What if the Franklin river hadn’t been saved?
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| Mass civil disobedience saved Tasmania's Franklin River - it might not have fared so well today. |
Stopping the Gordon-below-Franklin dam was one of the Australian environment movement’s great victories: in the late 1970s, the state-owned Hydro-Electric Commission wanted to flood one of three last temperate rainforests in the southern hemisphere to create a power station.
About 33km of the Franklin, a pristine wild river home to breathtaking ravines and rapids, and surrounded by untouched Huon pine and myrtle beech forest, would have drowned. After years of heated debate, pro-dam Liberal Robin Gray took power in 1982 and passed legislation allowing construction to begin. What happened from there was partly down to luck and timing, but could not have been achieved without one of Australia’s most successful acts of mass civil disobedience.
Read Lenore Taylor’s story from The Guardian - “‘The Franklin would be dammed today': Australia's shrinking environmental protections.”
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