News

24th July 2026 | State Library Auditorium, State Library NSW

Nature is reality.
We are born of nature and die back into it.
Physically and spiritually we are completely made up of it.
Nature is our bedrock reality.

The 10 million humans alive 12,000 years ago were part of the natural Earth. Now there are 8 billion of us rapidly destroying that Earth. Worse, and suddenly, without debate or consensus, our authorities are moving control of our lives across to the ultimate power extracted from nature which is artificial intelligence. AI.

Was this inevitable or is it a matter of choice? Whatever the case, we know that the existence of humanity, if not all life on Earth, is at stake.

Of the 20 million or so species of life only one, Homo sapiens, is wrecking it.

Stopping the advance of the human high-tech gurus and billionaires, who have arrogated power over the planet, and at least putting them on a democratic leash, will take mass protest and defiance by the rest of us. That take-over must take place or humanity as we know it is finished. If the revolution succeeds, humanity will need every bit of nature left on Earth to salve its wounds and heal its injured soul.

The choice that faces and fascinates us all is between true and false, between real and make-believe, between living in nature or dying in cyberspace.

Getting back to reality, to truth, in this age of us putting our brains into the unreality of cyberspace, means pulling our heads out and getting back to nature and its non-lethal derivatives.

Fourteen billion years ago, the Universe exploded into being in the Big Bang. Five billion years ago Earth precipitated out of the boundless energy of that Big Bang.

Earth is just right for life: not too hot, not too cold and at a perfect distance from the fiery Sun for water to exist in its three forms – solid, liquid and gas – and for life to emerge and flourish.

A few million years ago humankind as we know it emerged out of Earth’s forests. Homo erectus evolved to homo sapiens: we stood upright and became aware, reflective and able to tinker with all that nature presented, in and around us.

Twelve thousand years ago that tinkering led to agriculture, the clearing of vegetation and the taming of our fellow wild creatures. We started destroying Earth’s forests, savannas and grasslands, along with the bountiful surrounding seas, all of which had helped cradle us into existence.

That tinkering is now catastrophic. In just my lifetime, three quarters of Earth’s wildlife has been destroyed and now the rate of that destruction is being deliberately increased on the altar of growth economics, itself being transformed by artificial intelligence.

The evolution of Homo sapiens is a continuum right through to this era of artificial intelligence. Suddenly, our overriding existential question is, how soon will our control of artificial intelligence switch to its control over us?

For almost all of human history we were immersed in and part of nature. Now our leaders are convinced that we are above it. They are willingly letting society be absorbed into the unnatural alternative of cyberspace.

Whatever they think, we are 100 percent nature, and this bedrock truth prevails: nature can do without us, but we cannot do without it.

As Barcelona’s Antoni Gaudi observed so long ago: ‘all human creativity comes from the great book of nature’.

Nature is our foundational reality.

It provided us with awareness and, with it, emotions and imagination, as well as creativity. And a sense of reality: that is, a clear sense of the difference between that which is real and that which is fake.

Without presuming where the red line should be drawn, it seems to me that there may be four dimensions of this fakery, all interrelated. The first was when we replaced nature with our self-serving simplified version, as with agriculture, gardens, pot plants, and frog ponds. 

The second was our replication of nature – copied or imagined alternatives – so that our mind experiences a derived reality as in story-telling, music, books, films, radio and television.

The third was the derived power of nature as in wood-fired, oil-fired, coal-fired, gas-fired electric power or nuclear energy and all of their consequences including modern cities, transport systems, aircraft and space travel.

And now, a fourth, is cyberspace – the metaverse or post-reality Universe.

The replacement of nature brings with it growing existential danger for everyone. Defending Earth’s future by standing with the forests or demonstrating against the abuse of artificial intelligence in the cities are part of the same great adventure.

We know about the spectrum of human ingenuity; it can be beautiful and it can be brutish: from Hildegard to Hitler, Einstein to Pol Pot, Nightingale to Trump, Khamenei, Netanyahu and Putin.

That spectrum is blurred when we turn on our devices and enter cyberspace, the imaginary environment of electronic communication, the realm of virtual reality.

A dictionary definition of ‘virtual’ is ‘not physically existing as such but made by software to appear to do so’.

Virtual is fake. When we are in cyberspace – in the thrall of computers, apps and ear pods – we are in fakery. It may feel good and have us wanting more, but it is an unnatural and dangerous make-believe.

The ‘godfather’ of AI and Nobel Laureate, Geoffrey Hinton, says that AI comes with a 10 to 20 percent chance of it causing our extinction in the next few decades.

I asked Artificial Intelligence what threat it posed to you and me. It replied that ‘the ultimate threat AI imposes to human existence centres on loss of control. As AI approaches and potentially surpasses human cognitive capabilities … experts fear machines could develop autonomous goals, deceive creators to ensure their own survival, and utilise strategies humanity cannot anticipate or counteract’.

AI confirmed that as it reaches superintelligence it could cause humanity’s destruction. Even if AI’s emerging tendency to cheat and deceive humans in its own self-interest spares us, it comes with predictable human own-goals. Artificial intelligence says that human ‘bad actors could use AI to engineer pandemics, cyberwarfare, or set off lethal autonomous weapons systems such as drone swarms that ignore human judgement or control.’

It doesn’t mention nuclear war first up, maybe because that threatens AI itself. However, war gaming models mostly end up opting for total nuclear war. Real military AI is undermining traditional nuclear deterrence.

The 2026 Global Peace Index, released in London last month by the Institute for Economics and Peace, reveals ‘a world struggling with the economic consequences of a record-high number of conflicts that are increasingly interconnected and difficult to resolve, accompanied by a rapid technological revolution in warfare that is leaving international law and diplomacy far behind.’

Human misery and loss of confidence in life has come about because the few nastier, more narcissistic bullies in human society have been let take the reins of power by the comfortably myopic mass of more good-hearted people. This has to change. We have to get out of what J K Galbraith called this ‘culture of contentment’. 

For the first time in history, machines are making life-and-death combat decisions faster than any human can review them, and the international frameworks meant to govern them don’t exist. 

Human geopolitical and corporate competition is impelling the rushed deployment of AI systems, risking accidental or deliberate catastrophe for life on Earth. Global investment in preparations for war, including AI, is now two hundred times that spent in proactive peace building.

In a world largely run by empathy-lacking billionaires, the reality of this immediate menace is astounding. It is up to us, the people, to wrest control from these arrogant, self-centred thugs and their unnatural use of AI, while we can still do so. Our so-far compliant mass of caring humanity must cease to be frozen into inanition like hens facing a python.

How about Australia take the lead in promulgating the mooted United Nations ‘Benign AI Treaty’ to ensure AI remains in the service of enhancing good, safe outcomes for our global community, rather than threatening us.

In this beautiful world, where human spirit and intelligence have repeatedly defied totalitarianism, we are urgently challenged to overcome our instinctive fears of standing up out of the comatose crowd: to rescue life on Earth from the obvious mischief of cybertechnology, now infesting and taking control of deadly arsenals of weapons and therefore all human fortune.

In doing this, we’ll need nature more than ever. It is our bedrock reality and comfort. As the human herd is putting its head deeper into the cybertrap, it is crucial that nature is there when we either pull our head out or safely dismantle the trap.

I left medical practice in the 1970s to join many others in the campaign to save Tasmania’s Franklin River, now recognised as offering one of the world’s top whitewater rafting adventures. With no farms, industries, resorts or townships on its banks, the Franklin flows free to the sea. Even as the dam works were going ahead and all seemed lost, we kept campaigning, lifted by the twin thoughts that while there is life there is hope and that hope requires action.

Instead of writing prescriptions for high blood pressure, insomnia, skin rashes and depression (the anxiety-driven outcomes of modern materialist society) I joined other environmentalists in preserving what we could of the greatest anxiolytic – that is, storehouse for human happiness – wild Earth and its infinite splendour.

Conservationists are conservators of life, dedicated to human wellbeing and the right of all our fellow species and ecosystems to exist.

How deeply dissatisfying it must be to be driven by greed, destroying more of nature for personal profit. To be a Rhinehart, Adani or Musk: rich in money but poor in spirit.

But they are in control and we are charged with defying and dismantling their plutocratic sway over the public’s natural commons as well as the obscene gap between rich and poor in both our domestic and global community. Not least here in Australia, we must stand, unrelenting, in ensuring the survival of what’s left of the natural world in which love, that essential positive in being human, has always flourished best.

As D.H. Lawrence lamented ‘Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was made a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and setting of the sun and off from the magic connection of the solstice and equinox. This is what is the matter with us. We are bleeding at the roots, because we are cut off from the Earth and Sun and stars, and love is a grinning mockery, because, poor blossom, we plucked it from the stem on the tree of Life and expected it to keep on blooming in our civilised vase on the table’. 

Divorced from nature and lost from our origins, there is a greater potential for hate, both of self and everything else: that is, to lack consideration, ignore our own mortality and, ultimately, as no other species has ever done, self-destruct.

Albert Camus decided to defy our mortal lot by being constructive, an act of rebellion against the absurdity and despair of the human condition. And don’t we, in this Trumpian age, need it. Camus wrote in 1954 that ‘in the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer’.

That’s me too. In particular, I enjoy being ‘green’ because this puts me in the fight for the most fundamental ingredient for human peace and happiness which is nature itself.

It must be said again and again, nature is reality. It is the foundation of our physical and spiritual wellbeing.

In 1730, in India, Amrita Devi put all on the line for that spiritual oneness. When the Maharaja of Marwar said he needed to cut down their Khejarli forest, her Bishnoi villagers objected. Amrita said that she had a spiritual kinship with the forest, turned down a bribe and, with her daughters, hugged the trees. The Maharaja’s soldiers moved in and beheaded Amrita and her daughters along with 259 other villagers, before he relented and left the forest alone.

In 2026, Amrita Devi’s spirit and defiance is needed to save us from the Maharaja of Artificial Intelligence, now threatening to cut the natural heads off all us 8.3 billion human beings.

In this world of laws criminalising peaceful environmental defenders, but giving subsidies and accolades to life-threatening tech billionaires, we are challenged to stand defiantly with nature. To reverse the destruction. To reject the bribes. To stare down the bulldozers, chainsaws and cyberfanatics. To insist that the commonsense of protecting what’s left of Earth’s life-giving ecosystem must prevail.

We have to prevent being placed in the menacing hands of loveless artificial intelligence which, right now, is moving towards supplanting humanity. Opposing that AI take-over, and defending nature, are two sides of the coin of human wellbeing.

Next summer, as more of the native forests of Tasmania are logged and incinerated to ship woodchips to China, I intend to camp out in the forests with friends again in defiance of the needless destruction. Because in saving forests we are saving the soul of humanity.

How can we not make such a stand for the forests? My fear is of letting myself be beheaded – debrained, disempowered and dispirited – by artificial intelligence replacing reality.

I am not Amrita Devi but I am fired by her spirit which is needed now more than ever by the forests, their cockatoos, rare migratory parrots, giant freshwater crayfish, masked owls, skinks, insects, Tasmanian devils and wombats.

Doing nothing is caving in to anxiety, anger and depression. Taking action is the recipe for fulfilment and happiness. Sign a petition, make a donation, meet a politician, talk with friends, and have fun along the way. And here’s an invitation: when you’re ready, come and visit Tasmania’s forests. Be arrested by their beauty. Don’t get depressed, take action.

Bob Brown.
2026. 

Click here to view a recording of the full Gold Medal for Human Rights ceremony, including a panel discussion featuring Sue Higginson, Jacqui Mumford and moderator Grace Vegesana.