I’m talking about that moment when you feel overwhelmed by the beauty and wonder of life on this blue green planet of ours.

And then there are moments when it all comes crashing down. When the sight of a clear-cut forest jars your soul. When the senseless slaughter of whales fills your vision with blood. Or the prospect of a nuclear winter, or of runaway global warming leaves you searching for an honest reply to your children’s questions.

These are the moments that change people’s lives. When our moral compass finds true north. When we realise that some things are more important than others, and that standing up for what is right is what matters most.

It was one of these moments 30 years ago, that inspired a small group of people in Albany to take direct action to stop whaling. They hoisted the Greenpeace banner on Australian soil for the first time and they put their bodies on the line - standing between what was right and what was wrong.

Since that time Greenpeace Australia Pacific has grown from a rag tag volunteer outfit, to a professionally run organisation with over 60 staff and over 100,000 supporters around the country. We’ve taken on campaigns from Papua New Guinea to Tasmania, always with the same conviction, and with the same commitment to our founding principles of independence and non-violent direct action.

When the laws are unjust or are destroying our future, and when official channels continue to fail, people of conscience have a responsibility to act. It’s just as true now as it was in the 1700’s when Irish politician Edmund Burke said: “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

Peaceful direct action and civil disobedience are a fundamental part of our democracy. The reason we have weekends is because of labour movement protests. Women have the vote because the Suffragettes took to the streets. The anti-slavery movement, Gandhi, Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement all used civil disobedience to win fundamental freedoms that we now take for granted.

Greenpeace’s 30 year commitment to peaceful direct action has enabled us to confront environmental crime and shine the spotlight on issues ranging from the bloody whale hunt to dumping nuclear waste at sea and illegal logging. And now the imperative for action is stronger than ever.

When your children ask you about climate change and about the future, can you honestly look them in the eye and tell them that it’ll be ok? And that you’re doing enough to protect their future?

Climate change is already resulting in more extreme weather events and if it reaches the tipping point that many scientists fear, our children will be living in a very different world from the one we grew up in. Lets’ be clear. Runaway global warming will be violent. Rising sea levels, acidified oceans, drought and extreme weather are violent disruptions that scientists predict will result in mass extinctions and massive displacement of people. I don’t want to dwell on the point, but it’s serious.

We have a rapidly closing window to make deep cuts in greenhouse emissions. At this point, we don’t just need a 10% renewable energy target. We don’t need people just to buy energy efficient light bulbs.

We certainly can’t pin our hopes on the pipe dream of cleaning coal. We need a radical and urgent transition plan to a green economy. We need to ban new coal fired power stations and coal mines.

We need a green development programme that will make the Marshall Plan look like a Sunday school picnic. The transition away from destructive industries and their replacement with efficient, sustainable alternatives needs to be the basis of the next industrial revolution.

And what do we have? We have our governments taking us in exactly the opposite direction. Trashing the Kyoto Protocol in a cynical attempt to undermine global action on climate change.

We have both major political parties supporting a massive expansion of the coal industry, with a doubling of the export capacity of Australia’s largest coal port in Newcastle. We have new coal mines opening up all over the country and a raft of new coal fired power stations on the drawing board. Meanwhile, renewable energy companies are packing up and heading overseas.

The disconnect between the reality of climate change and our political leadership is stark. We’ve sat through 20 years of inaction - making submissions to government processes, endlessly providing evidence and arguing the science. We need action, and we need it now!

After 20 years of inaction, it is clear that people power will be the only effective counterbalance to the vested interests of the coal and fossil fuel industry who are effectively writing climate change policy and who are threatening our future.

After 20 years of inaction, non-violent direct action increasingly becomes a moral duty.

There will be accusations of violence and of being ‘un-Australian’, and all sorts of abuse. And the thing we’ll need to remember is what is actually important. Life. And our children’s future. The consequences of the doing nothing on climate change are just far too devastating, violent and irresponsible to contemplate.

So Greenpeace will continue taking peaceful direct action as we have done for the past 30 years.

We invite you to join us.

John Hepburn
Energy Campaigner

This article appeared in the October 2007 issue of NOVA magazine.