Environmentalism for a Modern Australia
A call for Australia's green movement to be more radical and pragmatic.
Reflecting on the Apollo 8 mission in 1968, Astronaut Bill Anders said,
“We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”
The following is an adaption of part of the speech I gave at our Environmentalism for a Modern Australia conference on the 10th of October.
Australia's established environmental movement has become stuck, right at a time when we need solutions more than ever.
Global conflict, accelerating climate change, loss of biodiversity and increasing economic inequality mean the future can feel more like something to worry about than something to look forward to.
But what we see is that large parts of the established environmental movement have become more concerned with policing inherited positions, than embracing new evidence and new solutions to the challenges we face.
I don’t say this to cut them down.
As environmentalists, we stand on their shoulders.
The ideas and concepts we discussed at our conference were shaped by their efforts.
Many of the incredible landscapes, ecosystems and thriving communities are a testament to their courage and determination.
But respect and appreciation for those who came before us shouldn’t prevent us from questioning established positions, or asking whether those positions still serve the goal of ensuring people and nature can thrive together.
Because I believe too much of the established environmental movement has become simultaneously not pragmatic enough, nor radical enough.
Not pragmatic enough because too often a campaign strategy, technology or solution is rejected because it does not fit comfortably within a worldview developed decades ago.
We can see this in some of the technologies the established movement continues to oppose.
Gene technologies that could help us produce more food on less land, with fewer pesticides and other inputs, are still treated with deep suspicion.
Nuclear energy, despite being a proven source of low-carbon electricity with an extraordinarily small land footprint, remains prohibited in Australia and opposed by much of the established environmental movement.
That doesn't mean every application of gene technology is good.
And it doesn't mean every nuclear project makes sense.
It means we should judge technologies on the evidence, their impacts and their alternatives, rather than deciding decades in advance what is and isn't acceptable.
But the established environmental movement also hasn't always been radical enough.
Too much time is spent asking how we can make the current system less destructive, often by arguing for a return to past systems that didn’t serve people or nature then and certainly wouldn’t serve us now.
Environmentalist George Monbiot calls this green social nostalgia.
A yearning for a return to an imagined purity and goodness of people working the land.
"WePlanet Australia is the antithesis of this. What we represent is a kind of radical pragmatism."
Radical about envisioning a future of abundance where people are freed from the tyranny of back-breaking labour.
Where the circumstances and biology we are born into don't determine the lives we can lead.
Where everyone has the opportunity to thrive.
And a future where nature can thrive too.
Not manicured to fit a human vision of what nature should look like, but given the space to adapt, evolve and flourish with far less human pressure.
But also pragmatic about how we get there.
Pragmatic enough to remain open to new ideas, evidence and solutions.
Pragmatic enough to see the world not just as we wish it to be, but as it actually is.
So what does radical pragmatism actually look like?
Take animal agriculture.
The Australian Conservation Foundation is doing good work asking how we can make beef less destructive. How do we stop cattle production driving deforestation? How do we make sure supermarkets aren't selling beef produced at the expense of native habitat?
Those are important questions.
"But WePlanet Australia asks a more radical one: Can we skip the cow altogether?"
Not by banning beef.
Not by forcing everyone to become vegan.
And not by telling people that foods which are important to their families, their culture or their health are somehow morally unacceptable.
Instead, what if we made the alternatives so abundant, affordable and delicious that they simply became the natural choice?
You walk into a supermarket wanting to make spaghetti bolognese.
Maybe you pick up a plant-based mince.
Maybe you pick up cultivated beef, made from real animal cells without needing to raise and slaughter the whole animal.
Maybe precision fermentation has produced the fats and proteins that give the food the taste, texture and nutrition people want.
And eventually the question isn't, "How much am I willing to sacrifice for the environment?"
It's, "Why wouldn't I choose this?"
That is a radically different future.
A world where we can feed billions of people without needing to raise tens of billions of farmed animals every year.
A world where choosing food produced without slaughter doesn't require changing the meals we love or abandoning our cultural traditions.
But the pathway to that future is also deeply pragmatic.
Because people are complicated.
Price matters.
Taste matters.
Convenience matters.
Culture matters.
Habits matter.
Most people don't make decisions at the supermarket based on political philosophy.
And we shouldn't expect them to.
If we want people to change, then we need to make the better option genuinely better.
That's what it means to meet people where they are.
"People change when the better option becomes the easier option."
And this is not some distant science-fiction idea.
Right here in Sydney, Vow is already producing cultivated meat that Australians can eat.
We are already learning how to produce animal proteins and fats through precision fermentation at scale.
And Plant-based foods continue to improve.
These technologies are still young. They have challenges around cost, scale, regulation and consumer acceptance.
Radical pragmatism means acknowledging those challenges too.
But imagine if we get this right.
Animal agriculture currently requires enormous amounts of land.
If we can produce more of our food using dramatically less of it, then we don't simply reduce emissions or animal suffering.
We create space.
Space to reconnect fragmented ecosystems.
Space for wildlife.
Space for forests and wetlands.
Space to rewild landscapes.
And when I say rewild, I don't mean trying to recreate some perfect version of Australia from a particular moment in history.
Nature isn't static.
I mean giving ecosystems enough space and resilience to adapt, evolve and thrive with less pressure from us.
That's the future I want environmentalism to be capable of imagining.
We can apply exactly the same thinking to energy.
We shouldn’t be turning technologies into political identities.
The destination must be clean energy abundance.
A future where we have enough clean electricity to power our homes, electrify transport and industry, manufacture more of what we need here in Australia and support technologies we haven't even invented yet.
Wind, solar, storage, hydro can all contribute to that.
And yes, nuclear energy can contribute to that too.
Our job isn't to choose our favourite technology and defend it forever.
Our job is to identify the future we want and then honestly assess which tools can help us get there.
That is radical pragmatism.
Radical enough to imagine systems fundamentally better than those we have today.
Pragmatic enough to accept that there will rarely be one perfect solution.
And open enough to keep changing our minds as the evidence changes.
Tyrone D’Lisle is the National Manager of WePlanet Australia, a father and a long-time environmental and social justice campaigner. He has been active in environmental and social justice movements for more than a decade, working across political advocacy, campaigning and grassroots organising.