a different perspective that we call Tiam. By itself this philosophical thought is only a form of knowledge, but it can be made reality if each and every one of us participates in the minga (collective community work).

– Sarayaku resistance leader José Gualinga

Amazonian Indigenous organizations representing 511 First Nations are calling for a global pact for the permanent protection of 80% of the Amazon by 2025 as an urgent measure to protect their land and water and sustain the fundamental role of the Amazon as a global climate regulator. We can support their demands.

Push companies to clean up oil pollution

The Peruvian government and the companies responsible should fund the remediation of polluted sites. Thousands of sites have been mapped by forest communities and international organisations. Only a small fraction of these have funding for remediation, and only a fraction of these have seen any progress.

It’s a fundamental principle of climate justice that if you made the mess, it’s your responsibility to clean it up.

Get big international banks to pull out of funding Amazon oil

State-run companies need help from international investors to finance their operations. This means we have a powerful leverage point to stop the flow of money that funds the destruction.

And banks are feeling the pressure. Some international oil companies have withdrawn from blocks in Peru over the years because of protests by Indigenous communities. And some big banks have already made public statements that they will not fund oil extraction in the Amazon.

Banks need to know that there is no social license for funding oil and gas in the Amazon and violating forest communities’ consent.

JP Morgan Chase, HSBC, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup are at “very high-risk” of funding the destruction of the Amazon according to a scorecard report by Stand.earth and Amazon Watch.

Banks must not finance new oil and gas expansion. They need to phase out their current financing. And they must adopt strong, binding policies to respect Indigenous rights to self-determination.

The Amazon forest and river are iconic in the global imagination. Despite serious oil threats, much of the forest is still intact. It is entirely possible to hold accountable the corporations that would destroy it, and support the communities who will protect and defend it. This gives me heart.

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Walking with awareness into the forest

When I finally get to walk out into the jungle, I feel my awarenesss lighten, quicken and expand. I slow my gait and drop into the stillness of my breath, padding with soft, elastic steps so I don’t startle the birds. Even though I’m a lover of forests, I’m a little scared of how encompassing the green is, and how strong the pulse of life feels. Multiple harmonics of insects and frogs thrum and tone.

I crane my neck to see past the thick bushes into the high canopy. Then I see them – huge old trees with hundreds of ferns and orchids and mosses and bromeliads growing on them, all kinds of plants all over the tree. I feel joy surge up.

Epiphytes are “air plants” growing in the nooks and crannies of their tree hosts. Unlike parasites, they don’t suck from the tree, but nurture themselves with nutrients from the air, falling rain, dew, mist, and from the canopy compost of decaying leaves.

I see Oropendola nests hanging like three-foot sacks, intricately woven from vines and leaves. One of the birds calls. It’s an extraordinary sound, like cascading slow-motion water drops into a deep, resonant, operatic pond.

A black butterfly flutters by and lands momentarily. Wings closed, it’s dull, brown, hidden. Wings open, it’s suddenly glossy black with iridescent green and blue flashes like lightning. Wings closed, I can’t see it. Wings open, it surprises me. “Huh!” I think, “It’s that easy to transform?”

I scan my imagination out to the whole forest and try to feel how vast it is. I wonder if the trees, whose breath we depend on, love us as much as we love them.

• Support Amazonian Indigenous organizations who represent 511 First Nations and their allies who are calling for a global pact for the permanent protection of 80% of the Amazon by 2025.

• Let’s stop banks financing Amazon destruction. Sign on to tell the major banks to adopt an Amazon-wide exclusion policy for oil. You can also use your own bank’s “Contact us” feature to ask them how they are divesting from fossil fuels.

• Check out the Kukama women’s federation who are building capacity in their community and taking on decades of neglect from big oil.

• Ask the Peruvian government to support the self determination and land rights of tribes in Peru who choose to remain uncontacted, but are threatened by oil and logging companies.

• Follow groups campaigning to build power to protect the Amazon rainforest and our climate future following the leadership of Indigenous peoples, like Amazon Frontlines and Amazon Watch.
  

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A huge welcome to all my new subscribers. Thanks for being the very first. I am honoured so many people have signed up, especially since many of you are experts in your fields! Today’s issue is a long read inspired by my recent travels in the Peruvian Amazon.

Be well,

Kathryn

Some urgent questions are burning inside me and I want to explore them with a community. That’s why I’ve started the EarthCrew blog. Welcome to the very first issue. I can’t wait to start the conversation.

Here’s what’s keeping me up at night

As corporations hellbent on burning even more fossil fuels heat up our beautiful planet, urgent questions are burning inside me. Facing them alone is exhausting. By building a community of thoughtful, determined readers on EarthCrew, I hope to make exploring them into a rich and vital conversation.

• How do we find shelter and sanctuary in an age of climate disruption?

• Who are the activists, visionaries and village builders dismantling the old world and creating the new – and how exactly do they do it? What more can we each do to shift things faster?

• What are the climate solutions? Great outlets already cover clean energy and tech. That’s not my bag. I want to delve into creativity, collaboration, accountability, consent, reciprocity, celebration, vision, and determination.

• How can we build our courage to face what’s coming, and our empathy and power to stand for climate justice? How can we renew our energy to do this work – and become more deeply connected with nature and community?

• What are the big climate stories the media is missing – especially the ones about how to actually stop the corporations hellbent on destroying everything?

I have a big pile of notes and half-written stories on these questions, and it’s time to dig them out of my notes app, dust them off, and push them into the light of day.

By building a community of thoughtful, determined, creative readers on EarthCrew, I hope to make finishing and sharing these stories into a rich and vital conversation.

For launch, the email newsletter content is 100 per cent free. Get every issue fresh in your inbox by subscribing now.

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It’s hot – but some people are getting rich from it

A few days ago, NASA air pollution scientist Ryan Stauffer tweeted a chart showing absurd +20°C temperature anomalies as Europe rung in the new year with unusual winter warmth and record-crushing nighttime highs.

“Speechless,” he said. “The climate implications are hard to ignore.”

He’s one of many scientists, previously cautious about predictions, now gobsmacked by the suddenness and ferocity of recent events.

The balanced atmosphere that supports the beautiful, astounding diversity of life on Earth is becoming chaotic. But in 2022, as people were harmed by floods, fires, and storms, the executives and boards of fossil fuel corporations doubled down on their polluting business model.

They reaped obscene profits from skyrocketing coal and gas prices off the back of Vladimir Putin’s fossil-fuel-funded war. The International Energy Agency projected net income for oil and gas producers will have doubled in 2022 to an alarming and obscene US$4 trillion.

The fossil fuel industry is feasting on hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies and windfall profits while household budgets shrink and our planet burns. Polluters must pay. ― U.N. chief Antonio Guterres

Rather than accepting the need for change, in 2022 big polluters imposed the largest-ever annual rise in pollution, more than offsetting 2021’s pandemic-induced decline. They’re planning a huge expansion of oil and gas extraction – and are turning to increasingly absurd greenwash to cover for their greed. Let’s remember that just 100 companies caused 71% of climate pollution.

We are in a desperate endgame against them and our only hope is for people to unite to protect nature and each other against ridiculous odds. We will each need to call on all the creativity, collaboration and determination we can muster.

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”

― Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

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When I started out in journalism 20 years ago, I was desperate to cover climate change.

My journalism has been published and broadcast in the Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Big Issue, Inside Sport, and on ABC Radio. My 44-day solo mountain walk through the Australian Alps which burned up behind me was a feature in Australian Geographic.

But back then editors were cautious about climate change coverage, and I lost patience and turned to more direct advocacy. Now I've been a full-time climate activist for at least 15 years.

As communications and mobilisation lead with the Australian Conservation Foundation and climate justice campaign director for GetUp, I've helped hundreds of thousands of people take literally millions of actions – holding fossil fuel corporations accountable, advocating to decision-makers, and organising communities. I am also a climate leader with the Climate Reality Project.

Together, campaigns I’ve been a part of have won: a huge climate vote in federal elections; new laws to support clean energy; the ending of billions in subsidies for polluting fuels; and backing in First Nations people who are leading campaigns against nuclear waste and fracking.

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What’s inside EarthCrew climate change newsletter

When you subscribe, you’ll get a mix of quick analysis, reporting, and storytelling about people making change, plus the occasional essay or podcast about hot campaigns or climate adaptation – helping you make sense of the most critical issue of our time.

Most climate content covers problems, without analysis of who caused them, why, and how to change things. There’s little on what to actually do. I promise to flip this.

Sometimes I’ll deconstruct the skills and strategies of collective action – because the billionaires are not going to save us from climate change! The markets won’t save us. Even renewable technologies – critical as they are – are not the most important thing.

It’s people who show up, speak out and act together who will change things – and limit the destruction wrought by climate pollution to the maximum extent still possible.

And it’s a hard truth that no matter how rapidly we force big polluters to stop, we are in for serious disruption and uncertainty this decade. For many people, the catastrophe is already rolling through their lives. That’s why I’ll also focus on communities preparing for or rebuilding from disaster – and explore practices and processes for transformational change.

I hope to meet readers who are powerful advocates in your own communities. And I hope the stories challenge and inspire you to use your gifts and vision to push for faster change.

Thanks so much for reading this inaugural issue of EarthCrew.

I’d love to know what your burning questions are. Leave a comment on this post and let’s start a conversation.

Kathryn

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