Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

are independent. A secretariat based in
Amsterdam helps with information flows
and some co-ordination of activity; but
local groups have their own membership,
structures and funding sources. There are
around 1,000,000 individual members and
4,500 local groups of FoEI, including the
12 local groups in Australia.
Decisions are made at the international
meetings and an executive committee
(with representatives from groups from
around the world) has ability to make
certain decisions on behalf of the network
between meetings. A chairperson,
nominated by national groups, is elected
at the international meeting. The first
chair from a Southern group is the current
chair, Ricardo Navarro, of CESTA/ FoE
El Salvador, who was appointed in
1996. Groups put forward proposals for
international campaigns and projects at
the international meetings and must have
a cross section of groups from around the
world actively involved.
Some significant campaign victories
of FoE International have included:
involvement in campaigns and national
referenda in a number of countries in
Europe that halted the expansion of the
nuclear industry; the closure of a number
of nuclear power plants; forcing the World
Bank to cancel various projects, including
large dams in the Amazon, which would
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have displaced Indigenous communities;
developing the Radio Amazonia program,
which has installed more than 100 locallycontrolled
radio stations in Indigenous
and forest-dwelling communities in the
Amazon; highlighting and stopping many
instances of illegal tropical rainforest
logging, and significant campaigns at the
international level on both ozone depletion
and climate change.
FoEI sent a delegation to investigate
the impacts of the first Gulf War on
the environment and, by tracking and
highlighting illegal waste shipments
to Nigeria and other countries, has
significantly influenced illegal waste
dumping in Southern countries. In 1985,
FoE was instrumental in securing an
indefinite ban on dumping of nuclear
waste at sea. FoEI is also recognised as
having done ground-breaking campaign
and theoretical work on sustainability. In
recent years, several campaigns have
achieved great success through targeting
the financial institutions who provide funds
for environmentally or socially destructive
projects including large scale mining and
forestry operations.
FoE Australia produces an annual
summary of FoEI’s key campaign
achievements that is available from the
national liaison office. For more details on
FoE International see www.foei.org
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