Environment and Climate

Water courses through the history of Western Australia. When historian Ruth A. Morgan began writing Running Out?: Water in Western Australia in 2007, the state was in the grip of drought, climate change was at the fore of public debate, and Perth’s first desalination plant was a year old. The 2005 state election had hinged on the ‘Kimberley–Perth canal ... More

Writing an effective book on climate change is a challenge as diabolicalas it is important. The complexity of the science, economics, and politics is daunting. How to extract the diamonds lurking in the rough of the International Panel on Climate Change reports? How to balance the good cop, dishing out hope, with the bad, lashing the reader with honest accounts of p ... More

Since the loss of Lake Pedder, the Apple Isle has been the site of some of Australia’s most famous environmental battles: Franklin River, Farmhouse Creek, Wesley Vale, Styx Valley. In the Tamar Valley near Launceston, tensions continue to simmer over the future of the Gunns Pulp Mill – even in the wake of the collapse of its original proponent, Gunns Ltd, in Sep ... More

Many years ago, after working for a while in Europe, we returned to Australia via America. We picked up a car in Atlanta and drove through sprawling cities, alarming slums, and abandoned downtowns. Across Mississippi and the broad, reassuring openness of Texas, to Arizona and the Grand Canyon, we passed through the alien electrics of Las Vegas, down into Death Valle ... More

Late in 1986, the Australian Bicentennial Authority took sixty celebrities off to Uluru to make the television advertisement containing the jingle ‘Celebration of a Nation’. Just as the shoot finished, a heavy storm broke, prompting the stars to run for cover. ‘Oh, darling,’ cried Jeanne Little, a popular television personality at the time. ‘The real Austr ... More

Speaking about the process of painstakingly researching the ‘terrible mistakes’ made on climate policy by the Rudd and Gillard governments over the six years of their existence, Philip Chubb told an audience at the Wheeler Centre that he ‘almost exhausted [himself] with gloom’. Indeed, this important book, which covers the Icarian trajectory of climat ... More

With resource shortages looming and climate change a topic of intense discussion, it is becoming increasingly important for people to find ways to reduce their day-to-day consumption and carbon footprint. Greg Foyster’s Changing Gears seeks to explore the question of how to do so through the author’s own interesting, and no doubt exhausting, cross-c ... More

A friend and colleague from Europe visited in October 2010 for the first time in almost a decade. I had peppered him in the intervening years with emails bemoaning the long drought, the record heat, the lack of rain, the bushfires, the water restrictions, the young and old trees dying, the rivers ceasing to flow and finally drying altogether. I had described the har ... More

‘No’ is not part of modern consumer life. ‘Yes’ is the catchcry of the market. Despite the best efforts of scientists and activists, it may be too late to phase out fossil fuels and find alternatives to the mass consumerism that is so dependent on them. Human-induced global warming’s tipping point is nigh. There is almost no turning back. Geo-enginee ... More

In the aftermath of Chernobyl it is hard not to see nuclear disaster as the muse of abject horror. The degree of uncertainty surrounding life after catastrophe – genetic mutation, contaminated food supplies, mass displacement of townships – is unfathomable for governments and citizens alike. At a time when the need for accurate information is at its greatest, mi ... More