Thirty years ago, on this day, March 26th, 1995, red and green try to mix, with limited success.
Bad blood flows between the green movement and the union movement. The controversy over logging recently has led to ugly incidents between timber workers and conservationists. Ms George said she had agreed to speak at a conference on women and the environment this weekend to try to ease some of the hostility between the two groups…. The Australian Conservation Foundation’s executive director, Ms Tricia Caswell, said the ACF, Greenpeace and women’s groups had decided to host the conference at the World Congress Centre because women were often the backbone of community environment groups and were the main environmental educators to children but received little recognition.
Milburn, C. 1995. ACTU’s George Plays Peacemaker To Greens, Unions. The Age, March 24
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 361ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that Australia is a patriarchal settler colony with horrendous attitudes on sex, race, nature, and there are ongoing cultural, ideological, political, physical battles around this. When ACF set this conference up, they were probably hoping that they could bask in the glory of a carbon tax, but it was not to be.
crucially,Can we find someone who was there that would be interesting, a woman who was there in Melbourne, 30 years ago. So for an interview, Article doesn’t have to be specifically about that conference and whether it meant anything, because, frankly, maybe it didn’t. It can be more broad than that. Okay, send out the request.
What I think we can learn from this
We fail. And we keep failing.
What happened next
We failed some more.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day:
March 25, 1982 – congressional hearings and CBS Evening News repor
March 25, 1988- World Meteorological Organisation sends IPCC invites.
March 25, 2013 – Australian Department of Climate Change axed