Stepping out of the ivory tower into fire and flood: Climate activism and the academy

Abstract

In early 2022, an unprecedented flood event in Lismore, New South Wales plunged an entire community into trauma and chaos. I draw upon this event to highlight the imperative for climate activism in the academy. Activist research, and activist teaching in law classrooms, are already reshaping the law of the Holocene in response to the climate crisis and will increasingly do so. I suggest that, in light of their ecological privilege, academics must also modify their personal and professional conduct. We must all be climate activists, if only because climate will spare none of us.

In February 2022, Lismore, New South Wales (NSW), the hometown of Southern Cross University, and the surrounding area experienced unprecedented, catastrophic flooding. Two years earlier, the region, together with much of the east coast of mainland Australia, had endured the catastrophic fires of Black Summer. Both events are a manifestation of the ongoing, accelerating climate crisis.

Activism and environmental justice have always been core concerns of the (now dismantled) School of Law and Justice at Southern Cross University – my workplace for three decades. I have been an activist for my entire academic career and advocated for activism in the academy. It is timely to reflect, yet again, upon the imperative for activism in the academy – from this current vantage point, as the ongoing climate crisis engulfs the academic and broader community of which I was a member for over 30 years.

What follows is a cautionary tale, and a call for climate action. I explore potential avenues for climate action in the academy. The central premise of this article is that all academics, and not only the academics of a university already experiencing the ravages of climate change, have an overriding obligation to be climate activists. There is no possible justification for neutrality, dissembling or prevarication in light of what we know, and have experienced, at 1.1 degrees of global warming.

Activism and the academy: A personal journey

My first academic paper was published the year after I and five others founded a regional law school with a stated commitment to social and environmental justice – the Southern Cross University School of Law and Justice. I had earlier been introduced to the force of direct action, as a participant and legal observer in the Chaelundi forest blockade in 1991. In the wintry depths of what Justice Stein, of the NSW Land and Environment Court, would later describe as a ‘veritable forest-dependent zoo’, ¹ forest defenders successfully blocked the ingress of bulldozers while John Corkill fought and won a landmark case against the NSW Forestry Commission. ² This courtroom victory led to the introduction of the first threatened species legislation in the state of NSW. ³ The Chaelundi blockade was an intoxicating and empowering experience.

Participating in forest blockades was not feasible for me in 1994. I was teaching and caring for a baby, frequently breastfeeding her on campus and in lecture breaks. When, however, a Ballina magistrate ejected a breastfeeding mother from his courtroom, it was clear to me that direct action was required. I entered his courtroom with a small group of mothers, we unbuttoned our shirts, and we began to breastfeed. This was lactation activism.

I reflected on these events in an article entitled ‘Stepping out of the Ivory Tower with Contemptuous Breasts’, published that year in the Alternative Law Journal. ⁴ Sadly, breastfeeding babies in corridors of power, and in Australian courtrooms, remains unusual and, in some instances, unacceptable. ⁵ When Greens Senator Larissa Waters fed her baby in the Senate in 2017, she set a breastfeeding precedent. ⁶

Fourteen years after this first article, I wrote about the role of members of my then law school in supporting and promoting activism – as activist educators, as legal observers in forest blockades, as researchers. It was, again, the Alternative Law Journal which published ‘Activism and the Academy’ ⁷ and, again, the impetus to write this piece came from my personal experiences.

Another 14 years passed. Just two years earlier, in 2020, our regional law school had become the casualty of a major restructure. At the same time, the University’s National Centre for Flood Research, described as a ‘living laboratory’, was shut down. ⁸ And then, in February 2022, Lismore academics stepped out of their ivory tower into the stinking, polluted, swollen floodwaters of the Wilsons River – into chaos and disaster, into ‘the flooded ruins of our climate ground zero’. ⁹

The Lismore floods

On 28 February 2022, mainstream news and social media outlets around Australia were dominated by extraordinary images and live feeds emanating from Lismore. Hundreds of terrified people were huddled on rooftops and in roof cavities with their children and pets, trying to escape the rapidly rising river. Lismore is located on a floodplain and its community is accustomed to floods; the last major flood event had taken place only five years earlier. A flood of this magnitude was, however, unprecedented. Residents fled houses previously unaffected by floodwaters. ¹⁰ Facebook feeds were cluttered with desperate pleas for help. An army of volunteers in ‘tinnies’ responded to the unfolding emergency and rescued stranded individuals and families, despite multiple hazards and instructions to the contrary from the overwhelmed State Emergency Services. Had volunteers not stepped in, there would have been far more casualties.

In the early hours of that Monday, Jan, my ex-husband, messaged my daughters, husband and me with the words: ‘I am still alive’. When we read this, he had already spent four hours on his North Lismore rooftop in torrential rain, with a disabled flatmate and a neighbour. He sent a photograph of the rooftop surrounded by muddy water, the rain driving down, his flatmate hunched under a large black umbrella, his neighbour sheltering under a solar panel with her bare legs protruding. My climate scientist husband was one of the coordinating lead authors of the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, ¹¹ released that same day. He displayed the image while delivering a virtual presentation; this photograph, he said, was taken today by a member of my extended family, currently imperilled by one of the climate impacts outlined in the report.

Jan and his friends stayed on the rooftop until midday, suffering from the early stages of hypothermia; at that point, a boat picked them up and took them to the evacuation centre at Southern Cross University. Between 2000 and 3000 people eventually sought shelter in an inadequately staffed and under-resourced area – the indoor basketball court – designed to accommodate only 200 people. ¹²

Surrounding areas were impacted as well, in an interminable sequence of flood disasters. Coraki, Ballina, Woodburn, Mullumbimby, Murwillumbah: the list of affected towns and communities in the Northern Rivers went on and on. Some received less media coverage and subsequently less assistance than others. ¹³ Overall, there were fundamental gaps and unconscionable delays in official responses. ¹⁴ Greg Mullins, former Commissioner of Fire and Rescue NSW, attributes this, at least in part, to the fact that state-based agencies and emergency services are ‘organised and resourced to fight the hazards of the last century, not this one’, and to an absence of national leadership. ¹⁵

Extraordinary community-led initiatives supplemented these gaps. The Mud Army went from house to house, with gumboots and brooms, pulling ruined furniture and belongings from sodden interiors and hosing out mud. Volunteers delivered food and medication. ¹⁶ Activist Susie Russell drove to Lismore and set up a Trees Not Bombs recovery café. ¹⁷ The Koori Mail, an Indigenous organisation which provides a fortnightly national Indigenous newspaper, organised the distribution of food, donated clothing and other supplies for months. ¹⁸ Aidan Ricketts, a law colleague at Southern Cross University who rescued 29 people in his boat on the day of the flood, referred to this unstinted community assistance as ‘the free state of Lismore’. ¹⁹

These efforts were augmented by the physical labour of Australian Defence Force personnel, who arrived in the region after the Prime Minister belatedly instructed the Governor-General to make a National Emergency Declaration – the first such declaration made under legislation enacted in response to the Black Summer megafires. ²⁰

The magnitude of the task was daunting. There was devastation and damage everywhere: sodden mounds of furniture and belongings destined for landfill, ²¹ inundated paddocks, carcasses of drowned livestock, extraordinary landslips severing rural roads and, in some instances, cutting off communities and burying houses and their occupants. ²² After the Mud Army had left, stripped back shells of houses in North and South Lismore remained uninhabitable and without power. Some owners began repairing their homes with what they hoped were flood-proof materials; others waited for direction as to their long-term fate. Lismore, as one resident wrote, was a ‘town wide awake, awaiting tangible answers to pull us from the limbo that is our reality’. ²³ Flood refugees flocked to temporary accommodation, including pods and caravans; First Nations people were reportedly living in tents months after the floods. ²⁴ Families were separated. Schools were relocated: two private schools on to the University campus. A Flood Inquiry was established in March, took evidence, and handed down a report at the end of July. ²⁵ A Northern Rivers Reconstruction Corporation was created. Children asked their parents whether there was a word for fear of rain.

This flood was by no means the only extraordinary flood event of 2022. There was a second flood in the Northern Rivers at the beginning of March. In September, mega-floods displaced 33 million people in Pakistan and left many of them homeless. This tragedy dwarfs the events in the Northern Rivers in magnitude, but it does not detract from the particular lessons encapsulated in these events – that previous extreme weather events cannot serve as an indicator of what we should expect from the climate disruptions of the Anthropocene, and that no place is safe.

These lessons were already evident in the Black Summer megafires. Despite the extra-terrestrial ambitions of certain billionaires, a growing demand for bunkers, ²⁶ and strategic purchases of property in places demarcated as global refuges, ²⁷ there are, as historian Dipesh Chakrabarty wrote in 2009, ‘no lifeboats here for the rich and the privileged’. ²⁸ Vulnerable communities may well be in the frontline of climate impacts but, as Aidan Ricketts put it, in the wake of the Lismore flood, ‘[climate] is going to get everyone at some stage’. ²⁹

Activism in the aftermath

In the aftermath of the floods, traumatised and angry flood victims engaged in various forms of activism. The Prime Minister was heckled when he made a brief visit to Lismore nine days after the first catastrophic flood and refused to engage directly with the community. ³⁰ Flood victims, including a Southern Cross University law student, drove to Sydney with debris from their destroyed homes and displayed it in front of Kirribilli House; Nymboida resident Melinda Plesman had similarly brought the burnt remains of her Nymboida home to Parliament House during Black Summer. ³¹ Ella O’Dwyer-Oshlak, a 13-year-old student whose Lismore home and school were destroyed by floodwater, addressed a huge crowd at a youth climate rally in Sydney in late March 2022: ‘Have you ever had to flee your house in the middle of the night, in the middle of a storm, scared out of your mind because you don’t know what is going to happen?’ ³² In June, 22-year-old Mali Cooper locked their neck to a car’s steering wheel and blocked the entrance to the Sydney Harbour Tunnel. Under new anti-protest laws, they had faced the possibility of a prison sentence. Accepting that Cooper had been severely traumatised by the floods, magistrate Jeff Linden dismissed the charges on mental health grounds and released them into the care of a psychologist. ³³

These are challenging times to be a climate activist. In 2022, in response to disruptive protests at Port Botany and on the Spit Bridge on the part of climate activist group Blockade Australia, the NSW government passed legislation ³⁴ designed ‘to prevent illegal protestors from causing further mayhem’. ³⁵ Interfering with traffic on major roads, bridges or tunnels, or damaging certain public transport and infrastructure facilities, now attracts penalties of major fines and/or up to two years in jail. In early December 2022, ‘Violet’ Coco, a member of climate activist group Fireproof Australia, received a prison sentence of 15 months, with a non-parole period of eight months; she had been charged with seven offences after blocking one lane of the Sydney Harbour Bridge for 28 minutes with a parked truck, on which she stood holding a flare. ³⁶ The sentence was widely condemned by human rights advocates, as was an initial denial of bail while her appeal was pending.

Other states have similarly introduced punitive legislation targeting climate activists. Queensland’s so-called ‘dangerous devices’ legislation ³⁷ was enacted after climate activists locked on to fossil fuel infrastructure in north Queensland, and bridges and road infrastructure in central Brisbane. Under Victorian legislation passed in 2022, ³⁸ protesters found guilty of hindering, obstructing or interfering with timber harvesting operations face jail sentences and increased fines. Tasmania, undeterred by a successful High Court challenge to earlier anti-protest legislation in Brown v Tasmania, ³⁹ enacted an amended version in September 2022. ⁴⁰ These legislative initiatives are operating in conjunction with punitive bail conditions imposed by some magistrates, which have left activists unable to communicate with their friends and effectively under house arrest. ⁴¹ Similar conditions exist in control orders imposed on suspected terrorists. Unlike terrorists, however, these climate activists have not engaged in or planned acts of violence.

The constitutional validity of such Acts is questionable after Brown v Tasmania. Two Knitting Nannas are currently challenging the NSW legislation, arguing that it infringes the constitutional implied freedom of political communication. ⁴² It is fitting that this challenge should be mounted by two of these subversive, trope-defying, non-violent elders, who collectively ‘sit, knit, plot, have a yarn and a cuppa, and bear witness to the war against the greedy, short-sighted corporations that are trying to rape our land and divide our communities’. ⁴³ When an earlier piece of legislation ⁴⁴ made it illegal for climate activists to enter mining sites and ‘interfere’ with those sites, ⁴⁵ the Knitting Nannas, undaunted by the prospect of convictions and lengthy jail terms, announced that they had begun knitting ‘jailbird outfits’. ⁴⁶

Academics as activists

Academics, and particularly those of us who are lawyers, may well harbour reservations about law-breaking. There are some, including renowned climate scientist James Hansen, who are prepared to engage in acts of non-violent civil disobedience and risk arrest in pursuit of climate action and climate justice. ⁴⁷ Most people are, however, concerned about the personal and career consequences of convictions, particularly when jail terms may ensue. Furthermore, as the grassroots collective Wretched of the Earth, among others, has pointed out, the risks for activists engaging in non-violent civil disobedience are unevenly distributed. The collective has suggested that the strategy of being arrested, on the part of Extinction Rebellion activists, should be evaluated in the context of white privilege and ‘the reality of police and state violence’. ⁴⁸ In the remainder of this article, I will explore activist strategies available to academics who are unwilling or unable to engage in acts of non-violent civil disobedience, but nevertheless acknowledge the imperative for climate action in light of a global climate crisis.

In the third decade of the climate century, ⁴⁹ with net zero emissions a global aspiration but, it would seem, unachievable in the next 10 years, research with immediate, practical application by climate activists is critically important. There are some outstanding examples of this. The Children’s Trust lawsuits, which were launched initially in the United States in 2011 and have led to similar youth climate lawsuits worldwide, build upon the work of Professor Mary Christina Wood on the atmospheric public trust doctrine. ⁵⁰ The ‘rights turn’ in climate litigation, ⁵¹ in which litigants are highlighting the many causal links between the climate crisis and human rights violations, has been influenced by academic research in this area. Lawsuits against so-called Carbon Majors seeking damages to address climate impacts are based in part upon the investigations of geographer Richard Heede in the field of attribution science. ⁵² In Queensland courtrooms, climate activists have drawn upon my own research into the applicability of the extraordinary emergency defence in the context of the climate crisis. ⁵³ And no climate lawsuit would have any prospect of success without the research findings of the global community of climate scientists, working under the aegis of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; ⁵⁴ these findings substantiate all climate activist lawsuits.

Research comprises only part of academic activist obligations. Academics must recognise the importance of instilling climate awareness, and cultivating necessary skills for climate action, in their students. Bond University is playing a pioneering role in this field, having introduced a specialist climate law degree at the beginning of 2021. ⁵⁵ The stated purpose of the Bond degree is to educate the climate lawyers of the future, but it is incumbent upon legal educators to instil climate consciousness in all law students. As Justice Brian Preston, Chief Judge of the NSW Land and Environment Court, has argued, every lawyer has a responsibility to practise climate conscious lawyering, by demonstrating ‘an active awareness of the reality of climate change and how it interacts with daily legal problems’. ⁵⁶

Legal educators must explore the climate implications of legal principles and legal practices in every category of law. Traditionally, legal issues relating to environmental protection were corralled in the largely marginalised field of environmental law, which operated almost entirely as a subset of administrative law. Climate law is now spilling over into, and reshaping, corporations law, human rights law, torts, criminal law, constitutional law, taxation law, international law, refugee law – and this is not a complete list. Climate law is omnipresent and impossible to ignore. Climate lawsuits around the world are drawing upon tortious duties of care, upon constitutional rights and human rights enshrined in legislation and conventions, upon directors’ duties. International climate obligations are fiercely debated. The dubious economics of climate mitigation, including carbon credits and offsets, present contractual and other private law problems. First Nations people are raising issues of climate-related cultural genocide. Future lawsuits may well revolve around a mooted additional international crime in the Statute of Rome: the crime of ecocide, or even omnicide. ⁵⁷

Every area of law is implicated in the ongoing planetary crisis and will be fundamentally transformed as a consequence. Justice Beach, in Minister for Environment v Sharma, flagged the possibility of ‘new seed varieties for sustainable duties of care’. He foreshadowed the modification of existing concepts in the area of negligence that might, he speculated, have ‘reached their shelf life, particularly where one is dealing with acts or omissions that have wide-scale consequences that transcend confined temporal boundaries and geographic ranges’. ⁵⁸ We are likely to see the cultivation of ‘new seed varieties’ in other well-established legal doctrines, to accommodate the planetary scale and ‘slow violence’ ⁵⁹ of climate change.

Law can no longer be viewed or presented as an abstract entity, somehow distanced from its social, economic, political and environmental context. Time-honoured myths about the neutrality of legal principles, and the political independence of law’s guardians and enforcers, must be interrogated and discarded in the classroom. There is an undeniable collusion between the way private law operates in practice and the climate crisis; as Nicole Graham observes, ‘[m]any private law concepts and doctrines were developed to protect and defend the socio-economic institutions that facilitated climate change’. ⁶⁰ She has identified, as a primary role for legal educators, the need to teach our students how ‘to take on the challenge of rethinking and reframing the legal architecture and operation of climate change inducing law.’ ⁶¹

But to be an activist transcends our academic roles. We cannot separate our professional lives from our personal lives and lifestyles, in the same way that we cannot maintain an objective, narrative distance from the climate disruptions of our present and future. We are all ‘tangled up in trouble’, ⁶² caught up in what the late Deborah Bird Rose has called the ‘Anthropocene noir’. Referencing Timothy Morton’s discussion of the Oedipal moment in which we, as narrators, belatedly realise that we are also criminals, ⁶³ she observed that

[t]he Anthropocene implicates us all in this looming darkness. We human beings are all criminals, all detectives and all victims. That is the situatedness of the Anthropocene – everyone is contributing to it, everyone is affected by it, everyone is guilty. ⁶⁴

We can no longer maintain an artificial separation between what we research and how we carry out that research, what we teach and what we do. We must act in accordance with our convictions. This means lobbying for fossil fuel divestment, and the development of meaningful emissions plans by the institutions we work in and support. In addition, and importantly, ‘Hypermobile Academic Elites’ ⁶⁵ must be prepared to forgo international air travel and its associated greenhouse gas emissions; here, a transformation of entrenched academic and personal practices and expectations is required. It is fortuitous that hybrid conferences and virtual meetings are now an accepted part of academic life, after two years of pandemic-related restrictions on travel.

Greta Thunberg, leader of the global youth climate activist movement, famously refuses to fly at all; she travels by train and, in order to attend the United Nations Climate Summit in 2019, crossed the Atlantic on a solar powered racing yacht. Thunberg has popularised ‘flight shame’ but climate activists were abstaining from air travel, and advocating for abstinence, before she became a public figure. Plane Stupid was established in 2005. ⁶⁶ Organisations such as Flight Free ask members to avoid air travel and to sign pledges to that effect. ⁶⁷ Flying Less ⁶⁸ and ExPlane ⁶⁹ were created specifically to address the carbon footprint of jetsetting academics.

There is a widespread reluctance among even ecologically conscious academics to sacrifice the convenience of air travel: ‘[t]hey do harm-inducing things because they can’. ⁷⁰ Yet, as journalist and climate activist George Monbiot wrote in 2006, ‘[i]f you fly, you destroy other people’s lives.’ ⁷¹ We must acknowledge and address the structural injustice of ecological privilege, and also recognise that the lives destroyed could be our own or the lives of our family members. As Deborah Bird Rose stated, ‘while it is manifestly true that we are not all situated identically, no situatedness is granted immunity’. ⁷² It is neither ethical nor reasonable, from a utilitarian perspective, to condone long-distance air travel in the climate century.

Conclusion

The traditionally pristine ivory towers of the academic community are increasingly surrounded by floodwater, savaged by hurricanes, penetrated by toxic smoke from megafires and invaded by climate refugees. This is a tangible manifestation of Anthropocene disorder. ⁷³ We must, to adopt Donna Haraway’s phrase, ‘[stay] with the trouble’. ⁷⁴ As researchers, as educators and as members of a privileged elite, it is incumbent upon us to fight for systemic and institutional change and the implementation of effective climate mitigation targets, to facilitate climate adaptation on the part of our own and other communities, and to reduce our individual carbon footprints.

We share, with the rest of the human community, an obligation to address the ongoing planetary catastrophe of the climate crisis in our professional and everyday lives. As political scientist Jessica K Green has written, ‘we all have skin in the game that is climate politics, whether we are aware of it or not’. ⁷⁵ We must all be climate activists, if only because climate will spare none of us.