Modern Western environmentism starts with the English Romantic poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, who redefined nature as a thing of beauty to be embraced, rather than a savage force to be feared and tamed. 

Australia’s own environmental movement began in the late 19th-century with bushwalking clubs. Bushwalkers came to love the Australia’s wilderness, and saw the need to protect it. And for most of the 20th century, environmentalism in Australia was about preserving wilderness from development, campaigning for the creation of national parks and against logging, mining, farming and residential threats to wilderness.

This "wilderness era" climaxed in the 1970-90 period with a series of "treehugging" battles to save rainforest and old-growth native forest in Queensland, northern NSW and Tasmania.

While conservation remains important, from the 1960s onwards new environmental concerns began to enter the mix of Australian environmentalism.

The 1960s saw the birth of the bush regeneration movement. During the 1960s and 1970s there was growing interest in biodynamic and organic farming, as a reaction to the widespread use of artificial chemicals in agriculture. A key Australian contribution to environmentalism in the 1970s was Permaculture, a philosophy of farming and sustainable living developed by Bill Mollison and David Holgrem in Tasmania. 

This era saw the growth of a self-sufficiency, back-to-the-land movement. This was associated with the 1960s and 1970s hippy counter-culture, with people moving to rural regions such as the northern NSW around Nimbim, to apply organic and permaculture principles.

The 1980s saw the anti-nuclear movement reach a climax with the campaign to prevent uranium mining in Kakadu, and the wilderness protection strand of Australian environmentalism reach its peak with the successful campaign to prevent the Franklin River in Tasmania being dammed and direct action protests against old growth logging and mining.

In the 1980s the Franklin River campaign, in particular, saw the first green political parties, which turned into The Greens.

In the 1990s, scientists worldwide began to sound the alarm about global warming. Growing recognition of the scale of this issue began to move the environment from a fringe issue towards the centre of political debate. This process gathered speed around 2005-6 due to increasingly ominous reports from the International Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. 

The first decade of the 21st century has seen the green movement grow exponentially, in Australia and worldwide, driven by the climate change issue. On the one hand, the green movement now challenges the fundamental values of modern society. On the other hand, green concerns and rhetoric are increasingly adopted by mainstream businesses and politicians. There has also been a huge growth in a “green business sector” of companies providing green products and services.

Right up until the 1980s, Australian environmentalism, while influenced by developments and concepts from overseas, could be said to be primarily concerned with protecting Australian wilderness.

Since about 1990 and increasingly since the turn of the century, environmentalism has become a global movement, prompted by the global nature of the threats of climate change and loss of biodiversity, and the communication revolution of the internet and email.

Chronology
1860s Probably Australia’s first anti-logging campaign, to protect native forest at Ferntree Gully in Dandenong Ranges near Melbourne.
1872 Yellowstone in California made the World’s first national park
1879 Royal National Park created south of Sydney – the world’s second national park.
1908 Myles Dunphy and friends form the Orizaba Tourist Club, one of the first associations promoting bushwalking and wilderness appreciation and protection.
1909 Wildlife Preservation Society of Australia founded, Australia’s first national conservation organisation
1918 Birds and Animals Protection Act.
1924 Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner gives a series of lectures laying out principles of biodynamic farming
1931-1933 Campaign by bushwalking clubs and conservationists to establish the Blue Gum Forest near Blackheath in the Blue Mountains as a nature reserve; one of the first campaigns to protect a wilderness area in Australia.
1927 Ernesto Genoni introduces biodynamic farming methods to Australia.
1932 NSW Federation of Bushwalking Clubs formed
1940 First use of term “organic farming” in the book Look to the Land by UK writer Walter James (Lord Northbourne).
1949 Fauna Protection Act
1955 Blue Mountains National Park and Warrumbungles National Park created in NSW
1957 National Parks Association created.
1962 US scientist Rachel Carson publishes A Silent Spring, a book about chemicals in agriculture, regarded as a landmark in promoting environmental awareness.
1966 Australian Conservation Foundation set up.
1967 Publication of Weeds and their Control by Joan and Eileen Bradley, laying out the “Bradley Method” of bush regeneration adopted by bush regeneration groups around Australia.
1971 First Federal Govt. Environment Department set up by McMahon coalition government.
1971 Aquarius Festival held in Nimbim: some festival participants decide to stay in region, establishing it as a focal point of Australian counter-culture.
1971-75 Sydney “green bans” by building unions where union members refused to work on developments threatening bushland and historic sites including The Rocks, Glebe, etc.
1972 UN Earth Summit and Stockholm Declaration: first attempt at global regulation of the environment.
1972 United Tasmania Group (UTG) set up with Bob Brown and Milo Dunphy as co-directors, largely to campaign against damming of Lake Pedder. Regarded as the world’s first “green” political party.
1972 Total Environment Centre set up.
1972 International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) set up as a global body for the organic movement.
1972-3: Anti-nuclear movement given impetus by opposition to French nuclear testing in Pacific.
1973 Lake Pedder in Tasmania flooded by hydro-electricity dam.
1974 The UTG in Tasmania, Conservation Party in Queensland and Victorian Environment Group contest Senate seats – the first “green” candidates for Federal office in Australia.
1970s Builders Labourers Federation instigates a policy of “green bans” over development plans for Kellys Bush in Sydney. 
1975 Project Jonah set up to campaign against whaling, leading to 1980 Whale Protection Act banning whaling in Australia.
1976 The Tasmanian Wilderness Society (later to become The Wilderness Society) set up at a meeting at Bob Brown’s home in Tasmania.
1976 Campaign Against Nuclear Energy (CANE) established.
1977 ALP introduces no uranium mining policy (modified to "three-mines" policy in 1984).
1977 Greenpeace Australia Pacific set up, initially focusing on whaling.
1978 Kakadu National Park created.
1978 Australian whaling ends.
1978 Australian branch of WWF (then World Wildlife Fund; now Worldwide Fund for Nature) set up.
1979 Protests at Terania Creek in northern NSW as part of the Save the Rainforests campaign with protestors blocking logging; the first large, on-site, “direct  action” environmental protest in Australia.
1980 First green activist elected in Australia: Norm Sanders, for the Democrats, to the Tasmanian House of Assembly.
1982 Rainforest Conservation Society set up to campaign to protect the Daintree Rainforest in Queensland.
1982-3 Blockades and direct action campaign to prevent damming of the Franklin River.
1983 The Sydney Greens registers as the first Australian “Greens” party.
1983 Hawke ALP Federal Government grants South West Tasmania World Heritage status to prevent damming of the Franklin River by Tasmania’s Hydro-Electric Commission following a grassroots campaign.
1983 campaign to save the Gorden River from being dammed.
1984 German Greens leader Petra Kelly visits Australia; urges creation of a national green party.
1984 Tasmanian Wilderness Society becomes a national organization as The Wilderness Society.
1984 Nuclear Disarmament Party set up.
1985 French Government agents sink the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in Auckland harbour.
1985 Queensland Greens set up.
1987 Montreal Protocol bans CFCs that are causing the hole in the ozone layer over Antartica.
1989 South Australian Greens set up.
1989 Greens (standing as independents) win 5 seats in Tasmanian state election and hold balance of power; Green-Labor Accord agreed.
1990 Greens WA set up.
1992 The Australian Greens Party formed.
1992 UN conference passes the Rio Declaration, signed by 178 nations, calling for more ecologically sustainable development.
1997: Kyoto Protocol; Australia under PM John Howard refuses to ratify.
1998: Protests stops Jabiluka uranium mine in Kakadu.
2000 Melbourne mass protests against World Economic Forum, following the “Battle for Seattle” at the World Trade Organisation summit in 1999.
2001 Stockholm Convention: treaty signed by 120 nations bans 12 key pollutants found in fertiliser and industrial waste.
2008 Rudd Government ratifies Kyoto Protocol.

© Mark Mann 2011