Adani: Following Its Dirty Footsteps

From fishing villages on the Gujarat coastline to Adani’s power plant in Mundra and the company’s headquarters in Ahmedabad, Lindsay Simpson’s personal story tracks how the Adani Group managed to woo Australian governments into approving Australia’s largest coal mine in the Galilee Basin and port expansion in a zone of great ecological sensitivity.

Why would an Australian Prime Minister, a State Premier and a handful of regional mayors back such a project, risking the future of the Great Barrier Reef and threatening Australia’s vast precious source of underground water - the Great Artesian Basin? And what of the consequences for greenhouse gas emissions if other proposed mines in the Galilee Basin go ahead?

Why is there a single-minded pursuit of the mining of coal when we are running out of time to do something useful about climate change? As a tourism operator in the Whitsundays Lindsay Simpson, investigative journalist, former academic and author, is determined to expose the contribution of coal mines to global warming, which is threatening the world’s largest living organism - the Great Barrier Reef - with extinction.

With other activists, she travels from Adani’s Indian headquarters in Gujarat to Parliament House in Canberra to lobby politicians, demand answers and question motivations. She also documents the power of the social movement, Stop Adani, which has captured the public imagination.

In an astute analysis of this ongoing environmental battle, the biggest since the Franklin Dam in the 1980s, Lindsay Simpson argues that while Adani might have gained the backing of politicians, it has not won over the Australian people.