A colleague asked me a deceptively simple question last week: Where do we keep our environmental activism history? Her friend had been part of the 2021 ‘water runs,’ delivering water filters to a majority-Aboriginal Gamilaraay/Gomeroi community suffering after the Barwon River in Victoria stopped flowing for nine months. This was solidarity in action, when the Sydney-based Aboriginal rights group FIRE (Fighting in Resistance Equally) and University of Sydney students successfully supported a vulnerable community directly suffering the impacts of the climate crisis.
Enacting solidarity—collaborative engagement by allies not directly suffering from injustice—can be really difficult for activists to do.[1] My colleague thought the example could teach others, but worried it was being lost to time. So where do these stories live, she wondered? Who records and preserves them? If it weren’t for one participant’s efforts to record the story in a student newspaper, this history would have slipped away.[2]
Of course, iconic protests face no such challenges. A media pack hungry for drama and novelty eagerly recorded the hundreds of people standing in front of bulldozers to block the damming of the Franklin River in Tasmania for a hydropower development. Children across the country are taught about this campaign, so much so that it is now part of Australian lore—protesters, rivers, rainforests; familiar heroes and villains.
But for every iconic campaign there are thousands more that fall through the cracks of history. When the flyers and posters are lost and the participants are forgotten, so too is our understanding about how our shared environmental history has been shaped by activism.
This tendency to forget also has deep implications for how we address the escalating climate crisis. Without archives, we must base our understanding of effective environmental activism on the stories that have been passed down; stories preserved because of media attention rather than because they offer complete lessons about what succeeds, what fails, and why…
The Visibility Problem
I set out about ten years ago to try and address this gap. As an activist, I’d sat in many planning meetings trying to figure out why our campaigns were failing. But as an academic, I’d learnt that success garners much more research than failure.[3]
That mismatch always struck me. Most activism is small, local, and volunteer-run, yet most research focuses on large, well-resourced groups like Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth. In part, that’s because the bigger organisations may excel at documentation and drawing outside media. By design, their campaigns become part of history the moment the cameras snap. This is not to say that other, smaller activist groups don’t create and maintain records, but these latter archives tend to be scattered in personal collections, community spaces, and lower-profile digital platforms, making it difficult for researchers and future activists to discover and learn from them. To redress that imbalance, in 2016 I began building a new kind of archive that also records the overlooked, misplaced, and undocumented history of activism. This was to be a place where campaigns and groups of all shapes and sizes, from every corner of Oceania, could be preserved and learned from.
This history is currently stored at www.theenvironmentalmovement.org. The site was inspired by the digital architecture of tools like SPLC’s ‘Hate Map‘ and Nonviolent Action Lab’s Crowd Counting, with data sourced from seminal texts such as Hutton & Conner’s History of the Australian Environment Movement, and the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine—an unparalleled resource for retrieving the lost digital footprints of grassroots organising.[4] Over the last decade, I and others have searched through time to locate forgotten groups, learn their issues, count their resources, track their communication platforms, and trace their networks. Through that work I’ve learnt that the vast majority of groups are entirely volunteer-run. Half of them work on just a local scale. And most of their campaigns fail in some way.
Who Gets to Define Activism?
This project has led to awards, grants, and collaborations, but it has also brought challenges, especially around definitions. What counts as a ‘campaign’? Or a ‘group’? These questions come up constantly. Some organisations describe a court case, a petition, or even an end-of-year donation appeal as a campaign. Others run one-off projects in response to a crisis—like delivering water filters to a community facing climate-induced shortages—but don’t call themselves environmental groups.
At first, I tried to adhere to the rigid pre-imposed definitions demanded by peer reviewers and funders. But eventually, I realised—the conclusion was inescapable—that definitions must follow the activism, not academic theory. Activism is dynamic and self-defined. If a group identifies its work as environmental, or if its members call an action a campaign, then that is what it is. Our tools and categories must evolve to reflect the world they aim to describe.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Failure
Focusing only on successful activism distorts our understanding of it. We celebrate the tactics that helped save the Franklin River, but rarely do we remember, let alone honour, the equally determined efforts to protect the many other rivers that were dammed. We remember tree-sits when they succeed, but forget campaigns for the forests that fell.
Our project—the Environmental Movement Research Hub—offers a different approach. Our database includes thousands of campaigns where the mine still got built, the forest was cleared, or the policy change never came. Uncomfortable truths—but ones we must face.
Acknowledging failure isn’t pessimism—it’s how we learn. Patterns are emerging: failed campaigns often lacked early legal advice, lost momentum after initial outrage, or never sparked enough outrage to begin with. Some were drowned out by fossil fuel narratives and money. Others simply lost the information war. There are as many ways to lose as to win.
The patterns we are finding reflect major theories of social change: groups with more resources may succeed more often (Resource Mobilisation Theory), access to political opportunities can shape protest strategies (Political Process Theory), and how issues are framed affects who mobilises (Framing Theory). Environmental history doesn’t just record the past—it can shape more effective activism in the future.
Building Better Tools
Creating more inclusive documentation means abandoning academic gatekeeping and embracing how activists define their own work. It also means looking beyond success. This requires systematic mapping—searching social media, local newspapers, council records, and community newsletters to find groups that would never appear in traditional databases. Everything is documented: the two-person group opposing a local development, the school environmental club, the Indigenous ranger program, the community garden collective.
But archiving history isn’t enough. The next stage is building tools to learn from it. For activists, the data reveals which tactics work. For researchers, it expands what counts as environmentalism. For funders, it exposes the vast volunteer infrastructure traditional funding models often miss.
The goal isn’t just better archives, it’s better activism. By documenting both victories and defeats, we create learning tools that help future campaigns avoid predictable pitfalls and build on tested strategies. Every failed campaign holds lessons if we’re systematic about capturing and sharing them. When we remember the water runs— not just the celebrated victories—we begin to count what truly matters.
[1] Shilu Tong, Jonathan M. Samet, Will Steffen, Patrick L. Kinney, and Howard Frumkin, “Solidarity for the Anthropocene,” Environmental Research, no. 235 (2023): 116716.
[2] Andy Mason, “Driving Water to Collarenebri,” Honi Soit, May 22, 2019.
[3] Robyn E. Gulliver, Cassandra Star, Kelly S. Fielding, and Winnifred R. Louis, “A Systematic Review of the Outcomes of Sustained Environmental Collective Action,” Environmental Science & Policy 133 (2022): 180–92.
[4] “Hate Map,” Southern Poverty Law Center; “Crowd Counting Consortium,” Ash Center; Drew Hutton and Libby Connors, History of the Australian Environment Movement (Cambridge University Press, 1999); “The Wayback Machine,” Internet Archive, https://archive.org.
[5] John D. McCarthy and Mayer N. Zald, “Resource Mobilization and Social Movements: A Partial Theory,” American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 6 (1977): 1212–41; David S. Meyer and Debra C. Minkoff, “Conceptualizing Political Opportunity,” Social Forces 82, no. 4 (2004): 1457–92; Robert D. Benford and David A. Snow, “Framing Processes and Social Movements: An Overview and Assessment,” Annual Review of Sociology 26, no. 1 (2000): 611–39.
* Cover Image: The earliest website archived on the Wayback Machine from Rising Tide Australia, 27 May 2005. https://web.archive.org/web/20050615142219/http://risingtide.org.au/
[Cover Image description: A clipping from the Rising Tide Australia’s website showing climate change activism events and actions, with a photo of protesters holding a “Coal Power = Climate Disaster” banner.]
Edited by Samia Cohen; reviewed by Josephine Goldman.