Beyond the banners

Every day across Australia, environmental groups are taking action. Some are restoring habitats. Others are running campaigns. Many are doing both – and more. But what does all this activity add up to? What does environmental activism in Australia actually look like on the ground? With thousands of environmental groups across the country, that's not a simple question to answer. But it's an important one, because at its core, activism requires action. In our previous report, we explored how movements succeed: through measurable wins, by converting bystanders to activists, and through positive group dynamics. But before we can measure effectiveness, we need to understand what's actually happening. Because while we can debate the best ways to create change, one thing is certain: movements have to move. They have to do something rather than nothing. Today, we're exploring that 'something – who's doing what, where they're doing it, and what their actions might tell us about activism itself.

Q1: What is the Australian environmental movement?

It is actually pretty difficult to know 'what' a movement is. By its nature a movement is always changing. New groups are forming, disbanding and evolving every day, and nobody apart from the people in that group may be no wiser.

Some groups – and they have to be collectives of some form – may wish to keep their activities quiet. However, one good rule of thumb when trying to think about what a movement 'is', is to remember that advocacy by its nature involves communication. So if a group is not communicating about what it's doing somehow, somewhere and to someone, then it's probably not 'part' of the movement.

Let's start with where groups are actually located. Take a look at the picture; this is a snip from a PowerBI dashboard. We can see that according with Australia's geographic diversity, groups are clustered around the coastal areas. New South Wales and Victoria are the most well populated with environmental activists. But Tasmania, Western Australia and Queensland are also not to be sneezed at.

Q2: How long has the Australian environmental movement been around for?

Environmental care in Australian has been practiced for tens of thousands of years. Colonisation shattered practices that had been successfully caring for the landscapes over this time. Prior to 1950, and for most of the years up until around 2005, most groups directed their efforts on conservation issues; protecting habitat, advocating for native species, or preserving unique Australian places. But in the last two decades we've seen unprecedented change.

Q3: What is the Australian environmental movement actually doing?

As the graph shows, the focus overwhelmingly is conservation. Preserving and protecting forests, the marine environment, native fauna or the unique Outback deserts.

But changes around 2005 and 2019 have altered the movement. Those surges of groups turned a nascent issue – climate change – into a massive movement wide focus. Groups advocating primarily for action on climate change in general are by far the most numerous in the dataset.