Why I joined the Greens
I grew up as the fourth of eight children in a very Catholic, very patriarchal family. My family prayed a lot, attended lots of masses and some more, but discussion of politics and sex and religion were pretty non-existent Thankfully my horizons expanded when I went to university. I did science because I wanted to contribute towards providing food for people, but I was exceptionally naïve and ecologically illiterate. I tended to think that people who talked about the environment did not care about starving people. But at the same time I was also someone who was aware of how silence can let bad things flourish and I wanted not to fail to speak out when I should (and while I could).
Fast forward a few years and my first real interaction with the Greens occurred when I attended Queensland government biotechnology forum, in about 1996. I recognized Bob Brown as a politician but did not know his name. Thankfully he introduced himself. We listened to a seminar promoting genetically modified food crops, and afterwards Bob asked me how I felt about it. I owned that I felt uncomfortable about it even though the presented logic seemed fine. He seemed to agree. His question stayed with me for a few days until I found my own resolution – that the underlying framing of the seminar was not good. But Bob’s question stayed with me also because I realized that in my life prior to that, people had not tended to ask me how I felt about anything. It is such a respectful thing to allow another person to have their own feelings.
Within a couple of years, while still an academic at QUT in Brisbane I was co-teaching an introductory subject in environmental management with Drew Hutton. I was thrown in the deep end teaching this subject and I covered text-book style matters related to environmental management while Drew brought all of the matters to life and demonstrated that the environmental management principles and theories were all fine and good, but then there was the real world. It was only within the last decade that I discovered that Drew was involved in both The Greens and Lock The Gate Alliance – both organisations which I had come to know and greatly respect.
I have muddled my way through my adult life with a passion for ecological sustainable development developed through my studies and then teaching at QUT. I have been involved in various protest/community matters wherever I have lived in minor ways, but then in Wollongong I became involved in campaigning against further coal mining in the Sydney Drinking Water Catchment. I felt compelled to do what I was doing though it often seemed futile. I discovered that local Greens were the only people trying to help community on this and other matters. My poor family had been on the ride alongside me, massively supportive – and were also learning political lessons alongside me. I was not a member of The Greens though I had started handing out for The Greens. Up to that time I had appreciated being able to talk to any politician and be my own unaffiliated self. But then my son Dylan became a Greens member and soon afterwards when no-one else nominated for the federal election, became the Greens Cunningham candidate. I joined the Greens following his example (after discovering the four Greens principles aligned so well with my own) to support him and others who put their hands up to try to change the politics and the system for the better.
Deidre Stuart