While politicians pollute the planet, First Nations leaders are defending Country with heart, culture and community

You can go looking for footage of Australia’s environment minister Murray Watt announcing his approval of the Burrup Gas Hub extension—one of the world’s biggest liquified national gas projects, which is now set to remain open until 2070—but you won’t find any. 

Federal ministers are federal ministers because they know the game: Never descend to the personal. Never get your hands dirty. Never allow your voice, your body, your hesitant breath to come near the flame. Why would you, when you can do it all by media release? 

But for opponents of such madness, hiding behind a media release isn’t an option. Defenders of Country must physically immerse themselves in the places they are protecting: Marching, sweating under the sun, shouting at pitiless concrete. 

For First Nations activists, this has always been so, ever since Australia’s colonial project painted the same binary: The tailored Englishman, the ‘naked savage’. But the bonds between extractor and his allies are only ever transactional, driven by mutual convenience and fear. Watt may have his lobbyists, but ultimately he’s alone, with his media release.

The bonds of the defender, on the other hand, are longstanding, communal and widespread. And they’re often led by women.

Patagonia’s recent short film Sea Country – Malu Lag is about the existential threat facing Torres Strait communities as sea levels rise. For an Australian from the mainland, there is a sense, looking at the imagery, that the Strait is another country entirely—a Pacific nation, perhaps. And in a deep sense, it is a place apart. 

When Australians acknowledge First Nations people in formal settings, it’s always spoken and written as ‘Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders’. But no Aboriginal culture on mainland Australia is the same—and Torres Strait Islander culture is a separate culture altogether. That careful separate mention, one that so many Australians now speak and write almost unconsciously, is about unifying ancient separateness with modern belonging. It’s a paradox.

“Torres Strait Islander people don’t contribute to national or global emissions. We are the least responsible and the most at risk of losing everything.”

- Tishiko ‘Tish’ King

Patagonia’s film focuses on Tishiko ‘Tish’ King, a climate justice advocate, marine biologist and Kulkalaig woman with ancestral ties to the island of Masig. Tish feels an obligation to use her education, her knowledge, in support of her people. “Torres Strait Island people live intrinsically with the ocean, the land, and the sky,” she says. “That is our responsibility: To look after her, so she can look after us.”

The islands of Zenadth Kes/Torres Strait will be drowned within 30 years if we’re to believe current projections. Coral bleaching, erosion and king tides are already affecting life there. Now, today, and not in some theoretical future, rising seas are lapping at homes, tainting fresh water supplies, salting crops and inundating sacred places.

In 2022, eight Torres Strait Islanders petitioned the UN on behalf of their communities over Australia’s failure to remedy its own environmental destruction. The UN agreed with the Torres Strait Eight: Their rights to family life and culture had been violated—but the Australian government is yet to pay a cent, yet to take a step in response. Murray Watt, like Tanya Plibersek before him, stood mute. Since then, a separate Federal Court challenge has been lost: This one a July 2025 finding that the federal government did not owe Torres Strait Islanders a duty of care to protect them from global heating.

Tish is bright and articulate. A survivor of cancer at a young age, she laughs a lot and cries openly. When she dives, her coloured braids swirl around her underwater, a visual rhyme with the sea creatures around her. On land, she festoons herself with badges, jewellery and colorful prints. And she has a way of getting straight to the heart of things. “Torres Strait Islander people don’t contribute to national or global emissions,” she says. “We are the least responsible and the most at risk of losing everything.”

Indigenous activists like Tish must move between two worlds: The home that fuels their passion, and the outside world that needs to hear the message. Patagonia’s film studies the contrast. In the islands, Tish soaks up the knowledge: This plant will treat a stonefish sting; if this one’s flowering, that fish will be spawning. Land and sea talk to each other, and people listen in.  

Then, in cold northern climes, surrounded by buildings, Tish makes the arguments. In her hotel room getting ready, and on stage, microphone in hand, she’s a real physical presence. Yet the people causing the harm—the politicians, the executives—are not. They’re somewhere far away but close to their homes, not nervously practising their lines and smiling through the fatigue. Not jet-lagged or hustled by security. This is the ministerial knack. This is the nature of power. “Conservation is not an idea,” Tish insists. “For our people, it’s a way of life.”

Original Power is a community-based Aboriginal organisation, set up to provide Aboriginal people with an inside track to Australia’s renewable energy transition. It’s all about self-determination in communities and on Country, providing support for everyday people to take their own environmental action. And when those actions are underway, it makes connections and adds research and skills so they’re as effective as possible.

If this sounds mechanical, on the ground it’s anything but. “We are not prepared to see our lands and waters defined by their potential mineral value … it is not who we are,” reads a statement on Original Power’s website.

This more combative side of Original Power’s work is evident at Leigh Creek in the Northern Flinders in South Australia. Here, the Adnyamathanha people are pushing back against hazardous underground coal gasification (UCG) on their Country. UCG takes place in coal seams, but is not the same as fracking: It’s combustion-based, and if anything it’s dirtier and more dangerous. Even Queensland has turned away from it.

“White climate organisations are all about polar bears and the ice caps—about saving things for your children. Which is great. But First Nations action is a different lens. We’re the first scientists and astronomers. The cultural instincts are embedded in us as people.”

- Angel Owen, Seed Mob

Karrina Nolan, a proud Yorta Yorta woman, is Original Power’s Executive Director. She has described the organisation’s mission as “building capacity in our communities to self-determine what happens on our Country.” She makes the point that First Nations people hold the consent rights over vast areas of potential renewables development in Australia. So it’s vital that communities are in a position to make good decisions.

Original Power’s pitch to First Nations is about empowerment rather than activism. Addressing a roomful of corporate types at the Sydney Energy Forum in 2022, Karrina’s tone was one of welcome, of opportunity; and when she talks, she is all about persuasion over confrontation. The organisation is doing its own, self-determinative thing; corporate Australia can get on board or be left behind.

The First Nations Clean Energy Network is an example of what’s being achieved. The extreme heat events caused by climate change are making life harder and less healthy for Northern Territory communities in particular. Power outages, combined with the heat and poor housing mean that bodies take the brunt once again. Original Power has been hitting back by setting up solar microgrids—community owned solar power that provide more energy security for rural communities.

Another example is their campaign to strengthen cultural heritage laws so that travesties such as the destruction of Juukan Gorge in Western Australia by mining company Rio Tinto can never happen again. In this work, Original Power is part of a bigger collective—the Aboriginal Heritage Action Alliance—which is devoted to this mission.

Seed Indigenous Youth Climate Network—better known as Seed Mob—is harnessing the power of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander young people to defend Country and make change.

Seed Mob’s Angel Owen, a proud Butchulla-Woppaburra woman from Southeast Queensland, says that the movement’s leaders have always been women. “We’re the nurturers,” she says. “We’re the caretakers and the fixers.” Angel ’is 26 years old, and joined the network at age 14, an experience that’s not uncommon. Across the rest of the Seed Mob team, she says, there are only three people over 30. “It’s youth-led, and it’s pretty deadly.”

There are two ‘buckets’ of work keeping Seed Mob busy: Training and development, to teach young people to be leaders in social justice; and campaigns. The current priority campaign, the pithily titled “Don’t Fuck the Kimberley,” aims to eradicate fracking in the region, and achieve a long-term moratorium in WA.    

Angel has a fascinating take on the uniqueness of First Nations climate action. “White climate organisations are all about polar bears and the ice caps—about saving things for your children,” she says. “Which is great. But First Nations action is a different lens. We’re the first scientists and astronomers. The cultural instincts are embedded in us as people.” If seasonal sequences fail, Angel explains, “it means the stories aren’t guiding us anymore. So there’s so much more at stake for us as mob.”

When Angel talks of “our ancestors, our connection, the fire in the belly,” she’s identifying an entirely different way of defending Country. “It’s bigger than us,” she says. “We’re planting the trees we’ll never sit under.”

First Nations activism—the home-grown, grassroots kind that fights for Country—is of course not confined to Australia.

In North America, Native American groups have a long and successful record against mining, forestry and tourism over-reach. In southeastern Utah, a long battle has been waged by Native Americans over the two million acres of rock plateau known as Bears Ears. The Country is visually arresting: Buttes and canyons of red and gold, bathed in desert light. The language of connection here sounds different to my Australian ears: the Ute and Navajo peoples talk of granaries, corrals, tipi rings, sweat lodges, hogans, wickiups and shade-houses. But the threats—vandalism and development; uranium, oil and gas extraction; media releases—are all too familiar. 

Aamjiwnaang bodies took the hit. The government was nowhere to be found. They’ve developed a term for this kind of inattention: Environmental racism.

The defence of Bears Ears in the 20th century was mounted by individuals and small tribal groups banding together as the Bears Ears Intertribal Coalition. National Monument protection of 1.36 million acres finally arrived during the Obama administration, the first (of many) tribal nation-initiated National Monuments in the United States. But predictably, Bears Ears achievement came under attack during the first Trump term: The park was reduced in size by 85 percent and protracted litigation followed: The Biden administration addressed the damage by reinstating the park’s original boundaries and adding more land in a new National Monument declaration. Trump will try again in his second term—but resistance is now so well-co-ordinated through the NARF that he’ll have a fight on his hands.

Other US First Nations environmental causes have fallen on the wrong side of Trump’s ascendency, failing to thread the eye of the needle as Bears Ears has done. The Apache tribe failed in their court bid to stop the development of a giant copper reserve under their sacred lands at Oak Flat, near Phoenix, Arizona. Trump has vowed to back the miners. Apache religious ground will soon be devastated by a crater three kilometres wide and a thousand feet deep.

In South America, First Nations resistance to forestry and mining developments is literally a matter of life and death: Brazilian Indigenous activist Bruno Pereira and British journalist Dom Phillips were murdered in the Amazon in June 2022. 

Since their deaths, the ousting of the Bolsonaro regime and the presidency of ‘Lula’ da Silva have created the conditions to bolster environmental defences. A newly-created federal police department for the Environment and the Amazon has attracted scores of young Indigenous men to work as paid defenders of the rainforest.

Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani woman of the Ecuadorian Amazon, formed the Ceibo Alliance—a federation of the Waorani with the A’i Cofán, Siekopai and Siona peoples of Ecuador, Peru and Colombia. Her work has won her a Goldman Environmental Prize; Time magazine named her among their 100 most influential people in the world in 2020, and she has been named a United Nations Champion of the Earth.

Her particular foe is the oil industry, which has long sought to drill in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Their methods are often circuitous: Religious missionaries appear, bringing with them a white Jesus and a tacit approval of the oil companies. Her friend and fellow activist Amo was shot dead. Nenquimo wrote an eloquent testimony to him in her own memoir, the first by any Waorani writer, We Will Not Be Saved. Her brand of advocacy places women front and centre: “When women have a seat at the table representing their communities and their peoples, everything’s different,” she told The Guardian.

In Canada, such battles are entrenched by the collision of Indigenous lands and the petrochemical industry. In Sarnia, Ontario, there is a cluster of refineries known ominously as Chemical Valley. Aamjiwnaang people, whose lands abut the valley, have been stricken by illnesses caused by avoidable benzene pollution.

“These are the communities experiencing rising seas, catastrophic flooding, biodiversity loss and cultural displacement firsthand. Yet they are actually also the knowledge holders, the land stewards and solution builders who have been protecting ecosystems for generations.”

- Tishiko 'Tish' King

As benzene levels spiked in 2024, the Aamjiwnaang declared a state of emergency. The government responded with ad hoc compliance notes to the polluter, without once consulting with the Aamjiwnaang.

Aamjiwnaang bodies took the hit. The government was nowhere to be found. They’ve developed a term for this kind of inattention: Environmental racism. Such outrages have spurred Canadian Indigenous activists to form the Assembly of First Nations, a collective of 634 communities across the nation. The aggregated knowledge and bargaining power of such a massive organisation gets results. And therein might lie an interesting example for Aboriginal Australia.

There are many more stories like these: In Aotearoa, in the Pacific Islands and among the Inuit. To say nothing of the countless other grassroots movements that are seeding among Australian First Nations.

Many of the world’s Indigenous environmental activist groups belong to a peak body called the Indigenous Environmental Network, which has seen the urgency of its mission radically accelerated in the 35 years it has existed.

Science and the arts are ever so gradually shrugging off their ignorance and turning to ancient knowledge for new inspiration: The defence of the earth and seas has arguably lagged behind this change. But this generation coming through—so often led by women—are placing themselves in harm’s way in defence of Country. 

 “These are the communities experiencing rising seas, catastrophic flooding, biodiversity loss and cultural displacement firsthand,” says Tish King. “Yet they are actually also the knowledge holders, the land stewards and solution builders who have been protecting ecosystems for generations.”

To watch Sea Country — Malu Lag, learn more about First Nations leadership in ocean protection, and sign a petition for Australia to protect 30 per cent of its ocean by 2030, head to Patagonia.

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