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He was doing it yesterday, in Hobart's Grand Chancellor Hotel, where delegates to a tourism conference found the after-lunch course was a Brown film of Tasmanian wilderness being fire-bombed, poisoned and clear-felled.
Several football fields a day, 20,000 hectares a year, were being wiped out. It was a total assault on forests. Anyone who had doubts need only go outside and count the log trucks - 75 a day - rumbling up Macquarie Street. "We want them out of the old-growth forests now," he said to an overflow crowd.
In the room next door, his friend, East Timor's foreign affairs spokesman, Jose Ramos Horta, was selling his nation's tourist delights ("more secure than Fiji"). Bob Brown thought Tasmania had more to offer, but only if the "madness" of turning old-growth hardwood into woodchips - at the bargain price of $10 a tonne - could be tackled.
There was no mincing about. Senator Brown challenged the tourism industry to stop being so selfish and start standing up for the environment. It was a move from the "ethics of profit" to the "ethics of wonder," he said.
Simon Currant, from Tourism Tasmania, did not agree, and accused Saint Bob of a "subjective, emotive presentation that contains lies". Unfazed, the senator acknowledged the attack, then moved on, flagging a new cause, one that he said would rival his 1983 campaign to save the Franklin River.
It was a logical progression from the first conservation battle, the failed bid to maintain the sublime Lake Pedder. He would focus on the preservation of the Styx, a valley north-west of Hobart that houses the world's tallest hardwood forest, including the tallest flowering plant in the world, a hardwood 96.5 metres high. Tourism, not timber, would salvage Tasmania, he said. On his analysis, 3000 of the state's direct 18,000 tourism jobs come from wilderness; 2500 come from logging. The timber industry, which he said the majority of Tasmanians opposed, was staging a "fire sale" of the environment.
"It hasn't changed since the Franklin dam," he said. "Politicians still back a total blitz of forests."
In an election where the commitment of the leaders is an issue, this was an unequivocal performance. Bob Brown may be unexciting to look at - his ears stand out like open car doors and he is nasal in his delivery - but as the applause at the end showed, he knows how to stir a crowd.
It is probably because he stands for something. Loggers can't understand where he gets his votes from, but for young people, like Emily, 23, a "cake baker", who sat on the steps outside his office in forest colors, singing a song, he is a hero. It is an irony, really. Bob Brown is 56, and "very aware" that most Greens voters are under 30. He represents hope to them, but his hope is getting new, younger faces to join him in Canberra.
That could happen, but it is less likely than his own re-election. The Greens in Tasmania are pulling about 9.5 per cent, which is 4.5 per cent short of a quota. He will get most of the Democrats' preferences, but because the Liberals are favoring Labor over the Greens, it could be a tight finish for the final senate slot.
The man who still lives in a wilderness cottage in Liffey, central Tasmania, remains upbeat. "I'm feeling better, happier, than ever," he said, embracing his friend Ramos Horta. He was "very doubtful" about going into the Senate. But getting the chance to speak up for East Timor and Tibet made it worthwhile.
And he has had some wins. He may not be able to compete with his arch-rival, Democrats leader Natasha Stott Despoja, in the PR race - this week she has been pictured on the beach in a bathing suit and in a shop wearing a T-shirt - but he has managed to block a forests bill that would have meant, he says, unwarranted compensation for loggers.
As he left the tourism talkfest, his credentials, like his Jesuit-style suit, remained unmarked.
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