Virginia took the Australian folklore dream of a home among the gum trees literally when she built her bungalow nestled at the feet of five towering gumtrees. Many people might say building so close to blackbutt puts one's house at risk. However, Virginia views it the other way - to lose the trees puts more important homes at risk: the abodes of the native animals she has committed her life to protecting.

"We decided to keep the trees because they had hollows everywhere and that's homes for wildlife and hollows are in really short supply," she said.

She didn't realise when she bought the block of land at South Durras in the early 1980s that it would change the course of her life.

However, if it weren't for her move into the heart of Murramarang National Park, she wouldn't have been National Forest Campaign Coordinator for The Wilderness Society, she would never have become involved with Forests Alive, the Great Eastern Ranges or Western Australian environmental protection charity Gondwana Link. If not for all of these, she wouldn't have been named WILD Magazine's 2001 Environmentalist of the Year and she definitely wouldn't have been named one of 20 'global wilderness visionaries' by the World Wilderness Congress in 2010.

And yet all of this Virginia has achieved because of a decision she made to do something about protecting the beautiful wilderness she saw on her new front doorstep in Durras.

It was the 1980s, and Virginia said there were "dirty tactics" and "really nasty manoeuvring" at play all along the NSW south coast as developers tried to cash in on ribbon development along the coastline.

Durras was not immune, and soon land around Durras Lake was listed to be rezoned and sold off.

Virginia was at the time working for the Federal Treasury but quickly became a key leader in the newly formed 'Friends of Durras' group - a community-based conservation group founded to fight for Durras Lake.

"As a bureaucrat, I thought everyone would follow the rational arguments," she said.

"I learned then that if you want to protect something in Australia, people have to fight for it.

"Yes, you need the science, but you also need the community.

"Whether it's the Wet Tropics World Heritage Area, Fraser Island or even the Great Barrier Reef or Durras Lake, communities have to fight for them."

And Friends of Durras fought.

Virginia would door knock tourist caravans in summer asking them to join the fight.

The group grew to more than 1200 members, becoming one of the largest grassroots conservation groups in the nation at the time.

They took out an article in the Women's Weekly and an advertisement in the Financial Review telling developers locals were strongly opposed to the sell-off. Group members turned up at the auction with placards.

The land didn't sell.

So Virginia decided the best way to save the land around the Lake was to buy it themselves.

Friends of Durras raised more than $100,000 and helped buy the land, which was then added to Murramarang National Park, where it remains.

"I really didn't understand until I got involved in trying to protect Durras Lake just how hard it was to save anything," she said.

"I learnt what it takes to save things."

Virginia no longer believed arguing over the scientific benefit of trees, green spaces and healthy ecosystems would suffice in the fight for wild places.

"It was a revelation that governments weren't going to act independently to protect these places," she said. The community needed to come together and make a stand.

She also learnt her interests and skills were well-equipped for the task and, what's more, she loved it.

"I'd always been interested in science. This was a different skill set I discovered in myself: science informing policy," she said.

From there, she became National Forest Campaign Coordinator for The Wilderness Society. From the small-scale of Durras, suddenly Virginia was fighting for Port Hinchinbrook and Tasmania forests.

"There is never a shortage of problems at all scales to be dealt with," she said.

For Virginia, the local problems and global problems are closely intertwined.

She was in Madrid at the UN Climate Change Conference when the Currowan blaze jumped the Princes Highway and raced into Murramarang National Park during the Black Summer Bushfires.

Tracing the fire's movements from the other side of the world, Virginia thought her home was destroyed.

Yet her forest retreat, where she lives with her husband and the occasional red neck wallaby, the resident goanna, bellbirds, galahs, cockatoos and the thousands-upon-thousands of microbes, lichen and fungi in the soil that hold the ecosystem together, managed to survive.

However, fear had struck too close to home for comfort.

Virginia said the fires were "not an aberration" but "the beginning of the change - which is a terrifying thing".

"Climate change has hit us hard already and I don't think anyone was expecting that," she said.

More than 40 years after she decided to first paint a placard for Durras Lake, Virginia is still fighting the same battles to protect natural environments around the world. While she said she could easily give up, she has no plans to stop anytime soon.

"40 years is young for a tree," she said.

"If I give up, we've got no hope.

"If people who know how bad things are and what needs to be done turn their back, then it's no good expecting people who aren't as involved in it and don't know as much to somehow rather magically pick up the ball.

"I tell everyone of my generation who is involved in conservation they cannot retire.

"We have a moral responsibility to try and educate people, help people change, help governments change.

"It's make or break time."

The key to a good campaign, Virginia has learnt, is community involvement.

"Involving the community starts with love," she said.

"Every good campaign has always started with taking people to the forest - getting people in to see why something is special."

When she was fighting to save the hardwood trees in the ancient forest of Styx Valley, Tasmania, she would take celebrities, businessmen and activists to the Global Rescue Station established 80 metres in the air amongst the canopy.

"Just about everyone from the mainland that was taken on a walk into that forest would end up in tears because of the disjunct from these magical forests with soaring eucalypts and complete rainforest understory and extraordinarily beautiful ferns and then you walk a few hundred metres to this war-zone, smashed clear-felled coupe," she said.

"They were shell-shocked."

It is powerful experiences like these that Virginia has found have resounding effects on the people who visit them and start to grow community support. And community support, Virginia said, was the key.

"How do you influence decision-makers to change their approach? It is always through community support," she said.

She sees her role as educating decision makers and future generations on the potential climate calamity she sees rapidly approaching.

She is working to increase awareness of how the biodiversity crisis the world faces interacts with the climate crisis.

"It's not just that climate change is really bad for wildlife and forests," she said. "It's actually losing the integrity of our natural ecosystems. We continue to damage them, clear them, log them, pollute them and make them more vulnerable to the threats that will increase with climate change, like more severe fires, more severe droughts, more severe storms."

It's why she cares so much about the greater gliders in the trees, the occasional lyrebird frolicking in leaf litter, the outcrops of spotted gums that stretch from her house down towards Cookies Beach and what she calls "the treasures at every scale that are in a forest".

She sees herself as a small part of an intimately connected global system.

"The creatures shape the forest," she said.

As just one small creature in a bigger system, Virginia is determined her legacy is to leave the forests in better shape than when she started.