The newly elected Andrews government has promised to bring public ownership of electricity back to Victoria. However, there are no immediate plans to reinstate the public utility model that prevailed through much of the twentieth century. Rather, a publicly owned renewables company will operate within an electricity market shaped by decades of neoliberal reform.

I was picked up to go to a citizen science camp in Goongerah-East Gippsland. I'd come to Melbourne for respite, after the Lismore flood. I was excited to see Audrey, who I'd first met at a citizen science camp 10 years ago. But the forest looked completely different to how it had looked the last time I'd visited.

When a self-proclaimed ‘eco-fascist’ committed mass murder in Christchurch in March 2019, it drew attention to the influence on the far-right of ecological thought ¬– an ideological tendency most often understood to be of ‘leftist’ derivation.

Once more, the substantial population living in contamination zones on land they don’t own are left to their own devices. There is no state to save them, no legal enterprise assured of victory to fund their fight. The only option provided by the powers that solely exist for this type of catastrophe is to surrender to the elements.

It may be easier, and more desirable in times of crisis, to focus on tall tales of nature rebounding in our absence than to truly reckon with our place in the global ecosystem. But reckon we must if we are to avoid, on the one hand, magical thinking, and on the other, environmental misanthropy.

‘We have to be in the faces of these people because otherwise – silence is acquiescence. So I’m going to be in your face every single day, you people are going to know about me every single day. You’re going to be educated every single day. We’re not going away, we haven’t gone away in 250 years, you tried to wipe us away, we come back generation after generation, yeah?’

These days the hippies aren’t so hopeful; they’re asking: now that hope and confidence are insufficient to the task at hand, how do we live with integrity?

I used to be like you. I lived in the city, I became vegan and I went ‘to the country’ occasionally, getting angry at the lack of signage about the massacres through which my fellow colonists come to be here. I knew about the bees dying and REFLEX paper through Facebook, and I thought that the old growth forests, like the greenies, were somewhere ‘out there’, somewhere further away than Daylesford or Castlemaine.

After a century of Royal Commissions and interstate agreements we are arguably closer than ever before to destroying our largest river system.

In Queensland we grow up with a conditioned disgust for cane toads. It’s a telling concern: they’re not from here. They first came across the seas to eat the cane beetles, sugarcane being one of the primary crops of local agriculture. But the beetles are high up in the cane and the cane toads can’t reach them, failing their first objective. From the few specimens brought over in a suitcase, cane toads have been spreading down the east coast and west across the top of Australia ever since.

On 4 December 2018, the Australian rare earth mining company Lynas suffered a critical setback to its operations in the Malaysian city of Kuantan. The Malaysian minister of energy, science, technology, environment and climate change declared that the mining giant can no longer operate without a plan to safely dispose of its radioactive waste. The announcement came off the back of more than a decade of grassroots activism against the multinational company.

On a warm Thursday evening in early September, a community meeting about the New South Wales Government’s proposal to establish a new, long-awaited marine park in and around Sydney was held at Fishing Station in Mona Vale, on the city’s northern beaches. Around three hundred local fishers crowded in to voice their anger, bodies spilling out of the tackle shop’s doorway and into the carpark. To them, the marine park was a ‘lockout’.

In the silver light, the brumbies’ plush manes glisten. A soft dusting of snow clings to the thick hair that hangs around their hooves. We pull our car to the side of the road and watch in silence as the band trots down into the still, white valley. There is something majestic about the scene. The hillsides sparkle in the headlights. ‘They are Australian?’ my Colombian partner asks me. ‘Yes,’ I reply, but falter.

The debate over Hobart’s proposed cable car – mooted to run from Cascade Gardens and across the Organ Pipes to the pinnacle of kunanyi/Mt Wellington – transcends the stereotypical Tassie-greenie vs. ‘economic progress’ conflict. Local tensions are being ignited by concerns over due process and political transparency, the erasure of Indigenous rights and cultural agency, and short-sighted planning that is viewing the future of Tasmania purely through a tourism lens.

The ancient Egyptians venerated the ibis. Followers of ibis cults would visit temples and purchase mummified ibises for use in votive offerings. The ibis was a sacred bird associated with creation and fertility and knowledge and learning. The ibis cults became so wildly popular that priests began breeding and rearing the birds onsite, specially for mummification.

If someone told me a visit to the Western Treatment Plant, where half of Melbourne’s sewage is treated, would lead me to contemplate the Anthropocene and my place as a human on this planet, I wouldn’t have believed them. But there I was, in an area of the facility that contains the most concentrated result of treated human excrement. Surrounded by rolling hills of biosolids too contaminated by metals to be safely used, I thought about the human impact on the environment, of my own impact, and of how each of us successfully ignores the refuse left behind by our own body.