Uncle Jimmy Everett-puralia meenamatta by Ramji Ambrosiussen for Bob Brown Foundation.
We welcome submissions from Indigenous activists and researchers, forest protectors, scholar-activists, collectives and creatives, and others working with the forest, environmental and ecological justice movements. Submit expressions of interest here.
Our upcoming themed issue focuses on forests and forest struggles across the continent.
Send us your abstract or pitch by Friday 20 December.
Green Agenda publishes essays and non-fiction writing with forceful political and theoretical analysis, we also welcome contributions such as interviews, book reviews, creative and visual projects, and more.
Reimagining the world, from the forest
Our relationship with forests has reached an impossible point. The climate crisis, deforestation, and accelerating biodiversity loss reveal how conventional and state-backed approaches to “forest management” rooted in colonial and extractivist paradigms were never tenable. Reimagining our world from the forest is a necessity.
What does forest defence, restoration, and restitution look like for there to be a future? How must forest-struggles re-world our world?
Forests are kin and ancestors for Indigenous and peasant communities. Forests are not merely resources to be exploited nor collections of trees. But breathing beings that sustain life, biodiversity, climates, and worlds – embracing cultural and spiritual undergrounds making up the green fabric of existence.
Last year’s announcement bringing forth “the end of native forest logging” in Victoria in January 2024 was initially celebrated as a victory by the forest movement. But recent events have shown that the reality on the ground remains alarming. Reports of continued logging masked as “bushfire prevention”, “fire management” or “storm recovery” reveal the urgent need for the critique and abolition of conventional “forest management” practices and patriarchies. Unregulated logging on private land continues apace.
Meanwhile across New South Wales, Tasmania and Queensland state sanctioned logging and extinction continues. Western Australia is also experiencing new threats, despite the “end of native forest logging” there too. This reality rehearses the colonial patterns of dispossession and ecological destruction that have long plagued Indigenous Country and communities.
Against the threats from the logic of capital, short-sighted governmental policies, and climate change, we move to stand with planetary health, eco-feminist life, and decolonial futures. Central to this reimagining of the world, from the forest, is the transformation enacted by Indigenous sovereignties and grounded ecological knowledges of the forest and its ecosystems.
For this issue of Green Agenda, we invite contributors to explore the multiple realities of forests in our struggles for ecological justice, decolonial futures, economic and social justice, and Indigenous sovereignty in so called Australia. We seek contributions that challenge the commodification of nature and narrate forest futures where forests as living beings are once more understood as integral to our collective wellbeing and survival.
We are particularly inspired by the spirited actions of Uncle Jimmy Everett-puralia meenamatta, a palawa elder arrested for protesting against old-growth logging in the Styx Valley. Uncle Jimmy’s forest-resistance echoes the ongoing struggles of Indigenous peoples across the world. From the Maroons in the Caribbean who created autonomous societies in mountain forests resisting colonial powers, to the Marind people of West Papua fighting against the encroachment of oil palm plantations through new forms of forest kinship, the truth of Country and Forest or “sylvan sovereignty” is everywhere. Uncle Jimmy’s defiance will not only upend logging practices in lutruwita/Tasmania, but in doing so also challenges colonial jurisdiction. The very idea of Australia as a white possession is overturned while Uncle Jimmy invites us to join in the reworlding that forest sovereignty brings about, with Country, ecology and decolonised belonging.
Across the state of Victoria, the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung and the Taungurung people in the Central Highlands, the Dja Dja Wurrung people in central Victoria, and the Gunnai/Kurnai people in Gippsland, have all led fundamental forest struggles. Further east, the Bidwell-Maap have sustained decades of resistance against forest destruction in East Gippsland, with elders like Uncle Clayton Harrison, Uncle Bevan Harrison and Uncle Albert Hayes affirming sovereignty and opposing the ruin of Country through logging. Their direct actions at Goolengook, Survey Road, and the Bidwell Reserve near Errinundra have shown how logging proceeds without consultation or consent on unceded Country. Together with Gunnai/Kurnai and Monero peoples, their struggles reveal how forest defence is inseparable from Indigenous sovereignty.
Indigenous sovereignty, decision-making power and deepening forms of allyship across the ecological justice movements are essential to any genuine forest protection. As Gunnai/Kurnai, Gunditjmara and Djab Wurrung woman Lidia Thorpe and Anica Niepraschk wrote back in 2019, addressing the environmental movement, “there will be no ecological justice in Australia without its First People”. Indigenous relations with Country don’t simply defend trees but nurture old and new possibilities for planetary becoming.
The forest movement in Victoria has itself been a constellation of resistance. At this intersection, the Victorian Forest Alliance (VFA) has emerged as a key force for action and imagination, working alongside or coordinating with organisations such as The Wilderness Society (TWS), the Victorian National Parks Association (VNPA), and groups like Friends of the Earth (FoE), Environment East Gippsland, Wildlife of the Central Highlands (WOTCH) and GECO (Goongerah Environment Centre), among many others nurturing resistance against the machinery of extraction and dispossession.
Through these alliances, Indigenous communities, researchers, and forest defenders have also exposed how forests in what we now know as Australia have become part of the global deforestation front, wounds in the planetary fabric, positioned alongside the threatened forests of the Amazon and Congo basins. The vital witness-work of many has exposed how the state and bureaucratic language of “management” and “prevention” often masks ongoing violence against forest life.
We have also learnt from ongoing forest struggles beyond so called Australia. There urban spaces interact with and impact forested areas. The case of Bondy Forest in the eastern suburbs of Paris shows how racialised communities within northern metropoles find refuge and resistance in wooded spaces. These forests of resistance don’t simply challenge the binary between “urban” and “natural” environments but remake space and futures through forest struggle.
As we grapple with these commitments to forest-struggle, it is palpable, once more, that forests have never been static entities, but dynamic vitalities embracing human and more-than-human life. Country and sylvan sovereignty invite us to consider how forest-struggles should mobilise not just communities but also other-than-human species whose lives depend on these ecosystems. The demands for multispecies justice emerging within, also challenge us to think beyond anthropocentric notions of rights and justice, towards broader understandings of forest life, expansive ecosystems, roots, threads and foliage, and life, and the possibility that our place was always there, within the green fabric of existence.
For this issue, we welcome grounded writing and creative work that engages with these themes and contemporary forest struggles across so called Australia.
Who can contribute?
We work with social justice, antiracist, and ecological commitments, and in favour of Indigenous sovereignty. We welcome contributions from all who share an interest in exploring ideas that are consistent with and explore left, progressive, and environmental thought and its contemporary relevance.
We especially welcome contributions by Indigenous and racialised writers, forest protectors and activists, researchers, artists, and community organisers seeking to deepen our understanding of forests and place, Country, ecology, democracy, politics, and justice.
Payment
Green Agenda is a project of the Green Institute, a not-for-profit. Green Agenda receives no ongoing funding. We rely on donations to help pay for contributions. Donate here now. We offer up to $300 per piece to our authors as a contribution to the writing or making of their work.
About Green Agenda
Green Agenda is an online journal and project dedicated to publishing and working with grounded forms of writing – writing by people and from places, projects, and communities, where transformative or prefigurative change is already at play, across so-called Australia and the region.
Our work, like that of the green movement around the world, is underpinned by a commitment to ecological sustainability, social and economic justice, peace and nonviolence, and participatory democracy.
Carlos Morreo
Editor, Green Agenda
Naarm/Melbourne
Feature image: Uncle Jimmy Everett-puralia meenamatta by Ramji Ambrosiussen for Bob Brown Foundation.