As extreme weather becomes the norm Bolivia’s first indigenous president, Evo Morales, believes that to fight climate change we need to recover the values of indigenous people. Indigenous Australian writer Alexis Wright says something similar in her essay ‘Deep Weather’ in the latest issue of Meanjin. Noting the devastation of the 2009 Victorian bushfires, the […]

We don’t know yet how serious the nuclear crisis in Japan will be. With luck, the leaks will be contained soon. God knows, the Japanese people have suffered enough. But what’s happened so far highlights the fundamental problem with nuclear energy. The case against atomic power is – and has always been – very straightforward. […]

To most people who have studied the humanities, the benefits of such an education are self-evident. I could list all the joys of ethics, rhetoric, aesthetic analysis and critical thinking; the specific thinkers that introduce these concepts like Plato, Aristotle, Burke, Nietzsche, Wollstonecraft, Marx, Freud, Simone de Beauvoir, Russell or Arendt, among many others. I […]

I loathe plastic water bottles. I detest them, I really do. I think they’re ridiculous, wasteful, overpriced and faintly offensive. They’re faintly unhealthy, and insulting. I prefer them to the endless consumption of bottled soft drinks, but I still consider them more pointless. And, in the words of my eighty-five-year-old great aunt, they’re a little […]

On Saturday morning, two activists at Camp for Climate Action chained themselves to Xstrata Ravensworth Coalmine. They were arrested for their action. On Sunday, over 150 activists pushed over a fence to block the train lines running to Bayswater coal-fired power station. The most recent count is 73 activists arrested, including an 88-year-old man. We […]

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 […]

It’s been raining cats and dogs in Victoria. We’re leaping puddles, keeping an eye on overflowing water tanks and sighing with relief as Melbourne’s parks and trees slurp up the huge soaking. But the rain that tumbles into creeks and rivers also floods our waterways with enough rubbish to fill the MCG. In Melbourne alone, […]

Earlier I was doing reading for a subject for my Masters. It was about the various forms of environmentalism as they had existed in the past, and in the then-present (1996). Among the last things in the given reading was a table of environmental ideas divided up by how wacky they were considered to be. […]

Screw Light Bulbs Donna Green & Liz Minchin UWA Publishing Screw Light Bulbs was written when its authors got to the point of having written or read one too many articles suggesting that the best thing individuals could do towards fighting climate change was change their light bulbs. Recognising that this was at best a […]

In the wake of Synthetic Genomics’ dramatic achievement, ‘playing God’ was the predictable cry in the media. The verb is misleading. It implies that whereas God works, Venter and his colleagues are merely playing; a blasphemous mockery, the trifling mimicry of a monkey, carrying out the form of creation while missing its content of the […]

Heading to the @wheelercentre for @Mean_land Reading in a Time of Technology. Should be interesting.less than a minute ago via TweetieSuzanneSteinbrucknerOfficialSuze Apologies to anyone unable to attend last night’s second official Meanland event at The Wheeler Centre, because it was a fantastic adventure. Not only was it riveting and engaging, it was positively electrifying; every […]