I was sitting on my Northern Tablelands property when the news broke that the Federal Government was finally reforming our quarter-century old nature laws. The same property where I started researching soil health and water cycling back in 2000, desperately trying to understand what was happening to the landscape I knew so well. I had been watching the climate crisis unfold every day, right here in front of me, in the ground beneath my feet.
On November 27, 2025, the Senate passed historic reforms to Australia's environmental laws. After 25 years of fighting for this moment, I should have felt relief. Instead, I feel a new fierce urgency. We've won the framework, but the fight for implementation, and for the future who will inherit the world, is just beginning.
Our governments have failed young people over the last 30 years. I've been watching every minute: the millennium drought, the catastrophic fires, the devastating floods. I've watched ribbon gums dying across Eastern Australia and heard from friends who have watched coral bleaching devastate Ningaloo and the Great Barrier Reef.
In 2018-19, when two years without rain forced me to abandon my organic farming operation, I realised even my best efforts to build climate resilience weren't enough.
The increase in carbon emissions over the past 60 years is about 100 times faster than previous natural increases. So much of that has happened since we knew about the dangers of climate change. Humans have been around for 300,000 years and in just 30 years of willful ignorance, we've decimated a livable planet.
The deal between Labor and the Greens establishes Australia's first federal Environmental Protection Agency with genuine authority. We'll finally have National Environmental Standards, significantly increased penalties, and tests to prevent projects causing environmental decline or irreversible harm.
But the biggest win is removing the exemption for native forest logging under regional forest agreements. Within just under 18 months, these operations must comply with national standards. Exemptions that facilitated forest destruction for a quarter century will finally close.
This matters more than most people know. Forests aren't just scenery. They are essential infrastructure for water cycling and cooling. When you lose the canopy, you heat the ground up and all the animals used to a cool forest floor suffer. I've watched entire areas around Bundara and Armidale dying: not individual trees, but entire ecosystems collapsing.
Some experts say the only hope in hell we've got of cooling things down is enough healthy landscape with good soil and vegetation to prevent heat reflection. We must not only protect everything we've got; we must start enhancing our landscape.
The laws aren't perfect. The Greens secured removal of coal and gas from fast-tracked approvals but didn't get a climate trigger. We know very well climate change drives environmental destruction. Just look at coral bleaching or South Australia's algal bloom. Large emitting projects will disclose emissions but won't necessarily be rejected.
After five years of stalled progress, compromise was necessary. But we can't let the Albanese government treat this as mission accomplished.
I've been advocating for a "biophilic revolution", the term Singapore used when greening the city in the 1960s. I want to see that commitment across Australia. Because we're not just protecting what's left, we need to actively regenerate landscapes.
We've lost our small water cycling through decades of nature loss, and it's as important as the global climate system for survival. We need everyone, city dwellers and farmers alike, rolling up their sleeves, planting, protecting soil, enhancing landscapes. People are looking for direction and purpose. This should be it.
I meet young people questioning whether to have children because they're worried about the environment. An entire generation is weighing whether to bring kids into a world where trees are dying, reefs are bleaching, and governments spent three decades looking the other way.
I look at young people working hard to make a future for themselves and think: How could we let you down? These laws are for future generations. They're the foundation that should have been built decades ago. They're protection for koalas, greater gliders, and countless species depending on healthy forests. They're about ensuring young people don't inherit a continent of dying trees and bleached reefs.
For 25 years, I longed to see a government that wouldn't deny climate science take power and act seriously. Now we have a Labor government that's delivered reformed nature laws. That's worth celebrating.
But Murray Watt and this government need to ask: do you want to be responsible for losing another 10 years through poor implementation and weak enforcement? Because if we do, we're not going to make it.
Climate change and environmental destruction aren't abstract future threats. They're killing ecosystems as you read this. The trees on my property are still dying. The reefs are still bleaching. We don't have another decade to waste on weak implementation.
But wouldn't it be beautiful if this was the moment when young people could say, "Oh, actually, we're going the right direction"? Everyone out there planting, old fossil fuel sites getting rehabilitated, landscapes being rehydrated and cooled?
Now, finally, we have the legal framework we need. The hard work of implementation begins now, and we can't let up the pressure for a single moment. When nature suffers, people suffer. This is a reset. The government now has the responsibility to protect forests, wildlife, people, and the future generations who deserve better than the 30 years of failure we've given them so far.
Glenn is a farmer and climate advocate from the Northern Tablelands who has been researching soil health, water cycling, and climate impacts since 2000.
