I’ve never been in the presence of a blossoming corpse flower. I’ve never breathed in the scent. But through my computer screen I could experience Putricia’s soft velvety folds, her firm but wilting spike. I could feel close to her.

Uranium has come a long way from the “modern Midas mineral” of the 1950s. However, in an increasingly dangerous, militaristic and volatile world, it remains a lucrative and potentially lethal metal. And it is so important precisely because of its contested past and possible futures.

Looking for things meant I could enjoy the feeling in my body. Something like hope, or friendship.

A love letter — no, wait, poster — to cycling by the great Sam Wallman.

This is an essay about the chickadees, a bird family of North America, and about climate politics. By the end, it’s going to ask you to join me in November in Newcastle, New South Wales, for the People's Blockade of the World’s Largest Coal Port.

"Found living in the safety of rockpools, sponges are animals sensitive to disturbance. They can regenerate, reshaping with the water flow." A new comic by Sofia Sabbagh.

Political journalism follows scandal like a loyal dog. The Murray-Darling Basin is a gift to such an enterprise, breeding scandal and tragedy, windfall and downfall, wealthy abundance and mass ecological death.

This essay explores the political ecology of suburban gardens, focussing on Sydney but also drawing on insights from cities around the world. It draws on my academic studies in geography and political economy, but also on an adult life spent largely as a labourer building and maintaining gardens, parks and urban bushland.

Driven by the Merri-Bek City Council and local community groups such as Friends of Merri Creek, the restoration of the Merri Creek has been wildly successful. To walk down the track is to feel like you’ve stumbled into a completely different city. One would hardly recognise this place as the runoff hub of Melbourne’s industrialised north, a deathly quiet place that stank of something unnatural just two generations ago.

Dr Huhana Smith and cousins have spent the last twenty years focussing on the restoration of her ancestral coastal land and waterways at Kuku Beach, near Levin, in Aotearoa/New Zealand, using biochar—the carbon-rich remains of slow-burned wood. Smith and her collaborators use biochar not only as a tool for land restoration, but also as an artistic medium. Their work is critical for thinking about what is possible when Māori communities have control of their cultural and spiritual bases.

I ride to the city along the Upfield train line—and a creek, which I can't see and which isn't on Google Maps, but the frogs love it. It's an invisible wildlife refuge in Melbourne's inner north.

All our environmental problems require a radical change in how we think about resources and land. Before 1788, there was no wilderness: management for biodiversity was also management for the availability of food, fibre, wood and medicine. Harvesting these things was also a form of management.

Some fungi live inside plants. Some live on their surfaces, and some live around plant roots. Pre-colonisation, a tree may have had 2-50 different types of companion fungi, each with their own community, which were spread across the ecosystem. The more native fungi, and the larger the fungi community, the healthier the tree.

To winaga-li, Gomeroi/Kamilaroi people must be able to access Gunimaa. They must be able to connect and re-connect. Over 160 years of colonisation has privileged intensive agriculture, grazing and heavily extractive water management regimes, enabled by imposed property regimes and governance systems. Gunimaa and Gali still experience the violent repercussions of these processes, including current climate changes which are exacerbating impacts, as droughts become longer, floods and heat extremes become more intense, and climatic zones shift, impacting on species’ viability and biodiversity.

‘Notice how you feel’, the tour copy suggests, as the forest gives way to a clear-felled expanse. On the map, a key highlights points of interest: from those areas a patient visitor might be able to spotlight a Leadbeater’s possum, to coupes that are open for logging. Often, these areas overlap.

‘The canary in the coalmine’ is an overworked phrase, but has its used-by date really expired? One might insist, its time is now. But not as a means to keep noting the impact, measuring the fallout, counting the losses. But as a call to action, as plaintive as the cry of the bush stone-curlew, as commanding as the call of the crow.