Into the Wilderness Inc.?

Name-calling, in-fighting and brinkmanship are nothing new to environmental activism, but now they have brought an iconic Australian to a perilous fork in the road. At stake for The Wilderness Society are annual revenues of $15 million, the jobs of 150 staff, the support of nearly 50,000 members, and its very identity.

TWS Inc is the management committee concerned with moneys, membership, mission, and support for staffing. Several state level campaign directors calling themselves ‘Save TWS’ have successfully campaigned for the removal of TWS Inc’s current executive. With the exception of South Australia, they claim executive director Alec Marr and his colleagues have made TWS an unaccountable dictatorship deaf to the wishes of members. They also say that Marr himself is essentially a belligerent autocrat.

For his part, Marr holds that TWS is bound by a constitution better suited to a small tennis club than the nation’s biggest green NGO. He points to negotiations with the Australian Electoral Commission over plans to ballot TWS’ entire membership as proof of his longterm vision. Opponents say these discussions are a self-serving measure taken by an illegitimate committee that re-elected itself in secret in November last year.

But Marr claims these actions were taken to protect the organisation and its members. Save TWS has made a similar claim in defending their actions in opposing Marr.

Of all the battles that TWS has fought, Save TWS versus TWS Inc may yet become its most damaging. In the first weekend of May, after court battles over how to conduct a legal vote to determine who manages TWS, the entire process descended into farce.

An EGM (extraordinary general meeting) was held on May 2 but no vote could be taken because voting by phone had been deemed unconstitutional by the Tasmanian Supreme Court following a challenge by supporters of Save TWS, and would not have been available to the 600+ members who phone-conferenced.

West Australian campaigner and Save TWS spokesman David Mackenzie then announced a meeting in a different venue, leading about 250 people from the original venue to another location where a vote did take place. MacKenzie and supporters issued a press release naming themselves the newly elected management committee. Marr, however, maintains this vote has no legal basis and that he is still executive director.

With two self-proclaimed heads, TWS functionally has none. This latest escalation comes at the worsening peak of an internal dispute that has now run for more than a year.

Marr defends an aggressive management style saying it is pulling the organisation into the next decade, ready to grow massively in membership and reach. His goal is for a professionally run operation with a million paid-up supporters and capacity to act immediately anywhere on the Australian continent, rather than spending three weeks promoting a rally to raise funds to take an action.

He said effective decision-making and consultancies resulted in no net job losses during the global financial crisis, even when TWS’ own Board anticipated sacking 40 per cent of staff over a four-month period. He paints opponents within the organisation as self-involved coup leaders, unprofessional and bent on devolving TWS to a shadow of its 1985 self – an underfunded, barely effective grassroots movement with limited scope.

But detractors challenge both his management style and vision. Vica Bailey, Tasmanian campaign director, long-time TWS activist and supporter of Save TWS, said those grassroots were an essential part of TWS’ character, and that the corporate model Marr imposed was inconsistent with the organisation’s spirit, community experience, and its identity as a locally responsive NGO.

Both groups want to set the agenda: both deride the other. Both claim legitimacy while rejecting most negative claims laid at their feet.

The night before this latest development, Marr said the ongoing rift had taken a great personal toll and had been even harder personally than time spent as Defendant No. 1 in the Gunns 20 case. But he wouldn’t concede the likelihood of loss and his expectation was that TWS meetings and decision-making processes would face further legal challenges.

His apparent fall from grace after more than two decades of inspired environmental action is genuinely tragic, but there is more at stake than one man’s personal legacy.

Already, 2010 is an election year when state and federal politicians want climate change to be a non-issue. Despite press releases about a bright new day for TWS, it is likely that this period will herald the beginning of a new battleground for TWS – just not the battleground its membership, volunteers, and supporters might choose.