Tim Flannery

Memories of Robert Hughes

Kevin Rudd’s decision to defer his emissions trading bill until 2012 represents an abrupt and dramatic policy reversal, the significance of which, both nationally and globally, will only grow with time. It’s a funk in the true sense of the word: a …

Ian McEwan’s latest work can be read as a farce whose principal theme is Hamlet’s musing that “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Indeed, when introducing the novel’s protagonist – the physicist Michael Beard, …

On the morning of 19 December, we will likely wake to read the results of the United Nations Climate-Change Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark. The meetings will be, according to Lord Stern, the most important to have occurred since World War II, and whatever …

James Lovelock’s ‘The Vanishing Face of Gaia’

Over the past four years, there has been immeasurable progress on climate change - in public awareness, in media interest and in the political response to the problem. In early 2005, one of us was completing The Weather Makers; the other was …

As I write, in mid March, a geriatric sandy-coloured rat wanders his enclosure at the Alice Springs Desert Park. Death can't be far off for the poor creature, which would hardly matter except that, as far as anybody knows, he's the last central rock-rat …