Charlie Prell, Farmers for Climate Action
Grant winner update | Gundangurra Land | Words Bella Wiggs
Meet Charlie Prell. A sheep farmer from Crookwell, husband to wife Kris, father to Nick and Alex, climate activist of 20 years, and Chair of Farmers for Climate Action.
Crookwell is a town in New South Wales’ Southern Tablelands on Gundangurra land. It is home to less than 3000 people. Yet, more than 2 decades ago, it was on the radar of wind farm developers as the nature of the land Charlie lived and worked on began to change.
“I've been engaged with climate change for about 20 years, because at the turn of the century, we were approached by a wind farm development. They said, “we're interested in putting wind turbines on your land.” That was just at the start of the millennium drought. It was all very timely.”
The advent of the millennium drought brought about suffering for Charlie and his family far beyond the impacts it had upon his sheep farm.
“At that point, we were really desperate. We were basically bankrupt. I was running a farm suffering, and me and my wife were both suffering from serious mental health problems.”
Charlie’s depression was not brought about by his own changing reality; but by the way he saw the politicians, that were meant to represent him, becoming more and more removed from that reality that Charlie and his fellow farmers lived with.
The climate denialism that plagued politics around the time of the millennium drought included propaganda about the wind turbines that had been thrown to Charlie as a lifeline. Voices from the Coalition tried to make a case for the negative physical and mental health effects of this new source of energy. To find out whether or not these problems did exist, Charlie “started to explore the renewable energy industry from the start, because not many people knew much about wind turbines at all” in Crookwell.
This led Charlie on what he described as a wider exploration on the issue, where “it became apparent to me that we’re living through climate change”. He came to understand that climate change had brought about all of this suffering, and that it was a problem that not enough people around him were talking about, let alone trying to fix.
“There was always that thing about, ‘no particular event is attributable to climate change’. The millennium drought was when I first started to become aware of that.”
So, Charlie began to fix what he could see was broken in front of him. He started to advocate for the benefits of wind power by publicly engaging in the debate over their merits. He worked with the Australian Wind Alliance on their RE-Alliance program, all the while still waiting to have turbines installed on his land.
“The turbines were only installed in 2017 because of the political connections within the government. It was a long journey. But I did really enjoy exposing the liars within the federal government in the anti-wind movement.”
Charlie’s exposition caught the eye of a group of “35 or 40” farmers in the Blue Mountains, who invited him to what would become the inaugural meeting of Farmers for Climate Action in 2015. Charlie was on the original steering committee of the group, and then co-chair of the first board with Lucinda Corrigan, a beef cattle farmer from Riverine. He says he knew then that “there was a role farmers had to play in the climate debate we're still having in this country; what plans to change, and what to do about it.”
By this stage, Charlie had started to make an income from the wind turbines he had advocated to make a home for on his land. He says his personal life had turned around; he sold land he was no longer using after the turbines went up, his wife no longer needed to work as a nurse to make a vital supplementary income for their family. He had seen how, even in the microcosm of one person’s universe, the effects of climate change can be totally destructive, and the solutions to it, equally rehabilitating.
Knowing that the solutions farmers needed to their worsening challenges were already available, and only inaccessible because of political ill-will, Charlie was ready to throw himself wholly into Farmer’s for Climate Action when he ‘retired’ last year. Though, he doesn’t find his new gig any less tough.
“I’ve always been a really community-minded person. That was challenged, seriously challenged, during the wind farm divide, but even more so in the debate about climate change, particularly in regional Australia. Because it was really quite frightening to walk into any part of regional Australia up to three years ago and start talking about the threat of climate change and what it actually meant.”
Charlie says that he has been less astounded by the growth of FCA, from 40 to 40,000 members, more or less, and more astounded by the way that people outside of the FCA tent now receive them; “the number of people that are quietly waiting for us to appear… to give them legitimacy and support, and the organisation to speak for if they want to speak up” is how Charlie knows things are changing.
“I love talking about a revolution. The revolution has already happened. Talking about changing everything into a more sustainable one. I think we have a really important part to play, whether us, or someone like us in that space.”
Managing the growth of FCA has been “really difficult” with the resources that they have. Groundswell’s support catalysed $40,000 of core funding towards FCA’s community organising efforts in 2020, which meant that in 2021, they had capacity to build their movement across the entire East coast of Australia.
“I think the importance of that funding for us is to know that we have not just the support, both financial, and logistical from Groundswell, but also the opportunity through Groundswell to network with other people who are doing similar stuff to us. ”
“Most of our funding comes from urban environments”, Charlie shares. He describes his frustration, and disappointment, at the National Party-pushed rhetoric that exists in regional Australia, around a non-existent city/bush divide. “That’s not quite right. We’re all in this together. Climate change is catastrophic for farming operations, but it's also catastrophic for cities.”
He recounts the day (4 January 2020) when Penrith was the hottest place on earth, and explains how as cities experience the sorts of first-hand effects farmers have lived with for decades more and more often, the greater the opportunity we have to reestablish the innate connection Charlie thinks the city and the bush always had in Australia, before political powers started to try to “divide and conquer” in breaking that connection down.
“The familial connections between urban Australia and regional Australia have been fractured a bit. They're not as strong as they were 15 years ago, but I think that they're being re-established for two reasons. The first is that I think urban Australians are starting to realise that maybe there's better places to go than Bali for your holiday. Secondly, rural Australians are starting to realise that they're not the second-class citizens that most of them thought they were. Being treated as second-class citizens was pretty much standard out here. I think that's changing and it's going to take a long time.”
Charlie says this goes both ways. That “regional Australians are starting to understand that urban Australians are not all inner-city, woke, late-sipping lefties” as groups like Groundswell make a home for people united over the collective action they're taking on a common cause.
“I think Farmers for Climate Action are actually bridging that divide without going too far. I think we’re actually giving urban Australians hope that there is more intellect and worldly views and common sense out here than a lot of urban Australians probably thought. That’s all good for society.”
If you Google Crookwell today you’ll be told it is “a rich farming area for merino wool and cattle. The area is home to Australia's first commercial grid wind farm with its large white windmills circling furiously to generate electricity.” The similarly furious efforts of Charlie Prell to earn that title for his hometown have spun out to create a movement more than 10 times the size of Crookwell. Farmer’s for Climate Action has given hope to a fleet of farmers across regional Australia, as much as to those far removed from the frontline.
Farmers for Climate Action
Make sure the farmers talking sense on climate change are heard by the media, policy makers and Australians.
Join Groundswell
