Running Through the Scene of the Crime

If a place gives you identity, peace or purpose, what do you owe it when it is under attack?

For many of us, running is refuge.

It is private time. Relief from work, care, grief, noise, screens and obligation. For some people it is the only hour in the week that still feels truly their own, so it makes sense that many runners do not want politics dragged into that space.

But in the ecological and political moment we are in, the desire to keep running ‘apolitical’ is itself political. Silence leaves the door wide open to the corporations and governments already reshaping, clearing and degrading the land.

That does not mean every runner has to become a full-time activist, or that every run should be treated as a political opportunity. But if you benefit from these places, build identity from them, claim to love them, or use them to build a personal brand and following as an athlete, then you also owe something back to them.

At the very least, you owe them a refusal of silence and a refusal of the normalisation of their destruction.

The beloved Bibbulmun Track and surrounding trails of WA’s Northern Jarrah Forest are one of the clearest examples of this contradiction in Western Australia. They sit deep in the South West imagination: the Waugal, Noongar country and dreaming, towering forest, iconic wildlife.

Meanwhile, the Northern Jarrah Forest is being torn down at rapid pace and in real-time. Alcoa was recently fined for illegal clearings from 2019 to 2025 and has faced many more investigations, all the while blocking officials from monitoring the impact of its operations on our drinking water.

Anecdotal evidence from people on the ground and on the trails, including the work of campaigners like the WA Forest Alliance and Greens MP Jess Beckerling, paints an even worse picture. And judging by Alcoa’s expansionist ambitions, this is only the beginning.

Yet trail and running culture continues to generate enormous attention through these places without devoting much energy towards what is happening to them.

Trail running has surged in popularity in recent years, and so too has the culture of the FKT (Fastest Known Time) attempt. Last year alone there were multiple attempts on the Bibbulmun Track, each attracting buzz, social media attention and raising the profile of the athletes involved.

How do we reckon with the fact that our community seems remarkably capable of extracting story, meaning, beauty, spectacle and even status from these landscapes while saying almost nothing about their destruction?

To say people are quiet because they do not care would be too easy, and unfair. Many runners do care. Many people in these communities are thoughtful, grounded and deeply attached to the natural environment. But there are reasons people stay quiet.

For most of us, myself included, running is refuge and people are protective of their right to disconnect. Some may also feel unqualified to speak about mining, climate or ecology, or simply too worn down to bring politics into a peaceful space.

The hard reality is that politics has already entered this space.

It arrived through land clearing, sponsorships, branding, trail diversions and increasingly un-runnable conditions due to climate and environmental changes. The question is not whether politics belongs here. It is a question of whose politics gets to triumph or is normalised.

Speaking up about forest destruction or mining and fossil fuel sponsorship is treated as divisive or overly political. Wearing Chevron across your chest at the City to Surf, however, is considered ordinary and harmless fun. That is how normalisation works.

Corporate power has spent decades teaching us to experience its presence as generosity, while anyone who names the violence beneath it is accused of dragging politics into sport.

The Northern Jarrah Forest is another version of the same story. Alcoa’s destruction has unfolded for years in plain sight while its relationship to public institutions and community life has helped soften and obscure that destruction.

Until recently, Alcoa was a sponsor of the Bibbulmun Track Foundation. That relationship has now shifted to Newmont, another mining giant and destroyer of forest country. Their logos have each been on display at the Perth Hills Discovery Centre campsite over the years — a central hub of the Track.

This is the quiet embedding of destructive power into the life of a place until it feels ordinary.

John Pilger wrote of Australia as a ‘secret country’, held together by silence and selective history: the gap between the Australia we like to imagine and the one built on dispossession and violence. That secret country is reinforced whenever we treat a beloved landscape as scenery while declining to name the powers tearing it down.

We love the bush, the trail, the endorphin rush and the challenge of moving through it, but too often we do so in a way that leaves the real structure of power intact.

But if a place gives you peace, pleasure, strength, identity, community, meaning, financial gain or a platform, what do you owe it when it is under attack?