Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

Since at least the early 1980s, FoEM has
also run a bookshop, which continues to
act as a high profile street level presence
for FoEM in its local community and is an
important outlet for campaign materials
and ideas. The FoEM bookshop is an
important source of specialist books and
materials. It has also helped to shape how
other bookshops, libraries and institutions
approach and portray environmental
issues and concerns.
FoEM ran a community arts space/
gallery during the 1980s and early
1990s, providing an early and important
Melbourne outlet for indigenous artwork
from central Australia and the Kimberley.
This was an accessible and welcoming
venue for local artists and other community
ventures, and the FoEM building – then
at 222 Brunswick Street, Fitzroy – was a
prominent part of Melbourne’s activist and
cultural landscape.
Following a campaign against French
nuclear tests in the Pacific, the Anti-
Uranium Collective emerged in 1974. Its
aim was to oppose Australia’s contribution
to the nuclear fuel/weapons cycle: the
mining and export of uranium. It now has
30 years of continuous campaigning to its
credit and continues to form the core of
FoEA’s national campaign activity.
In the early days, various people had
considerable influence on how the group
developed. A number of members of
the Hayes family were significant and
provided a strong tactical analysis of the
role of FoEM in the broader environment
movement. Neil Barrett, Richard Nankin
and Alison Parkes were involved in Chain
Reaction magazine, which was based
in the Melbourne office. Denis Hayes,
Jim Falk and Neil Barrett collaborated
on the production of the book Red Light
for Yellowcake, which sold over 35,000
copies. The ‘stop uranium mining’ stickers
that were perhaps the quintessential
slogan of the decade eventually sold
more than 100,000. Les Dalton and Alison
Parkes helped establish the Movement
Against Uranium Mining (MAUM), while
others initiated the first ethical shareholder
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actions at the AGMs of mining companies
MIM and Hamersley. Andrew Herrington
was actively involved, especially in the
development of the structure of the
organisation. Alan Parker, Mick Harris
and Jack Gildering were among those
who pulled the Alternate Technology
Association (ATA) together. Various bike
related projects also worked from FoEM.
In 1976, The Age newspaper described
the FoEM office as a “barely furnished
terrace house in Carlton … there is no
obvious indication that FoEM lives in at
least 16 other countries, is represented on
the UN Environment Program, and … has
so far gained support of not just the left
wing unions but professional organisations
and church groups … the office workers
are fairly young, well educated and poor”.
In the early 1980s, FoEM established
a Food Justice Centre to work on plant
variety rights at a time when patenting of
seeds began to pose a grave threat to
subsistence farmers around the world.
Its other concerns included the use of
harmful chemicals in Southern nations
and corporate ownership and control of
food. The creation of the Food Justice
Centre marked a significant development
in Australian environmental politics. Its
emphasis on international solidarity,
critiques of corporate power, and cross
over into areas far beyond ‘conventional’
environmentalism was a living example of
FoEM’s style of work. In 1983, the Food
Justice Centre established an organic fruit
and vegetable co-op that ran for about
six years. The co-op aimed to provide
organically grown food at reasonable
prices, to improve the network between
growers, distributors and consumers
of organic foods, to work as part of
the international campaign against the
use of pesticides in agriculture and to
produce materials about methods of food
production and their impacts on both the
environment and health.
From the 1980s, FoEM consistently
worked to highlight the risks associated
with the release of genetically modified
organisms (GMOs). In 1995, it published
Gyorgy Scrinis’ book Colonising the Seed:
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