On a cold winter morning in the Jarrah forest east of Perth, Daniel Garlett walks slowly along a firebreak, stopping often. He gestures to the ground, the leaf litter, fungi, and the soft give of soil underfoot, then lifts his hand toward the canopy above. The trees are tall and widely spaced, their trunks marked by old burns. Light filters through in long shafts.

“This is a living system”, he says. “Not trees. A system”.

Garlett is a Noongar cultural educator and community advocate who has spent decades opposing logging, mining, and large-scale land clearing in Western Australia’s forests and catchments. He lives here because he says he cannot live anywhere else. The quiet, the canopy, and the smell of damp earth after rain are not amenities. They are conditions of life.

As we walk, Garlett speaks not in slogans but in obligations. Country, he explains, is not something people own or manage. It is something they belong to. “Country speaks for us”, he says. “And because it gives us so much, we have a responsibility to give back”.

That responsibility does not switch off. Environmental defence, for Garlett, is not episodic. It is continuous. This constancy, the fact that the work never ends, defines both his commitment and its emotional cost.

A question that never left

Garlett grew up in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt, a landscape profoundly reshaped by land clearing. His parents and grandparents, he says, were hard-working people who laboured on farms. As a child, he remembers waking from dreams in which forests still stood, then looking out to find paddocks where they should have been.

“I’d wake up and say, the trees were here last night”. he recalls. “Where have they gone?”

The question stayed with him. Over time, it became a reckoning with loss, responsibility, and the burden of caring for places that cannot speak in parliamentary hearings or environmental impact statements, but speak constantly to those who know how to listen.

Garlett’s work eventually took him into schools, prisons, psychiatric wards, universities, and international forums. He has spent decades involved in native title and heritage assessment processes, and has worked alongside scientists and lawyers as well as Elders and local residents. He understands the science. He understands the law. He also understands how often both are overridden, or reduced to procedure.

What is rarely acknowledged in environmental debates is not only the political or scientific labour involved in this work, but the emotional and psychological labour. This is the cumulative weight of grief, restraint, and responsibility involved in carrying Country while explaining its destruction to others.

The forest as a body

Garlett does not talk about the Jarrah forest as a collection of trees. He talks about it as a living system that includes everything above and below ground. The soil. The roots. The insects. The small mammals, reptiles, and birds. The fungi and microbial life that bind the forest together.

Most people, he says, see the forest in parts. He sees it as one organism.

He reaches down and lifts a handful of damp leaf litter, as if to show what is usually invisible. The fine network of life underfoot is easy to ignore until it is disturbed. Then it is not only trees that are lost, but the relationships that make a forest a forest.

Garlett uses a simple analogy. If a person cuts off a finger, it does not grow back. The damage is not reversible just because the wound closes. He speaks in a similar way about forest destruction, about the confidence with which governments and companies talk about rehabilitation and regrowth.

“There’s no way of regrowing stuff like that”, he says, meaning the long-developed complexity of Country. In his view, you can plant trees, but you cannot quickly rebuild the whole system that once existed.

The labour of translation

Much of Garlett’s emotional labour lies in translation. He is asked, again and again, to compress complex cultural relationships into the language of approvals, assessments, and consultation records.

Environmental approval processes require First Nations people to translate lived knowledge into reports and checklists. Elders speak carefully. Companies commission assessments. Recommendations are recorded. Projects proceed.

“It doesn’t matter what they say”, Garlett reflects. “It’s just part of the process”.

The effect is corrosive. People are asked to participate in procedures that offer the appearance of listening while stripping those contributions of power. Over time, this produces exhaustion and a sense of futility that is difficult to articulate but hard to ignore.

Garlett speaks of the loneliness of being one of very few Indigenous voices consistently present at forest rallies and public meetings. “Out of 38,000 Noongars,” he says, “sometimes it feels like I’m the only one”.

That isolation is not the result of apathy. It is structural. Poverty, precarity, and cooptation shape who can afford to resist. Heritage work pays poorly. People take it because they need the income. Others keep their heads down because they cannot afford the attention. Sustained resistance requires time, emotional energy, and a willingness to be uncomfortable. These are luxuries unevenly distributed.

Still, Garlett keeps showing up.

At rallies in Perth’s hills suburbs, he often stands just off to the side. Families arrive with children in raincoats. Elderly bushwalkers lean on poles. Cyclists roll up with helmets still on. A few people carry hand-painted signs. Many more come with nothing but a sense that something is slipping away.

People approach Garlett quietly. They thank him. They ask questions. He listens. He reassures. He explains.

Environmental advocates, particularly Indigenous advocates, are expected to perform calmness. They are expected to educate politely, persuade patiently, and remain generous under pressure. Garlett understands this expectation intimately.

“I love these people for it”, he says of the non-Indigenous allies who walk alongside him. “They’re doing something sacred”.

But the requirement to remain composed and emotionally available while witnessing ongoing damage to places that hold deep cultural and spiritual meaning extracts a cost that is rarely named. It is the cost of carrying grief in public and translating it into language that will be tolerated.

Garlett also carries what he has seen elsewhere. “I go in and out of prisons and mental health wards”, he says. He describes how the loss of forest and the loss of connection to Country show up in people’s bodies and minds, not as ideology but as distress.

“The lack of forest is detrimental to people’s mental health,” he says. “We know this now”.

Still, when environmental concerns are raised, they are often dismissed as emotional or anti-development. The labour of justifying grief becomes another form of work.

Living with the impacts

Garlett chose to live in the Jarrah forest because proximity matters. He has lived in the city before, but moved further into the hills over time. The forest offers spirituality and connection in a world that often feels hectic and transactional.

When he talks about connecting to Country, he turns the usual phrasing around. People, he says, connect to Country. Country does not connect to them. The relationship requires effort, attention, and restraint.

Restraint sits at the centre of his ethic. Take what you need to survive, and no more. Water, food, shelter. Give back in return. He describes this as a give-and-take relationship, a way of living that resists the logic of endless extraction.

The threats he worries about are both immediate and slow. Water contamination is not hypothetical. Some people in the hills, he says, are afraid that mining expansion will poison waterways. Land clearing is not abstract. Housing and land development, he argues, can be as destructive as the mining projects that dominate public debate.

He is careful not to reduce environmental harm to a single villain. “We go on and on about mining companies”, he says, underlining how one name can become a stand-in for a broader system. Mining matters, but so does everything that clears, fragments, and drains Country.

An all-around approach is needed, he argues. Protect what little forest is left, not for ourselves, but for future generations.

Garlett is pragmatic about power.

State governments frame forest extraction and mining in familiar terms. Jobs, regional development, and economic necessity dominate the language of justification. Environmental Protection Authority recommendations can be set aside. Heritage legislation can be overridden by ministerial discretion. Long-term ecological health is weighed against short-term revenue.

Garlett understands the pressure people face to put food on the table. He does not dismiss that. But he is blunt about what it becomes when it is used as a permanent excuse.

If a project cannot proceed without destroying Country, then perhaps a different project should be found. The premise that sacrifice is inevitable is, to him, a political choice disguised as realism.

He points to public commitments by political leaders, including the Premier, about stronger protections. He also points to how often those commitments feel distant on the ground, where approvals continue and the burden of resistance falls on those who live near the forest.

Within the prevailing logic, opposition is framed as unrealistic or obstructive. It is cast as a refusal to accept tradeoffs deemed inevitable. Responsibility is pushed downward onto communities and custodians, who must keep explaining, educating, and absorbing the damage.

After forty years of activism, Garlett no longer believes awareness alone will save the forest.

“If you want to protect Country”, he says, “you have to understand politics”.

Petitions, he notes, have gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures over decades. He has watched crowds swell and recede over the years. In recent times, he says, the turnouts have grown again. On any given day, when he is out in the forest, he meets hundreds of people walking, riding, picnicking. Many stop to say hello. Many ask the same question in different forms: what happens when it’s used up.

Politics, in his view, is not a layer added after the moral argument. It is the terrain on which protection is decided.

What it costs to keep explaining

Late in the afternoon, the rally disperses. Families head home. The noise fades. Garlett lingers, packing up signs and speaking quietly with those who remain.

Tomorrow he will return to the forest. The next day to a classroom. After that, another meeting. Another consultation. Another explanation.

Environmental defence, in this form, does not end. It becomes a permanent condition.

What is lost is not only forest cover or water quality, but time, emotional bandwidth, and the ability to rest. The labour of constantly translating grief into acceptable language, of remaining calm, generous, and persuasive, is carried by those least able to set it down.

Garlett has not lost faith in people. He sees hope in the growing crowds, in children walking through rain with their parents, and in strangers who stop to talk on bush tracks. He sees hope, too, in the simple fact of attention, the moment when someone pauses and looks up at the canopy as if seeing it properly for the first time.

“Country speaks”, he says. “The question is, are we listening?”

For those who do listen, the responsibility does not pass. It settles quietly and heavily, and must be carried again and again. The work is not only to protect what remains, but to keep translating what Country is saying, and to keep paying the emotional cost of being heard.

Image: Daniel Garlett