Dave Witty

‘Tasmania is in a new age of fire,’ writes Andrew Darby in an article for The Guardian. The fires in February, which came close to destroying ancient Huon pines in the takayna/Tarkine and pencil pines near Cradle Mountain, were started by a dry lightning strike, as were the fires which tore through the Grove of Giants six years ago. Lightning strikes were once responsible for less than 0.01 pe ... (read more)

It is rare to encounter spacecraft in nature writing. Indeed, most definitions of nature confine it to Earth’s boundaries. A few pages into Lauren Fuge’s book, we are treated to the image of two Voyager space probes, more than sixteen billion kilometres from the Earth and ‘driven by the most ecstatic imaginings of human exploration’. This is a mark of Fuge’s ambition. She is as comfortab ... (read more)

Shortly after Black Saturday, David Lindenmayer was giving a seminar on post-bushfire recovery when a member of the audience yelled out, ‘If it wasn’t for you greenies, none of this would have happened.’ Lindenmayer’s response was neither defence nor attack, but rather to rephrase the man’s words. ‘Your hypothesis,’ he said, ‘is that a fire in a forest that is logged and regenerate ... (read more)