What happens to a Green when he photographs the renewables industry’s damage to Australian rainforests?
The Greens turn their backs.
In August 2025, Steven Nowakowski took my husband, Bruce, and me on an incursion into a wind turbine installation on a ridge in Australia’s wild far north, to show us what they ignore.
The roads hit us first. The developer had cut 39 kilometres through the forest to carry turbine blades longer than a jumbo jet’s wingspan. Bulldozers had shoved the old growth trees aside into long rows, and crews had blasted the ridgelines flat.
Twenty-eight turbines stood over us, each 226 metres tall, 91 metres taller than the London Eye. Around their concrete footings lay dead bats and birds.
Steven crouched beside them. “They light the turbines up at night,” he told us. “The lights pull in the insects, and the insects pull in the bats. Nobody is really even counting.”
Steven is a renowned wilderness photographer. He sells his calendars at a Sunday market for $20 each. He ran as an Australian Greens candidate in 2006 and backed the party’s push for 100% renewables until he photographed the turbines’ impact on the rainforest. He co-founded a volunteer group that defends biodiversity in court.
Ravenshoe, a timber town, sits below that ridge. When the tropical forests won World Heritage listing in 1988, the logging stopped, and the Greens celebrated a victory. Nearly 40 years later, the bulldozers are back on the same ridgelines, and those same Greens back the machines because they are “renewable”.
