Over 200 years ago human beings began burning large quantities of the coal, oil and natural gas that had been buried under the Earth’s surface for hundreds of millions of years. This may eventually come to be seen as the most fatal misstep in the history of humankind. When...
Environment
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Robert Manne
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The Nation Reviewed | Environment | Foreign Affairs | Politics
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Arnold Zable
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The Nation Reviewed | Environment | March 2010 | Society & Culture
A year on from the Black Saturday fires, there’s a perverse beauty in the burnt forests, a striking interplay of black and green. The scorched eucalypts are fringed by halos of young leaves; epicormic growth, it is called – nature’s stopgap measure to revive stressed trees....
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Kate Rossmanith
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The Nation Reviewed | Environment | March 2010 | Society & Culture
One morning in 1683, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, a merchant and amateur scientist in the Dutch city of Delft, set about the daily ritual of cleaning his teeth. Proud of his teeth, but perturbed by the solid white growth he could see between them, he scraped off some offending...
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Shane Maloney
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Environment | March 2010 | Encounters
Rabbits are poor conservers of energy. They can’t adapt to drought. Their diet is not diverse. All in all, they are not well suited to the Australian environment. But when it comes to reproduction they can’t be bettered. Mating takes 30 seconds, courtship included. In a...
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Peter Doherty
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The Monthly Essays | Environment | Foreign Affairs | November 2009 | Politics
The scope of what science can do is constantly being enhanced by technology. While microbiology is benefiting from new, ultra-high-speed gene and protein sequencers, climatology is being informed by next-generation satellites that can measure the depth and area of ice sheets...
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Tim Flannery
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The Monthly Essays | Environment | Foreign Affairs | November 2009 | Politics
For all their importance, the international climate negotiations have hardly been pursued with urgency. Until recently, they have been somewhat Wagnerian in character: seemingly interminable and with expectations of resolution eternally denied. In September, however,...
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James Bradley
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The Nation Reviewed | Environment | September 2009
It takes little more than two hours for the spotter planes to locate the first whale shark of the day. Along with the two-dozen or so others who have paid several hundred dollars to spend a day diving with the sharks, I don my mask and flippers in readiness to swim. We are...
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Alan Saunders
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The Nation Reviewed | August 2009 | Environment
“We’re in the renaissance period of artificial light at night,” says composer and light designer Mary-Anne Kyriakou. “If the city at night is only a place where people drink, what good is the city?”
On this warm June night, the crouching pug dog of a building that is...
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Robert Manne
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June 2009 | The Nation Reviewed | Environment | Politics
The Labor government of James Scullin was elected in October 1929, the month of the Wall Street crash, which history regards as the beginning of the Great Depression. In November 2007, the Labor government of Kevin Rudd was elected ten months before the collapse of Lehman...
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Tim Flannery
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June 2009 | Books | Environment | Society & Culture
James Lovelock's latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (Allen Lane, 192pp; $29.95), has an important message. In a few years, or a few decades at most, abrupt changes in Earth's climate will begin, which will end up killing almost all of us and...
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