This story was originally published by PublicSource, a nonprofit newsroom serving the Pittsburgh region, and supported by the Pulitzer Center. For more of its journalism, visit publicsource.org.
It took four Noongar men to hoist the warm, lifeless kangaroo onto the hooked limb from which they skinned and gutted their kill. Working the carcass with an agile knife, 28-year-old Christopher Nannup carved lean chunks from the tangle of fur and sinew. Ribs, thighs, torso and tail were loaded onto the truck to be shared among family and friends.
“I’m just hoping that he’s tender,” said Franklin Nannup, Christopher’s uncle and a respected local elder who assisted the hunt.
Christopher and his nephews represent the next generation of the Noongar, who have inhabited Australia’s southwestern tip for 50,000 years. Their local corporation recently acquired rights to occupy and manage the land on which they shot three kangaroos and netted 20-something mullet fish during an afternoon in late March. But this amounts to a small gain in a story of colonization, dislocation and recurring threats to the land now fronted by a Pittsburgh corporation mining the Northern Jarrah Forest, named for a distinctive slow-growing gum tree.
“I’m going to be opposing (Alcoa’s planned expansion) all the time for the simple fact that there’s only one place in the world where the jarrah trees grow—and that’s my country,” said Franklin Nannup.
Since 1963, Alcoa has mined bauxite from the foothills of Australia’s Darling Range under a special political agreement that skirts regulation, guarantees access to scarce water and assures low royalty rates.
What was once a modest mining operation has become one of the global industry’s leading operations. Australian ore now generates about three-quarters of Alcoa’s total production of alumina—an oxide refined from bauxite and smelted into aluminum to make smartphones, computers, skyscrapers, electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines. And as global climate goals stress building more to emit less, the North Shore-headquartered metal maker seeks more to keep up with surging demand—to build, Alcoa says, the green energy future.
Alcoa’s Australian lease, spanning nearly 5,000 square miles, cuts across much of the remaining Northern Jarrah Forest, with over 8,000 unique plant and animal species. The company’s mining footprint has grown in recent years, and it’s seeking approval for its biggest expansion to date.
In 2023, when a former Alcoa boss told Wall Street analysts the company had “no fixed timetable” for securing new mining approvals in the jarrah forest, corporate stock dropped more than 7 percent, or $650 million.
From Alcoa headquarters overlooking the Allegheny River in January, Alcoa CEO William Oplinger told investors clinching the expansion approval is of “paramount importance.”
Alcoa’s proposal to mine three vast new jarrah tracts—totaling the approximate square mileage of Pittsburgh—is under review by the state government. The company’s many prior expansions have never undergone this process.
Alcoa has, in recent years, sought more and higher quality bauxite. To find it, the company has mined closer to rural communities and within protected drinking water reservoirs.
Western Australian authorities have warned that if Alcoa is allowed to expand, contamination of drinking water for the city of Perth, and its population of 2.3 million, is “considered certain,” and could endanger water quality in “most, if not all,” of Perth’s drinking water dams. They cautioned that long-term development of the region could be stunted by resulting costs and water shortages.
“The relationship between Alcoa and the Western Australian community is in a period of change,” said Travis Robinson, a former chief of staff to the state environmental minister who now runs a private equity firm in Perth with mining interests among its portfolio.
Alcoa did not respond to repeated requests for interviews or comment for this story.
The company has long said it effectively rehabilitates the forest that it clears, producing company-sponsored research to back its claims. In its most recent sustainability report, Alcoa acknowledged increased scrutiny of its forest rehabilitation practices and the company’s “potential impact on Perth’s drinking water supply.”
Alcoa said it is “committed to enhance the way it operates in order to comply with stricter environmental requirements, including enhanced protection for drinking water and biodiversity, reduced forest clearing and accelerated forest rehabilitation.”
The company’s opponents see the approval process as a possible tipping point.
“There’s only been Europeans in this country for 200 years, and the impact that we’ve had on the natural environment is just extraordinary,” said Jess Beckerling, an incoming state legislator who petitioned for the review of Alcoa’s expansion. “And even though we’re not the traditional or the rightful custodians of this country, we have a custodianship responsibility.”
In 2022, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations’ chief climate body, declared the Northern Jarrah Forest critically endangered by a warming world. Hotter, dryer seasons and bushfires plague the forest.
Mining, scientists say, threatens to push the forest over the edge. If more is lost, the entire ecosystem could collapse, and with it hundreds of unique species endemic to the Darling Range, including black cockatoos, numbats, quokkas and bandicoots.
“The forest has been taken to its knees,” said Kingsley Dixon, an Australian botanist, and director of the ARC Centre for Mine Site Restoration, who worked with Alcoa for decades to rehabilitate forest ecosystems.
The leafy canopy stood 100 feet above Dixon as he inspected the charred, bristly trunk of a kingia australis. Its sharp, grasslike leaves fell like narrow daggers, and the scientist held a seed pod the size of an apple to the afternoon sunlight.
“This is an immortal plant,” Dixon, 71, remarked. The species evolved nearly 120 million years ago.
The trunks were blackened with charcoal and the pods had begun to flower. The kingia australis grows no more than an inch each year, Dixon said, naturally engineered to thrive in the unrelenting climate of the Darling Range.
“They’re just extraordinary,” Dixon said, estimating the plants before him to be no less than 500 years old. Grass trees—“some of the oldest flowering plants in terms of their ancestry on earth,”—stood beneath jarrah and marri trees in a cluster nearby. Underfoot, the small leaves of hibbertia poked through the forest floor.
The jarrah forest’s location on the western coast of Australia, surrounded by ocean and desert, is a natural isolating force that has, over millennia, formed a “totally unique system,” Dixon explained.
The entire ecosystem, he said, depends on the layer of reddish ore 13 feet beneath the forest floor.
“Two things want bauxite: The Aluminum Company of America and the jarrah forest. They both have an utter, total dependence on it. Who wins?”
In 1974, Dixon was a 20-year-old summer intern at Alcoa, working to regrow mine sites. “I just thought we could solve the jarrah forest,” he recounted. “That was the vision of the company.” Dixon later founded a research center, discovered that smoke from bushfires could prompt germination, and worked with Alcoa as a contractor from what he called “the leading restoration research group in the world on native ecosystems.”
But after the turn of the millennium, mining “was starting to skyrocket,” he said, touching areas previously thought off-limits. Rehabilitation could not keep up and his center dissociated from Alcoa.
In 2022, the botanist was one of a team of scientists to develop new international standards for mine site restoration, which launched that year in Montreal at the United Nations’ convention on biological diversity. The standards, Dixon explained, are based on a concept of native reference, which marks the forest for how it resembles and functions as its former, native self.
Dixon’s ramshackle Toyota Hilux bounced along a former hauling road cut through the forest, a few hundred yards past where he had stopped to examine the kingia. Soon, the landscape opened into an Alcoa forest restoration site—a flat plain marked by ruts reaching to the crest of the bare hilltop.
An 700-year-old jarrah lay felled and charred in the dirt, positioned by Alcoa as a habitat that might one day support plant and wildlife.
This forest, Dixon explained, would never be the same. The rows of scattered seedlings poking through the dirt were “ecologically meaningless,” he said, against a backdrop of unmined forest at the perimeter.
As a condition of its agreement with the state, Alcoa must rehabilitate the land it mines. In the 1970s, the company developed a mine site restoration program, leading it to be the first mining company recognized by the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honour for Rehabilitation Excellence in 1990. In 2001, Alcoa said it had achieved 100 percent plant species return.
But the trial, based on Dixon’s research, could not be replicated at scale, he said.
Last year, Dixon published new research, which found Alcoa’s rehabilitated mine sites lacked the biodiversity that defines unmined jarrah. Crucial plant species were “effectively absent,” and replanted forest would not sustain key animal species. The reason, the researchers posited, could be the removal of the bauxite on which the ecosystem evolved.
In November, 154 Australian scientists published a letter that called on the Australian government to “halt the destruction of one of the world’s most important and biodiverse temperate forests—for future generations, for the sake of the planet and to avert an extinction catastrophe.”
“We wanted to put on the table, once and for all, a correction of the mythology that they are putting back a jarrah forest,” Dixon said. “First Nations know it. Bushwalkers know it. Local communities know it. … They all know it’s not coming back.”
Credit: Quinn Glabicki/PublicSource
At Alcoa’s southernmost mining outpost, a dump truck the size of a two-story duplex was loaded with 206 tons of bauxite from a dusty pit, destined for “the crusher”—a hulking rock grinder that feeds rubble ore to an 11-mile conveyor belt supplying the refinery around the clock.
The company mines about 34 million metric tons annually to generate about 9 million metric tons of alumina.
The bauxite is found 10 to 20 feet below ground in a gravelly layer above the bedrock. To get it, Alcoa rips out the trees and bulldozes the topsoil, using explosives to blast through layers of rock. Once the bauxite is extracted, the dirt is returned and the top layers planted with seeds—beginning the process of rehabilitation.
Alcoa employs a team of scientists who continue to study and write about its rehabilitation methods. The company maintained in 2023 that it had rehabilitated 75 percent of the forest it has mined in Western Australia.
A government agency reached a different conclusion. As of 2023, “no areas have been assessed by the state as meeting the completion criteria” for rehabilitation, according to a memo from the Western Australian Department of Biodiversity, Conservation and Attractions.
During a public tour of Alcoa’s rehabilitation areas attended by PublicSource journalists, Tanya Patterson, a community education officer at Alcoa, said the company continues to hone its methods and has improved upon original guidance set by the state government when their programming began.
“We have done our own research and come up with better ways of rehabilitation,” Patterson said.
Perhaps bauxite mining’s most emblematic victims are the three black cockatoo species native to the Darling Range.
To the Noongar, these birds are valued as totems, channelers of ancestral spirits and carriers of seasonal messages, like the arrival of salmon.
The converging threats of climate change, suburban expansion and habitat loss from logging and mining have brought the Baudin’s black cockatoo to the brink of extinction. Experts estimate there could be as few as 2,500 mature adults in the wild.
“It’s really sad because you can see the pendulum swinging,” said Sam Clarke, animal management and education officer at the Kaarakin Black Cockatoo Conservation Center.
The center on the outskirts of Perth takes in sick and injured birds and nurses them to health before releasing them into the wild. Most are struck by cars or attacked by ravens, but last year they admitted many birds found weak from starvation.
Cockatoos depend on the nuts of the jarrah and marri trees and nest in the hollows that form within their trunks once they reach about 200 years of growth. But decades of mining and logging have shrunk the once-sprawling forest, and few remaining trees are old and large enough to support nesting sites.
Alcoa claims it takes measures to avoid harming cockatoos by marking trees they’re known to inhabit to indicate they should not be felled. A public tour of Alcoa’s mining and refining facilities included a stop at one such “cockatoo island”—a clump of around 15 trees surrounded by acres of barren mine site.
“One of our very special birds is the red-tailed cockatoo,” said tour guide Patterson. “Any trees that are of importance for cockatoos, we will retain those and mine around them.”
Dean Autherell, founder of the Carnaby’s Crusaders, constructs large, wooden boxes that he attaches to trees to create artificial nesting sites. In the last few years, nearly 200 birds have nested in his boxes.
“This is just a Band-Aid—it’s not a long-term solution. The only long-term solution is restoring the habitat.”
Cheryl Martin threw a handful of white dust into the dark water of the Murray River where it winds north through the town of Pinjarra. In a parking lot behind her, a weathered monument memorializes an encampment of Noongar slain by colonists in 1834. Her great-great-great-grandmother, just a young child, slipped away while as many as 80 of her friends and relatives were gunned down around her.
In this moment, though, Martin was at peace.
“The spirit’s soft, gentle,” she said.
The dust Martin scattered pays tribute to her massacred family, as well as a much more ancient benefactor—a serpent-like deity known as “Woggle.”
When Martin’s ancestors prayed for rain, tradition maintains, the Woggle slithered inland, drawing water in her wake as she formed the region’s sustaining rivers and tributaries. Humans were then made custodians of the land.
Over tens of thousands of years, the Noongar developed methods to protect and nurture their natural surroundings: controlled burns to prevent larger fires from raging, limits on hunting birds during nesting season, totem assignments marking each individual with an animal they must care for and abstain from eating.
All this amounts to an intricate system of balance, according to Daniel Garlett, an activist and former manager for the South West Aboriginal Land and Sea Council.
“All that’s naturally asked of us, not just First Nations people, is that you take and you give and give and take, living in harmony with Mother Nature,” Garlett said. “You’ve got to love that country like your own mother.”
The Noongar continue to shoulder their responsibility as environmental stewards, though many see it as an uphill battle against Alcoa and other industry players.
“The bauxite mining activity is taking from Mother Earth … from what is ours,” said George Walley, a Noongar elder.
Alcoa engages Indigenous peoples both through voluntary efforts and in ways required by law. It recently concluded its second “Reconciliation Action Plan” that laid out steps for supporting and consulting with First Nations communities in light of the continent’s “rich diversity.”
Several Noongar leaders, though, say their relationship with Alcoa has deteriorated in recent years as the pace of deforestation has quickened.
Trevor Stack of the Winjan Corporation, a community organization representing Noongar in an area near Pinjarra, said he used to sit at the table with Alcoa when he felt they were operating in good faith.
“Over the years we just made a decision that with Winjan—where we’re at and where Alcoa are at, where they come in and they decimate the land, and we as Aboriginal people, we look after the land—we can’t be seen sitting with these guys,” Stack said. “It’s not a good look.”
Garlett took a hardline stance against Alcoa when he used to represent Noongar claims under “native title,” a legal principle that gives traditional owners limited rights to weigh in on planned uses of their ancestral land.
Garlett felt Alcoa’s offers amounted to “petty things,” like school uniforms, refrigerators and occasional apprenticeships, often accepted out of desperation.
“This story is: They preyed on First Nations people’s impoverished lifestyles to do as they please,” Garlett said of the Pittsburgh company.
“And I can say that, because I had a firsthand seat at those negotiation tables, that I was disgusted and still am,” he added.
Alcoa did not respond to PublicSource questions about its interactions with Indigenous communities.
The competition around the limited seats at the company table has brought strife among former friends within the Noongar community, according to Mary Walley, whose father Clary is by birth the most senior Noongar in Pinjarra.
“That’s why all the families argue now. It’s because of Alcoa,” she said.
The central connection between the Noongar and their country means the fate of the jarrah forest is far more than an aesthetic or lifestyle consideration, said Brad Vitale of the Harvey Aboriginal Corporation, a community organization based 20 miles south of Pinjarra.
Vitale believes a lot of the struggles that plague aboriginal communities—such as mental health, self-esteem and unemployment—stem from land destruction and the community’s dislocation from it.
“If we can’t connect back to country, it’s going to be a huge health issue for our people.”
As a former local government worker he has helped lead river restoration programs and has witnessed some promising signs, including the return of several aquatic species.
“We are trying our best to rehabilitate and correct,” said Vitale. “That’s a bit hard when you’re a few people against lots of destruction.”
The Fund for Investigative Journalism also contributed funding to support this project.
Jamie Wiggan is deputy editor at Pittsburgh’s PublicSource and can be reached at [email protected].
Quinn Glabicki is the environment and climate reporter at Pittsburgh’s PublicSource and a Report for America corps member. He can be reached at [email protected] and on Instagram @quinnglabicki.
This story was fact-checked by Matt Maielli.
Photo editing by Stephanie Strasburg.
This article first appeared on PublicSource and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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