Tonight I went to an event to celebrate The Wilderness Society’s 50th birthday.

I heard about how the Wilderness Society was founded from grief and defiance after the failed campaign to defend Lake Pedder in Tasmania. Environmentalists came together after they’d lost the fight to prevent the glacial lake from being flooded. Instead of walking away, they decided to work together collectively to not lose the next battle.

When the next battle came — the battle to stop the Franklin Dam — they won. This campaign changed Australia’s history and formed The Wilderness Society.

The night also heard from Euan Ritchie about the shocking crisis of biodiversity in Australia and the fact that we know more about extinctions that happened in other countries a century ago than we do about extinctions that happened right here in Australia last year in 2025. The most recent species to go extinct in Australia was the Christmas Island Shrew.

I am profoundly sad that we are sleepwalking into such irreversible loss of unique life. The scale and speed is shocking and a profound failure.

What that really means is the loss of unique life and the cascading impact that extinctions have. The entire fabric of our shared ecosystems is being unravelled — with the climate crisis being the most existential unravelling of them all. This has awful impacts on our health but it affects the ecosystems that rely on the interconnected web of nature. The extinction of plants and animals impacts water, soil, the air, the climate and ultimately our own ability to sustain life.

The night finished with a fantastic update about the practical campaign that The Wilderness Society is running in Victoria. The Wilderness Society is fighting for the right of our tall forests to simply exist, to end all old-growth forest logging, which still happens on private land. Ending government-sanctioned and government funded logging in Victoria is a massive milestone, but it still continues.

It makes me think about why I support The Wilderness Society. Because of its radical history and radical present. Because it invests in community organising and harnessing people power. And because it recognises that even if we lost the last battle we can still win the next one.