Just weeks before unprecedented wildfires broke out across Australia, killing an estimated 1 billion animals, the prime minister declared that the country faced a terrible threat: environmental protesters.



“A new breed of radical activism is on the march,” Prime Minister Scott Morrison said in a November speech. He added that there was a “place for peaceful protests,” but he wasn’t going to stand for environmentalists obstructing and delaying mining projects or calling for boycotts of banks that finance the country’s coal industry.

He promised to find a way to “successfully outlaw these indulgent and selfish practices that threaten the livelihoods of fellow Australians.”

The wildfire crisis began — and Morrison went on vacation in Hawaii — before the prime minister could advance any anti-protest measures, but he wasn’t making an idle threat. State lawmakers had already passed a new law targeting environmental protesters, which allows officers to search activists without a warrant and criminalizes the use of locking devices that make it hard for police to remove protesters during a sit-in. This fell short of what some state lawmakers from Morrison’s ruling coalition had hoped; they had also proposed prison sentences for people arrested more than once during protests.

Morrison’s promise to quell environmental protesters in Australia is part of a global trend. Being an environmentalist has long been dangerous — at least 164 activists worldwide were killed in 2018, according to the NGO Global Witness. Many more were threatened, arrested, or slapped with lawsuits by corporations hoping to tie them up in court.

As the climate crisis intensifies, so are environmental protests. And many places — even countries with strong free-speech protections — are increasingly casting environmental activists as a new kind of extremist and using broader powers to punish and marginalize them.

Almost 100 prosecutions were documented worldwide against environmentalists or activists defending community land rights from corporate interests last year by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. Ana Zbona, a project manager at the center, told BuzzFeed News that such prosecutions were most common in countries like Peru, Russia, and the Philippines, but said it was rapidly becoming more common in the US.



“It doesn’t matter if you’re in Nicaragua or the US, powerful people want to stop you. And the government is prepared to help,” said Carla Garcia Zendejas, director of the people, land, and resources program at the Center for International Environmental Law in Washington. “And they don't just use brute force — governments use the rule of law and create the legitimate legal backing to put people in jail because you’ve equated environmental protesters with terrorists.”

The movement against anti-mining protesters in Australia was prompted last year by a bitter fight in Queensland over a planned new coal mine that is projected to become one of the largest in the world. The Carmichael mine is slated to be active for the next 60 years, and a scientific analysis found that it could produce coal that would add an estimated 77 million tons of carbon dioxide on average each year over the life of the project, more than all automobiles on Australian roads in 2016.

Australian environmental activists view the project as a serious threat at a time when the UN says nations must be making drastic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions to stop catastrophic warming. As the project has advanced, protesters have engaged in acts of civil disobedience, including suspending themselves above railway lines or chaining themselves to cement-filled drums to block rail lines. They have also used boycotts to pressure companies linked to the project to back out. The Morrison government — which has close ties to the coal industry — has responded by vilifying protesters with help from news outlets that are part of Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire.

The biggest change that Morrison wants to make to federal laws isn’t to punish people for street protests — that’s regulated by the state governments — but rather to make it a crime to call for boycotts of companies involved in supporting mining projects, a tactic known as “secondary boycotts.” One major boycott and protest target of opponents of the Carmichael coal mine has been Siemens, a German engineering firm that is building the signaling system to transport coal from the mine.