Category

Environment

Climatic changes may mean that by the middle of next century, every year would be a potential “Ash Wednesday” year of extreme bushfire danger, according to CSIRO scientists. The risk would be greatest in south-eastern Australia, the nation’s most fertile and densely populated region, the scientists have told the national Greenhouse 87 conference. It is the first time the possibility of such a dramatic increase in bushfire risk has been linked to the global warming many scientists will occur within the next 50 years.
[Sydney Morning Herald, December 4, 1987]

Bob Beale

The philosopher Donna Haraway speaks of the imperative of “staying with the trouble”, of not shying away from reality but instead inhabiting the present in all its complexity, terror, hope and joy and recognising our kinship with those around us. Perhaps it is time we all learned to do that, time we learned to recognise our own hopes and fears in other people. Because that is what many of us glimpsed in the faces of the people on the beach in Mallacoota on New Year’s Eve. We saw ourselves, our shared future, the terror and pain of what is coming. And we could no longer look away.

James Bradley

For the hapless energy minister [Angus Taylor] had managed in Madrid the one success of his ministerial career to date and that was to discredit our nation in the eyes of the world by being in cahoots with such colleagues as a nation led by medieval butchers, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, a nation led by a latter-day vivisector, exactly the sort of pariah states any democratic country feels proud to have as allies.

Richard Flanagan