Bob Brown's credo is 'one person, one vote, one value, one planet’. In 1976 Bob hosted the first meeting of the (Australian) Wilderness Society at his home beside the Liffey River in Tasmania. In 1990 friends helped him set up Bush Heritage Australia which now protects one million hectares of high-conservation lands across Australia.
Bob was in the Tasmanian Parliament from 1983 to 1993. He led the five Greens in the balance of power after 1989 when the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area was doubled in size.. Besides being jailed for 17 days during the Franklin River blockade in 1982, Bob was locked up for 11 days, and strip-searched five times in 1995 for joining a blockade of bulldozers invading the Tarkine wilderness. He has been shot at, beaten up and vilified by vigilantes.
Bob’s books include Lake Pedder (1984), Tarkine Trails (1993), Memo for a Saner World (2003), Earth (2009), Optimism (2014) and THERA (2023). In 2022 Bob and Paul took part in The Giants, a feature film about forests.
The Bob Brown Foundation, set up after Bob left the Senate in 2012, is a vigorous national environmental group which takes peaceful direct action to stop environmental vandalism. Its flagship campaigns are to protect Tasmania’s Takayna rainforest and to end native forest logging nationwide. BBF is working to end fish farm feedlots in the seas and to protect Antarctica, its krill and marine ecosystems.