Liz Downes

A full time activist, researcher and campaigner, Liz is a director of the Rainforest Information Centre (RIC). She coordinates the Ecuador Endangered campaign, which since 2017 has supported local communities and conservation teams to stop grand-scale mining proposals that affect over 2 million hectares of protected forests and Indigenous lands across the country. Through its crowdfunding efforts for legal fees, RIC made possible a major win in 2021, when Ecuador’s Constitutional Court ruled in favour of the Rights of Nature for the Los Cedros cloud forest, banning mining in the reserve.

Liz is  a member of the Melbourne Rainforest Action Group, a volunteer-based advocacy group working to monitor the activities of Australian mining companies who are operating in Ecuador. Liz has made several field visits to Ecuador to support communities dealing with the impacts of these companies, and is deeply in love with the diverse people, cultures and ecosystems of this incredible country. Closer to home, she works across different spaces and sectors to research and resist the unbridled expansion of extractive industries – especially the so-called ‘green mining’ for critical minerals that are being greenwashed as essential for climate change mitigation.

Liz also wears a Deep Ecology facilitator hat. She has been passionate about Deep Ecology since first attending a workshop of John Seed’s in 2006, and over the past decade has co-facilitated many workshops and immersions, mostly in Victoria and Tasmania. To her, it makes perfect sense that the only way we can traverse the climate and ecological catastrophe created by our colonial-industrialised society is to repair our relationship with the living Earth, with each other, and with all other beings who share our home. On a personal note, she is obsessed with slime mould, a life form which has been around for hundreds of millions of years and is completely amazing.