Lismore-based lawyer Steve Bolt has recently retired, after thirty years of practice in the Northern Rivers. The Echo caught up with this illustrious local legal legend to talk about the intersection of activism and the law, in his own life and the wider community.

Lismore councillors Big Rob and Andrew Bing have led the charge to remove all CSG and nuclear free area signs from the Lismore local government area. 

It's ten years today since a wave of relief spread through Camp Liberty at Bentley, when those gathered discovered that the riot police would not be coming, and gas company Metgasco was being referred to ICAC by the NSW government.

With hundreds of riot police expected to confront thousands of protectors on site at the Bentley blockade, west of Lismore, it was a great relief to many when the NSW government suspended Metgasco's Petroleum Exploration Licence on 15 May 2014, effectively handing a historic win to the community.

Whenever anyone says, ‘There is nothing we can do,’ I think of the Knitting Nannas. I think of this powerful and politically potent group of older women who hold the frontline of so many impossible protests with a ball of yarn and a cheeky conversation, and not just an ironing board – an iron will! They stand in unity. They know there is work to be done. And they do it.

The forests of the Northern Rivers were protected in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s by activism. The Terania Creek protest was a landmark environmental protest

Recently I’ve been wading through hundreds of hours of archival material from the successful struggle to keep the Northern Rivers gasfield free. The collective optimism and unity in the face of what seemed, at the time, like an unstoppable opponent, is inspiring. 

In Australia, it's not easy being green. There are no monuments to those who have risked their lives and liberty in the defence of Australia's unique and precious ecology.

Greens candidate for the seat of Page, Kudra Falla-Ricketts, launched her campaign yesterday at the site of the Bentley CSG battleground.