It would be difficult to find a better representative for green living than Giz Watson MLC. Holly Hammond recently caught up with Giz to discuss the environment, politics and ‘living green’.

Giz is well known in our community as a champion for LGBTI rights; however, she is equally passionate about her commitment to the environment. Giz leads a low consumption lifestyle, buying locally and cycling to work regularly. Her house is as energy efficient as possible with a low water use garden that includes a front nature strip of beautiful flourishing natives. Having a long interest in native bush regeneration, Giz still finds the time to occasionally get out to local bushland and do some weeding. Asked to sum up ‘living green’, Giz says, it is about ‘minimising one’s impact on the planet, and maximising one’s contribution to the maintenance and care of the planet.’

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Of course, one of the big ways Giz contributes is as a Greens member of parliament, where she believes her party works ‘to have the people making decisions, writing laws, being made to consider evidence of environmental impact, in the longer term beyond electoral cycles.’

Along with the environment, Giz has an abiding commitment to non-violence and social justice. Giz first became involved in activism as a thirteen year old opposing the Vietnam War. Since then her activism has seen her engage in environmental campaigns relating to bauxite mining, creating and maintaining state and national parks, preserving old-growth forests and banning uranium mining in WA.

Reflecting on her time in parliament, Giz notes her key highlight, ‘The ending of logging of old-growth forests was an extraordinarily emotional and exciting outcome. It was a hard fought and long fought process to finally force the political system to catch up with community wishes.’

However, for Giz, it’s always back to the present to focus on the most pressing current environmental issues facing WA, which she believes to be water, salinity and energy. ‘The sustainability of our current water use is one of the most pressing issues. Mostly the debate has been about where do you find the next source of water, where do you build the next desalination plan – We really we need to be talking about how we live within our means.’

Giz further espouses sustainable agriculture, ‘we’re still losing football fields of land to salinity daily,’ she says. ‘We need a transition strategy for the area that we call the wheatbelt to landuse that will halt any further degredation and actually start to reverse desalination.’

And when it comes to energy, Giz takes a strong stand in favour of renewable sources, saying, ‘no new coal. There should be no entertaining of further coal fired power stations because we’ll never meet any greenhouse gas targets if we further increase that source of power.’

This May, as Giz celebrates eleven years in the WA parliament, she is as committed as ever to the environment and living a green life.

Holly Hammond