Good Weekend's Who Mattered 2019: Environment

The climate strike kids: "Many were scolded as ‘inner-city puppets’, but the stories in the streets were different." Plus: Kate McBride, Grace Brennan, Brynn O’Brien and Emma Herd.

The climate strike kids

The advocacy of Greta Thunberg was one of the most inspiring flashpoints for progressive politics in 2019, the young Swedish activist becoming a rallying point for a generation fed up with inaction. Out of it came the School Strike 4 Climate movement, with a reported six million children from 150 countries taking part in the first demonstration. Australia was represented by more than 300,000 students from across the nation.

“The schools-strike project was met with a lot of cynicism at first – ‘Hadn’t this generation been raised online to communicate entirely through selfies?’ ” says The Age news director Michelle Griffin. “And yet, they came in their tens of thousands, in person, with handwritten signs and thoughtful proposals.”

The protesters called on the government to reach 100 per cent renewable electricity supply and exports of green energy by 2030, and to prohibit new fossil fuel projects (such as the Adani-Carmichael coal mine in central Queensland), while offering a just transition for the workers and communities supported by those industries. “And while many of them were scolded as ‘inner-city puppets’, the stories in the streets were different,” says Griffin. “These teens came from the country, from the housing estates on the fringe, from the most expensive private schools in the land and some of the poorest.” Castlemaine teenagers Milou Albrecht, Harriet O’Shea Carre and Callum Neilson-Bridgfoot were among the more prominent home-grown organisers, and they came not from the chattering classes but from rural Victoria.

“At a time when climate politics is riven by division and hysteria across the board, by arrests and abuse and finger-pointing, it was the school strikes that offered a model of sober, serious protest,” says Griffin. “They’re too young to vote, but they’re also too young to despair. They’ve learnt skills that I suspect will make this generation a force to be reckoned with as they turn 18.”

Kate McBride & Grace Brennan

Farmer Kate McBride, 21, became the face of the fight to save the Darling River earlier this year, when the video she filmed of her father holding a dead Murray cod during Menindee’s mass fish kills went viral.

A fifth-generation grazier on the 200,000-hectare Tolarno Station, McBride was already a custodian of the land – as both a Healthy River Ambassador and the youngest ever board member on the Western Local Land Services council – but in 2019, she shone as a strident and articulate voice on an environmental catastrophe.

“Kate stepped out from her parents’ shadow – the McBrides have one of the largest private landholdings in NSW – to become one of the key figures in the public debate about the dying Darling River,” says The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age environment editor Peter Hannam. “As one person put it, ‘She threw a dead fish into the NSW election’ in March, helping to steer the biggest electorate in the state out of the Nationals’ hands for the first time in decades.”

Meanwhile, fellow female farmer, Grace Brennan, found success with the social media movement Buy from the Bush, which encourages city slickers to do something tangible to help those struggling with the drought. Brennan, who lives on a sheep and cropping farm in Warren, western NSW, launched #buyfromthebush on Instagram and Facebook, and in little more than a month had gathered 106,000 followers, whom she directs to small businesses in drought-affected areas, from a smoothie bar in Walgett to a bush pub in Gulargambone, from a business that sells canvas laptop bags in Yass to another offering Turkish towels from Cooma.

The bush needs local champions, says Hannam. “That can come in the form of people who are willing to take on the increasingly well-funded agribusinesses, or someone who reminds us of the hardiness of those trying to scratch out a living on our often unforgiving land.”

Brynn O’Brien and Emma Herd

The Australasian Centre for Corporate Responsibility was a largely unknown entity three years ago, as was its executive director, Brynn O’Brien. Yet the feisty brand of shareholder activism O’Brien brings to the table has now become impossible to ignore.

The resolution at the heart of her latest campaign? Pressuring the world’s biggest mining company, BHP, to cut ties with a list of powerful Australian lobby groups (including the Minerals Council of Australia), because of what O’Brien says are positions inconsistent with the Paris Agreement on climate change.

The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age business reporter Nick Toscano covered the recent annual general meetings of the mining giant, where O’Brien secured almost one in four London investor votes, and close to one in three in Sydney. “There are protesters in the streets and outside Parliament House, but Brynn O’Brien picks her battles in the boardroom,” says Toscano. “For some company directors, she might just be one of the most daunting forces they know.”

Raising green issues in corporate Australia in a different way is Emma Herd, CEO of the Investor Group on Climate Change. The Investor Group poses pivotal questions about the bottom line: as a director, are you fulfilling your fiduciary duties if you are not examining your firm’s exposure in a warming world, and if not, how might you explain that to your investors – and perhaps your lawyers – down the track?

“The group is now said to represent investors holding billions, which is nothing to sneeze at,” says Toscano. “The success of groups like Herd’s demonstrates that the investment community no longer considers climate change a fringe concern, but rather a long-term material risk. Whether it’s physical risk like prolonged drought or the risk of sudden regulatory changes devaluing assets like coal-fired power plants, investors are looking at these things from a long-term lens rather than one of short-term profitability.”

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