Each spoke about the successes, highlights, and challenges of working in environmental law and shared their personal connection to the fight for environmental justice including how they started their journey at EJA.
Emily recounted the incredible opportunity of bringing our forest protection court cases to trial in the Federal and Supreme Courts. Bronya shared her pride for the amazing coal pollution team’s work establishing EJA as leaders in tackling the enormous issue of toxic coal ash waste. Virginia spoke about how empowering and helping smaller community groups to prepare and make submissions has been her highlight since joining EJA earlier this year. And, Ariane talked to the power of our work exposing Adani’s international track record of non-compliance with the law.
Our panelists all work on different issues and in different ways. Emily and our forests team are expert litigators running court cases, Bronya’s coal ash work emphasises public advocacy – using our legal expertise to expose regulations that are failing to protect communities from pollution. The value of these different approaches was the subject of lively discussion but all of our panelists agreed that it’s the combination that is critical to our impact.
The panel made it clear that at Environmental Justice Australia we pack a pretty big punch for a small organisation competing with better-resourced opponents.
It was really wonderful to highlight the work of some of our team at EJA during our 2019 AGM. As we keep pushing for environmental justice around Australia — we intend to continue to keep our community of supporters updated every step of the way.