Thirty Years of Creative Resistance - Friends of the Earth Australia

was (and remains to this day) the only
state with Container Deposit Legislation
(CDL) and the beverage industry fought a
long and well funded campaign to ensure
this situation continued. FoES mounted a
strong argument about the employment
benefits that would be created through
good recycling and CDL, estimating that
an extra 3,000 jobs would be created in
NSW if CDL was to be implemented in that
state.
FoEM established the Recycling and
Employment project (funded by the
Victorian Ministry of Employment and
Training), which carried out research into
the employment potential of recycling
schemes. FoE campaigners remained
cautious on the issue of a proposed
litter tax put forward in 1984 because of
the possibility that it would, in Richard
Nankin’s words, “victimise consumers”
without “addressing the problems of
wasted resources and energy and the
serious disposal problems created by
throw away packaging”.
In approaching its campaigns, FoE
consistently placed simple issues in a
deeper context of consumption, social
implications and political structures.
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Urban or ‘brown’ issues were consistently
covered by FoE activists during the
eighties, while traditional biodiversity
issues continued to dominate public
debate. Ian Watson, in Fighting for the
Forests, wrote that “urban issues have
always been poor cousins in that family of
issues which have pre-occupied Australian
conservationists” but noted that “FoE, the
most socially radical of the environmental
groups of the 1970s and 1980s, regularly
analysed major urban issues”.
The profile of FoE started to wane in the
mid and later part of the decade, partly
as ‘environmental’ concerns became
more narrowly defined. Forest campaigns
were the dominant priority of much of
the movement and received the bulk of
media attention and funding throughout
the 1980s and 90s. The Tasmanian
Wilderness Society, through the brilliantly
successful Franklin River campaign
in 1983, transformed itself into The
Wilderness Society (TWS), with branches
across the mainland. In true form, FoE’s
main published contribution to the Franklin
River campaign was a cover story in Chain
Reaction on employment in Tasmania,
which drew the conclusion that ‘building
dams destroys jobs in other sectors of the
Tasmanian economy’.
As other groups gained profile on
more popular and ‘sellable’ biodiversity
issues, FoE continued to plough on
FoE 30 Years 39