BrookeOehm Smith

what I did about it

Activism

292 posts between 2006 and 2012, written while it still looked as though Australia might act.

Alongside the writing: IT and communications for Friends of the Earth, protests organised, and the chair of Boeing Australia's Environment Committee. Almost none of it worked, in the sense that the thing we were trying to prevent is now happening. It was still the correct use of those years.

The posts are left as they were written. The 2007 argument reads differently in 2026, and it should — editing it now would be a way of pretending I knew then what I know since.

2006 — 2012283 posts

Climate Action Brisbane

Six years of climate campaigning from Brisbane — policy, coal, emissions trading, and an argument that very nearly got somewhere.

Two hundred and eighty-three posts, and the shape of them is the story: seventy-three in the last months of 2006, one hundred and seventy-two in 2007, thirty-five in 2008, then almost nothing. 2007 was the year it looked like something might actually happen in Australia, and the blog ran hot. What followed was the long deflation.

The content is policy analysis, event announcements, calls to action and a running argument with the coal industry. The recurring tags are the fault lines of the period: clean coal, emissions trading, renewable energy, denial, and a politician who was Prime Minister at the time.

The last post is from July 2012 and is titled "Why the carbon tax will work". It did work, briefly, and was repealed two years later.

Worth reading

Read it on Blogspot

20079 posts

Protest Participation

Nine posts over nine weeks — a clearing house for campaign emails, so they could be forwarded once instead of to everyone individually.

The shortest of the four and the most specific. The premise is stated in the blog itself: rather than forward every petition and campaign email to friends one at a time, put them somewhere and let people come to them.

Avaaz on Wolfowitz and the World Bank, the Union of Concerned Scientists on Exxon, Care2 on fuel efficiency standards, WWF on tigers. It is a snapshot of the mid-2000s online campaigning ecosystem, most of which no longer exists in that form.

As a blog it is slight. As an artefact of how activism was organised in 2007, before social platforms absorbed the whole function, it is more interesting than its length suggests.

Worth reading

Read it on Blogspot

What happened next

The blogs wound down, the campaigns dispersed, and the emissions kept rising. The habit of looking at a system, reading the data, and arguing that the failure mode is already visible did not go anywhere — it just went back into the engineering.

The general blog this grew out of, and the technical notebook that came after it — another 53 posts — are on the writing page.