(Note that due to space, but not importance, much has not been covered, and there are gaps in this history that deserve filling.)
TASMANIA, THE MID-1980S. Environmental activists were celebrating the victory of the No Dams campaign, a massive blockade which led to the preservation of one of the world’s greatest wild and scenic natural rivers: the Franklin. But it soon became clear further actions would be needed to protect Tasmania’s wild lands. An upsurge in the market for woodchips meant the state’s native wet and dry eucalypt forests were being shredded into chips, with increasingly remote areas being logged using newly imported large industrial tractors, cable towers and other advanced means to denude a forest quickly. And there were plans afoot for native-forest clearfells within the future extensions to the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area; for Tasmanian environmental activists, saving these forests became their next target.
In the decade following the saving of the Franklin, clever, non-violent direct action (NVDA) blockade tactics bloomed all over Australia—many targeted at preventing roads entering into wilderness—including cementing vehicles into the road, tripods, and other simple-to-construct but hard-to-dismantle human blockades, engineered and installed often in severe conditions by small advance teams. But it was in Tasmania’s tall trees in particular that, of the many developments in blockading forest decimation, aerial activism in the form of tree-sitting would evolve as a standard blockading tool. And in terms of peaceful protest, what could be more peaceful than sitting in the canopy of dense mature native forests, temporarily thwarting the march of machines far below?
1986-1987: FARMHOUSE CREEK, SOUTHWEST FORESTS
Safety is a paramount objective of NVDA protesting. As a result, not all activists initially endorsed the idea of ascending, rigging, and occupying trees far off the ground,
