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.

This book is overtly anti-racist and is all about conserving ecologies, and it acknowledges the colonialism of natural history, but it also is entirely inside what it critiques. It’s the most bizarre contradiction I've encountered in decades of critical writing, reviewing and activism.

We are at a crossroads where gas could be locked into the energy grid for the coming decades. We could combine investment in renewable energy to decarbonise manufacturing jobs, and regulate the industry to ensure that more gas stays in Australia. But the choice is likely to be obfuscated as a single pathway: one more silver bullet, one more rush for gas.

Perhaps we must become reconciled to the fact that, as much as we would like to see ourselves as part of nature, to look at a tree and see it as one of us, the fact remains that to entire ecosystems it is we who are the octopus. We are Cthulhu, the primordial horror and existential threat.

We need to engage with scale. We need to keep thinking that the loss of a million animals is a terrible tragedy that must be avoided at all costs. We must also realise that the loss of a billion animals is not the same. It’s a thousand times worse.