In March 2009 I was the lead NSW delegate to the Australian Greens’ National Council in Perth when I experienced a curious fact of climate politics. Our state party put a proposal that the Senators pull back from having emissions trading as the key plank of climate policy, a position Christine Milne had enshrined in […]

Forty percent of all Australian water is used by agricultural irrigation in the Murray Darling Basin. At least that’s my estimate, based on some widely available and often quoted figures*. So 40% of all of our water is used in an industry that employs 3% of the workforce. This could almost be fair, I suppose, […]

At 0900 hours the enemy combatant was identified squatting, camouflaged, in the undergrowth. The target was photographed and captured without incident. He is believed to be a scout from the coming invasion party. Perhaps that’s not quite how the first cane toad was reported near Noonbah Station, southwest of Longreach in Queensland last week, but […]

So I finally got around to reading Jared Diamond’s 2005 book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Clearly I’m way behind the times, but the book is eight hundred pages long. Anyway, the central thesis of the book is that environmental factors, and the way people respond to them, can play a major […]