#StopAdani: The Landscape of Environmental Activism in Australia
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2020
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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Australian grassroots action on climate change is a recent phenomenon. Climate change as an issue of concern entered the political landscape and the national psyche of Australia later than in other countries, but since then there has been a surge of climate action. A grassroots layer of the climate movement has been co-evolving with the proposal of development projects such as coal mines. Australia’s grassroots movement consists of concerned citizens seeking to address climate change through personal action by pushing for broader economic, political, and social change. The research produced by this analysis delves into this aspect of climate action in the context of the coal mining industry in Australia, with particular focus on environmental discourses (e.g., sustainable development, environmental justice, green radicalism) characteristic of the #StopAdani movement that has evolved to contest the proposed Adani mine. What is the geography/landscape of environmental activism in the case of the Carmichael Coal Mine in Queensland, Australia? I draw on social media data, interview data, as well as important documents and sources from the gray literature to address this question. Analyzing across these various datasets, I show that the Australian grassroots movement against the Adani coal mine has been able to adapt its vantage depending on scale, employing an economy-centered argument about the infeasibility of fossil fuel extraction at the local scale and an environment-focused argument about the injustices of coal mining ventures on the global scale. I also find that while the movement historically engaged with diverse discourses, ideas of environmental justice became more prominent in the movement following the Australian bushfires. Social media data illustrate how Twitter contributes to the dynamism of grassroots activism while also illustrating how important events, e.g., the bushfires, can have a dramatic effect on orientation of activism. The data also illustrate how different framings of the same issue, i.e., the economic unviability of the Adani mine and the environmental injustices of the Carmichael, can have a unifying impact on social movements.
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