1.1.1. The Cry of a Growing Silence
This beautiful piece is about the loss of birds, of wonder and of boyhood in Anson’s home place – the northern plains of Victoria. I think the opening image: “Jigsaw pieces of new silence begin to join” is as poignant a metaphor of environment...
1.1.2. In Praise of Pardalotes
Keeping with the bird theme (sorry, I am a birdwatcher since childhood) is this lovely little piece by John Woinarski who studied pardalotes for decades. John celebrates their tiny, dumpy, yet purposeful beauty, and the gift of their presence and ...
1.1.3. More Greed and More Loneliness
Broadening the outlook to the human condition and a sickness at the heart of modern society, Michael Leunig names our delusions and our disease as only he can. This article is the first time I can remember the obeisance to the economy being called...
1.1.4. The Really Inconvenient Truth
It is awkward intruding one’s own musings with such fine company. Such an act can be seen as a piece of egotistical opportunism, or even a shallow trick, like that played by the supermarkets when they package up desirable fruit and vegetables with...
1.1.5. Running out of Gas
Keeping to the big picture, Growthbusters produced this excellent and wide-ranging podcast in 2019 that seeks both to cover the big issues for the environment and address their deeper causes.
Interviewer and text: Dave Gardner
“Our two guest...
1.1.6. Submission to Victorian Government Extinction Inquiry
Deliberately moving between scales, this submission to the Victorian Government Extinction Inquiry by local friend, Heinz, skilfully joins the personal with the institutional, the global with the ‘backyard’ (in this case, the Western District of V...
1.1.7. Understanding the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future
Extending the idea of a submission on the state of the environment and extinction, the following paper moves from Heinz’s more personal and local perspective to that of a global outlook. As such, this most powerful of papers could have been includ...
1.1.8. Capitalism, the Doomsday Machine
In a typically thoughtful and incisive piece, Richard Heinberg tackles the global belief system – capitalism – and finds that “the machine is still on its path to world annihilation”. He then neatly summarises four major responses to the looming c...
1.1.9. Birds are a Liberation that Never Ends
This delightful piece by Richard Flanagan captures as well as anything I’ve read the great gift and sheer joy of birds: “Few things induce volts of happiness in me like the common cranky fan (Grey Fantail) when it meets me near the water tank and ...
1.1.10. Killing Nature in the Mind
I am lucky enough to look out on this from my loungeroom window every day. These great rock ranges began forming 400 million years ago and Mt Abrupt’s obdurate slab face mocks my petty existence. I suppose I should be angry about this, feel slight...
Explore Other Sections
1. Build the Nature-Human Relationship
This section is designed to foster appreciation and insight that will – hopefully – lead to novel ways to build a better relationship between human beings and Nature. This section is also atypical ...
2. Reduce Consumption
I hope Reneé Descartes would forgive us for saying that, at least for the modern world, he was wrong. When, in 1637, he said: “I think, therefore I am”, he could not have anticipated that the majo...
3. Replace God of Growth with God of Quality
In a supposedly secular age there has arisen a global religion and god like never before, a religion whose reach and power makes every other belief system before it seem pitiful and insignificant: ...
4. Work, Volunteer, Act for the Environment
What we do in our day-to-day lives can have great impact. Section Four divides up these actions into three groups – Work (4.2 & 4.3), Volunteering (4.4), and Action, e.g. voting, protesting, et...
5. Reduce Population
Even on top of Mt. Everest, in one of the remotest, most difficult places on earth, there is a great traffic-jam of people jostling for position. And yet, ever more vociferously, we deny that overp...
6. Ensure Media Acknowledgement of Environmental Context
The media is one of the three, great ‘poles’ of power in the world (alongside political and corporate power) and how they frame and present ‘the environment’ has a profound effect on how we respond...
7. Stop Further Loss of Natural Habitat and Species
New York is an exciting, mesmerising place. Human culture is extraordinary and often wonderful. Our powers of transformation of the natural world seem limitless. The trouble is, we don’t seem to be...
8. Assist Energy Descent and Transition
Our current energy largesse is an extraordinary ‘gift’, an unprecedented gift of the ages; millions of years to produce and from millions of years ago. Coal, oil and gas, forming...
9. Support New, Environmentally-Aware, Economic Systems
Just as with the previous section – ‘Energy’ – which is, inescapably, all about fossil fuels so pre-eminent and extraordinary has been their dominance and transformation of the world in the last 20...
10. Reduce Wastes to the Rate of Natural Assimilation
Section 10 will attempt to organise this enormous topic by addressing the context and status of pollution in 10.2, before focussing in on air pollution; particularly greenhouse gas pollution and cl...
