October 21, 2025
For 73-year-old Cath Wallace, environmental activism is a lifelong pursuit. Her drive to protect the planet’s most fragile ecosystems is inherent to her identity. A former economics and public policy academic at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, Cath turned to activism in the mid 1970s. Since then, she has dedicated her life to reducing environmental harm and educating others about what we owe the Earth.
Cath’s tireless advocacy for Antarctica, carried out in lockstep with her organization, the Environment and Conservation Organisations (ECO), resulted in comprehensive protection for the entire continent and earned her the Goldman Environmental Prize in 1991. Today, Cath is as busy as ever.
Cath is currently at work in her home country of New Zealand and online, trying to influence global policy through South Pacific and international institutions, including the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition, the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the Climate Action Network, and the South Pacific Regional Fisheries Management Organisation. Destructive fishing, climate destabilization, and other activities that cause lasting harm to Earth’s biophysical systems and species are all matters of concern to her.
Between campaign meetings with ECO, Cath set aside time to chat with us about her decades-long commitment to environmental advocacy. We spoke about the critical role Antarctica plays in the Earth’s health, a new, undemocratic New Zealand law that’s greenlighting dangerous mining projects, and why we need to rethink our responsibility to the planet.
The Environment Meets Economics
Raised by scientist parents, with a biologist mother who regularly took her tide-pooling along the New Zealand coast, Cath shared that her interest in the environment was inevitable. “I don’t think I had any chance of not being an environmentalist,” she joked.
“Rock-pooling gives you an intuitive understanding of ecology,” explained Cath. “You see these wonderful species working together or against one another, you see the sea bringing in nutrients, and you understand how fragile an ecosystem can be—and that you need to be careful with it.”
Beyond her parents’ influence, Cath’s training as an economist and economic historian greatly informed her opinions on the environment, shaping her ideas of both sustainability and economic progress. “It was clear to me that ignoring the environment when it comes to economic matters is absurd,” she said. “An economy based on the extraction of resources is about the same as burning the furniture to keep warm.”
The Global Importance of Antarctica
In 1982, when a colleague from Friends of the Earth US asked for ECO’s help opposing negotiations to set up rules for mining in Antarctica, ECO agreed. Cath was already facing down mining companies on the Coromandel Peninsula in New Zealand, and it was a natural step to join the effort to prevent mining in Antarctica.
“The more I got involved,” Cath explained, “the more I came to understand the continent’s unique values, climate, and its vital biophysical systems,” which include deep ocean currents and mountains buried in ice sheets five kilometers thick. The primary danger to Antarctica, Cath realized, wasn’t simply oil spilling on ice, but ice melting due to climate change.
“Already 40% of the ice on Antarctica has shrunk in size, and that ice is freshwater—70% of the world’s freshwater,” Cath shared. As the ice in Antarctica melts more rapidly due to increasing global temperatures, the buttresses that support the ice sheets slip, setting off a disastrous chain reaction.
Melting ice causes more freshwater to flow into Antarctic seawater, altering its salinity and density and rerouting the cold, deep-water currents that flow from the region—currents critical to regulating heat, carbon, oxygen, and the distribution of nutrients around the world. When these deep-water currents weaken, “they completely disturb the whole global nutrient dispersal system and climate,” Cath said. The results are catastrophic: ice breaks up, animals struggle to reach their food, and climate systems around the world suffer massive disruptions.
Prolonged Protections for Antarctica
The Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition’s (ASOC) work fighting against mining in Antarctica culminated in the creation of the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty (also known as the Madrid Protocol). The protocol, which was signed in 1991 and entered into force in 1998, designates Antarctica as “a natural reserve devoted to peace and science.” Among the protocol’s provisions is an indefinite ban on mining and a commitment to evaluate all proposed activities in Antarctica for their environmental impacts.
Every year during the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, the governing countries address environmental issues. “The Antarctic Treaty is a great example of what can happen when you have forbearance and good collaboration,” Cath pointed out.
Another key part of the Antarctic Treaty system is the 1981 Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources, which aims to conserve ecological relationships and minimize changes to the marine ecosystem. Unfortunately, while the treaty parties, pressured by ASOC, have secured protection for several Antarctic marine areas under the convention, Cath said they’re being blocked by powerful countries. Other issues remain, including commercial fishing in the Southern Ocean and enormous harvests of krill, a keystone species essential to the diets of many other marine species.
Determined to End Deep-Sea Bottom Trawling
Cath currently serves as vice-chair of ECO, a New Zealand-based network of over 45 organizations dedicated to the environment and conservation. ECO is a member organization of ASOC and the Deep Sea Conservation Coalition (DSCC), which is currently campaigning to put a global moratorium on deep-sea mining and a stop to bottom trawling.
New Zealand is now the only country that still allows deep-sea bottom trawling in the South Pacific high seas, a commercial fishing practice Cath described as “nonsensical, ecologically devastating, and a form of ecocide.”
During bottom trawling, commercial fishing fleets use long metal ropes to drag heavy, weighted nets across the ocean floor to catch bottom-dwelling species and fish spawning aggregations just above the sea floor, decimating fish stocks and other species, and destroying vital ecosystems containing centuries-old corals.
“It’s the most murderous way of fishing,” Cath insisted. “It’s like deciding you want to harvest birds in a forest, then bulldozing down the trees in order to catch the birds that fly up.”
Despite DSCC’s campaigning, Cath said the New Zealand government hasn’t taken decisive action against bottom trawling or seabed mining—though on paper the story looks different. New Zealand has designated certain seabed areas as Benthic Protection Areas (BPAs), in which dredging and trawling are prohibited. However, these areas, which amount to 32% of the country’s seabed, weren’t frequent fishing zones to begin with. Plus, Cath noted, other forms of fishing and seabed mining are still allowed there.
“The fishing industry managed to pretend that this was them being incredibly conservation-minded and forbearing, but it’s fake,” Cath said. “I call them bogus protected areas, because off-bottom trawl fishing is still allowed. The BPAs were implemented to avoid designating these areas as marine protected areas.”
Fighting against Fast-Track Approvals
In spring 2025, New Zealand passed the Fast-Track Approvals law, which allows certain regionally and nationally significant projects—from housing developments to seabed mining—to receive fast-track consent for approval. The law was created to rebuild New Zealand’s economy, but at a terrible cost: projects with devastating environmental impacts will be greenlit.
“The New Zealand government is systematically undoing participatory democracy, removing public participation, and weakening environmental standards, rules, and processes to benefit vested interests without any apparent concern,” Cath explained.
One of the most contentious and widely opposed projects listed under the Fast-Track Approvals law is a proposal to annually mine 50 million tons of iron sands from the seabed off Taranaki, a project that New Zealand’s supreme court blocked years ago.
For nearly a year now, Cath and her colleagues at ECO have been entrenched in the fight against numerous fast-track projects. The latest is a proposal to mine hard rock gold under the Wharekirauponga Track in the Coromandel Forest Park, a protected conservation forest. “The forest is likely to be dewatered, ‘waste’ rock and ore will be removed, toxic tailings will be dumped, blasting will affect the ecosystem above, and an ancient tiny frog species endemic to the forest are likely to be badly affected,” Cath explained.
She noted that the project had a 1,000-page application. “We had 20 working days to analyze it, and no legal funding apart from what we raised ourselves,” she added. An ECO member organization, the Coromandel Watchdog of Hauraki, is currently leading the charge against the proposal, working alongside a handful of Māori organizations and local communities.
Not only does the Fast-Track Approvals panel decide who is allowed to make counter submissions, but there’s also no guarantee that one will have a hearing if selected. “It’s part of a much greater regression of this government, where they are unpeeling protections. Before this, everyone in New Zealand would have had a right to make submissions for or against a proposal and to make their voice heard,” Cath explained.
Despite the law’s built-in obstacles to thorough project review, Cath and her colleagues remain determined. “We do what we can: join groups of people from the community who are trying to fight these proposals, and pool resources and information,” she said.
Everyday activists can get involved, too. Along with amplifying the concerns that organizations like ECO are raising, Cath said it’s crucial to call the government out and take a financial stand if you’re able. “We need people to put pressure on our government through trade and reputation, to demand them to be better and not backslide. We’re also asking people with capital to refuse to invest in projects approved under this law,” she explained.
Writing a New Environmental Narrative
Protecting the environment and conserving resources don’t just require practical action, Cath said, but require changing the narrative around our relationship to the environment. “We have to change our perception of our own entitlement and get much more responsible,” she explained.
Examining our entitlement starts with “creating a narrative of care for the Earth.” Cath elaborated: “Be moderate in the demands we make of the environment so we can live within Earth’s capacity, respect each other, and respect the rule of (good) law.” To Cath, moderation and respect involve prioritizing renewable energy over fossil fuels (which she said must be phased out), being a good ally to Indigenous people like the Māori, and pushing commercial fishing and mining industries to reflect on and reduce the harm they’re causing.
When considering any environmental action or campaign, Cath also likes to ask herself: “What’s growing from this?” Her aim is always to promote well-being—both for the planet and for its inhabitants. After all, protecting vulnerable ecosystems inevitably protects people.
Advocating for well-being over profit is no small feat, but Cath has confidence in the power of the compassionate collective. “It can be done,” she asserted. “You have to persevere, but globally mobilizing people is ultimately the way of protecting this planet. It’s time for us to make a just transition and move to a low-carbon economy within the planet’s limits and let ecosystems flourish.”
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