Welcome to the inaugural ePublication of Chain Reaction, (#1 2026).
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We hope you enjoy reading this first edition of Chain Reaction ePublication #1.
- The Chain Reaction Editorial Collection
Chain Reaction ePub #1 contents
- The strategy behind the Rising Tide blockades By Tessa Campisi
-
News from Friends of the Earth Australia
- Report on the Koalas of Won Wron and Mullungdung State Forests
- ANFA Conference (Nuclear Free Alliance)
- News from the FoE International network
- Book review - Treeshape by Trace Bella
- REader contribution
RISING TIDE: THE STRATEGY BEHIND THE BLOCKADE OF AUSTRALIA"S LARGEST COAL PORT.
Transcript of an interview by Tessa Campisi with Nick Wallis, Rising Tide community organiser; based in Naarm/Melbourne.
This was aired on 3CR, December 2025.
Photo credit: Friends of the Earth Act on Climate Collective
In November 2025, thousands of people across Southeastern Australia flocked to Muloobinba/Newcastle to join Rising Tide’s blockade of Australia's largest export coal port. This is the third year that Rising Tide activists have taken direct action to demand a just transition away from fossil fuels, making waves in the media both in Australia and internationally.
Behind these successes, there is a very intentional and detailed strategic plan. Tessa interviewed Nick to learn a little bit more about Rising Tide's organising principles.
Tessa: Can you tell me a bit about Rising Tide’s mission?
Nick: The mission is to build a powerful nonviolent movement to stop coal and gas corporations from destroying our planet, ignited by a landmark struggle at the world's largest coal port. There's three parts;
The first part is that there's a strong emphasis on non-violence in our movement, and it's partly strategic: it’s an effective way of running a movement and having an impact.
The second part is aiming to stop coal gas corporations. Our target is the fossil fuel industry; the coal and gas corporations that are fuelling the climate crisis.
The third part is ‘at the world's largest coal port’. Newcastle is the world's largest coal port: the coal that's exported from there is responsible for around 1% of global emissions.
Rising Tide hope to be able to use the struggle at the Newcastle to ignite what we've called ‘the landmark struggle’. Something that can bring some momentum to the climate movement. Something that can inspire people to get more involved and hopefully have some really significant wins for the climate movement.
Tessa: Nonviolent tactics, or ‘civil resistance’. Would you elaborate on what that looks like and why this is such an important part of Rising Tide?
Nick: Civil resistance goes way back. It's a term that was coined by Gandhi in the fight for independence from British rule. Civil resistance is non nonviolent. It's disruptive, escalatory, and involves acting outside of institutions and laws and unjust systems. In Gandhi's case, he was resisting a set of institutions and laws and unjust systems, namely the British colonial state. In our case, we are resisting a set of institutions, a set of laws, and a system that supports the fossil fuel industry. The climate movement in general has found that it's very difficult to get the kind of progress we need by acting within that system. The reason we're engaging in civil resistance, is to act outside of those laws, outside of those institutions to bring around social change.
Tessa: It's always interesting to look at these movements, how they're all part of the same story of resistance against oppressive structures and injustice.
‘Story-based strategy’ recognizes that humans understand the world not so much through facts and data points, but how this fits into narratives, with protagonists and symbolism and tension and drama. Rising Tide emphasizes the need to ‘win the story war’.
What is the narrative that Rising Tide is trying to shape, and how does this contest the ‘stories’ which perpetuate the status quo?
Nick: As you said, stories contain characters. We’re trying to set up a story so the characters on the side of the climate, within Rising Tide, are the characters that you want to see yourself being part of. Representing us as a diverse group of everyday Australians, who are opposed to a small elite group of people who are destroying the planet. At a very general level, that's the way that we're constructing our story.
What you said is absolutely right; that people often think about the world through narrative. The coal and gas corporations have done a great job of setting up narratives that have been effective in preserving their industry. One of those narratives is that the coal gas industries are really important for jobs in Australia. There's a couple of ways that you could try and resist that particular narrative.
One way is saying that's actually false. For example, the coal industry only employs ~ 0.2% of the population. But that's not an engaging story: it's accepting the idea that coal industry jobs should be preserved and then quibbling with them about the exact numbers.
Rising Tide’s story will replace the coal industry story. One of our key demands is a 78% tax on fossil fuel exports to go to funding a transition and new jobs for workers currently employed in fossil fuel industries. These are the people that will be left high and dry when the fossil fuel industry closes up in 10 years, or hopefully sooner.
This story accepts the importance of jobs, has an underlying assumption that the coal industry is ending, and that the fossil fuel industry is not appropriately preparing for this inevitable change. We’re countering the fossil fuel industry stories by introducing another really powerful story. It’s a more effective way of countering the narrative that they've used to prop up the fossil fuel industry. We use story to create an ‘us’ that's appealing and a ‘them’ that's isolated and unappealing.
This pro-worker story is really important because we do genuinely care about the people who are going to lose their jobs, and its an effective way of countering the strategy of the fossil fuel industry.
Tessa: This is part of Rising Tides strategy that I find really interesting and compelling is about minimizing and isolating the opposition, or the ‘villains’.
Nick: When we create the smallest possible ‘them’, we're aiming to isolate the people who are opposed to the action we need on climate change. About 25% of the population are alarmed by climate change and think that serious action needs to be done, and quickly. Then there’s a progression of views towards people who are just aware of it and concerned, then people who are undecided, through to people who think that it might be a problem but they're unsure, to people who just think it's really not an issue and we don't need to worry about it at all.
When we look to create the largest ‘us’ and the smallest ‘them’, we're looking to mobilize the people who are already on our side. The people who already think that there's something that needs to be done. The people on the far end of the spectrum, in opposition to us, who think there’s a climate change hoax, those people we want to isolate. There’s not much hope of engaging with them and getting to change their mind. So, the aim is to make them really small. In practice we want to be careful about who our targets are when we are telling these stories.
So our targets, for example, are not workers in the fossil fuel industry, right? These are people who are trying to put food on the table. Those people are not our enemies. They're not our opposition.
Similarly, the police are not our enemies. When we engage in civil resistance, or civil disobedience (a core part of our action strategy), the police are trying to restrict what we're doing. They're trying to arrest us. There are many members of Rising Tide who have really varied experiences with police, some of which are extremely negative. So there's reasons for us to have a negative stance towards the police. But adopting an antagonistic stance to towards the police actually ends up putting some of our activists and some of our more vulnerable members, such as people with disabilities, people of colour, or queer folk, at risk. Antagonise the police and we piss off a lot of the individuals that are operating in this system. That allows them to use their power in ways that we prefer they wouldn't use it. Once they're pissed off, they treat these people in some pretty horrible ways.
Rising Tide adopts a neutral stance towards the police. They're definitely not our friends, but our opposition are the people who run the fossil fuel corporations, the decision makers and the enablers in politics. Politicians who are still approving coal and gas expansions. Labor has approved ~33 new coal gas expansions since they came into power [as of November 2025]. Those are the people that we want to isolate. Those are the people who we want to make seem ‘small’. We want to make ourselves look as large and as powerful as possible.
Tessa: This flows quite well into another strategic framework underlying Rising Tide’s work, which is about momentum organizing and bringing more people into the movement. So, what exactly is momentum organizing, and what does it mean to build momentum?
Nick: Momentum organizing combines two models of community organizing. One is a structure-based model, where you slowly and incrementally build up. Community groups build power and build up connections to decision makers. You then eventually affect change on a specific issue.
Structure-based organizing can be contrasted with movement-based organizing. That's a mass mobilization model looking to get as many people as possible involved as quickly as possible. It's kind of explosive and disruptive in the way that it comes onto the scene.
The momentum model combines these two models to essentially try and bring some structure to a sort of very, very large social movement. That's what the model is in general.
In terms of what it means to have momentum in a movement; you want to be undertaking actions that build your momentum. We are constantly assessing whether the next action that we're about to do is actually going to build our power, or whether we're going to have to invest more energy than the momentum that we're going to get out of it.
Tessa: From where you stand, and you've been in the movement for over a year now, what evidence can you see of this increased momentum?
Nick: One thing is the attendance at the blockade. We had ~40% more registrations for the blockade, weeks out (of the event). When it came to the blockade itself, in 2024 ~173 people arrested and we turned around one coal ship, a big achievement.
This year [2025] there were 181 people arrested, (I think), and we turned around three coal ships. We shut down the port of Newcastle. That suggests that we're building our power, that we have more disruptive capacity now than we did at the same time last year.
Last year we trialled a two-day foundations training, introducing people to the principles of civil resistance and social movement theory that Rising Tide uses, and training people up in planning their own actions. We plan to keep rolling those trainings out and run these trainings around the country and run a dedicated direct action training camp in Newcastle.
There’s evidence that there's momentum building in terms of how effective our actions were at the blockade. We also have evidence that we're building our capacity to grow our movement.
Tessa: And what is the vision for what this momentum will look like when it's at its zenith?
Nick: When this momentum reaches its peak, we imagine reaching a stage of fully fledged civil resistance where the actions we have the power to take in Newcastle go beyond symbolically disruptive and start moving towards genuine economic disruption of the Port of Newcastle. At the moment we have one blockade every year, and we're looking at moving towards a disruption going on throughout the year with people coming from all over Australia, being trained up, and coming to Newcastle to stay for a couple of weeks, a couple of months, maybe some people who are pausing their studies or work to stay for a year and contribute to the campaign.
We imagine getting to a point where our disruption combines with economic pressures that the Port is under. It erodes the social license that the Port has in Newcastle and around Australia and we get to the point where the government is forced to negotiate with us to meet our three demands.
- to immediately cancel all new coal gas projects.
- to tax fossil fuel profits at 78%, and fund community and industrial transition away from the fossil fuel industry and pay for climate loss and damage.
- to end coal exports from Newcastle by 2030.
Tessa: Thank you so much for coming on the show and sharing with us, Nick.
If you would like to get involved with Rising Tide, you can connect with your local hub via the website: www.risingtide.org.au
This interview was originally broadcast on ‘Out of the Blue’ on 3CR community radio on 14/12/2025. Find other episodes on: 3cr.org.au/radioblue
Reproduced with the permission of 3CR and Tessa Campisi. Minor changes and omissions have been made to the transcript by the editor.
Photo credit: Friends of the Earth Act on Climate Collective
News from the FoE Australia network
Report on the Koalas of Won Wron and Mullungdung State Forests
This excerpt is from a longer report on the Strzelecki Koala population by Anthony Amis for the SKAT Collective, Friends of the Earth, Melbourne.
Between June 2020 and November 2025 Friends of the Earth conducted koala surveys at Mullungdung and Won Wron State Forests in south east South Gippsland, Victoria. These forests are in the Gippsland Plains Bioregion on the traditional lands of the Gunai/Kurnai people.
50 koala ‘hotspots’ or Primary Koala Habitat (>0.5 koalas/ha) have been identified by FoE. These hotspots total only 269.58ha or 0.9% of both Won Wron and Mullungdung State Forests, but account for 22% of koala numbers.
Mullungdung could qualify as an area of Regional Koala Significance (eg an area larger than 4,000-5,000 hectares capable of sustaining a koala population of 500 animals). Existing legislation in Victoria cannot protect the Strzelecki koala based on its unique genetics.
Victoria’s Flora and Fauna Guarantee Act does not allow listing a species based genetic diversity within a species, but the Federal EPBC Act does.
Strzelecki koalas in the nearby Strzelecki Ranges are facing a myriad of issues, including ongoing fragmentation of habitat and the devastating consequences of fire, storms, plantation logging and the privatisation of most of their habitat in the 1990’s. Tens of thousands of hectares of the Strzelecki Ranges are currently being converted to pine plantations. Recent estimates in Strzelecki Wet Forest in 2023 by Biolink revealed an estimated population 4 times less (9) than actual numbers estimated by the State Government.
Friends of the Earth proposes that all of Mullungdung and Won Wron State forests are added to the State’s reserve system.
Link to the full report
The Australian Nuclear Free Alliance ANFA
Photo credit: ANFA, supplied by Friends of the Earth Anti Nuclear Collective.
ANFA is a network of Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal people and groups concerned about existing or proposed nuclear developments in Australia, particularly on Aboriginal homelands. FoE supported members of the FoE Nuclear Free Collective to attend ANFA in 2025.
The 2025 ANFA meeting in the beautiful Flinders Ranges (Nukumu Country) was very positive and heartening. It is so powerful to share stories and celebrate wins together over a fire and a cuppa. This year saw a new generation of anti-nuclear activists organising the meeting and joining the Committee. This new wave of energy, talent and dedication is a great way to consolidate ANFA’s past to help build our future. There are always lots of challenges and complexities but ANFA is well placed to keep the nuclear free fire burning brightly.
Look at the Jim Green article on the ANFA site.
Anfa attendees – 2025 meeting Flinders Ranges.
Statement link: https://anfa.org.au/anfa-2025-meeting-statement/
NEWS: Friends of the Earth International
ASIA PACIFIC
Why Environmental Justice Movements Must Confront Militarism and Empire
Jun 22, 2026
For many years, movements have spoken about the connections between ecological destruction, extractivism, colonialism, and economic exploitation. Yet the scale of violence unfolding today demands renewed clarity and collective action. The destruction of lives, communities, and ecosystems across the region is not occurring in isolation.
In response to these developments, Friends of the Earth International and allied movements issued a collective position condemning militarism, imperial aggression, and the ongoing devastation inflicted on people and the planet. For many in our network, this marked an important moment of political unity: a shared commitment to speak out together against the interconnected crises threatening communities across the Global South.
To deepen these conversations, Friends of the Earth Asia Pacific convened a webinar bringing together movement leaders and environmental justice advocates from across the region. The discussion explored how war, militarism, ecological destruction, and economic domination are deeply intertwined—and why building a just and sustainable future requires confronting all of them together.
For a full transcript: Why Environmental Justice Movements Must Confront Militarism and Empire | Voices from FoE Asia Pacific
Image Credit: Elena Mozhvilo on Unsplash
EUROPE
We want our land, our water - our Justice
03/06/2026
We are witnessing the dark side of the so-called “green transition”: Frantic mining exploration in protected areas without respecting the local communities’ needs and opinions.
In Mina Doade in Galicia, Spain. local communities and groups have been flagging serious concerns over water resources, biodiversity and public participation since 2020.
“So-called ‘green mining’ does not exist”, they tell us. “What does exist is the elimination of our natural and cultural heritage. What exists is the pollution of our water – the water we drink, the water we bathe in, and the water that irrigates and gives life. What exists is the destruction of agriculture, livelihoods, and our future. The company has no permit from us to build its lithium mine on our ground.”
This case and similar ones recently led to a fervent controversy between the European Parliament and Commission.
Deals behind closed doors
In Galicia, Portugal and elsewhere, communities are already contesting mining projects that threaten their water, air, and livelihoods. The process of selecting “Strategic projects” is opaque. Sustainability assessments are hidden, environmental data is withheld, and decision rationales are not disclosed under the pretext of business-sensitive information and “security” reasons.
Friends of the Earth Europe, amongst other groups, have repeatedly requested access to environmental information and public participation in decision-making (as required under EU access to documents legislation and the Aarhus Convention), also in an official letter to EU Commissioners. However, the European Commission consistently refused to disclose technical assessments and internal documents, stating reasons related to public security and the protection of economic and commercial interests. Now, some MEPs are speaking out publicly, forcing the Commission to put the cards on the table.
Inhabitants of Doade, Galicia, threatened by a "strategic" mining project. Image credit (C) SOS Suido Seixo
To read more: Galician community threatened by mining: We want our land, our water – and justice
UNITED STATES
Lease Sale Seeks to Transform Arctic National Wildlife Refuge into a Fossil Fuel Industrial Zone
June 5, 2026
ANCHORAGE, Alaska – The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) today announced results from a sweeping oil and gas lease sale in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge – the third oil and gas lease sale held in the Refuge.
The only companies willing to bid in the Coastal Plain were the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority (AIDEA) and Hex LLC, an Alaska company. Neither has any experience drilling in the Arctic.
The new leasing still poses significant threats to habitat, iconic wildlife, and Indigenous ways of life in one of the nation’s most wild and beautiful landscapes. All of the leases are in important polar bear habitat.
The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge was first protected under President Dwight Eisenhower in 1960 as the Arctic National Wildlife Range and later designated the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge by President Jimmy Carter. The Refuge spans 19.3 million acres. On the northern coast lies the Coastal Plain, the biological heart of the Refuge that contains 1.56 million acres of tundra, braided rivers, and wetlands. The Coastal Plain provides essential habitat for polar bears, caribou, and millions of migratory birds. It is exceedingly sensitive to disturbance and slow to recover.
Following are statements in response to today’s lease sale from plaintiffs and Earthjustice:
“Drilling in the Arctic Refuge is reckless, and the market keeps confirming it. It is a remote, fragile landscape that is expensive to drill and risky to bet on, and no amount of pressure from Washington changes that. We should not be putting this delicate habitat on the line for an oil patch that does not exist.” Bobby McEnaney, Director, Land Conservation, NRDC.
“It is absolutely reckless to continue down a path that overlooks the irreversible damage of the Arctic by the Trump Administration and Big Oil.” Raena Garcia, Senior Energy Campaigner for Friends of the Earth.
To read more: Lease Sale Seeks to Transform ANWR into Fossil Fuel Zone
BOOK REVIEW
Treeshape by Trace Balla.
ISBN 9781761181252 . Published 03 / 03 / 2026; Allan and Unwin. Binding Hardcover. Pages 136.
Art reproduced with permission.
Review by Danella Connors
What a gift Trace’s book Treeshape is!
It is part autobiographical, part memoir, part adventure story, part map, part wisdom teaching and total invitation.
Not only about trees, it is also a story acknowledging First Peoples, of Country, displacement and creating home, of activism, of loss and regeneration. And mostly a story of staying true to your own heart and all that you hold deep.
Perhaps at it’s heart, it is also mostly a mother’s love story for her son.
To me, this is definitely a book for all. For the child, the teen, the adult, the aunt, the uncle the grandparent, the grumpy neighbour and the favourite one who lives down the street. As they live either in us or amongst us.
To my heart, this book needs to be held by community. Be that family, village, the tribe, or another other collective. Give it time, give it space and allow the deeper conversations and explorations to percolate through and be shared. Answer the inevitable questions of the child. Enquire of your own understanding and connection. Lean in and find out more where needed. Can the complex like uranium mining, be shared simply and intelligently from elder to group, from adult to child.
All is made very palatable and easily digestible through Trace’s beautiful graphic form and style. Take a seat amongst your young ones and explore just one open page at a time. Give time for their experiences and stories to come forward. Let it shape attitudes and carry you all forward with deeper understanding, and greater commitment to the places in your own life, where you share love with the natural world.
Illustration from Treeshape by Trace Balla
Illustration from Treeshape by Trace Balla
READER CONTRIBUTIONS
ePublication #1 2026
Publisher - Friends of the Earth, Australia
Chain Reaction ABN 81600610421
FoE Australia ABN 18110769501
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