From the Local to the Global and Back Again: The Rainforest Information Centre and Transnational Environmental Activism in the 1980s

Abstract

This chapter provides a history of Australia’s Rainforest Information Centre (RIC) and explores its role in building a global environmentalist network during the 1980s. The formation, role, and work of the RIC is linked to characteristics of the alternative rural community from which it emerged, as well as scientific research and activist experience acquired during campaigns and blockades to protect forests in New South Wales. The nature of diffusion regarding environmental research, music, organisational forms, and repertoires of protest between Australian activists, rural communities in the Solomon Islands, and members of Earth First! and the Rainforest Action Network in the United States is also analysed.