Earth, Water, Air & Fire: How environmentalists occupy Australia's radical centre.
Does composting make you a communist? Are solar panels only for socialists? Will recycling threaten the royalists?
Of course not.
But party politics and the mainstream media lags way behind the everyday environmentalists already fuelling the core of Australian society.
Well-meaning and left-leaning friends have told me: "Greens should focus on fighting for the environment" in the very same breath as "Greens should not pursue mainstream political power."
That's contradictory nonsense! Who says activism and centrism can't go together?
In fact, environmentalists have long straddled the great Australian political divide.
But most politicians are so busy looking left and right as they walk down the middle of the road, they are missing what is right under their feet: Planet Earth
by Cat Holloway
To be clear, Greens don't sit at the political centre. But environmentalists do.
In the culture war against Green agitation, the environment is collateral damage - often missing altogether from democratic discourse.
In his curated collection of essays from global leaders, The Centre Must Hold, Yair Zivan argues:
"(Centrism) is about finding the most productive and effective balance between globalisation and local communities, civil rights and security, religion and democracy, free markets and protecting the weakest in society."
See what he did there? He forgot to mention the environment.
He's not alone. When I first started in journalism in the 1990s - on Murdoch tabloids no less - I was almost daily covering environment angles. But nowadays, several major mastheads don't even have an environment or science section and ecology stories are mounted within the frames of energy economics or tourism.
Indeed, the Sydney Morning Herald's federal election feature on Gilmore’s crucial climate change debate didn't even mention The Greens' candidate (who ended up achieving almost the same number of votes as the Climate 200 Independent.)
This month, two Sydney Morning Herald features spun the Kiama by-election as a three-horse-race (Liberal, Labor, Independent) relegating The Greens candidate, Tonia Gray, to the same pile as fringe groups like Legalise Cannabis and Animal Justice, despite the fact that she garnered more than 11% of the first round vote in Kiama's 2023 election, compared to the Liberal Party's 12%.
Our most widely read newspaper might choose to ignore Australian history as well as European trends, to perpetuate the tired narrative that Greens are extremists.
But in doing so, they are cloaking with invisibility the everyday environmentalism movement well underway.
A new Biodiversity Council study revealed that 75% of Australians support strengthening our national environmental laws and only 4% are opposed to it.
But that's not the message from the mainstream media. In fact, that old cliche about good journalists making bad enemies is reflected in some chilling statistics.
Unesco joint research dating back 15 years found that, since 2009, more than 70% of environmental journalists were attacked for their work. At least 749 environmental journalists faced violence and intimidation and of 44 murders of environment reporters, just five resulted in convictions.
The good news? Media control hasn't stopped grassroots environmentalism from blossoming.
While parliaments hesitate and endlessly negotiate, communities act.
Robyn Gulliver’s University of Queensland research showed that by 2019, nearly one million Australians volunteered for environmental charities including tree-planting programs, solar installation in schools, food security forums, and insurance advocacy by bushfire survivors.
"The environmental movement is also increasingly crossing into traditionally conservative areas, with the emergence of groups such as the Coalition for Conservation and Farmers for Climate Action, which has united 7,000 farmers and 1,200 agriculture industry supporters." Gulliver wrote.
School Strike for Climate marches in 2019 saw 300,000 children and their supporters ditch classes to rally across Australia in likely the largest public demonstrations since the marches against the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
Multiple Covid lockdowns and tightening of anti-protest laws has since dimmed that student flame, but it empowered other youth protest activity and the growth of involvement in, for example, Rising Tide and Extinction Rebellion campaigns.
Parents for Climate is a nonpartisan environmental advocacy group "by parents for parents" was founded in 2019 by six mums and now has a membership in excess of 23,000 across Australia.
First Nations Clean Energy Network recently launched as a partnership of people, community organisations, land councils, unions, academics, industry groups, technical advisors, legal experts, renewables companies and others to ensure that First Nations communities share in the benefits of the clean energy boom.
Participation precedes policy and institutions follow communities that save money, protect place and collaborate practically on environmental problems.
That bottom-up pressure on competitive politics is not ideological but borne of people's real and common need.
Clean Up Australia Day every March is the country's biggest community environmental event, attracting in 2024 more than 750,000 volunteers across 10,000 local events.
The organisation now partners with specialised clean up events (such as Tangaroa Blue on the Great Barrier Reef) at different times of the year across Australia with the formal support of businesses and local councils.
Rooftop solar systems passed the 4 million mark in Nov 2024 (about 1 in 3 homes), and continues to grow.
The Australian Energy Council's first quarter report for 2025 reported that rooftop photo voltaics supplied around 15% of the National Electricity Market’s power.
According to the Clean Energy Council, there are now 185,798 home battery units installed across Australia. In the second half of 2024, 28.4 per cent of rooftop solar installations had an accompanying small-scale battery.
At the local council level, the Cities Power Partnership is Australia’s largest network with more than 175 local councils, representing almost 65 percent of the Australian population, "leading the way to a thriving, zero emissions future".
A love of nature is normal, not niche.
Citizen science is on trend too with the Aussie Bird Count in 2024 listing more than 57,000 people recording 4.1 million birds in a single week, providing vital national biodiversity data that councils and scientists use to inform development decisions.
According to Local Land Services, just in Greater Sydney in 2023/24 more than 930 groups and 23,000 volunteers contributed 209,000 hours to on-ground habitat work. Multiply that across the state and the scale is enormous.
Country Needs People stats show Indigenous Ranger groups and Indigenous Protected Areas now cover approximately 104 million hectares of land and 6 million hectares of sea via 129 ranger groups.
Plastic Free July reached 174 million participants globally in 2024 and the NSW Return and Earn saw 13 billion containers returned since 2017, with $72m raised for community groups.
Repair cafés are booming in Australia, valued for cutting waste and building community. While more than 800 Community Gardens are now listed in the charity's national directory with hundreds of thousands of volunteer hours reported in 2024.
I could go on, but you get the picture.
From conservation to protest
The roots of nature conservation in Australia stretch back to 1879, when the Royal National Park was established outside Sydney – the second national park in the world after Yellowstone in the United States.
The park was a pragmatic initiative of five-time NSW Premier John Robertson, often described as the grandfather of Australian liberalism, who championed protecting the land and allowing public access.
Sydney was so crowded and polluted that Robertson created a protected nature park for recreation and as a clean retreat to improve the health of all social classes.
A century later, environmentalism moved from conservation to protest with Tasmania's Franklin River campaign in the 1980s, perhaps the most iconic environmental struggle in Australian history and the beginning of the Green movement in Australia.
More than 2,000 protesters and 1,200 arrests meant 'No Dams' dominated the 1983 federal election, with Bob Hawke’s promise to stop the dam helping to bring Labor to power.
The High Court upheld the Commonwealth’s intervention, cementing environmentalism at the constitutional heart of Australian governance.
The Save The Franklin campaigns proved that environmental passion and perseverance could swing elections and define national identity.
Words change, so should we.
The original meaning of radical is from the Latin "radix" or "root" and meant going to the foundations of something, not skimming the surface. Now, radical means disruptive or against the status quo.
The term centrist was first used in 1872 to deride middle-ground politicians as opportunists lacking conviction. Today, centrism is celebrated as a pragmatic, balanced approach that blends political ideas from the left and the right.
Radical reformers in the 19th century wanted to change structures, not just make cosmetic adjustments. While the centrists preferred compromise, moderation, and incremental reform.
Environmentalism combines both those sensibilities.
It is radical in its addressing of the roots of life — climate, water, soil, biodiversity. And it is centrist because it balances human need with ecological limits - sustainability.
Far from being a fringe ideology, environmentalism embodies the logic of radical centrism: politics that is both transformative and unifying. Or, in the words of US President John F. Kennedy, 'idealism without illusion'.
But without recognising the biophysical and chemical realities of life on Earth, centrist policy is hollow - merely managing society's decline under the pretense of stability.
The environment and the Kiama by-election.
The Greens, unsurprisingly, have the most comprehensive, established and ambitious environment policies.
Independent, Kate Dezarnaulds, advocates strongly for reform on climate change resilience, renewable energy policy and environmental and heritage protection.
The Sustainable Australia Party also considers the environment as foundational to its science-based ideals, especially regarding population management.
The Animal Justice Party stands on issues affecting wildlife, farm animals and pets. While most other minor candidates make at least a passing mention of environmental values.
But the candidates representing the two big political parties, Labor and Liberal, have nothing - no words at all - about the environment in their campaign statements.
Tragically, they are likely to win the most votes.
Until citizens inject their everyday environmentalism into political choices, the radical change we want and need will not happen.
And the 'sensible centre' will continue to be just another name for more of the same.
