It’s little surprise that five of the six abstentions came from nuclear weapon states: the United States, China, Israel, Pakistan and India (joined, oddly, by South Sudan). But in a dismaying display of power politics, France and Britain voted with Russia and North Korea to oppose assistance to people and landscapes irradiated during decades of nuclear testing.

Diplomats representing Western powers are prone to talk about “the international community,” “the rules-based order” and “democratic versus authoritarian states.” But on this occasion the jargon was undercut by the willingness of London and Paris to line up alongside Moscow and Pyongyang to avoid responsibility for past actions and to limit reparations.

With the International Court of Justice debating genocide in Ukraine, Myanmar and Palestine and UN agencies seeking to defend international humanitarian law, the hypocrisy of major powers has been polarising international opinion. Developing nations are increasingly challenging an international order that sanctions official enemies, at the same time as absolving major powers of the responsibility to deal with their own breaches of international law.

Over the past three years, ambassadors Teburoro Tito of Kiribati and Akan Rakhmetullin of Kazakhstan have coordinated international consultations on how the nuclear assistance provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, should be implemented. Articles 6 and 7 of the treaty, which entered into force in January 2021, include unprecedented obligations on parties to the treaty to aid nuclear survivors and contribute to environmental remediation.

Kiribati and Kazakhstan might seem an unlikely couple, but they have bonded over a common twentieth-century legacy. Both nations’ lands, waters and peoples have been devastated by cold war nuclear testing, and in each case the responsible countries refuse to take responsibility. Britain and Russia have bonded, too, but in their case, they’re united in their refusal to assist their former colonies.

After conducting twelve atmospheric atomic tests in Australia in 1952–57 — at the Monte Bello Islands, Emu Field and Maralinga — Britain sought a new location for developing and testing more powerful hydrogen bombs. During Operation Grapple, the British military conducted nine atmospheric thermonuclear tests at Malden and Christmas (Kiritimati) islands in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, which is today part of the Republic of Kiribati.

Just as Britain chose the “vast empty spaces” of the South Australian desert and the isolated atolls of Kiribati for its tests, Moscow sought similar expanses within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Over more than four decades, it held 456 nuclear tests in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan. The history of Soviet testing in the Central Asian republic and its radioactive legacies, spread across more than 18,000 square kilometres, has been documented by Kazakh scholar Togzhan Kassenova in her compelling 2022 book Atomic Steppe.

Once the TPNW was adopted, Kiribati and Kazakhstan led efforts to develop mechanisms for dealing with the health and environmental effects of radioactive fallout. After seeking technical advice from survivors, nuclear scientists and UN agencies, they developed a set of proposals for action and a UN resolution seeking international support.

Now adopted by the UN General Assembly, that resolution proposes bilateral, regional and multilateral action and the sharing of technical and scientific information about nuclear legacies, and “calls upon Member States in a position to do so to contribute technical and financial assistance as appropriate.” It requires UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres to seek members’ views and proposals about assistance to nuclear survivors and report back to the General Assembly.

Like most non-binding UN resolutions, this one is couched in the cautious diplomatic terminology required to forge a consensus among 193 UN member states. How then do the French and British governments justify their vote against assistance to nuclear survivors, a decision echoed by Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un?

When I put questions to France’s ambassador to the Pacific, Véronique Roger-Lacan, the French foreign affairs ministry replied, justifying its decision to stand with North Korea and Russia “because this resolution does not recognise the efforts already undertaken and because it aims to establish an international liability regime which ignores ongoing bilateral or national efforts, to which we are committed.”

According to the ministry, the French “fully” assume their “responsibilities and do everything we can to compensate all victims of nuclear tests, in accordance with the law of 5 January 2010 relating to the recognition and compensation of victims of French nuclear tests, modified in 2017. In this respect, France has in recent years strengthened its human and financial resources allocated to managing the consequences of the tests, including the identification and assistance of potential victims.”

It’s true that in 2010 France established the Comité d’Indemnisation des Victimes des Essais Nucléaires, or CIVEN, a commission to evaluate compensation claims from civilian and military personnel who staffed French nuclear test sites. But CIVEN’s significant flaws mean it is disingenuous to suggest that successive governments are “managing the consequences of the tests.”

President Emmanuel Macron’s refusal to respond fully to demands for assistance have been widely condemned by Mā’ohi political, church and community leaders in French Polynesia, where France conducted 193 nuclear tests from 1966 until as recently as 1996. They note, for example, that during its first five years of operation CIVEN approved only 2 per cent of claims submitted by personnel exposed to hazardous levels of ionising radiation at Moruroa and Fangataufa atolls.

Changes to the law since 2017 have improved the compensation process, but CIVEN still rejects more than half of all applications. Political and community leaders in French Polynesia continue to push for further reforms as well as an apology for the ongoing trauma caused by thirty years of testing.

In 2022 the French government created a special Mémoire des Hommes website dedicated to the Mā’ohi Nui nuclear testing program and began declassifying some relevant documents. But only archives relating to the Pacific Testing Centre are eligible for declassification — not those that cover France’s atmospheric and underground tests in Algeria between 1960 and 1965. France used its North African colony to conduct four atmospheric nuclear tests at Reggane and thirteen underground tests at In Eker in the Sahara desert, tests that continuing three years beyond Algerian independence in 1962 to give Paris time to build its testing bases in the South Pacific.

Indigenous survivors and researchers from the Nuclear Truth Project continue to call for better access to nuclear archives and the release of the documentary evidence required for compensation programs. They have also developed protocols to ensure any efforts for remediation and assistance are focused on redress for both historic and future harms from nuclear activities.

December’s UN resolution is just one step in a longer campaign to deal with the humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons under the TPNW. Seventy countries have now ratified that treaty, and the nuclear weapon states are getting anxious.

The United States, France and Britain — the three states that tested nuclear weapons in Oceania — first tried to ignore the TPNW, but as the number of ratifications mounted, they began to actively oppose it. In our region, eleven Pacific island countries and territories have ratified or acceded to TPNW and the remaining colonial dependencies have also joined the call for assistance to nuclear survivors, even though they can’t sign the treaty.

In September last year the Assembly of French Polynesia unanimously passed a resolution in support of the TPNW. As ICAN France, the local affiliate of the International Campaign to Abolish the Nuclear Weapons, noted, “while French Polynesia cannot currently access the assistance and rehabilitation outlined in Articles 6 and 7 of the TPNW due to France’s non-ratification, it sends a resounding message in favour of the treaty to Paris.”

President Moetai Brotherson of French Polynesia says the Assembly resolution sends an important message to Paris. “It’s not legally binding, so that’s probably one of the reasons they don’t really care about it,” Brotherson told me in November. “But it has a symbolic value that is very strong. For us, it’s only natural that we have this kind of position taken at the parliament. It’s a message we want to send to the world — that nuclear weapons are dangerous and we can destroy this planet if we are not cautious about it.”

In Australia, Kiribati, Marshall Islands and French Polynesia, Indigenous communities affected by nuclear testing want the weapons states to provide funds for independent, comprehensive radiological surveys of nuclear test sites and surrounding communities. They also want the nuclear powers to monitor, secure and remove nuclear wastes on a scale and standard comparable to the clean-up of domestic nuclear sites in their home territory.

As they ended their twentieth-century test programs, the Western powers used the Pacific Ocean as a dumping ground. A 2017 French government report on ocean dumping of nuclear waste admits that 2580 tonnes of nuclear waste in concrete drums was dumped in the ocean at site Oscar off Moruroa atoll in the eight years from 1974. Seventy-six tonnes of untreated radioactive waste had already been submerged at the nearby November site between 1972 and 1975.

ICAN France has also documented significant amounts of nuclear waste buried in the Sahara desert after France’s seventeen nuclear tests in Algeria, even though the French government still refuses to communicate details of the waste and landfill locations to Algerian authorities.

British nuclear test sites in the Monte Bello Islands and South Australian desert are also scarred with the radioactive legacies of atmospheric tests and the hundreds of experiments — including burning uranium and plutonium — conducted on the land of the Anangu people. The nuclear threat to these sacrifice zones is not over. Last year, Barngarla traditional owners won a long battle to protect their country and storylines from the proposed establishment of a radioactive waste on their land near Kimba in South Australia.

France’s answers to my questions about why it joined Russia and North Korea to vote against the Kiribati/Kazakhstan resolution might have been less than satisfactory, but British high commissions in the Pacific declined to respond at all.

Unlike France and the United States, Britain doesn’t have a compensation commission for survivors of nuclear testing. In fact, Britain has a shameful record of nuclear secrecy: in 2018, the National Archives withdrew public access to key files about British nuclear testing in Oceania.

Over more than thirty years, British, Australian, NZ and Fijian military veterans who served at British nuclear test sites in Kiribati and Australia have unsuccessfully lodged a series of cases and appeals before British courts and the European Court of Human Rights. They have sought damages under civil law for the illnesses they attribute to their service at nuclear test sites. Britain’s defence ministry has consistently opposed these claims, unfailingly appealing against lower court rulings that assisted veterans.

A fatal problem for the veterans is that they lack documentary evidence of rates of radioactive exposure for military personnel — evidence still buried in the British archives. Last month, the UK Daily Mirror reported how successive governments have maintained the cover-up, with government agencies refusing to release relevant data. “In 2018, the UK Ministry of Defence claimed it ‘had no information’ about blood testing during the nuclear trials,” the newspaper reported. “Last year the Atomic Weapons Establishment, an MoD agency, admitted it holds up to 5000 files, including a list of 150 specific documents mentioning blood and urine tests taken during the weapons program.”

At a time of warfare in Europe and the Middle East, the actions of these nuclear weapon states highlight their hypocrisy. As civilians are massacred in Ukraine and Gaza, developing nations are mobilising through the UN General Assembly, the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court to end a culture of impunity for states that declare themselves democratic. •

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During the preceding two days an agreement had by no means been guaranteed. After two weeks of negotiation, the core issue, on the future of fossil fuels, was deadlocked. On the one side were around one hundred small island states, developing countries and EU members, plus Australia, insisting that fossil fuels must ultimately be phased out. Anything less would be “signing our death certificate,” as Samoan natural resources and environment minister Cedric Schuster put it. On the other side were the petrostates and China. Rallied by an instruction from the secretary-general of OPEC, subsequently leaked, they were determined to hold out against any language committing the world to ending fossil fuel production. This would spell, they claimed, their own economic demise.

There are three ways for negotiators to overcome polarised conflict of this kind, and all three were duly used in the final text.

First, find another verb. If “phased out” is not acceptable to one side and “phased down” to the other, the negotiators will have tried alternatives. “Eliminate,” “end the use of,” “take urgent and rapid action towards the alternative”… Ultimately, it was “transition away from” that proved acceptable to all sides. The key sentence in the final agreement reads:

28 (d): Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science.

Linguistic style is not a COP concern.

Second, include several subtly different paragraphs covering the same topics. That way the different sides can each find some text to suit their needs. Immediately before the clause above is this one, which makes essentially the same point, but not quite:

28 (c): Accelerating efforts globally towards net zero emission energy systems, utilizing zero- and low-carbon fuels well before or by around mid-century.

And a little later:

29: Recognizes that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.

In UN-speak, “transitional fuel” means gas, so this clause gives comfort to the gas producers, whatever else is included about transitioning away from fossil fuels.

Third, employ “constructive ambiguity.” Find terms that can mean different things to different audiences, allowing each to claim that it says what they want it to. The key term here is “energy systems.” This is ambiguous: does it just cover power, heating and cooling, which is what most people would say constitutes a country’s “energy system”? Or does it include energy used in transport?

The uncertainty is critical, because if transport is not included, this is not a fossil fuel phase-out. In particular, it would let the oil producers off the hook, since oil is the primary transport fuel. Expect the petrostates to argue that that is indeed what it means — and they will point to a separate clause about transport to support their case. (Why have one of those if this already includes transport? But see point two above.) Meanwhile the advocates of phase-out will say that this is evident nonsense.

If the agreed text can be read in different ways, what does it mean? There isn’t in fact much doubt about this, as the Saudi minister’s expression revealed. The UNFCCC’s official press release spelled it out: the agreement “signals the beginning of the end of the fossil fuel era.” The petrostates had their interpretable clauses — “a litany of loopholes,” said the Alliance of Small Island States — but Team Phase-out had definitely won.

Does it matter, though? There’s a good case for saying no. This text is not binding on anyone. It is the outcome of the Global Stocktake, or GST, an assessment process mandated by the 2015 Paris agreement to guide the national targets and plans that will actually do the emissions cutting. On the Paris five-year cycle, these Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, must be delivered in 2025. The GST text is meant to be heeded when countries set out those plans, but in truth it can be ignored if they so wish. The new NDCs will be for 2035 and 2040, some time before phase-out is meant to happen.

But there’s another way to look at it. Odd as it sounds, this is the first time that any UNFCCC text has mentioned fossil fuels. They’ve been the effective elephant in the room. Every other kind of goal has been used: a temperature limit (2°C above pre-industrial times, then 1.5°C); an emissions target (net zero by 2050); a renewable energy aspiration (the COP28 text specifies a tripling by 2030). COP26, two years ago, finally managed to single out (unabated) coal, and called for its phase-down. But the petrostates had always resisted the naming of fossil fuels as a whole.

This really is where the rubber hits the road. It simply isn’t possible to limit warming to 1.5°C, or cut emissions to net zero, without more or less eliminating the production and consumption of all fossil fuels. It’s only “more or less” because some can be abated through carbon capture and storage technologies, or biological sequestration, or — though we don’t know how to do this at scale yet — the direct drawing down of carbon from the air. But the essential point stands: a safe climate means pretty much phasing out fossil fuels.

In this sense the real impact of the COP28 agreement will not be so much on the immediate behaviour of fossil fuel producers as on the longer-term global debate about energy policy. It will become harder, in short, to argue for an expansion of fossil fuel exploration and mining. If the world has agreed to phase out fossil fuels, how can a new coalmine, or a set of new oil and gas drilling licences, be justified?

Phasing out may not mean the immediate abandonment of fossil fuel production — on the contrary, the COP28 call is for a “just, orderly and equitable” transition — but it surely cannot mean finding and extracting more of the stuff. As the International Energy Agency has made clear, currently exploited reserves hold more than enough carbon to meet the global carbon budget allowable for a 1.5°C world. There is no space for any more.

Of course, changing the debate doesn’t guarantee that the case will be won. But UN textual agreements could never do that. The Paris agreement itself can’t do that — it is founded on the principle of national sovereignty over climate policy. (That’s why there is an “emissions gap” between the aggregate of national emissions commitments and the total that would be needed to limit warming to 1.5°C.) But the terms of the debate do matter. Before 2013 there was no articulated concept of “net zero” emissions. But within eight years every major economy was committed to a net zero target. In very few major countries can an electable politician say they’re not in favour of reaching net zero. In time, the phase-out of fossil fuels may come to have the same political power. And that will then change how fossil fuel policies are made.

The focus in Dubai was all on the production side because the producers were in the room. Fossil fuel phase-out is going to be genuinely difficult for many countries, particularly those highly dependent on coal, oil and gas for export revenue. Australia provides a case in point. Poorer countries in this group — Nigeria, Angola, Mozambique — will demand that the developed world help them make the transition; they were angry there was not more in the COP28 text obliging this. But the real work of phase-out is going to be done on the demand side. Consumers are going to require less.

This is already happening. From the start of the Industrial Revolution, Britain spent nearly 250 years burning coal; today it has more or less been eliminated from the UK power grid. Around 80 per cent of all global investment in electricity production now goes to renewables, grids and storage. In Europe electric heat pumps are beginning to make inroads into gas-based heating systems. On a lifetime basis electric vehicles will be cheaper than petrol and diesel ones within two or three years. The first ships to run on green hydrogen and ammonia are now in production. It’s only really in aviation, where biofuels are not yet viable at scale, that it is hard to see how demand for fossil fuels will fall. The transition has already started.

And we know how it works. Scientists and engineers develop new green technologies. They start out being very expensive, so governments subsidise them. As more are produced, innovation and scale reduce their costs. Governments then mandate a proportion of total supply to take a green form. This creates increased demand for the technology, leading to more innovation and economies of scale and a further reduction in costs. As costs fall, government targets can be raised. Gradually a tipping point is hit where the green technology is cheaper than its fossil rival, and the subsidies become unnecessary. As the capital stock gradually turns over, the green transition becomes complete.

This is precisely the story we have seen in solar and wind power and batteries, where since 2010 costs have fallen around 85 per cent, 55 per cent and 85 per cent respectively. A similar fall in costs can be seen in electric vehicles, and heat pumps will follow. There is a virtuous circle connecting policy, innovation and scale.

The real question, however, is of speed. Had the world started acting seriously on climate change when it was first understood in the 1990s (the initial assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was published in 1990), a gradual path could have been followed to a low-carbon future. But it has really only been since 2008–10 that climate policy around the world has become serious. Atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are therefore much higher than they would otherwise have been, and we need to get to net zero more quickly.

This tardiness has made the required trajectory of emissions reduction very steep: the IPCC calculates that, for a 1.5°C pathway, emissions in 2030 need to be cut to around half of their 2019 levels. In turn this has made the politics of transition much more difficult. It would have been hard to replace a coal, oil or gas industry over a period of fifty years. Doing it over twenty-five will stretch governments to the maximum. Many will surely baulk at the prospect.

This then is what the next two years will be about. COP28 has provided the guidance. COP30 in 2025 is when governments must publish their targets and plans. There will of course be a COP between the two: there always is. COP29 will be in the even more improbable location of Baku, capital of Azerbaijan, another oil producer. But it won’t have very much to do. The real focus turns to the city of Belém in northeastern Brazil, gateway to the Amazon, in November 2025. The beginning of the end has begun. •

The post The beginning of the end appeared first on Inside Story.

For Edelman, the global public relations company hired by the United Arab Emirates to support its COP28 presidency, the answer is sixty-four. That’s the size of the company’s team at the UN climate conference, now into its second week in Dubai. (Thirty per cent by 2030 is the UAE’s modest new “clean energy” target.) But the host country is taking no chances: it has also hired communications firm BCW, whose COP team is twenty-five-strong. Yet even these eighty-nine communications specialists were not enough to prevent a PR disaster dominating the media coverage of the COP’s first week.

Sultan Al Jaber, the UAE’s controversial choice to chair the conference — his other job is chief executive of the country’s giant oil company ADNOC — was seen in a leaked video denying that climate science required an end to fossil fuels. In a conversation with former Irish president Mary Robinson, as revealed by the Guardian, Al Jaber lost his cool when questioned about the future of the oil and gas industry. “There is no science out there, or no scenario out there,” he said tetchily, “that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5°C.”

Unfortunately for Al Jaber, plenty of scientific scenarios say exactly that. In its last global assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, analysed hundreds of results from economic climate models in which global warming is limited to 1.5°C above preindustrial levels. When they use realistic assumptions about the proportion of carbon that might be captured and stored or removed directly from the atmosphere, they show that on average coal, oil and gas consumption will have to be cut from 2020 levels by 99 per cent, 70 per cent and 84 per cent respectively by 2050.

Al Jaber’s comments attracted immediate criticism from climate scientists. They were “verging on climate denial,” said Bill Hare, veteran Australian IPCC author and COP-watcher. Johan Rockström, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, acknowledged that a 70 per cent reduction in oil production didn’t mean bringing it to an end altogether, but stressed the importance of clear messaging: “I cannot see scientifically there being any other communication than that we need to phase out fossil fuels.”

Messaging was indeed Al Jaber’s problem, for the central point of contention at COP28 is precisely what language should be used in respect of fossil fuels. “Phasing out” is the demand of the most climate-vulnerable countries, supported by the European Union. “Phasing down” is the weaker alternative preferred by China, India and Saudi Arabia. (John Kerry, the US climate envoy, was trying “largely phased out.”) As the neutral chair of the conference, Al Jaber is meant to be mediating between these positions, not supporting one of them.

This should have been the point at which the PR people earned their fees. Edelman’s website boasts that crisis management is one of its specialities. But either they’re kidding themselves, or Al Jaber didn’t take their advice. In a hastily convened press conference the following day, the COP president put on another ill-tempered show. Flanked by the chair of the IPCC, Professor Jim Skea — looking decidedly uncomfortable — Al Jaber insisted that “we very much believe and respect the science.” But he could not help himself also attacking his critics. “I am quite surprised,” he said, “with the constant and repeated attempts to undermine the work of the COP28 presidency.”

Al Jaber’s ill-judged remarks and thin political skin are the result of not having to face a free media in his own country. They probably won’t derail the final outcome of the conference, where the search is now on for other forms of words (neither phasing out nor down, but another verb altogether) that can reconcile the opposing positions on the future of fossil fuels. But the episode in many ways exemplified the wider problem at this and recent COPs.

The problem is the focus on glossy announcements that satisfy the PR people but often do little to clarify what countries and companies are actually doing to bring down their emissions or support developing countries to become more climate-resilient.

In the first week of the COP the UAE announced no fewer than ten official declarations, pledges and coalitions in which various combinations of countries and companies signed up to various degrees of commitment to action on climate. These covered Agriculture, Food and Climate, endorsed by 146 countries; Climate and Health, 133 countries; Renewables and Energy Efficiency, 128 countries; Climate Relief, Recovery and Peace, seventy-five; Gender-Responsive Just Transitions, seventy-four; Cooling, sixty-six; Hydrogen, thirty-seven; Climate Finance, a disappointing thirteen; along with an Oil and Gas Decarbonisation Charter (fifty-two companies) and a Coalition for High Ambition Multilevel Partnerships pledge (sixty-five countries).

This was not all. Strangely absent from the official website but much vaunted on the day of launch was a Declaration to Triple Nuclear Energy by 2050 endorsed by twenty countries. And alongside all these the UAE has also announced a raft of other new initiatives: a Global Decarbonisation Accelerator, an Industrial Transition Accelerator, a Coal Transition Accelerator (joining the existing Powering Past Coal Alliance), a Global Education Solutions Accelerator, a Net Zero Mobilization Charter, an Innovate for Climate Tech Coalition, a Charter on Finance for Managing Risk, a Net Zero Export Credit Agencies Alliance, a Roadmap for Islamic Sustainable Finance, an African Green Industrialisation Initiative, a Global Electric Cooling Coalition, a Waste to Zero Coalition, a Buildings and Cement Breakthrough, and a Global Youth Statement.

It’s hard to know what to make of all this. It’s clear that for the UAE this welter of announcements has been a major focus of the overall PR effort. Every day four or five new press releases have landed in the inboxes of the 4000 journalists attending the COP, overwhelming them with new pledges, targets, carefully honed quotes from government and business leaders, and triumphant group photos in front of giant declaratory backdrops. The impression given is undoubtedly impressive, a reflection of a busy year of coalition-building and commitment-cajoling by Al Jaber and his team. Yet at the same time it is almost impossible to know how many of these pledges — particularly the government ones — will actually lead to new policies or spending in the countries that have signed up to them.

The nuclear pledge provides a case in point. The press release trumpeted the commitment to tripling nuclear energy capacity. Both France and Britain signed up. But France’s electricity system is 72 per cent nuclear already, so clearly tripling does not mean “in France.” Britain has nine nuclear power stations but has been struggling since 2007 to build a tenth, which is now due to come onstream in 2027. So tripling is not on the cards there either. It turns out that what these countries have signed up to is an aspiration for other countries to triple their nuclear capacity: not quite as much of a commitment as it looked at first sight.

The financial pledges attached to the announcements are even more obscure. The UAE website boasts a dazzling array of new financial pledges announced at COP: a total of US$6.8 billion for energy, US$8.5 billion for lives and livelihoods, US$1.2 billion for inclusion, and a puzzling US$61.8 billion for “finance.” But whether these sums are really new money or a recycling of old commitments is impossible to know. Forensic examination by NGOs has shown that much “climate finance” is only tangentially related to climate, and internationally comparable accounting is woeful. It is doubtful that most of these COP announcements will buck the trend.

Yet wholesale cynicism would also be misplaced. The reason there are so many initiatives in the UAE’s list is that climate mitigation and resilience are needed in every industrial sector, and there are a lot of sectors. What’s been striking at this year’s COP is the much deeper level of engagement of many business representatives than previously.

In the past many business-led events were largely exercises in self-promotion. There’s been a fair amount of that in Dubai, but also many more events and conference sessions genuinely exploring the challenges of decarbonisation and adaptation in different sectors and countries. Green technologies are advancing rapidly — there have been multiple sessions on the potential of artificial intelligence to support climate action — and investors are pouring in money.

In effect there’s been a parallel conference going on here — while the UN negotiators do their increasingly abstruse thing in the formal sessions, the real world has broken in and is taking over the space. It’s messy, it’s not properly accountable, it’s all still largely voluntary rather than regulated. But it reflects a sea change in the scale and seriousness of business action on climate around the world.

All round the COP conference venue the PR people have put up little slogans and homilies to inspire the delegates. “Let’s lead change.” “The urgency of the climate challenge demands courage, not caution.” “Action inspires hope.” Strangely enough, they might be right. •

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We need to bring some historical discrimination to debates about what was new about the Black Summer. In particular we need to look at the history of firestorms, the distinctive fatal fires of southeastern Australia that culminated in named days of terror: Black Thursday 1851, Red Tuesday 1898, Black Sunday 1926, Black Friday 1939, Black Tuesday 1967, Ash Wednesday 1983 and Black Saturday 2009. How did the summer of 2019–20 relate to this grim lineage?

Black Thursday, 1851

The British colonists of Australia came to “this continent of smoke” from a green, wet land where fire was cosseted and coddled. They had rarely, if ever, seen free-ranging fire at home for it had been suppressed and domesticated over generations. They had so tamed fire that they had literally internalised it in the “internal combustion” of the steam engine.

These representatives of the industrial revolution brought to Australia many new sources of ignition, yet they also introduced houses, cattle, sheep, fences and all kinds of material belongings that made them fear wild fire. And they found themselves in a land that nature and human culture had sculpted with fire over millennia, a land hungry for fire and widowed of its stewards by the European invasion. It was an explosive combination. They did not know what the bush could do.

The foundational firestorm of Australian settler history occurred a few months after the residents of the Port Phillip District heard the news that British approval had been given for their “separation” from New South Wales. The impending creation of a distinct colony, soon to be called Victoria, was a cause for much celebration in Melbourne in November 1850, and a five-day holiday was declared.

Three months later, on Thursday the sixth of February 1851, in the soaring heat of a scorching summer, terrifying fires swept across the forests, woodlands and farms of the southeast. “Separation” had been celebrated with hilltop bonfires and now it was sealed by a scarifying firestorm. It was right that fire should forge the political identity of the most dangerous fire region on the planet.

“Black Thursday,” wrote the visiting British writer William Howitt, who arrived the year after the fire, “is one of the most remarkable days in the annals of Australia.” “The whole country, for a time, was a furious furnace,” he reported, “and, what was the most singular, the greatest part of the mischief was done in one single day.” He then went on to make some startling parallels. “It is a day as frequently referred to by the people in this colony as that of the Revolution of 1688 in England, of the first Revolution in France, or of the establishment of Independence in the United States of America.” In Australia, Howitt seemed to be suggesting, it was nature more than politics that would shape our identity.

Black Thursday, “the Great Bush Fire,” was a revolution of a kind. It was the first of the Black Days to be named by Europeans, the first recorded firestorm to shock and humble the colonists. Although the newcomers had quickly learned to expect bushfires, this was something else; its magnitude and ferocity terrified all who experienced and survived it.

At first the Melbourne Argus could hardly credit the reports from the bush, but then the breathless testimony kept tumbling in. Drought, high temperatures and ferocious northerly winds fanned the flames into a giant conflagration. People rushed to fight with green boughs “as in ordinary bushfires,” but all were forced to flee. Flames leaped from tree to tree like lightning; the fire careered “at the rate of a horse at full gallop”; sheep, cattle, horses, kangaroos and smaller native animals hurtled before it and hosts of birds were swept up in it: “the destruction of the wild creatures of the woods, which were roasted alive in their holes and haunts, was something fearful to contemplate.” People “went to bed, or lay down (for many did not dare go to bed), in a state of the greatest suspense and doubt as to whether they should see daylight next morning.”

Four days after the fire, Frances Perry, wife of the Bishop of Melbourne, recorded that “in some parts of the country the people are completely panic-struck. They thought, and well they might, that the world was coming to an end.”

The words of survivors painted a picture strikingly similar to the grand panorama of Black Thursday (1864) by artist William Strutt. For his imagery he drew on reportage as well as his own experience of the heat, smoke and fear of the day. Over three metres in breadth, the painting depicts what Strutt called “a stampede for life,” where people and animals, eyes wild with panic, flee southwards in terror.

Stampede for life: William Strutt’s Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 (1864). Click here to enlarge. State Library of Victoria

The “Great Bush Fire” of 1851 was the first large-scale firestorm to terrorise the British colonists. It wreaked its havoc just a decade and a half after British pastoralists invaded the Port Phillip District of New South Wales. Sheep, cattle and people had swiftly moved into the grasslands of the southeastern corner of the continent, but in 1851 the invaders had only recently outnumbered Aboriginal peoples and Indigenous burning regimes persisted in some places.

Because of its timing on the cusp of this change, Black Thursday was an intriguing amalgam of old and new Australia. It was an event embedded in the unravelling ecological and cultural rhythms of the southeastern corner of the continent. But Black Thursday was also an outrageous outbreak of disorder, the first schism in the new antipodean fire regime, a portent of things to come.

Red Tuesday, 1898

European settlers feared and suppressed fire near their properties and towns, and misjudged its power in the bush. But it did not take them long to begin to use fire for their own purposes, even if clumsily and dangerously. “The whole Australian race,” declared one bushman, has “a weakness for burning.” The language the bush workers used — “burning to clean up the country” — was uncannily like that of Aboriginal peoples.

In the drier forests of the ranges (but generally not the wet mountain ash forests, which had less grass), graziers used fire as Aboriginal peoples had done: to keep the forest open, to clean up the scrub, to encourage a “green pick,” and to protect themselves and their stock from dangerous bushfire. But, unlike Aboriginal peoples, the newcomers were prepared to burn in any season. And the legislative imperative for settlers was to “improve” the land they had colonised — and “improvement” first meant clearing. The Australian settler or “pioneer” was a heroic figure depicted as battling the land and especially the trees.

This fight with the forest assumed theatrical dimensions in South Gippsland, where each summer neighbours gathered to watch the giant burns that, they hoped, would turn last year’s fallen and ring-barked forest into this year’s clearing. They needed to establish pastures as quickly and cheaply as possible. Small trees were chopped, undergrowth was slashed, and sometimes large trees were felled so as to demolish smaller timber that had previously been “nicked,” thereby creating, as one settler put it, “a vast, crashing, smashing, splintering, roaring and thundering avalanche of falling timber!” The slashed forest was left to dry until the weather was hot enough for the annual burn, the frightening climax of the pioneer’s year.

In the mostly wet sclerophyll forest of the South Gippsland ranges, some of it mountain ash, it was often hard to get a “good burn” because of the heavy rainfall and the thick scrub’s resistance to wind. Farmers therefore chose the hottest summer days for these burns, “the windier and hotter the day the better for our purpose.” These settlers of the world’s most fire-prone forests awaited the most fatal days.

A “good burn” could so easily become a firestorm and in Gippsland in 1898 it did. “Red Tuesday” (1 February) was the most terrifying day of the “Great Fires” that year, a whole summer of fear and peril. Intense clearing fires had accompanied ringbarking, ploughing, sowing and road-making in Gippsland for two decades, but settlers were still shocked by the Great Fires, which were like nothing they had ever experienced. Although they were stunned by the speed and violence of the firestorm, the new farmers understood that it was a product of their mode of settlement. Their principal pioneering weapon had run amok. As farmers burned their clearings into the encircling edges of the wet, green forest, they might have guessed that soon the fires would link up and overwhelm them.

Just as Black Thursday was memorialised in a great painting so was Red Tuesday captured in a grand work of art. When historian Stephen Pyne surveyed fire art around the world, he found Australian paintings to be exceptional for their gravitas, their capacity to speak to cultural identity or moral drama. “Bushfires did not simply illuminate the landscape like a bonfire or a corroboree,” he wrote, “they were the landscape.”

This is vividly true of John Longstaff’s depiction of Gippsland, Sunday Night, February 20th, 1898. Longstaff was born on the Victorian goldfields a decade after Black Thursday and travelled to Warragul to witness the long tail of the 1898 fires. Whereas Strutt’s painting was intimate in its terror and chaos, showing us the whites of the eyes of people and animals, Longstaff evoked the drama through its magisterial setting. Human figures are dwarfed by towering mountain ash trees and the immensity of the bush at night, and appear encircled and illuminated by fire. Flames lick at the edge of the clearing and a leaping firestorm races towards us from a high, distant horizon.

Longstaff exhibited his grand painting in his Melbourne studio in August of that year, lit by a flickering row of kerosene-lamp footlights. Gippsland, Sunday night, February 20th, 1898 is a painting of a landscape, and it focuses on the forest as much as the fire and the settlers. “The Great Scrub,” the enemy of the settlers, is a powerful presence in the panorama; it inspires as much awe as the flames. The people in the painting, who are seeking to “settle” this fearful forest, are enclosed and entrapped by its vast darkness. The erupting bushfire is both a threat and a promise.

Burning off

Firestorms became more frequent in the twentieth century, as sawmilling and settlement moved more deeply into the mountain forests of Victoria. The greatest of them came on Friday 13 January 1939, the grim climax of a week of horror and a summer of fire across New South Wales, South Australia, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria. In that week, 1.4 million hectares of Victoria burned, whole settlements were incinerated, and seventy-one people died. Sixty-nine timber mills were engulfed, “steel girders and machinery were twisted by heat as if they had been of fine wire,” and the whole state seemed to be alight.

Judge Leonard Stretton, who presided over the royal commission into the causes of the fires, pitied the innocence of the bush workers, immigrants in a land whose natural rhythms they did not yet understand:

Men who had lived their lives in the bush went their ways in the shadow of dread expectancy. But though they felt the imminence of danger they could not tell that it was to be far greater than they could imagine. They had not lived long enough. The experience of the past could not guide them to an understanding of what might, and did, happen.

Stretton investigated the settlers’ culture of burning, taking his commission to bush townships and holding hearings in temperatures over 100°F (38°C). His shocking finding was that “These fires were lit by the hand of man.” Yet rarely were they malevolent arsonists. Mostly they were farmers and bush workers, and their fire lighting was casual and selfish, sometimes systematic and sensible, and increasingly clandestine and rebellious. They were settlers burning to clear land and graziers firing the forest floor to promote new grass. Burning was a rite — and a right. They were landowners who, when they saw smoke on the horizon, threw a match into their home paddock.

Settlers felt “burning off” helped to keep them and their neighbours safe. Travellers to the Yarra Valley in the first decades of the twentieth century wouldn’t have been surprised to see “half a dozen fires on the sides of mountains.”

When the Forests Commission of Victoria was founded in 1918, it assumed control of the state forests and forced graziers out if they did not stop burning their leases. Forest officers, charged with conservation of timber, tried to suppress fire, but farmers and graziers believed that their burning kept the forest safe from fire by keeping fuel loads down. George Purvis, a storekeeper and grazier at Moe in Gippsland, explained to the 1939 royal commission that everybody used to burn off many years ago: “We could meet a few of our neighbours and say ‘What about a fire’… Nowadays, if we want a fire we nick out in the dark, light it, and let it go. We are afraid to tell even our next door neighbour because the Forests Commission is so definitely opposed to fires anywhere, that we are afraid to admit that we have anything to do with them.”

As a result, Purvis explained, the bulk of farmers did not burn their land as much as they wished. And so, as fires gathered force in the week before Black Friday, people desperately burned to save their property and their lives. It was considered better to burn late than never, and these fires (indeed “lit by the hand of man”) “went back into the forest where they all met in one huge fire.”

Perhaps fire was so much a part of the Australian landscape and character that it could never be eliminated or suppressed. It had to be accepted and used, and perhaps it could be controlled. The 1939 royal commission signalled a new direction. In his recommendations, Stretton gave official recognition to a folk reality and tried to give focus and discipline to the widespread popular practice of burning to keep the forest safe. He recommended that the best protection against fire was regular light burning of undergrowth at times other than summer. Only fire could beat fire.

Vivid word-picture: the report of the 1939 royal commission.

As Stephen Pyne observed, this “Australian strategy” was in defiant counterpoise to the North American model of total fire suppression. The strategy was reinforced by another royal commission, this one following the 1961 Dwellingup fires in Western Australia, which endorsed systematic, expansive, hazard-reduction burning of the jarrah forests of the southwest.

It took time for official “controlled burning” to supplant unofficial “burning off.” In 1967, a Tasmanian firestorm provided dramatic evidence of the persistence of rural traditions of burning. On 7 February, which became known as Black Tuesday, a “fire hurricane” stormed through bushland and invaded Hobart’s suburbs, coming within two kilometres of the CBD. The fire caused the largest loss of life and property on any single day in Australia to that time.

Black Tuesday had strong elements of Black Friday 1939 embedded within it. Of the 110 fires burning on that Tuesday, ninety started prior to the day and seventy were uncontrolled on the morning of the 7th. Significantly, only twenty-two of the 110 fires were started accidentally; eighty-eight were deliberately lit. In other words, bushfires were common, deliberate and allowed to burn unchecked. “No one worried about them too much,” reflected Tasmanian fire officer John Gledhill, echoing Stretton.

Tasmania’s 1967 Black Tuesday fire, with its heart in the expanding suburbs of Hobart, signalled a new type of firestorm in Australian history. The bush had come to town. But the town had also come to the bush, insinuating its commuters and their homes among the gums. This event initiated an era of fires that would invade the growing urban interface with the bush: Ash Wednesday 1983 (Adelaide and Melbourne); Sydney 1994; Canberra 2003, when more than 500 suburban homes were destroyed in the nation’s capital; and Black Saturday 2009, when only a wind change prevented the Kilmore East fire from ploughing into Melbourne’s densely populated eastern suburbs.

During the second half of the twentieth century, casual rural fire lighting gradually became criminalised. The law was enforced more strongly and public acceptance of open flame declined. Fire was gradually eliminated from normal daily experience as electricity took over from candles, kerosene and, eventually, even wood stoves. Firewood for the home became more recreational. “Smoke nights” — once part of the fabric of social life and an especially masculine ritual — went into decline as smoking itself became a health issue. Instead of being a social accompaniment and enhancement, smoking was pushed to the margins of social life, even becoming antisocial.

It had been different in the interwar years: in 1939 the Red Cross, “concerned about the health of the bush fire refugees,” appealed to the public for “gifts of tobacco.” Even for victims of fire, smoke was then considered a balm. On Black Sunday 1926, Harry King, a young survivor at Worrley’s Mill where fourteen people died, crawled scorched and half-blinded for four kilometres through the smoking forest to tell his story in gasps. At the end of his breathless account, he opened one badly burned eye and whispered: “I’m dying for a smoke, dig.”

The ferocity of “the flume”

The years of the most fatal firestorms were burned into the memories of bush dwellers: 1851, 1898, 1926, 1939, 1967, 1983, 2002–03 and 2009. Stretton’s vivid word-picture of Black Friday 1939, which became a prescribed text in Victorian Matriculation English, joined the paintings by Strutt and Longstaff in forming a lineage of luminous fire art.

The most frightening and fatal firestorms have all roared out of the “fire flume.” That’s what historian Stephen Pyne called the region where hot northerly winds sweep scorching air from the central deserts into the forested ranges of Victoria and Tasmania. In the flume, bushfires strike every year, firestorms every few decades. Firestorms are generated when spot fires ahead of the flaming front coalesce and intensify, even creating their own weather. They entrap and surround. Firestorms are bushfires of a different order of magnitude; they cannot be fought; they rampage and kill. Their timing, however, can be predicted. They come at the end of long droughts, in prolonged heatwaves, on days of high temperatures, low humidity and fierce northerly winds.

The firestorms are intensified by particular species of trees — the mountain ash and the alpine ash — that conspire to create a raging crown fire that kills and then reproduces the whole forest en masse. These tall ash-type eucalypts need a hot, fast-moving crown fire, upon which their regeneration uniquely depends, to crack open their seeds. The ecology of the forest depends on firestorms, so we know they also happened under Aboriginal ecological management.

In the last 200 years, the clearing, burning and intensive logging of the new settlers exaggerated and intensified the existing rhythm. In many remaining forest districts firestorms have come too frequently for the young ash saplings to grow seed, and so towering trees have given way to scrubby bracken and acacia. Those two colonial paintings captured the fatal, colliding elements of the Victorian firestorm: the peril, horror and panic of the people, and the indifferent magnificence of the tall, fire-hungry trees.

In 2009, I resisted use of the word “unprecedented” to describe Black Saturday because it was the familiarity of the firestorm that horrified me. Although the event was probably exacerbated by climate change, the recurrent realities were more haunting. As I wrote in Inside Story at the time, “the 2009 bushfires were 1939 all over again, laced with 1983. The same images, the same stories, the same words and phrases, and the same frightening and awesome natural force that we find so hard to remember and perhaps unconsciously strive to forget.” As a historian of the fire flume, I was disturbed by Black Saturday’s revelation that we had still not come to terms with what we had already experienced.

In the months following Black Saturday (2009), I was invited to assist the small community of Steels Creek in the Yarra Valley to capture stories of their traumatic experience. Working with historians Christine Hansen, Moira Fahy and Peter Stanley, I wrote a history of fire for the community that presented the ubiquity and sheer repetitive predictability of the phenomenon in that valley. One bushfire after another, year in year out. As we set out this rhythm, a deeper pattern emerged, which was the distinction in this region between bushfires and firestorms. The ferocity of the firestorms was generated not necessarily by trees near a settlement but by forests more than ten kilometres away, perhaps thirty or forty kilometres away. Survival in summer is not just a matter of clearing the gutter but also knowing what forests live in your region.

It has proven too tempting and too easy for Australians to overlook or deny the deep local history of the Victorian firestorm. Sometimes Aboriginal mosaic burning, which was applied to so many drier woodlands across the continent, is assumed to have been used in the wet ash forests too. For example, in his book Dark Emu, Bruce Pascoe argued that “a mosaic pattern of low-level burns” was used in mountain ash forests and suggested that wild fires in the forests affected by Black Saturday “were largely unknown before the arrival of Europeans.” But this cannot have been the case, for when Europeans arrived they found mature, even-aged ash forests, the very existence of which was evidence of historical, powerful crown fires.

For example, botanist David Ashton identified one old stand of mountain ash at Wallaby Creek as dating from a firestorm in 1730. Furthermore, ash forests would have been destroyed by frequent fires, and low-level burns are not feasible in such a wet ecosystem. Aboriginal peoples would have used low-level cool burns to manage the drier foothill forests but not the ash forests themselves, for mature mountain ash trees can easily be killed (without germinating seed) by light surface fire. Woiwurrung, Daungwurrung and Gunaikurnai peoples used the tall forests seasonally and probably burned their margins, maintaining clearings and pathways along river flats and ridgetops. They were familiar with the forest’s firestorms and would have foreseen and avoided the dangerous days.

Even six generations after Black Thursday 1851, we stubbornly resist acknowledging the ecological and historical distinctiveness of the Victorian firestorm. It is astonishing that the Black Saturday royal commission cranked through 155 days of testimony but failed to provide a vegetation map in either its interim or final report. In one of my submissions to the inquiry, I drew the commission’s attention to this absence in their interim report, but it was not remedied. Senior counsel Rachel Doyle was more interested in pursuing the former Victorian police chief Christine Nixon about her haircut on 7 February than in directing the commission’s attention to the unusually combustible forests through which the fires stormed.

The royal commission went some way towards being more discriminating about the variety of bushfire, weather, topography and ecology, but not far enough. Forests featured in the commission’s report mostly as “fuel.” “The natural environment,” the commissioners explained in opaque bureaucratic language, “was heavily impacted.”

Thus the firestorm’s origin in the ecology of the forest was ignored even by a royal commission. Or people explained it away by interpreting such outbreaks as entirely new, as products of either the cessation of Aboriginal burning or of anthropogenic climate change. Indigenous fire and global warming are highly significant cultural factors in the making of fire regimes, but both work with the biological imperative. It is clearly hard for humanity to accept the innate power of nature.

The same tendency led Victorians up the garden path of fire policy. The most shocking fact about Black Saturday 2009 was that people died where they thought they were safest, where they were told they would be safest. Of the 173 people killed on Black Saturday, two-thirds of them died in their own homes. Of those, a quarter died sheltering in the bath.

As I wrote in Inside Story in 2009 and 2012, the “Stay or Go” policy was a death sentence in Victorian mountain communities in firestorm weather. Although the policy guided people well in many areas of Australia and had demonstrably saved lives and homes elsewhere, it misled people in this distinctively deadly fire region to believe that they could defend an ordinary home in the face of an atomic force. And it was this confidence in the defensibility of the home and denial of the difference of the firestorm (coupled with a faith in modern firefighting capacity) that underpinned the lack of warnings issued by authorities to local residents about the movement of the fire front on Black Saturday.

For much of the history of these forests, including their long Aboriginal history, no one believed their homes were safe in a firestorm. Evacuation was the norm. Sometimes the elderly and vulnerable were extracted by force from their homes by caring relatives and friends. Most people fled of their own accord. A “safe place” was a creek, a bare or ploughed paddock, a safely prepared or quickly excavated dug-out, a mining adit or railway tunnel, or just somewhere else. If you were trapped at home, there was an art to abandoning it at the right moment. The acknowledged vulnerability of homes made it essential for those caught in them to get out. And people in those earlier times were more inclined to look out the window, go outside and watch the horizon, sniff the air.

In 2009, the internet was a killer. The private, domestic computer screen with its illusion of omniscience and instant communication compounded the vulnerability of the home.

The Black Summer

The fire season of 2019–20 was completely different in character from Black Thursday (1851) and its successors. It might be compared best with the alpine fires of 2002–03, which were also mostly started by lightning in remote terrain and burned for months.

Coming after severe drought and more record heatwaves, the summer of 2019–20 tipped fire patterns into widespread rogue behaviour. It is not unusual for Australians to have smoke in their eyes and lungs over summer — the Great Fires of our history are remembered not only for their death tolls but also for their weeks of smoke and dread. But in the summer of 2019–20 the smoke was worse, more widespread and more enduring, the fires were more extensive and also more intense, NSW fires started behaving more like Victorian ones, and the endless “border fire” symbolically erased the boundary anyway.

Australia was burning from the end of winter to the end of summer, from Queensland to Western Australia, from the Adelaide Hills to East Gippsland, from the NSW south coast to Kangaroo Island, from the Great Western Woodlands to Tasmania. Everywhere, suddenly, bushfire was tipping into something new.

As spring edged into summer and the fires worked their way down the Great Dividing Range and turned the corner into Victoria, people who remembered Ash Wednesday (1983) and Black Saturday (2009) braced themselves. January and February are traditionally the most dangerous months in the southern forests. But this time central Victoria’s good winter rainfall and wetter, cooler February prevented the flume from ripping into full gear.

Therefore an unusual aspect of the fire season of 2019–20 was that these Great Fires did not explode out of the firestorm forests of Victoria and Tasmania. It was one reason why the death toll for such extensive and enduring fires was relatively low; they did not break out in the most fatal forests. Another reason was that Black Saturday had led to a new survival policy: to leave early rather than to stay and defend. Early evacuation thus became the enforced strategy of authorities well beyond the firestorm forests. Again, a regional and ecologically specific strategy became generalised as a universal policy. But at least this time it erred on the side of caution and surely saved lives.

The sheer range, scale, length and enduring ferocity of these fires made them unprecedented. The blackness of the named days of Australia’s fire history describe the aftermath of the sudden, shocking violence of a firestorm; it evokes mourning, grief and the funereal silence of the burned, empty forests. Black and still.

But when the fires burn for months, a single Black Day morphs into a Black Summer. There seemed never to be a black day-after; instead the days, the weeks, the months were relentlessly red. Red and restless. The colour of danger, of ever-lurking flame, of acrid orange smoke and pyrocumuli of peril. The smoke killed ten times more people than the flames. The threat was always there; it was not over until the season itself turned — and only then was it declared black. But the enduring image is of people cowering on beaches in a red-orange glow, awaiting evacuation. I think of it as the Red Summer.

Living with fire

A long historical perspective can help us come to terms with “disasters” and even ameliorate them, but most significantly it can also enable us to see beyond the idea of fire as disaster. There will be more Black Days and, under the influence of climate change, longer Red Summers. We have to accept and plan for them, like drought and flood. We should aim to survive them, even if we can’t hope to prevent or control them. We must acknowledge the role of global climate change in accelerating bushfire and urgently reduce carbon emissions. And we should celebrate, as I think we are already beginning to do, the stimulus that bushfire can give to community and culture.

In the quest for how to live with fire, Indigenous cultural burning philosophies and practices have much to offer all Australians. Sometimes we can even see a fired landscape (of the right intensity and frequency) as beautiful or “clean,” as Aboriginal peoples do. We are slowly learning to respect cultural burning and its capacity to put good fire back into a land that needs fire. But we must go further and actually allow Indigenous fire practitioners to take the lead again.

Victor Steffensen, a Tagalaka descendant from North Queensland, has written a humble and hopeful book, Fire Country (2020), which is as much about negotiating the bureaucratic hierarchies of fire power as it is about fire itself. As his mentor, Tommy George, declared in frustration, “Those bloody national park rangers, they should be learning from us.”

But cultural burning is not the same as prescribed burning. Sensitive controlled burning might, in some ecosystems, render the land safer for habitation, although it has proven difficult to achieve required levels in a warming world. And in a landscape of transformed ecologies, greatly increased population and rapidly changing climate, it is unreasonable and dangerous to expect Indigenous peoples to make the land safe for the proliferating newcomers; it would again set vulnerable people up to fail. Anthropologist Tim Neale has argued that the settler “dream of control” places an “impossible burden” on Aboriginal peoples, trapping them again within an idealised expectation of unchanging ancient behaviour.

Renewing and reviving Indigenous fire practices is important, first and foremost, for human rights, native title and the health, wellbeing and self-esteem of First Nations communities. We are fortunate that an additional opportunity presents itself: for a rapprochement between the exercise of Indigenous responsibility to Country and modern Australia’s need for labour-intensive and ecologically sensitive fire management on the ground. There is much creative promise in that partnership, and developing it will take time, patience and respect.

Throughout 2019, fire experts pleaded with the federal government to hold a bushfire summit to prepare for the dreaded summer, but the prime minister refused, fearing that acknowledging the crisis would give credence to climate action. Yet at the end of the summer he established another retrospective bushfire inquiry, the fifty-eighth since 1939. Many of the sensible, urgent recommendations of those earlier commissions have been ignored and await enactment. Rather than spending millions of dollars on lawyers after the flames, the nation would do better to spend a few thousand on environmental historians to distil and interpret existing, hard-earned wisdom.

Australian scholars of fire need to work on at least three temporal scales. First, there is the deep-time environmental and cultural history of the continent and its management over millennia. Second, there is the century-scale history of invasion, documenting the changes wrought by the collision of a naive fire people with the fire continent. And third, there is the long future of climate-changed nature and society. Black Thursday was the first firestorm after the invasion, an ancient ecological cycle with new social dimensions. Red Tuesday, Black Sunday and Black Friday were exaggerated by settlement and rampant exploitation. Black Saturday was more like the past than the future, a frighteningly familiar and fatal amalgam of nature and culture. But the Red Summer of 2019–20 was a scary shift to something new, fast-forwarding Australians into a new Fire Age. •

This is an abridged version of “The Fires: A Long Historical Perspective,” Tom Griffiths’s contribution to The Fires Next Time: Understanding Australia’s Black Summer, edited by Peter Christoff (Melbourne University Publishing, 2023).

The post Continent of fire appeared first on Inside Story.

This year, though, the series would have to be pitched as a documentary. COP28 opened on Wednesday in the improbable location of Dubai, where futuristic glass towers and a palm-shaped luxury resort raised from the sea cater for the world’s gas-guzzling classes. Dubai is the principal city of the United Arab Emirates, the world’s eighth-biggest oil producer. The head of the UAE’s state-owned oil giant ADNOC, Sultan Al Jaber, is the person its government has appointed to be president of the UN climate conference. And last week the BBC published leaked briefing notes for Al Jaber’s meetings with twenty-seven countries over the past year revealing that, as well as discussing the COP negotiations, he was pursuing energy investment deals for ADNOC and another UAE investment company he heads, Masdar.

For the climate NGOs this was merely confirmation that the UAE should not have been made host of the COP in the first place, and that Al Jaber was a completely inappropriate person to preside over it. “A brazen conflict of interest,” said Amnesty International, calling for him to resign.

But there was never any chance of that, and most of the country delegates in Dubai have reacted to the revelations with a world-weary shrug. “So the UAE is pursuing its oil interests?” said one. “And your point is…?”

The UAE’s energy interests overseas are large. The Financial Times estimates that it has invested almost US$200 billion in energy projects in the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe in the last year alone. Around half of this is in oil and gas, including for a major expansion of new drilling. This blatantly ignores the International Energy Agency’s warning that meeting the agreed goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial times effectively means no more fossil fuel exploration. The UAE’s plans alone will blow the global “carbon budget” out of the water.

The UAE argues that the finger of blame is being pointed in the wrong direction: it is merely responding to demand. On all realistic projections, countries will still be using oil and gas till well into the mid-century, and the UAE’s is the cheapest and among the least polluting.

And look at the other half of the UAE’s energy deals, adds Al Jaber: huge new solar, wind and geothermal investments helping provide power and air conditioning to developing and emerging economies from Azerbaijan to Zambia, China to Turkey. For many poorer countries, the UAE’s investments are critical — and far larger than anything they receive from Western governments or private sector companies. You don’t hear many developing country delegates criticising the UAE here.

Yet the revelations about Al Jaber’s Janus-like activities in the run-up to COP28 can’t be wholly dismissed. The UN rules are clear: the COP president must be neutral and impartial, and must not act to further their own interests. In Dubai over the next two weeks probably the single most contentious issue on the agenda will be the future of fossil fuels.

A distinctive feature of this year’s COP will be the “global stocktake.” This is one of the key processes set out in the landmark Paris climate agreement of 2015. Every five years, the agreement says, countries must take stock of their progress, or otherwise, over the last five, and set out global ambitions for the future. In this way the stocktake should inform the Nationally Determined Contributions, or NDCs, countries must make two years later, in which they must each set out new and stronger emissions reduction targets. The next round of NDCs is due in 2025.

Over the past year the global stocktake negotiations have been fraught. Climate scientists have made it very clear that collectively the world is not remotely on track to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5°C. In its annual report on the emissions gap, the UN Environment Programme observes that the difference between the emissions trajectory the world needs to be on for 1.5°C and the one it actually is on has widened rather than narrowed.

Last year it looked as if countries’ plans would take the world to around 2.6°C of warming; today it is probably 2.9°C. At that level much of the world’s agricultural output and water supplies will be at serious risk of failing, the incidence of extreme weather events regularly catastrophic, and large numbers of species would be wiped out. Countries’ current plans for emissions in 2030, UNEP says, need to be cut by another 42 per cent to be on a 1.5°C-compatible pathway.

The stocktake negotiators have focused on the future rather than dwelling on past and present failures. Everyone agrees there should be more investment in renewable energy: COP28 is likely to set a new goal of tripling global renewables capacity by 2030. That will not be easy: solar and wind power are being installed around the world at record rates, but market forecasts currently expect capacity only to double by then.

The COP will also agree on a doubling in the rate of energy efficiency improvements. Energy efficiency has long been the cheapest way of cutting emissions — the International Energy Agency describes it as the “first fuel” — but has always been something of the Cinderella of energy policy, requiring regulatory tightening in many different sectors. Doubling the rate of global improvement will require accelerated innovation in heat pumps, vehicles, consumer goods and industrial processes.

COP28 may well also reach an agreement on methane. Methane is one of the most potent greenhouse gases, more powerful as a cause of warming than carbon dioxide. It is produced by livestock, by waste disposal and as a by-product of fossil fuel production. Here the UAE is playing up its status as an oil giant. Only a country like his, says Al Jaber, can bring the global oil and gas sector to the COP table. Expect a historic announcement of a new tough methane target for 2030, and the major oil and gas companies — traditional opponents of climate policy, and enemies of the climate movement — pledging their support.

As ever, though, it won’t be the things that everyone can agree on, however important, that will dominate negotiations. The major battle this year will be over what the COP says about the future of the fossil fuel industry itself.

The small island states and other nations most vulnerable to climate impacts are insisting on the science. The goal of 1.5°C means reducing carbon emissions to net zero by sometime before 2050. That means ending fossil fuel use more or less entirely. (“Net” zero allows some residual emissions, but only if they are captured and stored, either by increased vegetation or geologically.) So COP28 should agree that fossil fuels must be phased out.

The European Union, with its strong pro-climate-action lobby, is sympathetic. But for China, India, the United States and Saudi Arabia it is a step much too far. They want the text to say merely that fossil fuels should be “phased down,” not out. They also want this to cover only “unabated” fossil fuels: if coal, oil and gas plants are fitted with carbon capture and storage technology to capture the emissions and bury them underground, then they should be exempt from the phase-down.

With the two groups of countries so far apart, agreeing on the text will be very difficult. So the question being asked is: will the UAE be a neutral and impartial chair of the negotiations on this crucial issue? Many observers think it is hard to believe so. Al Jaber is only COP president for a year; he will be chief executive of ADNOC for much longer. The interests of the UAE are not exactly a secret. So expect another bruising conclusion to the conference, we are told, with NGOs crying foul, and the negotiations running acrimoniously into extra time, as they so often do (last year by nearly two whole days).

But there’s another possibility. Al Jaber is a deal-maker. That’s what he does in the day job, and what he’s been doing at those meetings over the last year. He wants to show that this is what you get with a serious player from a serious oil state. So he’ll find some clever new wording to bridge the gap between “phasing out” and “phasing down,” acknowledging that the use of fossil fuels will no doubt come to an end, eventually, but in the meantime they are needed to help the world’s poor escape their poverty. And then he’ll bring the gavel down on a successful COP before, not after, the scheduled end.

In fact, he’s shown what he can do already. The first day of a COP normally manages to do no more than agree on the agenda — and that often takes hours of wrangling in itself. But the first day of COP28 on Wednesday ended with an unprecedented agreement on one of the most significant issues of the entire two weeks.

Developing countries have been arguing for years for a fund to compensate them for the “loss and damage” climate change is now inflicting on their economies. Last year they won the fund — but it had no money in it, and everyone expected the negotiations about how it was to be organised to last several more years. Yesterday, though, the UAE pulled a remarkable rabbit out of the conference hat. Not just an agreement on the arrangements for the fund, but US$440 million of financial pledges to it — including US$100 million from the UAE itself.

Curmudgeons noted that these sums are not nearly enough — the economic costs of loss and damage already run into the billions, and with the UAE’s oil revenues having soared last year to almost US$100 billion a group of former world leaders led by Gordon Brown urged it only this week to provide US$3 billion for climate change. In comparison, US$100 million is small beer.

But Al Jaber didn’t look too worried at the press conference closing the day. He had pulled off a stunning coup, developed and developing nations alike expressed themselves delighted, and the UAE was in its rightful place. •

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Within three minutes of posting, two members of the group had commented on top of each other to say the photo was taken at the corner of Liverpool and Elizabeth Streets, Hobart, looking up what is now Elizabeth Mall towards the GPO clock tower on the left. That’s how quick and attentive people are in groups like this. And they were correct, I know the place perfectly well. I don’t live there anymore, but this is my home city.

Old photographs are posted in this group several times a day and each attracts many comments, and sometimes dozens. This is just one local history group among countless others on Facebook and other social media platforms. Nostalgia is the main theme, certainly, but with every post, comment and share, memories are stimulated and connections with place and community are enacted.

Recollections are often detailed and intricate. Concerning the date of the rainy-day photograph someone suggested the women’s coats indicate late 1950s. “A bit earlier I think,” came a swift reply. “By the mid–late 1950s hemlines had risen a few inches to a bit below the knee. I remember them well from my teenage dressmaking days!”

Others leapt in to name the make of the cars, the consensus being that the one in the foreground is an Austin A40 Devon, although a few people suggested a Hillman Minx. “I immediately could smell the upholstery,” said one. “Go Dad!”

Still others noticed the banks. People love to reminisce about banks. “What happened to the beautiful old bank on the corner?” someone asked. It’s still there, came a reply, now a branch of the National Australia Bank, but the clock has been removed recently, they thought, having not displayed the correct time for a while.

The Hobart Savings Bank on the extreme right of the image has been pulled down and replaced with what one commenter described as a “modern monstrosity.” Someone else claimed to still have a pink bankbook from there with a few pounds in the account, but: “I suppose the government has pinched that.” This person remembered being interviewed by the manager there for a home loan, $20,000 over twenty-five years at 6 per cent. “Real service back then by real people, all those tellers. We have lost so much.”

By this time I was thoroughly engrossed in the world of this photograph. I sent it to my two brothers. Yes, that’s an Austin A40, said Paul, and the car with the smashed-up grille in the centre of the photograph is a Chevrolet (“1939 I think”). He noticed the traffic lights, which I had missed, and how all the pedestrians are wearing titfers. Hats, that is. (I had to look that up.)

Mark remembered the Kodak store still trading in the 1970s. “Mind you, I remember when Hobart had half-a-dozen good photo/camera stores,” he added. As a keen photographer himself, he appreciated the mood and story in the photograph. It’s harder than it looks to take pictures that do that.

For me the main feature is the GPO clock. Our grandfather worked in that building, and I picture him glancing out the window at that very moment, hoping the rain might have eased in time for his bus ride home.

I like to know the origins of things, so I sought out the photograph’s descriptive information at the State Library of Tasmania. It does have a fairly precise date, May 1953. (So, the Facebook commenter knowledgeable about 1950s hemlines was right.) It is one of a series of about 12,000 images made between 1951 and 1973 by the Tasmanian Education Department. Hats off to the library staff for their work to preserve and digitise this series; it’s magnificent.

The photos cover a wide range of subjects other than schools and education, suggesting that the department’s photographers could be called on for a variety of assignments. Our rainy-day photograph shows that they might also fill the end of a roll on the way back to the office with whatever took their fancy.

Mark is right, it’s the mood of the photograph that is captivating. Wet streets are eternally interesting for photographers and artists, and this unknown photographer appears to have sheltered under an awning and brought the shutter down just as everyone is too busy getting out of the rain to notice or care.

See how they have caught the Chevrolet’s crumpled grille just as it swung around the corner towards us? This car has had a bingle, as my father would say, the sort of thing that could occur on any wet day. Central Hobart was not built for cars, and yet in these postwar years a lot more people could afford them. The result: frustration.

Then there’s the woman on the right who draws our gaze as she walks briskly away from us into the frame. With her reflection shimmering up from the pavement, she turns provincial Hobart into a scene John le Carré could have conceived. The cut of her coat is pure 1950s. Clothes rationing is out, Christian Dior’s New Look is in, and this woman can afford the latest modes.

Other women appear to be making do with their older things. The woman with the basket crossing the street, head down against the rain: she could have been wearing that severe jacket and skirt since the 1930s. She’d be about our grandmother’s age, I should think, part of a generation for whom frugality was a necessity and later a habit.

The more I look at the photograph, the deeper I fall into a liminal state between connection and disconnection. I know this place, and yet I don’t. I belong and yet I don’t. I think it’s the raindrops bouncing up off the road that gives the image its perpetual drama. Where is all that water going to go? In Hobart, it goes into the Hobart Rivulet.

Autumn is when the rivulet is most prone to flooding. In June 1954, thirteen months after our photograph was taken, flash floods forced several feet of water into the basement of O’Conor’s shoe shop. You can see the shop sign in the photograph. Staff working there to save the stock might have drowned if the floor-level windows had given way. There had been bad floods in 1923 and 1947, but the 1954 floods were said to be the worst in a hundred years.

The rivulet emerges on the slopes of kunanyi/Mount Wellington and runs through present-day Fern Tree and South Hobart. Reaching the city, it ducks underground and up again a few times before disappearing for a kilometre or so directly under the CBD. (In 2016 the rivulet wall was breached during building works, causing more than $15 million in damage to the Myer department store and several retailers in the adjacent Cat and Fiddle Arcade.) Then it comes up for air for a short stretch parallel to lower Collins Street, disappears, and finally meets the River Derwent at an outlet north of Macquarie Point.

For thousands of years First Nations Tasmanians moving seasonally through the Hobart region would have understood the rivulet’s seasons and moods, and how it connected with other natural watercourses to support animal and birdlife. Then, in February 1804, lieutenant-governor David Collins decided that this was the ideal place to establish a settlement. The “Run of clear fresh Water” he found there played a large part in his decision. Efforts the previous year at Risdon Cove, on the eastern side of the Derwent, had faltered partly for lack of reliable clean water.

Collins understood the need to protect the rivulet, and within weeks had issued instructions to the settlers not to pollute it or destroy the “underwood” close to its banks. By 1805 a footbridge had been built across it connecting a bush track leading north, which later became Elizabeth Street. This bridge was replaced in 1816 by a brick structure named Wellington Bridge after the famous duke. Today it is covered over by Elizabeth Street but a small void protected by a grille affords the curious shopper a reminder of Hobart’s earliest days.

The first European settlers quickly learned that although the rivulet could sink to a trickle in the summer, heavy rain or snowfall on the mountain could turn it into a torrent. And this was even before the town authorities decided to alter its course for the first time, in 1825, with what was known as the “New Cut” along a section of lower Collins Street.

The New Cut diverted the rivulet towards another creek and sent both of them away from their natural bed, which had been under the present site of the City Hall. Their confluence had formed a silty beach prone to flooding, and the diversion was designed to facilitate land reclamation in support of burgeoning waterfront industries.

Early maps of Hobart — this one for instance — show how the rivulet once pursued its own gentle course from the mountain to the river, and how ruthless was the grid of streets imposed on top of it. Over time the rivulet has been diverted, dammed and forced through numerous pipes, tunnels and culverts: controlled and exploited, in other words, for the settlers’ convenience.

David Collins’s instructions to protect the rivulet were ignored, and by the mid 1820s it had become polluted by refuse from humans, animals, tanneries and distilleries. Outbreaks of disease were inevitable. In 1828 the town sheriff reported that the rivulet had become a “receptacle for all the filth and impurity of the town.”

The strip along lower Collins Street was the worst, and just as likely to flood as before. It has never been a pretty part of town, as you can see. In high school I had to catch a bus along here and my moody teenaged thoughts were not enhanced by having to stare at a tired old watercourse while I waited. Residential housing had all gone by then and I didn’t know that these streets used to be known unofficially as “Wapping,” after the working-class waterfront area of London. For a hundred years or more, the people of Hobart’s Wapping suffered the most from flooding and pollution, as the poorest people often do.

Efforts over many decades to improve the supply and quality of Hobart’s water finally culminated in 1895 with the completion of two major reservoirs at the Waterworks Reserve above South Hobart, with a combined capacity of 500 million litres. They still supply Hobart’s drinking water.

The rivulet can still rise up in anger. Calamitous flooding in 1960 led to new control measures, but in 2018 the section along lower Collins Street once again turned into a seething and very dangerous torrent. A group of urban geographers noted then that the problem (not unique to Hobart) is that urban planning measures have become disconnected from nature and overlook the ecological functions of watercourses. Built-up areas deprive a city of green spaces that act like natural sponges. It’s hard to apply water-sensitive planning principles to a city already built.

At the end of my meditation on the photograph taken in Hobart in 1953 I returned to the original question: where does all that water go? How do we prevent our cities from becoming alienated from their natural environmental features? The upper reaches of the rivulet are better managed now, but the challenges are real. Still, the open waterway is fouled by rubbish and other pollutants, some from the South Hobart tip.

If you have fifty-three minutes to spare, spend them with Pete Walsh, the Platypus Guardian. Pete, who first sought solace at the rivulet after a serious medical diagnosis, was drawn there to reconnect with something he thought he was losing. Sitting on the bank one day he was astonished when a platypus emerged from the water and zoomed up to him, wiggling her bill as if she had something to say. He realised that a fragile population of platypuses was still managing — against all odds — to call the Hobart Rivulet home.

The more Pete visited the rivulet the more often he saw this zooming platypus, so he named her Zoom. That profound moment of connection inspired in Pete a passion to do what he could to preserve a habitat for these ancient animals, and a whole community of supporters has since joined him. If Zoom has a message, it must surely be to ask us to tread more lightly on this earth. •

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Curtin’s famous statement came in late December — and I will quote it because it is meet and right so to do. The prime minister said: “Without any inhibitions of any kind, I make it quite clear that Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with Britain.”

With those carefully chosen words — “inhibitions,” “pangs” and “kinship” — Curtin acknowledged that this geopolitical pivot carried an emotional cost for Australians. The population was still overwhelmingly of British descent and “home” was Britain, even for many of those born here. Curtin’s words therefore implied a national coming of age, a relinquishment of childhood dependence, a step into maturity. A British dominion was asserting an independent foreign policy. Australia, facing peril, was insisting on a direct, unmediated relationship with the United States of America.

When we think of Curtin, it is so often this declaration that comes to mind for it represents a cool Australian assessment of geopolitical realities at a moment of existential threat for the nation. My predecessors as lecturers in this series have often revisited this declaration too. They have analysed the geopolitical world of Curtin and its transformation through the decades that followed: superpower rivalry and the cold war, the reconstruction of postwar society, the strengthening American alliance, the rise of China, empire and decolonisation, the reckoning with a settler nation’s colonial past, Australia’s defence and security in a globalised world. These are all extrapolations of the world Curtin knew; he either played a part in bringing them about or might reasonably have foreseen them. His words echo down the years with enduring meaning.

But there is a dimension of the future that he could not possibly see or even imagine. Indeed, it has blindsided us all. That is my subject tonight.

When John Curtin died in office in 1945, his legendary status was confirmed and his words gained even more weight. The year of his death became another turning point: the loss of a revered prime minister, the end of the second world war, a new era of social reconstruction in which Curtin had invested, the beginning of a long economic boom such as Australia had not known since the 1880s, and the unleashing of the atomic bomb.

The atomic era was born eleven days after Curtin’s death. On 16 July, the world’s first nuclear device was exploded at the Trinity test site in New Mexico. Stratigraphers identify geological eras by residues in rocks, and 1945 is marked in sediment by the abrupt global geological signature of nuclear fallout.

Curtin was acutely conscious of Australia’s place in the world. “World-mindedness” was a common phrase in the 1940s, expressing an aspiration for peace and understanding after decades of war. Curtin also thought globally, for he was a citizen of an empire that spanned the Earth, a pacifist and a politician keenly aware of the international labour movement. He was conscious that a land at the bottom of the globe could not isolate itself from an increasingly connected world. He revived and extended immigration and joined international negotiations leading to global institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. His colleague, Dr Evatt, would later serve as president of the United Nations General Assembly.

So there was world-mindedness and there were global social and political perspectives, but did Curtin ever think in terms of the planet, a living, breathing, vulnerable Earth? Probably not. This requires environmental thinking in deep time and deep space, a consciousness that has evolved in our own lifetimes. It’s a perspective and an understanding that Curtin and his contemporary leaders could not have foreseen or even imagined.

John Edwards writes beautifully in the first volume of his book, John Curtin’s War (2007), of Curtin’s sense of time and space. Edwards reconstructs Curtin’s regular commute across the Nullarbor — his crossing of the vast treeless plain by train from Perth to Canberra, a journey that took him five nights and four days on six different trains with five changes of gauge. He describes Curtin and his fellow passengers smelling “the faint dry fragrance” of saltbush and mallee scrub “as it had been for millions of years.” When stretching their legs during the stops, they walked the bed of an ancient sea and “crunched fossils of sea creatures underfoot.” Edwards reminds us that “In its entire length the Trans-Australian track did not cross a single permanent stream of water.”

What a path to the parliament! There were 500 kilometres of “precisely straight track” surrounded by desert where Curtin “could see the circle of the plain around him from horizon to horizon.” At night through the right-hand windows he could pick out the points of the Southern Cross. He preferred not to fly, and anyway, the air services were neither frequent nor comfortable. But later during wartime, when he was forced to fly the Atlantic, Curtin told his secretary that he placed his hopes of making the crossing in the skill of the pilot, the rotation of Earth, and God Almighty. That is, human ingenuity, the steady old reliable planet, and God.

It is that view of the steady old reliable planet, the unchanging Earth, that has been disrupted in our lifetimes. How has our understanding of the world — the planet — changed since John Curtin’s death?

In the first decades of the twenty-first century we are living in “uncanny times,” weird, strange and unsettling in ways that question nature and culture and even the possibility of distinguishing between them. The modern history of the Western world — the Renaissance, the expansion of European peoples across the globe, the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the dawning of the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution — these are chiefly stories of the separation of culture from nature; indeed, they are stories of the mastery of culture over nature. Now in our own time we find nature and culture collapsing into one another all around us. No wonder it feels uncanny.

The Bengali writer Amitav Ghosh uses the term “uncanny” in his book The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016). For him, the word “uncanny” captures our experience of what he calls “the urgent proximity of non-human presences.” He’s referring to other creatures, insects, animals, plants, biota, the very elements themselves — water, earth, air, fire — and our renewed and long-forgotten sense of dependence upon them.

The planet is alive, says Ghosh, and only for the last three centuries have we forgotten that. We have been suffering from “the Great Derangement,” a disturbing condition of wilful and systematic blindness to the consequences of our own actions, when we are knowingly killing the planetary systems that support the survival of our species. That’s what’s uncanny about our times: that we are half-aware of this predicament yet also paralysed by it, caught between horror and hubris.

We inhabit a critical moment in the history of Earth and of life on this planet, and a most unusual one in terms of our own human history. To understand the implications of the present, we have to learn to think in deep time.

It’s very hard for us humans to comprehend or even imagine deep time. If you think of Earth’s history as the old measure of the English yard, that is, the distance from the King’s nose to the tip of his outstretched hand, then one stroke of a nail file on his middle finger erases all of human history. The discussion of deep time is full of these sorts of metaphors — human history as the last inch of the cosmic mile, the last few seconds before midnight, the skin of paint atop the Eiffel Tower. Metaphor is possibly the only level on which we can comprehend such immensities of time.

In the last couple of decades we have developed three powerful historical metaphors for making sense of the ecological crisis we inhabit. One is that we live in the Sixth Extinction. Humans have wiped out about two-thirds of the world’s wildlife in just the last half-century. Let that sentence sink in. It has happened in less than a human lifetime. This is an extinction rate a hundred to a thousand times higher than was normal in nature.

There have been other such catastrophic collapses in the diversity of life on Earth, five of them sudden shocking falls in the graph of biodiversity separated by tens of millions of years, the last one in the immediate aftermath of the asteroid impact that ended the age of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago. We now have to ask ourselves: are we inhabiting — and causing — the Sixth Extinction? In 2014 the American journalist Elizabeth Kolbert wrote an influential book called The Sixth Extinction, and she subtitled it An Unnatural History. It is unnatural because the Sixth Extinction involves, to some extent, our consciousness and intent.

Another metaphor for the extraordinary character of our times is the idea of the Anthropocene. This is the insight that we have entered a new geological epoch in the history of Earth and have now left behind the 12,000 years of the relatively stable epoch known as the Holocene, the period since the last great ice age. The new epoch of the Anthropocene recognises the power of humans in changing the nature of the planet, its atmosphere, oceans, climate, biodiversity, even its rocks and stratigraphy. It places humans on a par with variations in Earth’s orbit, glaciers, volcanoes, asteroid strikes and other geophysical forces.

There is debate about exactly when the Anthropocene began, but one definition is that we were first jolted into the new epoch by the Industrial Revolution in the late eighteenth century, when we began digging up and burning fossil fuels. That brilliant and profligate exploitation of a finite, buried resource underpinned population growth and economic expansion — and it also unleashed carbon on a massive and accelerating scale and began changing the atmosphere of the planet.

Another date given for the beginning of the Anthropocene is around 1945, the year of Curtin’s death. It was, as we’ve seen, the beginning of the atomic era. It also initiated an exponential shift in the impact of humans on the planet. In the mid twentieth century, the human enterprise exploded dramatically in population and energy use and rapidly began to outstrip its planetary support systems. World population, water use, tropical forest loss, ocean acidification, species extinction, carbon dioxide and methane emissions, fertiliser consumption and so on, all soared after 1950. This turning point is known as the Great Acceleration.

So I’ve talked about the Sixth Extinction and the Anthropocene. And there is a third potent metaphor for the moment we inhabit. It concerns the history and future of fire. It suggests that we are entering not just the Anthropocene but also a fire age that historian Stephen Pyne has called the Pyrocene. The planet is heating due to human greenhouse gas emissions and it is heating so quickly that it threatens to tip Earth into an escalating cycle of fire. In other words, we are entering an extended fire age that is comparable to past ice ages.

Let’s take a moment to think about those ice ages.

Some 2.6 million years ago, Earth entered a period of rhythmical ice ages — a geological epoch called the Pleistocene — and during this epoch average global temperatures dropped 6–10°C and ice sheets at the poles extended dramatically across Eurasia and North America. These repeated glaciations were harsh and demanded innovation and versatility; they were a selective pressure on evolution and promoted the emergence of humanity on Earth. Throughout the Pleistocene, the ice ages were punctuated by brief warmer periods known as interglacials, which generally lasted about 10,000 years.

We are living in an interglacial right now; geologists have separated it off from the Pleistocene and called it the Holocene, which means “recent.” But it is really part of the same rhythmic pattern that has prevailed since we evolved. We humans are creatures of the ice. The Pyrocene — the fire age — is something we’ve never seen before. The Pyrocene threatens to knock Earth out of the steady planetary rhythm that has seen the birth of our own species.

How do we know about these ancient rhythmic ice ages? By reading the rocks, of course, but now also by studying the ice itself. I’m fortunate to have visited both of Earth’s ice caps, and the most awesome one is definitely ours, the southern one, Antarctica. I twice voyaged south with the Australian Antarctic Division, on the second occasion at the invitation of the Australian government to mark the centenary of Douglas Mawson’s Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911–14. After a long wait for a break in the weather, we held a ceremony on the ice at the historic huts, the place Mawson called “the home of the blizzard.” Through the years of Curtin’s political life, Antarctica was becoming a primary site for Australia’s world-mindedness, and in 1959 our nation was one of the original twelve signatories to the Antarctic Treaty, which was effectively the first disarmament treaty of the nuclear age.

Antarctica is where nine-tenths of the world’s land ice resides. Seventy per cent of Earth’s fresh water is locked up in that ice cap. That’s a discovery humans made in my lifetime. Antarctica is not only the coldest and windiest continent; it is also paradoxically the driest — and it is the highest. It has the highest average height of any continent because it is a great dome of ice four or five kilometres thick that has built up over millions of years. In the 1950s we discovered that the driest of all continents is actually a vast elevated plateau of frozen water. The implications of that discovery are immense: it means that world sea levels are principally controlled by the state of the Antarctic ice sheet. If the southern ice cap melted, oceans would rise by more than sixty metres.

As we enter the Pyrocene, Antarctica is vulnerable and fragile, more brittle than we expected. This year the expanse of winter sea ice around Antarctica diminished dramatically below its average by the size of Western Australia. The continent of ice is a precious glistening jewel that holds the key to our future and to our past. It’s a giant white fossil, a luminous relic, a clue to lost ages: it enables us to travel through time to the Pleistocene Earth. The ice is an amazing archive. Embedded in an ice cap are tiny air bubbles from hundreds of thousands of years ago. When you drill into an ice cap kilometres thick, you can extract a core that is layered year by year, a precious archive of deep time. I think of ice cores as the holy scripts, the sacred scrolls of our age.

The deepest Antarctic cores currently retrieve 800,000 years of climate history. Right now, the search is on for the first million-year ice core, and Australia is involved in the quest.

In the 1990s, a long 400,000-year Antarctic ice core was extracted from the inland ice sheet. It produced a rhythmic, sawtooth graph of past ice ages, revealing the heartbeat of the planet. The brief peaks on the graph represented warmer interglacials; the extended troughs were the cold ice ages. The ice core charted four full cycles of glacial and interglacial periods and established that the carbon dioxide and methane concentrations in the atmosphere moved in lockstep with the ice sheets and the temperature. It’s the barometer of the planet’s health — a graph of its nervous system — through hundreds of thousands of years.

Ice cores also revealed that present-day levels of greenhouse gases are unprecedented during the past 800,000 years. The level of carbon dioxide in the historical air bubbles has leapt since the Industrial Revolution, and especially since 1950. So, before Antarctica was even seen by humans, it was recording our impact. And it was this glimpse of the deep past as revealed in the archive of ice that shocked people into a real sense of urgency about the climate crisis.

These three metaphors — the Sixth Extinction, the Anthropocene and the Pyrocene — are historical concepts that require us to travel in geological and biological time across hundreds of millions of years and then to arrive back at the present with a sense not of continuity but of discontinuity, of profound rupture in our own time. That’s what Earth system science has revealed: it’s now too late to go back to the Holocene. It may even be too late to hang onto the Pleistocene, the long epoch that birthed our species. We’ve irrevocably changed the Earth system and unwittingly steered the planet into an uncertain future; now we can’t take our hand off the tiller. We have to use our awesome power wisely.

The metaphors of deep time that we’ve been considering have some visual counterparts in deep space that have also emerged in the last half-century. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, out and across the void and into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the Moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped:

Bill Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, is that pretty!

Frank Borman: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the unscheduled photo, excitedly, and Earthrise became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the twentieth century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Frank Borman said, “It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.” And Bill Anders declared, “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

A few years later, in 1972, a photo taken by the Apollo 17 mission and known as The Blue Marble became one of the most reproduced pictures in the world, showing Earth as a luminous breathing garden in the dark void. Earthrise and The Blue Marble had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities.

Within a few years, the American scientists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock put forward “the Gaia hypothesis”: that Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb, an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. During the years of the Moon missions, British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth, revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing that exponential growth could not continue forever.

Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection. In 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and enormously influential report The Limits to Growth, which sold more than thirteen million copies and went into more than thirty translations. Authors Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth.

Two decades later, on Valentine’s Day 1990, the Voyager spacecraft was tracking beyond Saturn, six billion kilometres away, when it unexpectedly glanced over its shoulder. Again, Voyager was not programmed to look behind as it journeyed into the unknown, but scientists decided to take a risk and commanded the spacecraft to look back. And so we have a picture of Earth as a mere speck of dust in space, an image that astronomer Carl Sagan called Pale Blue Dot. “Look again at that dot,” wrote Sagan. “That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

These images from outer space of the unity, finiteness and loneliness of Earth helped escalate planetary thinking. From a colossal integration of Earth systems data came a keen understanding of planetary boundaries — thresholds in planetary ecology — and the extent to which the human enterprise is threatening or exceeding them. Three identified thresholds have already been crossed: changes in climate, biodiversity and the nitrogen cycle. At least we now understand our predicament even if we are perilously slow to act. The fossil fuels that got humans to the Moon now endanger our civilisation.

Now let’s bring this story back home to our place on this Earth. Australia is uniquely exposed to the grim, rough edges of these new world narratives. Shockingly, we are leading the world into the Sixth Extinction. Modern Australian history is like a giant experiment in ecological crisis and management. Ecologists working in Australia today often feel like they are ambulance drivers arriving at the scene of an accident. The southwest of Western Australia, for example, is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots and it is experiencing an exceptional loss of habitat. It is the site of what literary historian Tony Hughes-d’Aeth has called a “radical disappearance,” “an extinction event on a grand scale.”

And we inhabit the continent of fire, the driest inhabited continent, a land of drought and flooding rains that is held in the grip of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation, which means that Australia is on the frontline of the Pyrocene. Southwest Western Australia, with its sudden 30 per cent decline in rainfall since the 1970s, is one of the first places to experience the climatic shift expected with global warming. The Black Summer fires — when more than twenty-four million hectares of Australia’s southern and eastern forests burnt, including a million hectares of the Great Western Woodlands — were a symptom of our condition and became a planetary event. Smoke from those fires encircled the globe.

Furthermore, our modern history is a by-product of the Anthropocene. The British invasion of Australia was part of the age of empire and took place as the Industrial Revolution gathered momentum in England. Thus ancient Australia’s transformation into a colony coincided with the start of the fossil fuel era. The Endeavour was a repurposed coal ship. The new nation became highly dependent on fossil fuels, especially on coal, and in recent decades it drew world attention by persisting with the political denial of climate change. Modern Australia, we have to remember, was built on denial: the denial of Aboriginal sovereignty and cultural sophistication, the denial of frontier violence and warfare. At the recent referendum about the Voice, we witnessed a further national expression of denial.

But we have many opportunities here too. Our robust democracy, our active citizenship, our capacity for creativity and innovation, our impressive community leaders (many of them young, most of them women), our unique and inspiring environment, our destiny as a renewable energy superpower. And the continent’s deep Indigenous human history. In just a generation we have turned upside down the way we understand the history of Australia.

When I was in primary school, the history of this country was told as a footnote to the story of the British empire. In my classroom, the book we used was A Short History of Australia, written in 1916 by Professor Ernest Scott. It began with what he declared was “a blank space on the map” and it ended with “a new name on the map” — that of Anzac. So the story of Australia climaxed with a national sacrifice on a beach on the other side of the world. Australia at that time was seen as a new, transplanted society with a short and derivative history, a planned, peaceful and successful offshoot of imperial Britain. Aboriginal peoples, depicted as non-literate, non-agricultural, non-urban and non-national, could have no “history” and did not constitute a “civilisation” — thus they could find no place in the national polity or the national story or even as citizens of the Commonwealth.

But in the half-century that followed, Australians realised that the New World they thought they’d discovered was actually the Old, and that the true “nomads” were themselves, the colonisers who had come in ships. From the early 1960s, archaeologists confirmed what Aboriginal people had always known: that Australia’s human history went back eons, into the Pleistocene, well into the last ice age, earlier than Europe’s. The timescale of Australia’s human history increased tenfold in just thirty years and the journey to the other side of the frontier became a journey back into deep time.

We now recognise the first Australians as the most adventurous of all humans, pioneer sea-voyagers who, over 60,000 years ago, saw the beckoning, burning continent of eucalypts glowing over the horizon of the ocean. The island continent girt by sea was transformed into a complex jigsaw of beloved and inhabited Aboriginal Countries and ecologies. Aboriginal societies were — and are — diverse, innovative and adaptive; over 300 languages flourished here. Now our histories of Australia strive, as the Uluru Statement puts it, to let “this ancient sovereignty… shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.” This challenge is not going away, no matter how many toddler tantrums the nation has. Reckoning with our colonial history is a daily responsibility of living on this continent.

Therefore we can now see more clearly that, on Australian beaches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, there took place one of the greatest ecological and cultural encounters of all time. Peoples with immensely long and intimate histories of habitation encountered the furthest-flung representatives of the world’s first industrialising nation. The circle of migration out of Africa more than 80,000 years earlier finally closed.

This is a land of a radically different ecology, where climatic variation and uncertainty have long been the norm — and now those extremes are intensifying. Australia’s long human history spans great climatic change and also offers a parable of cultural resilience. The history of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia takes humans back, if not into the ice, then certainly into the ice age, into the depths of the last glacial maximum of 20,000 years ago and beyond, into and through periods of average temperature change of 5°C and more, such as those we might now face.

When Europeans and North Americans look for cultural beginnings, they are often prompted to tell you that humans and their civilisations are products of the Holocene and that we are all children of this recent spring of cultural creativity over the last 10,000 years. By contrast, an Australian history of the world takes us back to humanity’s first deep sea navigators and to the experience of people surviving cold ice-age droughts even in the central Australian deserts. It brings us visions of people living along fast-retreating coastlines as they cope with the dramatic rising of the seas.

Human civilisation here was sustained in the face of massive climate change. This is a story that modern Australians have only just discovered, and now perhaps it offers a parable for the world. The continent of fire will lead the world into the new age of fire. But it also carries human wisdom and experience from beyond the last ice age.

Living on a precipice of deep time has become, I think, an exhilarating dimension of what it means to be Australian. We can now see that the modern Australian story, in parallel with other colonial cataclysms, was a forerunner of the planetary crisis. Indigenous management was overwhelmed, forests cleared, wildlife annihilated, waters polluted and abused, the climate unhinged. Across the globe, imperial peoples used land and its creatures as commodities, as if Earth were inert. They forgot that the planet is alive.

In the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is clear that Australia is facing a new existential threat, quite different from that which Curtin addressed in 1941. We are embroiled in a climate emergency and biodiversity crisis that threaten to destroy our security and way of life.

It’s not just a threat; it’s actually going to happen unless we act swiftly and decisively. It is a planetary event, but Australia and its region are especially vulnerable to its effects. National security assessments and reports from Australian defence chiefs have acknowledged our predicament, identifying the climate crisis as “this clear and present danger,” “the greatest threat to the security and future of Australians” and “the Hundred Year War” for which we are seriously unprepared. To meet the challenge, we will need to recognise that we do indeed face a crisis, an emergency, and that we will be required to mobilise with a grave sense of urgency as if in a war.

In that December 1941 address to the people, Curtin sought to wean Australians off a subconscious cultural reflex to trust to luck, isolation and Britain. “I demand,” he said, “that Australians everywhere realise that Australia is now inside the firing lines.” He spoke of the need to shake citizens out of false assumptions of security; he talked of awakening “the somewhat lackadaisical Australian mind” and of the “reshaping, in fact revolutionising, of the Australian way of life until a war footing is attained quickly, efficiently and without question.” “We can and we will,” he promised.

What would a brave but realistic geopolitical pivot look like in our own time? What would constitute a Curtinesque act of visionary leadership now?

I think it would entail a recognition that, because of our extreme ecological and economic vulnerability in this escalating crisis, Australia needs to lead the world into the energy transition. Not to drag its feet, not to wait for other nations, but actually to demonstrate the path to zero emissions. To provide global direction and inspiration. And to do so out of intelligent national self-interest as well as out of “world-mindedness.”

Australia needs to grasp its opportunity as a renewable energy superpower. It needs to wean itself swiftly off its fossil fuel dependency, not cling to old, polluting forms of power and vested interests. A Western Australian like John Curtin would have to take on that challenge in the mining state, reminding constituents of the long-term significance of minerals in the renewable future. Of course it will be difficult and fraught. But that is what leadership is about: stepping wisely into the future that is coming for you.

Yes, it will be difficult but it is also simple. The physics of the planet are simple and we know what we have to do and what will happen if we don’t. The enemies of action are either ignorant and short-sighted or selfish and greedy. The pathway to electrification has been laid down clearly. The technologies are there or fast developing, as is the business momentum.

But the free market can’t move fast enough and government must lead. Even funding for the transition is readily available in the form of massive government fossil fuel subsidies that can be diverted, and windfall profits to the oil and gas industry that demand to be taxed. The economic, social and environmental benefits to the nation will be immense. I believe that the people are ahead of government on this and that they will welcome bold leadership. To paraphrase John Curtin, we should step into that future now, quite clearly, without any inhibitions of any kind, and free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with coal, oil, gas, Murdoch and Rinehart. •

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After this year’s startling rises in global temperatures and climate-related disasters, we may need to move the goalposts. Scientists at the European Union’s Copernicus Centre estimate that Earth’s average surface temperature was already 1.23°C higher by August 2023 than in pre-industrial times. At that rate, the temperature anomaly will top 1.5°C by 2035.

By chance, 2035 is also the next milestone year for which all countries must put forward new targets under the Paris agreement. And last week the International Energy Agency, the OECD’s energy counterpart, warned that current policy settings mean the world is on course for temperatures to be 2.4°C warmer by 2100 than in days of old.

The IEA is funded by Western governments, including Australia. It advocates a rapid “clean energy transition” to net zero emissions — but it knows that success ultimately depends on support from key developing countries, especially China and India. So its pitch is diplomatic; where activists see climate disaster ahead, the IEA sees a glass half full. Before the 2015 conference in Paris, the agency notes, its equivalent modelling found global warming would lift average temperatures in 2100 by 3.5 degrees.

The IEA’s latest report, Net Zero Roadmap: A Global Pathway to Keep the 1.5°C Goal in Reach, updates its 2021 Roadmap ahead of the coming COP28 ministerial meeting on climate in Dubai. Essentially, it’s a blueprint for ministers and their governments: if you’re serious about reducing greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, something like this is what you should be aiming for.

Its advice is pitched at countries in general: it offers no specific recommendations to any of them. But on one key question in the Australian debate — is it right to expand coal and gas fields for exports? — the IEA’s stance puts it clearly in line with the Greens and against the two major parties.

“There is no need for investment in new oil and gas projects,” the IEA’s executive director, Turkish energy economist Fatih Birol, declared at the report’s launch in Paris. A few countries would still use oil and gas in a world of net zero emissions, or NZE, but the IEA estimates global demand for fossil fuels will peak in this decade and then fall precipitously. That makes new investments a risky proposition.

If the IEA’s roadmap to NZE is followed, which is unlikely, global oil consumption will be just 7 per cent of today’s levels by 2050, gas consumption just 5 per cent, and consumption of coal just 2 per cent. But, as the report keeps pointing out, we’re not there yet.

Laura Cozzi, the IEA’s director of sustainability, technology and outlooks, pointed out that global emissions in the energy sector hit a new record level last year despite significant falls from 2019 levels in advanced economies. Certain unnamed countries, she noted, are still building new coal-fired power stations, expanding fossil fuel projects and heavily subsidising fossil fuels. She summed up the world’s prospects of keeping global warming to 1.5°C: “Not. Good.”

And yet the IEA’s key message is that it’s still possible. “While the global pathway to net zero by 2050 has narrowed, it is still achievable,” Dr Birol concluded. “It is too soon to give up on 1.5°C.”

Why? Partly, perhaps, because if the IEA gave up on that goal then governments would be free to do so as well. But partly, too, because the transition is going very well in some respects — and if governments and business bring the same focus to where they’re lagging, they could dramatically change the global trajectory.

First, the good news. In some key areas, the world is moving fast enough to meet the milestones set out in the 2021 roadmap. In two of them, it’s on track to do better than that. All this is bending the curve of our trajectory from fossil fuels to renewables, but governments have to maintain momentum by progressively tightening that curve.

For example: the decline in future global warming under current policies from the 3.5°C the IEA estimated in 2015 is not enough, but it is a dramatic start. It reflects significant shifts in government policies, business costs, technological development and investment decisions.

Back in 2015, the report implies, the IEA was expecting the global energy sector to be emitting about 42.5 gigatonnes (Gt, or billion tonnes) of greenhouse gases by 2030. Eight years later, it now expects the same sector to be emitting 35 Gt, a drop of 7.5 Gt, or 18 per cent, in just eight years.

Okay, numerous factors are involved in that. They include reduced economic growth as a result of Covid, technological breakthroughs in many areas, and the IEA’s past underestimation of the scale of the shift to solar. That aside, though, government, business and people have changed their priorities in some areas to abandon unsustainable ways of doing things in favour of sustainable ones.

The IEA report estimates that almost half of that 7.5 Gt difference in its new and old forecasts of the energy sector’s 2030 emissions has come from breakthroughs in just one sector: solar energy. It kept expecting solar energy’s dazzling growth to fizzle out, but got that very wrong; instead, solar’s price kept falling, demand kept rising, and month by month it has been replacing coal and gas power. The report estimates that by 2030, under existing policies, solar and wind will each generate roughly 15 per cent of the world’s electricity.

In Australia, solar already has that share of the market, wind slightly less. Our problem lies in creating the storage and transmission capacity to operate a system based on intermittent power sources. Australia is the world’s number one in per capita use of solar, but its transmission network was built for another age, and it has a charming tradition of allowing its farmers to be the world’s number one NIMBYs.

The IEA’s report unfortunately sheds no light on how we should fix these problems. But it does tell us that solar energy use is growing even faster than its 2021 report hoped for, and wind almost as fast, and their combined growth has provided 5 Gt of the 7.5 Gt saving in 2030 emissions.

Another 1 Gt comes from another renewable (or potentially renewable) source: electric vehicles. Here too, like everyone else, the IEA was caught by surprise. In 2015 it expected that electric cars would make up 2.5 per cent of the global car market by 2030. Now it predicts they will make up almost 40 per cent — or more if policies and research moves to bring them on faster, especially for trucks and commercial vehicles.

Some of their growth is due to policy shifts. Governments in the European Union and the United States stared down the car manufacturers, imposing tough emissions standards that forced them to switch strategy to focus on making electric cars. India and some other developing countries rolled out financial incentives and charging stations to replace the masses of tuk-tuks (two-/three-wheelers) on their roads. And, like the boom in solar, the boom in electric cars was made possible by China’s goal of creating new global industries it can dominate (though that has its own problems).

On some issues, some governments are getting serious about trying to stop global warming. And if they’re not, business is doing it for them. The IEA reports that in the last two years business investment in low-emissions energy grew by 40 per cent to US$1.8 trillion, more than Australia’s entire annual output. That’s just as well, because from 2022 to 2030, on the IEA’s roadmap, it will need to grow to US$4.5 trillion.

“We now estimate that global manufacturing capacities for solar PV and electric vehicle batteries would be sufficient to meet projected demand in 2030 in the updated NZE Scenario, if announced projects proceed,” the report concludes. “This progress reflects cost reductions for key clean energy technologies — solar PV [photovoltaic], wind, heat pumps and batteries — which fell by close to 80 per cent… between 2010 and 2022.”

The glass is half full. Unfortunately, it is also half empty.

The IEA’s roadmap to NZE has not changed much since 2021, but its presentation has. Reading it, you’re struck by the repeated entreaties for “fair and effective international cooperation” to help developing countries other than China to “unlock clean energy investment” so their economic growth will not require emissions growth.

You’re also struck by statistics showing that different countries are on very different paths. From 2019 to 2022, the IEA estimates, energy sectors in the European Union and the United States cut their greenhouse gas emissions by 4.5 per cent. But despite its world-leading roles in developing solar, wind and electric cars, China increased its emissions by 7.5 per cent, while emissions in other developing economies rose by 4.5 per cent.

You might think that’s because Westerners pump out far more emissions than China. Not so. The IEA report doesn’t analyse the issue, but its statistics tell us that the combined emissions from energy sectors in the European Union and the United States are 7.5 Gt a year. That’s just 20 per cent of the world total.

If the advanced economies meet their upgraded targets under the Paris agreement — a big if, as British politics shows — their emissions in 2030 would be 5.5 tonnes of greenhouse gases per head, whereas China emits 7.5 tonnes per head and growing. (Australia is an outlier, its total emissions being roughly 20 tonnes of greenhouse gases per head if you exclude the big discount it claims for stopping land clearing.) “The policies currently in place are inadequate to meet [countries’] stated national commitments, let alone longer-term net zero emissions pledges,” the IEA concludes.

Europe has led the way in reducing emissions, but the cynicism with which British prime minister Rishi Sunak has now reversed course to try to win re-election suggests that public support for that role is fragile. The Biden administration has made the United States another global leader, but if the Republicans win back the White House next year, then that too will go into reverse.

Xi Jinping doesn’t have to worry about re-election, and global net zero emissions would be unthinkable without China’s leadership in developing low-cost solar power technology and componentry for wind turbines, electric cars and heat pumps. But China under Xi has also built most of the world’s new coal-fired power stations; it now has 71 per cent of all coal-fired plants in the global pipeline.

However urgent the need for action, there is nothing inevitable about the world achieving net zero emissions within a generation. The European Union and rich countries on this side of the Pacific have written their net zero pledges into law, but few developing countries have followed. And, of course, the United States can no longer make bipartisan commitments.

But as I pointed out in reporting the IEA’s 2021 roadmap, the developing countries are the ones that matter most. They will be generating most of the world’s economic growth from here to 2050, and they will decide how to power it. Not only China and India, Indonesia and Brazil, but Africa too. In general, they’ve been cautious about what they commit to, and with good reason. They claim the West has kept promising financial help to develop clean energy, but has sometimes failed to deliver.

The IEA report frequently alludes to this, emphasising the developing world’s needs for financial and technological support. It suggests that the West bring forward its net zero target date from 2050 to 2045, China advance its deadline from 2060 to 2050, and other developing countries (most of whom are relatively minor emitters) take their time. The cause needs them on board.

The IEA’s milestones are challenging. In 2022, the world generated 61 per cent of its electricity by burning coal, gas and oil. (In Australia it was 68 per cent.) The IEA wants that dependence swept away, cutting fossil fuels’ share to 29 per cent by 2030 and just 9 per cent by 2035. Australia has set itself an even more ambitious target to cut fossil fuels to just 18 per cent of electricity generation by 2030, but there’s a growing consensus that we won’t make it.

The IEA wants 70 per cent of new vehicles sold globally by 2030 to be electric, up from 13 per cent in 2022, and then 98 per cent by 2035. By 2030 it proposes that space heating and cooling systems in all new buildings use energy-efficient heat pumps (or split systems), a huge change from less than 1 per cent in 2022.

It sounds dramatic, but the IEA argues that electric cars and heat pumps will save the customer money in the long term — just as solar and wind energy are cheaper than burning coal and gas. That’s why these four cheap, mature technologies are its priorities for action now.

The report skates over the problems that Australia and other countries are experiencing as solar and wind energy make coal-fired power uneconomic in daylight hours, yet it remains a necessity at night. Its recent report on Australia acknowledged the problem, but offered no solution except a sort of “try harder.”

But much in the report is relevant to Australia. It implicitly rejects Labor’s policy of phasing out fossil fuels at home while expanding exports for others to burn. If our goal is to stop global warming, you can’t do it by transferring emissions from power stations here to power stations in Asia. You can argue the detail of how the transition to renewables should be managed, but the IEA insists that fossil fuels must be phased out throughout the world. As Dr Birol explains, “What matters is emissions, regardless of which country produces them.”

Reducing the destructive methane emissions caused by mining fossil fuels is another of the IEA’s key priorities. Often, it says, it would be far cheaper for miners to capture the escaping gas and use it. Australia was a late signatory to the global pledge to try to reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030. They have become the fastest-growing source of Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The climate debate here focuses on renewables vs fossil fuels, but the IEA’s focus is on “low-emissions sources of electricity.” That includes nuclear power and carbon capture, usage and storage. Both are outcasts in Australian debates — the Howard government even banned nuclear power stations — but remain in the IEA’s toolkit, albeit for use only in rare cases.

It’s safe to assume that the Coalition’s new campaign for nuclear power in Australia is primarily aimed at renewing the climate wars; nuclear would be an expensive way to provide backup power at nights and on gloomy days. Even the IEA, as strong an advocate as any, sees nuclear providing just 2.7 per cent of the new “low-emissions” capacity it advocates for the world.

Rather, its emphasis is on the potential savings the world could make by focusing on energy efficiency: in homes, offices, shops and factories, cars, planes, ships, everywhere. As an example, redesigning new fridges and air conditioners could cut their electricity consumption almost in half by 2035.

Nothing would score better in human welfare than a global campaign to give every household in the developing world access to clean cooking technology to replace their deadly old indoor wood fires. If this could be done by 2030, the IEA estimates, it would remove 1.5 Gt a year of greenhouse gas emissions and save 3.6 million premature deaths. And that would cost just 1 per cent of the world’s annual energy investment.

But these changes require political or business decisions. The IEA offers only nonpartisan expertise — something that governments here and elsewhere don’t value as much as they should. The agency has to keep its mouth zipped, especially on how to solve the problems it exposes. Take energy efficiency. The obvious way to increase efficiency is a carbon price: make it more expensive to waste energy, and people will find ways to cut its use. But to many on the right, a new tax is taboo. So the IEA has to tiptoe around by suggesting second-best solutions.

The Albanese government is in danger of overpromising on targets while underdelivering on policies to achieve them. Its carbon price is limited to 200-odd companies, it is walking both sides of the street on fossil fuels, and most of the reviews it has launched have yet to produce outcomes. This is what happens when you allow the political staff to take charge of policy. •

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The episode rather neatly demonstrated the balancing act Lula is trying to perform on the world stage. He has been assiduously positioning Brazil as an independent global power, seeking to act as a mediator in Ukraine rather than condemning Russia as demanded by the United States and Europe, promoting the non-Western BRICS club of major economies (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and flying to Cuba to reiterate Brazil’s role as a leader of the G77 grouping of developing countries.

But he has also just signed a joint declaration with the United States proclaiming the G20 group of large economies the principal forum for multilateral diplomacy and declares himself a global champion of democracy, warning of the perils of authoritarian populism promoting racism and civil violence. (Brazil had its own “invasion of Congress” events in January this year when supporters of former far-right president Jair Bolsonaro stormed parliament and the Supreme Court in an attempt to overthrow Lula’s election victory, a deliberate echo of the events of 6 January 2021 in Washington, DC.)

The jury may be out on whether this balancing act can work, but no one could accuse Lula of passivity in foreign policy. In the past few weeks he has attended the Global Financing Pact summit in Paris, the BRICS summit in Johannesburg, the G20 summit in Delhi, the G77 summit in Havana and the UN General Assembly and Climate Ambition and Sustainable Development summits in New York, and convened his own Amazon summit in Brazil’s northeastern city of Belem. This year Brazil chairs the Latin American trade partnership Mercosur. Next year it will hold the presidency of the G20. In 2025 it will lead the BRICS and will also host the critical UN climate summit COP30.

To appreciate what Lula is seeking to achieve from this feverish activity it helps to understand the man. Now seventy-seven, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (“Lula” was an early nickname he later formally incorporated into his official name) has not had the usual politician’s life. Born to poor parents who migrated from Brazil’s northeast to São Paulo in search of work, Lula didn’t learn to read until he was ten. Starting out as a metalworker in the automobile industry, he became a trade unionist, was elected leader of the Metalworkers’ Union at the age of thirty, and then led major strikes and democratic protests against Brazil’s military dictatorship in the 1970s.

In 1980, increasingly identifying as a socialist — neither a communist nor a moderate social democrat — Lula helped form a new political party, the Workers’ Party. Though he was widely mocked for his poor Portuguese, his electrifying rhetoric and brilliant organising skills marked him out. He was elected to Congress in 1986 and subsequently stood as the party’s presidential candidate three times before finally winning in 2002.

In office, Lula immediately set about fulfilling his election promise to attack poverty, establishing the Bolsa Familia system under which mothers received welfare payments conditional on their children staying in school and being vaccinated. Aided by an economic boom, he raised the minimum wage, and expanded primary education and healthcare. Poverty in Brazil fell by more than a quarter in his first term alone. Re-elected in 2006, he turned his attention to the Amazon, succeeding in slowing deforestation for the first time. Brazil’s economy grew and its public debt fell.

When he left office after two terms in 2010 Lula had popular approval ratings of over 80 per cent and the undying enmity of Brazil’s conservative political elite. When the Trumpian populist Jair Bolsonaro became president in 2016, no one was surprised when he used a compromised judicial system to put Lula in jail.

Defeating Bolsonaro in last year’s election was redemption for Lula. But in a deeply divided country — the parallels with the United States are remarkably close — the margin was tiny: 50.9 per cent versus 49.1 per cent in the run-off vote. In the Brazilian Congress, which he does not control, Lula has had to cobble together an unstable multiparty coalition, making his legislative task much harder this time round.

Nevertheless, he has high ambitions. His Ecological Transformation Plan is meant to be a comprehensive economic strategy aimed at greening the country’s industrial structure. He wants to raise agricultural productivity to expand food production while conserving the country’s abundant natural resources. He has committed to ending hunger by extending Brazil’s welfare system, and to ending the illegal incursions into the Amazon forest by miners and loggers that routinely lead to violence against indigenous people. Deforestation is already down by over 40 per cent in less than a year.

Lula’s remarkable ability to build pragmatic political alliances makes it likely that he will achieve much more of his program than his congressional numbers would suggest. But it is on the world beyond Brazil that Lula’s political gaze is now increasingly fixed.

It is not too much to say that Lula wants to redesign the global order. In his speech to the UN General Assembly this week, Lula railed against the increasing inequality of a global economy in which, as he pointed out, the ten richest billionaires have greater combined wealth than 40 per cent of the world’s population, and 735 million people go hungry. He noted that the richest tenth of the world’s population are responsible for almost half of all carbon emissions, but also insisted that developing countries did not want to follow the same economic model. And he decried the erosion of multilateralism — “the principle of sovereign equality between nations” — in global affairs.

Lula’s rhetoric has always been grandiose, even utopian. But he has a remarkable record of making things happen. At the end of this year’s G20 summit in New Delhi, Lula set out his plans for next year’s presidency. Under Brazil, he said, the G20 would focus on reducing global inequality, poverty and hunger; on making the global growth model more environmentally sustainable, in terms of both climate change and nature conservation; and on reform of the way international institutions are governed.

Because he believes it is what will unlock the others, it is the last of these goals that is really in Lula’s sights. Like almost all leaders from the global South, Lula looks at how multilateral institutions work and sees both historical obsolescence and profound injustice.

Almost all the major institutions of global governance have remained unchanged since they were established at the end of the second world war. Eighty years later, despite new economic and regional powers emerging — notably the European Union, Germany, Japan, India and Brazil — the UN Security Council still has only five permanent members (the United States, Britain, France, Russia and China), the great powers that had prevailed in the war. And the World Bank and International Monetary Fund are still governed by their largest shareholders, an even narrower group of Western countries dominated by the United States and the other economies of the G7 (Germany, France, Britain, Italy, Japan and Canada).

All members of the World Trade Organization have equal decision-making power, but partly for that reason it has increasingly been bypassed in recent years by regional and bilateral trade agreements promoted by the United States, China and the European Union. The world’s premier economic advisory body, the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development, or OECD, remains in thrall to the free-market orthodoxies of the Western countries that run it.

And the single most powerful institution in the world economy is arguably the dollar, in which a huge amount of global trade and investment is denominated. But this means much of the world is deeply vulnerable to changes in its value, as the last two years of simultaneously rising dollar and US interest rates have shown. The dollar is not even governed by postwar international arrangements: its master is the US Federal Reserve, whose mandate is entirely focused on the US economy.

Lula wants all this changed. This is why he has loudly pursued the development of the BRICS grouping, even going so far as to suggest that it could seek to replace the dollar as a global trading currency. Lula sees the BRICS as a non-Western power bloc to counter the G7, whose cohesion in the decision-making forums of the G20, World Bank and IMF starkly contrasts with differences among the major countries of the global South.

At its recent summit in South Africa, the BRICS group admitted several new members, including the wealthy and increasingly assertive Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates, with the aim of extending its reach and influence. But most Western commentators are dismissive. They note that BRICS, unlike the G7, is made up of countries whose economic and political systems are not only fundamentally different from one another but also subject to major tensions and conflicts, especially in the case of superpower rivals China and India. Nevertheless, it is a signal of Lula’s intent that he wants to strengthen an alternative alliance through which to pursue his reform agenda.

Lula’s public statements on Russia and the war in Ukraine should be seen in this light. Like most countries in the global South, Brazil regards the UN Security Council as the proper arbiter of international conflict. If the Security Council assesses and then condemns one country’s aggression, Brazil will also do so. But it has never done so when the Security Council has not come to a judgement — as in the case of Ukraine, because Russia has exercised its permanent member veto.

Talking to Brazilian foreign policy experts in Brasilia and Rio I detected no illusions about Russia’s responsibility for the war in Ukraine. They note simply that the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, supported by almost all other Western states, was also illegal under UN law. And they observe that the West can apparently find fiscally unconstrained sums of money to defend Ukraine while simultaneously claiming it has no money to expand development aid or climate assistance to the poorest and most vulnerable countries elsewhere in the world. “And what did you do during Covid?” one asked me. “When the world cried out for vaccines, you hoarded even your surplus ones.”

Brazilians are enjoying the country’s new prominence on the global stage. Lula gets notably less criticism for his numerous foreign trips than leaders in most other countries. Along the way, he won’t hesitate to criticise the West for its moral failures. But he will also seize the chance to work with it. “Brazil is back!” the president likes to say. Preparing to assume the chairmanship of the largest powers at the G20, he doesn’t intend to waste the opportunity. •

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The stars are our ancestors lighting up their campfires across the night sky. The universe exploded into being fourteen billion years ago and is still expanding. As it cooled and continued to inflate, an opposite force — gravity — organised matter into galaxies and stars. Everything was made of the elements forged by stars. Around billions of fiery suns, the interstellar dust and debris of supernovas coalesced as planets, some remaining gaseous, some becoming rigid rock. Earth, with its molten core, its mantle of magma and a dynamic crust, was born. The planet is alive.

In the shallow waters off the western coast of the continent metamorphosed by the Dreaming sit solid mementos of the beginning of life. They are living fossils, cushions of cells and silt called stromatolites. After life emerged in a fiery, toxic cauldron in an ocean trench, bacteria at the surface captured sunlight and used it to create biological energy in the form of sugar. They broke down carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, feeding off the carbon and releasing oxygen as waste. Photosynthesis, Earth’s marvellous magic, had begun. It was just a billion years after the planet was formed.

To later inhabitants, oxygen would seem the most precious waste in the firmament. But it was a dangerous experiment, for the oxygen-free atmosphere that had created the conditions for life was now gone. Stromatolites hunched in the western tides descended from the creatures that began to breathe a new atmosphere into being.

Two billion years ago, enough oxygen existed to turn the sky blue. The same oxygen turned the oceans red with rust. Thus life itself generated the planet’s first environmental crisis. This ancient rain of iron oxide is preserved today in the banded ores of the Hamersley Range. The universe was then already old, but Earth was young.

The planet was restless and violent, still seething with its newness. When separate lands fused, the earth moved for them. Australian landmasses shifted north and south as crusts cruised over iron-rich magma. Large complex cells fed off the growing oxygen resource and diversified rapidly. For almost 400 million years the whole planet became gripped by glaciation and scoured by ice, and most life was extinguished. The long reign of the ancient glaciers was written into rock.

As the ice withdrew, life bloomed again. Organisms of cooperative cells developed in the oceans and became the first animals. Six hundred million years ago, a supercontinent later known as Gondwana began to amass lands in the south, and their titanic fusion created a chain of mountains in central Australia. Uluru and Kata Tjuta, inspirited by the rainbow python, are sacred rubble from this momentous first creation of Gondwana.

Life ventured ashore, protected now from dangerous radiation by the strengthening shield of ozone gas around Earth. Plants and animals sustained each other, the essential oxygen circulating between them. Gondwana united with other continents, creating a single landmass called Pangaea. When the planet cooled again, surges of glacial ice scoured life from the land once more. But life persisted, and its reinventions included the seed and the egg, brilliant breakthroughs in reproduction. They were portable parcels of promise that created a world of cycads and dinosaurs.

Earth gradually changed its hue over eons. Rusted rock and grey stone became enlivened by green, joining the blue of the restless oceans. Chlorophyll conquered the continents. Pines, spruces, cypresses, cycads and ferns found their way up the tidal estuaries, across the plains and into the mountains, but the true green revolution awaited the emergence of flowering plants. These plants generated pollen and used animals as well as wind to deliver it. Insects especially were attracted to the perfumed, colourful flowers where they were dusted with pollen before they moved to another bloom. It was a botanical sexual frenzy abetted by animal couriers. The variety of plants exploded. Nutritious grasslands spread across the planet and energy-rich fruits and seeds proliferated. As this magic unfolded, Gondwana separated from Pangaea again and consolidated near the south pole, where it began to break up further.

The cosmic dust that had crystallised as Earth, dancing alone with its single moon and awash with its gradually slowing tides, seemed to have settled into a rhythm. The bombardment of meteors that marked its early life had eased. Giant reptiles ruled, small mammals skulked in the undergrowth, and flowers were beginning to wreak their revolution.

Then, sixty-six million years ago, the planet was violently assaulted. A huge rogue rock orbiting the Sun plunged into Earth. The whole planet shuddered, tidal waves, fires and volcanoes were unleashed, soot blackened the atmosphere, and three-quarters of life was extinguished. The largest animals, the dinosaurs, all died. But the disaster of the death star also created the opportunity for mammals to thrive. The comet forged the modern world.

Flat and geologically calm, the landmass that would become Australia was now host to few glaciers and volcanoes. But ice and fire were to shape it powerfully in other ways. About fifty million years ago, in the final rupture of Gondwana, Australia fractured from its cousin, Antarctica, and voyaged north over millions of years to subtropical latitudes and a drier climate. Fire ruled Australia while Antarctica was overwhelmed by ice. The planet’s two most arid lands became white and red deserts.

The newly birthed Australian plate rafted north into warmer climes at a time in planetary history when the earth grew cooler, thus moderating climatic change and nurturing great biodiversity. It was the continent’s defining journey. It began to dry, burn and leach nutrients, the ancient soils became degraded and impoverished, and the inland seas began to dry up. In the thrall of fire, the Gondwanan rainforest retreated to mountain refuges and the eucalypt spread. Gum trees came to dominate the wide brown land. The bush was born.

Three million years ago, when North and South America finally met and kissed, the relationship had consequences. Ocean currents changed and the Pleistocene epoch, marked by a succession of ice ages, kicked into life. Regular, dramatic swings in average global temperature quickened evolution’s engine. The constant tick and tock of ice and warmth sculpted new, innovative life forms.

In southern Africa, an intelligent primate of the forests ventured out onto the expanding grasslands and gazed at the horizon. This hominid was a creature of the ice ages, but her magic would be fire. One day her descendants walked north, and they kept on walking.

By the time they reached the southeastern edges of the Asian islands, these modern humans were experienced explorers. They gazed at a blue oceanic horizon and saw that there was no more land. But at night they observed the faint glow of fire on a distant continent. And by day they were beckoned by haze that might be smoke and dust. What they did next was astonishing.

The people embarked on an odyssey. They strengthened their rafts and voyaged over the horizon, beyond sight of land in any direction — and they kept on sailing. They were the most adventurous humans on Earth. They crossed one of the great planetary boundaries, a line few land-based animals traversed, one of the deep sutures of tectonic earth. This was over 60,000 years ago. The first Australians landed on a northern beach in exhaustion, wonder and relief. They had discovered a continent like no other.

The birds and animals they found, the very earth they trod, had never known a hominid. The other creatures were innocent of the new predator and unafraid. It was a bonanza. But the land was mysterious and forbidding and did not reveal its secrets easily. The people quickly moved west, east and south, leaving their signatures everywhere. They had to learn a radically new nature. Arid Australia was not consistently dry but unpredictably wet. The climate was erratic, rainfall was highly variable, and drought could grip the land for years. The soil was mostly poor in nutrients and there were few large rivers. But these conditions fostered biodiversity and a suite of unique animals and plants that were good at conserving energy and cooperating with one another.

The first people arrived with a firestick in their hands, but never before had they known it to exert such power. For this was the fire continent, as distinctive in its fire regimes as in its marsupials and mammal pollinators. Fire came to be at the heart of Australian civilisation. People cooked, cleansed, farmed, fought and celebrated with fire. The changes they wrought with hunting and fire affected the larger marsupials which, over thousands of years, became scarce. People kept vast landscapes open and freshly grassed through light, regular burning. By firing small patches they controlled large fires and encouraged an abundance of medium-sized mammals. As the eucalypt had remade Australia through fire, so did people.

They had arrived on those northern beaches as the latest ice age of the Pleistocene held the planet in its thrall. Polar ice was growing and the seas were lower, which had made the challenging crossing from Asia just possible. People could walk from New Guinea to Tasmania on dry land. This greater Australia, now known as Sahul, was the shape of the continent for most of the time humans have lived here. People quickly reached the far southwest of Western Australia and the southern coast of Tasmania. From the edge of the rainforest they observed icebergs from Antarctica, emissaries from old Gondwana.

For tens of thousands of years after people came to Australia, the seas continued to retreat and the new coastlines were quickly colonised. Every region of the continent became inhabited and beloved, its features and ecologies woven into story and law. Trade routes spanned the land. People elaborated their culture, history and science in art and dance, and buried their loved ones with ritual and ceremony in the earliest known human cremations. Multilingualism was the norm. Hundreds of distinct countries and languages were nurtured, and the land was mapped in song. This place was where everything happened, where time began.

As the ice age deepened, the only glaciers in Australia were in the highlands of Tasmania and on the peaks of the Alps. For much of the continent, the ice age was a dust age. Cold droughts settled on the land, confining people in the deserts to sheltered, watered refuges. Great swirls of moving sand dunes dominated the centre of the continent but the large rivers ran clear and campfires lit up around the lakes they formed. About 18,000 years ago, the grip of the cold began to weaken and gradually the seas began to rise. Saltwater invaded freshwater, beaches eroded, settlements retreated, sacred sites became sea country. The Bassian Plain was flooded and Tasmanians became islanders. Over thousands of years, Sahul turned into Australia.

The rising of the seas, the loss of coastal land, and the warming of average temperatures by up to 8°C transformed cultures, environments and economies throughout the continent. People whose ancestors had walked across the planet had survived a global ice age at home. In the face of extreme climatic hardship, they continued to curate their beloved country. They had experienced the end of the world and survived.

The warm interglacial period known as the Holocene, which began 13,000 years ago, ushered in a spring of creativity in Australia and across the planet. Human populations increased, forests expanded into the grasslands and new foods flourished. Australians observed the emergence of new agricultural practices in the Torres Strait islands and New Guinea but mostly chose not to adopt them. They continued to tune their hunting and harvesting skills to the distinctive ecologies of their own countries, enhancing their productivity by conserving whole ecosystems. A complex tapestry of spiritual belief and ceremonial ritual underpinned their economies. The sharing of food and resources was their primary ethos.

Strangers continued to visit Australia from across the seas, especially from Indonesia and Melanesia. Four thousand years ago, travellers from Asia brought the dingo to northern shores. During the past millennium, Macassans from Sulawesi made annual voyages in wooden praus to fish for sea cucumbers off Arnhem Land where they were generally welcomed by the locals. The Yolngu people of the north engaged in trade and ceremony with the visitors, learned their language, adopted some of their customs and had children with them. Some Australians travelled by prau to Sulawesi.

In recent centuries, other ships nosed around the western and northern coasts of the continent, carrying long-distance voyagers from Europe. One day, early in the European year of 1788, a fleet of tall ships — “each Ship like another Noah’s Ark” carefully stowed with seeds, animals and a ballast of convict settlers — entered a handsome harbour on the east coast of Australia and began to establish a camp. These strangers were wary, inquisitive and assertive, and they came to stay. They were here to establish a penal colony and to conduct an agrarian social experiment. They initiated one of the most self-conscious and carefully recorded colonisations in history on the shores of a land they found both beautiful and baffling.

They were from a small, green land on the other side of the world, descendants of the people who had ventured west rather than east as humans exited Africa. They colonised Europe and Britain thousands of years after the Australians had made their home in the southern continent. They lived in a simplified ecology scraped clean by the glaciers of the last ice age, and were unprepared for the rich subtlety of the south.

For 2000 years before their arrival in Australian waters, the Europeans had wondered if there might be a Great South Land to balance the continents of the north. By the start of the sixteenth century, they confirmed that the planet was a sphere and all its seas were one. They circled the globe in tall sailing ships and voyaged to the Pacific for trade, science and conquest. The British arrivals were part of the great colonialist expansion of European empires across the world. For them, success was measured through the personal accumulation of material things; Australians were the opposite.

On eastern Australian beaches from the late eighteenth century, there took place one of the greatest ecological and cultural encounters of all time. Peoples with immensely long and intimate histories of habitation encountered the furthest-flung representatives of the world’s first industrialising nation. The circle of migration out of Africa more than 80,000 years earlier finally closed.

The British did indeed find the Great South Land of their imagination seemingly waiting for them down under and they deemed it vacant and available. It was an upside-down world, the antipodes. They would redeem its oddity and emptiness. The invaders brought the Bible, Homer, Euclid, Shakespeare, Locke and the clock. They came with guns, germs and steel. With the plough they broke the land. They shivered at “the deserted aboriginal feel of untilled earth.” They dug the dirt and seized it. Sheep and cattle were the shock troops of empire; their hard hooves were let loose on fragile soils and they trampled them to dust. Australian nature seemed deficient and needed to be “improved.” Colonists believed that the Australians were mere nomads, did not use the earth properly, and therefore did not own it.

But the true nomads were the invaders and they burned with land hunger. War for possession of the continent began. It continued for more than a hundred years on a thousand frontiers. Waterholes — the precious jewels of the arid country — were transformed into places of death. It was the most violent and tragic happening ever to befall Australia. So many lives were sacrificed, generations of people were traumatised, and intimate knowledge of diverse countries was lost.

Australia entered world history as a mere footnote to empire; it became celebrated as a planned, peaceful and successful offshoot of imperial Britain. A strange silence — or white noise — settled on the history of the continent. Nothing else had happened here for tens of thousands of years. Descendants of the newcomers grew up under southern skies with stories of skylarks, village lanes and green hedgerows from the true, northern hemisphere. And they learned that their country had a short triumphant history that began with “a blank space on the map” and culminated in the writing of “a new name on the map” — Anzac. So the apotheosis of the new nation happened on a distant Mediterranean shore. The cult of overseas war supplanted recognition of the unending war at home, and the heroic defence of country by the first Australians was repressed. They were disdained as peoples without agriculture, literacy, cities, religion or government, and were allowed neither a history nor a future.

The British and their descendants felt pride in their new southern land and pitied its doomed, original inhabitants. Colonists saw themselves as pioneers who pushed the frontier of white civilisation into the last continent to be settled, who connected Australia to a global community and economy. They were gratified that their White Australia, girt by sea, a new nation under southern skies, was a trailblazer of democratic rights: representative government, votes for working men, votes for women. But the first Australians lay firmly outside the embrace of democracy. They continued to be removed from country onto missions and reserves; they did not even have a rightful place in their own land, and every aspect of their lives was surveyed.

The invaders lived in fear of invasion. Had they used the soil well enough, had they earnt their inheritance? Would strangers in ships, boats, threaten again? Had they reckoned with their own actions in the land they had seized? There was a whispering in their hearts.

New peoples arrived down under from Europe, the Americas and Asia, and the British Australians lost their ascendancy. Australia became the home again of many cultures, vibrantly so, and a linguistic diversity not seen on the continent since the eighteenth century flourished. Many languages of the first peoples persisted and were renewed. The classical culture of the continent’s discoverers endured; their Dreamings, it was suggested, were the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia. A bold mix of new stories grew in the land.

The invaders of old Australia did not foresee that the people they had dispossessed would make the nation anew. The society they created together was suffused with grief and wonder. The original owners were recognised as full citizens and began to win their country back through parliament and the courts. They believed their ancient sovereignty could shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood.

But now the planet was again shuddering under an assault. The meteor this time was the combined mass of humans and their impact upon air, oceans, forests, rivers, all living things. It was another extinction event, another shockwave destined to be preserved in the geology of Earth. The fossilised forests of the dinosaurs, dug up and burnt worldwide since Australia was invaded, had fuelled a human population explosion and a great acceleration of exploitation. Rockets on plumes of flame delivered pictures of spaceship Earth, floating alone, finite and vulnerable in the deep space of the expanding universe. Ice cores drilled from diminishing polar ice revealed, like sacred scrolls, the heartbeat of the planet, now awry. The unleashing of carbon, itself so damaging, enabled a planetary consciousness and an understanding of deep time that illuminated the course of redemption.

The Australian story, in parallel with other colonial cataclysms, was a forerunner of the planetary crisis. Indigenous management was overwhelmed, forests cleared, wildlife annihilated, waters polluted and abused, the climate unhinged. Across the globe, imperial peoples used land and its creatures as commodities, as if Earth were inert. They forgot that the planet is alive.

The continent of fire led the world into the new age of fire. But it also carried wisdom and experience from beyond the last ice age.

Humans, as creatures of the ice, were embarked on another odyssey. It would take them over the horizon, to an Earth they have never before known. •

References: The stars are our ancestors: B.T. Swimme and M.E. Tucker, Journey of the Universe • “the most precious waste in the firmament”: Richard Fortey, Life: An Unauthorised Biography • “The planet is alive”: Amitav Ghosh, The Great Derangement and The Nutmeg’s Curse • iron oxide, the seed and the egg: Reg Morrison, Australia: Land Beyond Time • the true green revolution: Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey • expanding grasslands: Vincent Carruthers, Cradle of Life • distinctive in its fire regimes and mammalian pollinators: Stephen Pyne, Burning Bush • conditions of biodiversity: Tim Flannery, The Future Eaters • Sahul and the last ice age: Billy Griffiths, Deep Time Dreaming • conserving whole ecosystems: Peter Sutton and Keryn Walshe, Farmers or Hunter-gatherers? • “each Ship like another Noah’s Ark”: First Fleet surgeon George Worgan in Grace Karskens, People of the River • agrarian social experiment: Grace Karskens, The Colony • guns, germs and steel: Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel • “the deserted aboriginal feel of untilled earth”: George Farwell, Cape York to the Kimberleys • “the true, northern hemisphere”: Shirley Hazzard, The Transit of Venus • “a blank space on the map”: Ernest Scott, A Short History of Australia • a whispering in their hearts: Henry Reynolds, This Whispering in Our Hearts • “the Iliad and Odyssey of Australia”: Noel Pearson, A Rightful Place • “a bold mix of the Dreamings”: Alexis Wright, The Swan Book • “we believe this ancient sovereignty can shine through as a fuller expression of Australia’s nationhood”: The Uluru Statement 2017 • a great acceleration: John McNeill and Peter Engelke, The Great Acceleration • “the heartbeat of the planet”: Will Steffen • the new age of fire: Stephen Pyne, The Pyrocene.

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Resources minister Madeleine King announced that all activities at the site will end immediately, apologised for the “uncertainty” experienced by Kimba residents and acknowledged her regret for the “profound distress” experienced by Traditional Owners — the Barngarla people — during the decision-making process.

King’s announcement came less than a month after the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation’s campaign against the facility culminated in a breakthrough Federal Court verdict. Justice Natalie Charlesworth ruled that the decision to store Australia’s nuclear waste at Napandee was subject to “apprehended bias” and should thus be set aside. Her decision has been labelled a “king hit” for plans to dispose of Australia’s low- to intermediate-level nuclear waste.

But while many assume that the ruling rested on native title (an issue that was certainly discussed), the minister wanted to make clear that the “question raised in this case was about a decision-making process, not a claim of native title.” In reality, the judgement was a comment on consecutive Australian governments’ inability to take public anxieties about nuclear waste seriously, a tendency stretching back decades.

As Justice Charlesworth detailed, the evidence led her to conclude that former resources minister Keith Pitt had “already made up his mind about the selection of Napandee as the site” ahead of its formal determination. By making statements “to the effect that the Australian Government had made a commitment or promise to the people of Kimba that a radioactive waste facility would be situated at Napandee,” Pitt was judged to have shown apprehended bias — that is, his mind was “foreclosed” to the possibility that the post-nomination consultation would change the outcome.

Justice Charlesworth found that Pitt also displayed a “dismissive attitude to its key opponents, the Barngarla people.” Describing the judgement as the conclusion of a “David and Goliath” battle, the Barngarla Determination Aboriginal Corporation’s chair, Jason Bilney, reflected on the outcome in light of truth-telling: “It’s about listening to the First Nations people, and here we are today and we prevailed and we won.”

Napandee was a latecomer to the process of deciding where Australia’s nuclear waste would be stored. The first round of applications had resulted in just one suitable site: Wallerberdina Station, near Hawker, in South Australia’s Flinders Ranges. Seeking further options in late 2016, resources minister Matt Canavan approved an amendment to the nomination guidelines to allow private landholders to nominate their own properties for consideration. Early the following year, the federal government received several new sites for consideration; one of them was Napandee, a 160-hectare property put forward by owner Jeff Baldock.

With these new sites in contention, efforts began in Hawker and Kimba to gauge local support for the facility. Several ballots conducted as part of the consultation process returned a slim majority vote against hosting Australia’s nuclear waste in Hawker (48–52) and a majority for hosting it in Kimba (62–38). Both communities were divided, and in both cases the Traditional Owners argued they had been “locked out” of voting and not adequately consulted. Once Napandee was selected as the final location in 2020, the Barngarla committed to having the decision reversed.

Justice Charlesworth’s judgement might be a welcome one for the Traditional Owners but it by no means marks the end of the wider debate over the storage of Australia’s nuclear waste. After all, Australians have been here before and will undoubtedly find themselves here again.

If it feels as though the issue of radioactive waste has been in the news for a very long time, that’s because it has. For decades, politicians, experts and the public have debated the ins and outs of radioactive waste storage and disposal in Australia. As the debate rages on, the nation’s nuclear waste mounts.

Australia’s existing waste consists mainly of low-level radioactive waste products and contaminated materials used in medicine, industry and scientific research: contaminated PPE, for example, and unused radiopharmaceuticals and contaminated gowns and bedlinen. The nation’s radioactive waste burden is partly the consequence of saving countless lives: in 2022 alone, 300,000 nuclear medicine diagnostic exams were claimed on Medicare, each of them producing both low- and intermediate-level nuclear waste.

Regardless of radioactive materials’ positive uses, the mental leap from nuclear waste to barrels of toxic sludge, ballooning mushroom clouds and radiation sickness shouldn’t be dismissed. Uncertainty about radioactivity’s association with cancer and other serious health concerns, its impact on the environment and the contradictory way it appears to be handled and approached by authorities induce unease. Rather than treat these anxieties as baseless, decision-makers need to face them head-on and deal with them seriously.

This was exactly the advice given to the Keating government in the No Time to Waste report released by the Senate Select Committee on the Dangers of Radioactive Waste in 1996. The committee found that the rules and regulations governing nuclear waste storage were not only difficult to understand but were also inadequately enforced. The rules themselves hadn’t kept up with shifting international standards and appeared to operate differently from state to state. Coming after a nuclear waste spill at Port Augusta in 1991, these conclusions would only have increased public concern.

The more recent case of a radioactive capsule lost in remote Western Australia is a good reminder of why such concern prevails. Australians were told not to be concerned by the misplaced 8mm diameter capsule, but — in the same breath — were “urged” not to touch it. Chief health officer Andrew Robertson, who chairs the Radiological Council of Western Australia, warned that coming into contact with the tiny capsule “could cause radiation burns or severe illness.”

Once it was found, though, the public health risk associated with the capsule was reported as having been extremely remote. The contradictory messages, and the lapses of security with which they were associated, caused understandable apprehension.

But accidents like these don’t just fuel anxiety. They also fuel discussion of the need for a national remedy to the risks posed by the decentralised handling of potentially dangerous radioactive materials. At present, Australia’s nuclear waste is housed at over one hundred sites across the country — some of them in populous areas — including hospitals, universities, mines and the Lucas Heights reactor in Sydney. Proposals for national repositories to centralise these storages extend back at least to 1998.

The proposal most like the one successfully opposed last month came in 1998, when prime minister John Howard took up the Senate committee’s recommendation of two years earlier that the government begin seeking a site for a national, well-regulated waste repository. Opposition flowed thick and fast, laced with fears that placing the waste in the desert would merely put it “out of sight, out of mind.”

Ever conscious of the radioactive legacies of British nuclear testing at Maralinga and Emu Field, and also aware of the waste generated at the large-scale Olympic Dam mine, many South Australians resented the suggestion that theirs would become the nuclear waste state. But it wasn’t the state’s nuclear past that determined the repository’s fate; it was the government’s determination to stick to a “decide and defend” model of site location, as Griffith University’s Ian Lowe recently described it.

Cabinet papers released earlier this year detail the Howard government’s plans to defy opposition from South Australians. They reveal cabinet’s commitment to defending the government’s choice of site through “the compulsory acquisition of… native title rights and interests in the area” and the overriding of “any South Australian legislation which seeks to prohibit the establishment of the national repository.”

South Australia’s Rann government brought a Federal Court case against the Commonwealth in 2004, arguing that attempts to compulsorily acquire land in South Australia for nuclear waste storage were unlawful. As it did last month, the Federal Court ruled in favour of the applicants.

Howard subsequently announced the government’s decision to “abandon” the repository because of a “failure of the states and territories to cooperate with the Australian Government in finding a national solution for the safe and secure disposal of low level radioactive waste.” What might have been interpreted by Howard as a failure by the states to cooperate with his government would have been interpreted by affected communities as the federal government’s failure to cooperate with them. Precisely the same accusation was levelled by the Barngarla.

In light of this month’s ruling, and echoing Howard, Minister King last week reaffirmed her government’s commitment to safely storing and disposing of Australia’s nuclear waste. Looking ahead, though, AUKUS and Australia’s acquisition of nuclear submarines will profoundly affect this commitment. And only last week Nationals leader David Littleproud reaffirmed the Coalition’s view that Australia should go nuclear.

Larger-scale nuclear pursuits — including nuclear submarines — would undoubtedly complicate Australia’s nuclear waste disposal. To date, Australian governments, Coalition and Labor, have been unable to secure widespread public support for a national storage or disposal facility for low- to intermediate-level radioactive waste. Yet the AUKUS security pact makes Australia responsible for the storage of high-level waste produced by its submarine fleet.

Despite assurances that this won’t be a problem until at least the 2050s, the prospect is well worth considering in light of the Federal Court’s ruling. This judgement, like those that came before it, demonstrates that nuclear waste storage and disposal in Australia isn’t necessarily an issue of technical ability (though this remains up for debate); rather, it requires governments to both obtain community consent and allay public concerns.

As King made clear, a national waste facility “requires broad community support.” This doesn’t mean simply obtaining the support of ratepayers or property owners — it means the whole community. And while this is undoubtedly an immense task, if the recent and earlier judgements teach us anything, it is that an issue like this won’t be resolved until communities’ voices are heard and apprehensions adequately considered. •

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To Robin’s mind, the way we think about birdos was burnished in the years after the second world war, when a great wave of human immigration swept into this nation and projects like the Snowy Mountains scheme became gold star efforts in the national photo album.

Sir William Hudson, commissioner of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Authority, told European workers, “You will no longer be Balts and Slavs but Men of the Snowy.” He basically meant Australian, which might seem rich coming from a bloke born in New Zealand, but that is one of the interesting things about so many Australians — they come from somewhere else. And unlike migrating birds they enrich this place by staying and building their nests and calling it home. The migrating birds nick off back to where they’ve come from.

Robin’s point is that the new wave of immigrants got to know their new nest by trying to understand its environment, and birds were obvious examples of the similarities and differences between where they came from and where they found themselves.

As a counterpoint to the Snowy scheme, Robin recalls an Aboriginal Australian radio host laughing along with her about how “locals” (the host and friends) took great delight in laughing at the foibles of the “bird people” who come from all over the world to Alice Springs to add to their “life list” of birds. Watching the newbies make a mess of birdwatching was thoroughly entertaining.

This is important, because there is a distinct Britishness to the idea of birdwatching. Even though the eccentric, genteel birdwatcher is a bit of cliché, the British Empire was in a very real sense an epic imperial pickpocketing of other nations’ cultures, wealth, and flora and fauna. There is a feeling of rapaciousness in collating information and collecting specimens, and a sense that many bird people create little feathered fiefdoms.

The birdos’ world is a layered and complex one, starting with the fascinating difference between twitchers and birdwatchers. A twitcher will go to great lengths to view a bird, mark off the target on a list, and then move on to the next nugget of avian gold. A birdwatcher is content to watch birds, learn a little about them and, usually, gather in a group to pool experience. Both are completely fine occupations, but the difference turns out to be important as Robin describes the complexity of being a birdo.

Robin tells her story in a straightforward, fact-filled way, and gives us a glossary of acronyms for the countless number of birding and conservation groups that dot its pages. And the stories she tells of birdos — the petty jealousies, the political manoeuvrings, the epic but unsuccessful treks, the blind, even hapless, luck of some discoveries — cover the spectrum of human emotions.

It helps if you like birds, I suppose. I grew up in a house surrounded by trees. Moreton Bay figs, tall gums, enormous fruit-laden mango trees. They could be anything to a young imagination — castles to storm, mountains to climb, ships to sail, rockets to soar into space. And they contained a menagerie of wildlife: fruit bats, possums and, most wonderfully of all, birds.

We were surrounded by the sounds and sights of all sorts of birdlife. Lorikeets chattering in the fruit trees, the crows with their laconic calls a backdrop to the day, butcherbirds, singing magpies, robins, finches, kookaburras and doves. It was there my interest in birds was born.

Even sparrows held a certain fascination, going about their business looking humbly fetching with their tan, grey and brown colouring. Introduced from Britain in the mid nineteenth century, they were considered pests. I spent hours trying to trap the things in homemade contraptions made of fishing line, sticks and cardboard boxes, with bits of bread as temptations to attract the little fidgets.

I had no hope of catching any, but as long as I amused myself my mother was more than happy. I remember a neighbour of ours, Mr King, muttering under his breath “Bloody sparrows, another lousy gift from the Poms.”

Robin tells a lovely story about a sighting of one of Australia’s rarest birds, the night parrot. Shane Parker, the South Australian Museum’s then curator of birds, was on a tourist camel trip when others noticed he’d frozen at the back of the group. He sat pointing, mouth open, his face “whiter than his pith helmet.” Rex Ellis, who has run bush safari tours for over fifty years, raced back to Parker and asked him what the matter was.

Parker, usually an articulate man, was having difficulty making any sensible communication. He replied in a shaking voice, “I have just seen a night parrot.” At first, Ellis’s response was mixed — disbelief and a little envy — for, in his words, to find such a specimen “had always seemed an unattainable dream, but the sight of Shane’s face and his incoherency could leave no doubt in anyone’s mind that he had seen a night parrot.”

The story reminded me of my mother-in-law, a lovely woman who was a lifelong birder, and a friend of hers who was also a birder. The friend came marching up to me at a birthday celebration and said, without an introduction and in a slightly accusing tone, “Anna has just told me that you saw a Gouldian finch… in habitat!”

I admitted I had — on a trip to the Northern Territory, quite by chance — so, yes, it was true.

“What did it look like?” asked the friend. “Quickly please.”

I think she thought that a quick prompt would reveal I hadn’t seen any such thing. She was, after all, a lawyer of some note.

“Like it was wearing a jumper from the 1980s, lots of colours that shouldn’t have matched but sort of did” was the best I could come up with.

She looked at me, nodded and said slowly, “Wouldn’t find that description in a field guide, but quite accurate in its way. I hope you know how lucky you were.”

I assured her I did.

She wasn’t rude, just a birdo, somebody who was “mad for the feathers,” as my aunt would say of herself and others of the bird-fancying tribe.

Most of my encounters with birds aren’t recorded, but some years ago I had the good fortune to host a layperson’s TV journey through the world of birds and birdos. I came into very close personal contact with an eager male emu (type “William McInnes” and “emu” into a search engine and enjoy!), watched orange-bellied parrots at close range, went on a pelagic day trip that defies plausible description and, in short, entered the lives of people who had a passion for birds.

Birds defy gravity. They soar, sweep, sing and nestle in our imagination. But there’s more: as Robin writes, bird fancying, birding, twitching or being a birdo — call it what you will — is also a cover for understanding “land management, for understanding ecological connections, for relaxation and happiness,” even “for understanding global interdependency.”

Birdwatching also seems to me to tell us something about ourselves as human beings. It’s not too much of a stretch to think we share our marvelling at birds’ antics with people like Leonardo da Vinci, who wrote, “Once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward.”

And if being a birdo was good enough for old Leo then it’s good enough for the rest of us, and a good start would be to read this wonder-filled book. •

What Birdo Is That? A Field Guide to Bird-people
By Libby Robin | Melbourne University Press | $40 | 272 pages

The post Mad for the feathers appeared first on Inside Story.

Taking place in the airy World Conference Centre in the former West German capital, the official title of the conference is the fifty-eighth meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice, and the fifty-eighth meeting of the Subsidiary Body for Implementation, both of them subsets of the better-known UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. The delegates’ task is to take forward the agreements made at the twenty-seventh meeting of the Conference of the Parties, COP27, which took place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in November last year, and prepare the 28th meeting, scheduled for Dubai in the United Arab Emirates this coming December.

If all this sound complicated, that’s not the half of it. The conference agenda sets out the many different negotiating tracks that previous COPs have set in train. It is a bewildering array of numbers, concepts, processes and former host cities.

Along with the second Glasgow Dialogue on Loss and Damage, there’s a meeting on matters relating to the Santiago Network under the Warsaw International Mechanism, also covering loss and damage; the seventh meeting of the Paris Committee on Capacity Building; the eighth meeting of the Katowice Committee on Impacts; a workshop under the Glasgow–Sharm el-Sheikh Work Programme on the Global Goal on Adaptation; not to mention a meeting on the as-yet-unlocated “rules, modalities and procedures for the mechanism established by Article 6, paragraph 4, of the Paris Agreement and referred to in decision 3/CMA.3.”

It is easy to be cynical, of course. But the negotiating agenda is not simply a make-work scheme for government officials. It reflects the reality that tackling climate change is a complex and multifaceted task involving not just every country in the world but also many different kinds of policy.

Debate in developed countries focuses mainly on climate “mitigation” — how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by decarbonising energy, transport, industry and agriculture. But the primary issues are different for poorer countries experiencing devastating floods, droughts and hurricanes, and changes to food production and water availability from rising temperatures. They are more interested in how to adapt to the changing climate and whether they will be compensated for the loss and damage they suffer — with both issues requiring the rich world to make good on its promise of financial and technical assistance. A complicated negotiating agenda is a small price to pay if it leads to any of that support being delivered.

Yet the question remains whether it will be. Although the Bonn conference continues the official UN process, it is in many ways not even the most important climate negotiation at the moment. Just two weeks ago the richest countries, meeting at the G7 summit in Japan, declared that this year they would finally reach the US$100 billion in annual climate financing they first promised at COP15 in Copenhagen fourteen years ago. And in two weeks’ time French president Emmanuel Macron will host an even more significant summit in Paris.

Macron’s aim is to establish a new financial pact between the global North and South to guarantee finance for environmentally sustainable and climate-compatible development. In Bonn, government officials are discussing processes and modalities intended to govern finance and other forms of assistance to countries in the global South. But in Paris, heads of government will be agreeing on actual money for renewable energy, adaptation and disaster prevention, potentially in the hundreds of billions of dollars, via bilateral aid, World Bank lending and private sector finance. You could be forgiven for thinking that the official UN talks are a bit of a sideshow.

Not that controversy will be absent in Bonn. The fact that this year’s COP will be held in a Gulf oil state is the main focus for climate activists. With the UAE having helped water down COP27’s position on the phasing out of fossil fuels, the appointment of the chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company as president of COP28 looked to many like a deliberate provocation. Sultan Al Jaber is in fact an experienced climate negotiator who, as former head of UAE’s investment fund Masdar, developed the country’s extensive global portfolio in renewable energy. But it was inevitable that his appointment to chair the UN climate talks would attract criticism.

Pointing out that Al Jaber’s company is hugely expanding its oil and gas production, the campaigning group Oil Change International has described his appointment as “a truly breathtaking conflict of interest… tantamount to putting the head of a tobacco company in charge of negotiating an anti-smoking treaty.” More than 130 members of the US Congress and European Parliament have signed an open letter calling on him to be removed as COP28 president. His presence, they said, reflected the “undue influence” of fossil fuel companies over UN climate talks and “risks undermining the negotiations.” The fact that a UAE official was recently found to have edited Al Jaber’s Wikipedia page to remove such criticisms has only added fuel to the fire.

Al Jaber himself will brush off the controversy: as a close ally of the ruling family his position isn’t in jeopardy. But other countries will hope the furore embarrasses the UAE sufficiently to provoke some compensating action. The country has been making huge windfall profits from higher global energy prices in the past two years. What better way to demonstrate its commitment to the climate than by providing a few tens of billions of dollars in financing for the most vulnerable countries?

Elsewhere there is talk about reforming COPs themselves — not least in the United Nations, where the gulf between the linguistic complexity of the negotiating agenda and the practical requirements of dealing with climate change has not gone unnoticed. In quiet meetings behind the scenes this year the organisation has been canvassing views on how to bridge the gap.

It is not as if the rest of the world is absent from UN climate meetings. On the contrary: nearly 50,000 people are estimated to have attended COP27 last year, most of them representatives of businesses, investors, international organisations, NGOs and research institutes. These people come to the annual COPs to participate in a global climate conference and expo, with literally thousands of events and meetings alongside the formal negotiations.

Most of these attendees are focused on how to make progress in the real world: the new technologies being developed to cut emissions, the policies required to incentivise them, the financing available for investment, the research and data needed to monitor both the climate and climate actions, and the political campaigning to pressure corporations and politicians.

It’s in these spheres and among these kinds of players that climate action is really occurring, not in UN negotiations. The Paris Climate Agreement has been signed, and its detailed rulebook completed. Important issues are still to be resolved, not least on finance. But observers generally acknowledge that the focus of attention at COPs should really be on the real-world action, not the talks.

Up to a point, the UN already recognises this. Alongside the negotiations it convenes a wide range of partnerships between companies, countries, cities and researchers to develop and disseminate climate solutions. These cover technologies, business models and policies in a range of nine fields from energy to oceans, transport to land restoration. The question being posed for COP28 is whether this so-called Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action could move closer to centrestage.

Could a parallel conference be organised, alongside the negotiations, to present and discuss climate progress in the real world? Might this provide a forum where some of the major industries, companies and financial institutions that have made ambitious-sounding climate commitments over recent years — commitments critics often describe as little more than “greenwashing” — are called to account? As several observers have noted, this would be particularly appropriate for COP28, which will feature a “global stocktake” of action and inaction over the past eight years.

Typically, the question of whether COPs could be made more relevant to the real world won’t be on the negotiating agenda in Bonn over the next two weeks. But as ever in these thirty-year-old talks, it is as much what goes on in the corridors and during the time-outs that matters. There are six months still to go before the world reassembles in Dubai. It’s still possible that when it does so, it will find itself at a somewhat more useful gathering. •

The post Where’s the climate action? appeared first on Inside Story.

This small child doesn’t know that the street out the front of their house is, potentially, a very dangerous place. A very dangerous place: the street outside is something all parents take great care to teach their children to be wary of: never to linger on, never to cross without an adult. Remember: Look right, look left, look right again.

Luckily, pedestrian fatalities in Australia are slowly decreasing. In 1998 398 pedestrians died, but by 2018 the number had fallen to 177, though this past decade the figure has remained pretty steady. Worldwide, some 270,000 pedestrians are killed each year on roads, and this number also shows a downward trend over time.

So are our streets becoming less dangerous to walk on? Not necessarily. While safety improvements might have been made to your street in recent years, many transport studies also show declines in pedestrian mobility, especially among young children.

When quizzed on these trends, close to 70 per cent of parents in New South Wales said there’s too much traffic on the roads for their children to walk safely to school in the morning. Many parents of small children will bundle them into the car instead — much safer.

Dutch authors Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet are bothered by facts like these. In their new book Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives they call for a radical rethink of our streets and the role they play in our lives.

Verkade and te Brömmelstroet lead with a series of provocations: Why do we think about streets first and foremost as places to move from A to B? Why does the need for speed and efficiency triumph over other kinds of uses? And do we even know how to imagine alternatives?

Questions like these hadn’t occurred to Verkade, a Rotterdam-based journalist, until she met te Brömmelstroet, otherwise known as “the Cycling Professor,” at the University of Amsterdam. On assignment to write a series on bicycle superhighways, Verkade’s interview with te Brömmelstroet completely upended how she thought about streets, inspiring the three-year journey of discovery recounted in Movement.

Be warned, she writes, “Read this book and you might never look at the street outside your front door in the same way again.”

The cars that ate Paris — and Los Angeles, Sydney and Delhi too

It’s hard to overestimate how radically the automobile has transformed how we live together in communities. With its mass adoption across developed nations in the twentieth century came the wholesale reconstruction of city neighbourhoods.

The principle of circulation took hold: looking down on Manhattan in the 1930s from his privileged view in an aeroplane, Le Corbusier was struck by a vision of the city as a body in need of fluidity of movement. He called motor cars “machines of circulation” and likened roads to human arteries, promoting flow and reducing stagnation. Instead of crooked laneways and dense housing, motorways were built to clear congestion and connect far-flung suburbs.

Before the transformation: Cumberland Place, The Rocks, in 1901. Rocks Resumption photographic survey/Museums of History NSW

Life on city streets changed. Playing on the street became more dangerous as more and more people drove cars. Whole neighbourhoods were demolished to make way for new road networks. Kids learned to play elsewhere.

Some communities fought back. Most famously, a Canadian journalist who had moved her family to Manhattan in the early 1950s, resisting the pull of low-rise suburbia in favour of cheaper inner-city housing and street buskers, found herself leading a community campaign to stop the demolition of her local park, Washington Square. Describing her alarm at its proposed replacement with a sunken expressway, Jane Jacobs called on her mayor to champion “New York as a decent place to live, and not just rush through.”

Jacobs would go on to lead a successful ten-year battle to save the park and the surrounding Greenwich Village, inspiring community campaigns across the world. In Amsterdam, Verkade and te Brömmelstroet write, a mass campaign of tactical resistance from community and activist groups prevented the demolition of the city centre to make way for a new road network.

Similar campaigns occurred in Australia in the late 1960s and 1970s as well, with new alliances forged in places like inner Sydney between working-class unions, student groups, environmentalists and historical preservation societies, united in their fight against proposed new motorways.

Like Jacobs, people wanted places to live, not places to rush through. The communities saved by these activist campaigns are now highly valued tracts of real estate. People love to live in places like Greenwich Village, Verkade and te Brömmelstroet’s Amsterdam, and Fitzroy, Surry Hills and Potts Point because they are walkable, loveable, liveable.

But as iconic as these campaigns to “save our streets” were, the reality is that the majority of Australian, North American and European cities were completely redesigned around the needs of the motor car. After the campaign to save Washington Square, the number of cars on roads doubled every ten years until the end of the 1970s. Ownership then accelerated even faster, until the world hit one billion registered vehicles in 2011 — one vehicle per every seven people in the world.

Those who studied the impact of motorways came to realise that the more roads you built, the more people expected to be able to drive — generating what’s called “induced demand.” If you keep on building more and more roads, people will drive more. In Australia we now have over twenty million cars for just over twenty-six million people, among the highest rate of car ownership in the world.

The next billion cars on this planet won’t take too long: it’s predicted there will be two billion cars on the roads by 2030, driven by rapid rates of motorisation sweeping across the developing world. Like first world cities, cities of the developing world are rapidly expanding their road networks to make way for floods of new cars, ushering in a tsunami of new infrastructure projects. Some twenty-five million new kilometres of roadway is expected to be laid by mid-century, a 60 per cent expansion from 2010.

At this rate, we’re careering headlong into a future of planetary-scale bitumen and concrete.

Can we imagine anything different?

If you want to see how cities could work without relying on a car to get around, visit the Netherlands, home to the writers of Movement, where a quarter of all trips are by bike. You can find more than 37,000 kilometres of cycle paths here, many of them segregated, as well as a network of bicycle “super highways” connecting towns and cities built in recent years.

This is the place where urban designers come to study how streets could work differently — not primarily for motor cars but for cyclists. Here you can find streets where cycle lanes run up the centre and cars are relegated to side lanes, where intersections like the “chips cone” assist cyclists riding together in large volumes. Sensors on traffic lights prioritise cyclists’ movement in wet weather.

But even the Dutch don’t quite have it right. Despite the investment in infrastructure, they still experience high casualty rates on roads. In 2021 a third of all road fatalities involved cyclists. This reflects the high rates of cycling in general, of course, but also shows that helping cyclists move more efficiently and across greater distances doesn’t always mean safe streets. In fact, as mobility diversifies to take in new kinds of vehicles like e-scooters and e-bikes, cycle paths themselves are also becoming more dangerous.

The authors of Movement see a big problem in valuing streets primarily for personal mobility. It turns out that even with mass investments in road networks, the average time spent travelling remains roughly the same. Why? Because greater distances also become the norm.

By prioritising investments that help us rush through, we also neglect to invest in other parts of our communities. And we neglect to account for the true costs incurred. Do we really recognise what it costs us as a society when children can’t move safely around our communities?

As much as this is a story about mobility in cities, at the heart of Movement is a call to pay attention to how decisions are being made about the street and community you live in. The message here is that how we live together in communities, and how we come to prioritise some activities over others shouldn’t be handed over to technocrats, planners, developers and politicians. We all have an interest in caring about the shared spaces in which we live.

Marco the Cycling Professor spends a lot of time campaigning for small changes to where he lives, in Ede. Why is it that a local school has prioritised a car drop-off zone but not created space for something else? How did this get to the top of the local council’s list of investments, encouraging parents to drive rather than helping them with other actions? Was it a popular vote, or did an active minority campaign for the car option when everyone else went about their lives thinking about other things? (Yes.)

Marco letter-drops the community, invites everyone to respond to the proposal, urges people to show up to the meetings. He manages to get the drop-off zone defeated.

Everyday actions can make a difference, sometimes. In Paris, mayor Anne Hidalgo has used her powers to reduce car use in the city core and plans to ban all non-residential city traffic there by 2024. Car-free zones have been created outside schools, diesel cars banned, speed limits dropped to thirty kilometres per hour, and substantial investments made in new cycle paths.

Car ownership is down to three in ten Parisians. The city is being completely reimagined as a “fifteen-minute city” prioritising access to local services over freedom of movement. Why should everyone have the right to cross the city by car whenever they want? Many other European cities are following suit.

What about Australia?

Keep spending to keep moving

Roads receive a lot of investment in Australia — collectively, it looks like we care about them a lot. In New South Wales alone, the latest budget included an $11 billion allocation for new road projects — on top of the estimated $21 billion spent on the West Connex motorway since 2015. That doesn’t include the costs of maintaining local roads, paid through council rates. In 2018–19, the national figure was as much as $8.3 billion, or an estimated half of all rates collected by local governments that year.

Massive spending like this is justified because of the way our time has come to be valued. In the field of transport economics, the value of time is expressed as a function of movement: if you are in any way held up when you are travelling to and from work in your car, then the time you are delayed is given a dollar value, multiplied by the volume of people estimated to be travelling each day for work.

On this basis, Infrastructure Australia’s Infrastructure Audit estimated the total cost of road congestion in Australia’s six largest cities to be $19 billion in 2016, expected to blow out to $39 billion by 2031. With those figures in mind, it doesn’t take long before multibillion-dollar investments to build new road infrastructure start to look kind of reasonable.

But what if we applied the “value of time” metric in other ways?

What do children sacrifice to let cars rule our streets? They lose the time they might have spent playing on the street, walking safely to a park, walking safely to school. Do we know how to value this time lost? Do we know how to cost how time spent isolated compares with time spent playing with others?

With less mobility come greater levels of obesity. A recent study by the Monash Business School Centre for Health Economics estimated the annual cost of childhood obesity in Australia at $43 million. While obesity in children is increasing for a host of reasons, one determinant is exercise. There is a cost there, being borne by children. We need to get better at valuing it.

What of other costs of car-dominated communities? There is the value of time lost when someone is killed — otherwise known as the “value of a statistical life” — which is currently $195,000 per year in Australia, or $4.5 million per death on average. In 2020, when 1106 people lost their lives due to road accidents (just over one in six were collisions between cars and cyclists or pedestrians), we can count the cost at $4.98 billion.

If you care to multiply the total number of road deaths reported in Australia between 2012 and 2021 (11,894) by the figure of $4.5 million per life lost, you’ll arrive at a figure of $53.5 billion. That’s not including the costs of serious injuries. The World Health Organization says the current global road death toll of 1.4 million per year will rise to 1.8 million by 2030. That means road traffic, judged by accidents alone, is deadlier than malaria.

There are other costs. In OECD countries, the health impacts of air pollution were estimated at US$1.7 trillion in 2010, with about half of this attributable to road transport. The evidence increasingly shows that diesel fumes increase the risk of dementia, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s disease. As research continues to show causal relationships between air pollution and human health, a bigger picture of what we are losing in cities is emerging.

Animals also suffer: some ten million are estimated to be hit on Australian roads each year. The carnage is driving some species close to extinction: recently, motor vehicle deaths were found to be the leading cause of death for the endangered Queensland cassowary, whose numbers have been reduced to a few thousand in recent years.

This is without touching on the environmental costs attached to the burning of fossil fuels, the manufacture of cars and the laying down of concrete. What is the value-of-time equation associated with how the burning of fossil fuels for transport will affect future lives?

Australians in particular are clearly being let down by allowing such a limited range of metrics to be used in such powerful ways. These metrics also miss another vital feature of public spaces — their contribution to the flourishing of individuals, communities, cities and societies. Everyday streets and public spaces are not just engineering problems to be solved, or costs to be avoided; they are also places in which social and individual benefits are realised. Can we place a dollar value on this kind of flourishing?

Ultimately, how we value our streets says a lot about how we value our time. As Annie Dillard famously wrote, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing.” No one wants to spend their life stuck in traffic, but the law of induced demand says we’re not getting that time back by spending more and more on roads. The authors of Movement have it right: it’s time to think differently about that street outside your front door. Hey, you might even like to stop and linger awhile. Why the rush? •

Movement: How to Take Back Our Streets and Transform Our Lives
By Thalia Verkade and Marco te Brömmelstroet | Translated by Fiona Graham | Scribe | $29.99 | 288 pages

The post Why the rush? appeared first on Inside Story.

After ten days of talks between officials end in deadlock, pairs of ministers (one from a developed country, the other from a developing one) are charged with seeking out compromises on the major issues. After two more days, still largely deadlocked, the ministers hand over to the host country’s COP president — this year, Egypt’s foreign minister Sameh Shoukry — to try to produce a compromise text. The president initially develops what are essentially shopping lists of options that define the differences between different countries’ positions but do little to resolve them.

By now it is Friday morning, and the conference is due to end at 6pm. The negotiations fall silent as the president takes further “soundings.” The exhibition halls and food stations are dismantled; anyone who isn’t a country delegate, UN staffer, journalist or NGO analyst leaves for home, their COP done. Six o’clock comes and goes. A new text is shown to the heads of delegation at 3am on Saturday morning, but there are no printed versions and phones are confiscated so they can’t take photos. The president again retreats to his cell, inviting individual ministers in for more hours of bilateral contemplation.

Finally, at 1pm on Saturday, a new compromise text is published. The major negotiating groups go into separate meetings to discuss how much they dislike it. The compromise is “unbalanced,” each of them says, leaning too far towards the other side. The groups take a long time to work through the various documents, not least because many countries are members of more than one group. (China, for example, is part of the “G77 and China,” which includes all the countries deemed “developing” when the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992, but also part of a much more tightly knit and hardline “Like-Minded Group” with India, Saudi Arabia and Malaysia.)

Teams of NGO analysts pore over the documents, examining what has shifted and what has not, and issue briefings to grateful journalists on-site and geeky campaigners back home. As the concluding plenary is postponed multiple times amid further consultations, and the meeting climbs up the league table of “longest-ever COPs,” bets are taken on when it will end.

By Saturday evening most COPs have at last finished, with a compromise agreement no one likes but everyone is too exhausted to oppose. The process is masochistic because it’s the delegates themselves prolonging their own irritable sleeplessness. It’s sado- because the only other people left are sad individuals who still care. Your correspondent included.

COP27 seemed determined to inflict even more pain than normal. By Saturday midnight, leaks revealed that Saudi Arabia had introduced new text not just watering down but reversing the opposition to fossil fuels. Britain’s head of delegation, Alok Sharma (president of last year’s COP26 in Glasgow), was spitting, while the venerable US deputy head Sue Biniaz — John Kerry by this time confined to his hotel with Covid — was seen talking at length on two phones. Presumably one was to Kerry; was the other the White House?

It’s now 2am and journalists and NGO staffers are sprawled out on chairs asleep. The Egyptian presidency announces there will be a plenary between 3am and 6am. It actually starts at 4am. When it does, it seems that final texts have at last been agreed. Shoukry takes no chances. Post-last-minute amendments have been made at this stage in the past (in fact, last year). He names the key document. “Seeing no objections,” he says, not looking up to the hall in case he sees any, “it is so decided,” and bangs his gavel down. Further pauses ensue, more documents are approved, but at around 6am on Sunday morning the texts have been concluded.

Not that it’s actually finished at this point. A further three hours of speeches come from the floor, as countries and negotiating groups explain their grudging welcome for some aspects of the text and their deep disappointment at others. It’s not till past 9am, fourteen days after the conference opened and nearly forty hours after it was due to close, that we can say that another COP is over.

Was it worth it? In the end, just two significant decisions caused all the conflict. The first was “loss and damage,” UNFCC-speak for the economic and human costs faced by developing countries as a result of the greenhouse gas emissions of developed ones over the past two centuries.

Loss and damage was recognised as a concept in the Paris climate agreement, but with a huge caveat: the developed countries secured an explicit exemption from legal liability for the multibillion-dollar impact of a warming world.

For the same reason the developed countries have held out against any kind of financing mechanism for loss and damage, which would require both more aid money and the tacit acceptance of moral responsibility. For the last six years, as developing countries’ demands for a loss and damage “finance facility” surged ever more strongly, the developed countries held them off with a variety of designed-to-be-useless discussion forums.

But this year the dam broke. After John Kerry had spent the first ten days insisting that the United States could not and would not support a financing facility or a fund, with the European Union equally adamant, each produced a new draft on the final Friday accepting just that. It was surprisingly poor diplomacy on their part: if they actually were prepared to concede this (and most observers thought they would have to), they would have gained much more credit by doing so early in the conference.

Crucially, this would also have given them a much better chance of winning their primary condition of support, namely that China could no longer hide behind its historical “developing country” status and would have to contribute to the funding pool as well. By leaving it so late to concede the creation of a loss and damage fund, the United States and the European Union wasted the opportunity to put public pressure on China, and the final wording included merely a vague reference to “other sources” of financing beyond the developed nations.

Nor was any actual money promised for the fund. Before that happens, further consultation on what precisely the fund can be used for, which countries will be eligible, and how it will be governed will proceed for at least a year. Nevertheless, this was a historic moment for climate-vulnerable countries, whose delegates were exhausted but jubilant at the end.

Ultimately, though, the more contentious final issue was fossil fuels. Last year, for the first time, the COP addressed not just greenhouse gas emissions in the abstract, but also their direct causes in the combustion of fossil fuels. A scientifically self-evident but nevertheless unprecedented bit of text was agreed noting that holding warming to the 1.5°C temperature limit would require the “phasing down” of coal use. (China and India baulked at the last at the aim of “phasing out.”)

In Sharm el-Sheikh the vulnerable countries’ and NGOs’ goal was an agreement that such phasing down should apply to all fossil fuels (that is, also oil and gas) and not just coal. Their cause was surprisingly taken up by India, keen to deflect attention from its still-abundant coal use.

But Saudi Arabia and next year’s COP hosts, the United Arab Emirates, were not having that. No doubt with a little gentle pressure on their import-dependent neighbour Egypt, they instead redefined “clean energy” to include “low-emission” fuels as well as renewables. By “low emission” they mean gas, a much lower-emitting fuel than oil, but not in the slightest a near-zero one in the manner of hydro, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal or nuclear. To the anger of many, the Gulf states’ language made it into the final agreed text.

The significance of these textual niceties is often overplayed. Nothing in general COP decision text is legally binding, and no petro-state will change its behaviour as a result of it. Last year’s bitter endgame argument over whether coal should be “phased out” or merely “phased down” was a case in point: without a date for phasing out, the two phrases in practice mean the same.

Yet the Sharm el-Sheikh language approving “low-emission fuels” as part of emissions reduction plans is a serious blow to the climate action cause. It will be used to justify the expansion of gas production and consumption everywhere this is government policy, giving the apparent seal of approval of the UN climate regime. The climate-vulnerable countries and NGOs were aghast; it was this issue that took the talks into the small hours on Sunday morning.

It won’t only be the Gulf states, however, who are pleased. One of the most insistent arguments running through COP27 pitched a range of African countries against the European Union and NGOs over the financing of gas. Africa has a lot of unexploited gas resources, and the countries under whose territory they lie are understandably keen to exploit them. Yet it is also true that keeping within the 1.5°C goal will require, as the International Energy Agency has pointed out, the cessation of all new oil and gas (as well as coal) production anywhere in the world.

The European Union and NGOs insist that Africa could supply all its energy needs through solar, wind, geothermal and other renewable resources. But that’s not the issue. The value of gas is in the foreign exchange it earns — a major source of the hard currency dollars to which few African countries have much access. They are simply not going to pass the opportunity up — and particularly not at the behest of a hypocritical Europe that built its own wealth on fossil fuels and is currently scouring the world for new gas contracts to make up for lost Russian supply.

In fact, the issue of African gas heralds the emergence of a new era in climate policymaking. It’s a focus on the so-called “just transition”: the principle that decarbonisation strategies must be aimed not just at cutting emissions but also at providing alternative sources of jobs and livelihoods in the process.

As countries get serious about tackling climate change, moving from generalised target-setting to specific economic policymaking, this imperative is coming to the fore. African countries desperate to reduce poverty and develop into middle-income economies won’t allow decarbonisation to stop them. And nations already dependent on homegrown fossil fuels will only be willing to reduce their dependence if they can see a viable alternative source, not just of domestic energy, but also of employment and foreign exchange earnings.

The argument over fossil fuels in the final text was symbolic, but in this context it was not nearly the most important development at COP27. That came in two separate announcements that were not part of the formal conference but merely part of its fringe; and indeed one of which was not made in Egypt at all.

During the first week of COP27 the government of South Africa announced a new US$8.5 billion “Just Energy Transition Partnership,” or JET-P, with the United States, the European Union, France, Germany and Britain. It aims to transform South Africa’s energy and industrial landscape by reducing its dependence on coal, increasing its renewable supply, upgrading its electricity grid, and developing its car manufacturing sector to become a domestic and global supplier of electric vehicles.

For a country that employs 92,000 coalminers, and whose giant, sclerotic state-owned energy company, Eskom, is unable to prevent regular blackouts across the country, this is a hugely ambitious program. The loans and loan guarantees from the donor countries will barely begin to cover the scale of the investment needed, but it is hoped they will leverage in orders of magnitude more from the private sector.

Even more importantly, the political challenges will be enormous. In a country already experiencing social unrest as a result of the rising cost of living and persistently high levels of unemployment, laying off coalminers could be a recipe for trouble. The coalmining union is one of the bastions of political support for the country’s ruling African National Congress. During the year-long consultation process the government undertook to prepare the partnership plan, it was clear that many sections of the public remain to be convinced that reducing coal consumption is in the country’s interest, or will make their own lives better.

The same challenge also faces the government of Indonesia, which, a week after South Africa, announced its own Just Energy Transition Partnership with the United States, Japan and others. This time the package of loans and guarantees was worth US$20 billion. The announcement was made not in Sharm el-Sheikh but in Bali, where Indonesia was hosting the annual G20 summit. But it had the same COP27 resonance: another huge coal-producing nation choosing ultimately to leave the coal in the ground and pledge its long-term future to renewable and geothermal energy. The partnership plan envisages Indonesia embarking on an industrial strategy designed to exploit the country’s world-leading nickel and tin mining to create battery factories and other high-technology plant.

If the world is to succeed in cutting greenhouse emissions at the same time as enabling developing countries to grow and to modernise, these JET-Ps, or something like them, are surely the form it will take. Vietnam is currently in talks with the Western powers to do the next deal, and India is making interested noises as well. It has not escaped anyone’s notice that such partnerships are potentially a means by which the West can offer developing countries financial assistance — and political influence — to rival those of China’s huge Belt and Road Initiative.

More widely, the principle of the “just transition” is likely to be the basis for much climate policy over the coming years. It already informs Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, whose trillion-dollar subsidies for green energy and industrial production are conditional on components being sourced from US manufacturers (or those within the North American Free Trade Association, namely Canada and Mexico), a fact which has led the European Union to threaten to take the United States to the World Trade Organization for breaching trade rules.

This is essentially a form of green protectionism — but it is also surely the inevitable political consequence of serious decarbonisation. Moves away from fossil fuels and energy-intensive industry will only be supported by the workers and communities affected if alternative jobs and livelihoods are on offer. Imposing domestic supply chains may not be economically efficient according to neoclassical free-trade theory, but in the eyes of any politician it makes perfect political sense.

Although these issues were animatedly discussed in COP27 fringe meetings — there was an entire pavilion devoted to Just Transition policy, sponsored by the International Labour Organization — very few measures or proposals entered the decision text. But they almost certainly will in due course.

COP27 has demonstrated the notable shift that has occurred since the 2015 Paris agreement. Before then, COPs came first, setting out principles and mandating national action, which countries subsequently followed. Today the order has been reversed. Countries are designing and implementing policies for mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage. If a few years later they get mentioned in COP texts as important examples to follow, that is just a bonus.

This is indeed how it should be. The Paris climate agreement sets out the principles and legally binding rules of climate action, with more detailed regulation negotiated at subsequent COPs. But now the international rules are in place, the focus of debate must inevitably shift to the national political arena, where policy is made and politics rule. Given how tortuous they have become, that COPs have less and less for their negotiators to do is a boon to them as well as to the watching world. •

The post Agreement by ordeal appeared first on Inside Story.

How do plants, animals, insects, birds, nesting bees, raspy crickets, humans, mulgaras, yellow billy buttons, bats, bush flies, river red gums, euros, desert oaks, salt lake wolf spiders, thorny devils, copperburrs, mulga, sap suckers, zebra finches, waddywoods, banded stilts, spinifex, marsupial moles, antlions, Mitchell grass, lerps, harvester termites, burrowing frogs and fat-tailed dunnarts — how does this gorgeous, ebullient array of life come to be, how does it find ways to flourish, and how do its constituents relate to one another, now and over time, across millions of years?

How do we learn to see the richness and diversity of this life? How do we read Country for its presences and absences? How do we fine-tune our capacity as humans to appreciate and understand the miracles that unfold at our feet and under the skies every day and night? These are beautiful, inspiring, exhilarating questions and they underpin this book, which is a glowing compendium of intelligent wonder.

Steve Morton is our guide in this quest, an admired CSIRO scientist, a renowned ecologist and a gifted writer, and he is introducing us to his home, the beautiful and diverse arid lands of Australia. Australian Deserts: Ecology and Landscapes is about two-thirds of the continent, an astonishing and vast region, and everything that lives in it.

And we glimpse our guide too from time to time: a human in his chosen and beloved setting, relishing a desert dawn, attending a pit-trap, sharing a cup of campfire tea with colleagues, or driving at dusk on the saltbush plains, his forearm resting on the open window when a raspy cricket, large, slim and stylish in tawny colours, lands on his arm. Steve and the handsome insect exchange a glance before the cricket sinks its jaws painfully into his skin. As he fights the pain and fights to keep the car on the road, Steve can’t help admiring the poise, attitude and éclat of that rascally raspy.

Admiration is a strong emotion in this book. This is science with a heart. The natural world elicits Morton’s appreciation and awe. And he accommodates mystery. He is often happily astonished: when describing masses of grasshoppers shooting up into the jet stream and flying halfway across the continent, he exclaims, “who would have believed such a thing?” It’s “a life history,” he says, “that seems like science fiction.”

There is tenderness, too, in the author’s relationship with other forms of life, a warm regard for his fellow creatures and the miracles of survival they daily perform. He describes desert ecologies with rapt affection and pries into the personal lives of plants and animals with delicacy and respect. He is careful not to be sentimental or anthropomorphic, but he does use his imagination and literary skills to project the reader into the experience of other living things: we are offered X-ray vision so that we can see inside river red gums, underground radar so that we realise how much life is busy beneath us, and time-lapse imagery so that we can appreciate the workings of evolution. We are even enabled to sit between the wings of a grey teal in flight.

Weeping mulla mulla growing among feathertop spinifex and shrubs regenerating after fire in the Tanami Desert. Mike Gillam

There is a kind of autobiography of a desert ecologist that can be gleaned from the pages of this book. We see the author in his late teens out with his dad admiring merino sheep and talking to a farmer on the Hay Plain. The youth is distracted from pastoral talk by male brown songlarks in a frenzy of breeding display; he becomes captivated by their soaring and plummeting, by their singing at full throttle to the female birds.

Young Steve hears their call, too, and soon he is lured away from his destiny as a farmer. And later at university we see him having a Eureka! moment in his first-year biology practical class when he peers into a microscope at the profuse life to be found in the abdomen of a termite. He shouts with glee at the sight of such a vigorous diversity of organisms. In that moment, he decides to become a biologist, and he has felt grateful to termites ever since.

Although Steve Morton is a particularly fine individual of the human species, this book is not about him. His modest appearances on the surface of the text are as fleeting as those of the burrowing frog after rain. But the warmth of his curiosity and the joy of his wonder suffuse the book.

He is not the only human who appears in this text. There is a strong sense of an intellectual community, of the collegiality of ecologists and bush scholars; there is an international fellowship of the field and the laboratory, of the lecture hall and the tea room. Every insight depends on others; knowledge is collective and organic. It advances by being shared and tested; it relies upon teamwork, upon long-term observation in the field, upon a robust scientific culture. This book glows with pride at the collective achievement of ecologists in Australia over decades.

And it glows too with respect for the knowledge and teaching of Aboriginal peoples. It is wonderful to read an ecology of Australia that is so plainly and profoundly indebted to the ecological wisdom of First Nations peoples. Here is the kind of respectful confluence of traditions of knowledge that so many people have been striving for, especially in Alice Springs.

It’s not just about supplementing Western science with Aboriginal insights; rather, it’s about recognising — as this book does — the primacy of Aboriginal understanding and management of Country and making that deep knowledge the foundation for all ecological inquiry. The result is immensely heartening and quite beautiful, a respectful integration of Aboriginal and settler philosophies, united in their awe of the land, nature and the elements.

There are three further ways in which this book might be honoured in the traditions of science and literature. First, it enacts an ecological vision. As I read this book, I truly begin to understand what it is like to think and see like an ecologist. So Australian Deserts is not just about a vast, enchanting region, it is also about a particular way of seeing the world in all its vibrant connectedness. Science leads to philosophy which leads to poetry, and insights flow the other way too, from art to ecology. From now on, if people ask me what an ecological vision means, I will give them this book.

Second, Australian Deserts is a remarkable contribution to two centuries of Australian desert literature. Here I can only briefly invoke an impressive lineage of which Morton is very conscious: writings by Ernest Giles, Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, Cecil Madigan, Ernestine Hill, Hedley Finlayson, Alice Duncan-Kemp, Francis Ratcliffe, Ted Strehlow, Alan Newsome, Isabel McBryde, Dick Kimber, Peter Latz, Kieran Finnane, Tim Rowse, Mike Smith, Barry Hill, Eleanor Hogan, Mark McKenna, Margaret Kemarre Turner, Rod Moss and Kim Mahood, to name just a few. This constant pulse of scholarly and literary reflection coming from the heart of Australia has changed national understandings and identity, and Morton’s book embraces that conversation and adds to its richness.

Much of the early desert literature was about searching and disappointment, about expectation and failed dreams, but Morton writes as someone who is joyously, ecstatically at home, intellectually and emotionally fulfilled by the ecology and landscapes of arid Australia. And Aboriginal peoples appear not as strange or other but as respected teachers, their ancient and continuing cultures the embodiment of what it means to read and love Country.

Third, Australian Deserts, although primarily a scientific work, is also a book-length piece of nature writing. Morton is an exquisite writer. Part of the pleasure of reading this book is the sheer elegance and precision of every sentence. There is a formal grace to his prose, a quiet majesty to the intricate portrait he weaves. Literary exactitude is, in his hands, a scientific instrument, an essential tool in his quest to create holistic understanding.

Morton is educating us in a more precise language about deserts, and tutoring us in a different sense of time, not just of deep time but of slow time. For desert life is patient and so must we be. The author reminds us that at times of climatic stress, “the country is waiting rather than dying.” Without us being told explicitly, we come to understand that an ecologically intact landscape tends to be beautiful.

Thus, I would place Australian Deserts in another lineage, an international bookshelf of nature writing where science and literature coalesce felicitously. On that shelf can be found Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Richard Nelson’s The Island Within, J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain, George Seddon’s Landprints, and Barbara York Main’s study of the Western Australian wheatbelt, Between Wodjil and Tor.

Australian Deserts is destined to become a classic for this combination of scientific vision and literary poise, and because there is a further dimension of magic in it. Mike Gillam’s photographs of desert life and landscapes are, quite simply, extraordinary. They are no mere illustrations of the text, although they do perform that role superbly. They offer a parallel vision that complements the micro and macro scales of the prose. The book is subtitled Ecology and Landscapes, for “ecology” invokes science and “landscapes” invokes art. But “ecology” also suggests intricacy and “landscapes” implies vastness. Mike Gillam’s photography works on both levels; indeed, it is one of his conjuring tricks to make an aerial landscape photo look like a view through a magnifying glass and a close-up ground portrait look like a view from the air. There is a powerful ecological message in that, about systems and patterns across all scales of a landscape.

Gillam’s pictures are painterly photographs, high-art in the poetics of colour and light, yet they are also scientifically precise and stunningly intimate. They bring you eye to eye with insects and animals; Mike must have learned the patience of the deserts to capture such portraits. Such are the fruits of obsession. Mike Gillam on Australian deserts deserves the recognition accorded to Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis on Tasmania’s Southwest.

This is a book that will bring learning, joy and inspiration to generations of humans, and greater compassion for our fellow creatures. It may also help us to live here with deeper respect and understanding, and with a keener awareness of beauty, wonder and complexity in this magnificent land. •

Australian Deserts: Ecology and Landscapes
By Steve Morton, with photographs by Mike Gillam | CSIRO Publishing | $59.99 | 304 pages

The post Ecology of extremes appeared first on Inside Story.

Julian’s personal library is a little lifeless now, ignored by most, treasured by a few. In a thousand ways, this Intimate History of Evolution is an effort to interpret that library’s meaning, an intellectual ecosystem of the modern natural and human sciences.

Julian’s “personal library” was bestowed on him by his grandfather, a titan of nineteenth-century zoology and comparative anatomy, and a competitive, combative self-made scientist who revelled in his title “Darwin’s bulldog.” Julian (1887–1975) overlapped Thomas Henry (1825–1895) by eight years. His inheritance, of which the library is a symbol, was rich, strange, complex and multivalent — “an intellectual ecosystem” indeed.

Alison Bashford is a distinguished Australian historian whose global perspective and research experience — in science, naval, medical, environmental and population history — equip her well to explore and elucidate that “ecosystem.” Her Intimate History is scrupulously researched and broad in scope, taking in three generations of the talented Huxley dynasty.

A formidable undertaking, yes, but also lucid, lively and addictive — a book for that creature beloved of publishers, the avid general reader. Its weighty scholarly apparatus does not interfere with the narrative flow; the generous visual component of the book is not merely illustrative but rather an integrated and striking adjunct to which Bashford often has recourse. She enjoys picturing and analysing her “primate” subjects through their milieux. (In one shot, for example, those “fraternal primates,” Julian and Aldous Huxley, are fondling “a young relative” — a chimpanzee? — in the San Diego Zoo.) Some of the book’s photographs are unforgettable, most notably the contrasting images of Julian’s “adored” Guy, the lowland gorilla, “caught” hauntingly by Wolfgang Suschitzky in the London Zoo in 1958, and confrontingly as a “latex-stretched” specimen in his glass case in London’s Natural History Museum.

Hovering over all of An Intimate History is the towering figure of Charles Darwin. The Huxley name has not, like Darwin’s, gone into the language as an adjectival football to be kicked around for all manner of purposes even 140 years after his death. (If much of America’s media culture had not descended into fatuity, one might expect to hear it traduced, still, on Fox News.)

But Bashford is interested not in a hierarchy of “great men” but in context, fortuitous combinations, and pivotal moments in history:

The explosive idea of evolution by natural selection was as suited to Huxley’s character as it was a paralysing ill match for Charles Darwin. Together, and with a close circle of like-minded friends, they drove a new scientific naturalism in the middle of the nineteenth century, contesting any explanation of nature, old or new, that relied on a beyond-natural or supernatural force or origin.

The double act — Charles Darwin + T.H. Huxley — brings to mind another forceful duo, Martin Luther and Lucas Cranach. Luther was not, like Darwin, shy of confrontation, but he needed the skilled woodcutting hand of Cranach to illustrate and make accessible the complexity of his Reformation proclamations and turn his German translation of the Bible into the age’s equivalent of a bestseller.

Thomas Henry was, of course, so much more than a carnival barker to Darwin, as Bashford makes clear. If he had to found an intellectual lineage through his own labours rather than inherit one, he did so rapidly and successfully, in fertile partnership (eight children) with Henrietta Heathorn, whom he met and fell in love with in Sydney during a stop on his only field exploration voyage, on the Royal Navy’s wonderfully named HMS Rattlesnake. Darwin on HMS Beagle, Huxley on HMS Rattlesnake: Bashford must have smiled to see some of her work mapped out for her!

Huxley was commissioned as a surgeon, not a naturalist, for his Rattlesnake voyage, but he nonetheless used his Pacific time (the voyage took years) to dissect, study and record some of its creatures, notably the jellyfish. Bashford has fun with lovesick Huxley and his jellyfish:

Thomas Henry was subject to “a painful and unbalanced mental state,” “lethargy,” “self-questioning,” and “depression”… When he felt discontented, he said he reached for Carlyle, and tried to discipline himself by scheduling thoughts-of-Henrietta into his daily routine. One hour before bedtime should do it, allowing the rest of his waking hours to focus on his jellyfish.

But lovesickness had its dark shadow side. Thomas Henry suffered from serious and debilitating depression throughout his life (which makes his prodigious output all the more remarkable). And so did his “Inheritor” (Leonard Huxley’s term for his son, Julian Sorell Huxley). Thomas bequeathed more than his library to his grandson. With it came the burden of expectation, generational pressure, ambition, and the kind of intelligence that could simultaneously suffer and analyse some of the causes of his mental agony — self-inflicted or externally imposed.

Julian was every bit as complex and volatile a human being as his forceful grandfather. And he was, again like his grandfather, skilled at communicating science to a wide public. (They were “unquestionably the founding masters,” Bashford claims.) In Julian’s case, this is perhaps unsurprising — he came out of a family of professional wordsmiths. Thomas Henry and Henrietta’s second son, Leonard, married Julia Arnold, granddaughter of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, niece of the poet Matthew, and sister of novelist Mary Augusta Ward. Julia founded Prior’s Field, a progressive school for girls, and was a formidable woman and educator for all of her short life (she died at forty-six). Her photograph is the other riveting “see-right-through-you” portrait in the book.

Julia and Leonard’s third son, Julian’s brother, was Aldous Huxley. The Huxley family all wrote poetry. They lectured, taught, and wrote novels, essays and memoirs. (Bashford includes a helpful five-generational family tree — one of a number of illustrative “trees” in a book where the crossovers of evolution, descent, genetic inheritance, ecospheres, ethnology, zoology, anthropology et cetera often call for a reader as “disciplined” as T.H. Huxley himself.)

And the communication line continued: Julian was successfully hectored into writing for a general public by H.G. Wells; he made films, winning an Oscar for his Private Life of Gannets in 1934. David Attenborough’s first television production was presented and narrated by Julian Huxley. He was prominent in wildlife conservation, a correspondent and friend of Jane Goodall. In 1975, the year he died, the first edition of Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation: A New Ethics for Our Treatment of Animals was published. Bashford: “Between them, Thomas Henry and Julian Huxley embodied and enacted the modern shift in animal research and animal ethics from imperial natural history, in which animals were collected, and then pinned, stuffed or pressed, to the modern phenomenon of the ‘zoo’… and onwards to early environmentalism, the ‘conservation’ of wild species and their habitats.”

The organising principle of Bashford’s Intimate History is its focus on the lives and works of the two Huxley individuals, Thomas Henry and Julian. But the time span — almost 200 years between T.H.’s birth and Bashford’s reflections on the twenty-first-century relevance of Julian’s cautions about “an imperilled global ecology” — provides her reader with a panoramic view of an era of extraordinary and accelerated change.

The book asks: “How are we humans animal and how are we not? What is the nature of time and how old is the Earth itself? What might the planet look like — with or without humans — 10,000 years hence?” That the Huxleys had the nerve, the effrontery, to offer answers to these questions is a cause for celebration, and the book is, in part, a celebration of intellectual bravery. There is something disarmingly frank about Thomas Henry’s plans, itemised in 1860:

To smite all humbug, however big; to give a nobler tone to science; to set an example of abstinence from petty personal controversies, and of toleration for everything but lying; to be indifferent as to whether the work is recognised as mine or not, so long as it is done:— are these my aims? 1860 will show.

That grandfather and grandson made mistakes was inevitable. That they were fallible, sometimes irascible, often insufferable human beings is unsurprising. Perhaps more remarkable is the way they were able, sometimes, to temper and bend their natures in the search for truth, and that others of less volcanic but equal intellect loved them. Bashford: “Huxley and Darwin’s friendship was a strong one, and lifelong. They acknowledged births and deaths, the most joyful and difficult family moments alike… Their interactions were sincere, direct, authentic and forthcoming.”

You could strip out all reference to personal and family life from Bashford’s work and still have a vivid, fine-grained account of the complex history of evolutionary theory, natural selection, sexual selection, the decline and revival of “Darwinism,” and the mutations and developments during the century after Darwin’s death (language that mixes Darwin and Mendel is always a metaphorical minefield). Many of the (male) players would still appear, T.H. Huxley and his anatomist antagonist Richard Owen would still do battle (“a silverback and a blackback asserting dominance in the family group that was British natural scientists”), and the intricacies of the intellectual disputes would still be teased out. But the story would be a partial sketch of their world, and readers can, in any case, go elsewhere for evolutionary history (Bashford’s unobtrusive forty-page index might be a start).

This is social and scientific history, the two inextricably combined, its great virtue being that it provides the context, the “ecosphere” if you like, in which ideas were explored by men and women who depended on one another, and for whom thinking was as natural as breathing.

Bashford is clear-eyed about the blind spots of her protagonists. T.H. Huxley, “the nineteenth century’s most famous fact-finder and lover-of-evidence fell in with presumptions about higher and lower humans.” We could call those views “racist” now. But in doing so we’d have to contend with the complexities of debate about what “race” means, if anything. Julian’s investigations into eugenic theory could easily (but incorrectly) be confused with the National Socialists’ deadly application of it. And as Thomas Henry refuted the theories of his contemporaries, so Julian corrected, adjusted, modified and developed the theories of his grandfather and his grandfather’s great friend and colleague Charles Darwin. So, we move forward, step by imperfect step, leap by occasional leap.

The melancholia that afflicted Thomas Henry on HMS Rattlesnake was visited on Julian. (It seems to have skipped over his father Leonard.) His sexual life was fraught, from the time of juvenile infatuations at Eton to his hectic affairs before and throughout his long married life to an assertive and yet loyal Juliette Baillot. For Julian’s memorial service, Juliette, with their children Anthony and Francis, designed the cover sheet. It depicted two birds facing one another, derived from Julian’s best-known (to this day) zoological work, The Courtship Habits of the Great Crested Grebe.

By the time of his death in 1975, eighty years after that of his grandfather, and ninety-three after Charles Darwin’s, the world was in a position to understand, much more fully and richly, “man’s place in nature.” But Julian Huxley was also keenly aware of the fragility of ecosystems; he lived through the Cuban missile crisis and understood how modern humanity, for all its knowledge, could obliterate itself and its place in nature. And in 2022, his grandfather’s ambition to “smite all humbug” and show “toleration for everything but lying” resonates like thunder. •

An Intimate History of Evolution: The Story of the Huxley Family
By Alison Bashford | Allen Lane | $59.99 | 576 pages

The post Smite all humbug appeared first on Inside Story.

Yes, it’s COP time again: that annual attempt by journalists to persuade their editors that this year’s UN climate conference is genuinely important and they really should give it some coverage.

Is COP27 genuinely important? At first sight it’s hard to make the case. Up to and including the twenty-first of these conferences, in Paris in 2015, COPs really were important. The international community was desperately trying to reach a new international agreement to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and every year the torturous negotiations produced another faltering step forward. Paris itself produced a historic treaty: the first genuinely comprehensive global climate agreement, with a built-in mechanism for strengthening itself every five years.

But once we had the Paris agreement, what was there to negotiate about? There was a geeky answer: Paris was a high-level accord and many detailed implementation rules still needed to be worked out. COPs 22 (Marrakech), 23 (Bonn), 24 (Katowice) and 25 (intended for Santiago but actually in Madrid because of some local political difficulties) duly worked on these specifics, with few people outside the climate world taking much notice.

COP26, scheduled for Glasgow in 2020 but postponed for a year because of Covid, was the five-year moment when the emissions targets set in Paris had to be strengthened. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had reported in 2018 that global emissions must be more or less halved by 2030 if the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels was to be met. Greta Thunberg was leading an increasingly vocal movement of younger climate activists; publics were beginning to mobilise again. Countries would be under the spotlight to respond.

But the conference ran into a huge problem. Yes, many governments brought new emissions reduction commitments (“nationally determined contributions,” or NDCs) to the table, some of them quite ambitious. And many pledged themselves to net zero emissions by 2050 or a decade or two later. But when all these promises were added up, they still fell well short of the cuts scientists said were necessary to meet the 1.5°C goal.

COP26 came up with pretty much the only option it could to “keep 1.5°C alive” and rescue the conference from failure: countries admitted they were not doing enough and promised to come back in a year’s time with stronger, 1.5°C-compatible commitments.

And so COP27 was dragged from post-Paris obscurity and turned into the next critical climate moment. Will those world leaders use their six minutes to announce new targets sufficient to close the “emissions gap”?

Unfortunately we know the answer, and it’s No. Only one major economy has said that it will table a new and stronger NDC — Australia, which for a short time finds itself in the unusual position of being a global climate leader. But the other 195 signatories to the Paris agreement have offered little or no change.

As a result, the emissions gap is barely narrower than it was a year ago. In its latest annual report the UN Environment Programme calculates that current policies offer a two-thirds chance of limiting the global temperature increase to 2.8°C above pre-industrial times. Cuts pledged by governments would reduce this only to 2.6°C.

To limit global warming to 1.5°C, emissions must fall by 45 per cent more than is envisaged under current policies by 2030; for 2°C, a 30 per cent cut is needed. Launching the report, UNEP executive director Inger Andersen warned that “we had our chance to make incremental changes, but that time is over. Only a root-and-branch transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster.”

It is hardly surprising, of course, that so little progress has been made over the past year. It’s not been a propitious time to think about emissions reduction plans. In a world still recovering from the Covid pandemic, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has triggered huge global energy price increases, food shortages, generalised inflation and a cost-of-living crisis, not to mention the threat of nuclear war. China and the United States are adopting increasingly belligerent stances towards one another. With the US dollar rising as the Federal Reserve hikes interest rates, many developing countries are seeing trade and growth slow and are falling back into unsustainable indebtedness.

In the meantime, severe climate impacts have become more frequent. After record-breaking heat waves baked India and Pakistan in the summer, monsoon flooding left a third of Pakistan under water, affecting an estimated thirty-three million people and killing more than 1500. As glaciers melted in the Himalayas, extreme heat in Europe led to wildfires. In France, low river levels meant insufficient water to cool nuclear power stations, which had to be shut down, while German barges had difficulty finding enough water to navigate the Rhine.

In the United States, Colorado River reservoirs hit record lows and major flooding occurred elsewhere, from Death Valley to eastern Kentucky. In China, an eight-week heat wave and drought dried up parts of the Yangtze River to the lowest level since the mid nineteenth century — until parts of the same area were inundated with flooding rains in August.

The need for action could hardly be clearer. But if COP27 won’t see any new commitments to cutting emissions, is it even worth holding? Could not the greenhouse gases from all those leaders’ and delegates’ flights at least have been saved?

There are two grounds for saying that, despite all this, COP27 will be a worthwhile event. The first is that climate change is not all about cutting emissions, or “mitigation” as climate negotiators call it. This aspect of the subject dominates the debate in most developed countries because they are responsible for most of the world’s historical and present emissions, and are now more or less all embarked on a difficult process of decarbonisation.

Elsewhere, though, reducing emissions is not the big national issue. Most developing countries produce very few greenhouse gases: their economies are just not large or rich enough. What they are desperately trying to do is cope with the climate change they are already experiencing, and what they want is for the developed world finally to provide them with the financial assistance they have been promised for thirty years to support climate-resilient development.

It is these issues, not mitigation, that will dominate debate at COP27. The agenda has three parts.

The first is adaptation, climate-speak for the things countries have to do to adjust to a warming world: building flood defences, planting drought-resistant seed varieties, and so on. The Paris Agreement decided that there should be a “global goal on adaptation” in the same way that there is a global goal (1.5°C) for cutting emissions.

It seemed clear to scientists and to many developing countries that the adaptation goal should logically be the obverse of the mitigation one, since the more emissions are reduced, the lower the global temperature rise will be, and therefore the less adaptation countries will have to undertake. But the developed world has so far resisted any attempt to define the adaptation goal in this way: it would cast an unforgiving light on their failures to mitigate enough. Negotiators will have another go at COP27.

Second, the subject of “loss and damage” will take centre stage. This is the term used to describe the economic costs developing countries experience from climate impacts. Such costs are in many cases large and growing, not least because of more frequent and more severe extreme weather events.

But the concept of loss and damage unnerves developed country negotiators. It looks far too close to the idea — increasingly being tested in the international courts — that the rich world is legally liable for such costs, and could therefore be forced to pay practically unlimited compensation. The Paris Agreement did recognise that loss and damage occurs but included an explicit clause ruling out any legal liability.

This has not stopped developing countries — particularly the small islands and low-lying states most vulnerable to climate impacts — from pushing for more financial aid. At COP26 they demanded a new financial facility be created for this purpose. The knockback by developed countries nearly brought the conference to a halt; a last-minute compromise in which a “Glasgow Dialogue” was established did little to assuage the vulnerable countries’ anger. They pointed out grimly that the Glasgow Dialogue on Loss and Damage could now be added to the list of futile non-negotiations that already included the Warsaw Mechanism for Loss and Damage and the Santiago Network for Loss and Damage created by previous COPs.

A new financial facility for loss and damage will therefore be back on the agenda in Sharm el-Sheikh; it will be the developing world’s single biggest demand. Recognising the Paris clause, many are now insisting that what they want is specific and automatic help when they are hit by an extreme weather event. They are not seeking reparations for historical emissions. Some developed countries may in turn be relenting: Denmark recently announced the first-ever pledge of specific loss and damage funding. If the financial facility is not agreed — or explicit talks are not at least promised towards it — the vulnerable countries may well walk out.

In the end, adaptation and loss and damage both come down to the third key agenda item, which is finance. Once again, the developed world will be in the dock: it has still not organised the $100 billion per year in financial flows to developing countries it promised at COP15 (Copenhagen, 2009) and again in Paris. Although the funds were meant to be secured by 2020, only $83 billion was provided that year, and the latest review suggests the $100 billion won’t be met till 2023.

The consequence is not just that insufficient money is flowing. It’s the disastrous loss of trust that the shortfall has caused. If developed countries can’t keep to their most straightforward promises, developing nations are little inclined to make commitments of their own.

At the same time, though, the $100 billion is not really the issue. That sum doesn’t get anywhere close to the trillions of dollars now needed for global investment in climate mitigation and resilience. Governments don’t have that kind of money; it’s going to have to be raised from the private sector. Intense discussions are under way looking at how this can be done.

In Sharm el-Sheikh these discussions will take place away from the formal negotiations. Veteran climate economist Nicholas Stern of the LSE will publish a new report with the executive director of the UN Economic Commission for Africa, Vera Songwe, on how much money is needed for different purposes, and how it can be mobilised. Banks, insurers and investment funds will be out in force, proclaiming their commitment to net zero and green growth, while trying to defend their continued financing of fossil fuels.

The World Bank, meanwhile, will come under renewed attack for inadequate climate commitment. The International Monetary Fund will look good by comparison. Even the world’s central banks will be in on the debate, now committed to assessing their financial systems’ stability in terms of “climate risk” as well as the usual capital adequacy.

And this is where COP27 will prove itself worthwhile after all. It’s not really about the formal negotiations. COPs are the annual gatherings of the world’s climate industry. That’s not a term of abuse: acting on climate change is now a major driver of economic growth, of investment and trade, of urban regeneration and rural land restoration, and of civil society mobilisation.

People come from all those sectors: from city authorities and sub-national states, from multinational corporations and green technology innovators, from impact investment funds and academic research institutes, from non-government organisations from both the North and South of the world. They come to announce their new projects and commitments, to network and plan, and to discover what’s happening elsewhere.

And those government leaders will have to make a speech about climate change when they come to the COP. For many of them it may be the only one they make on the subject this year. Oddly enough, none of them will say “actually, you know, this climate change thing is not really happening, so we’re doing bugger all about it.” Each of the six minutes will force leaders’ attention onto the global crisis and what they should at least say they are doing in response. And most importantly, each of those speeches will be covered by those leaders’ national media outlets. They will appear to be talking to the international community, but that’s just the backdrop (and an important one). Each will be talking primarily to their national media and public.

This, in the end, is the justification for the annual UN circus. Progress on climate change will ultimately come because publics the world over will demand it from their governments. They will do this when they are better informe, and the challenge gets a higher profile in each country’s political debate.

Political leaders need to be forced to say they will act, and to be held to it. In a world where so much else is happening, that’s hard to engineer, either for civil society or for the media. Climate change is not news: it’s been the same story now for many years, and if it can be reported on any day it can always wait for another one.

So the point of COPs is to provide a focal point, a moment: one fortnight a year when climate change is unequivocally on the political agenda, and on the news. This year NGOs will find it harder than usual to make their voices heard: the Egyptian government has notoriously been cracking down on dissent and demonstration, and hotels in Sharm el-Sheikh are too expensive to allow most activists to attend.

Nevertheless, for a couple of weeks, climate will come into focus. Political leaders will make speeches, and they will be covered on the main TV news. Broadcasters will run climate change features. Editors will commission articles. •

The post What exactly is the point of COP27? appeared first on Inside Story.

When did it become the practice at Aboriginal funerals to cover the grave mound with artificial flowers? In the deep desert they left the corpses to desiccate in the spinifex. Evelyn’s people built platforms out of branches, and suspended the bodies above flat stones, reading into the spatter of dissolving body fat the story of who was responsible for the death.

While I’m pondering my choices, a swarm of Aboriginal children enters the shop, splitting into ones and twos, and moving with practised efficiency down the aisles. A girl of twelve or thirteen saunters past, sizes me up, and palms a small bottle of perfumed oil. She knows I won’t give her away. A matronly shop assistant swoops on the girl, grips her wrist, and peels the bottle from her hand, gesturing with her jaw towards the door. “Out!” The child swans away, followed by her cohort, shrieking and giggling as they make off down the street.

It’s a seamless piece of choreography, everyone playing the part they’ve been cast to play, the moves as familiar and practised as a long-running piece of theatre. When I pay for my flowers, the shop assistant shakes her head. “Little ratbags,” she says, without anger.

The funeral is a day’s drive from Alice Springs, in Western Australia. When my car breaks down 600 kilometres up the Tanami Road, 300 kilometres short of my destination, it feels like a replay of the trip I made fifteen years earlier with my friend Pam Lofts to attend the funeral of another Aboriginal woman, Patricia Napangarti Lee. That time, we made it with the help of the local station people and the staff of the Granites goldmine, and I know that the same network will get me there this time. In the years between now and then, Pam has died, too, of motor neurone disease.

I’d been aiming to camp at the turn-off to my old home, the cattle station my family established in the 1960s, and it’s when I stop near the abandoned roadhouse of Rabbit Flat that I realise I have a problem. Hanging onto the bull bar of my twin-cab utility while I squat to pee, it takes me a moment to realise that the detached idler arm is the reason for the peculiar angle my steering wheel has adopted in the last half hour, and that I’m in trouble.

It’s not far off sundown, and I’m not far from where I had intended to camp, so I drive in the lowering light to the station turn-off, choose a clear space near a stand of mulga trees that will provide morning shade, let Pirate the dog out, collect some firewood, and think about what to do. The mulga branches make their familiar tracery against the fading red horizon, and my body makes its cellular adjustments of recognition that we are back on home ground.

My mobile phone shows a single bar of reception. This amuses me, given I am in one of the remotest locations in Australia and until six months ago it was rare to get one bar of reception where I live, thirty kilometres from Canberra, the national capital. When I climb onto my roof-rack, the phone shows three bars. I get down and light the fire, feed Pirate, make myself a gin and tonic from the emergency supplies in the esky, climb back onto the roof-rack, and consider who to contact.

On a whim, I text my youngest brother in Brisbane, not because he can do anything to help, but because we have made several trips out here together, and he will know exactly where I am and how it feels — the night falling, the mulga wood fire flaring, the particular Tanami stillness we internalised as children and which bonds us across political and other differences.

Within a few minutes, he rings back.

“If anyone else was broken down on the Tanami, I’d be worried,” he says.

I have a flash of regret that I’m someone no one worries about, followed by the knowledge that being worried about has always irritated me, and that it’s been part of my life’s project to become someone people don’t worry about. We chat for a while, and I flag my options — to contact the station and see if I can borrow a vehicle to drive to the funeral, or to backtrack to the mines and hope to get my car repaired in time to make it under my own steam.

My brother rings off and I call the station, leaving a message when no one picks up. I also text my colleagues in Alice Springs, the team I’m taking leave from to attend the funeral, to let them know that I’ve broken down and will keep them in the loop.

During the night, the fire burns down to a bed of coals, and I wake early to the intrusive presence of the small, persistent, moisture-deprived flies that appear every decade or so in response to some inscrutable climatic rhythm. While I’m boiling the billy for my morning cup of tea, the phone rings — it’s the station manager, Mark, who has just picked up my message. I explain my situation, and he says he will come out and see what he can do to get me on the road. It’s a fifty-kilometre drive, and it will take him a while to organise the tools he needs, so I brew another billy of tea, move the car so that the front end will be in the shade all morning, and settle down to wait.

The current station manager is the youngest son of the only other white family that settled in the Tanami in the 1960s. As part of a move to rationalise the viability of Aboriginal-owned cattle stations, the lease was recently put up for tender and taken over by Mark and an older brother. My family left and his family stayed, but we share the knowledge of what it means to live here.

Mark understands my imperative to get to the funeral. Evelyn’s brother worked as a stockman for my family in the sixties, and Evelyn took to heart the fact that as a baby I was given the skin name of Napurrula, making me her sister in the Aboriginal kinship system. Apart from the relationship we had and the personal grief I feel, I am family, and this is something I have to do.

The other urgent reason to get to the funeral is that, at the request of Evelyn’s daughter Megan, I’m bringing food for the wake. There’s a crate of potatoes, onions and sweet potatoes on the tray, and the back seat is loaded with boxes of lettuces, tomatoes and avocados. Covered with wet towels, the salad vegetables are travelling well so far, but there’s a time limit to their viability.

A LandCruiser pulls up beside me, with a toolbox and a welder tied down on the back.

“G’day,” Mark says. “Let’s have a look at the problem.”

He squats by the front wheel of my car and assesses the damage. It’s a year since we last spoke, apart from the telephone conversation this morning.

“Don’t you have a partner who can come on these trips with you and keep you out of trouble?”

“No,” I say. “It’s one of the things I forgot to do.”

He laughs, crawls under the vehicle, and sets about welding up the broken part. It’s a serviceable job, and will get me back to the Granites, but probably won’t stand up to 300 kilometres of corrugated road.

“Thanks, Mark. I owe you one,” I say.

I make my way back to the Granites turn-off and call the number for visitor enquiries. Time passes. Eventually, a woman emerges from the demountable building beside the entry boom gate, and invites me and Pirate into the airconditioned interior to wait for the return of the senior mechanic, who is out in the field on a job. She’s pleasant and friendly, and we chat for a while before she gives me the wi-fi password so I can use my laptop, and we both get on with some work while Pirate sleeps on the lino floor.

More time passes, and the mechanic arrives, checks my car, unbolts the idler arm, and takes it back to the workshop to be repaired by a professional welder. Half an hour later he returns, reattaches the part, and tells me I’m good to go.

Most of the day has been consumed by this process, and it’s late afternoon by the time I get back on the road, with 350 kilometres to travel and a load of food to deliver. The lettuces and tomatoes are still in good order under the wet towels, although the waxed cardboard boxes they are packed in are getting soggy.

Because there’s a time difference of an hour and a half across the border, it’s only seven-thirty when I arrive in the community, although it’s been dark for several hours. The Sorry camp is at Daisy Kungah’s house, where fires are burning and people are hunkered in groups that disperse into familiar individuals as they recognise my car and stand up to greet me.

“We was worrying for you. We thought you was coming this morning.”

“At least somebody worries about me. I broke down — took all day to get the car fixed.”

Given the unreliable vehicles everyone drives, breakdowns are too common to provoke comment. I made it, and that is all that matters. I find Megan, and embrace her while she keens, the ritual wail of shared grief I can never bring myself to make. Then I make my way around the assembled friends and relatives, embracing, shaking hands, beginning at last to feel my own sadness through this collective sorrow.

Once the Sorry business has been attended to, I unload the crates and cartons of food, hand out packets of tobacco, negotiate with Daisy that I will come back early in the morning to have a shower, and drive back to the river crossing, where I find a place to camp away from the road, collect firewood, light a fire, throw down my swag, and exhale.

Evelyn’s death has been sitting in my mind like a parcel waiting to be unwrapped. It has not been possible, in my other life, to feel the loss properly. I could only hold open the space of grief until I re-entered her world and the visceral knowledge of who she was. She stalks across my memory in a dress the colour of the dahlia flowers I’ve brought to grace her grave. •

This is an edited extract from Wandering with Intent, essays by Kim Mahood (Scribe $35).

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Colourful and noisy, the Glasgow demonstrators waved a diverse range of banners and placards. But one seemed to dominate. “Make it a fair COP!” said the bright yellow hearts waving above the marchers’ heads. “Climate justice now!” It expressed the marked shift within the climate movement over the last few years, in Britain and elsewhere. This cause is no longer just about protecting future generations from the likely ravages of a warming planet. It is about defending the poorest peoples of the world from the devastating impacts they are experiencing right now.

After all, the idea of “climate justice” expresses a profound truth. Climate change has been caused by the burning of fossil fuels over two centuries in the richest countries of the world. It is indeed what has made them rich. But it is wreaking its greatest damage on the poorest countries and people; indeed, it is making many of them very much poorer.

I walked for a while alongside a group wearing brightly coloured national costumes. They came from some of the low-lying Pacific islands that will cease to exist if sea levels rise as currently predicted. Walking with them was Tishiko King, a Torres Strait Islander and campaigns director of the Australian youth environmental organisation Seed Mob. She was there, she said, to stand shoulder to shoulder with First Nations across the world fighting for the rights of indigenous peoples. “Too often our voices are missing when decisions are being made that impact our future,” she told me. “So if world leaders won’t hear us in the conference, we’ll make sure they’ll hear us on the streets!”

Nearby another Australian, Caroline Sherwood, held a homemade banner depicting Scott Morrison with his head in the sand in front of a massive coalmine. The Sydneysider said she was ashamed of her government. “Their plan to meet net zero by 2050 is nothing more than a public relations exercise: it has no substance,” she told me. Almost everyone I spoke to, wherever they were from, expressed similar shame or disappointment. They all noted the gap between politicians’ rhetoric and what they themselves saw happening.

At the “Fridays for Future” march the previous day, though, the mood had been different. This was the demonstration by the young people galvanised by Greta Thunberg’s weekly “school strikes” — around 20,000 of them — and they, like Thunberg, were angry. Though COP26 was only halfway through, Thunberg told the crowd, it was already a failure. The politicians were all talk and no action. It’s just “blah blah blah,” she said, repeating the catchphrase that has reverberated around the global media this past week.

To the young people I spoke to, almost all of them under twenty-five, climate change feels like an existential threat. One banner put it simply: “You’re stealing my future!” At a personal level, the prospect of living in an unstable world of frequent natural catastrophes and geopolitical conflict fills many with deep anxiety. A recent Pew poll of 10,000 young people in ten countries found nearly half admitting to climate-induced feelings of distress that affected their daily lives. Almost four in ten said they were not sure if they would want to bring children into such a world.

At a political level, the young people’s concerns are much more directed. They are angry with their parents’ generation. It is those born before 1970 — as several of my interviewees made pointedly clear to me (born 1960) — who have failed to act on climate change over the past quarter century. And it is they, the millennials and “generation Z,” who will suffer from our self-indulgent and selfish lifestyles.

And many of them are angry at capitalism too. This was a powerful thread running through the assembled slogans. “Systems change not climate change!” said one banner. “Uproot the system!” demanded another. And a third: “Environmentalism without socialism is just gardening.”

Wit aside, this was no throwaway rhetoric. These young climate activists offer a powerful critique. Capitalism has caused this emergency. So only getting rid of capitalism can solve it. It’s an argument fed by some serious scholars and bestselling writers. In her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, the Canadian author Naomi Klein argues that the modern capitalist economy, run by huge corporations and financial interests, and feeding on mass high-carbon consumption, cannot reverse its core dynamic of material growth and human exploitation. Only economic transformation, based on the principles of ecological sustainability and social justice, can do that.

The core demand of the radical climate movement is for a “green new deal”: a thoroughgoing program of public investment in reducing emissions and restoring nature, combined with new rights and higher wages for workers and oppressed minorities, and constraints on financial capital. Its most famous champions are Klein — whose most recent book sets out the case — and the young US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose millions of followers on Twitter and Instagram attest to the power of her inspirational rhetoric (as well as her effective interventions in the US Congress). Thousands of young people have become local and national activists for a “GND” in America, Britain, and elsewhere across the world.

Listening to young people articulating these arguments it would be easy to dismiss them as the usual activist minority. But the Pew poll should make politicians ponder. Around 65 per cent of those surveyed around the world felt governments were failing young people. These are voters (or in some cases soon will be) and it is pretty clear that climate change will determine how many of them vote.

They have already shaken up the environmental movement. Only a few years ago that movement was led by the “big logos” — Greenpeace, WWF, Friends of the Earth and the like. Today the running is made by young climate strikers, direct action groups blocking roads and chaining themselves to bulldozers, and students forcing their universities to divest from fossil fuels. It’s Greta Thunberg whom the media now turn to first. Here at COP the dominant civil society voices are groups from the global South rather than their Western counterparts. The new political power of radical and predominantly youth-led climate activism is everywhere apparent.

And yet there is something paradoxical about this too. Because looking at the climate science — and there is also plenty of that on show in Glasgow — it is the urgency of the required action that presses most strongly. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that global greenhouse gas emissions must be cut by 45 per cent by 2030, en route to net zero by around 2060. It is difficult to imagine capitalism being overthrown in that kind of time. In practice, capitalism will have to solve the climate problem, or it will not be solved.

There are plenty of capitalists here who will tell you that this can be done. Companies with climate solutions are out in force: hundreds of them boasting of their new and cheaper green technology, their expert financial and consultancy services, their innovative new product just waiting for some government policy to make it profitable.

Their business rivals are here too, of course. Global Witness has enterprisingly counted the number of representatives from the fossil fuel sector registered for the conference and noted that, at over 500, it is more than any country has brought. Most of these companies are claiming to be turning green (if gradually), but few observers are very convinced. A recent report by the UN Environment Programme found that current plans for oil and gas drilling and coalmining globally amount to twice the level that would be allowable under a scenario in which global heating were limited to the COP26 goal of 1.5°C above pre-industrial times.

Can capitalism be greened? It is the question that underpins the entire conference, though it won’t be mentioned in the negotiating rooms and is too provocative for most of the fringe meetings. The answer in practice is likely to have two parts.

First, it won’t be greened by itself. Almost all the progress in environmental technologies and consumption patterns over the past thirty years has come about as a result of government policies. Energy efficiency standards, pollution regulations, renewable energy mandates, conservation orders, product bans, green taxes, emissions trading schemes, research and development subsidies: it is the panoply of state interventions in markets that have driven such progress as we have had. And it is much more far-reaching interventions that will be needed if fossil fuels are to be squeezed out of the global economy and investment in green solutions increased to the levels required. There might even be some people who would question whether an economy subject to such intervention should still be called entirely “capitalist.”

Second, this will be a continuous battle, for every policy put forward will be opposed by an incumbent interest. The fossil fuel representatives gathered in Glasgow are as nothing next to the number of their lobbyists who are being deployed in national legislatures. The banks and pension funds will carry on financing them until they are legally prevented from doing so. For every politician with green voters to satisfy there will be another — often the same one — with local high-carbon jobs at risk and consumers complaining about higher prices.

In this field of political conflict — one that will inevitably dominate the next decade — it matters that there are people on the streets and young people who are angry, for the demonstrators in Glasgow and elsewhere across the world are setting the terms of the debate. Climate justice, fairness for future generations, net zero, 1.5°C, a green new deal, green capitalism and anti-capitalism: we are only going to hear more of this argument. For those seeking to understand what the political and economic future might look like, this will surely be it. •

The post “System change, not climate change!” appeared first on Inside Story.

Suddenly you stumble upon a great presence. A massive fibrous foot rears out of the leaf litter, searching for clear air and sunshine as it rises, now pale-trunked and straight as a pole, to a distant, high canopy. This upper realm it shares only with its own kind, their heads in the mist — or is that smoke? You have met the monarch, Eucalyptus regnans, the Mountain Ash.

This remarkable forest is close to Melbourne, just an hour and a half from the MCG. It is a magical kingdom where Earth’s tallest flowering plant soars to heights approaching one hundred metres and where, at its feet, is found a ferny understorey of cascading waters and dancing lyrebirds.

This precious ecosystem on the edge of Australia’s southern metropolis is evoked and celebrated in The Great Forest. Written by distinguished forest scientist David Lindenmayer and illustrated with stunning photographs by Sarah Rees, Chris Taylor and Steven Kuiter, this new book reminds us that the towering forests of ash are both awe-inspiring and fragile. We are living through the moment when the future of this immensely old and delicate ecosystem is hanging in the balance.

As Lindenmayer says, “there is perhaps nothing more extraordinary than an old-growth Mountain Ash forest.” He lovingly describes the magical environment in which he has worked for four decades, mapping and understanding the evolution of the forest and tracking the endangered Wollert (Leadbeater’s possum), one of Victoria’s faunal emblems. In the understorey of the Great Forest you might find 10,000 different gene sequences for fungi and soft tree ferns that could be 1000 years old. And at the foot of the world’s tallest flowering plant is the world’s tallest moss (reaching fifty centimetres). Everything is straining towards the light.

Long-term ecological studies require immense personal dedication and institutional support, and deliver precious insights and great public benefit. Australians should feel deep gratitude for the work that Lindenmayer and his research team have been doing since the 1980s from his base at the Australian National University.

The Mountain Ash is not only a majestic eucalypt, it is also a distinctive one. For the first fifty years of its life it can grow a metre a year, reaching similar heights to the giant redwoods of North America but in a quarter to half the time. When mature its girth can exceed thirty metres. Old trees shed tonnes of bark every year and dangle streamers of bark designed to take fire into the canopy. The Mountain Ash is unusually dependent on its seed supply for regeneration — and it needs a firestorm to crack open those seeds high in the crowns of the trees and to cultivate the saplings successfully. Ash-type eucalypts generally grow in even-aged stands; they renew themselves en masse. These magnificent trees have evolved to commit mass suicide once every few hundred years, on the hottest, windiest days after long drought. And when they burn, they do so with atomic power — as the Black Days (Thursday, Friday, Saturday…) of Australia’s recent fire history testify.

The continent’s weather pivots dramatically here between cold Antarctic fronts and hot northerlies from the centre. What kind of organism profits from this combustible edge, growing fast on the wet, cool bounty of the Southern Ocean but drawing also on periodical incursions of fiery breath from the arid, continental inland? A magnificent tall, wet fire weed.

Since European invasion, firestorms have become more frequent. Fires are essential for regeneration of the forest, but if fire returns before the young trees have produced seed, the species can be eliminated. This fragile long-term balance has been destabilised by clearing, logging and climate change.

But Indigenous peoples in this region lived with firestorms too. Aboriginal mosaic burning, which was applied to so many drier woodlands across the continent, is sometimes wrongly assumed to have been used in the wet Mountain Ash forests too. For example, in his popular, prize-winning book Dark Emu (2014), Bruce Pascoe argued that Aboriginal peoples managed Mountain Ash forests with “a mosaic pattern of low-level burns” and that wild fires in the forests affected by Black Saturday “were largely unknown before the arrival of Europeans.” But this cannot have been the case, for ash forests would have been destroyed by frequent fires, and low-level burns are not feasible in such a wet ecosystem.

Wurundjeri, Taungurung and Gunaikurnai peoples used the tall forests seasonally and probably burned their margins, maintaining clearings and pathways along river flats and ridgetops. They were familiar with the forest’s firestorms and would have known the dangerous days.

The opportunity to walk in an old-growth Mountain Ash forest — an experience familiar and beloved to our recent forebears — is becoming a rarity. As Lindenmayer explains, old-growth forest once comprised 30–60 per cent of the Mountain Ash ecosystem, and now it makes up just 1.2 per cent. That is a horrifying statistic. The loss has been caused by industrial-scale logging and an accelerated cycle of fire. The two are inextricably related: logging operations make forests more prone to high-severity fire. And logging large old trees after a fire, so frequently done, can make the habitat unsuitable for many wildlife species for up to two centuries.

As a result of these changes and incursions, the Mountain Ash forests of Victoria’s Central Highlands are now classified as critically endangered under the International Union for Conservation of Nature. We are fast losing an ecosystem that is both precious and productive. Old-growth forests support rich biodiversity, furnish nesting hollows for animals, store large amounts of carbon and generate high water yields. The tall trees, many of them in closed catchments, milk the clouds and deliver an unusually high-quality fresh water supply to the city. Water from these forests is worth more than twenty-five times the commercial value of their timber.

The Great Forest is an exquisite book that should alert people to the majesty of this environment. Readers will delight in Chris Taylor’s photos of rock and heathland on the Baw Baw Plateau and his panoramas of the Cathedral Range (Nanadhong), Sarah Rees’s rendering of delicate montane fens and her subtle compositions of air, light and water in Wurundjeri Country, and Steven Kuiter’s gorgeous portraits of a pink robin in rainforest and a powerful owl with its (beheaded) prey. The book seductively invites you into the sensory worlds of tree canopy, granite tor, fern bower and leaf litter. I’ve walked many gullies and ridges of the Great Forest but this book revealed more glorious secrets to me.

A dawalin (the Taungurung word for waterfall) during a storm in the Toolangi Forest on Taungurung Country. Chris Taylor

The splendour of the book is reminiscent of the imagery and advocacy generated in the 1970s and 80s about the forests of southwest Tasmania. The photographs of Olegas Truchanas and Peter Dombrovskis came to define a region threatened by unbridled hydro-electric development, distilling its majesty and ecological integrity for city audiences. Their photos of wild rivers and luminous rainforest, panoramas of peak and range, and insect-eye portraits of pebble and leaf enabled people to inhabit these remote places — and to fight for them. The Great Forest is a book in that tradition. It offers beauty, science and advocacy in defence of an ecosystem under attack.

The book pays respect to Country, beginning with a Statement of Sovereignty from Lidia Thorpe, the first Aboriginal senator for Victoria, and locating photos and events in Wurundjeri, Taungurung, Gunaikurnai and Bunurong Countries. This constant education in language and territory invokes not only the deep past of this place but also its enduring ecological and cultural coherence.

Giving this vast, diverse ecosystem a single name — “The Great Forest” — is also powerful politics, making it simpler to celebrate and defend. In 2001 I chose the name Forests of Ash for my book about the same environment, a title that united ash and fire, ecology and history. But “The Great Forest” has the advantage of being both complimentary and singular. It brings back into parlance the nineteenth-century name given to the Great Forest of South Gippsland, rugged tracts of Mountain Ash country that farmers fought with axe and fire over a hundred years ago. It also ties the book to the decade-long campaign to create the Great Forest National Park, which proposes to link, extend and upgrade existing reserves to ensure better protection for the tall trees and all the life they harbour.

Both campaign and book depict the Great Forest as proximate yet unknown, as “hidden in plain sight.” We are told that the forest is on Melbourne’s doorstep but few know it is there; it remains “largely unappreciated.” This argument heightens our sense of discovery and the feeling that we are appreciating a secret just in time. Although there is clearly truth in this, it underplays two centuries of settler awe, affection and advocacy. The book understandably presents a sharp contrast between the long-term care by Aboriginal custodians and the “brutal and catastrophic” impacts of European colonisation. Scientists tend to enforce this opposition, thus simplifying the environmental sensibilities of both Indigenous and settler cultures. The newcomers compromised the natural values of ecosystems so severely that scientists often depict settlers in purely negative terms, as “disturbances.” But there is another story about this forest that might be told, one that is barely hinted at here.

Victorians have long known and loved this forest. From the beginning, it quickly became part of their identity. Colonial Victorians knew they lived among tall gum trees: residents became known as Gumsuckers as opposed to Cornstalks (New South Wales), Bananalanders (Queensland), Croweaters (South Australia) or Sandgropers (Western Australia). “Fernmania” and “wildflowering” took hold of the populace, and excursionists and picnickers made raids into the Great Forest. Naturalists and bushwalkers came to know and love every peak and gully. There were sponsored searches for the tallest trees, and Victorians boasted of their heights at intercolonial and international exhibitions. Beloved ancient giants were given names similar to those bestowed on Aboriginal individuals identified as “the last of the tribe”: “King Edward VII,” “Uncle Sam” or “Big Ben.” Pilgrimages were made to their great buttresses — an impressive photo of the entire village of Fernshaw gathered at the foot of Furmston’s Tree in 1933 is included in the book. International visitors to Melbourne were taken to see the tall trees and to hear the lyrebird; Californian conservationist John Muir had to be shown the towering rival to his celebrated redwood. Noted colonial photographers J.W. Lindt and Nicholas Caire — antecedents of The Great Forest photographers — brilliantly captured the magic of fern gullies and forest giants. Many of their images hung in railway carriages, and Lindt sold 25,000 prints of the Black Spur area alone in the 1880s.

Small-scale sawmillers felt awe for the forest even as they cut it down. Workers at bush sawmills lived in the heart of the Great Forest in small, remote communities that women and children might escape only once or twice a year. When firestorms bore down upon them, as they did increasingly with the incursions of sawmilling, these vulnerable families cowered in primitive underground dugouts. When the royal commission into the 1939 fires held hearings in forest communities, it was foresters, sawmillers and bush workers who patiently tutored Judge Leonard Stretton on the distinctive characteristics of the Mountain Ash forests. University botanists, schooled overseas, didn’t know nearly as much as the local bushmen.

It was not until the late 1940s that an ecologist began to “pry into the personal life of E. regnans,” as he put it. That was David Ashton (1927–2005), a gentle botanist, artist and poet who conducted a fifty-year experiment in the Mountain Ash forests after they were severely burnt in the Black Friday fires of 1939. He worked at Wallaby Creek in a cathedral of tall trees seeded in a great fire in the summer of 1710, a century before European arrival (he counted growth rings). The well-named Ashton discovered the essential role of intense, fast-moving crown fires in the regeneration of Mountain Ash, and revealed that the conditions that renew the tall forests are the very same ones that conjure a firestorm from hell for any humans in its path. But he also found that frequent fire was devastating to the future of the ash. Ashton is not mentioned in this book, but he was Lindenmayer’s outstanding predecessor. They are the two brilliant, dedicated ecologists of the Great Forest.

In the 1920s and 30s Mountain Ash became Victoria’s most sought-after building timber. Tramways snaked into inaccessible gullies, bringing timber to the railheads. Sawmilling destroyed the forest and accelerated the incursions of severe fire, but it was also a local, family economy with strong links to the communities of the bush.

Later in the twentieth century, multinational companies in league with government scorched and smashed the forest for export and woodchips. This was a different era of industrial-scale clear-felling. Many of the old sawmillers recognised that their industry now operated without restraint and they felt the loss. A bunch of dedicated enthusiasts set about documenting the “timber tramway” era of forest sawmilling and became ardent champions of both the natural and cultural heritage of the forests. History and natural history are not necessarily in opposition. They can come together to defend the Great Forest today.

The Mountain Ash forests are pillars of Victoria’s identity. When Melbourne opened its new museum in the Exhibition Gardens in 2000, it chose to place the Great Forest at its heart. There at the core of Melbourne Museum is the Forest Gallery, a living outdoor space focusing on the tall Mountain Ash forests of Victoria. It has trees, shrubs and ferns, live animal exhibits, flitting birds and cascading water.

The “producer” (yes, that was his title) of the Forest Gallery, Luke Simpkin, called it a “shop window” on the magnificent tall forests. During planning it was called “The Gallery of Life,” for it aimed to overturn the notion of a museum as a place of dead things extracted from drawers and cabinets. It was also envisaged as the symbolic keystone of the new institution, connecting the “science” displays to its left and the “history” exhibitions to its right, reminding visitors how knowledge comes together in place, in a whole, living environment.

The Forest Gallery is cool, refreshing and evocative. During the vaccination rollout in Victoria in the spring of 2021, the Exhibition Building vaccination hub opened an overflow centre in the museum, next to the Forest Gallery. The nurse looking after my daughter said she was delighted to have its green, watery coolness nearby: “I take my breaks in there, go for a walk, and reset.” This little city satellite of the Great Forest is doing its job.

The secret revealed by this book is not that the Great Forest exists, but that it is being lost. In the Central Highlands there has been a massive decline in the area of old growth in the past twenty-five years. The Victorian government’s decision to end native forest logging in 2030 is welcome but too late. Lindenmayer convincingly argues why it must end earlier, preferably by 2024. For a start, a decade’s supply of commercial timber just isn’t there. Furthermore, current logging in the Central Highlands is both uneconomic and destructive: it is leading to further loss of large trees and the decline of animal populations, and creating an even more fire-prone landscape. Carbon storage and water production are much more valuable to the state than exporting woodchips. Victoria would save between $110 million and $190 million annually if logging stopped today.

Logging frequently breaches the logging laws and codes that do exist. For example, three-quarters of current logging operations in the Upper Goulburn water supply catchment alone are in breach of codes of practice. In May last year the Federal Court, in a scathing judgement, found VicForests in breach of its obligations under the Central Highlands Regional Forest Agreement in no fewer than sixty-six coupes. The Great Forest ends with Chris Taylor’s photos of recent logging operations. They are not sensational but documentary, and are carefully interpreted for readers so that we understand how logging operations are breaking the law and why the long-term effects are devastating.

Challenging the forest industry requires courage, for it does not play nicely. Its corporate spokespeople smoothly dispense spin. In the southeast forests of New South Wales in the 1980s, state forestry officers permitted woodchipping of giant trees dating from the sixteenth century while blithely assuring the public that no old-growth forests were being logged. Similar deceptions have been perpetrated in Victoria.

When you take the industry on, as Lindenmayer has done with solid science and careful long-term monitoring, it sledges you. Industry lobbyists and sections of News Corp have made personal attacks on the scientist’s reputation. This year the Victorian County Court forced two timber industry advocates to retract their comments and apologise. In 2020 more than a hundred Australian and international scientists wrote to the Victorian government expressing their “shock and dismay” at the comments of Monique Dawson, CEO of Victoria’s logging agency, VicForests, who refused to accept Lindenmayer’s published opinions or acknowledge him as an authority. Corporate Australia doesn’t want to hear inconvenient truths. Meanwhile a precious ancient ecosystem crashes and burns in our lifetime.

Australia’s forest wars, like its climate wars, have been debilitating. Facts are constantly met with entrenched denial. Vested interests delay sensible, urgent action. In a world tipping into runaway biodiversity loss and climate change, we can now see clearly that the people defending old-growth native forests have been both heroic and right. I am filled with admiration and gratitude for the First Nations peoples, the scientists and activists, the photographers and artists, the historians and storytellers who know that the future of all creatures depends on the health of these forests. Many of them live close to the trees and are defending culture and community as well as ecology. A Great Forest National Park will strengthen Indigenous land management, water production, carbon capture, fire safety, biodiversity, the tourist economy and local wellbeing. The tall trees make us feel puny, but we will decide their fate. •

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Until that point, the peaceful coexistence of humans and monkeys had relied on a delicate arrangement: the monkeys attracted tourists to the city, and the tourists bought bananas to feed the monkeys. Like almost everything else in 2020, this system was upended by the deadly new virus that emerged in China in January. When the world economy ground to a halt in March and the tourists suddenly dried up, the monkeys lost their main food source. The resulting anarchy revealed the fragility of the foundations on which normal life in the city was sustained.

In Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World’s Economy, historian Adam Tooze tells this story many times over: in the Philippines, twenty giant cruise ships stranded in Manila Bay, cut off from the outside world; on the world’s oceans, as many as 400,000 mariners living in a giant floating quarantine; in Pakistan, low-paid garment workers locked out of their workplaces; in India, the biggest internal migration since Partition in 1947; in South Africa, rhinos pre-emptively dehorned to deter poachers emboldened by the absence of safari tours. Wherever you were in 2020, distant, seemingly incomprehensible economic forces brought some degree of misery, misfortune and disruption.

Why did this happen, and what did it all mean? Shutdown is an attempt to answer these questions, to make a pattern out of this mounting pile of disasters. Its sprawling, loosely chronological account carefully recreates the unfolding chaos that overtook our newsfeeds for much of the past eighteen months. It is avowedly a first draft of history, an effort to “cast a narrative frame over the tumult.”

As any of Tooze’s regular readers will know, his scope is always dizzyingly expansive. He writes everything books, ambitiously framed and global in perspective. All of his recent work is cast as “grand narrative,” he says, the better to “do justice to the momentousness and complexity of the shocks and transformations” — political, economic, environmental — “we are living through.” History has not ended. We are in the midst of several global crises. Like it or not, he argues, “we are in medias res.”

Tooze’s previous book, Crashed (2018), provided a thorough and at times head-spinning account of the financial chicanery that brought about the 2008 meltdown and the eurozone crisis that followed in its wake. And as he writes in Shutdown, it was these interconnected crises that most profoundly shaped the policy response to the Covid shock. When the bottom fell out of the global economy in February and March last year, governments and central banks responded on a monumental scale. The fiscal and monetary taps were turned on almost overnight. Austerity, the disastrous byword of the years after the global financial crisis, was nowhere to be seen.

Also unlike the 2008 crisis, whose most profound effects were felt in the advanced economies on either side of the North Atlantic, the coronavirus pandemic was the first truly global shock of the neoliberal epoch. At the height of the emergency in March and April 2020, a collective decision was made to shut down virtually the entire world economy. At one point, almost 95 per cent of the global population was under some kind of restriction of their daily movements, either by choice or by compulsion. The effects were felt in both advanced and emerging market economies. In China, at least 130 million workers were laid off or displaced, the worst labour market shock ever experienced by any economy in the world. It was, writes Tooze, a “crisis like no other.”

Such a crisis called for extraordinary responses. In March and April 2020, governments in advanced economies abruptly abandoned any pretence of fiscal rectitude and opened the purse strings in a way that would have been unimaginable just a few months earlier. The American CARES Act — the rescue bill passed by an unusually productive Congress after just two weeks of negotiation — provided tax cuts and extra spending to the tune of US$2.2 trillion, no less than 10 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product. This was deficit spending on a scale that dwarfed the already massive 2008 response, the biggest “slug of fiscal support” ever delivered to an economy.

It was not simply an American phenomenon. By January 2021, the International Monetary Fund estimated that the total worldwide fiscal effort had topped US$14 trillion. Like their counterparts in the United States, eurozone policymakers were pushed into uncharted fiscal and monetary waters. In July 2020, almost a decade after it was first proposed, the bloc finally agreed to collectively issue debt — eurobonds — to fund the recovery.

Not to be outdone, China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, committed to net zero emissions by 2060. As Xi Jinping declared at the UN General Assembly in September, “Covid-19 reminds us that humankind should launch a green revolution and move faster to create a green way of development and life.” It was a remarkable moment. Pre-empting future Western pressure, writes Tooze, he “unilaterally opened the door” to global decarbonisation. Of all the radical new steps taken by governments in 2020, it may prove to be the most consequential.

More technical but no less momentous were the drastic interventions of global central banks. In March 2020, as asset markets collapsed, unusual turbulence in the market for US Treasury bonds — the “safe haven” asset that underpins the entire global financial system — forced the US Federal Reserve into radical action. After slashing interest rates to zero, the Fed pointed a fire hose at both public and private debt. At the high point of this bond-buying spree, it was monetising debt at the rate of a million dollars per second. Within weeks, it had bought up 5 per cent of the entire US$20 trillion Treasury market. As the meme of the moment put it, “Money printer go brrr.”

Tooze is one of the pre-eminent interpreters and most thoughtful critics of radical central bank policymaking since the global financial crisis, at least for those not versed in the arcane lexicon of macroeconomics and high finance. His output is prodigious. Recently, for example, he produced compelling long-form profiles of some of the key architects of the post-1970s global economic system: the central bankers Janet Yellen and Mario Draghi, and the influential economist and columnist Paul Krugman. Over the past fifty years, he observed, all have re-evaluated, if not dispensed with, their faith in the power of well-ordered markets to bring about equitable economic growth. Slowly and sometimes reluctantly, these high-powered centrists have inched their way “towards seemingly obvious political conclusions.”

This is a key insight. Faced with a cascading series of systemic crises, central bankers have been forced to experiment with increasingly unconventional policy tools. In 2020, in order to support the system, the US Federal Reserve bought both corporate and municipal bonds. Japan’s central bank bought equities. The Reserve Bank of Australia pegged short-term interest rates near zero, committing to buying as many bonds as it took to keep them there.

The effect of these decisions, if not their stated intent, was to allow governments and businesses to spend big in order to support their economies through the shutdown. Indeed, it was these drastic and somewhat technical actions — things like asset purchases, currency swap lines and “repo” agreements — undertaken by unelected and often unseen technocrats, that staved off an utter economic catastrophe in March and April. But as Tooze notes, you did not have to share the politics of the most conservative critics of loose monetary policy to understand their bewilderment: What were central banks doing? Did they have a mandate? Who was overseeing the central bankers?

In 2020, by necessity rather than design, governments and central banks essentially acted in tandem. This was a complete reversal of post-1970s thinking about fiscal and monetary policy, in which independent central banks were instructed to pursue price stability and inflation targets without recourse to government priorities.

The crisis-fighting measures unleashed in 2020 offered a glimpse of the true spending power of governments, particularly in the advanced economies. The massive, temporary expansion of the social safety net in the West was particularly revealing. In many parts of the world, poverty rates collapsed. Gross inequality in these societies had always been a political choice. On this point, Tooze cites John Maynard Keynes: “Anything we can actually do, we can afford.”

All of which raises the question: was this a turning point, the beginning of the end of the neoliberal age? Tooze is sceptical. The radical policy choices of 2020, he writes, were “Janus-faced.” On the one hand, they did reduce inequality, pull people out of poverty and reinvigorate left politics. But the “basic logic” of these fiscal interventions was always conservative. There was no redistributive impulse behind them, no coherent program for societal change. The actions of governments and central banks, he writes, were not Keynesian but Bismarckian: “Everything must change so that everything remains the same.” It was an ad hoc, top-down, crisis-fighting response with the thoroughly unrevolutionary goal of preserving the system.

For all of Tooze’s mastery of the technical aspects of global finance and its bewildering maze of acronyms, it is his framing of the events of 2020 within much grander narratives that makes his account both urgent and compelling. His project, developed and finessed in the years since Crashed, has been to deconstruct the political economy of the hyperconnected global market-based system that has been built over the last four decades — or to put it differently, to show how the attempt to outsource politics to the animal spirits of the market was itself a political project.

What the coronavirus pandemic has made frighteningly clear, however, is that this hyperconnectivity brings with it several unpredictable and systemic “megarisks,” themselves increasingly invisible and abstract: the mutation of a microbe in a virus, the melting of a glacier in Antarctica.

Tooze put aside another book about the climate crisis and the history of energy policy to write Shutdown. It is not hard to see why. Covid was the first global crisis of the Anthropocene, a textbook case of “blowback” from an increasingly unstable natural environment. And it is the most dramatic episode yet in what environmental historians call the “great acceleration,” the profound transformation of humanity’s relationship with nature over the past seventy years.

Meeting these environmental challenges requires “technoscientific” fixes, supported and implemented on a global scale. Governments, policymakers and other elites need to think and act globally to manage the risks brought about by hyperglobalisation, financialisation, interconnected global supply chains and air travel. Yet these same elites are “unable to grasp how to actually govern the globalised world that they have created.” In Tooze’s view, this obvious unwillingness to prepare for these risks is nothing less than “organised irresponsibility.” It is a collective failure to acknowledge the reality of the world we have built.

This is neoliberalism’s fantasy: that markets, left alone, will govern themselves. If nothing else, 2020 made it unmistakably obvious that there is no possible way of separating humans, markets and nature. It exposed how dependent the system is on the stability of the natural environment, and how ill-prepared modern societies are to cope with the future challenges of the Anthropocene. “The monkeys were here before us,” a Lopburi business owner told a reporter in July. “We have to adapt to them, not the other way round.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

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Turnbull’s words sum up why many people avoid trying to understand what’s going on in the Murray–Darling Basin — its ecology, productivity and politics. So it’s good we now have a mini genre of engagingly written Murray–Darling books, including Richard Beasley’s Dead in the Water — which is mainly a forcefully expressed version of the conclusions of the South Australian royal commission into the Murray–Darling, for which he was the counsel assisting — and Quentin Beresford’s forthcoming Wounded Country.

The focus of Sold Down the River is water trading, and what the authors believe has happened since water markets were created in the 1990s by separating water rights from the ownership of land. But the book oversells itself. The subtitle claims it shows “how robber barons and Wall Street traders cornered Australia’s water market.” The book doesn’t do this. That’s not to say water markets don’t have their problems, and the authors detail some of them — but they overstate their central case.

Earlier this year, the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission released the final report of its inquiry into water markets, which uncovered flawed market data, inequalities in access to information, and inadequate or non-existent regulation. What is needed, the ACCC declared, is “decisive and comprehensive reform.”

Water minister Keith Pitt announced he would set up an expert panel to devise the government’s response to the report, and $3.5 million was set aside for this purpose. But earlier this month the minister’s office confirmed the panel had not yet been appointed, nor its terms of reference set.

Why? Doubtless, part of the reason is that it rained, which always takes the political heat out of water policy. Meanwhile, Barnaby Joyce’s return as leader of the National Party saw the water portfolio shoved out of cabinet. There are many cynics in the world of water policy, and it isn’t hard to see why.

This means that Hamilton and Kells, while they don’t cover these recent events, aren’t wrong to smell many rats. But I’m not sure they are chasing the right ones.

They write from a position of profound scepticism about free markets, and in particular the Hawke–Keating government’s policies of deregulation, including opening Australia up to foreign banks. But before they get to the politics, they give us an elegantly written, sometimes lyrical, summary of the Murray–Darling Basin and its history. Those trying to get their heads around the issues could do worse than read it.

Even here, though, there are some notable omissions. Crucially, Hamilton and Kells don’t deal in detail with the big buybacks of water conducted under the Rudd government. Yet they claim that “emphatic social, economic and environmental evidence” shows “the process of buying environmental water from farmers [has] failed.” That isn’t the case, or at the very least is disputed. Buybacks certainly affect rural communities, but as several inquiries have found it is hard to separate their impact from all the other reasons for rural decline.

Indeed, the SA royal commission — referred to approvingly by the authors elsewhere — agreed with the Productivity Commission and several academic studies that buybacks were probably the cheapest, most efficient and to date most successful way of dealing with water over-allocation. The current government is wrong — and politically craven — to rule them out.

Here, Hamilton and Kells reflect the bias of their sources. They make much of the many interviews they have done with irrigators, but the sources identified by name mostly come from a vocal and highly politically involved group of Riverina irrigators. These people have long been hostile to buybacks, and more broadly to the idea that more water needs to be allocated to the environment.

Riverina irrigator Chris Brooks, for example, is quoted at length. A former chief executive of commodity trader Glencore, Brooks has backed Shooters, Fishers and Farmers Party candidates in New South Wales, and more recently announced he will support four independent or minor party candidates in government-held seats at the next federal election. He is considering running for the Albury-based seat of Farrer, currently held by Liberal Sussan Ley.

Brooks was also the main figure behind the “can the plan” protests of December 2019, in which irrigators blockaded federal parliament. He and people with similar views may balance the outsized influence of northern basin cotton farmers on federal politics and the National Party in particular, but they have not yet done more than represent their own sectional interests. Most are populists, offering simple “solutions” to complex problems.

From that perspective, the central narrative of Hamilton and Kells’s book — the argument that robber barons and overseas traders are manipulating the water market — is convenient and appealing.

But what about the evidence? Hamilton and Kells identify some of the problems with water markets, but the evidence for their central allegation of widespread market manipulation doesn’t get beyond the anecdotal and the presumptive. Their “central finding,” they say, is that policymakers made the “critical assumption” that the best economic use of water would also provide the highest financial return.

Whether the free market can be relied on to deliver good outcomes in water management is open to debate, of course, as is the question of whether financial returns are the only kind of “value” that should be considered. If we went purely on profitability, for example, we would accept the decline of small family farms, and rice growing and dairy, in favour of big corporately owned almond plantations and cotton farms. We would ignore the social value in a diverse farming sector and put to one side issues of national sovereignty and food security.

We are not doing those things, or not completely. River managers are universally worried about the proliferation of almond plantations on both sides of the South Australian border, all planted on newly irrigated land thanks to the owners being able to buy water on the open market.

Almonds are a thirsty crop. Delivering water to them already places a big strain on the capacity of the system, and the trees are mostly not yet mature. Victoria has imposed an embargo on new plantations, and South Australia and New South Wales are under pressure to do the same.

In other words, governments are not prepared to simply let the market rip. But nor, it seems, are they prepared or able to tackle the hard water-policy questions in a systemic way. And things drift, meanwhile, in disastrous directions.

But what of the authors’ central assertion — that big institutional investors are manipulating the market, hoarding water and creating artificial scarcity to maximise their profits? “If governments don’t act quickly,” they say, “basin agriculture will become a kind of irrigated Ponzi scheme, with over-investment in unsustainable crops and megafarms.”

They go on: “We are more than confident that, if and when a future audit or inquiry looks at this aspect of Australia’s water market experiment… regulators will have a lot of explaining to do… If you listen very carefully right now, you can hear the haptic hum and crackle of traders and agribusinesses shredding documents, deleting files and destroying USB sticks that contain evidence of their coordination and partnering.”

This last allegation is not supported by a reference — not even, as with some of their other assertions, to an unidentified interviewee.

The best evidence on whether institutional investors are manipulating the market is the ACCC’s water markets report. It certainly identified serious problems, but it found no evidence of market manipulation, despite extensive analysis and investigation, and despite using the ACCC’s powers to force data out of the big traders. This is the best information we have, and there is nothing in this book to force a reassessment.

Nor is the idea that the institutions have “cornered Australia’s water market” supported. In 2018–19, according to the ACCC, institutional investors accounted for an estimated 11 per cent of water allocation volumes purchased and 21 per cent of water allocation volumes sold. While the influence of institutional investors is growing, the main traders in water are those who use it — irrigators, agribusinesses and government environmental water holders. And, just this month, the Productivity Commission issued data showing that foreign entities own only 11 per cent of water entitlements in Australia (not only from the basin).

Hamilton and Kells refer to the ACCC report, describing its criticism of the market as a backflip on previous work. But they don’t deal with these conclusions, which undermine their central thesis. (They also describe the report as being published in 2020, when in fact it was 2021. Perhaps their publishers’ deadlines forced them to rely mainly on the interim report.)

So what do Hamilton and Kells think should be done? They suggest a “citizens assembly” drawn from across the basin to “make the high-level decisions about how to allocate water in the Basin.” They think that limited local trading should be allowed between farmers as a means of water management rather than for profit. Market players who are not connected to land should be forced out. Finally, they suggest “bipartisan agreements” between governments and a role for “a reconvened national cabinet” to oversee Murray–Darling reforms, including a cross-party, cross-jurisdiction standing committee reporting to the national cabinet. Well, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?

But it isn’t clear why those arrangements are either achievable or would lead to better outcomes than the endless negotiations of the Council of Australian Governments or the Murray–Darling Basin Authority, which after years of top-down autocracy is now showing signs of fostering genuine community involvement.

As Malcolm Turnbull’s comment indicates, it is a fantasy to think you can take the politics out of water. Rather, we need better politics. As the ACCC reported, the “robber baron” narrative combined with poor market design and flawed data has undoubtedly fed a lack of confidence in water markets. This book — more a polemic than an exposé — together with the current government’s culpable lack of action, will add to that lack of confidence. •

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One of Australia’s finest landscape painters, she was an extraordinarily gifted artist: versatile, productive, bold, subtle and profound. Our appreciation of her artistic achievement will only grow with the years. The intensity and beauty of her work is breathtaking, whether it be a panorama of central Australian desert ranges, an Antarctic iceberg, a dark industrial landscape or an exploding oil platform.

She was renowned as the artist of the largest commissioned work in the Australian parliament, the twelve metres by three metres Red Ochre Cove (1987) which hangs in the main committee room. Beneath its luminous presence, which features a shaft of light that references Tom Roberts’s Opening of the First Parliament of Australia (1903), our politicians and bureaucrats are routinely forced to reveal their failings. During the televised reports of Senate hearings on the nightly news, you can lift your eyes from their humiliations and gaze instead into the exhilarating otherworld of Mandy Martin’s art.

Mandy Martin, Red Ochre Cove, 1987, oil on canvas, Parliament House, Canberra. Click to enlarge

Mandy’s early works were on paper and often in the form of political poster art; later she took to oil painting and produced sensitively observed landscapes, often on very large canvases. Her mother, Beryl Martin, was a watercolourist and her father, Peter Martin, a professor of botany at the University of Adelaide. Years of accompanying her father on scientific field trips honed Mandy’s eye for ecological detail. From the 1990s she brought together her political and ecological sensibilities in a powerful series of “environmental projects,” as she called them.

Guy Fitzhardinge, whom she married in 1996, who brought to their partnership a deep knowledge of the land and its management, became an essential and enabling collaborator. As well as being a beef farmer, Guy was a director of Bush Heritage Australia, a member of the Commonwealth Threatened Species Scientific Committee and a director of Meat and Livestock Australia, among many other public roles.

Martin produced such a rich and varied oeuvre that it is impossible to encompass it here. But her environmental projects are worthy of special notice, and it was my good fortune — along with many other writers, scholars and scientists — to be invited to contribute to them. Mandy and Guy’s home in Wiradjuri Country near Mandurama, with its sweeping views across white box woodlands towards Mt Canobolas and Orange, became a salon, a place of art, nature, productivity and good conversation.

There was a fine beef herd in the paddocks, sugar gliders putting on a nightly show in the gums, superb parrots flitting past like darts, Mandy’s art on the walls, the latest literature on Guy’s shelves, a white box log in the fireplace, a great leg of hogget in the oven, a cherry pavlova on the table and gatherings of people passionate about the land and its future.

Mandy, always zinging with electric energy and fun, had a flair for creating this chemistry on tour as well: her artist’s caravan would unfold itself — alongside her famous ironing-board easel — in some of Australia’s most remote landscapes. Multidisciplinary conversations enabled by the art would then break out around the campfire and under the stars, leading ultimately to new, rich insights and significant literary, artistic and political outcomes.

Shadows lengthen as Mandy Martin finishes her day’s work back in camp at the Mulligan River, Cravens Peak Reserve, 2009. Tom Griffiths

Mandy’s imagination was already turning inland in the late 1980s, but from the mid 1990s she launched a triptych of projects that ventured beyond the Darling River in northern New South Wales to the edge of the Simpson Desert. Each of them — Tracts: Back o’Bourke (1997), Watersheds: the Paroo to the Warrego (1999) and Inflows: the Channel Country (2001) — involved a fieldtrip, a travelling gallery exhibition and a published booklet and were supported by Peter Haynes as director of the Canberra Museum and Art Gallery. I was invited to join the last two as a writer and was thus given a rigorous education in the aesthetics, history and politics of the Australian inland.

Guy Fitzhardinge seems to know everyone across outback Australia and so we travelled from homestead to homestead, walked the paddocks, engaged with the ecology and listened to the locals — under their verandahs, in their kitchens and by their firesides. He shares Mandy’s conviction that conservation is an urgent national priority, believing that productivity, ecology and aesthetics have a beautiful relationship and that you need people on country to look after it. As well as being an innovative farmer, he has a doctorate in environmental sociology and the ability to talk to people from all walks of life.

Mandy’s art grew out of her passionate engagement with both landscape and people; thus her painting was intensely social and self-consciously historical. People rarely featured in her landscapes but human feelings and beliefs framed them. She saw herself in a lineage of explorer-artists (especially Ludwig Becker, who travelled with Burke and Wills), and so planned “expeditions” and painted a series, numbering the canvases in the sequence of a journey.

Country and conversations energised her creativity, and the public character and momentum of an expedition placed her under daily pressure to produce. She relished having to sculpt her art out of the circumstances of the travelling day; it had to be swift, opportunistic and impressionistic, alert to mood and moment, light and sky, lunch and dinner.

Her creativity was visible and public and social, the dogs and children played around her feet and an impromptu painting lesson for a nine-year-old was conducted on the side. Mandy painted as we ate, as the billy boiled or under threat of dusk. And she also painted under command. For it was her deliberate strategy on this trip to ask landholders to choose her sites and scenes. She encouraged local people to take her to their special places and allow her to paint them.

Thus her art often depicted beloved scenes, places of significance to inhabitants. This generated further pressure, of course. Her hosts had expectations, especially about the portrayal of favourite spots. They would review the progress of a painting over her shoulder or with a grave sense of ceremony at the end of the day.

I remember how one gravelly voiced grazier of the Channel Country, Sandy Kidd, paced like a restless beast around the finished canvas of his favourite waterhole as it lay on the concrete floor outside his home in the fluorescent light after dark. He had even graded the track to the spot that day to ease the artist’s way. By the waterhole that morning, sitting on the newly graded earth where a deadly snake had just slithered, he looked around with pride. “I wouldn’t call the king me uncle in this place,” he announced. “I couldn’t catch a cold here.” Later, as we awaited dinner at his home, he handed us beer cans spattered with blood from the meat chiller.

Finally, the moment had come to see what the artist had done. With drink in hand, Sandy circled the finished canvas, approaching it from every angle and looking at it from the corner of his eye as if trying to take it by surprise. In a Shakespearean stage whisper, he muttered, “This intrigues me, this does!” Then, nervously gesturing towards the painting as if it were alive, he declared, “This puts emotion into me. I come over all emotional looking at that. The Channels, eh? I didn’t know I loved them so much till they tried to bugger them up.”

In 1996, Mandy and Guy both spoke at a scientific workshop held nearby in Windorah, where local landholders, Aboriginal people and scientific visitors offered “an ecological perspective on Cooper’s Creek.” The workshop was coordinated by locals and responded to the environmental threat posed by plans from Currareva station to develop irrigation for cotton farming. The community came together impressively in defence of their wild rivers — they surprised themselves just as Mandy’s painting surprised Sandy Kidd.

Mandy Martin, Coopers Creek on Currareva Station, 2001, oil, ochre, pigment/linen, 90 x 330 cm.

Crusty pastoralists admitted to emotions. The mayor of the Barcoo Shire, Bruce Scott, used words like “braided” and “anastomosing” and “ephemeral,” adapting the words of urban professionals to advocate the special attributes of their water system. One Cooper pastoralist, full of genuine wonder, called the channels “anastomazing.” And they are! The Cooper, Diamantina and Georgina are the three great rivers of the Channel Country, flaring out into myriad braided channels, revealing an intricate web of arteries across a vast landscape. Aerial photos of the terrain look like microscope slides of organic tissue.

This is a boom-and-bust ecosystem, an arid land animated by waterflows from elsewhere, a place where monsoonal rain falling hundreds of kilometres away to the northeast periodically floods down dry channels, bringing a spectacular pulse of life to the plains and a precious, intense productivity. The flush of water occasionally reaches all the way to the saltpan of Lake Eyre, a continental rain gauge. Constituting almost a fifth of the Australian landmass, the Lake Eyre basin is the largest inland draining system in the world. Aboriginal people hold up the open palm of their hand to represent the basin, their fingers signifying the rivers that drain into it.

You need science, art and imagination to understand an ecosystem of such scale. In winning the battle of the Cooper at the turn of the millennium, Mandy Martin’s art was as important as Richard Kingsford’s surveys of river birdlife or Chris Dickman’s long-term studies of desert marsupials or Bruce Scott’s regional political advocacy or the Gorringe family’s testimony of deep Aboriginal attachment. They all successfully argued for the importance of “going with the flow” in arid Australia, and they did so by bringing together science and art, ecology and emotion, economy and history. Channel Country pastoralists found themselves beginning sentences with the words: “I’m not a radical greenie, but…”

In 2010, further field trips to the Channel Country and new interdisciplinary work with fifty local and visiting experts culminated in the publication of a large and beautiful book, Desert Channels: The Impulse to Conserve (edited by Libby Robin, Chris Dickman and Mandy Martin). Martin’s canvases — designed in four sets of four and presented as gorgeous interludes between essays — were all painted on location at Ethabuka and Cravens Peak on the eastern edge of the Simpson Desert, and this time she deliberately chose “ordinary or unsensational places to paint, places encountered by chance rather than design.” She wanted to capture the accidents of nature and the intricacies of ecology, to help people feel “the sensuousness of texture.”

Mandy Martin, S-Bend on the Mulligan River, Toko Range, Cravens Peak Reserve 2, 2009, pigments/ochres/acrylic on canvas, 100 x 100 cm.

Mandy was striving to generate a new vocabulary and palette suited to the arid zone. Aesthetic evaluation, she argued, should be valued alongside scientific assessment, and both rely upon processes of sampling and re-sampling, consistent methodology and the patient accumulation of data. Mandy painted four canvases in sequence in each location, tramping back and forth between the different viewpoints, labouring for up to ten hours a day in the searing sun.

Martin was a researcher and a theorist, an artist-scholar, an esteemed speaker at international environmental history conferences and an adjunct professor at the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. South African environmental historian Jane Carruthers, who contributed to Mandy’s environmental projects, wrote of how the artist can partner the historian by fostering “interdisciplinary collaborations between the written and visual,” empowering others to think visually “and even to produce art.” Martin drew out the artistic potential of all her collaborators.

Great art breaks down barriers and opens minds, liberates people to see and feel in new ways. It is an effective political tool because it transcends politics. Mandy’s opening trio of environmental projects focused on settler lore and aesthetics, on the wisdom as well as failings of imported environmental visions in Australia. Her painting practice mobilised and elaborated traditions within the history of art: plein air painting, artists’ camps and documentary and scientific expeditionary art. Her work connected in this way not only with the likes of Ludwig Becker, Sir Thomas Mitchell, Conrad Martens and Eugene von Guérard, but also with the camps of the Heidelberg School, the multi-disciplinary expeditions of Russell Drysdale and John Olsen, and the immersive materiality of John Wolseley.

Did she relish the gendered intervention of her ironing board? Surely this early practitioner of feminist art did. Her ironing board was her stage, a place of theatre erected in the middle of the camp from which she could survey the scene and interact socially with her team, always with an eye for the comfort and interests of others. She directly addressed the landscape, like a conductor with her score. The horizontal board was perfect for the splash and wash of colour, the deft sketch of detail, and the urgent and fluent capturing of raw material and impressions which she later refined in her studio. She would use the sand at her feet, grind ochres, work blown dust and pollen into the paint and build layers from the substance of the place in which she stood.

Keenly conscious of how the land she painted was already layered with representation, Mandy often inscribed and painted words on her canvases that conjured connections to these cultural histories. Perhaps they were Becker’s words or Mitchell’s evocations of the seventeenth-century Italian painter Salvator Rosa (his favoured lens for the new land), or the latitude and longitude of the place, or some topographical annotations, or descriptions of its geology and vegetation from contemporary scientists and scholars. In this way she brought her painting into direct dialogue with science and literature, a conversation also enacted by her fieldtrips.

Mandy Martin, Westerton Ram Paddock 2, 2001, oil, ochre, pigment/linen, 90 x 165 cm.

David Malouf wrote in 2002 of her conscious cultural layering and Mandy, in turn, wrote in 2013 of how she and fellow artist David Leece were influenced in their choice of prospect by their shared reading of Malouf. Malouf perceived that the ambition of the literate European explorers of Australia was “to gather these new lands into a world of feeling that would be continuous with the culture they had brought with them.” Martin honoured that quest and built upon it, but she also took it in radical new directions.

Increasingly, she sought the guidance and collaboration of Indigenous artists on Country. In 2004, environmental historian Libby Robin, archaeologist Mike Smith and ecologist Jake Gillen travelled with Mandy and Guy to Puritjarra, an ancient rock shelter in the red sandstone Cleland Hills, 350 kilometres west of Alice Springs. Puritjarra is an extraordinarily significant place that, from the mid 1980s, deepened the chronology of human history in the centre of the continent from 10,000 to 35,000 years and provided evidence that people managed to sustain civilisation in the central deserts during the last ice age.

This expedition to such a remote site was a cross-cultural experiment, not just in bringing together art and science, but also in collaborating with the Indigenous owners, Ikuntji artists from Haasts Bluff. Their traditional knowledge, interpreted in acrylics on canvas especially for the project, was brought alongside Martin’s “European” vision where it generated a respectful dialogue about aesthetics, economy and history in a place of national significance. The paintings by Narputta Nangala Jugadai, Daisy Napaltjarri Jugadai, Molly Napaltjarri Jugudai, Anmanari Napanangka Nolan, Eunice Napanangka Jack, Colleen Napanangka Kantawarra, Alice Nampitjinpa and Linda Ngitjanka Naparulla are visually stunning and environmentally precise about their home.

Mandy, the visiting artist, painted her own breathtaking panoramas of the range and also collaborated with each of her visiting team members to produce multi-panelled canvases inflected with their distinct visions: archaeological, historical, pastoral, botanical. The boldness of this collaborative intervention in our national cultural life, captured in an exhibition at the Araluen Arts Centre in Alice Springs and the book Strata (2005), was remarkable.

Further ambitious, cross-cultural ventures followed. In 2007, renowned Kimberley artist Janangoo Butcher Cherel invited Mandy to paint alongside him in Fitzroy River Valley Country: “It led to one of the most extraordinary working relationships I have ever been lucky enough to experience,” remembered Mandy. On the Puritjarra project, the Ikuntji artists had done their painting at Haasts Bluff, but here Mandy was shoulder to shoulder with Mangkaja artists painting the same landscapes at the same time of day. The following year, three generations of Cherels came out to Painters Rock on Jalnganjoowa (Fossil Downs) to continue this journey into memory, country and the alchemy of art.

Southwest of Fitzroy Crossing is a big desert lake named Paruku (Lake Gregory), a World Heritage wetland in northwest Australia and “a human home of great antiquity,” a setting that geomorphologist Jim Bowler had long seen as a northern echo of his investigations into ancient human history at Lake Mungo. During 2011 and 2012, a project team of fifty artists, scientists and Walmajarri people from the Mulan community worked together on the Paruku Indigenous Protected Area beside the lake.

Alongside Mandy Martin, the curators and editors of the project were artist and writer Kim Mahood (who had a long association from childhood with Paruku and the Tanami), desert ecologist Steve Morton (who researched fire ecology in the Tanami and worked with Anangu people on the Uluru Fauna Study), and anthropologist John Carty who has lived and worked with Mulan people since 2002. Other visiting contributors included Guy Fitzhardinge, Jim Bowler, archaeologist Mike Smith, American writer and curator Bill Fox, ethno-ecologist Tanya Vernes, conservationist David Rickards, and creative artists Laura Boynes, Alexander Boynes, Faye Alexander, David Leece and David Taylor.

To draw together such a team was extraordinary in itself, but to do so on Country in a productive relationship with the Indigenous owners shows the sheer power of art, and of great artists, in energising genuine collaboration. Morton, Martin, Mahood and Carty wrote in their introduction to Desert Lake: Art, Science and Stories from Paruku (2013) that Paruku resonated with the most important questions of contemporary Australian life: “How are we to live with our shared history, our shared environments, our shared homes, in difference and respect? And how do we tell these stories together?” The Walmajarri people and artists welcomed and worked with the visitors, not only guiding the project, but redirecting it in several crucial ways. They had faith that multiple perspectives would generate “a kind of truth, a type of honesty about how things are in Australia now.”

These three innovative cross-cultural art projects focused in turn on deep archaeological perspectives, contrasting aesthetic visions, and social and ecological belonging. The next such project — known as Arnhembrand — brought art to bear on contemporary environmental challenges in caring for Country. Guy Fitzhardinge was chair of the Karrkad-Kanjdji Trust, which supports traditional owners in land management and cultural conservation in the Djelk and Wardekken Indigenous Protected Areas in western Arnhem Land. He knew that community members ranked “empty country” as the most severe threat to the maintenance of healthy country. His own research had for years critiqued the separation of social systems from ecosystems that underpins much Eurocentric thinking. In 2013 Mandy Martin was approached to work with Bininj people in western Arnhem Land as she had with Walmajarri people at Paruku, and in 2015 she held a drawing workshop supported by Djelk Rangers who saw the opportunity to tell stories about the cultural and land management work they were doing.

By 2017, nearly eighty Bininj people had become involved as performers and artists working with Martin and fellow Balanda artists Alexander Boynes, Laura Boynes and David Leece. Paintings, video works and a commissioned woven mat were created, and a mixture of Bininj and Balanda techniques were used. Mandy described the joy of watching the Bininj artists prepare their traditional bush brushes from speargrass slashed from the seafront and then deploy them with fluid precision. The team also used “the latest fluorescent Anthropocene pigments” mixed with traditional ochres to tell novel, confronting stories about invasive species, new fire regimes and changing climates.

As the project historian Billy Griffiths put it, “buffaloes, pigs, feral cats and cane toads have trampled, chewed, rubbed and wallowed their way across a delicate ecosystem… In the absence of traditional burning, fire, too, had become feral. The cultural landscape had transformed into a modern wilderness.” The project work, which was exhibited at Australian Galleries and published as Light — Stone — Fire (2017), has been archived by the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art where the director Bill Fox (a brilliant interpreter of Martin’s work) saw parallels in challenges faced by traditional Indigenous communities around the world, “whether it is the Inuit of Nunavut in the Canadian Far North, the islands of Vanuatu, or the scattered settlements of Arnhem Land.” Fox sees his museum as preserving information about how to achieve resilience in the face of change “and passing it down from generation to generation, and from place to place in order that we might all survive.”

After each of these exhilarating trips away, Mandy and Guy would return to their home amid the undulating white box woodlands, perched with its view northeast towards Orange. Winking at night on their horizon, bordering their property and expanding every year, was the Cadia Hill gold mine, the largest in the southern hemisphere. Mandy’s lifelong critical engagement with industry was now taking place in her own backyard.

True to form, her relationship with the mine owners was honest, forthright and constructive — and mediated through art. She completed a series of one hundred small canvases of the Cadia region, fifty of them depicting the local Belubula River in a golden palette using river sand and natural pigments, and the other half portraying the mine in a copper palette, using tailings from the dam and sulphide concentrate from the mine’s sag mill. She worked with Wiradjuri artists, and collaborated on canvases with neighbouring Indigenous artist Trisha Carroll. She launched further interdisciplinary projects combining art, science and storytelling that focused on the local mining landscape: The Lachlan: Blue-Gold (2003), Land$cape: Gold & Water (2003) and in 2016 a broader retrospective entitled Homeground, in which Mandy reflected on twenty years living in the Central West and selected twenty of her paintings of the region (out of more than 200) for exhibition.

As a boy, Guy would explore the rocky twists and turns of the Belubula River, whose name captures the sound of a gurgling, flowing stream, and he grew up knowing and romancing the traces of past mining in the landscape. But Cadia Hill was different in its sheer scale of mining and earth-moving and also in its amorphous international corporate elusiveness. In a beautiful essay for the Land$cape catalogue, Guy reflected that he now had “a neighbour who I do not know and probably will never know” and whose process of wealth creation lay far outside the local ecosystem or community. Nevertheless, he was determined “to explore and enlarge what we do have in common.”

Mandy, with fierce commitment, used her art to humanise the corporate face of the mine so that she could engage with it. And the argument she and Guy made through their work was that “the actual value of the Cadia region landscape is aesthetic, not material, and that the natural values of the river and native habitat if preserved, would in the long-term, outweigh the value of gold extracted from the mine.” It is a simple statement that is incontrovertibly true — if one can see long-term, can value the more-than-human, and can understand that Country needs people.

While plumbing the depths of her local region, Mandy was also prosecuting global environmental issues. Human survival in the face of massive anthropogenic climate change was a vital and urgent concern of hers for decades. In Australia, business and the arts have moved into the vacuum left by federal government denial of climate change, as Libby Robin has analysed, and are creating new partnerships such as a series of biennial Climarte Festivals, the first of which was held in 2015.

Mandy, working with Alexander Boynes and composer-musician Tristen Parr, created a series of stunning, panoramic performance pieces that combined traditional oil painting with video projection and a music composition. In Luminous Relic, a factory belching smoke gradually gave way to a collapsing Antarctic ice shelf, and in Rewriting the Score a Gondwanan fern forest morphed into an open-cut coalmine that became ravaged by fire. This piece ended with Parr, wearing a mine worker’s hard hat, poignantly playing his cello in a landscape of fern, coal and fire. These performances are visual enactments of chaos theory: time and landscapes collapse before your eyes and the globe becomes whole, elementally. Standing in that gallery in Morwell in Victoria’s Latrobe Valley in 2019, shoulder to shoulder with locals, I listened to workers moved by art who were feeling their way towards a new politics.

Martin had first painted the Yallourn Power Station in the Latrobe Valley in 1991 and here she was, a quarter of a century later, returning to the land of brown coal to deepen her critique. It is testimony to the coherence of her career. Her art began as a radical commentary on industrial and corporate power, drawing on the responses of European Romantic poets and artists to the industrial revolution to portray contemporary industrial incursions upon the Great South Land. She explored the links between the dark, satanic mills that emerged in the late eighteenth century and the vulnerable, beautiful landscapes of Australia today. As Mandy made these explorations from the 1980s, the grim implications of anthropogenic climate change burst upon us and made those links manifest in the very air we breathe.

We might reasonably say, therefore, that Mandy’s art foresaw the full horror of climate change. Her canvases from the early and mid 1980s pictured chimneys, mining residue and industrial plants in sublimely beautiful settings and they prompted us to ask: are they abandoned? is this the past or the future? is that smoke or cloud in the sky? are those mountains natural or terraformed by industry? Martin was already investigating the blurred line between nature and culture; she was preparing herself for the Anthropocene. Science eventually caught up with her and she was ready. The Sublime is both beautiful and terrible, grand and grotesque; it has a violence at its heart that threatens everything. When Mandy painted an exploding oil platform, it was both a magnificent form of terrorism and an objective commentary on fossil-fuelled cupidity.

Mandy Martin, Oblivion, 2019, pigments, acrylic and oil on linen, 200 x 200 cm. RLDI

And it is also wonderful art. When Dorothea Mackellar wrote of her love of the wide brown land in her poem My Country (1908), she evoked “her beauty and her terror.” Living on the land Mandy knew those Australian extremes, the supreme skies at sunset and the aching earth in endless drought. As an artist in thrall to the Romantic Sublime, she explored the edge between awe and fear and her paint dripped with passion. As an environmental scholar she was sensitive to delicacy and complexity, urgency and deep time, and the fragility of the planet’s predicament, the beauty and the terror. As a human being, she was warm, funny, intelligent, loving. Mandy Martin was a remarkably original, courageous and generous Australian artist whose vision of our land, and of its past and future, is inspirational. •

The post The beauty and the terror appeared first on Inside Story.

We stared at it in awe. There is something eerily grand about a creature that runs and climbs and jumps around in trees, now suddenly motionless — wildlife reduced to still life; an animal that can keep you awake half the night fallen perfectly quiet.

For the last twelve months, of course, it’s been mostly the other way round. When the world juddered to a standstill in March 2020, out came the critters. Now there really were kangaroos hopping down the main street (in our town the drought and fires had already forced the odd one to overcome its wariness of humans) and the skies, emptied of aircraft, seemed fuller of birds. All over the world, people found themselves listening harder to animals, because the background din of modern life was gone and their voices could be heard again.

Down our way, grey butcherbirds and Australian magpies seemed to sing more tunefully than before, and I grew especially aware of blackbirds. Were these European interlopers increasing in number, and should we have been worried? They’ve been in Australia since the mid nineteenth century, but from their nearly endless stream of melody late last year, my sense was that suddenly they were everywhere. Perhaps it was simply that I could hear them better.

A new book from the Welsh writer, Steven Lovatt, Birdsong in a Time of Silence, devotes a chapter to the blackbird, whose voice, at least in the British Isles, “rises unmistakable” over those of other birds in early spring. In March 2020, its song was not only the harbinger of spring; it heralded a time when people would be more aware of the sounds of nature than at any point since before the industrial revolution. Skylarks poured out their song from on high with greater clarity than before; cuckoos were more widely heard; there were even nightingales.

Scientists around the world have seized on this new-found peace. The Australian composer, Leah Barclay, who is leads a double life as a researcher in the area of acoustic ecology, has a particular fascination with waterways. Her recordings (made mostly with underwater microphones) feed her creative endeavours but also enhance our understanding of animal and plant life. The sensitive hydrophones can, for instance, pick up the sound of gases being exchanged by plants on a river bed, particularly if there is no noise from boats. The quietening of the rivers and oceans made such work not only easier, but different.

Michelle Fournet, from Cornell University, found that her study of humpback whales in Glacier Bay, Alaska, no longer depended on the few hours when the cruise ships weren’t around. Suddenly she had a whole summer. Because cruise ships predated her recording technology, she was hearing things no one had ever heard before. And the whales? Without ship noise to contend with, their songs seemed quieter and more nuanced. They could hear each other better, and they could also hear themselves.

Lovatt suggests in his book that the silence of the coronavirus shutdown meant the earth “could hear itself think,” but while that must surely be counted a good thing, it was doubtless confronting for some. There is evidence that being deprived of noise you have come to take for granted can prove discomfiting.

Take the damming, in 1929, of the rapids on the Vuoksi river in southeastern Finland. This was just twelve years after Finland gained its independence from Russia, and the construction of a hydroelectric dam was regarded as symbolic of the country’s progress. There were national celebrations. Sibelius was asked to composed an Imatra symphony (he didn’t). Ambassadors and heads of state came to witness the silencing of the Vuoksi.

But locals who had lived their lives against a sonic backdrop of the roaring river were spooked. It was too quiet, and the oddly noisy chirping of finches and warblers in the surrounding forests was small compensation.

A few years ago, I composed a piece about this moment, called Rauha (the Finnish word for peace). It begins with its climax — a hectic downward rush of notes that quickly peters out to almost nothing. Then there’s an unsettling fifteen minutes of silence punctuated by the occasional instrument, sometimes joltingly loud. Like those Finnish citizens last century, the listeners are left on edge wondering what might happen next and how this piece will end — how the peace will end.

As our lives return to something resembling their old routines, and the continuity of background noise resumes, many people, whether or not they are fully aware of it, will feel a sense of relief from the latter. But equally there are those of us who’ll be sorry to find that birdsong is less prominent, and life less safe for possums. •

The post Sounds of silence appeared first on Inside Story.

With summers cycling closer, hotter, longer — sweating dread — I’ve lately been rummaging through my closet of high Holocene winters: soup on slow combustion stoves, spencers and stockings, coal briquettes, puddles that crack underfoot, frost over paddocks and breath hanging in air, chilblains — remember those? Cold will still come, of course, in extremis, supercharged by wild shifts in the firmament. But the winters of my memory belong to a vanished epoch, and I’m bereft.

This isn’t nostalgia, but rather a condition environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht has identified as “solastalgia,” derived from solace (the lack of it) and desolation: “the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault.” A fortifying wander back through the geological continuum promises some perspective. Comfort, cold or otherwise, is surely too much to ask.

The plane from Melbourne is scarcely up and it’s down again in Launceston. A two-hour drive west and we’re pulling up on Tasmania’s Central Plateau. The southerly from the Antarctic is brutal but the plateau — the island’s highest landscape — is washed in eye-watering, pale sunlight, the kind that doesn’t warm so much as cook unprotected flesh. On a wide, wild plain not far from Lake Mackenzie, three figures are at work in the middle distance. They’re ecologists mapping environmental refugia, locations where topography, geography and climate have contrived a sweet spot within which besieged species find nurturing conditions for survival.

Even a day or two will do me, in my own search for refuge. Walking out to them, I’m lagging in the sure-footed wake of Ben French, a young ecologist who has enthused about the bush, the threats posed to it by climate change and his PhD subject — a rescue strategy for Athrotaxis cupressoides, Tasmania’s endemic pencil pine — for the length of the ride from the airport. The venerable tree’s majesty is rather lost in translation from the Latin. It dates back 150 million years, one of the oldest surviving plant lineages on Earth.

“There’s just something about them,” says French. “Something charismatic…” He’s struggling for the words, as I will, and do. Google the images of the late, legendary nature photographer Peter Dombrovskis — “Pencil pine at pool of Siloam, Walls of Jerusalem National Park, Tasmania, 1982.” You’ll see our transcendent, gnarly, haunting, humbling, portentous, gobsmacking problem.

The ground beneath my boots feels rubbery, otherworldly — and it is. Sphagnum peat can take millennia to form. It belongs to the same Gondwanan landscape as the pencil pine — the understorey and overstorey of the same primeval narrative. It deserves worship, not clumsy intrusion. It sighs and shifts as I pick a route across spiky hummocks and between clumps of vivid green, velvety cushion plants — up to 1000 years old, sorry, so sorry! — weaving around littered lumps of dolerite and basalt; occasionally stumbling into the sucking quagmire that threads the entire plain.

The bog — but really, who could call it such? — extends over an area the size of several footy grounds, enclosed by stands of snow gums (Eucalyptus coccifera) and a tumble of Jurassic cliffs. It’s a rare, precious ecosystem — a steeping sponge cake of decomposing plants and mosses that purifies and regulates water flows, nurtures biodiversity, and works heroically to cool the planet and mitigate humanity’s spiralling atmospheric crimes. Barely 3 per cent of the Earth’s surface hosts peatlands, yet they soak up and store more carbon than all the world’s other vegetation combined. Damage to these carbon sinks is a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, and they are being whacked by ever more severe droughts and rampaging firestorms. Which is why efforts to try to restore them, like the one under way here, are imperative.

Everywhere, this plain sprouts ghostly clumps of knee-high, ash-grey antlers — the remains of Richea scoparia, an alpine heath that ordinarily paints a sublime springtime palette of pink and red and creamy yellow across the highlands. But these specimens won’t bloom again. They were roasted in January 2016 when, after a record-breaking spell of heat and drought across the island, dry lightning strikes ignited even these historically non-combustible wetlands. Wildfires consumed almost 20,000 hectares of World Heritage–listed wilderness that summer. And that was merely the curtain-raiser. Three years later, in the summer of 2018–19, blazes sparked by massive dry lightning storms burned another 95,000-plus hectares of wilderness. Months later, these areas are still a no-go zone.

The bog is pockmarked with fire damage of various degrees. The only colours flowering in the rubble of rock, blackened trees and singed earth are fixed to tall rods planted in the ground by the field team — plastic squares of luminous orange, yellow, green, blue that will be used to plot aerial surveys. The crew, huddled in protective layers, is hard at work. Researcher Scott Nichols is doubled over, closely inspecting sphagnum mounds within the patchwork of survey squares. He calls out coordinates to Aimee Bliss, one of two research assistants, who scrawls them on a data sheet along with his diagnosis: “Healthy,” “Damaged,” “Killed.”

Sphagnum is a bryophyte — the oldest of all land plants, and likely the surviving link between aquatic and land plants. The building block for the peatlands ecology, it has no defences against wildfire. The healthy specimens clinging on here, Nichols explains, are mostly edging the puddles in the bog. Understanding in granular detail the response of peatlands to fire is critical to informing evolving efforts to try to preserve and rehabilitate them. His data sheets document vegetation and animal scats, peat depth and acidity. Drone shots will add the microtopography of slope and aspect.

In the next phase Nichols, Bliss and the last of the trio, Cameron Geeves, will peg small canopies of shade cloth over some areas — sphagnum doesn’t like ultraviolet radiation — scatter fertiliser to stimulate growth, and transplant cuttings of healthy growth to burnt areas. Then they will wait and watch and, over years to come, send in the drones to see what, if anything, works.

It’s painstaking, physically battering and psychologically bruising work — these are, after all, lovers of the natural world; scientists with an unblinkered understanding of what is unfolding. I’ve met many like them over fifteen years, on and off, reporting on climate science, and observed the tenor of their distress rising with the temperatures and the parts per million. This is, surely, a doomed endeavour?

No, declares Professor David Bowman, the storied scientist whose work has brought me here, and who is overseeing these projects, when he strides into the picture, a six-foot-something, sixty-one-year-old dervish of energy and flapping Gore-Tex, hollering questions and opinions over the wind. His forty-year scientific career has earned him recognition as one of the world’s foremost fire ecologists. This trial may not save the bog, he concedes. But that won’t constitute failure. What we may learn is that “if we lose one of these bogs, it’s basically gone forever.” Then the work would need to shift: identify unburnt bogs and “make sure they never get burnt.”

But how would this be possible? Bowman starts reeling off strategies that smack of environmental heresy. “It might be getting people with whipper-snippers and cutting a fire break around it. It might be getting solar-powered pumps and irrigating it during the summer. I have no bloody idea.” He expects many people will label such ideas as ridiculous. “But everything’s ridiculous now.”

Bowman was the lead author of a paper published by a cohort of distinguished Australian ecologists and biologists in 2018 urging a radical overhaul of conservation strategies in the Anthropocene, a shift to what they call “renewal ecology.” The noble Edenic ambitions of existing conservation efforts, of recovering ecosystems, were now futile, they argued. Environmental change was “inevitable and irrevocable.” The rate, scale and magnitude of the global crisis demanded hitherto unimaginable efforts to manage ecosystems to maximise the prospects for both biodiversity and humans. Whipper-snippering the wilderness, if that’s what it takes, to salvage what is salvageable.

Renewal ecology is about pushing back, “saying we’ve got nothing to lose,” says Bowman. “The precautionary principle made perfect sense in a non-Anthropocene environment, but once you are in the Anthropocene… it’s pointless. ‘Oh, something bad might happen.’

“No. Something bad is happening.”

As the chunk of the fragmented, fecund supercontinent of Gondwanaland we recognise today as Australia meandered northward, eucalypts and acacias capitalised on warmer, drier conditions, evolving to tolerate and even regenerate through wildfire. Gondwanan survivors like A. cupressoides clung on in damp, cool niches. Tasmania became the lifeboat for paleoendemic species, treasures that today underwrite the World Heritage status of the island’s wilderness.

When Aboriginal people wandered into the scene via a land bridge around 35,000 years ago, they brought fire to manage the landscape — a practice that has long intrigued Bowman. In all their thousands of years of occupancy, he says, Aboriginal fire regimes caused little disturbance to the Gondwanan forests. But since European colonisation, one-third of the island’s pencil pines have gone. Around half the specimens on the Central Plateau were lost in a single summer, 1960–61, when graziers set the bush alight to renew grasslands for their livestock. Until the 1990s, most wildfires were the result of deliberate or inadvertent human ignition. They still are, though these days humanity doesn’t need to strike the match.

Fire scars left on ancient trees and other paleo clues show that lightning has ignited Tasmania in deep history, but this occurred only rarely until 2000. Since then, dry lightning fires have become an almost annual event. In January 2016, after some of the driest and warmest months on record, eighty dry lightning fires ignited across western Tasmania. On 15 January 2019 — a single day — over 2000 strikes sparked more than sixty bushfires. Bowman likens what played out to “an alien spaceship coming in and just attacking the island with lightning bolts.”

While there’s been wide speculation that lightning activity is increasing, continuing work by scientists indicates that this is likely not the case. The lightning has always been there, they argue. What’s changed is that these bolts find the kindling for an incendiary new regime. As the planet heats, the rains produced by the low-pressure systems that nurtured the ecosystems of southern Australia over the aeons have been drifting south, falling into the sea, while evaporation is increasing. “Ongoing climate change is making dry spells longer and more frequent, increasing the fire prone area of Tasmania,” scientists explained in the Conversation in the wake of the 2019 fires. “Almost the whole state is becoming vulnerable to dry lightning.”

Leaving the sphagnum crew to their work, we set out across the singed landscape of Eagle Valley towards a site that the scientists unromantically identify as “Unburnt South.” First we must traverse a swathe of desolate, burnt country, dropping in on locations where French has been doing some research gardening, planting pencil pine seeds under a range of conditions he will monitor for years to come.

Bowman, a hiker since his teens, is as weather-beaten as the country, but moves across it at a cracking pace. He launches into a running, unfiltered commentary on the scene. “It was horrible,” of course, what happened here, he says, surveying scorched rocks and trees. “But it was amazing, there was so much learning and science, and then you are reframing thinking and breaking it down and building it up… Do I really believe that we can restore these systems? Well, as the world’s warming, it’s probably a 1000-year program to be planting seeds. It’s an amazing gesture.”

Lightning ignited what became the Mersey Forest Fire Complex on 13 January 2016, and over the next week blazes raged and merged, outrunning the capacity of local and interstate crews to respond. The firestorm gained such power it was spotting up to nine kilometres ahead as it exploded up Devils Gullet — a deep, narrow glacial gorge — and onto the plateau here at Lake Mackenzie. The peatlands smouldered until May.

Images shot in late January by photographer Rob Blakers, who built his reputation capturing the beauty of the Tasmanian wilderness, revealed the shattering scale of the loss — one of the world’s most treasured ecosystems reduced to a patchwork of char and toasted cushion plants. “The Central Plateau is littered by the gaunt skeletons of burnt pencil pines,” Blakers wrote in the Hobart Mercury, a tragedy that “brings grief to anyone who has a sense of what the living tree is like.” Bowman told the Age/Sydney Morning Herald that the vanishing of these trees was akin to “losing the thylacine.” He pulled no punches: “I think I would be being unethical and unprofessional if I didn’t form the diagnosis and say what it is — climate change. Under the current rate of warming I think this ecosystem will be gone in fifty years.”

That quote captured something of a seismic professional and personal moment, Bowman recalls. For years, he’d been tissue-wrapping his commentary with the customary caveats of science, “always sort of dancing on the spot… ‘Oh well, you know fires and the historical context, we can’t really say what’s climate change.’ And I just said, ‘This is what climate change looks like it. This is it.’ I just was over it.”

He argues for interventions like planned burnings, recognising that this looms as a “philosophical rupture” with the concept of self-sustaining wilderness, one that offends many conservationists and greens. But the vulnerability of the bush in the Anthropocene “has raised profound philosophical questions, and ongoing political discussion, about acceptable responses to the impacts of climate change on this World Heritage area.”

Ben French summons us to look at one of his sites, where he’s sown pencil pine seeds that happened — in a bit of cosmic good luck — to have been collected by the Royal Tasmanian Botanical Gardens for their seed bank not long before the fires. “I’m trying to capture all the variability within a site,” he explains, dispersing seeds between sphagnum hummocks, some up on the top, some down on the wet edges of the bog. Half of them are protected by small teepees of galvanised mesh, the remainder are at the mercy of herbivore grazers foreign and domestic — wallabies, wombats, rabbits and possums the lead culprits.

“Jo — you’ve walked between the markers!”

“Oh shit — did I just kill it?”

French assures me not. His anxious expression says otherwise.

Athrotaxis cupressoides can take fifty years to reach just a metre in height. Individual stems have been aged at over 1000 years, though it’s suspected they may be much older. The pencil pine and the King Billy pine, A. selaginoides, are a rare pair, the only extant species of their ancient genus.

Relic Gondwana: a glade of Athrotaxis cupressoides, or pencil pine. Jo Chandler

“Let’s imagine this works,” says Bowman. “Let’s be really optimistic — say some of these seeds take, and they germinate into little seedlings, then Ben will come here when he’s my age and say, ‘I did that.’ That would be awesome.” The other possibility, he expands, is that “we learn that it is just not going to work.” We learn that to salvage the species we’re going to have to find locations where it survives “and we’re going to irrigate it, and we’re going to have bloody fire breaks, and we’re going to save these things because we love them… It would be quite possible, theoretically, to excavate a pencil pine, dig it up with a crane, put it on the back of a truck and take it somewhere and plant it.”

The idea of translocating vulnerable species — plants and animals — out of harm’s way, once the solution of last resort, has gained pace and reluctant acceptance in triaging the Anthropocene emergency. Bowman raises the prospect of moving pencil pine specimens to botanic gardens, or cultivating them somewhere like Macquarie Island, where conditions may suit them for a while yet. This is the same guy who controversially argued in a Nature article a few years ago that one option for managing remote Australia’s multiple ecological problems was to bring in elephants and rhinos to control invasive, highly combustible gamba grass. “Of course, introducing large mammals cannot solve all of Australia’s ecological-management conundrums,” he wrote. “But the usual approaches… aren’t working. The full spectrum of options needs to be canvassed in an open and honest way.”

After an hour or so marching in the footprint of the inferno, surrounded by the agonies of ashen limbs reaching into blue sky, we finally find our way into Unburnt South. Indigo pools of water are surrounded by mounds of heath and greenery and stands of pencil pines. Surveying the growth under one of them, French leans in and gently teases out a young wild-sown pencil pine shoot — barely up to his first knuckle, it requires the keenest eye to find.

There’s a dense glade of A. cupressoides gathered in the lee of a cliff, a cathedral of surviving Gondwana. Stepping inside, it’s a tangle of moss and lichen, carpets of russet and yellow under labyrinthine branches. They’ve meandered over centuries of unhurried life, bulging joints wrapped in the wrinkled flesh of grey, flaking bark. The foliage, tendrils of delicate green, utterly unlike the familiar dressings of nearby eucalypts, turns to shades of pink and burgundy where it falls into the litter of magnificent decay.

The tree trunks are crowded close, sometimes leaning in unison, then suddenly individuals turning towards… what? It’s been discovered only lately that these are clonal organisms. “They’re all connected by underground stems and root suckers,” explains Bowman. “When you get your eye in, you can see they grow in clumps, or they grow in lines, and they’re very, very, very old.” How old surviving clones like these might be is difficult to say, but as explained in a Nature paper Bowman co-authored, at least some individuals may be survivors from the first seedlings that established on freshly exposed ground following the retreat of the ice sheet after the Last Glacial Maximum. “It’s not outside the realm of possibility they’ve been in situ for 10,000 years just spreading out,” he expands.

Perhaps this glade is a single organism — communicating, socialising and supporting itself via an intricate web of hidden roots and fungal filaments, conspiracies of insects and the chemistry of scent. Science has only lately begun to crack the coded language of trees, the social network of what’s being dubbed the “wood wide web,” which enables the forest community to share resources like water, to protect and care for its members and to warn them of dangers.

Shafts of sunlight insinuate themselves through the canopy, illuminating spiderwebs and bouquets of burnished moss that look more like they belong to the seabed than the forest floor. The light is dreamy. Breathing Gondwana, this inheritance of tens of millions of years of growth and renewal and survival provides some powerful solace. Wanting nothing so much as to lie down in this faerie dell and quietly metamorphose, I recall the theory that trees pump out perfumes to protect themselves from intruders. A. cupressoides is wafting something seductive, sedative. It’s all I can do to return to my time.

Following our trio of lengthening shadows back out across the fire zone, the Anthropocene — or the Pyrocene, as Bowman’s US colleague, Stephen J. Pyne declares it — feels all the more achingly impoverished. But Bowman weighs in with an unexpected take. Ecology is complicated, he observes. Climate change adds to that complexity. “It’s shape-shifting, like those games people have with the strings between their fingers… The same stuff can be rearranged and you get different outcomes.” Many of these may seem to represent an undoing. But there are other shapes to conjure.

American environmental activist and deep ecology scholar Joanna Macy talks about the epic collision now playing out, of “The Great Unravelling, under the pressure of the destruction caused by the industrial growth society” versus “The Great Turning… the transition to a life-sustaining society” built on new and sometimes very old ways of holding the land, generating energy, producing food. “The awesome thing about the moment that you and I share is that we don’t know which is going to win out. How is the story going to end?” So she said in an interview a decade ago. I wonder if she still believes the outcome is in the balance.

“The problem with the Anthropocene is that it can be presented as an end-of-times end, whereas really what it is is a threshold,” says Bowman. “It’s going into a new state, things are reassembling.” We need to try to find a different, more optimistic lens, he argues, or to at least be striving to learn from what is unfolding, to not see everything through the prism of what we’re losing or have lost. It will take another conversation or two for it to dawn that while I am flailing about in stages three, four and five of my grieving (anger, bargaining, depression), Bowman has long since graduated through testing and acceptance and is craning his neck towards the sunlit uplands.

“Okay, I’ve got a confession to make,” he says, pulling up and gesturing to a stand of casualties of the wildfires. “Even those dead pencil pines to me have a fantastic beauty about them. It’s killed, and it’s sad, but I can’t get angry about the fire… this was nature, nature started it.”

But it’s not, I object. It’s deeply unnatural — “nature kicked in the arse by human-driven climate change.”

“Yes, there is the stupidity,” he concedes, and pushes on. “If you say, ‘Okay, we want to make war with the climate,’ then the climate is going to win. It’s just going to crush us… [But] I can look at this and I go, ‘Well, you know it’s changing. It got burnt. It’s sad, but it’s regenerating, and there is going to be life here, and it’s still a beautiful landscape’… Even if all the pines get killed, it’s still beautiful.”

French agrees to the extent that yes, “the fact that it’s copped a beating and has changed doesn’t mean it is a write-off.” But the young man is less phlegmatic about what is playing out. “I find it really tragic, personally. It’s an area where I’ve spent a lot of time. Which I’m really attached to. I love pencil pines.”

“So do I,” Bowman interjects.

“I find it hard to be optimistic about it, going forward,” says French. “I find it quite upsetting.”

We rejoin the sphagnum crew for the night in a hut on the parched shores of Lake Mackenzie, sharing a vat of spicy vegetables stewed on a wood stove by lamplight. We’re stripped to our sweaty thermals, boots and socks drying by the hearth. Outside it’s bitterly cold, and the intergalactic views stretch from horizon to horizon. Inside it’s cosy and convivial, albeit a little ripe.

As a non-scientist and serial intruder on fieldwork, I love the raw exhaustion and intimacy of this downtime, where scientific problems and camp menus are deliberated with equal weight; where clever, curious and often unconventional beings are cloistered with their histories, preoccupations and foibles away from the distractions of the workaday world. It’s in these moments I’ve often found the most revelatory morsels for my notebooks. But this evening is just the warm-up.

Next morning, we take a short drive to the lookout over Devils Gullet, a platform levitating above sheer grey cliffs “carved out by ice and water moving off the plateau,” a sign advises. It allows 180-degree views over 200 million years of history: the “intrusion of hard dolerite rocks from deep within the Earth,” the uplift of the plateau, the advance and retreat of the ice sheet half-a-dozen times over the past two million years, the most recent glaciation peaking around 20,000 years ago. And, in all directions, the scars of the inferno that tore through here three summers gone. Spectral forests stripped of their canopy.

“Doesn’t it break your heart, to see all that burnt?”

“No, not really,” Bowman shrugs. “They’re eucalypts — it will regenerate. In fact, I’m surprised how much it has regenerated.” The lesson of so many years exploring biology is that “life is spectacularly resilient… I have no concern about life.” Which isn’t to say that it will be life as we know it.

Bowman describes the intensity and pace of the fire as it powered along this gorge in 2016. The fallout could have been much worse. One small shift in the wind and we would have lost the last, large remaining refugium of A. cupressoides, a forest called Dixons Kingdom in the Walls of Jerusalem National Park, hiding out somewhere south of us. Climate models have underestimated aspects of fire behaviour in the Anthropocene, he says, and are having to be recalibrated in light of the real-world fallout of just one degree of warming. “I’ve always found the whole thing vaguely hilarious,” he says. “People think that climate change is going to be staged. It’s actually punctuated by these incredible… thresholds, stresses. And then boom, it just changes.”

Our comprehension of the Anthropocene falls short on so many fronts. We broadly blame humanity, but not all humans are equal in their contributions to the mess. “Aboriginal cultures lived here pretty sustainably,” he observes, and adapted as the ice ebbed and flowed across the landscape beneath us. “There’s a cultural dimension going on here, and I think that’s the struggle that we’re involved with. What sort of society are we going to have? How are we going to adapt to the planetary constraints?”

By now we’re on the road, swerving around dead animals. Tasmania is unhappily recognised as the roadkill capital of the world, littered with bloodied carnage — possums, wallabies, pademelons, rabbits. Once these were kept in check by thylacines, and by Indigenous hunters, and then colonial trappers trading their pelts and meat. Today, the apex predators wince, ride the sickening bump and keep driving. Even in country cherished as World Heritage wilderness, so many cascading layers of disturbance. “If I was a good person, I would stop and drag that off the road,” Bowman says of the next casualty, a wallaby. He’s not being sentimental. Endangered Tasmanian devils and quolls come to feast on the dead, only to get taken out by the next vehicle. But we push on, we’re on the clock — he has a phone conference, and I have a flight to catch.

“What do the Gaians do?” asks Bowman.

I’m stumped. Who?

“The Gaians are the society that comes after the Anthropocene.”

I admit I’ve not heard of them.

“I made them up. It’s just an idea, for fun.” He’s conjured up a population for the next Earth, named for Gaia, the Greek goddess of the Earth, who was famously also appropriated back in the 1960s by James Lovelock to capture his theory of the planet as a living, self-regulating organism.

Bowman’s Gaians “are the people who come out the other side. And you have to ask the question… what do they do? What animates them? What is their belief? I know they are going to exist, but I don’t know what they do.” He’s workshopping some ideas. Even in humanity’s darkest moments, “art somehow survives, people still value things.” Ultimately their life’s work, their cultural work, will be about ecological restoration. “Because their survival will depend on it. Everything will be about restoration. It’s not about living with nature — it’s tending and restoring nature because the system will have been crashed so badly.”

Bowman’s not alone thinking about these next Earthlings. In her 2016 book Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene, University of Melbourne geographer Lesley Head has a chapter pondering “The Anthropoceans,” and how they (we?) remake ourselves and our world. They will “have emotional work to do” in the fallout, “they will practise hope rather than feel it,” they will toil physically much harder for the basics of life, they will have to be good at sharing, they will understand the many ways we are “embedded in the processes of the earth” but not “green” as we now know it. Like Bowman, she argues that the traditions of preservationist, conservationist environmentalism “are insufficiently powerful to deal with current and projected reality.”

By now we’re off the plateau, following the instructions of our iPhone navigator to our last stop before Bowman drops me in Launceston. In between directions, he is workshopping his thesis, wondering out loud about how the Gaians will manage questions of justice, how they will organise their resources, what the family unit might look like. “I’m pretty certain that it’s going to be more a matriarchy, more female dominated.”

He’s hazy (evasive?) on what will play out between our reality and theirs. He’s firmly directing his gaze somewhere past that conceivably apocalyptic horizon. Having witnessed the growing distress and anger of scientists who understand what we have done and where we are heading, I’m inclined to diagnose this as an insulating, self-care mechanism. Psychological refugium? I’m content to join him there, for now.

“Let’s be a bit more optimistic and assume that we get through the Anthropocene. Obviously, you know, capitalism will end and everything is going to change, like it already has. What will they [humans] do?… The narrative of the utopian stream or strand in the crisis we are in is not being tended.”

What if, he says, the Gaians look back at the work of people like the ones we’ve just left behind on the plateau nurturing sphagnum and pencil pines, “and understand that humans had this capacity not only to destroy nature but to tend nature, and then the nature that we have is not about a binary — it’s wilderness or not wilderness. It’s us. It’s our expression.”

Which is not to say it isn’t going to be hellish. “These people are going to be shit-scared. The storms that are coming are just mad… The capacity of an energised climate to create mayhem well… the insurance industry’s noticing what that’s like, and it hasn’t even started yet.”

And yet, he’s feeling “weirdly optimistic,” partly because we owe that to the generations who will live with it — among them his students, working up there on the plateau. And because, as this terrifying next Earth looms, “as the shit hits the fan, now we can get on with it. We can snap out of our torpor and break out of our denial because it’s the denial that is causing an amazing amount of the anxiety. People are so anxious.”

We pull up at a bushland property in the Liffey Valley at the foot of Drys Bluff, a steep precipice at the northern edge of the Central Plateau. We’re visiting a native plant nursery where Sally and Herbert Staubmann have conjured hundreds of pencil pine seedlings, some from seeds collected by the botanic gardens team, some from seeds they have collected themselves under permit, some from cuttings they’ve cultivated. These are the stock that will be used by Ben French and Scott Nichols to expand their restoration trials up on the plateau.

Herbert Staubmann, Austrian by birth, came to Australia as an electromechanic with Siemens. “I worked in Darwin for a while on big motors and generators in a tin shed before the wet season. I met a Swiss guy who worked in a nursery and I said, ‘I’ve had this — I want to work outdoors.’” Having given up machinery to get his hands dirty in horticulture, he found his way to this piece of magic country where he fell in love with Australian eucalypts and with Tasmanian-raised Sally.

While their nursery is a substantial operation, producing bulk quantities of some 400 varieties of natives, mostly Tasmanian endemics that they sell to councils, farmers, the hydro, and parks and wildlife authorities, it sits seamlessly within the wildscape. Plants are raised on unfenced terraces; native creatures are encouraged to roam and graze beneath, birds to come in and control the pests; and stormwater drains are lush with rushes and sedges to keep the frogs happy. The couple are proud of what they have built here over twenty years. There’s a rare aura about them, a contentment and gentleness, humility. Perhaps that is the gift of tending to seasons, to nature.

The couple show us their crop of A. cupressoides — rows and rows of what look like fragile green corals set in small black pots. They fuss protectively, plucking out invisible weeds, explaining how they’ve been experimenting with different techniques to try to raise sturdy specimens sufficient to meet the needs of the scientists. Cuttings are so far proving the easier option, but Herbert suspects that, long term, plants grown from seed will do better out in an increasingly hostile world.

“I sow them in autumn, let them germinate outside, leave them out over winter,” Herbert explains. “I’ve never had them dampen off — meaning succumb to a fungal infection.” But this year, trying to hurry things along to provide seedlings to Ben French, he put them for a spell in the propagation house “and they just started keeling over — I got them out and salvaged what I could.”

Sally Staubmann chimes in: “I think the strongest ones are the ones that come up outside over winter. That’s my theory.”

Herbert spent all the previous day roaming up on the plateau looking for seeds, returning with a tiny bagful to show for his efforts. “I’m not very confident that there’s a lot of viable seed,” he explains. “They seem to be aborting early — see the small ones here? I need to put a couple of those under the dissecting lens to see if there is a viable embryo in there.”

They’re excited to be part of the research effort, the restoration trials, to play a part in efforts to preserve A. cupressoides into the future, but they’re mindful that they are in a trial-and-error race against time and more than a bit anxious about how it will all turn out. “The important thing for Ben’s project — for your project — is to get these to a good size,” Herbert says.

Bowman reassures them. One way or another the trials will yield a result — he’s not worried about that. As he’s tried to impress on his students and field crews, failure is also success in what it teaches about how to go forward. But Herbert and Sally Staubmann are plainly more sentimentally inclined, hoping to see the survival of at least some proportion of their precious progeny. Herbert pulls up a punnet to show me what a plant sown from seed a year ago now looks like, forefinger prodding the soil to find the barely-there growth. “You’re looking at a couple of seed leaves in their initial stage, that are narrow and long… so they’re slow.”

I tell him I saw some wild-sown seedlings up on the plateau with Ben French yesterday.

“You actually found some? Some germinating seeds? Wow.”

It’s time for us to go — beyond time, so it’s a hurried round of farewells. The Staubmanns wave us off, smiling broadly. They are both small in stature, wearing skin and clothes weathered by the elements. They remind me of garden gnomes.

“What did you think of that?” Bowman asks as we pull away. The couple have already vanished into the landscape that they have contrived and preserved: architects and inheritors, consumers and custodians.

“It’s them.” The realisation falls out of my mouth. “They’re them. They’re Gaians.” •

This essay appears in the new anthology, Living with the Anthropocene: Love, Loss and Hope in the Face of Environmental Crisis, edited by Cameron Muir, Kirsten Wehner and Jenny Newell, published by NewSouth.

The post Weekend in Gondwana appeared first on Inside Story.

The clash on 7 December followed a month of roadblocks and demonstrations across the French Pacific dependency of New Caledonia. The protests were called by the “Usine du Sud = Usine Pays” collective, which unites customary chiefs, environment groups, trade unionists and members of the independence coalition Front de Libération Nationale Kanak et Socialiste, or FLNKS.

The immediate dispute was over which consortium could bid for the Goro nickel smelter and the other assets of Vale Nouvelle-Calédonie. The company, which began nickel smelting in 2010, is the local subsidiary of the Brazilian corporation Vale, one of the largest mining companies in the world, with interests in logistics, transport, energy and steel making. Vale is pulling out of New Caledonia by year’s end, threatening 3000 jobs.

But the battle over Vale’s assets hides a deeper struggle. Can the local people control New Caledonia’s extensive natural resources, including nearly a quarter of the world’s reserves of nickel, as they move towards a new political status?

Vale’s decision to leave New Caledonia was announced in December 2019, between two referendums on self-determination — the first in November 2018 and the second in October this year. In both cases, a majority of registered voters expressed a desire to remain within the French Republic. But the narrow margin of 57–43 per cent in 2018 and the closer 53–47 vote this year suggest the territory will move to the third and final vote by 2022. As New Caledonians decide on their political future, the independence movement believes that increased local control of the mining sector will help underpin a sovereign and independent nation.

Across Melanesia, recent conflicts in Bougainville, West Papua and New Caledonia have reflected concern about environmental management and the role of transnational resource companies. Mining lies at the heart of the political ecology of these Melanesian dependencies, both as a cause of discontent — about environmental damage and the distribution of financial benefits — and as a resource for economic viability in a postcolonial nation.

Kanak nationalists have learnt many lessons from mining operations elsewhere in Papua New Guinea, Nauru and other independent nations in the region, with their tragic history of environmental damage, tax avoidance and unequal distribution of royalties. Facing off against the French state and transnational mining corporations, they have long sought to add value to the islands’ main resources, nickel ore and other strategic minerals, rather than simply ship them offshore unprocessed.

After New Caledonia’s violent conflict of the 1980s, independence leaders sought to open up the nickel sector to foreign companies. Under the 1969 Billotte laws, France guaranteed an effective monopoly over nickel smelting to the French corporation ERAMET and its local subsidiary Société Le Nickel, which operates the Doniambo smelter in Noumea. The French government used its Strategic Investment Fund to maintain a 25 per cent holding in ERAMET, and has subsidised Société Le Nickel in good times and bad.

In the North Province, where the population is majority indigenous Kanak, the provincial administration established a development arm, the Société de Financement et d’Investissement de la Province Nord, or Sofinor, which purchased the mining company Société Minière du Sud Pacifique, or SMSP, in 1990. Led by local entrepreneur Andre Dang, SMSP has developed new smelting capacity over the past three decades, as well as becoming a major global exporter of nickel.

“We don’t want New Caledonia to end up like Nauru,” Dang told me last year. “They were a world leader in phosphate mining, but they abused it and used it all up. They are a sad country. So our strategy is to add value to the resource, which can generate funds for use in sectors beyond the nickel industry, to benefit the country and future generations.”

New Caledonia’s governing agreement, the May 1998 Noumea Accord, created new political institutions and transferred administrative and legal powers from Paris to the territory, opening the way for re-equilibrage (economic rebalancing) between the wealthy South Province and two rural provinces in the North and the outlying Loyalty Islands.

The Accord could only be signed because contending parties had previously agreed on the préalable minier (mining precondition) posed by the independence movement. The February 1998 Bercy agreement had allowed the transfer of strategic deposits of high-grade nickel ore in the Koniambo Massif to SMSP and Sofinor, opening the way for the US$6 billion Koniambo nickel smelter at Vavouto, in the north of Grande Terre, the main island. Today, this smelter is operated by Koniambo Nickel SAS, or KNS, a joint venture between SMSP and the transnational corporation Glencore. In an unprecedented deal, Dang persuaded the Anglo-Swiss financial conglomerate to grant SMSP 51 per cent controlling interest in KNS, even as Glencore provides finance and technology.

SMSP developed a strategy to raise finance by exporting lower-grade nickel ore to Korea and China through joint ventures over which it had 51 per cent control, keeping higher-grade ore for Koniambo. The company now has two joint ventures with the Korean corporation Posco: one, the Nickel Mining Company, exports tens of thousands of tonnes of ore to Gwangyang in South Korea, for smelting at the other, the Société du Nickel de Nouvelle-Calédonie et Corée.

The next challenge was to export even lower-grade ore to a joint-venture smelter in China. In October 2017, SMSP signed a memorandum of understanding with Yangzhou Yichuan Nickel Industry Co. Ltd. to develop a joint project, once again with a 51 per cent majority for SMSP–Sofinor. Ore exports to China began in 2018, moving beyond traditional markets in Australia and Japan.

Despite technical delays at Koniambo and massive financial inputs, SMSP’s operations in the North can be contrasted with a series of social and environmental disasters at Vale’s Goro plant in the South Province. Since it began production in 2010, the plant’s high-pressure acid-leach technology has generated major environmental problems and the South Province only holds a minority stake in Vale’s operations.

The Goro smelter and Vale’s nickel ore reserves are located in the Kanak customary region of Djubea-Kapumë, which makes up the southernmost portion of Grande Terre. In the two decades since the project was conceived, Vale has engaged in tense struggles with local customary leaders operating through the Rhéébù Nùù committee (“eye of the land” in the local Drubea language), which seeks environmental protection, jobs and opportunities for local subcontractors.

After violent protests in 2006, Vale and Rhéébù Nùù signed a cooperation pact to govern relations with local Kanak tribes. But once operations began, a series of acid spills from the Goro smelter damaged the freshwater ecosystem that provides resources and livelihoods to local villagers. A major leak of acid effluent from Goro in May 2014 sparked violent clashes with unions, neighbouring Kanak tribes and subcontractors, amid calls for the smelter to be closed.

Today, buffeted by these local disputes and the rollercoaster of global nickel prices, Vale wants out.

The value of nickel has fluctuated wildly in the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russia initially flooded the market with its reserves, sinking the price on the London Metal Exchange; later, when the booming Chinese economy increased demand, new smelters — including the Koniambo and Goro plants — were set up to ride the wave. But overproduction overlaid by technological delays and financial pressure left KNS, Vale and ERAMET–Société Le Nickel struggling with debt and falling share prices.

All three ventures were looking forward to a bonanza when more nickel will be needed for electric car batteries. But the recent slowdown in China’s growth and the impact of the 2020 pandemic has made it hard to maintain existing markets. Vale was the first to crack, announcing in December last year that it would sell its New Caledonian operations. The sale is being managed by the Rothschild bank, which issued a public offer and called for bids.

Nickel smelting is a specialised industry, and relatively few companies have the technical expertise to run the complex acid-leach technology while meeting environmental standards. With the financialisation of the global economy in recent decades, the nickel industry has become the target for speculators rather than long-established metallurgy companies like France’s ERAMET or Canada’s Inco and Falconbridge.

Because of its use as an alloy and for manufacturing stainless steel, and with demand fuelled by China’s remarkable growth, “nickel has become one of the sexiest metals on the planet,” writes natural resources expert Laurent Châtenay. “It has aroused the interest of a large number of financial mercenaries, who bought out the main gems of this industry (notably Inco and Falconbridge) and contributed to a gradual change in the culture of the nickel industry.” Xstrata, Glencore, Trafigura and other “financial nomads” undermined the industry’s culture, adds Châtenay, “enticed yesterday by the development of China and today by the prospect of the development of the electric battery.”

In April, the North Province’s development arm, Sofinor, announced a preliminary bid for Vale Nouvelle-Calédonie’s assets, in partnership with Korea Zinc. The Korean corporation is one of the world’s leading producers of zinc and other metals, and has extensive industrial experience in hydro-metallurgy. Under the bid, the three provinces would jointly hold a majority shareholding in a new venture, giving control of the smelter to New Caledonia. Some 20,500 hectares of mining titles would be returned to local control, amounting to nearly 8 per cent of the mining area of the territory.

But conservative politicians in Noumea opposed any expansion of Sofinor into the South Province. “This is unfeasible economically and unthinkable politically,” provincial president Sonia Backes, a leader of the anti-independence coalition Avenir en Confiance, told journalists. “Those who propose this have a desire to economically colonise the southern province.”

Vale began discussions with the Australian company New Century Resources, but after widespread local opposition New Century withdrew from talks on 8 September. By then, Vale Nouvelle-Calédonie’s managing director, Antonin Beurrier, had revealed details of Sofinor’s bid, indicated it was not acceptable and sought other partners. He offered exclusive negotiations until 4 December, with the aim of closing the sale in January 2021.

Then, in a late October surprise, Beurrier announced the creation of a new company, Prony Resources Nouvelle-Calédonie. Half of the shares in this entity would be held by New Caledonian interests, while the Swiss commodity trading house Trafigura would hold another quarter. FLNKS leaders were angered that Trafigura would be given priority over the bid from Korea Zinc. “Trafigura is only an intermediary,” said the FLNKS’s Victor Tutugoro. “It’s only interested in buying the smelter and the mining titles in order to resell them when the market for nickel is more active, drawing down the maximum amount of profit.”

Daniel Goa, president of the largest independence party, Union Calédonienne, entered the fray, calling for France to intervene in support of the Sofinor–Korea Zinc project. Nearly 3000 jobs would be saved, he said, “but much more than that” — in the spirit of the Noumea Accord, he asked France to “fulfil its role as a partner, regaining through control of the southern smelter all of the social and environmental impacts that are vital for the future of our country, whatever its political or constitutional future.”

For Goa, Vale’s announced withdrawal is “a triple opportunity” for New Caledonia. “It’s an opportunity to salvage the southern smelter. It’s an opportunity to hold 56 per cent of the capital in the enterprise instead of the current 5 per cent and to do this without becoming indebted. Thirdly, it’s an opportunity that would allow the return of the Goro holdings to the country and to protect its status as metallurgical reserves in a similar manner to the Koniambo reserves.”

In October, leading anti-independence politician Philippe Gomes told me that violent clashes were likely if the sale of Vale’s assets was rushed through without proper consultation. “There is the danger of mobilisation on the ground, something we’ve already lived through in the South,” he said. “I was president of the southern province between 2004 and 2009 when there were violent protests by the Rhéébù Nùù committee. They plundered the site, causing three billion Pacific francs in damage, they destroyed equipment, some fired on police vehicles. These were real clashes and it took hundreds of hours of discussion in order for work to begin again.”

Calling for Vale to reopen dialogue with local Kanak leaders, Gomes stressed that “you just can’t hand over a smelter that’s in the middle of four Kanak tribes, who live through hunting, fishing and agriculture. It just can’t be done and we are saying, hang on, you need to be transparent and open up dialogue. The more people are fearful, the more they will drag their heels.”

To press the case for Vale to delay the sale, customary leaders in the South formed a negotiation structure, the Instance Coutumière Autochtone de Négociation, or ICAN. This body includes the eight high-chieftainships and the customary council of Djubea-Kapumë, together with the Rhéébù Nùù committee. ICAN’s call for protests was echoed by the Usine du Sud = Usine Pays collective.

In early November, Union Calédonienne’s Daniel Goa called on his members to support the protests. As part of the month-long series of protests, rallies and blockades were held in the North, leading to the closure of some municipal services. In the South, protesters gathered outside the Blue House, the imposing headquarters of the South Province on Noumea’s waterfront. At the urging of provincial president Sonia Backes, the police moved in on 17 November, firing tear gas to disperse the crowd. Young protesters hurled stones at the police, then faded away to fight another day.

These actions by indigenous activists were backed by members of the pro-independence trade union confederation USTKE, who launched a series of strategic strikes that disrupted the economy and raised the stakes for president Thierry Santa’s government of New Caledonia.

Christopher Gygès, who is responsible for the economy, trade and finance in the government, expressed reluctance to accept any delay in the sale. “The offer from Sofinor and Korea Zinc has been rejected by Vale and by the Rothschild bank, which is in charge of the negotiations,” he said. “The relentlessness shown by the partisans of this process reveals that it is designed to allow the independence movement to take control of the southern smelter. This is not what one might call a national project.”

Tough words, but the ongoing protests and blockades eventually forced the French government to intervene. On 26 November, France’s overseas minister, Sébastien Lecornu, announced that he would organise a roundtable to discuss the future of the Vale smelter and more broadly the prospects for the nickel sector in New Caledonia. Lecornu stressed that the priorities for the French state include “respect for the law, the protection of employment at the site and the preservation of the environment.”

In a letter replying to Lecornu, Union Calédonienne’s Daniel Goa said that the independence movement would add another priority beyond jobs and the environment: “Respect for the general interests of the Kanak people and New Caledonians more broadly, who today are trying to build a country free from the pangs and torment of colonial dependency.”

The tense debate amplified long-running differences between the conservative party Calédonie Ensemble and the three other anti-independence parties that make up the Avenir en Confiance coalition. Under leader Philippe Gomes, Calédonie Ensemble announced it was open to a visit by technical experts from Korea Zinc to clarify their preliminary bid. Given the difficulties for travel and quarantine during the pandemic, Gomes called for Vale to delay a decision on the sale of its assets until major bidders could present equally detailed submissions.

An initial online discussion with Lecornu was followed by a formal roundtable in Noumea on 3 December, the day before Vale was due to sign an agreement with Trafigura and Prony Resources. After discussions late into the night, the participants agreed to approach Vale to delay the proposed sale to Trafigura, suspend blockades and protests, and allow Sofinor–Korea Zinc to conduct due diligence of Vale’s nickel assets before making a definitive bid.

Within three days of the roundtable, however, stone-throwing youth were again clashing with police at the entrance to the Goro smelter. The French high commission in Noumea ordered riot police to break up any protests, echoing the law-and-order rhetoric of the South Province leadership: “The damage and stone throwing that have caused several injuries in the ranks of the police must be condemned, and those responsible will face the full force of the law.”

In response, French loyalists armed with hunting rifles mounted roadblocks, leading the French authorities to ban the transport or carrying of weapons.

Angering his conservative counterparts, Calédonie Ensemble’s Philippe Gomes joined key FLNKS leaders to write to French president Emmanuel Macron on 6 December, calling on him to intervene and calm rising tensions in the South. On social media, Gomes argued that Vale “was acting like a conqueror, imposing its timetable for the sale between the two referendums. This is unacceptable. For Vale to withdraw is one thing. But setting fire to the country as they leave is another.”

Protests and clashes surged again in Noumea on 7 December. But the culmination of a troubled day came that evening, when Korea Zinc, in a shock decision, formally withdrew its bid. A day later, Vale accepted the offer from Prony Resources and Trafigura.

ICAN vowed to maintain its opposition, worried that when Vale walks away at year’s end, New Caledonians will be left to clean up after the company. “We call on Vale to assume full responsibility for its decision to withdraw from New Caledonia,” said John-Rock Tindao, chair of the Djubea-Kapumë customary council. “This responsibility involves the environment, especially in terms of the acid effluent tailings pond which should not be exposed any longer.” Possible breaches of the dam “could lead to forty-five million tonnes of toxic waste spilling into the lagoon.”

It was one more round in the quest for a sovereign and independent Kanaky-New Caledonia, built on a sound economy. The anger evident in the South has been exacerbated by fighting words on law and order from the authorities, and the deployment of riot police. Government rhetoric about the “independent decisions” of overseas investors won’t calm the growing tension, nor mask the failure of the French state to resolve the crisis. •

Reporting for this article was supported by a Sean Dorney Grant for Pacific Journalism through the Walkley Public Fund.

The post New Caledonia’s triple opportunity appeared first on Inside Story.

The ABC’s three-part series Fight for Planet A was already in the making when last summer’s bushfire catastrophe began to unfold, and was completed before the pandemic hit. If the three-month deferral of the broadcast date was arranged in anticipation of some reprieve from the pandemic emergency, things haven’t worked out that way.

Presenter Craig Reucassel delivers a brief introduction to camera explaining this unforeseen convergence of events. Watching it now, though, the series unavoidably comes across as something of an anomaly. Reucassel’s buoyant approach and the program’s whole “yes we can” premise seem out of tune with what looks like a depression looming.

Five Australian households participate in a challenge to see how much they can reduce their carbon footprint. The presumption is that they are all, in their different ways, guilty of ecological extravagance, but how does this come across now that the livelihoods of so many households are in jeopardy? The ABC’s manager of documentaries, Stephen Oliver, sees some advantage in shifting the focus from the pandemic, which leaves us “sitting there waiting for the experts to find a vaccine,” back to climate change, where we can all be instrumental in finding solutions.

At the beginning and end of the series, the five households assemble in the studio for an audit of their joint carbon emissions, represented as a bouquet of black balloons attached to a model house. In episode one, the house is in midair; the challenge is to reduce the balloon count enough to ground it. To achieve this, they must change diets, modes of transport and household energy consumption.

On its own, this aspect of the series could make for fairly bland lifestyle television. But Reucassel never allows us to lose touch with the sterner dimensions of his subject. The flair for performative interventions he demonstrated in The Chaser’s War on Everything (2002–09) comes to the fore as he uses forms of street theatre to engage passers-by in the broader challenge.

“The hardest part is getting people to visualise emissions,” says Reucassel. He heads for the beach with a cloud of carbon balloons attached to his back, intending to head off the prime minister, who is taking a weekend stroll in board shorts. Per capita emissions in Australia are among the highest in the world: can he get Morrison to “see” what this means? As it turns out, the strongest visual image is of the prime minister scrambling awkwardly over the beach wall to escape the encounter.

Reucassel has more success persuading ordinary people to front up to the problem. While the household challenge is under way, he sets off around the city and across the country to tackle the larger issues. As a nation, we emit 539 million tonnes of carbon each year, which makes a massive contribution to the melting of 463 billion tonnes of ice in Greenland and Antarctica. But what do such abstract statistics mean to most of us? A 6.5 tonne wall of ice, trucked into a square in the city centre, is a good way to draw attention. Curious onlookers are invited to guess how long it takes for the average Australian to melt this much ice. The bids come in. Ten years? A year? A month? Ten days, is the answer. People literally stop in their tracks.

Closer to home, though still remote from city dwellers, is land clearing. A road trip to a cattle station 300 kilometres from Cairns provides another kind of shock. Australia has one of the highest rates of land clearing in the developed world. Drone shots show trees falling in rapid succession, keeling over like infantry under machine-gun fire. Some 390,000 hectares are cleared in Queensland in a year, but when the drone shows what a 2000 hectare expanse actually looks like, the larger figure defies comprehension.

Back in the city, seventy volunteers assemble on the banks of the Yarra in Melbourne, holding up green umbrellas to represent a forested area the size of a modest free-standing house. Up on the bridge with a loud hailer, Reucassel starts another bidding game. How long does it take to clear this much land in Australia? “Every hour?” someone ventures. He encourages the punters to go lower, then eventually turns to the group below him and makes the call. The umbrellas snap closed in an instant, and the shock is palpable.

Our eye-watering national deficit to the planet continues to grow while governments prioritise anxieties about the economy. Yet what is the economy, after all, without the underpinning of natural resources? Fight for Planet A is structured so that the carbon audit of the five participating households is counterpoised by snapshots from the bigger picture. Ledgers of debit and credit are checked intermittently, with the implication that there is a clear analogy between the household economy and the macro economy of the planetary ecosystem.

There’s a risk of a significant misconception here, just as there is when household budgets are cited as a model for government budgets. For overarching questions of resource management, it’s the bigger players who call the tune and determine the parameters within which the rest of us operate. We’ve seen some outstanding environmental documentaries from Four Corners, focusing directly on corporate and government responsibilities for our woeful national report card. Linton Besser’s investigation into water management on the Murray–Darling (2017) is a prime example, but it also demonstrated how the politics of it all can leave us feeling angry and hopeless.

There’s plenty of anger among the respondents in Reucassel’s experiments, but his refusal of hopelessness is wonderfully effective. He has a gift for engaging the public imagination and galvanising community spirit. Whether he’s talking to ten-year-olds in the schoolyard, the guys in a student share house, the three generations of a well-heeled suburban family or an outback farmer, he has a way of connecting that is energising without ever being patronising.

Reucassel’s previous series, War on Waste, involved groups of high school students in skilfully organised campaigns that proved remarkably effective. It was a runaway success in 2017 with a sequel the following year. A youth perspective remains at the heart of this new series, reinforcing the message that renewal is not only necessary but also possible. •

The post Yes, we can appeared first on Inside Story.

By the end of the season, according to an ANU survey, the majority of Australians had been directly or indirectly affected by the fires. Around 2.9 million adult Australians had property threatened or damaged, or were evacuated at least once. Around ten million people were affected by smoke, with many experiencing months of prolonged exposure. Another three-quarters of the adult population — around 15.4 million people — had indirect experience of the fires via family and friends.

If there was any good news, it was the fact that deaths and acute injuries were lower than in previous catastrophic fire seasons. Some thirty-four people died during the fires, compared with seventy-five deaths during the Ash Wednesday fires in early 1983 and 173 deaths on Black Saturday in early 2009.

Emergency physician Simon Judkins, immediate past president of the Australasian College of Emergency Medicine, has worked in many disaster settings. He sees the relatively low levels of injuries and deaths in the 2019–20 season as evidence that we have learnt from previous events. “We have got good at evacuating, triaging and getting people out of affected areas when necessary,” he says.

Many of the measures taken during the season were recommended by the Victorian royal commission set up after Black Saturday: clear and consistent public messaging and comprehensive evacuation plans, for example, coordinated emergency services responses and protocols for treating injured people on site or moving them to city hospitals.

Demand on hospitals and local health services was kept manageable by including GPs in field clinics and in the teams sent by the National Critical Care and Trauma Response Centre. Mistakes were made in communications and emergency services responses, of course, but improved evacuation and treatment meant that existing health services were not overwhelmed.

Still, health experts warn against complacency. As Judkins observes, the system functions well because of the dedication of overworked health professionals who do their best in an under-resourced system. He emphasises that an already stretched public hospital system can quickly become overwhelmed.

Iain Walker, director of the ANU Research School of Psychology, agrees. “If we have systems operating at capacity then there is no ability to deal with any additional problems,” he says.“For example, if the Covid-19 pandemic had reached Australia a month earlier when we had mass bushfire-related evacuations we would have had two conflicting events co-occurring and would not have coped.”

With challenges of this kind likely to become more frequent and more intense, Walker adds, “we need to build capacity into our health and social care systems and other essential services to deal with these situations.”

Simon Judkins also stresses the need to do more to support health professionals, first responders and volunteers who worked at the bushfire frontline. “How do we manage not only acute response, such as getting medical and nursing staff to the affected areas, but also ensuring that we support the health professionals on the ground who worked for fourteen-hour days for four or five weeks non-stop?” he asks. “Who looks after GPs working in those areas who absorbed a lot of stress and suffering in their communities? Who relieves solo practice GPs in places like Mallacoota when they need a break?”

The acute effects might be the most obvious legacy of the fires, but by far their greatest health impact came from the smoke they emitted. Because bushfire smoke can travel long distances and linger in the atmosphere, many more people were exposed than experienced the fires’ direct impact — and that makes our limited knowledge of its effects all the more worrying.

Clare Walter, a PhD candidate at the University of Queensland, has analysed the findings of nine Australian studies on the health impacts of air pollution. They show that, in the short-term at least, air pollution causes increased presentations to hospitals for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, asthma, cardiac arrests and ischaemic heart disease.

These findings are supported by early research into the increased demand for healthcare during the 2019–20 bushfire season. Studies of air quality data for bushfire-affected regions of New South Wales, Queensland, the Australian Capital Territory and Victoria have found that the concentration of small airborne particles exceeded the ninety-fifth percentile of the historical daily mean on 125 of 133 days studied. In other words, concentrations were within the top 5 per cent on most smoke-affected days.

Researchers correlated this data with hospital admissions, emergency department attendances, GP consultations and ambulance call-outs to calculate that smoke was responsible for 417 excess deaths during the 2019–20 bushfire season and around 4500 presentations to hospital for cardiovascular and respiratory problems.

These findings suggest a strong relationship between bushfire smoke and specific health problems. But the exact causal relationship isn’t yet clear.

Almost all research on the health impacts of air pollution is based on measurements of airborne particulate matter, or PM, a mixture of solid particles and liquid droplets. PM is markedly elevated during fires and is widely monitored around Australia; that’s why researchers focus on its link with health problems.

The size and chemical composition of PM differs according to its source (apart from bushfires, the big ones are motor vehicles and coalfired power stations) and also from place to place. Evidence suggests that size matters, with small particles — those measuring less than 2.5 micrometers, or PM2.5 — being particularly damaging because they can penetrate deep into the respiratory system. But we know less about how their chemical composition affects humans.

Walters’s analysis has identified differences between the health effects of bushfire smoke and other forms of air pollution: specifically, respiratory impacts were comparatively stronger for bushfire pollution and cardiovascular impacts were weaker. But she stresses that only further investigation will show whether this is this is a causal relationship.

She has also found that bushfire smoke appears to affect adults more than children — the reverse of traffic pollution — although she can’t yet say whether this reflects biological or behavioural factors.

There’s another big unknown, too: the relative impact of heat and smoke exposure on health. With bushfires tending to occur on days of extreme heat, the two events can have a compound impact on humans. One recent Perth‐based study found a 6.6 per cent joint additive effect of PM2.5 and heat waves on admissions to hospital emergency departments. Again, the interaction is poorly understood.

Respiratory medicine specialist John Wilson, president of the Australasian College of Physicians, suggests that part of the reason that demand for healthcare rises during periods of smoke pollution might be that people with existing conditions are not sticking to their treatment plan. This may be because people delay regular medical appointments in response to public health advice to stay home on days of high pollution or because they are reluctant to seek help early for problems which then escalate into more serious issues.

On the question of the effectiveness of wearing a mask to reduce exposure to airborne particles, he is agnostic. “There is no clear answer from the research,” he tells me. “We have better information about their role in reducing infection due to the Covid-19 pandemic but there have been no clinical trials that definitively establish how effective they are.”

Wilson believes that Australia is the ideal setting for evaluating the effectiveness of masks, and stresses the need for their effectiveness to be confirmed before we face another major bushfire smoke episode. “When it comes to masks we have to either prove it or lose it,” he says.

More challenging from a research perspective is a better undersanding of the longer-term effects of bushfires. Existing Australian research in this area mostly comes from studies of the Ash Wednesday and Black Saturday fires, but the smaller scale of those fires means that it may not accurately predict the impact of the prolonged exposure last summer.

What is clear from the limited research is that the longer-term effects of smoke exposure go beyond the respiratory and cardiovascular systems. Some experts have suggested, for instance, that smoke exposure could increase the risk of Parkinson’s disease, Alzheimer’s disease and other neurological conditions. Some evidence also suggests that babies exposed to prolonged smoke in utero are at higher risk of low birthweight, which brings a heightened lifelong risk of conditions including cerebral palsy and visual or hearing impairment, and an elevated risk of heart disease in later life.

As some of these longer-term effects can be subtle and delayed, large-scale longitudinal studies will be needed to track groups over years and decades. The Menzies Centre for Health Policy’s Lesley Russell, an Inside Story contributor, is among the public health experts who have been arguing that more resources should be put into this kind of research.

She nominates four priority areas: longitudinal studies of all recognised firefighting personnel; longitudinal studies of communities most exposed to bushfires and bushfire smoke; greater awareness among and guidance for clinicians to help them recognise and deal with the health consequences of bushfires; and more focused research projects on high priority issues.

Some of the research gaps are being tackled with funding from the federal government’s Medical Research Future Fund, which has allocated $3 million for research into the physiological impacts of prolonged bushfire smoke exposure and $2 million for research into the mental health impacts of bushfires.

Although Russell welcomes this funding she is concerned by the lack of large-scale longitudinal studies. While she acknowledges this type of research can be very costly, she argues that “there are even greater costs involved in failing to undertake it — along with lost opportunities to improve the ability of the public health and healthcare systems to respond to future crisis situations.” She stresses the need for the findings of studies of the 2019–20 bushfires to be widely distributed and incorporated into the design of government services and programs.

ANU’s Iain Walker nominates social cohesion and resilience as other priorities for future research and action. He describes how the stress of a disaster can expose the “fracture lines” in individuals, families, communities and systems. Although social and community relationships are crucial to resilience, he says, they are often overlooked in research.

Given Australia’s vulnerability to natural disasters, Walker suggests that we should focus more on how to promote resilience to protect us in future disaster situations. He points out that understanding how resilience manifests in individuals, families, communities and systems will help in preparing not only for future bushfires but also for drought, pandemics, economic downturns and other crises.

Although the impact of bushfires on mental health often receives less attention, the evidence suggests that it can be more serious and long lasting. Research on the Black Saturday fires, for instance, found that mental health effects ($1 billion) exceeded the lifetime cost of deaths and injuries ($930 million).

But there are many gaps in our understanding of how natural disasters affect mental health. So far, the attention has been on short-term mental health needs of people directly affected by the fires.

After this summer’s fires, the federal government announced $76 million in funding for counselling and psychological services for people on the fire fronts, for bushfire trauma response coordinators, for emergency services workers and their families, and for youth mental health.

This funding expires in December 2021, though, and ANU’s Iain Walker warns that chronic and delayed mental health effects might not be visible for some time and could persist for years. He has been funded by the Medical Research Future Fund to examine these effects around Canberra and on the southern NSW coast.

“This is a neglected area of research,” he says. “There is some background research on how people respond to disasters more generally but still many gaps in our understanding of the specific impact of bushfires in an Australian context.” His research is looking at the range of psychological responses, including anxiety, depression and post‐traumatic stress disorder, and at the indirect mental health effects of the loss of possessions and property, damage to the environment and the sense of belonging to physical environment and associated changes in jobs.

The Australian Academy of Health and Medical Sciences agrees that mental health effects can emerge at any time and last for years. In its submission to the current royal commission it cites studies of the effects of the Black Saturday fires in 2009, which showed that one in five individuals in affected regions still had some form of psychological disorder five years later. The academy also found an increase in domestic violence in highly bushfire-affected communities. It warns that the twin stresses of Covid‐19 and the bushfires could exacerbate mental health problems.

Iain Walker highlights the vulnerability of healthcare workers, including first responders, who are not only affected by the bushfires themselves but also responsible for caring for others. “If a doctor or mental health worker is unable to work because of the impact of the crisis on themselves and their family then the whole system will fall over,” he says.

Specific population groups and communities were experienced more severe smoke-induced symptoms during last summer’s bushfires. They included people with pre-existing health conditions, elderly people, pregnant women, children, and people preparing to undergo surgery or anaesthesia.

We need to know more about the relative effectiveness of a range of strategies by making sure masks are used if and when appropriate, for example, by reducing the heat load in houses and public spaces, and checking indoor air purifiers and filters more frequently.

Respiratory specialist John Wilson’s message to government and health authorities is to pay more attention to pollution warnings and invest in targeted information campaigns informing people at risk about to reduce exposure and the importance of continuing to take medication, access routine treatment and seek early help.

Wilson also highlights the role that telehealth can play. “We have developed telehealth capacity as a result of Covid-19,” he says, “and we should continue to use this to protect vulnerable patients from infection and air pollution and reduce impact on emergency departments.”

People on low incomes are disproportionately affected by air pollution, says Clare Walter, not least because of their housing. “Australian houses are often not well insulated,” she says, “and even those with air conditioning often pull in air from outside if they don’t have a filter. People living in rented properties often can do little to improve the insulation of their houses and this can compound the existing risks associated with their higher rates of chronic disease.”

Walter recommends creating community-based “clean air shelters” to provide a safe environment for people during periods of high pollution. She also stresses the importance of ensuring clean air in childcare centres, residential aged care and other spaces occupied by vulnerable people.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people — with their higher rates of chronic disease and, in many cases, closer proximity to bushfire-prone areas — are also disproportionately affected by particulates and the loss of cultural resources during bushfires and other natural disasters.

But Indigenous communities can also be a source of knowledge and strength in combatting the adverse effects of bushfires. Their cultural and historical knowledge of land management and bushfire prevention practices can play a central role in bushfire prevention strategies, and non-Indigenous Australians can learn how cultural knowledge, values and practices assist Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in dealing with environmental adversity.

And, of course, people living outside cities are often at the frontline of bushfire-related harms. These communities have received short-term assistance to deal with the immediate impact of the fires, but there are concerns that attention has now moved to Covid-19. “Workforce planning needs to take place to ensure that not only are health professionals brought into affected communities, but that they stay there for enough time to properly respond to the health issues caused by the bushfires,” says the National Rural Health Alliance in its submission to the bushfires royal commission.

Perhaps the group most exposed to risk are prisoners in jails near fire-prone areas. The NSW government was criticised for not moving prisoners in the Lithgow Correctional Centre, 140 kilometres northwest of Sydney, when a nearby bushfire caused surrounding houses and building to be evacuated. Around a quarter of the inmates in the prison identify as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, many of whom would have been more vulnerable to the effects of smoke because of their poorer health status.

The arrival of Covid-19 at the tail end of the bushfire season is a stark reminder of the many ways in which climate change can threaten health and well-being. It highlights the need for a comprehensive and nationally coordinated approach to dealing with the health impacts of global warming.

As Australia prepares for another bushfire season, which could start as soon as late August, we have a chance to use the lessons of summer 2019–to reduce the risk of harm from bushfires and other extreme weather events. •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Summer’s legacy appeared first on Inside Story.

I happened to have been travelling in that very area only a week earlier. Our tourist ship had entered Hope Bay, where Esperanza station sits, on the morning of 29 January. Dark grey clouds were hanging low over the glaciers and mountains around the bay, and the water was open but for a few bergy lumps. Although the cloud obscured the warming sun, we had a good view over the Adélie and gentoo penguin rookeries that surround the small village of red buildings. Here, human and penguin colonies cluster close together.

Hope Bay is perhaps fated to be an Antarctic hotspot. On 1 February 1952 it was the site of the only armed encounter in Antarctic history, part of the decades-long territorial contest between Britain and Argentina. When a party of British scientists had begun re-establishing a base there, the encamped Argentine naval personnel tried to ward them off, first with a small burst of machine-gun fire and then with rifles, at which point the British took to their ship. Interestingly, the onboard historian for our cruise, a very experienced British Antarctic hand who had himself been an unwilling guest of the invading Argentines on South Georgia in 1982, neglected to mention this interesting piece of human history in his commentary from the bridge.

Shades of grey: approaching Esperanza Base on 29 January. Alessandro Antonello

The day before our brief visit to Hope Bay another Antarctic hotspot was in the news. Scientists working at Thwaites Glacier — an outlet glacier of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet — released the first-ever footage of its “grounding line,” the place where glacial ice meets continental rock. These lines, below sea level, are highly sensitive to increasing water temperatures, making them the sheet’s weak points. Were it to fully melt, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet would add three to six metres to the global sea-level, so a great deal of research effort is going into understanding its dynamics.

The media, perhaps unhelpfully, calls this the doomsday glacier. At higher latitudes, the satellite internet on the ship was slowing considerably, so it was a little difficult for us to view the footage from Thwaites Glacier clearly. Having studied the history of glaciology, including the historical efforts to understand the unstable West Antarctic Ice Sheet, I knew the importance of the moment. Since the 1970s, glaciologists and geophysicists have known that a marine-grounded ice sheet like this one would be vulnerable to rising temperatures. With the summer just finishing, we must now wait for the scientists to evaluate their data and present their analyses.

The ship I was on crossed sixty degrees south — the northern boundary of the Antarctic Treaty area — at about seven in the morning on 27 January. We were welcomed by a blanket of fog and a calm sea; our field of vision was defined by a spectrum of greys, blacks and whites. It was an auspicious day to enter the Antarctic, 200 years after Russian navigator Faddei Faddeyevich Bellingshausen made the first recorded sighting of the Antarctic continent. Aboard the Vostok — joined by the Mirny under the command of Mikhail Petrovich Lazarev — Bellingshausen saw what is now the Crown Princess Martha Coast in Queen Maud Land, part of the territory claimed by Norway. Poor Edward Bransfield, a British naval officer who saw the Trinity Peninsula on 30 January 1820, missed out on being first by only a few days.

Two hundred years after Bellingshausen, Russia is pushing on with its Antarctic efforts. On 12 February, the Russian state geological survey agency, Rosgeologia, announced it had spent the beginning of 2020 exploring the Antarctic continental shelf for oil and gas. In the Riiser-Larsen Sea — a few degrees to the east of the coastline Bellingshausen saw — it found what it describes as “potential hydrocarbon resources… estimated at about seventy billion tons.”

For those concerned about global carbon emissions and also environmental protection in Antarctica, this is worrying news. Mineral exploitation in Antarctica is banned under the 1991 Madrid Protocol to the Antarctic Treaty. Any suggestion, let alone an outright confirmation, that it will happen raises the geopolitical heat within the Antarctic Treaty System.

Rosgeologia’s work this summer is part of a decades-long search for oil and gas in the Antarctic by countries working within the Antarctic Treaty of 1959. There were early hopes of a hydrocarbon cornucopia that might supply a world cursed by energy scarcity as a result of either the “population bomb” or an Arab oil embargo. In 1969, oil was placed firmly on the Antarctic Treaty agenda when several companies began asking for exploration licences.

Soon it was the United States that seemed most eager and most capable of drilling for oil in Antarctica. Production was expanding into the Alaskan Arctic, so the challenges of a polar environment seemed technically surmountable; even the offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico and the North Sea, with their tempests, seemed to suggest that overcoming environmental barriers was merely a matter of technology and time. Throughout the 1970s, US diplomats, pushed and pulled by oil and energy interests at home, obstructed attempts by other countries within the Antarctic Treaty to restrain oil exploration and exploitation.

Even scientific drilling hasn’t been immune from suspicion. Drilling for ice cores (notably including the one extracted at the Soviet Union’s Vostok station in the 1970s and 1980s) has transformed our knowledge of climate change by demonstrating the link between carbon dioxide levels and global temperatures, but some geophysical research has inadvertently touched upon oil and gas.

When the research ship Glomar Challenger went to Antarctica in the summer of 1972–73, its drill penetrated gas deposits. As the Australian geoscientist Elizabeth Truswell details in her recent book about that voyage, A Memory of Ice, she and the other scientists on board were trying to understand the Antarctic ice sheet’s history. They pushed its known age back from three million years to at least twenty-five million years (a few more million years have since been added) but had to stop drilling when they hit gas, because of the danger to their vessel. The world’s media interpreted their results as another sign of Antarctica’s potential oil and gas wealth.

Warming times: Wilhelmina Bay on the Antarctic Peninsula. Alessandro Antonello

In the end, no commercial oil and gas drilling has ever taken place in Antarctica. Yet there have been vivid examples of the environmental dangers associated with it. The most significant oil spill came from the Argentine ship Bahia Paraiso, which ran aground in the Antarctic Peninsula in January 1989, spilling about 600,000 litres of oil. That incident, along with the catastrophic Exxon Valdez spill in Alaskan waters only two months later, highlighted the dangers of oil exploitation and transport. They contributed to the Antarctic Treaty parties’ agreeing to ban mining indefinitely in their 1991 Madrid Protocol, a deal that was hastily negotiated in place of a convention signed in 1988 that would have allowed mining.

News of Russia’s exploring for oil and gas in Antarctica is therefore not unprecedented. In the short term, the concern is less that Russia will begin full commercial operations in the Southern Ocean (a highly unlikely proposition) and more that it didn’t bother to disguise its efforts under the generic label of “scientific research.” Is this just another part of Putin’s global mischief-making? Russia also announced that it would send the world’s only nuclear-powered cargo ship, Sevmorput, south next summer with building supplies for Vostok station. Is that visit — apparently the first by a nuclear-powered vessel to Antarctica — part of a larger plan to raise the geopolitical heat?

The Bellingshausen anniversary has been a good opportunity for Russia to weave historic discovery and legitimation through its Antarctic activities. The Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, dutifully marked the anniversary and intriguingly, in an official recorded interview, stressed how Russian ambassadors and consuls around the world were essential to Bellingshausen’s success. Science, he was saying, did not happen without the state.

The Russian government has often used Bellingshausen’s achievement to justify its presence in Antarctica. In 1948, when the United States tried to pursue a solution to “the Antarctic problem” — the territorial conflict between Britain, Argentina and Chile and the contested territorial claims of Australia, France, New Zealand and Norway — the Soviet Union, newly armed with nuclear weapons and willing to contest American hegemony anywhere in the world, adduced the one example of historical connection to the Antarctic it had.

Lavrov wasn’t the only significant government figure to mark the Bellingshausen anniversary. The president of Estonia made an official visit to the Antarctic Peninsula aboard a small yacht. Bellingshausen, having been born in Riga to an Estonian-German family, has recently been somewhat reclaimed by Estonia as part of its post-Soviet identity. Estonia is making a name for itself as a “digital nation,” and so the president used her digital signature to conduct the business of state while she was observing the ravages of climate change. This seductive vision of non-territorial digital citizens roaming the globe, free to live their lives and do their work wherever they please, quickly butts up against the reality that the infrastructure of travel and computing blast out emissions that are helping to undermine Antarctica’s stability.

The summer also began with another big anniversary. Sixty years ago, on 1 December 1959, twelve nations signed the Antarctic Treaty in Washington, DC. The treaty was initially intended to guarantee freedom of scientific research and defuse territorial conflict in the region. Over its sixty years, it has been significantly enlarged and is now forcefully directed towards environmental protection and management. From twelve signatory nations there are now fifty-four parties, of whom twenty-nine are known as “consultative parties” — states with a right to participate in decision-making meetings for the continent.

“I believe no one wants to undermine the treaty,” Lavrov declared during the interview in January. “There are no signs of putting the treaty at risk.” Fine words indeed, but Russia’s actions in recent years can hardly be described as advancing the cause of environmental protection that is now so central to Antarctica’s governance. In addition to this summer’s search for fossil fuels, Russia has been obstructing action to conserve marine systems and fisheries in the Southern Ocean. In a working paper submitted to the 2019 Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting, it referred to “the ‘postponed’ use of mineral resources of the region.”

Russia isn’t the only country that still sees Antarctica as a potential site for drilling and mining. China clearly regards both the Antarctic and Arctic as resource frontiers where it will manifest its status as a “great polar power.” And several new or prospective Antarctic Treaty parties have also explicitly mentioned oil and mineral resources as part of their reasons for being in Antarctica and seeking “consultative” status within the treaty system.

Many Antarctic commentators are judging the treaty in terms of its ability to contain urges of this kind and the larger geopolitical manoeuvring they reflect. If this dreadful baking summer suggests anything, perhaps it’s that the need for broader global decarbonisation — rapidly, at that — will continue to undercut any justification for oil and gas exploration. While some countries will intermittently explore for oil and gas in Antarctica —openly or discreetly — the profound difficulties and expense of operating in Antarctic waters should prevent any serious exploitation. If a major oil company can’t see a future for drilling in the Great Australian Bight, can we seriously expect another to commence operations in Antarctica?

Summer is coming to an end. The last scientific resupply ships and flights are making the journeys that enable the permanent human occupation of the continent. This is the last season for the thirty-one-year-old Australian icebreaker Aurora Australis; it left the continent for the last time on 23 February, having resupplied Davis station. Sarah Laverick’s recent book Through Ice and Fire narrates the history of this fine vessel and its exceptional contributions to knowledge of the continent and the Southern Ocean. The launch of its replacement, Nuyina — a beautiful word for the southern lights from the Palawa kani language of Tasmania — is slightly delayed but promises a great future for Australian science in the south.

The season’s last flight from Australia’s Wilkins aerodrome leaves in early March. It has not been a happy summer for the ice runway, which was shuttered for nine weeks because the temperatures were too high. This phenomenon, sure to remain a problem over coming years, is encouraging environmentally destructive behaviour elsewhere. Australia plans to build a paved concrete runway in the Vestfold Hills, which will affect a significant patch of ice-free area and its delicate ecosystem. Although the plan is still undergoing environmental impact assessments — Antarctica is the one continent in which nearly all activities are carefully evaluated in this way — it does seem a foregone conclusion that the runway will be built.

While most tourist vessels have completed their season around the Antarctic Peninsula, some will ply the waters until late March. Warming in the peninsula is reducing sea ice and allowing the tourist season to operate over many months. In the parlance of the industry, what happens in Antarctica is “expedition cruising” and the tourists are thus “explorers.” This summer the explorers numbered more than 78,000, well up on last year’s figure of just over 56,000. These visits are not evenly spread across the region, with a few dozen sites bearing the brunt. New ships designed for polar tourism are being launched over coming seasons, so that number will only increase.

The hotspots we see in Antarctica — whether atmospheric or geopolitical — are related, though they have led to different kinds of responses. Those who look south through the lens of security see threats emerging from Antarctica. They see a platform for competition that we in Australia, or the West more generally, should be occupying with greater intensity in order to suppress, or at least match, any geopolitical threat from Russia and China. I’m more inclined to see the greater threat as the threat to Antarctica. The stability of the ice sheet and the health of animal populations rely on humanity drastically curbing emissions, and perhaps even curbing our footprint in the south.

The Australian author Meredith Hooper travelled to Antarctica a handful of times in the late 1990s and early 2000s. She spent the 2001–02 summer at the American Palmer station, a small base in the Antarctic Peninsula principally dedicated to studying the marine environment. Having trailed the ornithologists studying the local penguin rookeries, she called that season “the ferocious summer.” At the turn of the millennium, decades of data and scientific effort was showing that global warming was a dire problem. As a historian looking south, the most disconcerting element of this summer’s heat is that it repeats and renews the heat of past summers. Affairs seem not shockingly new but shamefully repetitive. •

The post Another ferocious summer appeared first on Inside Story.

I don’t use that term “unprecedented” lightly. In 2009 I resisted its use to describe the Black Saturday firestorm, for that fire had the features of a phenomenon Victorians knew all too well. Black Saturday was the latest in a lineage of frightening, fatal firestorms that have roared out of “the fire flume,” as historian Stephen Pyne calls the hot northerly winds that sweep scorching air from inland Australia into the forested ranges of Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania. In that region, bushfires strike every year, firestorms every few decades. Firestorms are bushfires of a different order of magnitude; they cannot be fought; they rampage and kill. The years of the great Victorian firestorms are burnt into the memories of bush dwellers: 1851, 1898, 1919, 1926, 1932, 1939, 1962, 1983 and 2009. These dates with their death tolls are the signature of a distinctively deadly fire region, produced by a cocktail of weather, topography and trees.

The firestorms are intensified by particular species of trees — the mountain ash and the alpine ash — that conspire to create a raging crown fire that kills and reproduces the whole forest en masse and takes people with it. These tall ash-type eucalypts need a hot, fast-moving crown fire to crack open their seeds, upon which their regeneration uniquely depends. Firestorms in these normally wet mountain forests erupt only after long droughts and they concentrate whole summers of fire and anxiety into single, violent events. The ecology of the forest depends on firestorms, so we know they happened also under Aboriginal ecological management. In the last two hundred years, the cultural history of the forest has exaggerated and intensified this natural rhythm.

In 2009 it was the familiarity of the Black Saturday firestorm that horrified me. The event was clearly exacerbated by climate change, but the recurrent realities were more haunting. As I wrote at the time, “the 2009 bushfires were 1939 all over again, laced with 1983. The same images, the same stories, the same words and phrases, and the same frightening and awesome natural force that we find so hard to remember and perhaps unconsciously strive to forget.” As a historian of the fire flume, I was disturbed by Black Saturday’s revelation that we had still not come to terms with what we had already experienced.

The long fire season of 2019–20 is continental in scale and has a whole new character. In an article for the Australian on 4 January, Gerard Henderson used the history of the Victorian firestorm to dismiss claims of novelty for this season’s fires. We have to be much more discriminating than this. One cannot talk about fire without being deeply attentive to locality, ecology and history. It is dangerous to generalise across ecosystems and fire regimes, as Victorians found on Black Saturday. There were so many deaths at home that day because people living in a distinctively deadly fire region had been reassured with a national survival strategy: that staying and defending was a genuine option in those extreme conditions. Such advice may have worked in many woodland areas, but it was a death sentence in the firestorm capital. It is essential for our survival and our culture that Australians learn a fine-grained, local language of fire, such as Aboriginal Australians developed over millennia.

The arrival of Europeans on the continent from the end of the eighteenth century catapulted the country into a spiralling, accelerating fireball of change. Global warming is the latest force to transform Australian nature, following continental drift, the ice ages, the firestick, cultivation, pastoralism, clearing, industrial agriculture and urbanisation. Human-caused climate change is transforming our continent before our eyes, in our own lifetimes. Droughts are becoming more frequent and severe, rainfall patterns are changing permanently, water is being trucked to inland towns, species are being pushed to extinction, and forests that evolved to burn are experiencing fire of different intensity and frequency such that some are no longer forests.

This summer, coming after severe drought and more record heatwaves, has tipped fire patterns into widespread rogue behaviour. It’s not unusual for Australians to have smoke in their eyes and lungs over summer — the great fires of 1851, 1898, 1926, 1939 and 1983 are remembered also for their weeks of smoke and for the black leaves of warning on lawns and in swimming pools. In the 1920s and 30s, bush workers on the watch for fire learned to identify fresh smoke in the acrid forest air. In 2002–03, the alps burned for months before culminating in their sudden defining invasion of Canberra on 18 January.

There is much that we are experiencing today that we can find also in patterns of the past. But the smoke is worse, more widespread and more enduring, the fires are more extensive and also more intense, NSW fires are behaving more like Victorian ones and some Victorian fires are more like those north of the border, and the “Border Fire” symbolically erased the boundary anyway. Australia has been burning since August, from Queensland to Western Australia to Kangaroo Island to Tasmania, from the Adelaide Hills to East Gippsland, in the Great Western Woodlands and up and down the eastern seaboard. And the Victorian fire season, where most lives are generally lost, is only just beginning.

Victorians always give their firestorms names, generally after the day of the week they struck. There are enough “Black” days in modern Australian history to fill up a week several times over — Black Sundays, Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays — and a Red Tuesday too, plus the grim irony of an Ash Wednesday. The blackness of the day evokes mourning, grief and the funereal silence of the forests after a firestorm. This summer will leave a black legacy, but there is no single, culminating event and no end to anxiety and fear, no defining day and no day-after yet. Individual Black Days have fused in a Savage Summer. •

The post Savage Summer appeared first on Inside Story.

He’s right to call for a cooling of tempers, but the claim that people are “angry about the debates” makes no sense. We are in a situation in which anger and debate can’t be separated; they are fuelling each other in an escalating feedback loop. Every day of this unfolding calamity has seen a flare-up go viral, as firefighters and displaced community members vent their fury on those they hold responsible.

Some, in accord with the Morrison government’s line of rhetoric, blame environmentalists and “inner city raving lunatics” for impeding hazard-reduction plans. Others blame the government and its backers in corporate media for fostering what former prime minister Kevin Rudd calls “a denialist cult,” which resulted in a response that was “evasive, tepid, tone deaf and above all, too late.”

When arguments get so heated that they explode in a volley of accusations and counter-accusations, we no longer have a debate, we have a slanging match. It’s something of an irony that this inflammatory exchange has come to a head over the matter of hazard reduction, one of the most complicated and uncertain aspects of bushfire management.

Brian Gilligan, former head of New South Wales National Parks and Wildlife Service, wrote recently about the challenges he faced in trying to explain why reducing fire hazards is far from straightforward. “I worry,” he said, “that the ill-informed commentary that passes for debate is rolling around again.”

Twenty years ago, faced with the same “repeated haranguing” about burning off, he took a group of media representatives on a flight along the Kosciuszko Range to show them the mountain ash forests along the ridge. Mountain ash’s natural relationship to fire is very different from that of the eucalypts on the slopes. Its life cycle, moisture content and reproductive methods mean it can’t be managed with the same techniques.

All this was explained in fascinating detail in the Catalyst documentary Earth on Fire, aired on the ABC in June 2014. I reviewed it at the time, and it has remained in my mind as a model of public communication about bushfires and climate change, outstanding in its unassuming, concentrated engagement with the learning curve on which rangers and forest ecologists are travelling. Reporters Anja Taylor and Mark Horstman followed teams conducting parallel research into megafire behaviour on opposite sides of the globe: in the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico, where the Las Conchas fire swept through in 2011, and in Victorian and Tasmanian forests where preconditions for megafire are at their peak.

US ecologist Craig Allen, who studies the deep history of forest fire, explained the changing conditions created by increases in average temperature and decreases in rainfall. The Las Conchas fire caused a paradigm shift in his understanding because it burnt the topsoil, a new phenomenon in fire behaviour. Much of the area is now a moonscape.

The capacity of megafires to traverse cleared ground by burning the earth itself has changed how researchers in Tasmania are modelling potential spread patterns. On a worst-case scenario, they could extend right through the city of Hobart.

David Bowman, a forest ecologist working in the Victorian alps, focused on how the whole bio-region is irreversibly changed by mega-fires. While government ministers make aggressive proclamations about the inadequacy of fuel-reduction programs, he and Peter Jacobs, chief ranger for the area, were confronting the loss of vast areas of forest that will not regenerate. Human-induced changes to the three key components of fire — oxygen, fuel and heat — have created a whole new scenario. “I’m not sure if there is a natural fire anymore,” said Jacobs.

Forget the noisy debate. There’s no substitute for following these professionals into the remote forests they have spent their lives observing and documenting. They don’t offer opinions, just detailed knowledge along with all the uncertainties that genuine researchers must acknowledge.

If politicians want to make pronouncements on such specialised matters as fuel reduction, they had better educate themselves in the physics and biochemistry of forest fires. They could start by watching this documentary. I would urge the ABC to show it again: it might help to calm things down and enable better public communication about how best to respond to the emergency we are faced with.

Rewatching Earth on Fire has strengthened a conviction I have long held that disastrously misconceived communications strategies took hold after Al Gore launched a worldwide campaign for action on climate change with his 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

One of the film’s highlights was a graph tracking temperature and CO2 concentrations over a 650,000 year timespan, showing how CO2 suddenly breaks through the glass ceiling of 350 parts per million at the turn of the second millennium AD. Gore used a scissor lift to show how far and how steeply the graph shoots upward — “off the charts” if the present trend continues. He cited a study that sampled 10 per cent of all peer-reviewed scientific articles on global warming in the previous decade, finding all 928 supported an anthropogenic view.

The challenge of persuading the public was never going to meet idealistic dreams of enlightenment. Nor, for that matter, was the science itself. Ray Evans, co-founder of the Lavoisier Group, a right-wing group devoted to contesting climate change research, was quick to use Gore’s own tactics against him, claiming that this level of certainty and belief amounted to “preaching a gospel.”

Gore’s political affiliations as former Democrat presidential candidate played right into the hands of those who — like Evans, a crusading neoliberal closely associated with mining magnate Hugh Morgan — sought to politicise the debate. Evans alleged that Gore’s “hockey stick” graph had been debunked by two Canadian researchers who demonstrated that the same statistical pattern could be produced from almost any data using the algorithm from which it was generated.

Gore’s stridency took its toll. His invocation of the unassailable authority of science has done the opposite of what he intended. Instead of capping the debate and sealing off all avenues of viable opposition, he threw a grenade into the arena.

What if the process of developing public awareness had instead been led by rangers, wildlife workers, farmers and fire chiefs? What if, rather than issuing proclamations of absolute certainty at square one, they had taken us with them on a journey on which doubts and uncertainties were part of the process of coming to an understanding?

I recall a conversation I had with a neighbour in Toowoomba — a retired farmer from a property on the Darling Downs — soon after the massive flood of January 2011. It’d happened before, he said. The trouble with all the talk of climate change was that people didn’t study the records. Reports show that Toowoomba had indeed experienced similar events in 1873 and 1893. Farmers often have weather logs for their property going back several generations, and are not easily persuaded by claims that any particular event is unprecedented.

It was a brief discussion, but I’ve often thought about it since. My neighbour wasn’t trying to engage me in an argument; he was just making an observation. He was sceptical in the genuine sense, unconvinced of the evidence and keeping his distance from beliefs and commitments. What if he were invited to join David Bowman and Peter Jacobs in one of the evening discussions we saw in Catalyst, deep in the Victorian forest? That’s the kind of communication we need. •

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These two images of Seddon — the professor of everything and the Man from Snowy River — are not as contradictory as they may at first seem. Professors are generally of something quite specific — even of accounting these days — and they preside over scholarly disciplines and social systems that discourage movement across them. To be a professor of everything is to be undisciplined. It is to be a maverick and a show-off; it is to elevate ideas over method, reality over abstraction, wit over earnestness. These are Australian bush virtues.

Seddon considered himself an intellectual more than a scholar. Being undisciplined, or temporarily disciplined, was his preferred state. In some senses he didn’t want to steep himself for too long in any one academic discourse, because his aspiration was not so much to master it as to reconnoitre (or even pre-empt) it. He enjoyed coming at things obliquely. That was the source of his originality. And it was perhaps an awareness of this that kept him moving, geographically and academically. Seddon was lured by the challenge of new fields in which to apply his adaptable intellect, and propelled by an uneasiness about becoming mainstream. The more one knows, or is expected to know, the harder it is to be cheeky. In the spaces and tensions between scholarly disciplines lies the freedom to be original. But one can’t dwell there; you have to keep moving.

Seddon’s family kept him moving from the moment he was born. His father was a bank manager and took jobs in various country towns in northwestern and central Victoria: Berriwillock, Romsey, Heathcote, Mildura, Nhill, Horsham. His adult life maintained the pattern on a larger canvas: Melbourne, England, Portugal, Canada, Perth, the United States, Sydney, Melbourne, Venice, Perth. His academic behaviour, as we have seen, was just as nomadic: English, geology, philosophy, history, environmental science, Australian literature. The first kind of mobility is common in academia, the second almost unheard of.

Academia — a wonderful word that concatenates arcadia, dementia and media — is international in orientation. In Australia at least, publishing or presenting overseas still has more clout than performing locally, and many Australian academics know Europe better than their own state. Seddon was an unusual academic in that he always knew where he was. “I’m a catchment boy,” he said. “I like to know where the rivers run.” Bushwalking was his favourite recreation. He fell between two stereotypes (or perhaps he straddled them). One is the intellect that is organic — that is emotionally and physically attached to one place and derives insights and meaning from that place. The other is the mind that develops through restlessness and, in becoming international, becomes almost placeless. Seddon presented a rare combination of the two: he was able to move easily in an international scene and say things of relevance to many places — he acquired Portuguese, Spanish, French, German and Italian, and in English he spoke with what he hoped was a “placeless accent” — yet he regularly invested creative energy in one place, and wanted to get to know it, physically and intellectually, from the inside.

This paradox was resolved, or at least accommodated, in his passion for gardening. Wherever he went, Seddon cultivated the soil and, quite literally, put down roots. The gardens he created have the same mixture of influences he carried himself: historical traditions that have to be respected, a dash of international style and a commitment to intimate native associations. He was determined to foster gardening habits that were frugal, ecological and local. His intensive local and regional studies — of Perth (with David Ravine), the Swan River, the Snowy River, and his own suburb of Fremantle — were his gardening writ large. They were the big backyards of his urban existence. In the 1970s, when Seddon was founding director of the Centre for Environmental Studies at the University of Melbourne, he became a key player in premier Rupert Hamer’s reconfiguration of Victoria as “The Garden State.”

His instinctively comparative mind was fascinated by contrasts of scale: he wrote in Sense of Place that “the world is now our toxic oyster” and he characterised the global village and the rebirth of regionalism as the tension between “jet-set and parish pump.” Seddon challenged the comfortable wisdom of “the tyranny of distance” and suggested we think of Australia as “a small country with big distances.” His work made strong connections between gardening and environmental history, putting the backyard into the national narrative, observing for example that “domestic lawn is one of the major irrigated crops in Australia.” An enthusiastic review of his 1997 collection of essays, Landprints, in the Sydney Morning Herald was even entitled “Backyard Solutions to Save the World.”

It would be easy to suggest that Seddon’s gardens and his regional studies were his response to city living and to a life of mobility, a sort of displacement therapy with its origins in a peripatetic childhood. (Even his birth certificate is dislocated. It says that he was born in Sea Lake, whereas it should have paid tribute to the nearby and otherwise little-celebrated Mallee township of Berriwillock.) Perhaps Seddon’s habit of attaching himself to place — and such a conscious, intellectual form of attachment — was his way of compensating for the social disorientation he experienced. He talked often of “orienting” himself — or, like the good naturalised Western Australian that he became, of “occidenting.” His strongest childhood memories were of landscape — the giant red gums of the Murray River and the damp volcanic undulations of Ballarat, where he went for secondary schooling — and he recalled the social stratification of country towns, where a bank manager’s family drifted somewhere in the middle tier of the professional hierarchy, with the doctor and lawyer above, the clergy and headmaster below. He experienced the marginality of boarding at a distant private school and of doing a compressed university degree at the end of the war. He then left Australia at the age of twenty-one to explore and work in Britain, Europe and America, to become a kind of occidental tourist. “I did all my youth very young,” he recalled.

Arriving in Europe was a revelation. Reflecting on his passage to England through the Mediterranean, he wrote: “This was the world of my schooling, yet I was experiencing it for the first time; the world where I was born and have lived most of my life, I have had to learn for myself.” He discovered that his education was upside down and that he had allegiances to both Europe and Australia. In Europe he encountered the sources of the concepts of harmony, proportion and composition that were deeply embedded in his aesthetic training, and he began to explore what was both enabling and disabling for an Australian working in these inherited cultural traditions.

Much of Seddon’s thinking and writing was to grow out of this dialogue across hemispheres, this self-consciousness as an “antipodean,” as Peter Beilharz observed in his review of Landprints. Seddon’s intellectual fellow travellers included Bernard Smith, the author of European Vision and the South Pacific (1960), Keith Hancock, the Commonwealth historian who was famously in love with “two soils,” and Joe Powell, a British-born Australian historical geographer who studied the fate of European images in the New World.

Seddon had two consuming passions: landscape and language. He was expert at reading landscapes and weeding the garden of words, and he believed in the practical insights that language offers to landscape design. Landprints united earth and paper in its title and was illustrated with inscriptions of nature and culture: concentric and radial sheep tracks, the feeding patterns of small crustaceans, the lines of middle-class Melbourne suburbia oriented to the compass. Seddon sought to master the grammar of landscape. He was interested in the history of words and loved playing with them.

And words opened doors for him. He recalled his two years as an English master at Winchester College, England, in the early 1950s, as “one of the most intense periods of my life.” In this setting, where “trained minds” were acquired by studying Latin and Greek, he felt “more alive than I have ever been before or since.” He found the college community to be “inclusive, deeply humane and deeply serious, committed to human decency, scholarship and ideas.” “But it was also exuberant, exhilarating, full of fun… I have never since been in a community of people who so loved their language… who delighted in its every inflection and richness and absurdity, and played with it, tossed it back and forth, as a precious toy.” He wrote to a fellow teacher there: “I saw myself [at Winchester] as socially disadvantaged in some ways — I didn’t have an upper middle class or aristocratic background — but the one entry to that society was verbal dexterity, wit. I could make people laugh and they could make me laugh.”

Seddon had an impish sense of humour, light and occasionally savage, as scathing as it could be self-deprecating. At Winchester he came under the spell of Walter Oakeshott, headmaster of the college from 1946 to 1954 and a notable scholar of medieval literature. Seddon had access to the college’s collection of medieval manuscripts, including the famous Winchester manuscript of Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur discovered by Oakeshott. He also relished the opportunity to work with the headmaster on a notebook of Sir Walter Raleigh’s that contained preparatory material for his History of the World. All Seddon’s early mentors — Jack Dart, headmaster of Ballarat Grammar School, “the first person I met for whom intellectual inquiry was a passion,” Nonie Gibson (later Dame Leonie Kramer) and Ian Maxwell at the University of Melbourne, and Oakeshott at Winchester — were ardent teachers and scholars of literature.

Seddon described himself as having “a literary intelligence,” one that finds exceptions to the rule, argues from the particular to the general and is philosophical rather than theoretical, speculative rather than abstract. His linguistic bias made him interested in metaphors, especially in the language of science. To strengthen his understanding, he enrolled part-time in undergraduate biological and earth sciences while lecturing in English at the University of Western Australia. With the help of study leave, he completed an MSc and PhD in geology at the University of Minnesota in 1964–66. This lover of poetics found himself studying geology right at the time that it was embracing plate tectonics, a dramatic paradigm shift for the discipline. He found that geology shared with English “the taste for particularity, the delight in the infinitely varied living earth.” Geology deepened his sense of time — Fernand Braudel, master of la longue durée, thus became his favourite historian — and strengthened both his empiricism and pragmatism. Seddon’s geological imagination enabled him to suggest that, from an agricultural point of view, a useful question to ask a continent was “Did you have a good Pleistocene?” It was a question that Australia failed.

I can’t help but see George Seddon as part of a masculine tradition of nature and landscape writing in Australia that goes back to the nineteenth century, one that celebrates country childhoods and explores tensions between the city and the bush, the field and the academy, and the amateur and the professional. Writers such as Donald Macdonald, Charles Barrett, R.H. Croll, Alec Chisholm and Crosbie Morrison promoted Australian nature and landscape to the general public through newspapers, books and, later, radio. They identified an informal bush education as the source of special moral and physical virtues, and advocated a combination of indoor and outdoor learning, of intellect and feeling, science and romance. Seddon once wrote an essay entitled “In Praise of Country Boys,” exploring the practical and political benefits of a country upbringing. He was more scholarly than any of these predecessors, but he shared their combination of vernacular and learned wisdom, their fascination with the determinism of place, their love of the essay and occasionally their scepticism about “armchair theorists.” He was eager, for instance, to assess the likelihood of ancient Aboriginal occupation of parts of the Snowy River gorge by drawing on his own experience of camping there, his intimate canoeist’s knowledge of where the sun falls and the wind blows.

He was himself very much a country boy. “Boyish” is one of the words I would choose to describe Seddon. It is a term now out of vogue, but in the early traditions of Australian nature writing, there could be no more positive an adjective. Macdonald, Barrett and Chisholm wrote “Notes for Boys” as well as “Nature Notes” in early-twentieth-century Australian newspapers. “Boys” was, for them, expressive of a sort of freedom and emotional irresponsibility that they hankered after for life. In “Notes for Boys” they passed on bush lore, martial instruction and the sense of a sacred male camaraderie that thrived in the open air of Australia. “Boyhood,” and a country boyhood at that, was the ideal of this masculinist culture.

Although Seddon did his youth very young, it stayed with him. Perhaps it was the benefit of having a long-lived mother. Seddon in his seventies still had a spring in his step and a youthful air, and he loved being cocky and cheeky, at once infuriating and lovable. He refused to be politically correct. His prose was manly, his metaphors often masculine. Robyn Williams wrote of Seddon’s “intellectual physicality” and Sam Pickering of his “muscular” prose. This was partly Seddon the field scientist coming through, his commitment to a vigorous outdoor inquiry, but it is also the “boy” testing himself and revelling in his sensuous engagement with nature.

But if Seddon in this sense brought echoes of an early twentieth-century culture unfashionably into the beginning of the twenty-first, he was also, in many ways, ahead of his time. Seddon was a connoisseur of landscape, of its surface forms, the arrangement of its features, its felicitous routes of passage, yet he was able also to plumb its depths and mysteries, to analyse it formally and technically. Whereas his approach may have been received initially as a novel contribution to environmental planning, historical geography or landscape architecture, it came to be celebrated as a forerunner of environmental history. By subtitling his 1994 book on the Snowy River “An Environmental History,” Seddon recognised this shift in his concerns and invoked a lineage he admired, one that embraced Keith Hancock’s Discovering Monaro (1972) and Eric Rolls’s A Million Wild Acres (1981).

Searching for the Snowy was like them in its scholarly devotion to, and creation of, a region, and in its integration of scientific, literary and anecdotal sources. Also like them, it featured the author in the landscape and offered a subplot of discovery, of searching, setting a modern, personal exploration alongside the earlier ones recounted. As Seddon put it: “The basic form of the river, perhaps appropriately, is that of a giant question mark.” And so was his book. It began with the confession that writing about the Snowy was “hard going,” largely because of the challenges posed by environmental history, a mode of inquiry demanding a new kind of literary and scientific integration. As with Hancock and the Monaro and Rolls and the Pilliga, it is the relationship between Seddon and the Snowy, between person and place, that is so intriguing. The three authors explore ways of knowing a tract of earth, ways of coming to possess it, materially, economically, intellectually and emotionally. They want to own it, not in the sense of dominating it but of belonging to it, of learning to identify and live with it. Instead of the illusion of Australia’s apparent “empty spaces,” Seddon yearned for the “fine detail of our land [that] was celebrated by those who came before us.”

“Sense of place” had long been an everyday phrase with Romantic origins, but Seddon gave it Australian substance and academic currency. He acknowledged that Sense of Place (1972) was his best-known book in Western Australia and described it later as “an old-fashioned regional geography.” But what made it distinct and prophetic was its concern not just with physical patterns but with the imaginative apprehension of the land, and the fact that both perspectives appear in the one book. It is subtitled “A Response to an Environment,” and this was a further novelty, for the book was an emotional as well as scientific document, a personal search for identity and belonging through the use of observation and research, through science and history.

Seddon’s self-revelatory foreword to that book explains how, upon his return to Perth after six years away from Australia, he felt cheated: “The country was all wrong… This wasn’t what I had come back for; where were the ferntree gullies, the high plains, the trout? All the plants scratched your legs… you couldn’t take a running stream for granted. It was slowly borne in upon me that I wasn’t an Australian at all, but a Victorian.”

In Seddon’s later years, the study of place — how it’s constructed and understood, and what connects people to it — returned as a primary concern of social scientists. And in the same period, local history assumed new significance as a means of decentring orthodox and national histories. The homogenising effects of international mobility and global commerce renewed questions about what constitutes local distinctiveness, and elicited a new curiosity about the resilience and power of place.

“Place” also came to have particular significance in postcolonial societies where it denotes territories that are often still contested, where settlers are still coming to terms with a land that is theirs but not theirs, that is neither the Old World nor a sanctioned indigenous inheritance. In an Australian polity percolating with contested native title politics and green sensibilities, local history acquired a new moral and environmental edge. In the decades after the appearance of Seddon’s book, “sense of place” became a fashionable term that sharpened into political questions of “belonging.” As he himself observed in 1995, the phrase had come to invite the question: whose place?

Seddon the antipodean turned Australian histories upside down, thus righting and reorienting them. He helped to generate the new environmental narratives that emerged in late-twentieth-century Australia in place of the imported, imperial accounts of origins, those views from outside that looked longingly to distant shores. The discovery of deep time — biological and human — entailed a journey into the continent itself, an “inside” view that demanded a truly indigenous history; it meant abandoning the narrative of the nation as a footnote to empire. Plate tectonics literally undermined Australia’s history of original isolation. It revealed that the island continent only became a separate entity in the recent geological past and that most of the country’s fossil history is cosmopolitan. It focused the attention of Australians on a geological genesis in the southern hemisphere, followed by a relatively brief, formative journey north. From the 1960s, archaeological research took Australia’s human history back into the Pleistocene, bringing geological time and storytelling into an exciting and unexpected convergence. George Seddon, that ebullient offspring of English and geology, delighted in articulating and elaborating this revolution.

Judith Brett has argued that academics rarely write convincing prose because the bureaucratic organisation of their working lives and the institutionalisation of knowledge into disciplines makes it very difficult for them to take writing seriously. It is, she suggested in 1991, often against the grain of their jobs to communicate with people outside their discipline or with a wider public. That Seddon was such an elegant writer is another unacademic thing about him. It was Brett who, as editor of Meanjin in 1986, published his first thoughts on the Snowy, the essay that brought his work forcefully to my attention. Seddon’s restlessness, as we’ve seen, freed him of some of the shackles identified by Brett. It’s why his natural medium was the essay, which after all is an essai, an attempt, a trial. The essay is a prose form that enables movement, subjectivity, a lightness of touch, a brave synthesis, and sometimes sacrifices substance for stimulation; Seddon mischievously called the essay “sub-academic.” It’s a form that allowed him to find heaven in a grain of sand, range across traditional boundaries of knowledge and parade his cleverness in an entertaining way. Seddon was Australia’s most distinguished landscape essayist, our equivalent of Britain’s W.G. Hoskins and America’s J.B. Jackson.

Among the many fruits of academic restlessness is that no one really owns you — but nor do they necessarily celebrate you. Seddon’s vision has enduring significance today: he made life better, planners more thoughtful and landscapes more beautiful; he helped us see our country from the inside. He was a maverick, an original. He was steeped in the classics and planted in the earth; literature and place were combined creatively in his chemistry. In his boyish way he encouraged us to “wag school” from time to time, to climb fences, to play, and to challenge what we read with what we feel, hear and see. •

This is an edited extract from the introduction to George Seddon: Selected Writings, edited by Andrea Gaynor, released last month by Black Inc.

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At various times during the twentieth century, grand schemes — from the Murrumbidgee irrigation scheme to Sydney’s Warragamba dam and southeast Queensland’s Wivenhoe — promised to give us unlimited water. Then, when capital city dam levels fell precipitously early this century, there was an unseemly rush to build desalination plants, even in places like the Gold Coast and Sydney that have relatively high and reliable rainfall. Like the big dams, those plants have helped perpetuate the myth that we can always expect boundless amounts of potable water.

For decades urban dwellers have swung between times of plentiful water, cut short by water restrictions when dam levels fell dramatically. The once-powerful statutory authorities that ran water and sewerage, including the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works and Sydney’s Metropolitan Water Sewerage and Drainage Board, have been replaced by corporatised entities much more likely to be subject to ministerial whim. Water authorities’ income partly depends on usage, so they can’t always be relied on to maintain water-saving messages unless supplies become  low,  restrictions usually triggered by the falling levels of the major dams. This year, once again, water restrictions are being rolled out across cities and towns.

When rural dwellers were asked how their water usage changed when they came to the city, the most common reply from children was that they could now leave the tap running when they cleaned their teeth. Using tank water makes people much more conscious of how much water they’re using, not only inside the house but in the garden. If you have a 10,000 litre tank and put on a lawn sprinkler, full bore, for a couple of hours you’ll see how quickly the water level falls.

Adelaide has always led the other capitals in the tank stakes, not least because its mains water is so unpalatable. Perth, by contrast, has the worst record for water conservation in Australia — so bad that the environmental writer George Seddon once observed that Perth should “fear the hose.” Yet Perth had fewer restrictions on garden watering during the last urban drought than any other mainland capital. That city also pioneered desalinated water for urban dwellers.

Most suburban blocks in Australia could readily house one or more 5000 litre tanks, and many could easily manage 20,000 capacity. At times of severe drought, a 10,000 litre tank for toilet, shower and laundry usually comes with an entitlement to a government subsidy.  A “first flush” water diverter can be cheaply installed to make the water safe for drinking. If you simply want to be able to water your garden, a 10,000 litre poly tank plus pump can be purchased and installed for around $1500 to $2000, much cheaper than even a rudimentary solar system. More constrained sites might require a slimline tank or two, but even those are now competitively priced. Tenants may have an uphill battle getting landlords to fork out for a tank, but they can still try moral pressure, or point out that the garden will die if they can’t water it.

At the height of the last great drought fear in Brisbane, in 2006, water bureaucrats from the southern states simply couldn’t believe that residents had got their consumption down to 160 litres per person per day. Peter Beattie’s government distributed four-minute timers to hundreds of thousands of letterboxes, introduced generous tank subsidies and insisted that all businesses develop a water plan. It also legalised the use of grey water on suburban gardens and installed tanks at schools, public transport hubs and other government sites with large roof areas. But then came the 2011 flood, and by 2013 the state government had given up on mandating water tanks for new dwellings.

So there is a simple solution to making urban dwellers more conscious of their water usage — make sure they get a tank. New South Wales, South Australia and Victoria  mandate or actively encourage tanks for new houses. Other state and all local governments should follow suit. When you think how much publicity solar installations have had over the last couple of years — any house, apartment block or business with some roof area can install solar — it seems extraordinary that we’ve forgotten our roofs can also capture water.

What can you do to conserve water? All the standard suggestions are being pushed again in all the capital cities: shorter showers; fewer dishwasher and washing machine cycles; ban cosmetic watering of driveways, lawns and cars. Many carwash firms now use recycled water; they all should, as should many other businesses. Golf courses, especially the wealthy ones,  should close if they  still use potable water for their greens. Peer pressure can also play a role. If you have friends or relatives with a swimming pool, always ask them if they fill it with tank water. If they don’t, you should politely refuse an invitation to use the pool. One of the most egregious acts of conspicuous consumption in Australia is the swimming pools that proliferate in apartment blocks and over-sized mansions within just a few minutes’ walk of the beach. •

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While most of these fires have broken out in the northern half of the state, on Tuesday this week the forecast of unprecedented catastrophic fire conditions was extended to the Greater Sydney, Illawarra and Hunter regions. In areas where the largest and most troubling fires were already burning, the forecast strong winds left fire services extremely concerned that the worst was still to come. Resources were paper thin, with 950 firefighters currently on the ground.

This is spring, remember. And let’s also not forget the fifty fires currently burning in Queensland, or the fires that hit the Sunshine Coast in October.

The forecast category of catastrophic fire conditions emerged from the inquest into Victoria’s 2009 Black Saturday fires, which claimed 173 lives. With the McArthur Forest Fire Danger Index exceeding 100, this is a treacherous combination of gusty winds, high temperatures, low humidity and extreme dryness. Any fire that ignites will quickly reach intensities and move at speeds that place properties and lives in imminent danger.

Conditions like these could have occurred before the category was defined, but their frequency and intensity are on the rise. Australia’s fire seasons have increased in intensity and length, and further increases are projected, most notably during spring. Extreme bushfires are also increasingly intense and frequent: in the case of Victoria, their average frequency has doubled since 1900. Bushfires that form their own weather systems and develop pyrocumulus clouds are projected to occur more frequently, especially in spring, over the next fifty years. And extreme temperatures — a key ingredient in extreme fire weather — are undoubtedly on the rise.

So let’s be crystal clear about this. Climate change is part of Australia’s bushfire landscape.

This is not confined to Australia. Global wildfire danger has increased since at least the 1980s. Climate change made Canada’s wildfire season of 2017 twice as likely to have occurred, and detectable climate change signals were behind the 2015–16 fire seasons in North America and Australia. The fire season in the United States is also lengthening — so much so it has overlapped with Australia’s over the past couple of years. Unprecedented fire conditions, impacts and costs plagued California during its 2018 and 2019 seasons.

How have Australian governments responded? NSW premier Gladys Berejiklian answered a question this week about the role of climate change in the fires with a curt, “Honestly, not today.” Barnaby Joyce blamed Greens policies (a claim that was quickly fact-checked and found to be wrong), and deputy prime minister Michael McCormack notoriously slammed anyone who linked the fires with climate change as “raving inner-city lunatics.”

If now isn’t the right time for discussion and action, it’s hard to imagine when will be. How many times will a state of emergency be declared before a conversation about bushfires and climate change is welcomed?

The Climate Council has released numerous reports linking bushfires and climate change, with no notable response from the government. Together with more than twenty other senior emergency personnel, former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner Greg Mullins attempted to convene a meeting on climate and bushfires with prime minister Scott Morrison and his colleague David Littleproud but was “fobbed off.”

Strikingly similar discussions about the relationship between climate change and bushfires have been sparked by a spate of other recent fires, including Tathra and Queensland in 2018, Tasmania early in 2019, and the Blue Mountains in 2013. These, too, were ignored by the federal government.

This attitude extends to climate change in general. Just last month, a parliamentary petition requesting the declaration of a climate emergency, signed by more than 400,000 people — the biggest e-petition ever submitted — was thrown out of parliament, despite more than 1180 jurisdictions across twenty-three countries (including sixty in Australia) having made their own declarations. When 11,000 scientists from across the world declared that the adverse effects of climate change are already here, the government was again silent.

In its Global Warming of 1.5°C report, published late last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned of the devastation further temperature increases will wreak on the Great Barrier Reef, yet our emissions-reduction targets remain woefully inadequate. The recent 300,000-strong climate marches have also fallen on deaf ears, with the government not only ignoring those voices but also threatening to punish harshly those who protest.

This failure to recognise the impact of rising temperatures and respond to majority public opinion is bewildering. Whether it’s manifested in bushfires, heatwaves or coral bleaching, climate change is here, now, and we must deal with it. As Margaret Thatcher said way back in 1989, “Every country will be affected and no one can opt out.” No amount of deflecting will change that. •

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At this point at least, the Australian Greens appear to be cheating this fate. While the party’s growth might have fallen short of more buoyant projections, it now seems to have built the foundations of stability: a sturdy social base, an active and tribal membership, and seats across the country’s state and federal parliaments. Just as tellingly, perhaps, it has acquired features associated with successful parties, including creeping factionalism, simmering personal feuds, and a tendency to litigate these internal disagreements through the media. The party is all grown up.

Paddy Manning, author and political journalist, maps this gradual rise to influence — from protest to parliament — in Inside the Greens. As a general history, it is a much-needed work: comprehensive, detailed and impressively sourced. While parts of this story have been covered elsewhere, Manning succeeds in pulling together the scattered narrative, while adding considerable original evidence and interview material. It is the first book to really chronicle “how the Greens began and grew in Australia, who they are now, and where they are going.”

Inside the Greens opens with the protesters who greeted US president Lyndon Johnson’s visit to Sydney in 1966. There that day were two future senators: a teenage socialist, Lee Rhiannon, and a conservative medical student, Bob Brown, who was attending the welcome parade in earnest. In a lengthy examination of the party’s origins, Manning follows its journey down two paths, one through the overlapping minor parties that preceded the Greens, the other through the extra-parliamentary fights that spurred its eventual creation.

The first strand is particularly fascinating. Here we see the rise and fall of the Australia Party, the Nuclear Disarmament Party and the Australian Democrats. While they were often more moderate than the Greens, they shared an emphasis on conservation and social liberalism, combined with a deep scepticism about the bureaucratic organising model of major parties. Memberships often overlapped. Each was simultaneously ally and rival, providing a glimpse into the emerging green politics but also presenting a barrier to its full realisation.

The environmental struggles are well known. With enviable access to the main players and their private papers, Manning recounts the battles to save Lake Pedder and the Franklin River, the fight against pulp mills in Tasmania, the Victorian push to halt forestry in East Gippsland, and the blockade against uranium mining at Jabiluka. (Each attracted future Greens representatives: Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Janet Rice and Scott Ludlam all rose through the campaigns as activists.) And while these chapters offer partisan rather than definitive accounts, the interviews provide vivid insights into the Greens’ worldview, revealing their cast of villains, their consistent tactics and their broader understanding of politics and political conflict.

The Greens are a stubbornly federated party — the Western Australian branch only joined the national organisation in 2002 — and Manning deftly weaves together the varied and uneven state experiences. He shows how early success propelled the Tasmanian branch into the centre of national discussion while the Queensland party was struggling to gain parliamentary traction. For their part, the Western Australians grew out of the imploding Nuclear Disarmament Party, just as the NSW branch emerged from urban left politics and the end of the cold war. These early differences left an imprint, creating distinct cultural identities across the state organisations. Some proved more successful than others.

At least at the federal level, the party’s decisive electoral breakthrough coincided with the collapse of the Democrats. This partly reflected that party’s internal disintegration, but it was also a result of the Greens’ more coherent left-wing pitch. Throughout the 2000s, its politicians were unambiguous and vocal on some of the era’s defining issues, particularly the Pacific Solution and the Iraq war. (Brown famously heckled George Bush during his address to the Australian parliament in 2003, an incident recounted here in detail.) By Kevin Rudd’s election in 2007, the party had a solid foothold in the Senate — and, by 2010, it possessed a vote in Julia Gillard’s minority government as well as the balance of power in the Senate.

Electoral success gave the party a new, and at times uncomfortable, intimacy with political power, and Inside the Greens examines these experiences at federal and state levels. Common themes emerge, connected by an almost existential concern: how should a party interact with forces that, for most of its history, it considered corrupting and suspicious?

For early Greens politicians like Christabel Chamarette and Dee Margetts, who held vital Senate seats during the Keating years, this question was both pressing and practical. Exactly how much should they demand in exchange for their support, and at what point should they remove it altogether? In 1993, Chamarette went very close to voting down the Native Title Act, claiming it did not go far enough in securing Indigenous ownership. (Her resistance was so obstinate that, as the debate dragged on, she began receiving supportive letters from racist opponents of the bill.) Twenty years later, the federal party would experience a similar dilemma on climate policy — first voting down Kevin Rudd’s scheme, later negotiating with Gillard to legislate carbon pricing.

Other considerations are more strategic. The party’s most rapid periods of popular growth have tended to occur while firmly outside the tent of government. Conversely, minority government under Gillard might have given the Greens unprecedented influence — a seat at the table that produced carbon pricing — but it was ultimately at the expense of electoral growth. Over that period, the federal party lost a third of its vote, and after a similar experiment, the Tasmanian branch lost even more. As Manning shows, the party is still unsure of what to do with this information, particularly if the trade-off between power and popularity is unshakable.

Running beneath this dilemma is a deeper question of purpose and ambition. Inside the Greens is littered with grandiose predictions made through the years — of winning dozens of seats in the House of Representatives or even replacing Labor altogether. Fair enough: this is politics; dream big. But it is often hard to tell how serious these goals are, or how they inform the party’s behaviour and strategy. Perhaps, like much of Bob Brown’s rhetoric, it combines irony and earnestness — a distant and flickering light on the hill.

Still, even with failed KPIs, the party’s expansion has been steady and durable. It now possesses dozens of seats in Australian parliaments, a small class of staffers and operatives, and the resources needed to run targeted campaigns. Stewart Jackson, a former state convenor of the Greens and now scholar of the organisation, describes this as a transition from movement politics to electoral professionalism. While the spoils of parliament can change a party — shifting power from grassroots members to elected officials — thicker institutional roots mean the Greens are less vulnerable to disturbances and shocks. In important ways, the party has assumed the air of permanency.

The book’s second half examines some of the internal pains associated with this growth. Here things get more controversial. While the party’s state branches have always been in tension — with Tasmanians advocating a centralised national organisation, for instance, and the NSW group holding tightly onto local autonomy — this has become particularly vicious and public in recent years. And, as Manning has examined elsewhere, these differences overlap with other, more ideological disagreements between the party’s socialist and environmentalist tendencies — disagreements that also exist within individual states.

Inside the Greens provides the most detailed coverage of these internal disputes currently on the public record. Two in particular receive extensive attention. The first is the recent saga over NSW preselections, initially after the death of John Kaye in 2016 and then in preparation for the 2019 state campaign. The book shows how an already brutal ballot escalated when a former party member accused Jeremy Buckingham, a moderate Green, of sexual assault — an allegation Buckingham denies. This is sensitive terrain, blurring personal, political and criminal considerations, and Manning is careful to present multiple perspectives. It was an ugly affair, as the book makes clear, and still reverberates through the state party.

The second major clash helped bring down the party’s Batman by-election campaign in 2018. While the NSW preselections reflected ongoing philosophical disagreements, this was self-sabotage at its most mindless, driven by local gossip and council ambitions. Jealous local members leaked against the party’s candidate, Alex Bhathal, accusing her of bullying and factional thuggery. As Manning suggests, these claims were fanciful and opportunistic — making Bhathal’s already difficult battle impossible. The book quotes at length journalist Martin McKenzie-Murray, who is even more dismissive of the discontents after reading the evidence of the “bullying”:

The real corruption to be found in the voluminous records of micro-aggressions is of language. Disagreement becomes abuse. Debate is violence. Ordinary requests are bullying. Frivolity is recklessness. I have encountered sensitivity so pronounced, so easily disturbed, that it resembles madness. And I detect in this hypersensitivity an imperious individualism, an almost hysterical primacy of one’s feelings — impractical in a political party and disastrous for the communal values of debate.

The book ends with a long, discursive conversation with prominent Greens politicians about the future of Australian politics and the party’s policy direction. The contrast with the factional brawling is glaring. While different figures present different priorities, suggesting distinctive postures and messaging strategies, for the most part they form a unity ticket. On climate change, social policy, war and democracy, they chart broadly left positions, with an implicit belief that history will validate them. As Manning argues in the book’s final pages, the party’s future will be defined by its navigation through these twin currents: between the sporadic, often bitter internal battles, and what Greens activists consider their vital, still-ripening political mission. •

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As someone with an idea for a book that’s been a long time coming, I was pleased to discover in the extensive list of Tim Bonyhady’s publications (which effortlessly cross and combine the fields of art history, environmental history and law) an article on the long-haired rat in Overland in 1992. Like the real-life rats of the past, the idea of the long-haired rat has clearly lingered, and after a long gestation has produced this delightful exploration of the teeming lives and dramatic deaths of members of a generally overlooked Australian species.

Bonyhady’s intention is to recover the long-haired rat’s lost world — its country, the animals around it and its place in human lives — from the time it entered written records in the 1840s to the present. Climate variation plays a central role: Bonyhady correlates the rat’s periodic irruptions with what have subsequently been identified as La Niña years. As pastoralists celebrated the arrival of flood waters from the northeast, so too did long-haired rats, emerging from their refuges around permanent water sources to follow new food supplies and bountifully reproduce along the way.

In narrating a series of floods and their aftermaths, Bonyhady draws on a surprisingly rich selection of evidence left by explorers, naturalists, pastoralists, missionaries, flying doctors, travellers and people sharing their experiences of rat plagues through local newspapers. Very few of them had gone in search of the long-haired rat, but when their paths crossed, it could hardly be ignored.

Many of the sources, including the papers of Burke and Wills and other well-known expeditions, and of their rescue parties, had to be carefully sifted for a comment here and an observation there. The more prolific writers include Kenric H. Bennett, the station manager and frustrated scientist who never quite reached the level of respect and authority he so wanted, and Hedley H. Finlayson, who lost a hand and much of his sight in a laboratory accident but still managed to be one of the leading natural history collectors of the 1930s.

Although the book necessarily draws mainly on published sources, Bonyhady also listens carefully for Indigenous voices, with their distinctive understanding of the species. Long-haired rats were totem animals and part of Dreaming stories, being integrated into the landscape in places like Maiurru Mitha Vambata (“dirt dug out of a hole by rat,” in the Adnyamathanha language) in the Flinders Ranges, renamed Mount Hopeless by Edward Eyre.

The Indigenous group whose relationship with the rat is most fully explored is the Diyari of the Lake Eyre region, drawing on ethnographic work by German missionary Johann Reuther, who lived among them from the 1860s. The “enchantment” of the book’s title refers to the Diyari’s singing to rats, both to entice them from their burrows when hunting and, malevolently, to inflict stress and hardship on other humans by sending the rats home, ending a period of abundance.

In contrast to the welcome given to long-haired rats by Indigenous peoples, settler colonists carried prejudices against them. Indeed, Bonyhady argues that the mere fact they were designated as rats was an “obstacle to sympathy,” with those species so named being more likely than other Australian mammals to become extinct. He reports that fifteen species of native rat have died out since the arrival of Europeans.

Sudden encounters with waves of rats that seemed to rise out of the earth itself, principally at night, triggered classic disgust responses that were heightened by the practical damage they did. Mid irruption, little of organic origin was safe: garden crops, pasturage, plant roots, the bark of trees, stored food, harnesses, boots, even the wooden handles of tools. Rats were blamed for undermining fences and roads, killing and eating lambs, and even igniting bushfires by gnawing wax-tipped matches. While some of these accounts seem exaggerated, Bonyhady has been cautious with the evidence and critiques those that become hyperbolic.

Although it does not discuss the concept explicitly, The Enchantment of the Long-haired Rat is also an exemplary study of animal agency. The rat’s irruptions disrupted the tenuously balanced systems settler colonists were attempting to put in place, and increased the numbers and impact of other outsider animals, native and introduced. The letter-winged kite is given particular attention as a specialised hunter of long-haired rats that became nocturnal in pursuit of its prey. Bonyhady uses this anomaly — most kites being daytime hunters — to trace the tensions between the uncredentialled naturalists who observed and reported on this behaviour and the unbelieving museum-based experts.

The kite wasn’t alone. Dingoes, foxes, cats, snakes (notably the inland taipan), goannas and even fish profited from the surplus of rats, with catfish and golden perch found to have eaten them as they swam across swollen waterways. When the irruptions subsided, these predators faced crises that could take them far from their usual territory or lead to their preying on novel species, amplifying the impact of the rats.

Interspecies relations were further complicated by the deliberate introduction of rat predators. In the 1880s, landholders sought large numbers of domestic cats from coastal cities and also, in a truly breathtaking move, imported hundreds of “native cats,” now known as quolls, from the central west of New South Wales to the Riverina. Even at the time, these measures were decried as not only unlikely to make much impact on the rats but also certain to harm birdlife when the irruption subsided.

While irruptions of long-haired rats have continued into the twenty-first century, Bonyhady demonstrates that their scale — both numerical and geographical — has been in decline since 1888. He concludes that even this furry embodiment of the Australian boom-and-bust cycle is not immune to the effects of commercial agriculture, climate change and the displacement of Indigenous land-management practices. Speaking to the importance of such historical studies for forming a baseline for current scientific understandings, he notes how the authors of a 1981 guide to Australian rodents that concluded long-haired rats were resilient in the face of colonisation assumed that the rat reached its greatest range in 1975, unaware of the vast territory covered in the 1880s.

Although vulnerable both to the droughts and intense rain that will increasingly characterise Australia, the long-haired rat is not considered to be endangered. Bonyhady’s ringing message is that all of the interconnected animals of the fragile Australian continent must be cherished, not only those judged to be charismatic or useful. For this and other reasons, The Enchantment of the Long-haired Rat is an important book for our times. •

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Last month the company carried out its threat to bankrupt Adrian Burragubba, the leading Indigenous opponent of the mine, who was unable to meet an order for court costs. At the same time, the company had secretly reached an agreement that the Palaszczuk government, which is running scared after the federal election result in Queensland, would extinguish native title over the mine site.

Remaining approvals, such as the lease on Moray Downs land for the workers’ camp and airport, have been finalised, and a royalty deal will reportedly be concluded soon. But Adani has yet to negotiate access to the Queensland rail network. Its owner, Aurizon (formerly the publicly operated QR), is coming under pressure from the public and large shareholders to limit assistance to what is legally required.

Despite these delays, the recent rhetoric of Adani and its backers suggests the project ought to be well under way by now, with thousands of jobs on offer. In reality, Adani has advertised just twenty-five jobs over the past month (as at 5 September), according to the company’s jobs portal, and no more than one hundred since the election, not even enough to offset cuts made last year.

It’s possible that this is simply a steady and orderly process of development on Adani’s part. If so, the company needs to pick up the pace soon if it is going to start exporting coal by its publicly stated target of 2021.

Alternatively, it may be that pressure to stop new coal projects has left Adani without partners for crucial parts of its work. As I wrote recently in relation to insurance in particular, the number of companies willing to back new and existing coalmines is shrinking, and the costs are bound to increase correspondingly.

More broadly, media reports suggest that GHD, which is carrying out the rail design work, is bearing significant reputational costs. Given the unhappy experience of previous engineering contractors like Worley Parsons and AECOM, it’s surprising a firm with an eye to the future would pick up this poisoned chalice.

That seems to be the view of another big engineering firm, Aurecon, which has just announced a break with Adani. Despite copping abuse from resources minister Matt Canavan, Aurecon presumably judges that it will be around long after Canavan has gone, and that the long-term costs of planetary vandalism is too much to bear.

Then there’s the operation of the railway. Aurizon seems unlikely to take it on, and another big operator, Genesee & Wyoming Australia, has said it won’t touch it. That leaves Pacific National, whose owners include at least one organisation, the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, that’s coming under pressure to divest from fossil fuels.

A final possibility is that the ultimate owner, Gautam Adani, is still playing for time, hoping to extract yet more government support before committing billions of dollars of his own money to a project that can’t possibly be sustained in commercial terms. As an Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis has shown, the whole plan now depends on a crony-capitalist deal involving Adani, his close friend Indian prime minister Narendra Modi and the government of Bangladesh.

Even so, without more financial support from Australian governments, it’s hard to see the project paying off. And it’s at least possible that part of the deal, now being challenged in Indian courts, will fall over.

While Adani has received an outsize share of attention here, the broader issue is the need for an orderly transition away from coal-fired electricity generation, and ultimately away from all burning of fossil fuels. If such a transition is to be feasible in the couple of decades available to us, no new thermal coal mines, or major expansion of existing mines, can be justified — and that applies to proposals such as Shenhua’s Watermark mine near Gunnedah and the New Hope mine in Acland, near Toowoomba. •

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The road to Maralinga reveals how large South Australia really is. We had been given a hand-sketched mud map to find the former nuclear test site: take a right on an unsigned mining road 170 kilometres past Ceduna; seventy kilometres later take a left onto a dirt road until you hit the crossing of the Trans-Australian Railway, along the longest straight stretch of rail track in the world; next, the map takes us on a weaving trail over claypans and dry lakes and into the Maralinga Tjarutja lands. We then have to drive for another hour through saltbush scrub until we reach a locked gate. Robin will be waiting for us there.

As we approach the rolling mallee woodlands, blue haze ripples low on the horizon; saltbush and stunted trees dot the country. There are no animals, no people and no signs of life except big, steel-coloured storm clouds spreading over the hills. Appropriately, Maralinga means “thunder” in the extinct Aboriginal Garik (or Garig) language — it seems apt considering the devastation that tore through the land here not so long ago.

During the cold war, the British were concerned that they’d be left vulnerable by the nuclear weapons programs being developed in Russia and the United States. They searched for an appropriate testing site within their empire to begin their own program. Canada was initially touted as a partner, though the government there baulked at the potential environmental damage. The remote bush in South Australia was identified as a possibility and Australia’s prime minister at the time, Robert Menzies, even agreed to pay some of the costs, something not requested by the British. The British conducted nuclear tests in Australia between 1952 and 1963, and at Maralinga from 1956. It was nuclear colonialism played out in one of the most remote areas of South Australia.

Nuclear testing started on the Montebello Islands eighty kilometres off the coast of Western Australia, before moving to Emu Field in the scrub 180 kilometres north of Maralinga. The British wanted a larger, more open tract of land where they could conduct their experiments in secret, and Len Beadell, the famous Australian bushman and surveyor who opened up the land for the Woomera rocket range in 1946, decided on the area in the west of the state as the most appropriate site for nuclear tests in South Australia. As Beadell knew, there were no towns there, but it was a significant Indigenous “highway” and Dreaming road that passed between sacred sites and the paths that led people from the south to central Australia. During his survey, Beadell even discovered what he called an Aboriginal “Stonehenge” on the track between Emu Field and Maralinga, though there was no time to investigate properly as the pressures of the cold war mounted.

A village was built at Maralinga, with London Road, Belfast Street, Tenth Avenue and East Street among the addresses where the personnel lived during the operation. There was a permanent airstrip, which at the time was the largest in the southern hemisphere, roads, an Olympic-size swimming pool, accommodation and railway access.

The first test was set for September 1956, only two months before the rest of the country would be celebrating the Olympics in Melbourne. The Buffalo 1 bomb, with a yield of fifteen kilotonnes (equivalent to 15,000 tonnes of TNT), was detonated at the One Tree site from a thirty-metre steel tower. It was the first of seven atomic bombs exploded over seven years at Maralinga. During the test years a total of 35,000 military personnel spent time at the base. Most were from Britain, though there were also men from Australia, Canada, the United States and New Zealand living in the Maralinga village.

We arrive at the locked gates, where the guide is waiting. Robin Matthews is a grizzled man in his sixties with the tanned skin of a life lived outdoors, a baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and a cigarette hanging from his dry lips. He is from an era that doesn’t exist anymore — his skin is blotched with a narrative of faded tattoos, inked long before it was fashionable. He wears a singlet with an unfurled dragon on the front, and he smokes and swears without worrying about appearances. Robin lives for this place and it’s part of him. He unlocks the gates and takes us through to the bones of the former village, a place he calls home and where we’ll camp for the next few nights.

Robin has been coming to Maralinga on and off since 1972, so he knows more about its modern story than most. He first came here on an odd job to help pull the village buildings down. He was a tuna fisherman in Port Lincoln at the time. For four weeks, he drove trucks carrying out the old materials and “it piqued my interest,” he says of an initial curiosity that has led to his nearly fifty-year association with the place.

“In 1973 I got a job on the railway at Watson and I saw some old records of the tests and the people who lived here, and I began piecing together the story,” he says. He came back again in 1984 to run the store in Oak Valley with his wife Della, who is Anangu. “Della wasn’t brought up the same way culturally as many of the Indigenous people — she doesn’t get frightened by the mamu spirits,” he says, referring to the evil spirits the Anangu believe still reside here. The land here was handed back to the Indigenous people in 2009, though, as Robin says, “So many people’s descendants died as a result of the blasts. It’s a bit like a graveyard for them.”

Robin continued to work on contracts in the area and when the land was handed back to the Indigenous people, he and Della were asked to be the first caretakers. While the people who live at Oak Valley don’t want to live in, or even pass through, the Maralinga land, they’re happy for it to be open to tourism, so the story of Maralinga can be told.

There is a strange aura to this place. The ghost town feel of the old buildings and half-buried foundations contrasts with the newness of this tourism enterprise, complete with hot water and wi-fi. We’re free to wander around the compound in the afternoon, past old water tanks, army barracks with open doors flapping in the wind, and a flagpole that hasn’t hoisted anything for years.

Robin returns the next morning in a repurposed minibus to take us out to the test sites. He speaks with fondness of the projects he’s responsible for here — he’s the tourism operator, former caretaker and maintenance man; and he knows every stretch — from the oleanders planted by the British around the dam, to the hiding places for the crimson flowers of the Sturt’s desert peas along the track.

Len Beadell’s roads take us into the Great Victoria Desert to the testing sites. It’s a nineteen-kilometre dead-straight track up onto a limestone plain scattered with stunted mulga scrub. The colour of the earth changes from red to sandy yellow in an instant. “Rabbits still dig things up,” Robin says, though as part of his job he continually digs burial pits with a backhoe to bury non-radiated junk.

After the clean-up from 1994 to 2000, the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency found that someone living at Maralinga full-time — like Robin — would receive no more than five millisieverts of radiation in a year, even in the most contaminated sites around Taranaki. Tourists who don’t disturb the soil, or “eat mouthfuls of dust,” as Robin puts it, would receive less than one millisievert. As a comparison, most people are exposed to about 1.5 to two millisieverts each year from natural background radiation. “There was a 0.2 reading at ground zero, to give you an idea of the clean-up,” Robin says.

As we approach the Taranaki site, we can see, nearly to the centimetre, where the vegetation vanishes — the invisible line from where the soil is poisoned. There is nothing except for small shrubs with shallow roots, scattered around the blast site. As soon as they grow to about twenty centimetres, they wilt and die.

“Kangaroos have started coming back here,” Robin says. Aside from the herds of camels, there are emus, dingoes and “lots of king brown snakes” reappearing as well. Taranaki got its name from the second world war battle in Papua New Guinea. Around this one site are twenty-two major pits, all at least fifteen metres deep and cased in reinforced concrete, to bury the plutonium from the blasts. Another interesting technique used during the clean-up was in situ vitrification, which involved burying enormous electrodes in the radioactive waste and pumping 8.4 megawatts of electricity into the soil. The process turned the waste into glass, encasing it before it was broken up and buried.

In all, 400,000 square metres of plutonium dirt is buried here in a granite-sided coffin, along with every bit of heavy machinery used in the operations — seventy-one Landcruisers, bulldozers, scrapers and excavators, all of them tipped into the pit. One thing I do notice are the red flowers popping up on the edge of the clearing, “They’re Afghan hops,” Robin tells me. They were brought here by Afghan and Pakistani men in the nineteenth century, to be dried and used as feed for their camels on the long interior expeditions that would have passed through here.

Throughout the afternoon we drive to the different ground-zero sites, hearing stories of the explosions and their after-effects — of atomic bombs being detonated midair, held aloft by giant balloons, and of the wind that carried radioactive dust into the Northern Territory and as far away as Newcastle after the blasts.

Despite the magnitude of the “big” blasts, the most harrowing names from the atomic era here are Kittens, Tims, Rats and Vixen. These were the “minor” trials that ended up being some of the most damaging experiments on Australian soil during the latter stages of the British occupation of Maralinga. Carried out in secret, the tests examined how toxic substances would react when burned or blown up. Uranium and plutonium-239 was heated up and fired through a chimney, then left on open, exposed ground for more than thirty years. The tests were designed to find out what would happen if a truck carrying plutonium caught on fire, or if a plane with nuclear warheads crashed. Chief scientist William Penney remarked that these tests must be done in Australia because “the short-lived radioactive material used in the initiating of the nuclear explosion would not pose a hazard.” Not if you lived more than 24,000 years in the future, anyway.

The tests stopped in 1963, though there was a junkyard of radioactive carnage left behind. At the time it was said to include up to 50,000 plutonium-contaminated fragments, though that number was later revised to three million. The eventual clean-up operation, which followed the Australian royal commission into the tests in 1984–85, took six years and cost more than $100 million.

Despite the sureties of our safety now, this wasn’t always the case. The nuclear personnel here in the 1950s and 1960s experienced countless deaths and health complications, workers during the clean-ups were exposed to health dangers, and the Indigenous people continued to be disregarded. “They had not felt its age-old rocks and its forgiving sand beneath their feet. They had not slept and dreamed under its stars or seen the moon rise,” Christobel Mattingley writes of the lack of understanding shown by the British and Australian governments, in her book Maralinga’s Long Shadow.

In early 1957, a few months after a 1.5 kilotonne bomb had been exploded at ground level at Marcoo, Mrs Edie Millpuddie and her family were traversing the plains of the Great Victoria Desert, as their ancestors had done for thousands of years. The bomb had torn a crater forty-four metres wide and twenty-one metres deep into land that was part of a significant Dreaming highway for the Indigenous people.

The Millpuddies, who needed shelter for the night, came across this enormous hole that would keep them out of the wind, and they tramped across the soft earth to the bottom of the crater, where the ground was still warm. It had been raining, so they scooped rainwater from the bottom to drink and lit a fire on the red sand flecked with melted glass.

On their approach Charlie Millpuddie had noticed that all the rabbits in the area seemed blind and disoriented; they were easy pickings for dinner. He lit a fire and cooked the rabbits, before the entire family went to sleep at the bottom of what they didn’t know was an atomic bomb crater. They stayed there for three days, until scientists noticed smoke billowing from the crater and rushed in to see what had happened. The scientists and military personnel immediately took the Millpuddies back to the village. To decontaminate them, says Robin, they were given “five showers and told that the reading was clear. They were then driven to Yalata and dumped there.”

Two weeks later Edie had a stillborn baby in Yalata; many thought it was from the radiation, though Robin believes it was something else. As part of their “evacuation” they were forcibly washed by the white mamu people, who then moved them off their land to an unfamiliar place with tribes they didn’t know. The Maralinga officers shot their four dogs, seen as family members, in front of them before dumping the bodies in the crater. The 1980s royal commission awarded Edie $75,000, though more tragic is the fact that the family’s grandchildren “all have physical and mental deformities now,” Robin says. “This all happened right where we’re standing,” he adds, to reinforce the tragedy of the situation and to highlight that this is not an event that has ended for the Anangu people.

The clean-up here only finished in 2000 — at the same time we were celebrating the Olympics in Sydney — and the land was handed back to the Maralinga Tjarutja people in 2009.

The effects of the nuclear experiments were not just felt by the Indigenous community. After the Marcoo blast, 283 men, the “Maralinga guinea pigs” of the “Indoctrinee Force,” were deliberately placed in the forward areas so they could experience the effects of the nuclear blast.

These men had separate living quarters from the rest of the Maralinga citizens. Without protective gear, they would help the scientists lay out the objects to be tested post-blast: from guns, cars and dummies to jets and Centurion tanks. The British deemed their eyewitness accounts to be necessary, as they would provide data on what to expect in the likely escalation of a worldwide nuclear war in the near future. The health issues for these guinea pigs were severe: cataracts, blood diseases, arthritic conditions, stomach cancers and, more tragically, ongoing health conditions and deformities for the offspring of the survivors.

There was no overt political pressure or media scrutiny of the tests until the 1970s, when some of those injured by the tests came forward, and a small group of journalists and politicians cast a more critical eye over the tests and the secrecy surrounding them.

Driving back along the straight roads to camp, the bus is quiet. It seems appropriate. There’s no room for idle chat. The air is too heavy with what we’ve seen today. This is the most isolated spot I’ve ever been to in Australia, though it’s not one empty of stories or history. I understand better now how loaded this place has become with sorrow, anger and, as Robin suggests, maybe a little bit of hope for the future.

“We now bring our kids and our grandchildren here to explain what happened. This is their land and their ancestors,” Robin says. He would love it if the Indigenous people would become guides here to continue the process of the Anangu people taking back their land, though he understands why they never will.

The sun is shining across the village the next morning and Robin busies himself with preparations for a charter plane of tourists arriving from Ceduna. Despite his spending a large part of his life here in Maralinga, I get the impression that he’s not done with it yet. “When I come down to the village and walk around by myself, I feel like I’m in a time warp,” he says, puffing on another smoke. “I’ve been coming here since 1972 and you can imagine what was going on here in the 1950s and 60s.” It is a time warp — the devastation of the tests, the echoes of the Indigenous stories here when it was a Dreaming road, and the green shoots of the future led by Robin and the Maralinga Tjarutja people.•

This is an extract from The Crow Eaters: A Journey Through South Australia, by Ben Stubbs, published this month by NewSouth.

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Apollo 11 was a magnificent technological feat that also stirred a common humanity. There were times when the sheer wonder of leaving our planet to land on another world transcended the grubby, aggressive cold war politics that fuelled the space race. The plaque left on the moon depicted the two hemispheres of Earth and assured the solar system that Apollo 11 “came in peace for all mankind.” But nationalism was the mud on their boots, and they tramped it in.

A few hours after the first moonwalk, an uncrewed Soviet spacecraft, Luna 15, crash-landed on the moon, thus giving the Americans a satisfying first spike on the graph of their newly installed lunar seismometer. Luna 15 took the space race to the finish line, for it was designed to retrieve Russian samples of moon rock before the Americans could return with their own.

The rhetoric of space exploration was so future-oriented and cold war politics so competitive that NASA underestimated the power of looking back. In 1968, the historic Apollo 8 mission launched humans beyond Earth’s orbit for the first time, out and across the void and into the gravitational power of another heavenly body. For three lunar orbits, the three astronauts studied the strange, desolate, cratered surface below them and then, as they came out from the dark side of the moon for the fourth time, they looked up and gasped:

Frank Borman: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there! Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that is pretty!

Bill Anders: Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.

They did take the photo, excitedly, and it became famous, perhaps the most famous photograph of the twentieth century, the blue planet floating alone, finite and vulnerable in space above a dead lunar landscape. Frank Borman said: “It was the most beautiful, heart-catching sight of my life.” And Bill Anders declared: “We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”

In his fascinating book Earthrise (2010), British historian Robert Poole explains that this was not supposed to happen. The cutting edge of the future was to be in space; Earth was the launch pad not the target. Leaving the Earth’s atmosphere was seen as a stage in human evolution comparable to our amphibian ancestor crawling out of the primeval slime onto land. And now, “after thousands of years of life on this planet” (declared the Los Angeles Times) “Man has broken the chains that bind him to Earth.” Humans had left the realm of solids and gases for gravity-free, oxygen-free space, for a new frontier and a beckoning future. The weightless astronauts, even in their clumsy spacesuits, were liberated. Furthermore, their new dominion was seen to offer what Neil Armstrong called a “survival possibility” for a world shadowed by the nuclear arms race. In the words of Toy Story’s Buzz Lightyear (sometimes hilariously confused with Buzz Aldrin), the space age looked to infinity and beyond!

So the power of the view back towards Earth took NASA by surprise. A few years later, in 1972, a photo taken by the Apollo 17 mission and known as The Blue Marble became one of the most reproduced pictures in the world, showing the Earth as a luminous, breathing garden in the dark void. Earthrise and The Blue Marble had a profound impact on environmental politics and sensibilities.

Within a few years, the American scientist James Lovelock put forward “the Gaia hypothesis”: that the Earth is a single, self-regulating organism. In the year of the Apollo 8 mission, Paul Ehrlich published his book The Population Bomb, an urgent appraisal of a finite Earth. During the years of the moon missions, British economist Barbara Ward wrote Spaceship Earth and Only One Earth, revealing how economics failed to account for environmental damage and degradation, and arguing, like Ehrlich, that exponential growth could not continue forever. Earth Day was established in 1970, a day to honour the planet as a whole, a total environment needing protection.

Then, in 1972, the Club of Rome released its controversial and enormously influential report The Limits to Growth, which sold over thirteen million copies and went into over thirty translations. In their report, Donella Meadows and Dennis Meadows wrestled with the contradiction of trying to force infinite material growth on a finite planet. The cover of their book depicted a whole Earth, a shrinking Earth. Shrinking the Earth became the title of a 2016 book by the American environmental historian Donald Worster about modern humanity’s ill-fated quest for endless growth and how the view of Earth from space initiated a change in consciousness comparable to the Copernican and Darwinian revolutions.

When the Apollo 14 astronaut Alan Shepard looked up from the lunar surface and regarded the Earth high in the sky, he was struck by “that thin, thin atmosphere, the thinnest shell of air hugging the world.” He looked at his home in the blackness and felt its extreme fragility, and he wept.

In the fifty years since Apollo 11, we’ve learned a lot about that precious atmosphere. Earth systems science emerged in the second half of the twentieth century and fostered a keen understanding of planetary boundaries — thresholds in planetary ecology — and the extent to which the human enterprise is threatening or exceeding them. The same industrial capitalism that unleashed carbon enabled us to extract ice cores from the poles and construct a deep history of the air. At least we now understand our predicament even if we are perilously slow to act. The blue planet is suffering the sixth great extinction and a climate emergency. The fossil fuels that got humans to the moon now endanger our civilisation. But fifty years after Apollo 11, we might hold onto the idea that the space race also unexpectedly quickened our race to save the Earth.

Last week I watched Todd Douglas Miller’s fiftieth anniversary documentary, Apollo 11, and was mesmerised by the real footage and voiceovers, and felt all the anxiety and suspense even though I knew what would happen next. The surviving 65mm footage surpassed all the efforts of Hollywood (in the 2018 film First Man) to represent the awesome power of the Saturn V rocket launch. I was moved by how mechanical and brittle was the whole grand enterprise. They were shooting at a moving target in a machine with 5.6 million moving parts. As the astronauts boarded the spaceship and the countdown proceeded, technicians were fiddling with a leaking liquid hydrogen valve on the rocket below them. In the Houston control room, slide rules were used dexterously. When Armstrong stepped out for the moonwalk, he bumped and broke a switch that was crucial to the operation of the ascent engine, and it was fixed with a ballpoint pen. The lunar module, Eagle, was a tinfoil Tardis. These vulnerable humans were camping at the edge of the universe.

I was twelve at the time of the Apollo 11 voyage and found myself in a school debate about whether the money for the moon mission would be better spent on Earth. I argued that it would be, and my team lost. But what other result was allowable in July 1969? Conquering the moon, declared Dr Wernher von Braun, Nazi scientist turned US rocket maestro, assured Man of immortality. I followed the Apollo missions with a sense of wonder, staying up late to watch the Saturn V launch, joining my schoolmates in a large hall with tiny televisions to witness Armstrong take his Giant Leap, and saving full editions of the Age newspaper reporting those fabled days. I’m reading them now: “Target Moon — here they come,” “Here we go round the Moon,” “Down to the Moon — Spacemen set for walk into history,” “Apollo hurtles for home — Nixon will see that big splash.”

Other news was pushed to the margins: about senator Edward Kennedy leaving the scene of a fatal car crash at Chappaquiddick Island, about the latest “light casualties” in Vietnam, about the immigration minister (Mr Snedden) welcoming a significant rise in the number of refugees settling in Australia, about the arrival of seven Nauruans in Australia for eye operations, about efforts to save the Great Barrier Reef from oil drilling. One telecommunications company took out a full-page advertisement comparing Neil Armstrong to Captain Cook and thus the moon to Australia as “yet another unknown where intrepid man has now trod.”

But the legendary cartoonist Les Tanner depicted the two astronauts sitting on the moon gazing at Earth and saying: “Funny — it looks like one world!”

Apollo was an astonishing extrapolation of the military-industrial complex, of a cold war superpower blasting even into space. Thus with the eyes of the whole world upon them, with a moment of unity in their grasp, the Americans planted their national flag on the moon. It was the next phase of colonisation, the new frontier, an affirmation of the future. Everything was simulated and rehearsed in advance, every possible problem imagined and solved before it could happen. The day before the launch the crew were still in simulators, practising the future. But NASA did not foresee Apollo’s greatest legacy. It could not imagine the radical effect of seeing the Earth. •

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The fight is about natural gas extraction in the Great Australian Bight. For several years, oil companies, including BP and Chevron, have signalled interest in drilling under the bight to confirm the existence of untold mineral riches. Equinor, a Norwegian oil and gas company, plans to begin exploratory drilling by 2021, pending final permission from the National Offshore Petroleum Safety and Environmental Management Authority, or NOPSEMA, a statutory Commonwealth agency.

Equinor’s Stromlo-1 well would be about 370 kilometres offshore, in some of the roughest seas in the world. Its isolation would make an oil spill hard, perhaps impossible, to contain. According to Equinor’s own worst-case modelling, a spill could spread over thousands of kilometres, west to Perth and as far east as the coast of New South Wales. In this scenario, Tasmania would be surrounded by oil.

To my embarrassment, I knew none of this until a recent trip across the country. In early March, having decided to act on an idea we had long talked about, my wife and I set off in a campervan with our two boys, nearly three and nearly one. “A really big adventure,” our eldest called it. We drove 10,000 kilometres in five weeks, Perth and back.

We got to Adelaide quickly, skipping over country where we had spent time before, then slowed down. Rather than head directly west from Port Augusta, we decided to turn south and mosey our way around the Eyre Peninsula. We spent our first night on the peninsula in Cleve, a quiet, pretty town about forty kilometres inland, but otherwise we kept to the coast: Tumby Bay, Port Lincoln, Coffin Bay, Elliston, Streaky Bay, Smoky Bay. The ocean supports many people in these towns, through fishing, oyster farming and tourism. And beyond its economic value, locals know its beauty. People we met on beaches and jetties welcomed us to the “west” and its beautiful azure waters.

The South Australian Tourism Commission has designated the road around the Eyre Peninsula part of its Seafood Frontier. For a few days we lived well on seafood fresh from the Great Australian Bight: fish at Streaky Bay, oysters at Coffin Bay and Smoky Bay. Along the coast we saw and met hundreds of grey nomads, many of whom had timed their trip to the Eyre Peninsula to coincide with the whiting run. They came with caravans and tinnies, ready to set up camp and spend days on the water fishing. At Elliston the sea looked so alluring that we went for a dip. The water was memorably clear and crisp. We had the beach to ourselves.

Everywhere, as we travelled around the Eyre Peninsula, we were implored to Fight for the Bight — posters at the bakeries, newsagents and pubs, stickers plastered to car bumpers. Signs urged people to hop on a surfboard, paddleboard or kayak and paddle out to join protests. We got the sense that the campaign had galvanised communities around the Eyre Peninsula and made protesters from people who had never protested before. It was inspiring. And the fight has spread across Australia: “paddle outs” have been held in every state.

The bight nurtures a wondrous marine environment. The New York Times reports that it has been called “Australia’s answer to the Galápagos,” its ecological value comparable to the Great Barrier Reef. About 85 per cent of its species are found nowhere else. Governments in Canberra and Adelaide know this. The Great Australian Bight Marine Park, covering over 45,000 square kilometres, is protected by South Australian and Commonwealth legislation.

Equinor says it can drill safely, the stock pledge of oil companies. Scientists disagree. The noise and reverberations caused by drilling will disrupt the delicate balance on which species depend. An oil spill would confirm the ecological catastrophe.

From the Eyre Peninsula we made our way along the bight coast to Penong, a town of about 200 on the South Australian edge of the Nullarbor. If you’re heading west, it’s the last stop for food, petrol and supplies before you venture on to that mighty, majestic plain. For travellers and truckies moving in the other direction, Penong is a place to refresh. Not all remote Australian towns feel welcoming. Penong does. There is a caravan park, school, roadhouse, pub and general store. And a windmill museum. On a bare patch of ground between the caravan park and the back of the roadhouse stand windmills of different sizes and ages. Among them is the Comet, the biggest windmill ever made and used in Australia. The sight of the windmills is surprisingly striking, especially when framed by the rising or setting sun.

About twenty kilometres down a dirt road from Penong is Cactus Beach. Since the 1960s, surfers in the know have come to ride its left and right breaks, some of the cleanest and most consistent to be found in Australia, or anywhere. Great white sharks cruise these waters, but the waves are so pure that few serious surfers are deterred. They don’t travel all the way to Cactus not to get wet. The limited number of camp sites in the dunes behind the beach are filled by surfers who stay for days, weeks or months.

Phil “Shirl” Laws and his wife Sharon run the Penong General Store and Comet Cafe. Shirl says that half of the town’s business, theirs included, comes from surfers. He worries about drilling in the bight and the effect an oil spill would have on Penong and other towns on the coast. A recent survey by the Australia Institute found that about seventy per cent of South Australians don’t want drilling in the bight. Shirl is more definitive: he knows nobody who is in favour of it.

The Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association reckons that Equinor’s proposal might generate 1500 jobs over the next forty years. It isn’t much of a carrot given that the bight already supports many more people than that, and without the risks involved in drilling. Nor do bight locals want a vision of progress imposed on them by those who measure its value only in monetary terms. The locals we met want their bight left as they know it, beauty over money. “Big oil don’t surf” reads one campaign slogan. As Shirl and I were talking, two men, aged about twenty, came into the store for hamburgers. On their ute was a sticker: Fight for the Bight.

Liberal politician Rowan Ramsey is the federal member for Grey, which covers more than 92 per cent of South Australia: all of the state other than the densely populated southeast. In June 2017, in a statement expressing support for the plan to drill, he praised the record of Statoil (now Equinor) and said he looked forward to the company bringing its “skills” to the bight. Lately he has been more equivocal, noting that his interest is “jobs and people,” a version of the “jobs and growth” incantation that blinds politicians, and conservative politicians especially, to social and environmental concerns.

Shortly before the May federal election, the Ocean Elders, a group of eminent citizens from around the world, wrote an open letter to Scott Morrison and Bill Shorten imploring them to protect the bight. Shorten pledged that a Labor government would move quickly to investigate the likely effects of an oil spill. It was something, though hardly an iron commitment to fight.

The Coalition’s response was similarly underwhelming. Resources minister Matt Canavan declared that “a re-elected Liberal National government will commission an independent audit of NOPSEMA’s current consideration of exploration in the Great Australian Bight.” As the Guardian reported, the commitment was aimed at voters in the marginal, coastal electorates of Boothby in South Australia and Corangamite in Victoria, both of which would be affected by a major oil spill from the Stromlo-1 well. With the election gone, there is reason to doubt the Coalition government will keep its promise. In October last year, Canavan called for offshore oil exploration, including in the bight, to be made a “national priority.”

When we first dropped in at Sharon and Shirl’s store, on our way to Perth, a picture of a line of cliffs caught my eye. “That’s Bunda,” Shirl said, “two or three hours west of here.” For twenty-five years he had been a truckie: Melbourne–Perth–Melbourne. On his way across the Nullarbor he’d stop at Bunda, at the top of the bight, and look out to sea. Sometimes he’d see dolphins and sea lions frolicking in the water. Once a shark came through the swell. He told us where to pull off the Eyre Highway for the best views.

The next day we followed his directions and drove to a rest area 110 kilometres from the WA border. Five hundred metres or so off the highway is a dusty space to park, and from there a gravel walking path leads to the edge of the continent. I don’t remember seeing a sign on the highway to suggest a stop was worthwhile. If not for Shirl, we would have sped past.

The Bunda cliffs rise more than a hundred metres above the bight and stretch about 200 kilometres from western South Australia to the border with Western Australia. We were awestruck by their size and drama, and by the peace and space: in front of us the wild waters of the Southern Ocean and its many shades of blue, behind us a vast expanse of red dirt. To stand in what seemed like an endless wilderness was mesmerising. Part of the spectacle is that nothing tempers the landscape. The surging waters of the bight and the ancient limestone of the Nullarbor meet in brutal, beautiful contrast. We’ve travelled far and wide; no place has held us like Bunda.

NOPSEMA officials are set to rule on Equinor’s environmental plan by the end of May. Before making their decision, they should be made to stand on the Bunda cliffs. There’s magic there, says Shirl. “You feel different. Look to where the sea meets the horizon and you can see the curve of the Earth.” He knows no other place like it. •

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Yet judging by her March–April procession through Berlin, Strasbourg, Rome and London — all journeys made by rail — Thunberg also needs to go (or at least talk) to those capitals and their hinterlands if her message that “our house is burning” is to take effective hold. This is but one paradox in a meteoric rise that seems already to hold both room for lasting good and risk of early burn-out.

Thunberg’s simple protest beside the Riksdag, drawing peers and publicity as the “Fridays for Future” accumulated, quite soon took her to the larger stages of Katowice’s COP24 and Davos, a would-be prop for anxious summiteers. Thence to encounters with Pope Francis, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and other dignitaries — though not Theresa May, whose plea of a full diary was met with a scornful empty chair. With no time to waste, Thunberg aims at the top and isn’t easily fobbed.

Here too her attitude is consistent with the belief that the highest stakes, the very sustainability of a habitable Earth, now require an unfailing sense of urgency. This driven, self-possessed, whip-smart young person acts as if her very being contains the despoliations inflicted each day on air, soil, seas and nature. Her Asperger’s syndrome, and the outsiderish sense it fostered, was an enabler of her insight, she says. “It makes me different, and being different is a gift, I would say. It also makes me see things from outside the box. I don’t easily fall for lies, I can see through things.”

The same guilelessness was plain in a February interview with Leslie Hook, the Financial Times’s environment and clean energy correspondent, who in quoting her riposte at a Davos gathering — “I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic” — reflected: “Thunberg doesn’t believe in offering cheery prescriptions for change. The world she sees is a dark one, and she wants other people to feel the same way.”

If media coverage in Sweden initially amplified her propaganda of the deed, it was her emotional truth that cut through to the public. “Why should I be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything to save that future?” she asked at a TED talk in Helsinki. Such lucid sentiments evidently reached the inner ear of many young people around the world, who made their own personal sense of Thunberg’s anguish and longing. An amorphous movement was born or, more strictly, as a student strike had marked the opening of Paris’s COP21 in 2015, revived.

The movement reached Britain in mid February via walkouts from school in London and other cities, with teachers’ blessing in many cases. A month later their numbers and reach were far larger. By then the Scottish Highlands campaigning of Holly Gillibrand, a thirteen-year-old from Fort William, had earned local stardust and a seat beside Thunberg at the politicians’ table. But the children’s crusade was but one game in town. Its mid-April protests coincided with those of Extinction Rebellion, or XR, a politically itinerant band of creative professionals trained, since its formation in April 2018, in the agile use of direct action to flummox authority.

Held on a bank holiday weekend to maximise numbers and impact — and given a serendipitous boost by Thunberg’s London visit — XR’s followers clogged main city arteries in a mini carnival whose vibe was more Glastonbury than end of the world. At Westminster, a naked dozen superglued themselves to the security glass of the House of Commons’s public gallery. Whether these tactics best served XR’s manifesto — “We are rebelling against the government for its crimes against humanity… [because] we are so very nearly out of time” — was unclear.

Well aired amid the passing annoyance and bemusement was actor Emma Thompson’s flight from Los Angeles to join the throng, brandishing a clenched-fist salute and a “There is no planet B” top, thus inverting one of Thunberg’s pithy one-liners: “You are never too small to make a difference.” For all that, the double dose of catastrophism won some favour in polls: clear majorities agreed on climate change’s peril and human responsibility for it, and as many as 26 per cent supported XR’s aims and tactics.

Outside the box: Greta Thunberg is applauded by (from left) environment secretary Michael Gove, Liberal Democrat MP Layla Moran, former Labour leader Ed Miliband and Green Party leader Caroline Lucas during a forum in the Houses of Parliament in London on 23 April. Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

There was plentiful disdain in the press, of XR as bourgeois-bohemian-tree-huggers and of Thunberg as an oddball in murky league with Europe’s grandees and luvvies. But many columnists, including centre-right ones, were notably positive about both. The FT’s Camilla Cavendish, now at Harvard after heading David Cameron’s policy unit, sensed among the protesters “the kind of courteous regret that is deadly serious,” and defended XR from the charge of privilege. After all, “it is the middle classes who must alter our lifestyles if change is to come,” while “this group’s leaders have the right credentials: Gail Bradbrook has a PhD in molecular biophysics, and Farhana Yamin, arrested after gluing herself to the pavement outside Shell’s HQ, was a lawyer for UN climate negotiations.”

Thunberg’s own schedule included meetings with needy Westminster figures, whose awkward lionisation met the antidote of her reproachful stillness. The politicians — Green, Labour, Liberal and Scottish nationalist, including the Commons speaker and the Conservative environment minister Michael Gove (“We have not done nearly enough. Greta, you have been heard”) — blathered away before posing for group photos. This riveting politics of the spectacle knocked the tedious strippers into a cocked hat.

Such encounters, and London’s festive days as a whole, illuminated rival approaches to climate politics. The conventional one sees a crisis with multiple stakeholders and many divergent short-term interests, requiring patient brokering of least-worst agreements whose tacit maximal aim is to fail better. Thunberg and XR see an existential threat mandating action equal to its unprecedented character — meaning wholesale transformation, not just retail trade-offs, guided by planetary needs rather than national interests.

In practice the contrast blurs when technocrats gesture to vision and radicals to pragmatism, as in XR’s proposal of net-zero emissions in Britain by 2025 or Thunberg’s saying the European Union “needs minimum 80 per cent reduction by 2030, and that includes aviation and shipping.” In Strasbourg, she even reflected that she has “learned how things work, how complicated everything is.”

Moreover, even these radicals’ actions and claims are made in the wake of pragmatist achievement (however limited) by “their own” governments. Thunberg’s self-propelled campaign, which Stockholm University’s Karin Bäckstrand credits with lifting climate change from “priority number eight” for Swedes, began three weeks before a general election amid a northern summer of heatwaves, drought and forest fires. Stefan Lövfen’s centre-left government had passed a Climate Act in January 2018 mandating pursuit of carbon neutrality by 2045, meaning an 85 per cent cut in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from 1990 (including offsets). Its successor, a more centrist coalition — with Lövfen and Isabella Lövin, the law’s architect, still in post — upholds Sweden’s image as one of the European Union’s climate pioneers.

The Swedish plan draws on Britain’s own Climate Change Act of 2008, whose target of an 80 per cent fall in CO2 emissions over the 1990–2050 period will now, after an advisory panel’s report published on 2 May, be extended to net-zero. Progress is steady: UK emissions on the producing side are 43 per cent less than in 1990, though the figure tumbles if shares of shipping and air transport are included. Periods without any coal-sourced electricity are becoming commonplace, an outcome charted by John Quiggin in Inside Story: a new milestone is the first coal-free week since 1882.

Meanwhile, the problems are growing, although Britain’s flash floods, heatwaves and coastal erosion pale before Australia’s Murray–Darling dystopia and much else. The energy sector is a mix of incoherence and, over nuclear and fracking especially, paralysis. Transport, health, agriculture and housing sectors are wheezing, with environmental impacts adding to their ills. And Britain’s burden on others, as Thunberg and XR argue, includes the accumulated legacy of early industrialism and today’s top-heavy global footprint. In London, the young Swede denounced Britain’s “very creative carbon accounting” and “ongoing irresponsible behaviour [which] will no doubt be remembered in history as one of the greatest failures of humankind.”

Still, Sweden and Britain’s climate record shows everyday politics making a difference. Too little too late, Thunberg and XR retort — and a failed politics too. Thus Thunberg told EU parliamentarians, or MEPs, that since “everyone and everything has to change” it seems pointless to “waste precious time arguing about what and who needs to change first.” Time magazine’s portrait of the grand tour reports her “brief smile” at mention of Barack Obama’s tweeted praise, before the language of ultimacy kicks in: “I believe that once we start behaving as if we were in an existential crisis, then we can avoid a climate and ecological breakdown. But the opportunity to do so will not last for long. We have to start today.”

For its part, XR’s urban swarm is an effort to turn Thunberg’s “as if” to purpose, and it has a manifesto: Common Sense for the 21st Century, a thoughtful booklet by the group’s co-leader Roger Hallam, aimed at inciting “high participation civil disobedience concentrated upon a single event: a rebellion.” The mechanics include “symbolic disruption” to “create a national conversation” and “bring the regime to the table,” and a national citizens’ assembly, chosen by sortition, which will eventually reduce the Commons to an advisory role. Despite the 1917-ish echoes, Hallam’s model of non-violent civil revolution is conceived as “an act of universal service and duty” in the “civic and republican tradition.”

Hallam’s work-in-progress — a rare blend of movement strategy, framing and ethics — is grounded in the world of English radicalism, as its Tom Paine title declares. That points up another paradox in the radicals’ case: that all climate politics (as opposed to diplomacy) are local. With favourable conditions, which usually means winning elections or at least arguments, the nation-state allows real progress. But the best of it will always be parochial as Earth’s emergency grows. More than most, Thunberg and XR are living in this truth.

The outlook, from Brazil’s Amazon to the Antarctic, is grim. CO2 emissions are still on an upward curve as the Paris agreement measures go awry. The International Energy Agency’s latest status report finds energy emissions grew by 1.7 per cent in 2018 to a historic 33.1 billion tonnes, thanks to Asia’s coal and the United States’s air-conditioning boom. Over 80 per cent of global energy production remains fossil-based.

Every year in which global emissions are not reduced, writes Oxford University’s Myles Allen, equates to another forty billion tonnes of CO2 being pumped out yearly for “today’s teenagers to clean back out of the atmosphere in order to preserve warm water corals or Arctic ice.”

The Arctic is but one of the world’s “potential tipping cascades” mapped by the Hothouse Earth report, a collaboration of the Stockholm Resilience Centre and Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published by Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS. This forecasts temperature rises over double the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s precarity levels, even were its core targets to be met. Cambridge University’s Peter Wadhams, former director of the Scott Polar Research Institute, chides the IPCC in his book A Farewell to Ice for, as he sees it, hedging the “Arctic death spiral” (Mark Serreze’s phrase). Wadhams, noting that in his half century of research the area of summer Arctic sea ice has reduced by more than half, says that “rapid and drastic” change there amounts to “a spiritual impoverishment of the Earth as well as a practical catastrophe for mankind.”

Both sources are cited by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, the Telegraph’s compelling Cassandra, who references another PNAS study from 2018: a paper on the geohistorical analogues of near-future climates, by the paleoecologist Kevin D. Burke and five colleagues. “As the world warms due to rising greenhouse gas concentrations,” they write, “the Earth system moves toward climate states without societal precedent, challenging adaptation.” John “Jack” Williams, one of the co-authors, says, “We are moving toward very dramatic changes over an extremely rapid time frame, reversing a planetary cooling trend [tracing back at least fifty million years] in a matter of centuries.”

The unprecedented warming trend is confirmed in studies published in early 2019 from, among others, the World Meteorological Organization, the UK Met Office, and NASA/NOAA. The UN’s assessment of retreating global biodiversity, from corals to insects, came in May as bleak reinforcement. In Evans-Pritchard’s words, addressed not least to sceptics among his newspaper’s own readership, “Frightening reports are constant fare for those paying attention.”

The weight of evidence could justify almost any response: crisis diplomacy, intensified protest, clean-one’s-house regional or neighbourhood plans, personal regimes — as well as Greta Thunberg’s gut-wrenched mix of despair and defiance.

But technological and economic currents are also opening new horizons of possibility, albeit with concerns over pace, scale, finance, and (as with lithium-ion batteries) green tech’s own blowback costs. Wind and solar power, battery capacity (with electric-hybrid aviation one prize), plus carbon-neutral electricity and hydrogen to fuel transport and heating, are key innovation areas. So too is carbon capture, including ambitious plans to capture atmospheric CO2 via dual-purpose (energy and storage) bioenergy.

Renewables’ falling long-term costs and greater efficiency are central to the transformation under way, according to analysis on Carbon Tracker, IRENA and Energy Watch. Fossil fuel’s burnout could accelerate sooner than all but optimists now envisage. In another data-rich article on this race against time, Evans-Pritchard turns into Pangloss: “It is easy to succumb to paralysing pessimism. Yet the technology exists to crack the problem… We are reaching the inflection point where market forces may suddenly start to drive fossil fuels out of the energy system.”

The implication is that climate apocalypse will always be with us (alongside other, nuclear or pandemic, kinds). There is no guarantee of escape, for that is in our capacity only if the latter is put immediately to good use. The Hothouse Earth paper has a checklist:

Collective human action is required to steer the Earth System away from a potential threshold and stabilize it in a habitable interglacial-like state. Such action entails stewardship of the entire Earth System — biosphere, climate, and societies — and could include decarbonization of the global economy, enhancement of biosphere carbon sinks, behavioral changes, technological innovations, new governance arrangements, and transformed social values.

For all this to come together, the world must “unite behind the science — make the best available science the heart of politics and democracy,” as Thunberg instructed Europe’s MEPs. In turn, that needs working ingredients now in deficit across a boiling planet: world security, core freedoms, legal order, social and informational trust. The reverse engineering involved — echoing Roger Hallam’s method of “first [working] out what success looks like and then work back to how it would be created” — looks even more forbidding than the XR strategy of “thousands of people breaking the law to create a transformation of political structures.”

Evans-Pritchard, who says XR is “right to raise the climate alarm in apocalyptic terms,” has faith in “cutting-edge technology and the creative élan of market forces” to do the job. These would depend on the same framework of law and freedom, unless environmental gains are so rapid as to release new, liberatory dynamics in other areas.

But the mood has shifted this year in Britain and Europe. Those reports, and timely broadcasts such as David Attenborough’s Netflix documentary Our Planet, capped by Thunberg and XR’s irruption, handed radicals a precious hat-trick of science, moral force and cultural momentum. Technocratic politics is taking ever more account of the new clamour, and conceding at the edges: British and Irish parliaments’ declaration of a climate emergency, France’s consultative citizens’ assembly. Elements of a lost political centre, craving a semblance of authenticity and the elusive youth vote, are only too glad to mingle with XR’s well-groomed principals, and proliferating media outlets to feature them.

The next big day of school strikes is 24 May, coinciding with elections to the European parliament, where Greta’s crusade is a boon for green parties. Its carousel aspect is also in full swing: press interviews, conference panels, festival invites, magazine features, celebrity encomiums, honorary degrees. A book of her speeches is out in days. Time’s profile makes “the teenager on strike for the planet” foremost among its “next generation leaders,” soliciting an all-purpose tweet from foreign minister Margot Wallström, a star in her own right: “Proud to be Swedish.”

The “invisible girl” felt the Earth’s pain as adults could not, and sent an SOS for them to act on. Instead of looking in the same direction, will they gaze at her finger, and turn the distress call into a feedback loop? Europe alone can’t answer. A breakout east and west, if a way can be found, would allow Greta Thunberg’s fierce urgency of now its true test. •

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This is dubious enough, but it prompts the question: how have station owners been allowed to capture huge amounts of water like this, which the government then has to buy back?

The scale of the works in the Darling catchment is astonishing. This semi-arid northern basin is very flat, stretching for over a thousand kilometres, with river channels meandering whimsically, splitting up and joining again, sometimes terminating in wetlands. When a big rain comes, the water pours along floodways and over large areas of floodplain.

Above: the northern Murray–Darling Basin (not to scale)

Station owners have constructed embankments that can be thirty or forty kilometres long, to keep the water from moving to neighbouring properties or getting back into the main channel, and to direct it instead into their “turkey nest” storages. They have re-engineered the rivers.

A little further down the Balonne from the “Watergate” purchases, Cubbie Station has built diversion channels twice as wide as the river itself. Its storage covers 12,000 hectares, extends for tens of kilometres, and holds as much as Sydney Harbour. Cubbie takes 200 gigalitres a year on average, and up to 500 gigalitres — which is more than the Condamine–Balonne’s typical natural outflow of just 348 gigalitres.

Despite vociferous protests from affected farmers and communities, and despite some media exposure of what’s been happening — for example, in a report by Paul Lockyer for ABC’s 7.30 in 2004 — this sort of development has proliferated, fuelled by high returns from cotton.

Writing in 2000, journalist Phil Dickie reported that the amount of private storage had doubled in the previous two years. Controls were minimal: “an outdoor dunny can need more planning permission” than a storage hundreds of metres across with walls up to five metres high.

Dickie wrote of the cosy relationships between the cotton growers and the Queensland government, the willingness of officials to bend over backwards to interpret rules in the growers’ favour, and the years of court battles to squash any objections. The community around St George became deeply divided. Anyone trying to sort out the mess was moved on.

Where the water went: cotton farm dams on the Moonie River in southern Queensland. Rex Patrick

A similar frenzy of dam-building has taken place in northern New South Wales. In 2017 an ABC Four Corners report, “Pumped,” showed big irrigators with a horrible sense of entitlement telling reporter Linton Besser to get off their property — though he was actually standing on a public road they’d rerouted to accommodate their channel.

The program showed the same stark divisions in the community — enriched irrigators versus everyone else, who’d been left high and dry, feeling “beyond angry.” Clearly a lot of water was being stolen — meters had been tampered with, pumping was occurring when the river was too low — and as soon as water department officers began gearing up to take compliance action, their unit was disbanded.

Outright theft of water must be stopped, of course. So far, just one irrigator has been taken to court, which doesn’t look like a determined response. But that’s not necessarily how most of the water is being grabbed. Out-of-control floodplain harvesting has been compounded by obligingly light rules for pumping out of rivers — another way for irrigators to fill up their dams.

For example, just before the Murray–Darling Basin Plan went through federal parliament in late 2012 — the plan that was going to rescue all the rivers — New South Wales put out a new water-sharing plan for the Barwon–Darling. Heavily influenced by the cotton growers, it actually loosened the regulations they were subject to. Additional A Class licences were issued, which allow pumping when river flows are low; these licences could now be used with huge pumps instead of ones limited to 150 millimetre pipes; and 300 per cent of a licence volume could be pumped out at any time over three years.

This opened the way for irrigators to pump lots of water into their dams using A Class licences saved up for this purpose, at times when flows were very low. They kept their ordinary licences for years when flows were higher.

Licences could also be traded. When, under the Basin Plan, the Commonwealth bought licences for the environment, more water was left in the rivers as a result, but this just meant there was more for the remaining irrigators to take.

Soon, nearly three-quarters of the water was in the hands of two big players, Webster Ltd and the Harris family. And the Darling kept drying up.

NSW farmer leader Mal Peters told Four Corners that most Australians supported a large amount of money being spent to fix the river. But “if the outcome of it is that we have a very few number of irrigators that have got a huge windfall out of this, I think everybody will be disgusted.”

Investigating the reasons for the massive fish kills down near Menindee over summer, both scientific panels — the Academy of Science one set up by the opposition, and the Rob Vertessy one set up by the government — could see it wasn’t just drought that had caused the Darling to dry up. The catastrophe was partly the result of human activity. But to what extent, neither could say.

The southern basin — taking in the Murray, Murrumbidgee and Goulburn — is comparatively regularised. But in the northern basin somewhere between half and three-quarters of the water taken is not metered. Nor is there any credible model of the system to explain what’s happening. The recent SA royal commission on the Murrary–Darling Basin was scathing about the slowness to act.

Just how laggardly governments have been is illustrated by New South Wales’s proposal last year for monitoring floodplain harvesting. This relies mainly on old-fashioned “gauge boards,” painted with water levels, to be read each day by the irrigators themselves, and audited just once every ten years.

The first big step towards saving the Murray–Darling came with the decision to cap diversions at 1994 levels. Since weather and water availability varies from year to year, a valley’s cap is not the same every year, but rather the volume that a model shows would have been diverted in that year if there was no underlying increase in diversion.

The Barwon–Darling went over its cap every year between 1997, when compliance started, until 2011. Then New South Wales changed the model, so it was always under. Meanwhile Queensland’s original caps were based on the diversion level at 2000 rather than 1994, since the state “started late” and was allowed a few years to “catch up” — which it went at with gusto.

The Basin Plan establishes new, lower caps by identifying diversion levels in 2009 and then specifying how much these levels must be reduced by retrieving water from irrigators. Baseline diversions for the northern basin have been determined to be 3812 gigalitres, nearly 1000 gigalitres more than the original caps, since things like run-off dams are now included.

Only 207 gigalitres of this is for floodplain harvesting. Yet this figure is now acknowledged to be a gross underestimate. Private storages along the Condamine–Balonne alone are thought to have total capacity of over 1500 gigalitres.

The SA royal commission was told that the Murray–Darling Basin Authority proposes, when it finally has a proper handle on the amount of floodplain harvesting, simply to use the new amount to increase the baseline diversions. So then the new caps will likewise be increased. There’d be precious little assessment of environmental requirements in that approach.

Even amid this scrambling to sort out what water is being taken, the new caps have been softened. The Basin Plan said 390 gigalitres should be returned to the environment, subject to a review. Last year, after a lengthy, controversial review, the Authority proposed this be changed to 320 gigalitres. Federal parliament baulked at first, then let it through.

The argument was that this was the price that needed to be paid for better protection of low flows. But governments have every right to protect low flows. It seems they feel that they have to tiptoe around the cotton growers.

Governments may not have much of a grasp on how much water is being hauled out of the Darling basin by irrigators. But anyone can tell it’s a lot just by looking at aerial or satellite photos showing multiple private dams containing water, right at the time the fish were dying.

And the wide expanse of cotton is there for everyone to see. Despite the current drought, over 100,000 hectares have been planted this season. In the order of 1000 gigalitres will be applied to this crop, and a further 1000 gigalitres is likely to evaporate in private dams. In the meantime, only forty gigalitres has flowed past Bourke in all of 2018.

Analysis by the Australia Institute shows cotton production stays reasonably high for as long as five years after the Darling has started to dry up.

Irrigators themselves are very aware of what is happening. They know that less water is reaching the main Barwon–Darling; they are happy to sell their water entitlements there to the government at high prices, then concentrate on their holdings in the top of the catchment, making sure even less water gets to the bottom.

People have given up expecting reliable water in the lower reaches of the Darling. Broken Hill used to get its water from the Menindee Lakes, but now $500 million has been spent on a new pipeline so it can get its water from the Murray, three times further away.

Also relying on the Menindee Lakes, Tandou was at one time a thriving irrigation enterprise with permanent plantings like vines. Then it switched to cotton and grain, growing a crop every couple of years. Not long after taking Tandou over, Webster Ltd sold its water to the Commonwealth. It was paid $38 million for the water — “ghost water,” as it was described by one experienced observer — and $40 million as compensation for having to restructure for dryland farming.

A wonderfully sweet deal. The sort of deal, like the “Watergate” ones, you’d expect Barnaby Joyce to approve of. Wait on — he was the minister then too, so he did.

The bigger scandal, though, is that so much water has been allowed to be extracted from the basin in the first place.

It’s a very long way from the days when paddle steamers plied their trade up the Darling to Bourke and beyond… when the river accounted on average for 17 per cent of the flows in the Murray. The Murray is a worry, certainly, but what is absolutely clear is that the next water minister needs to throw him or herself into reversing the destruction of the Darling. •

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Tony Abbott famously described the Labor government’s carbon “tax” (a price, in reality) as a “wrecking ball” through the Australian economy. But neither its introduction under Julia Gillard nor its removal by Abbott had any measurable effect on economic growth. Indeed, the economic outlook presented in the budget statements in those years didn’t mention carbon pricing as a factor in our overall performance.

Why did these apocalyptic predictions go so badly wrong? In the case of the ABARE modelling, it was the result of three main factors: exaggerated assumptions about the cost of reducing emissions, inappropriate choices in the modelling process, and misleading presentation of results.

The problems began with a decision to exclude any consideration of technological progress in energy efficiency or renewable electricity generation. This led to an overestimation of the cost of reducing electricity consumption and replacing coal-fired electricity with renewables. Relative to business-as-usual projections, most of the emissions reductions since then have come from these sources, along with a reduction in land clearing.

The second set of problems related to decisions about how the model’s solution is derived. Depending on how this is done, the costs of a policy can either be understated or overstated, and ABARE consistently chose the latter course. An important example is the question of what will be done with the revenue derived from a carbon tax. A common assumption, used by ABARE, is that the money is either kept by government or handed back to households as a lump sum. In reality, the proceeds of the carbon tax were allocated primarily to reducing income tax, which greatly reduced the economic impact predicted by standard models.

Even with these choices, the ABARE model yielded an estimated cost of less than 1 per cent of GDP, equivalent to a few months’ worth of economic growth. That’s clearly a price well worth paying as part of a global agreement to stabilise the climate. To obscure that problem, ABARE took all of the costs estimated to be incurred over twenty to twenty-five years and used a “present value” calculation to present them as a lump sum. The figure was further exaggerated by using a mythical average family of four, disregarding the fact that, because incomes are unequal, most households get a lot less than the (arithmetic) average.

All of these difficulties were pointed out at the time, by leading economic modellers such as Peter Dixon and Warwick McKibbin, and policy economists, of whom I was one. So why bring up this history now? The director of ABARE at the time was Brian Fisher, the man who has just released alarming estimates of the cost of Labor’s climate policy derived from a new model produced by his BAEconomics consultancy. Far from correcting the errors of the 1996 model, his model repeats them all, and adds new ones.

First, the cost of wholesale electricity is estimated to be as high as $135 per megawatt hour. In reality, contracts for solar PV, with battery storage, are currently being signed at costs of US$30/MWh (about A$40/MWh), and this number is sure to fall. By ignoring this, Fisher produces the absurd suggestion of a carbon price as high as $405 per tonne. That’s nearly twenty times the level that produced significant reductions under the last Labor government and has also produced big reductions in the European Union.

Second, instead of assuming that the state of the economy is determined by the decisions of the Reserve Bank, with the economic impacts of climate policy reflected in wages and prices, Fisher assumes that there will be a permanent increase in unemployment. This greatly exaggerates the economic costs of any policy.

Even so, as in 1996, the estimated effects remain small — around 2 per cent of GDP for the policy simulation closest to Labor’s announced policy. So Fisher then repeats the 1996 trick of adding up impacts over ten years. The end result is the scary cost range of $264 billion to $542 billion trumpeted in the media last week.

Once the obvious errors in the BAEconomics model are corrected, it is clear that the impact of Labor’s policy on aggregate GDP will be well below 1 per cent. That is so small as to be lost in the noise generated by exchange rate change, statistical revisions and the like.

While the average Australian family won’t even notice the cost, and some will benefit from the expansion of employment and business opportunities in renewable energy, it is crucial to support a just transition for workers and communities dependent on fossil fuels. The cost of such support, like that of the transition as a whole, will be very small in relation to the economic capacity of Australia as a whole. •

The post How much will it cost to deal with climate change? appeared first on Inside Story.

Born in Petersham, Sydney, in 1887, McFadyen grew up on a small farm at Five Dock, in Sydney’s west, where the scent of buttercups and the hooting of mopokes instilled in her an early interest in the natural world. She did not attend the local school, instead finding companionship in her dolls and the books her father scattered thoughtfully around the family home. In a sign of what was to come, she often spent her time reading, sketching birds at the local museum, looking through old diaries and notebooks, and pretending to publish newspapers. After the family moved to Brisbane Water on the NSW Central Coast when she was fifteen, McFadyen became “confirmed in her habit of writing rhymes.” Not long afterwards, her photographs, poems, nature writings and short stories began appearing in print.

It was some years later, at the end of the first world war, that the opportunity of a lifetime reached the young writer by mail. W.R. Charlton, editor of the Sydney Mail, invited McFadyen to edit the paper’s new children’s page. It was her dream job, and for the next eighteen years she skilfully wove natural history, botany and poetry into her weekly two-page feature, crafting an extraordinary legacy as the fairy editor “Cinderella.”

By writing to many of her correspondents personally, as well as publishing their letters and contributions in her pages, McFadyen won the favour of her young readers and their parents. Thousands of children in Australia and abroad dipped their nibs in ink to write to her, sending letters, postcards, poems, stories, photographs, flowers and drawings. “One of the children called you ‘Queen of the Fairies,’” wrote one nine-year-old in 1922, “and now I always think of you as a fairy, as we are all so fond of reading and talking about you, and yet never see you. Are you really a fairy?” There was something enchanting about McFadyen. As another boy explained that same year, there was a “magic about the Page” that was enticing.

McFadyen had published photographs and verse before the first world war, but it was only after she started editing the children’s page that she really discovered herself as a writer. In the 1940s she published a number of popular children’s books, including Pegmen Tales (1946) and Pegmen Go Walkabout (1947) — a series of stories about a family of clothes pegs who sail down the floodwaters of the Macquarie River with a naughty monkey — and Little Dragons of the Never Never (1948), featuring the adventures of two little horned dragons from the centre of Australia.

Like many of her contemporaries, McFadyen created characters that were magical and fantastic, but they lived in distinctively Australian landscapes, under the kurrajong trees and in the swamps of the Never Never. Such settings reflected not only McFadyen’s involvement in the literary community of her day but also her lifelong passion for nature writing and bushcraft. As the editor of the Australian Women’s Digest wrote in 1949, McFadyen was the “high priestess” of camping, “a veritable walking encyclopedia on insects, birds and animals, with a slight bias towards eels and lizards.” Such was her knowledge of Australian lizards that Taronga Zoo and the Australian Museum sent several to her for care.

McFadyen’s love of Sydney and native wildlife was accompanied by a deep anxiety about urbanisation and environmental destruction. Her poetry, much of it published in newspapers and magazines, reflected a nostalgia for a landscape untouched by modernity, and she supported — and agitated for — bird and forest leagues, bushwalking clubs, sanctuaries and other environmental initiatives. Especially through her nature writings, photography and the Boomerang Walking Club — a bushwalking group for those senior members of the children’s page capable of walking no fewer than twenty miles a day — she encouraged children to become conservationists, teaching them about Aboriginal lore, bushcraft, and botanical and birdlife studies.

McFadyen continued writing for children in her later years. She made regular contributions to the School Magazine, Junior Red Cross Record, nature magazines such as Wild Life and Walkabout, and the Fairfax press. She gave talks on radio, at schools and to the Zoological Society, and contributed play scripts to the ABC’s Youth Education Department. She wrote Kookaburra Comedies (1950) and The Wishing Star (1956) and was a foundation member of the Society of Women Writers NSW. First recruited to the Junior Red Cross by Eleanor MacKinnon in 1914, she remained an active member all her life, later teaching “bushcraft, natural sketching and first aid” at their annual camps.

“Heaven without a gumtree, it’d be absurd,” wrote Ella McFadyen in 1972. Photo shows McFadyen and one of her little dragon friends, 1940–50s. State Library of New South Wales

Until 1973, McFadyen also used her growing confidence as a naturalist and children’s writer in her critical manuscript reviews for the publisher Angus and Robertson. To the dismay of many aspiring Australian authors, she took a particularly unforgiving view of stories with characters or narratives that she believed children would find crude or unconvincing. “Few children really care for baby talk, or ideas too carefully broken down for their consumption,” McFadyen noted in 1932. “Children’s stories, like their clothes, are best made a little on the big side — they’ll grow into them.” She stood by this assessment all her life. In her opinion, young readers were as clever and discriminating as any other.

In 1976, four years after she was interviewed by Hazel de Berg for the National Library of Australia, McFadyen died in Lane Cove in Sydney. Little is known of her later years. She never married and, with few living family members to sponsor her memory, her writings were overshadowed by the immense literary output of children’s authors and illustrators such as May Gibbs, Pixie O’Harris, Mary Grant Bruce, Ida Rentoul Outhwaite and Dorothy Wall. (Unknown to Wall at the time, it was McFadyen who reviewed and revised her manuscript of Blinky Bill for publication.)
Still, hope remains. Parts of McFadyen’s life have been preserved in libraries and archives in Sydney and Canberra. Perhaps some or all of her letters survive in family letter albums and scrapbooks.

Ella McFadyen’s influence was felt more strongly by children than adults — a fact that overshadows the work and achievements of “missing” women all over the world. She was a trailblazer for Australia’s youngest writers, a beloved personality on Sydney’s twentieth-century literary scene, and a lifelong naturalist, able to translate her lofty ideals and love of nature into the language and lore of children. As she wrote in her poem “Adventure,” published in the Sydney Mail in March 1928:

What shall I find at the world’s end
When I lay safely by,
[…] I spoke with my heart; Sooth and fair,
Shall it be well with me? •

If you have any further information about Ella McFadyen or her family, please contact Emily Gallagher.

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I don’t remember the name of the documentary we watched, or even the teacher who showed it to us, beyond his spectacular moustache and fondness for lessons on “bush survival skills.” But I will never forget the graph I saw on the screen that day: a lime-green line, superimposed across an image of the earth, charting the rise of global surface temperatures since 1960. The line went up and steadily up, fading into ominous red as it approached the 1980s. There was no violent up-tick at the end, like the “hockey-stick graph” that would feature in An Inconvenient Truth seventeen years later. Nor did the line end in the splayed fingers of alternative “shared socioeconomic pathways” like the graph in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report twenty-eight years later. It nevertheless made a deep impression on me.

It was clear, from that line, that we were all going to have to do something, very urgently, to get it to go back down again.

With an imagination fertilised by stories of Vietnam war protests, the Australian kids TV show Secret Valley (in which plucky BMX-riding teenagers in a koala-filled valley stood battle with greedy real estate developers week on week), and the slogan “think global and act local,” I did the thing that was obvious for a child to do in 1989. I started a group within the school with a grandiose name. We were known as “PEACE,” an acronym for People for the Environment and Conservation Everywhere, and we had an immediate, concrete objective: the elimination of the non-recyclable polystyrene cups used in the school canteen to serve out chicken soup at lunchtime.

Tales such as these tend to follow a familiar narrative arc, one that traces a political awakening through the experience of coming together to make demands, and builds to the realisation of the immense power we realised we had to speak truth to power more generally. First the polystyrene cups, and then the world.

But that is not what happened. Instead, the school principal asked gently how else we proposed to keep the drinks hot and safe, we said we didn’t know, and “PEACE” dissolved soon after, our short- and long-term aims unmet. My nascent environmental consciousness was channelled elsewhere, into checking hairspray cans for CFCs and applying sunscreen and wearing broad-brimmed hats with renewed authority and vigour.

But this is not a simple tale of dissipated personal resolve. I did not lose interest in the global temperature line. Rather, I did what I was socialised to do. I “grew up.”

In 1990s Australia, this meant devoting attention to a different sort of line, one that was not written down or public, but rather in my own head: my private line of personal progress. I had been raised in the slipstream of the postwar “golden age” as an indirect beneficiary of a set of educational, industrial relations and social security policies that had enabled my father, who had grown up in a poor family and left school without matriculating in the 1940s, to move into the middle class in the 1960s after many years spent working as a cleaner.

Significant changes were under way in the Australian economy in the 1990s, but what was in my teenage head was a melange of beliefs from an earlier time: an awkward and undigested blend of Fordism, the Protestant work ethic, Keynesianism and second-wave feminism. These collectively distilled into the commonsense idea that hard work, delayed gratification and education were reliable fuel for an upward trajectory in life. It was a belief that, upon obtaining the requisite good marks at school, and then uni or TAFE, you had a ticket to do work that was interesting and useful, entailed more complexity and responsibility as you got older, and earned enough to enable you to buy a house, have a family, and retire comfortably. It was a deal I assumed applied to everyone; not a special offering for those with superabundant talent, energy or privilege.

Unlike the global temperature line, the determinants of this personal-progress line felt wholly within my control. They nestled comfortably in the fabric of everyday life, an unspoken and unacknowledged dimension of day-to-day chats with friends about things like which subjects to choose, which jobs to apply for, and where to live. Yet, as the 1990s flipped into the millennium, it became gradually clear that the pursuit of work that was socially useful, interesting and reasonably paid was not so much a singular endeavour as a competitive and strategic puzzle. You couldn’t have all three, or rather, for women, four, since the question of how to fit in children was an additional matter that we alone had to consider.

Those fortunate enough to be buoyed with parental wealth seemed to have an easier run, not only at achieving two, three or more of the prized quartet, but in taking risks to get them, backed by a sense of entitlement and the knowledge that their family would bail them out if needed. For those with less cultural and material capital, the horizons were shorter. And the rules that seemed so self-evident at high school had the habit of melting and morphing without explanation every time we tried to play within them.

As I was navigating these questions, that other line, the global temperature one, did not disappear from my consciousness. But, if I am honest, it occupied a different universe from that personal-progress line. I had the climate in mind when trying to decide whether to ride my bike rather than drive, when remembering to take my reusable bag rather than use a plastic one, when buying a KeepCup. The climate line related to stuff and its management. Superego, rather than ego. Things I was supposed to say no to rather than the grand, existential puzzle of what to say yes to.

Conversations about the climbing red line and what it meant were awkward to have with friends. They didn’t seem to last for very long.

The different ways we talk about work and its future don’t mesh well with the reality that we have just twelve short years to avert calamitous climate change.

The “just transitions” narrative, for instance, takes a narrow view. It quite rightly observes that there is no zero-sum choice between jobs and the environment. Twenty-four million jobs worldwide will be created by 2030 by virtue of renewable industries, comfortably eclipsing the six million jobs predicted to be lost from the cessation of fossil fuels. It is crucial that workers in the latter group are offered fair support to transition into these new industries or into other work, of course, but so far this story has little to say about workers who are not closely proximate to the work involved in energy extraction and production.

The “digital disruption” story of the future of work, by contrast, is expansive in its scope. It foretells unimaginably vast changes in present configurations of work, heralding the inevitable breaking down of jobs into tasks, many of them vulnerable to replacement by machines. A tone of gleeful inevitability commonly accompanies this narrative, paired with an insistence that technological change has invariably led to a “net jobs gain” in the past, and will do so again. As long as workers adopt a suitably “flexible” mindset, and no one holds back on investment in technology, all will be well.

A more pessimistic narrative of work may be found among the heralds of the “precariat.” For the first time in history, they argue, we have a generation who, despite high levels of educational attainment, are forced to work in “careerless jobs,” with no “shadow of the future” in their working lives, to use Guy Standing’s chilling phrase. Detached from any sense that what they say or do today will make any difference to their fate tomorrow, they are the new dangerous class: frustrated, insecure, indebted and stressed, ripe for seduction by the politics of xenophobia, populism and nostalgia.

And finally, there is an even grimmer story, in which panic gives way to elegy and lamentation. Commonly associated with the writer Paul Kingsnorth and the “Dark Mountain” project, this narrative suggests that human industrial systems are effectively unstoppable, fuelled by a set of toxic myths about the separation of humanity from “nature” and the necessity of human “progress.” All that can be done from here is to challenge these myths with counter-stories and privately pursue lives outside industrial systems.

These four narratives share a few common logics. All (apart from just transitions) tend towards determinism, and the sense that we humans have little agency in the question of how work is organised and valued, and that it is instead some other force, be it technology, neoliberalism or industrial capitalism, that sets the terms of our future. What each shares, too, is the implicit dismissal of work as a viable stage upon which we might collectively struggle for a better system. Indeed, these narratives carry little optimism that any alternative social order will ever be possible at all.

It is a diagnosis that is premature. Signs of an appetite for alternative orders to the “take/make/consume/dispose” model of human progress abound. From the streets full of schoolchildren on strike for the climate to the Green New Deal movement to the language of “circular economies” starting to be heard in business and government, new modes of thinking about what human progress means are emerging and beginning to erupt into mainstream politics all over the world.

And just as it is premature to give up on the possibility of a new social order, so too is it hasty to abandon the idea that work can be a political site from which to fight for the reform. For there is a crucial link between “sustainability” and work that is perhaps very obvious but rarely made explicit: the process of “sustaining” requires human labour. It means more than simply saying “no” to damaging acts of consumption; it also means saying “yes” to the human activities that are positively necessary for the repair, renewal and regeneration of our soils, our oceans, our cities, our critical human systems and our human bodies.

A society that exists within planetary limits is one that looks on such work as more than just an afterthought or “non-core” aspect to the “real” business of production. It rather treats it as utterly elemental.

So how do we currently value and organise this work?

In Perth there is a carer working in a residential care home who thinks that no one should ever die alone. There is no funding for palliative care supplies at her work, so she runs a raffle to enable her to buy what she needs, like moisturiser to use on the lips of people in the last days of life, when they can’t make their mouths wet any more. Most days she works more than an hour without pay. She has never been paid more than the award rate for forty-three years, despite the additional qualifications she has acquired with her own time and money. The time she gets to shower and toilet each person she cares for is approximately six minutes.

In Arnhem Land there is a Kuninjku man on an outstation who used to burn his country according to customary practice. His burning eased the destructive pressure on native species exerted by feral cats, cane toads, pigs, cattle and other animals, and formed part of a sustainable hybrid economy that comprised hunting and fishing, arts and crafts, and access to state transfer payments. Since 2015, government policy changes mean that he must now engage in “work-like activity” (which does not include caring for country) for twenty-five hours a week, on an hourly rate of $11.60, without standard industrial protections. He has no time for burning now, and the Kuninjku hybrid economy has all but disappeared.

In Brisbane there is a woman who loves to care for and teach young children. Her wage is so low that she cannot afford to have children of her own.

In Hobart there was a security guard who worked in the state’s court complex whose name was known by every employee and regular user of the building. She had a low, quiet voice capable of soothing the most intimidating of offenders. She offered support to domestic violence victims and solace to the parents of young offenders. One day, after twenty-one years of work, her position was converted into a casual one by the service multinational who had taken over the contract. She could not pay her mortgage on such uncertain wages, and was forced to leave.

In Perth there was an engineering graduate who wanted to work in renewable energy manufacturing. Despite top marks, he was unable to get a secure job in that field. Others in his cohort found jobs in oil, coal and gas industries, earning, on average, $180,000 a year.

In rural New South Wales there is a regenerative farmer who knows how to “read” the landscape, measuring success in terms of the levels of animal health, species diversity and the quality of nutrient and water cycling on his property. Seeing his farm in this way meant that he had to painstakingly “unlearn” everything he was taught about best-practice farming over decades.

In Adelaide there is a junior humanities academic who gave birth to a human being. Devoted to her discipline and the maintenance of an intergenerational conversation about the world through teaching and writing, she worked for years as a casual, always taking more than her allocated forty-five minutes per student per term to be the best teacher she could. Research was done in her own time in the hope of securing a permanent job, but with a child to care for, she could no longer afford to work for free, and has left the sector.

Each of these people does work that is the opposite of what anthropologist David Graeber has called “bullshit jobs.” They bestow, daily, the thing that Simone Weil described as “the rarest and purest form of generosity,” namely, attention.

Their work is environmental. Not in the narrow sense of being low-carbon-emitting (although it is that). Nor in the sense that it boosts biodiversity (although some do that too). Their work is environmental because it is centrally concerned with human and non-human regeneration, and in particular with fostering social cohesion, trust, civility and a sense of order. It is environmental because it fosters education and the passing on of learning about how to live wisely and within limits. No society can simultaneously exist within environmental limits and be a democracy that does not possess an abundance of these things.

There are some common themes in their conditions of work. Their jobs generally lack pathways in and pathways up. Most of these workers are not “held” within a secure career structure that enables them to reliably progress over time in seniority, nor are they paid adequately to comfortably afford those social markers of “life progress”: a house and a family and a secure retirement. They are, rather, expected to “trade off” the meaningfulness of their work for material security, status and self-development.

For many, daily work is often frustrated and interrupted by management processes that are ill-suited to their labour. They must contend with rigid Taylorist grids, competitive frameworks, productivity metrics: repertoires of control and efficiency derived from industrial contexts thrust into vocations that have, for millennia, followed the tempos and cyclical rhythms of human and environmental need rather than the dictates of the clock.

Many, if not most, of these workers live under the shadow of a glaring mismatch between the status of their work (in terms of pay and security) and the social value it creates. For we reward and support the stewards of renewal far less generously than we do the stewards of extraction and consumption, who benefit from myriad material and social supports that mean that their personal-progress lines don’t just start high, but are set up to rise.

No element of this work order is necessary, or inevitable. The point is not that these workers are victims. Far from it, most of those mentioned are actively organising and agitating in their workplaces and unions to make their conditions of work better. The point is rather that there is a deep perversity in our current order of work, which does not furnish the people who are doing the things most crucial to a flourishing planet and society with the means to flourish themselves.

As Australians, our obligations in responding to environmental crisis are particularly acute. We are one of the wealthiest and most technologically capable nations on the planet, and among the most blessed in renewable energy sources. Yet we are also one of the highest per capita emitters in the world. To put our current priorities in clear focus, the International Monetary Fund has calculated that Australia spends 1.96 per cent of its GDP on fossil fuel subsidies. That is almost four times the approximately 0.5 per cent of GDP we spend on early childhood education and care. In other words, for every public dollar we spend building a future for our youngest citizens, we spend nearly four dismantling that future.

There are powerful historical and geographical dynamics that have led to those damning numbers. Our “settler capitalist” trajectory was premised on extractive pastoral and mining practices. At the same time as that trajectory brutally destroyed and displaced Indigenous lifeways, it imported a highly gendered conception of public and private life that consigned work of social reproduction to women and systematically excluded it from the formal economic sphere.

But just as Australia’s history can be blamed for our present inertia, so too does it contain remarkable sources of inspiration for how we might meet the challenges we face now. We can learn from the religious, cultural and kinship structures that enabled Indigenous peoples to live on and tend to the land, sustainably, for millennia, and to pass on knowledge of how to care for country through the generations.

We can recall the philosophy that underpinned the creation of some of our key national institutions at Federation. The conciliation and arbitration system, for instance, was predicated on a set of principled arguments for determining where competitive markets belong and where they do not. It rested on a notion that our economic systems should be in service to a higher purpose — the development of people as full moral and social beings — and established systems for regulating industrial relationships to that end.

We can learn, too, from the fact that we have remade the fundamental determinants of our work order once already. One hundred years ago, the basic determinants of working life — the things that had the greatest bearing on your occupation, salary, permission to work at all — were gender and race. Imperfect and incomplete as the process was, we largely dismantled that system of formal discrimination in the final third of the twentieth century.

Finally, a sense of history can aid us in understanding why so many ostensibly powerful people seem to feel so powerless to do anything about our current crisis. Our embrace of a passive conception of government, one that confines itself, as Mariana Mazzucato has recently observed, to doing little more than merely “levelling the playing field” of the market and getting out of the way, has led us to consign great swathes of the work of renewal to the for-profit market. As a consequence, much of the care of our eldest and youngest citizens is the responsibility of firms necessarily operating within a financialised system that demands short-termism, risk-shifting, debt loading and lean labour costs. Such arrangements are not only unjust. They are the product of an anachronist and misplaced application of ideas that were gestated in the context of the cold war, in response to a centralising, statist, planning-obsessed Soviet enemy that no longer exists. They are institutional arrangements that come from another age and are not the ones we need to deal with these warming, fragmented and increasingly unequal times.

Such times demand a new work order, an updated social contract for our warming world that recognises anew that the purpose of our economy, and thus of work, is to facilitate the flourishing of our living systems. It is not to furnish markets, capital, GDP — or any of the human inventions we have devised as synecdoches for advancement — with raw material.

The essence of such a renewed social contract should lie in the notion that if you are doing useful work — and especially if you are doing the essential work of stewardship and renewal of our life-giving systems — you should be rewarded with the status, salary and self-development opportunities to enable you to fully develop your capabilities over your life course. You will not be left to knit together the elements of a full and flourishing career on your own.

The new work order can’t be technocratic. It needs to be built upon the strengthened efforts of those already engaged in renewal and stewardship work, and the community organisations, unions and environmental groups that support them.

There will be struggle. There are, after all, more than a few powerful stewards of the old take/make/consume/dispose order who will see no reason to simply surrender their status. We must start to see certain habits, practices and fields of expertise associated with short-termist, non-reciprocal corporate “extractivism” as being akin to occupational “stranded assets.” Just as certain bodies of fossil fuel ores must simply be kept in the ground, so too, these ideas for how to run a society must simply stay in people’s heads.

Technology must be seen as a servant rather than a master. It is crucial to contest the idea that technology, rather than people, determines the value and organisation of work. And, in particular, that it is “gigs” and “tasks” that comprise the natural units of work, rather than relationships, careers and domains of knowledge and practice. At the same time, it is crucial to avoid nostalgia. Digital capabilities and networked orders must be at the heart of our repertoire in thinking about how to reorganise and value work that is oriented to environmental repair and stewardship.

We must re-examine, too, our assumptions about what counts as low- and high-skilled work in light of what we now know about the complex needs of human and environmental systems. Our assumptions are currently stuck in a circular logic that ties status to levels of pay and credentialism, and “bakes in” the undervaluation of caring and relational work. There is no reason why domains of work that are currently fragmented and insecure cannot be rebundled into occupations that are more autonomous, skilled, relational and rewarding.

A new work order will not displace existing environmental imperatives. We must rightly continue to insist on a rapid and deep transition to renewable energy, reduced pollution and consumption, and the eradication of fossil fuel interests from politics. But a new work order will augment them in crucial ways, enabling people to weave the great work of social transformation into their everyday lives.

My generation will be the last to have a climate epiphany. My daughters are growing up always knowing that their world is careering towards a destructive path. They know it in the same sort of way I grew up knowing about the first world war — and thinking (with indecent arrogance) that if, somehow, I had been there, I would never have been involved in something so silly and pointless.

My hope is that by the time they are adults they will see as grotesque the fact that we — knowing about climate change — once paid our brightest young people handsomely for coming up with ingenious ways of flinging people and objects around the planet as frictionlessly and profitably as possible. That we did that at the same time as practically impeding the work of those engaged in the renewal and repair of the world. I hope they will look on such arrangements with a sense of incredulity, of the kind I felt when reading about the militarist logic that saw 57,000 British casualties on the first day of the Somme but insisted that young men wake up and go over the top to be slaughtered again the next day.

Of course, like any parent, I hope their little lines of personal progress rise, and that they find occupations that are useful and interesting and that nourish and nurture the people and places around them. But as every parent knows, I can’t do that for them. What I can do, and what all of us can do, is fight for a system that doesn’t press impossible dilemmas on their slim shoulders.

It is within our power to reshape our present order of work in a way that does not insist that the next generation must choose between work that renews the world and work that is materially secure. We can, instead, fashion a system that offers them a stake in a deep and expansive environmental politics. One that isn’t just about what they do or don’t buy, but that yokes together their private lines of progress with that other great line that determines and marks our collective fate. Such a system would not only be easier and fairer to live in. It would also enable their ambitions, their loves and their impulses to care for the places and people around them to be woven into a common social project they will fight for when we are all gone: the nurturance of life, and the flourishing of our common home. •

This is an edited version of the inaugural Iain McCalman Lecture, delivered at the University of Sydney on 6 February. The lecture was established to celebrate the career of the distinguished historian Iain McCalman.

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So there is a great deal to agree with in the South Australian royal commission’s seriously argued 750-page report on the Basin. The commission castigates efforts made to save the rivers since the Basin Plan of 2012, and forcefully supports the more drastic action advocated by many scientists.

But when it argues that scientists alone should determine what’s to be done, the commission goes too far. All this stance will do is make governments dig in.

That’s what is happening now. Despite all the money that’s been splashed around, the return of water to the rivers has inflicted pain on irrigation communities, and they’re alarmed by the notion of more water being taken back. And the federal, NSW and Victorian ministers have made it clear they are not for turning. We need to find a way past this jam.

Before we look at the commission’s central contention, though, it’s worth focusing on two matters that are relevant to the Darling disaster and require urgent attention. The first of these is the states’ lax management of the Darling and its headwaters, which has undermined the Basin Plan.

When there’s a monsoonal downpour in southern Queensland and northern New South Wales, a lot of the water flowing overland is being diverted by cotton growers into “turkey nest” dams before it reaches a river. That water isn’t measured, and there may not even be licences.

Growers also use huge pumps to fill their dams from water gushing down the rivers. Often licences hadn’t been fully utilised, and when the government bought out some growers to leave extra water for the environment, this water was simply pumped out by the remaining growers. Indeed, the rules on pumping were loosened.

Good water availability in the Darling headwaters, early 2019. Satellite image shows private dams (blue), and cotton crops (green) along the NSW–Queensland border. Sentinel Hub

As the royal commission rightly highlights, all this is a disgrace. Overland flows harvested could be calculated by metering the water in the dams or using satellite imagery to determine how much is put onto crops. The amount of harvesting and pumping must be cut back at least in line with the Basin Plan.

The second matter for attention is that, as the commission notes, the Basin Plan takes no account of the climate getting hotter and drier. The thinking was to deal with overallocation first, and climate change subsequently — and doing it all together would arguably have been too much for the interest groups to swallow eight or so years ago when the plan was being formulated.

But the current drought in the northern Basin, the worst on record, could be a sign of things to come; and this, as much as uncontrolled grabbing of water, could be behind the Darling calamity.

The unfolding drop in inflows needs to be allowed for, with the pain borne by irrigators and towns at least as much as by the environment. In the southern Basin, less water will result in lower annual allocations, but the large public storages will be better at catching the remaining environmental flow. Without counteracting steps, this means that most of the flow decline will hit the environment. Counteracting steps will be needed in the Darling as well: higher threshold flows before water is allowed to be pumped, or cuts in licence volumes.

Taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay to take water from irrigators on this account, and if some farms are rendered unviable, well, that’s the sort of thing that happens if we don’t stop climate change.

To move forward you really need to bring rural communities at least some of the way with you, and have the states onside. That’s how agreement was reached on the Basin Plan — which, for all its shortcomings, was a step in the right direction.

The royal commission, though, declares not only that the Basin Plan is weak and its implementation poor but that it contravenes the Commonwealth’s Water Act 2007. The commission praises this legislation as uniquely good, viewing it as giving primacy to environmental sustainability, as defined by good science.

But insofar as it gives such primacy to the environment, the law is actually a problem.

In the depths of the millennium drought (itself a harbinger of climate change), the Howard government announced the states had failed, and the Commonwealth would take over running the Basin. It had to rely on the Commonwealth’s power to enter into international agreements on such environmental matters as wetlands.

The water minister at the time, Malcolm Turnbull, rushed the legislation through parliament, touting it as the most far-reaching reform of water management in Australia’s history.

The Commonwealth’s new Murray-Darling Basin Authority then came up with very large amounts of water to be returned to the environment: between 3850 gigalitres (for a low chance of success) and 7000 gigalitres a year. (The average consumption of surface water was just under 14,000 gigalitres.)

The release of these figures in 2010 caused an outcry in irrigation communities, with copies of the document publicly burnt. The government then contrived to obtain further legal advice, which said that balancing account could be taken of socioeconomic matters. That was the only way for there to be progress.

The Basin Plan that ended up going through federal parliament in 2012 was for a more moderate 2750 gigalitres to be returned to the environment. Even then, a lot of money, and some smoke and mirrors, were needed to get all the states over the line. (Under certain conditions the recovery figure could be lifted by up to 450 gigalitres or cut by up to 650 gigalitres.)

Perhaps the water minister at the time, Tony Burke, was indeed assured, as he claims, that this lower retrieval figure was the right amount to save the river’s health, as determined by science. But the royal commission has revealed that quite a lot of fudging was done, including dropping some of the environmental targets. And a lot of the revised modelling and analysis was kept behind closed doors.

That’s the trouble with legislating for environmental sustainability to take precedence. Yes, intuitively, we need a healthy river, otherwise all our towns and farmers will be ruined. But logically that could mean returning 100 per cent of the water to the river (which would be many people’s ruin).

In reality, whether the river environment is sustainable is not a yes-or-no, black-or-white issue. Sustainability is a continuum. You can have 20,000 hectares of floodplain forest well watered and healthy, or you can have 40,000 hectares well watered and healthy. You might have to dredge at the Murray Mouth one year in three, or one year in twenty.

There are choices and trade-offs that need to be made. It is the role of science to assess different options as accurately as possible. It is then the responsibility of governments, after due consultation, to decide on which options to adopt.

Oddly enough, near the front of its report the commission quotes extensively from a letter from the late Professor John Briscoe of Harvard University to back up its view that the Act gives the environment overriding priority. But the Briscoe letter points out that doing this is a mistake and will lead to the very fudging and secrecy the commission now rightly slams; the Act is uniquely bad, and should be replaced.

It may seem bizarre to be arguing that governments should have final responsibility, given it is pretty clear that more water needs to be returned to the rivers and yet key ministers are resisting. But we will get to a better place if scientists, rather than being seen as gods, have their advice out in the open and respected for what it is. And if elected governments explain the choices they make.

Finally, we propose action to develop two new tools for assessing and managing flows. The first would enable science to contribute better to decision-making by governments, and the second would enable environmental water to be used as efficiently as possible. (Lots of other actions are compellingly advocated by the royal commission.

A model of flows and the environment: Develop, and make available to the public, good analysis/modelling that links river flows with environmental outcomes, using maps of historical and current vegetation condition for calibration. The aim would be to provide a clearer idea of how much water results in how much environmental benefit. The Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s commitment to this work has faded because states have withdrawn funds from what these days is seen as just a federal agency.

Capability to get flows to the right place at the right time: Continue to improve the way the large volumes of environmental water already assembled are best used. If water hadn’t been released downstream in recent years but kept in the Menindee Lakes, for example, would it have been possible to avert the fish kill? Even for a skilled operator it is a challenge to shepherd water down long tracts of river, meeting targets along the way, while managing water for consumptive use as well. A new computing tool is needed to assist with this.

The discussion of the Murray-Darling Basin takes place in an intensely polarised atmosphere. The first question you’re liable to be asked is, which side are you on? This has partly arisen from the Commonwealth’s scramble to push the states aside back in 2007.

Good policy processes involve interested parties being clear about the problem and listening to each other, so that the outcome — even though it will hurt different stakeholders — is generally understood and more or less accepted.

Even among the broad group of scientists (and social scientists), there are different disciplines and views that need to be heard. For example, there are economists who appreciate that policy decisions must start from where we are at, accepting that there are significant sunk costs: some wetlands may have deteriorated too much to warrant remediation.

It’s possible to map a way forward that’s respected by all sides, but it will need more than just panels of scientists, more than throwing bureaucrats under buses, more than lawyers and litigation. Above all, it will require ministers and governments to be open, to listen, and to take responsibility. •

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At worst, chief judge Brian Preston’s decision will be overturned by a higher court on the basis of a legal error. At best, the miners, Gloucester Resources Limited and Yancoal, will appeal and lose. The second-best outcome is if the decision simply stands, setting an example (though not, as I understand it, a binding precedent) for other courts.

There’s one other possibility: that the NSW government will use its powers to override the decision without invalidating the judicial reasoning behind it. That used to be par for the course, but even the NSW Liberals are waking up to the political risks of climate denialism.

If the proposal does go back to court, there’s a strong case for using “opportunity cost,” a key concept in economics, to show why it shouldn’t proceed. Put simply, the opportunity cost of something is what you must give up so that you can have it. If you spend $50 eating out, that’s $50 you will no longer be able to spend on something else.

So how should we think about the opportunity cost of carbon dioxide emissions? The best way is to assess it in terms of carbon budgets.

The Land and Environment Court heard evidence from ANU professor Will Steffen about how much more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases the world can afford to emit while keeping the probability of dangerous climate change (more than 2°C warming) reasonably low (less than 33 per cent). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “baseline budget” of greenhouse gases is equivalent to one trillion tonnes of carbon, of which 575 billion tonnes had already been emitted by 2017. Assuming total emissions of other greenhouse gases are equivalent to 210 billion tonnes, that leaves only 215 billion tonnes of carbon, or about twenty years of emissions at current rates.

Within the carbon budget, any additional tonne of carbon dioxide emitted by one source requires a tonne’s reduction somewhere else. It is the cost of this offsetting reduction that determines the opportunity cost of the additional emissions.

In any plausible strategy to stay within our carbon budget, coal-fired electricity generation must be among the first activities to be phased out. Even before the climate effects are taken into account, the health costs of pollution from burning coal are so great as to outweigh any cost advantages over alternative generation technologies such as renewables, gas and even nuclear power.

It follows that any new coalmines must be offsett by a reduction in the emissions budget available to existing mines. That’s the opportunity cost. In simple terms, it means closing more of these mines while they still have substantial coal reserves available to be mined. Economically, this will hardly ever make sense. The construction costs of the existing mines, including the environmental damage caused by their construction, can’t be recovered, and opening new mines would require all that spending to take place again.

Except in the unlikely case of a previously unexploited site with very low extraction costs, exploitable with little or no local environmental impact, it makes no sense to open a new mine at the cost of closing an existing one. As was made clear in Justice Preston’s decision, the Rocky Hill mine is no such case. Over and above its effects on the global climate, this mine would deliver marginal returns while substantially damaging the local community and environment.

Opportunity-cost reasoning is a powerful tool, but it needs to be translated into dollar values if it is to be used in the kind of benefit–cost analysis that informs legal decisions. In this case, the crucial question is this: how much damage will be caused if emissions of carbon dioxide exceed the trillion tonnes remaining in the global carbon budget? It will be at least as great as the value of the carbon-emitting activities that are allowed inside the budget. And that means that the damage will be at least as great, in dollar terms, as a carbon price high enough to keep us inside the budget.

No one can estimate this value with certainty, but we can get a general idea. When I examined the topic some years ago, I concluded that the necessary price was around US$50 per tonne. The US Environmental Protection Agency came up with a slightly lower estimate of US$42 per tonne for 2020. Either cost would be sufficient to ensure that the cost associated with opening a new coalmine would exceed the economic value of the mine, even before other environmental and social costs are added to the tally.

The counter-argument presented by the coalminers is what economists call a free-rider argument. The miners say that NSW courts have no business worrying about the global costs of climate change; they should only be concerned with the damage caused by climate change within the state. Further, any individual mine should only be held responsible for its share of total emissions, which is tiny.

This claim is absurd in any case, but particularly so when it is made by a company like Yancoal, which has operations in many countries, each of them contributing to damaging climate change. On Yancoal’s reasoning, each of its mines around the world should be assessed only for the damage caused by that mine’s share of global emissions, and only for the jurisdiction within which the mine is located. So, Yancoal’s Queensland mines get a free pass for damage caused in New South Wales and vice versa, not to mention the harm done everywhere else in the world.

It remains to be seen whether the higher courts will find this exercise in intellectual and moral gymnastics sufficiently convincing to overturn Justice Preston’s carefully reasoned decision. Sadly, the High Court has shown an appetite for this kind of obscurantism in the recent past. But perhaps it will get this one right.

Regardless of the outcome of this case, the logic of the Rocky Hill decision will ultimately prevail. Not only will the legal obstacles for coalmines become increasingly steep, but miners will sooner or later face demands for compensation for the damage caused by climate change.

The strongest case will be against mines that have commenced operation after the need to leave remaining reserves in the ground was already clear. Anyone considering investing in, lending to or insuring such mines should be prepared for more decisions like Rocky Hill. •

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He has high hopes of claiming discoveries in a wilderness still largely unexplored by Europeans. But things are not going so well.

By his own account — A Naturalist in Cannibal Land — Meek is the swashbuckling, superior Edwardian opportunist from central casting. The son of a naturalist, but with no formal scientific training, he’d travelled from London to Queensland at seventeen to work as a jackaroo, with a sideline in collecting and trading antipodean specimens. At eighteen he had his first commission from Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, heir to the Rothschild fortune and a zoologist, to venture into Queensland’s central ranges and bag three pairs of every kind of insect, bird or animal he could find.

Fifteen years later, Meek is being bankrolled by Rothschild to explore the Pacific, capturing exotic butterflies and moths to add to the baron’s natural history collection. It’s the adventurous life he yearned for, and a handsomely profitable one, but it is not without its travails. The islanders he has recruited as labourers have bolted into the bush. He recovers them, punishing the ringleader to persuade them back into reluctant service. By the time they have hauled his kit inland, though, seven are down with disease. It’s fair to say their welfare is not his paramount concern.

But amid this chaos is a glimpse of something beguiling. Setting up camp in the ranges on the Mambare River — likely within sight of the village of Kokoda — he sees an enormous and unfamiliar butterfly. She’s flying so high he brings her down with a shotgun armed with special ammunition. She’s brown with pale yellow markings, her wingspan measuring almost twenty centimetres.

Over the next month, Meek pushes about 130 kilometres inland and high into the formidable Owen Stanley Range — country where, thirty-six years later, the Japanese push down to Port Moresby would be defeated and the Australian legend of Kokoda born. The butterfly eludes him. Meek is “unfortunate enough to lose a couple of boys” — his carriers attacked and murdered. “The collecting was good, but the natives made it practically impossible for me to stay there any longer.” He retreats to Queensland for a spell.

A year later he returns, pulling up in Oro Bay, about thirty kilometres from where he shot the female butterfly. More misfortune: this time he’s laid up himself with terrible sores and raging fever. Then, somewhere near Popondetta, the present-day capital of Oro Province, he stumbles into the butterfly’s garden. He captures males splashed with iridescent turquoise and blue, and more females, some measuring twenty-eight centimetres wingtip to wingtip. Aided by villagers he rewards with mirrors and knives, he finds velvety black caterpillars with ruby spines. He plucks pupae from vine leaves and witnesses — “to my great joy” — a butterfly emerge. The species feeds on an “entirely different vine to other butterflies,” a hitherto unknown species of Aristolochia.

The butterfly specimens are dispatched to Rothschild, who names the subgenus Queen Alexandra’s birdwing, Ornithoptera alexandrae, in honour of the wife of Edward VII.

Meek’s faded trophies, complete with bullet holes, still reside under glass at Rothschild’s estate in Hertfordshire, now part of the British Natural History Museum. In Oro, their elusive kind, the world’s biggest butterfly, has largely vanished, along with much of its nourishing garden. O. alexandrae’s prospects for survival are now entwined with those of the 22,000 people who are the owners of its remnant habitat on the remote Managalas Plateau.

After thirty-three years of negotiations with and between 152 clans, the people of the plateau last year declared a conservation area over their 360,000 hectares of country, putting it out of reach of encroaching loggers, miners and oil palm plantations. It’s only the second, and by far the largest, conservation area in the country. They have resolved to find other ways in which the land might support their livelihoods.

Because such wild places are the last strongholds for so much fast-vanishing biodiversity, and critical to buffering the effects of climate change, we all have a stake in how this crazy-brave gamble turns out. And there are other intriguing dimensions to this story. In an era of seismic corruption and the fracturing of fragile services and infrastructure across Papua New Guinea, the preservation of the Managalas Plateau looks like something almost as elusive as O. alexandrae — good news. As a grassroots initiative, might it signal a turn of the tide in the narrative of external plunder — so much of it unapologetically rapacious; some of it, lately, dressed in finer ambitions but wearing the same old soiled colonial attitudes, blind and deaf to indigenous needs and desires?

After a decade travelling in and out of PNG, collecting too many bleak stories of violence, disease and dysfunction (yes, I too am a plunderer), I’m a little reluctant to chase this apparition for fear it will vanish. Up close, things are sometimes not as they appear from a distance. Yet here I am, stumbling around with my butterfly net on other people’s country.

At Oro Bay, where the Hekla had moored 111 years earlier, we pull off the coast road from Popondetta to pick up cold drinks and provisions at a cavernous tin-shed trade store before heading bush. To have any chance of seeing a Queen Alexandra birdwing butterfly (or QABB, as the locals shorthand it), I will have to travel deeper into the country than Meek likely did. Blessedly, not on foot, though at times it seems like that might be quicker.

The store sits on an inlet, a tide choked with garbage lapping at the shore. Stallholders do steady trade in buai, betel nut, for chewing and there’s a window offering liquor. Disconcertingly, one of the police escorts we collected back in town — pistol waving in his hand and thongs on his feet — makes a purchase. His young offsider, in a neat shirt and black lace-ups buffed to a mirror finish, waits in the back of our Toyota 4WD ute. My guide — veteran environmental champion, lawyer and local son Damien Ase — works his phone before we drive beyond network coverage.

Wilting in hot, wet shade, I slip the sandwich I have no appetite for to an appreciative hound. Eventually we are on our way.

We pass towering tanks full of crude palm oil awaiting shipment to become cakes and cosmetics around the world. They are fed by the harvest of red nuts from the squat, bristling oil palms that line the road. Palm oil production accounts for more than half of PNG’s agricultural export earnings. The cost had been plain to see through the window on my flight into Popondetta, over the ranges from Port Moresby: wild jungle canopy gobbled up by a meticulously machined green industrial landscape.

Before hitting the road to the plateau, I met Malchus Kajai, chair of the Managalas Conservation Foundation, in Popondetta — from where O. alexandrae has disappeared. “Because of the oil palm, the feeding grounds have been destroyed,” he explained. “We’re fortunate to have it up there.”

Kajai, who is fifty-seven, has spent more than half his life campaigning to preserve his birthright. He was studying for the Anglican priesthood when he began to worry there was more harm than good coming from development in Oro — the logging, the mining, the explosion of oil palm. His reading of the Bible was that “we have been entrusted to manage the forest. I started to take up the responsibility to speak and protect… The forest which is still virgin contains a lot of fauna, flora, a lot of species that have yet to be discovered.”

He had other concerns too. The fading of culture. Failing schools and health services. Diminishing income from crops like coffee and cocoa — not for lack of effort, but because without functional roads and communications, farmers could not market their produce. There’s been coffee on the plateau for sixty years, but lately it hasn’t been worth picking because of the obstacles getting it to market and the price, now less than $1 a kilo in a fifty-kilo bag. (Meanwhile, in Melbourne, I pay $50 for a kilo of PNG beans when I can find them.)

Such hardships underlie the willingness of many people — including some on the plateau — to sell rights to their country, but Kajai was one who led the resistance. Urbanised landowners were particularly keen for the pay-off, but then they wouldn’t have to live with the consequences. “We had a lot of conflicts, a lot of problems, especially with the elites — educated people who have been to town and were lucky enough to come down and get employment,” he said of the decades wrangling the conservation push.

To understand the obstacles the project had to navigate requires a few insights. First, land in PNG is still largely held under customary ownership. Second, PNG’s population is a diverse patchwork, with over 850 languages, so negotiations over one region may involve a multitude of tongues. (There are five across the Managalas.) Third, land is beyond price in a nation where the state is still so absent that country is all that can be relied on for survival.

These hurdles mean that any number of conservation efforts by marquee conservation outfits and other international non-government organisations — so-called BINGOs — have crashed and burned in the gulf between what distant donors expect and what local people need. Meanwhile, the country’s wilderness is being devoured by logging, much of it illegal. Exports of tropical timber have doubled over the past decade, making PNG the world’s largest exporter of round logs.

The profits from this trade have failed to improve life for most people on the ground, said Kajai. He’s the father of eight grown children. “The system has failed them… The system has failed us. But we have land. Land will not fail you. It is only when you are not creative that you’ll fail yourself.”

There’s bitumen carpeting the routes of the oil palm trucks, but it disappears after the turn-off to Afore village on the Managalas Plateau. Afore is only sixty kilometres away, but it will take around four hours to get there because the road is so bad. A dozen people are piled in the back of our ute. Most are locals who pay K50 (A$21) for the ride — around half the annual income earned by many households on the plateau.

I’m sitting up front with driver Colin Fred, who lives in Afore with his schoolteacher wife and three children. Grinding two sets of gears, playing the pedals like a 4WD virtuoso across the range from full throttle to light staccato, he somehow extricates the overburdened ute from dry ruts and muddy bogs. We plough through a wide river where the bridge was taken out by Cyclone Guba a decade ago. The road is ruined, but then so are pretty much all the routes relied on by the 80 per cent of PNG’s eight million–plus population who live in rural and remote areas. For them, this reality defines all else. Without a functional road you can’t bring teachers and medicines in or send crops and emergency cases out.

We lurch up onto the plateau, a shallow basin that sits between 650 and 850 metres above sea level, encircled by mountain ranges pushing up to over 2000 metres. A breeze flushes out the vehicle’s stifling cabin.

The road winds through stands of rainforest and wild banana trees, rows of coffee and cocoa, swathes of grassland, huts planted on stilts in scrupulously kept gardens of flowers and vegetables. The lushness is fed by rich volcanic soils. A scientist working here twenty years ago on an AusAID-funded research program theorised that the QABB probably gained its monumental size from the vigorous health of the single rare species of Aristolochia vine on which it lays its eggs, and the nectar of the hibiscus and ixora flowers it cruises. Dozens of eruptions had scattered layers of phosphate-rich ash across the plateau, providing “ample nutrients to sustain the caterpillars of such a large butterfly.” And it’s not the only extraordinary creature nurtured by these conditions: a billboard celebrating the conservation project lists half a dozen other flagship species, among them the Raggiana bird of paradise and Doria’s tree kangaroo.

The crucible for the project was a Tok Pisin literacy program back in 1984, enlisting academics and students from the University of PNG — among them aspiring lawyer Damien Ase. A central figure in the PNG conservation movement nationally and locally, Ase hails from a village on the other side of the plateau. “I saw all the destruction that was going on in those places where cash crops like palm oil and cocoa were taking over the forest,” he recalls. “I didn’t want my people to go through that… so I played my part.”

The literacy program evolved into a non-government organisation called Partners with Melanesians, which over the next decade shifted into conservation and development, securing funding from the Rainforest Foundation of Norway, which has supported the project from concept to realisation last year.

The Managalas declaration doesn’t entirely lock up the forests. Rather, it lays out a program of sustainable use of the landscape. Every part of the plateau has been mapped and zoned for one of five purposes: village life, subsistence gardening, larger-scale cropping, hunting grounds and no-go conservation areas. The hope is that this portfolio will generate a mix of activities and attract a variety of players — including researchers, tourists and produce buyers — to support local livelihoods. In Kajai’s vision of the future, farmers will find markets for their organic coffee and spices, village houses will have electric light, schools will plug into the internet, and students will become teachers, tour guides, scientists and health workers employed on the plateau, raising their own families, and sowing an ongoing connection to land and culture.

This model is what American anthropologist and PNG specialist Paige West describes as “conservation-as-development.” Such projects assume that environmental conservation can provide a flow of cash income, and that “development needs, wants and desires, on the part of rural peoples, could be met by the protection of biodiversity on their lands.” West has spent years closely observing the dynamics of such projects, which turn on contracts between villagers and outsiders — maybe a big non-government organisation, maybe research scientists. She has seen how much gets lost in translation: rural people don’t always understand the outsider notion of “conservation” and outsiders don’t always understand what villagers think of when they imagine “development.”

These days, West collaborates with John Aini, a PNG conservationist, to spotlight these failures among specialists, scholars and practitioners, and challenge them to find strategies for “decolonising conservation.” They describe how, time and again, they have seen outsiders come into communities with their own well-formed ambitions but little capacity to understand the links between local livelihoods and healthy biodiversity. Donor-driven projects almost inevitably fail, often leaving behind a volatile mess of failed expectations.

A big part of the problem, according to Vojtech Novotny, a Czech ecologist who has been working in PNG for decades — including running a modest sustainable livelihoods program in the villages around his field sites — is that many people who donate money and effort to saving faraway forests are afflicted by a crippling romanticism. He explored this in a provocatively titled 2010 paper, “Rain Forest Conservation in a Tribal World: Why Forest Dwellers Prefer Loggers to Conservationists,” arguing that “the global machinery of nature conservation remains, regrettably, remarkably inept at presenting indigenous owners of tropical forests with a decent offer in exchange for their continued management and conservation of a substantial amount of the world’s biodiversity.”

Forest people need income and services, and he’s seen little sign of improvement from the BINGOs in delivering on these. “They need a stream of new projects to excite donors, and that doesn’t really work here.”

But he’s “cautiously optimistic” about the prospects for the Managalas Plateau. He and others credit the realisation of the project last year to its organic roots, the engagement of local participants throughout, and the long endurance of both the homegrown Partners with Melanesians and its Norwegian benefactors. None of this guarantees it will deliver what is hoped, but “the advantage is that after thirty years, they have already been through the cycle of hope and disappointment,” says Novotny. They are perhaps well placed to ride it out a bit longer yet.

Malchus Kajai is banking on it. “It’s almost a year now, and people are asking us, ‘When is the service going to be delivered? When are we going to have a coffee mill? When are we going to secure a market for our coffee and our vanilla? When are we going to have better roads?’” People are anxious, he says. “I’m anxious.”

We arrive in Afore at nightfall, pulling up at a pair of spartan shacks that serve as headquarters of the conservation project. We settle in by torchlight, talking late by the cooking fire, eating rice and tinned fish beneath undiluted stars. We sleep under mosquito nets, serenaded by the chorus of forest creatures and a choir of mothers just returned from a church retreat.

I’m up at 5am, slip-sliding down a dark, muddy path to a pit toilet, praying our crew will soon be en route to a stand of forest where — they promise — I will find O. alexandrae. It’s my only shot. I’m booked on a flight out of Popondetta that afternoon, so I’m desperate to get this show on the road. But by the time the fire’s awakened, and pots of tea and rice brewed for breakfast, it’s gone 7am.

In the rear-vision mirror, Afore is otherworldly, an island in the sky encircled by rivers of ethereal morning mist. The track into the forest is barely discernible. I feel myself breathing in to help Colin Fred squeeze the ute between close trees and across too-narrow improvised bridges. Households sprinkled through the bush are surprised by the rare traffic, children chasing and laughing. We pass women hauling up pots of water from streams. The bone-weary gaze of one of them, as I wave, wipes the smile off my face.

Raynold Pasip leans in from the back of the ute to tap my shoulder. “This is my land!” he shouts over the revving engine as we pass through some invisible jungle boundary. Pasip is a wiry elder and a member of the Managalas Conservation Foundation board. We spoke at length the night before about the land, his history with the project, his hopes.

“When I walk to my own bush, I see the bird of paradise. I see a cassowary. I see a wallaby. I see all these things, I feel proud,” he said. “If I want to kill them for my meat for the dinner, it doesn’t cost me money. I can kill some of them, and then come and cook. The feathers for my dancing, [the] tails for making bilum [bag], and the bones I use [to] make a needle, different things. Our young children are taught, when they go they have a certain time for hunting, and a reason to kill birds and a reason to catch animals. They are not careless in killing birds or cutting trees.”

Pasip talked about the destruction he had witnessed elsewhere in PNG. He describes how that persuaded him to join forces with the elders of 151 other clans, deciding “this plateau should be declared for conservation… so our young generation, the children, will have benefit from their own resource.” They should not be mere labourers on their own land. But without a good road, without airstrips, “people struggle. They carry their own food, cargo, from their shoulders… they walk down to town and they do their marketing.”

He also talked about the peacefulness of the plateau, in the bush and even in the villages, where people were not disturbed by the fighting that has become part of life in so many communities. He spoke of places where you could find birds of paradise or great waterfalls or tiny frogs. The secret sites where, in old times, his people would take their dead. “They didn’t bury them in the ground. They have to go and wrap them around with a mat, and they make a little house on the tree, and they leave them there.”

We pull up at the tiny village of Dareki. The phone network on the plateau hasn’t worked for over a month, so Damien Ase couldn’t send word ahead of our coming. We surprise the man we have come to see — Conwell Nukara, the butterfly whisperer — at home with his small children under a verandah of palm leaves, drying off after a bath in the Pongani River. Briefed on our hurried mission, he leads the way, on foot, deeper into the forest.

We climb over logs and under a tangle of trailing vines including, Nukara points out, the Aristolochia favoured by O. Alexandrae. To us it’s poisonous, he warns. We wade through cloying air and a cool, shallow creek. Pasip and June Toneba, the women’s representative on the conservation board, walk with me. She points out cultivated plots mixed in with the wild growth of the forest: plantings of corn, peanuts, chillies. One of her objectives under the project is to bring in teaching programs for the women. They are such accomplished gardeners, but they struggle to turn this into profitable business, and their children are malnourished because they don’t have the knowledge or resources to feed them a sustaining diet.

Fixing the road is also, for her and other women, truly a matter of life and death. Because when their labours go wrong they can’t get to hospital in Popondetta, many mothers die delivering their babies. Toneba is still mourning the recent death of her own daughter, Imelda, after an asthma attack.

My gaze is on the ground, picking through the labyrinth of tree roots, when Toneba cries out. A flash of movement, a disturbance in the ether. A butterfly the size of a small bird, swooping and dancing around us. “It’s a Queen Alexandra… a QABB!” Toneba declares, and I’m swivelling about with excitement, or perhaps delirium. It circles close, but juggling camera, recorder and notebook I fail to get a fix, and then it’s vanished. When we catch him up, butterfly whisperer Nukara says that we were almost certainly mistaken, tricked by a similar but smaller birdwing.

Finally, we arrive in a clearing where a sign declares: WELCOME TO MISU — QUEEN ALEXANDRA BIRDWING BUTTERFLY FARM: A COMMUNITY INITIATIVE. Nearby is a green shade house, about half the size of a tennis court, which Nukara built last July. Inside are rows of saplings sprouting broad leaves.

He gently turns one over. Stapled underneath is a portion of another leaf he has plucked from the surrounding forest. Stuck to this is the brown and yellow pupa of O. alexandrae. Nukara turns another leaf, revealing another pupa. The one cocooning a female is as long as his index finger but plumper, the male specimen a little smaller.

Nukara says he roams the forest every morning looking for pupae. When he finds them he brings them into the shade house, where they stay up to eight weeks. This keeps them safe from birds and spiders. A day after they hatch, he opens the door and releases them, he says. So far, he’s waved out twenty-five: fifteen females, ten males.

“This is the largest butterfly we have in the world,” he says, “so that is our pride… It is also endangered, and in the future this will bring people from outside, tourists and other people who are interested, so we can make a small income from that.”

Nukara is wearing a t-shirt with the emblem of New Britain Palm Oil, one of the biggest producers in the country. He’s not being ironic, merely pragmatic. Decades of campaigning by environmentalists against rapacious habitat destruction by the industry, enlisting the orangutan as the poster child of the devastation through Sumatra and Borneo, has put producers under intense pressure to improve their sustainability credentials. In Oro, New Britain Palm Oil has recently announced it will bankroll a captive breeding program for the QABB to try to rescue its precarious population. Its experts have been visiting Nukara’s butterfly farm, talking to him about collaborating on what may be the last chance to save the vanishing species.

Nukara keeps a close watch on his growing flock of O. alexandrae. He checks in on the pupae and patrols the glade every morning. Butterfly poachers, modern-day Meeks, remain a real threat. Prized QABBs sell for thousands on the black market. There is an argument — including from some of the species’s passionate champions — that its best protection might be to permit landowners to trade a limited quota of specimens: killing butterflies to save them.

What happens, I ask Nukara, when you release these freshly hatched spirits into the wild? Do they flap away? “They hang around for a while,” Nukara says. “They even come back to me… then they fly up.” He saw half a dozen here just this morning. “You should have come early,” he admonishes. “Every morning, I am always filled with joy.”

To my great joy. That’s what A.S. Meek wrote on witnessing his prize emerge from its cocoon. At which point he pulled out his kit and killed it, securing the trophy inside one of his airtight japanned containers.

I scan the enveloping green one last time. Nothing. I shut my eyes. Birdsong, the chirp of lizards, the cacophony of unseen tiny creatures, the fall of fruit on the forest floor. The pulse of fecund energy. The silence of the ancestors perched in their trees. The more disturbing ghost of my own kind, Meek.

I’ve read somewhere that O. alexandrae flaps through the high canopy with the power and thrust of a bat. It’s not registering on my poorly tuned radar. Which is not to say it isn’t there. •

This essay appears in Griffith Review 63: Writing the Country, edited by Ashley Hay.

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Five years earlier, the signing of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change had recognised the growing scientific consensus that anthropogenic global warming was occurring, that it would pose an increasing threat, and that coordinated action was needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The aim of the Kyoto meeting was to move from a shared aims to a means of achieving it, to agree on binding commitments to reduce emissions.

The delegates gathered in Kyoto acknowledged that different countries were at different stages of economic development. Because Western countries had a 200-year head start in the industrialisation stakes, they would need to take the lead in reducing emissions, with developing countries, including China and India, joining at a future date.

The most committed countries, led by American vice-president Al Gore, were intent on reaching an inclusive agreement. Most European countries were keen on strong action, too, as was Canada under Liberal prime minister Jean Chretien, and the Japanese were determined that the meeting would be a success. Eventually this group succeeded in clinching a deal, with thirty-seven countries and the European Union signing on to become “Annex I” countries and commence the emissions reduction process.

Among the major players, the near-universal wish for a binding, unanimously agreed protocol meant that when a minor player like Australia played the recalcitrant it would be indulged. Below the main headlines in the Japanese press coverage of the meeting were stories of Australia’s threats and dissents, and the major countries’ efforts to accommodate them.

Global warming had been on the Australian political agenda since Bob Hawke’s 1990 announcement that his government wanted to cut greenhouse emissions by 20 per cent within fifteen years. While momentum faltered under Hawke’s successor, Paul Keating, the opposition Liberals under John Hewson began taking a stronger stand. But in the run-up to the Kyoto summit, the Howard government — though conscious that Australia was becoming increasingly isolated internationally — was much more preoccupied with maintaining economic growth. Indeed, cabinet papers released this year show that the government considered dropping out of the international talks altogether.

In the end, Australia’s environment minister, Robert Hill, succeeded in securing what the Howard government saw as an advantageous deal at Kyoto. His first achievement was to secure a very generous target for emissions reduction. In the initial agreement, covering the trajectory of emissions from 1990 (the first year for which emissions data was seen as sufficiently accurate) until the period 2008–12, the average commitment among signatory countries was a 5 per cent reduction. Some countries — Germany, for instance, with a 21 per cent reduction, and Britain with 12.5 per cent — went considerably further, but Australia’s special pleading allowed its emissions to rise by 8 per cent over the period.

Then, in the days before the signing, Hill sprang a new demand. Unless LULUCF — land use, land-use change, and forestry — was included in the calculations, Australia would refuse to sign. This came to be known as the “Australia clause,” and some countries were very angry at its inclusion. The European Union’s environmental representative, Peter Jorgensen, said that the Australian stance was “wrong and immoral”; later, two German analysts would bracket Russia, Australia and the members of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, as the principal obstacles to progress in the negotiations.

A case does exist for including LULUCF in the treaty. Although several countries argued that its measurement was difficult, it does have an impact on total greenhouse emissions. But it is only a very small part of the total mix in most developed countries (unlike in developing countries like Indonesia and Brazil, where large-scale land clearing adds substantially to carbon dioxide emissions). Indeed, the value of LULUCF is negative in most developed countries — more carbon dioxide is absorbed by forestry activities than is added by land clearing.

The key reason for Hill’s demand was that Australia’s rate of land-clearing had been abnormally high in the baseline year of 1990 — that level has never again been approached — which would make targets much easier to achieve. Subsequent figures show how true that was. In 1990, Australia recorded a total of 583 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent emissions. By 2010, that figure was down to 559, a reduction of 4 per cent, but the reduction was entirely due to changes in LULUCF. In fact, the fall in LULUCF emissions — from 163 tonnes in 1990 to just twenty-two in 2010 — was the sole reason Australia reached its already generous Kyoto target. If LULUCF had been excluded, Australia’s emissions would have gone from 420 to 537, an increase of 28 per cent.

After the summit, Howard described Australia’s outcome as an “absolutely stunning diplomatic success.” He welcomed the fact that Australia was able to “make a massive contribution to the world environmental effort to cut greenhouse gases” in a way that would protect Australian jobs. In 2002, nevertheless, he decided not to ratify Kyoto, although he said Australia would still meet its target. In this, he was following president George W. Bush, who had taken the United States out the previous year.

By 2007, with political momentum for action on global warming intensifying, both major parties went to the election promising an emissions-trading scheme. After the election, Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd won considerable kudos for committing to Kyoto. But this was an essentially symbolic action: thanks to the deal Hill had struck, Australia didn’t have to do anything at all to meet its Kyoto obligations.

Eventually, a second Kyoto target period was agreed on, although fewer countries signed on this time. Russia, the United States and Canada all dropped out, as did (post-Fukushima) Japan. Australia committed to a 5 per cent decrease between 2000 and 2020, and is on track to do this, but changes in LULUCF are again the key. In 2000, Australia’s total emissions were 552 and in 2020 they are likely to be 543, down slightly. But its LULUCF emissions are projected to decline from +67 to –10. Once again, Australia would have missed its target without LULUCF.

Such niceties have not inhibited Australian ministers’ capacity for self-congratulation. “We are one of the few countries in the world to have met and beaten our first round of Kyoto targets and to be on track to meet and beat our second round of Kyoto targets,” environment minister Greg Hunt proclaimed. Australia is different from “a lot of other countries,” said prime minister Tony Abbott in July 2015, because “when we make commitments to reduce emissions we keep them.”

Australia had another reason to remain in the second Kyoto round. The original protocol had included an incentive to promote quick action: if countries exceeded their targets, they received carry-over credits to the next round. In the event, a majority of countries met and exceeded their targets, and indeed Annex I countries as a whole reduced their emissions by 24 per cent over the target period to 2010 (rather undercutting Hunt and Abbott’s sense of superiority). On the other hand, total global emissions rose 45 per cent over this period, showing the urgency of involving the rest of the world in the process.

After Kyoto, a series of international summits — including, most dispiritingly, Copenhagen in 2009 — made very limited progress towards more effective action. Then, in December 2015, came the breakthrough gathering in Paris. The key to the success of the Paris talks was the concept of NDCs (nationally determined contributions), under which each country decided on its own target. Fully 186 countries submitted NDCs, and all of them adopted the goal of keeping the earth’s warming to less than 2 per cent, and if possible to less than 1.5 per cent.

Australia’s NDC target was a reduction of 26–28 per cent on 2005 levels by 2030. (The federal government’s Climate Change Authority had advocated between 45 and 65 per cent.) Many countries were criticised for setting themselves too modest a target. Indeed, some environmental critics have said that even if all participating countries met their targets, the fall in emissions would not be sufficient to keep global warming below 2 degrees. On the other hand, never before had so many countries recognised the urgency of the issue and committed themselves to action.

Australia embraced Paris. Foreign minister Julie Bishop said she was proud to have been part of such a momentous meeting; the government said its “ambitious” target would be “achieved through a credible policy suite that is already reducing emissions, encouraging technological innovation and expanding our clean energy sector.” While LULUCF reductions will still be helpful given the 2005 base year, this time they won’t be sufficient to hit the target.

Moreover, as has been well documented, Australia’s emissions have increased each year since the Abbott government abolished the carbon tax. On the face of it, Australia is heading in the wrong direction to meet its Paris commitments. But during the last few months a new escape clause has increasingly been invoked.

It started in November, when prime minister Scott Morrison stated — without elaboration and in seeming contradiction of the evidence — that Australia would meet its Paris commitments “in a canter.” To the extent that there is any substance behind this claim, it seems to rely on two factors.

The first is the likelihood that emissions from electricity will be lower than projected. The very high price of electricity during the term of the Coalition government has made price-conscious consumers cut back on consumption and encouraged the spread of rooftop solar systems.

The second factor, bigger but more problematic, is that the government believes that it is entitled to claim carry-over credits for meeting its Kyoto targets. According to a report in the Australian just before Christmas, Scott Morrison claimed that carried-over credits will be used to help meet the 2030 target. The paper said that “the use of carry-over credits was not ruled out at the recent climate talks in Katowice, Poland.” Also in December the Department of the Environment and Energy’s Australia’s Emissions Projections 2018 report stated baldly that overachieving Kyoto targets reduces Australia’s emissions reduction task for Paris from 695 million tonnes to 328 million tonnes.

It appears that the Morrison government is going to use these credits to more than halve the work needed to meet Australia’s Paris commitment. Before late 2018, no government minister or official had ever raised the possibility of claiming these credits. The official report, Australia’s Emissions Projections 2016, for example, made no reference to them at all.

Nor is it clear that any other country accepts that these credits can be used. The sixteen pages and twenty-nine articles of the Paris Agreement make no reference to carry-over credits — and it would be surprising if it did, given that four-fifths of the participating countries were not Annex I countries in Kyoto, and have no incentive to agree to anything other than a real reduction in carbon emissions.

Similarly, the OECD’s January 2019 Environmental Performance Review, which noted that Australia needed to intensify efforts to reach its Paris Agreement goal, made no mention of carry-over credits. No international document that I’ve been able to locate endorses the idea that they are an acceptable means of claiming emission reductions.

In Kyoto I and II Australia was able to use the special conditions it wrung out of other countries to claim it was fulfilling its international obligations. Then Australia went backwards on all major sources of emissions except LULUCF. Now, in the spirit of Robert Hill, the government has invented the idea of using carry-over credits to meet its Paris target. This is almost certain to be unacceptable internationally, but perhaps the obfuscation will hide from the electorate the government’s failure to move in any meaningful way towards the Paris targets it signed on to. •

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The fact that Adani has been unable to find external funding is well known, as is the fact that a starting date has been announced several times in the last eighteen months. But the pattern stretches back years, and goes far beyond problems with finance.

For at least five years, Adani has been announcing the imminent, or actual, start of the project. Over this period, business partnerships have been announced, only to then break down. In Adani’s telling, these serial divorces were due to the fact that the other party was no longer needed.

Preliminary design and construction work was under way in 2013 with a consortium that included Parsons Brinckerhoff as project manager and a fifty-strong engineering team from Worley Parsons. The project was suspended in 2015, however, and virtually all of the workforce was sacked. Two years later, the American engineering firm AECOM replaced Worley Parsons, only to pull out in May 2018.

In July 2014, Adani signed a “binding agreement” with South Korean company POSCO to build a standard gauge rail line, with construction expected to start in 2015. That deal also came to nothing, as did proposals for POSCO to invest in the project and buy around five million tonnes of coal. Another Korean customer, LG, signed letters of intent to buy four million tonnes of coal, but pulled out in 2015.

In January 2015, the company announced the awarding of a $2 billion contract to Downer EDI, stating that construction was expected to begin later in the year. That deal was cancelled in December 2017. In May that year, with POSCO out of the picture, Adani had announced it would be buying $74 million worth of steel from Arrium, owner of the troubled Whyalla steelworks. It’s unclear whether that deal is dead, but obviously the cut-down project now being proposed won’t need nearly as much steel.

Adani hasn’t treated its own staff any differently. When its Townsville regional headquarters was opened in 2017, 500 jobs were promised. In reality, there were never more than 150, many of them transferred from the Brisbane office. In June the number was reduced to one hundred and more staff were told their contracts would not be renewed.

All of this raises big questions about the claim that construction will begin before Christmas (or, in some versions, just after the new year). As far as can be determined, Adani’s Carmichael operation has no construction contractors, no professional engineering team and a staff level that would see it officially classified as a medium enterprise in Australia (from fifteen to 200 employees, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics) and a small business in many other countries.

There’s no sign that this is changing. In June 2017, Adani set up a jobs portal for its Regional Content Strategy. The portal was open to other employers, which was perhaps fortunate. Adani advertised a handful of jobs initially, but soon stopped. Despite yesterday’s announcement, a search of the site for Adani jobs produces nothing, just as it has done for months.

Yet Adani claims to be able to jump-start a $2 billion project with over 1500 workers in a matter of weeks. Casting further doubt on the announcement is the fact that the proposed project has been radically redesigned in the past few months, with a completely different route for the rail line and a new access arrangement with Aurizon, which operates the Goonyella-to-Abbot-Point line on which the coal will now travel.

The absurdity of the project is reinforced by the fall in the price of the low-quality coal to be produced from the Galilee Basin. Coal quality is measured in kilocalories per kilogram (kcal/kg), with higher values indicating more heat content and less ash. The standard is 6000 kcal/kg Newcastle coal, the price of which rose between 2016 and the recent closure of the Chinese import market for December. But the strong demand for high-quality coal has massively increased the discount for coal graded 5500 or below. The Australian Financial Review recently estimated that Adani would be lucky to get US$55/tonne for its coal, compared to a Newcastle price of US$100/tonne.

At that price, it’s unlikely that Adani could cover the costs of mining, railing and shipping coal, let alone earn a return on a $2 billion investment.

It’s highly likely, therefore, that this is yet another mirage designed to keep the project alive without committing any real funds. Perhaps Gautam Adani doesn’t want to write off the billions he has already wasted, or perhaps he just doesn’t like admitting defeat. Or perhaps he is hoping to establish enough “facts on the ground” to extract compensation from the Queensland and Australian governments if the project fails to get the new approvals that it needs.

Suppose, however, that Adani goes ahead with the project seriously, raising the disastrous prospect that the entire Galilee Basin will be opened to mining. Such a huge expansion in the global production of coal would virtually eliminate any prospect of holding global warming to 2°C, let alone the 1.5°C needed to minimise the harm from climate change.

At that point, the Labor Party will have to take a stand on the issue, something it has successfully avoided so far. Achieving the Paris goals will require a rapid move away from coal, implying the need for a moratorium on new coalmines as well as the orderly closure of existing mines.

It would be a brave step for Labor to lead the world in announcing such a moratorium. But the current opposition has shown surprising bravery on a number of issues, most notably tax policy, and has suffered no apparent electoral costs — rather the reverse. The majority of Australians want action on climate change and understand that the economic benefits Adani has long promised are illusory. Let’s hope that this economic and ecological disaster can still be stopped. •

The post Another Adani alarm appeared first on Inside Story.

“All of the town was very proud of the airport,” she recalls. “Everyone felt very happy about the planes; they would bring back mums and dads working in the aviation industry.” Her father was a senior executive in the local municipality whose responsibilities included noise abatement.

Some decades later, de Leeuw finds herself following in her father’s footsteps, but with a twist. Now a resident of Sydney’s inner west, where locals living under the flight path refer to “the Petersham pause,” named after one of the local suburbs, de Leeuw is a professor of public health leading a charge to reinvent the way that airports are conceptualised and designed. Together with colleagues at the UNSW Centre for Health Equity Training, Research and Evaluation, or CHETRE, de Leeuw wants to reinvent airports as “engines for health.”

On the face of it, this seems a tall order, given the many ways the aviation industry is bad for the health of people and the planet. Noise pollution is the biggest concern for many communities; a 2016 environment report by the International Civil Aviation Organization, or ICAO, On Board: A Sustainable Future, described its wide-ranging health impacts, including upon children’s learning and cognitive development. As well, airports are locations for the spread of infectious diseases, occupational health risks, and the sale and marketing of unhealthy products, not to mention the tensions and stresses involved in negotiating these often unwelcoming environments.

Perhaps most importantly, the aviation industry is responsible for a significant and growing contribution to carbon emissions. In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calculated that aviation is responsible for 2 per cent of anthropogenic carbon emissions, with about two-thirds coming from international aviation.

At Australian airports alone, the number of journeys is projected to increase by an annual 3.7 per cent over the next twenty years, from 135.1 million in 2010–11 to 279.2 million in 2030–31, according to a 2017 Australian government report, Managing the Carbon Footprint of Australian Aviation. Improvements in aircraft technology and operations, and other efforts to cut carbon emissions will not compensate for this growth, with emissions from domestic aviation projected to rise by an average of 2.2 per cent per annum until 2034–35.

These concerns are all the more reason for rethinking our approaches to airports, says de Leeuw. The idea for healthy airports arose when the CHETRE team began investigating the health and environmental impacts of an airport that is to be built in western Sydney, and heard about the distress and concern of many local residents. The researchers began to wonder what might happen if the airport could be reframed as a place offering positive opportunities for health. They were not only thinking of the health of travellers and airport employees, but also considering the health of local and distant environments, and local communities and industries.

“So we started to take a systems perspective on airport design and to think, how would we design this for health?” says de Leeuw. What if airports were designed to be carbon-neutral? What if they were designed to provide a pleasant experience for travellers? What if they supported sustainable local industries? What if they provided health-promoting and equitable working conditions?

Over the past eighteen months, de Leeuw has been raising these questions with the aviation industry, including at the ICAO. This Montreal-based UN agency oversees the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation and aims to support “a safe, efficient, secure, economically sustainable and environmentally responsible civil aviation sector.”

It’s not an easy sell, persuading engineers and corporations to reconceptualise themselves as agents for health. But the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals have proven a useful lever: all UN agencies, including the ICAO, are obliged to report on their implementation of these goals, many of which have a direct link to the health impacts of airports.

And there are emerging examples of healthy aviation practice. De Leeuw cites Norway’s aim to have a carbon-neutral aviation industry by 2030, Amsterdam Airport’s status as a net producer of electricity generated by photovoltaic cells, and the development of electric planes, with an electric Pipistrel light aircraft making history in Perth earlier this year.

The 2017 Australian government report describes efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of Australian airports. Those in Darwin, Adelaide and Alice Springs have embraced solar technologies, and the report describes Canberra Airport’s new terminal as “one of the most carbon-friendly buildings in Australia, employing water and energy-saving initiatives.”

On her regular air travels, de Leeuw keeps on her researcher’s hat, talking widely with airport staff and other travellers. She recalls experiencing a light-bulb moment when an airport urban planner told her, “We are not in the aviation business, we are in the mobility business.”

“It was such a deep, really profound insight,” says de Leeuw, pointing to the importance to the aviation industry of mobility well beyond the boundaries of an airport. “For that reason, Charles de Gaulle in Paris and Amsterdam Airport co-own the high-speed rail between those two airports… it is in their interests to get people in and out of airports.” She adds that mobility is in itself a critical determinant of health.

De Leeuw and her colleagues are now hoping to influence the design and targets for Western Sydney Airport, which is due to open in 2026. At the same time, they want to work more widely to encourage healthy retrofitting of existing airports, and to develop a discipline of aviation public health.

Not everyone is on board with the concept, though. Among the sceptics is Trevor Neal, who was looking forward to spending more time with his grandchildren and family after retiring as a firefighter. Instead, at age sixty-seven, he is putting in long hours as a community activist with Residents Against Western Sydney Airport.

The group formed in 2015 with about twenty people, and now has about 200 volunteers and a social media network amounting to thousands. It is campaigning for Western Sydney Airport to be scrapped in favour of a more environmentally friendly high-speed rail network linking up the major cities on Australia’s east coast. These routes account for a big chunk of the air travel to and from Sydney.

In September, prime minister Scott Morrison turned the first sod on the airport’s construction, exclaiming repeatedly, “How good is this?” He described the airport, which follows more than seventy years of stop–start planning for a second major airport in Sydney, as nation-building, economy-building, job-creating, city-shaping infrastructure that would provide a significant boost to Australia as well as the economy of western Sydney.

Neal, however, talks about its likely impact on the health of local residents, who already experience increased rates of health problems that can be exacerbated by air pollution, such as asthma and other lung diseases and heart disease. He points out that while a curfew on the existing airport benefits central Sydney residents, there are no plans for a curfew in western Sydney.

Neal also notes that the government’s assessments of the airport’s impacts were done before the flight paths were known, which calls into question their usefulness. And in the absence of a fuel line to the new airport, the roads between the airport and Botany will be busy with fuel tankers. Even the consultation processes have been detrimental for community health and wellbeing, according to a health impact assessment undertaken by CHETRE researchers. Residents told the researchers that they felt distressed, distrustful and disempowered.

After three years of solid campaigning, Neal thinks the concerns of Residents Against Western Sydney Airport are starting to gain wider traction, notwithstanding the support of many local council and business interests for the development. “We will fight against this horrendous project until it is scrapped,” he says.

While he doesn’t expect to be around long enough to experience the airport’s impact himself, Neal worries for his family’s future. “The reality is I will probably be six foot under by the time it starts,” he says, “but I do have children, grandchildren and a great-grandchild who all live in the area. The amenity of the area and the social inequality and the health impacts are going to be substantial.”

As for the notion of healthy airports, Neal has heard de Leeuw presenting at conferences. “I don’t have a problem with making airports more healthy, but I object to the concept that an airport can be healthy. It certainly can’t,” he says firmly.

On the day that I interview de Leeuw, hundreds of experts and civic leaders from around the world are gathering in Geneva for the First World Health Organization Global Conference on Air Pollution and Health. They hear about “overwhelming evidence” that exposure to air pollution kills seven million people each year, including 600,000 children. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is among those fronting a new global clean air campaign called Every Breath Matters, which is pushing for urgent action on this public health crisis.

All of which leads me to ask de Leeuw whether her group’s work could be seen as “health-washing” an industry with a devastating environmental footprint? “We’ve been accused of that,” she replies, noting that when she and her colleagues sought to publish in academic journals, reviewers raised just this concern.

This sentiment resonates with Michael Comninos, a consultant who advises government, industry and other groups on infrastructure, land use and innovation. He has worked widely across western Sydney, including with local councils in the Western Sydney Airport catchment area, and argues that the new airport should prioritise community health and regenerate the natural environment. It should seek to create the “next generation of airports” that people actually want to have in their backyard.

And he says that airports have a unique opportunity. “What I love about it,” Comninos says, “is that it’s a big, big block of land in one entity’s ownership. You don’t have the issue of fragmentation. Often a lot of the problems are because we have fragmented decision-making. But in the context of an airport, you can treat it like a little city that you have control over. You don’t really get many opportunities where you have such a large footprint and can reimagine how you engage with the natural environment.”

Comninos says that Western Sydney Airport has a rare opportunity to embed research, learning, engagement and product development. It is quite unusual in a Western democracy to build airports in cities, so “we shouldn’t waste that opportunity.” The airport, he suggests, could host a living laboratory to test ideas, such as how to generate electricity from the tarmac. But such an approach requires meaningful goals to be set from the outset. “If it’s not done that way, it will never happen,” he says.

As often happens in these conversations, we end up discussing the awful congestion at Sydney Airport that makes efforts to cycle or walk there almost life-threatening. Comninos grew up at Mascot, the site of Sydney’s existing airport, and remembers when he and his friends used to run to the airport to play hide-and-seek in the 1990s. He also recalls it as a place where many of his peers found employment.

These days, Sydney Airport provides some good examples of what not to do. Comninos describes as “a perverse arrangement” the deal whereby an expensive private rail line operates alongside a commitment by the government not to provide additional public transport by bus. It’s unlikely such an agreement would have been allowed if there had been a target at the time for the airport to be carbon-neutral, he says.

Western Sydney Airport is being developed at a time when the industry is under increasing pressure globally to improve its health and environmental footprints. As the executive director of the UN Environment Programme, Erik Solheim, wrote in On Board: A Sustainable Future:

The aviation sector perfectly illustrates why the world needs an integrated approach to the social, economic and environmental dimensions of sustainable development and why it must shift to an inclusive green economy that can underpin them. The sector supports some eight million jobs and 8 per cent of the global economy, bringing important international market access to developing nations, relief aid to crisis zones and research data to scientific communities. However, the demand for air transport continues to double every fifteen years, with around six billion passengers a year expected by 2030.

Nor, Solheim wrote, do we fully understand the environmental impact of all emissions, technologies and materials, including some of those being used to replace chemicals being phased out in line with the latest environmental regulations.

But when I email Western Sydney Airport’s executive manager of sustainability, Simone Concha, to ask about its health and environmental plans, she replies: “At this stage we are in the early stages of planning. I am sorry that we are not able to comment yet. Next year will be a better time to talk about design strategies for the Airport.”

Among those encouraging the incorporation of health into planning for the new airport is Mel Fyfe, a transport strategy and planning consultant. Her other hat is as social entrepreneur and co-founder of Blakthumb, an emerging social enterprise that plans to work with Indigenous communities in Australia and globally in building sustainable aquaponic farming systems for local traditional Indigenous foods.

Fyfe and co-founder Carey Taylor are working on plans for a pilot farm in central Sydney, and eventually hope to see such farms as part of Western Sydney Airport, or at least nearby, supplying healthy, locally grown foods to the airport. “The closer we can get the food to people, the less food kilometres and the more nutritious it is,” says Fyfe. This would also be an opportunity for visitors to learn about culture and traditional foods from Aboriginal communities in western Sydney, providing cultural immersion and local employment as part of the airport experience, adds Fyfe.

The concept of healthy airports immediately appealed to Fyfe when she heard about it from de Leeuw. Like de Leeuw, Fyfe has had a long connection with the aviation industry. As a child, she was obsessed with planes and longed to be a fighter pilot.

These days, she views airports as about far more than planes, passengers and throughput. “Good airports understand what makes people tick,” she says. “People need natural light, access to nature, places for relaxing, or for going for a swim. There are people who spend years of their lives in airports. Let’s not make miserable people who have to travel a lot. Let’s make it a very enjoyable experience. The more we can push the boundary with making places like airports healthy, the more it becomes a catalyst for other forms of transport to do it as well.”

Making generalisations about the health impacts of airports is fraught, given the diversity of experiences they offer. Some are purely unpleasant, whereas others can be “wonderful places to spend time,” says Fyfe. Earlier this year, she enjoyed a long stopover at Changi Airport in Singapore, taking a free bus tour of the city and checking out other facilities on offer, which include a gym, swimming pools, gardens and a free film theatre. Changi Airport “lets you relax and not feel like you are trapped,” says Fyfe.

“They are world leaders in sustainable infrastructure and services in Singapore,” she says. “They have the political will and the money to do it. They grow their transport system super fast and it’s really efficient.”

In Sydney and many other parts of Australia, however, it is clear that public health priorities don’t drive transport investment or planning. If they did, we would invest more in public and clean transport and less in motorways. Notably, Australian cities were not featured in an open letter to mayors issued by the World Health Organization’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, on World Cities Day on 31 October.

Instead, he praised Vancouver for designing to prioritise pedestrians and cyclists, and striving for zero emissions in transport and energy. Oslo had, he said, cut carbon emissions by 35 per cent by offering owners of electric vehicles benefits like tax breaks, free travel on toll roads and public ferries, access to bus and taxi lanes, and free municipal parking.

Meanwhile, the proposed freeway interchange near Western Sydney Airport has been described by one observer as “the size of a small town.” All of which is a reminder that efforts to create healthy airports cannot be isolated from ensuring that wider transport systems also prioritise health. Professor de Leeuw and her colleagues have a big job ahead. •

This is part of a series of health policy articles for Inside Story by Croakey editors Melissa Sweet and Jennifer Doggett.

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In the past two weeks alone, reports reveal fresh attacks on independent sources of advice. The Office of the Science Advisor to the Environmental Protection Agency seems set to be dissolved. This senior post offers advice to the EPA and its administrator on science underpinning health and environmental policies, regulations and decisions. The head of the EPA Office of Children’s Health, a respected paediatric epidemiologist, has been placed on unexplained administrative leave following reports that the incumbent has repeatedly clashed with administration officials bent on loosening pollution regulations. The disputes are reported to centre on the planned weakening of mercury emission rules, announced on 30 September, the administration’s failure to act on a recommendation by EPA scientists that the organophosphate insecticide chlorpyrifos be banned, and the proposal to dismantle programs that protect children from lead poisoning.

There are no surprises here. During the presidential campaign, Trump’s tweets linked autism to vaccinations and light bulbs to cancer. He has described global warming as a Chinese hoax designed to make American manufacturing uncompetitive, and has also claimed that it is based on faulty science and manipulated data. He has cited freezing temperatures as evidence that global warming doesn’t exist. He pledged during his presidential campaign to revive the coal industry and bring back miners’ jobs, foreshadowed sweeping deregulation of natural gas, oil and coal production as part of an “America First” energy plan, and promised to withdraw the United States from the Paris climate accord.

Senior political appointees dispute that human activity is the leading cause of climate change; the administration interferes in science policy processes and restricts federal researchers and their work; executive orders and regulations are used to bypass congressional debate. Thousands of government web pages relating to climate change have been taken down, buried or scrubbed of references to climate change and carbon. No part of the federal bureaucracy is immune.

It starts at the top. The White House Science Advisor was not nominated until July 2018 (ending the longest vacancy in the forty-two-year history of the post) and has yet to be confirmed by the Senate. Those concerned about climate change are relieved that the nominee is a well-respected meteorologist, but history shows that the effectiveness of science advisers is determined not by their expertise but by how closely they are in step with the political priorities of the administration they serve.

Trump headed off to major negotiations on denuclearisation with North Korea without any expertise in this area on his team. There is no chief scientist at the State Department, despite the fact that science is central to such issues as cyber security, global warming and monitoring nuclear capabilities, nor at the Department of Agriculture, which is redefining its core mission from the scientific monitoring of food production and safety to the promotion of farm exports. The Department of the Interior and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have both disbanded their climate science advisory committees, and the Food and Drug Administration no longer has a Food Advisory Committee to provide guidance on food safety. As the New York Times headlined, “Science is unwelcome. So is advice.”

Among these actions, Trump’s June 2017 announcement of the US withdrawal from the Paris Climate accord is perhaps the least meaningful, a victory of symbolism and bombast over reality. The earliest the United States can legally withdraw is November 2020, which means it will be an issue in the next presidential campaign. Meanwhile, many states are continuing their efforts to tackle climate change and are on pace to meet their share of the Obama administration’s pledge under the Paris accord. But the fact that the United States has ceded its leadership in this area and now stands as a rogue outsider has global implications.

The real damage is being done elsewhere, largely following a sixteen-point agenda delivered to the administration by coal baron Robert Murray, a major supporter of Trump’s election campaign. The wish list of regulatory overhauls includes ending regulations on greenhouse gas emissions and ozone and mine safety, cutting the staff of the EPA, and overhauling the office of mine safety at the Department of Labor. Cabinet secretaries have eager carried out these, egged on by the president, who claims “The never-ending growth of red tape in America has come to a sudden, screeching and beautiful halt.”

Scott Pruitt (a climate change denier who made a career of filing lawsuits to block EPA regulations) was an early cabinet appointment to head the EPA where he notoriously pandered to the interests of the very industries overseen by the agency. When he was forced to resign over ethical violations in July, his deputy Andrew Wheeler, a former coal lobbyist who had previously worked for Murray, the man with the to-do list, stepped in as acting administrator. Small wonder that Trump, even as he accepted Pruitt’s resignation, was moved to tweet, “I have no doubt that Andy will continue on with our great and lasting EPA agenda. We have made tremendous progress and the future of the EPA is very bright!”

The agenda Wheeler inherited includes the proposed repeal or weakening of more than thirty environmental protections. Key among these is the repeal of the Clean Power Plan, based on the Clean Air Act 1970 (as amended in 1990) — the centrepiece of the Obama Administration’s efforts to tackle climate change and meet the emission reduction goals pledged under the Paris agreement — and its replacement with a new rule. This would see power plants required to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions by around 1 per cent below 2005 levels by 2030 (the equivalent of taking 2.5–5.3 million cars off the road), a dramatic weakening of the Obama rule (which required a 32 per cent reduction below 2005 levels, equivalent to taking seventy-five million cars off the road). The EPA’s own analysis reveals that this change will result in up to 1400 additional premature deaths, 48,000 new cases of asthma and consequently 21,000 additional missed days of school every year.

Efforts to cap greenhouse gas emissions are also undermined by a proposed rule that would reverse by 2020 the requirement that manufacturers make cars more fuel efficient. This plan also includes language forbidding states like California from imposing stricter standards. Shockingly, in an environmental impact statement issued by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to justify this, government scientists make the admission that global temperatures will warm by 7°F (about 4°C) by the end of the century: this dire forecast is offered as a justification that changing tail-pipe standards is irrelevant — the planet’s fate is already sealed.

The Trump Administration can’t scrap the Clean Air Act outright. A 2007 Supreme Court decision enabled the EPA to declare that carbon dioxide is a pollutant under the Clean Air Act because it causes global warming and this endangers human health. Overturning that decision would require the Trump administration to disprove the science of climate change, a legal battle it is not willing to undertake. Instead, it has devalued a metric known as the social cost of carbon, which calculates damage to property, human health, agriculture and economic growth from carbon dioxide pollution and is used to offset the costs of compliance. The administration argues that each ton of carbon dioxide emitted by a car or a coal plant in 2020 would only cause between $1 and $7 in economic damages, far lower than the Obama administration’s estimate of $50.

The EPA is also proposing to rescind the provisions of the Clean Water Act that prohibit industries from dumping pollutants into streams and wetlands. Just this month it was revealed that the agency is pursuing rule changes that would overturn the current, decades-old guidance that says any exposure to harmful radiation is a cancer risk. This change, based on the claims of outlier scientists that a little radiation is good for you, could lead to higher levels of exposure for workers at nuclear installations and in some medical settings.

Under these proposals, even the dirtiest forms of pollution are getting a reprieve, despite acknowledged harms to human health. The heaviest burdens will fall on the poorest and most marginalised Americans, many of whom are black. Indeed, there is a kind of systemic racism at the heart of the environmental devastation that Trump’s policies promulgate.

As William Ruckelshaus, administrator of EPA under president Ronald Reagan, said when Pruitt was still in the job, “My principal concern is that Pruitt and the people he has hired to work with him don’t fundamentally agree with the mission of the agency. They are more concerned about costs associated with regulation.”

Pruitt acted early to restrict academic researchers from joining the agency’s scientific panels, instead appointing scientists who work for the industries the EPA regulates. He required the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee (which is mandated by law to prioritise the health effects of pollution) to also consider the potential economic and energy consequences of emission control measures — even though the Supreme Court unanimously declared in 2001 that the Clean Air Act “unambiguously bars cost considerations from the [standard-]setting process.” And he has proposed limiting the types of scientific research EPA officials can take into account when writing new policies.

Against this background, there was a heavy irony in Pruitt pushing back on an article published by two Harvard scientists in the Journal of the American Medical Association that estimated the administration’s proposed changes to environmental policies would conservatively lead to an extra 80,000 deaths every decade. According to Pruitt, these results are “not scientific.”

There is a saving grace to this nasty, widespread agenda: most of these changes are yet to take effect. They have been stymied by lawsuits, court challenges and even the concerns of the affected workers and industries. Automobile manufacturers now say that “climate change is real and we have a continuing role in reducing greenhouse gases and improving fuel efficiency” and are concerned that their investments in innovation will be lost. Miners worry they are not sufficiently protected from black lung disease.

Trump may have ordered Energy Secretary Rick Perry to halt the shutdown of coal and nuclear power plants, and is considering ways to force the purchase of coal-fired electricity, but ultimately market forces will drive the dirtiest, oldest power plants out of business. The numbers show that not much has changed for the faltering coal industry since Trump took office. Employment and production are up, but coal consumption is down and coal prices are lower now than they were when he took office. The industry is more affected by cheap natural gas prices than by burdensome regulations.

Moreover, the regulatory certainty these regulatory changes will deliver is ephemeral. They will ignite legal challenges that could last years. It is worthwhile pointing out here that the Obama Clean Air Rule never went into effect as it was stayed by a Supreme Court decision in February 2016. That hasn’t stopped Trump and his cohorts endlessly promoting the perception that the EPA has repealed Obama’s environmental legacy, encouraged new jobs, and made life easier (and more profitable) for big business.

Trump’s push to see Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court is partly about ensuring that these legal roadblocks are dissipated. In his twelve years as a federal judge, Kavanaugh has heard twenty-six cases involving the EPA. He is on record with an opinion, concurrence, or dissent in eighteen of those cases, and only twice has he sided against industry. In a 2012 opinion he adopted an “environmental originalism” approach, writing that the EPA “went well beyond what Congress authorised” in crafting a greenhouse gas permit program. In 2016 oral arguments, Kavanaugh said that the Clean Air Act is “a thin statute, it wasn’t designed with [greenhouse gases and climate change] specifically in mind.” He believes that it is up to the Congress to act on such issues. Environmental groups are concerned about what Kavanaugh’s appointment would mean for future Supreme Court rulings on environmental cases.

Will American voters recognise and act on this attack on science-based health and environmental protections? The science of issues like climate change is complex, and that can facilitate efforts to mislead and manipulate the public. And polling shows that voters’ views on the subject — like their views on nearly all issues these days — are increasingly politically polarised.

A March 2018 Gallup poll found that 87 per cent of Democrats believe global warming is caused by human activity, compared to only 40 per cent of Republicans. Scepticism among Republicans is increasing, with 69 per cent saying that the seriousness of global warming is exaggerated, compared to 66 per cent in 2017; only 4 per cent of Democrats see the threat as exaggerated. There are significant differences in Republicans’ opinions on environmental and energy issues based on age, with millennials much more likely to believe that the global warming is mostly due to human activity and that climate change is affecting their communities. About half of all Americans don’t think climate change will affect them.

In the same polling, a majority of Americans say protection of the environment should be a priority, even at the risk of curbing economic growth. Proposals to reduce emissions, enforce environmental regulations, regulate fracking, spend government money on alternative energy sources and pass a carbon tax all had majority approval.

There is little recent polling to show how concerns about climate change play out for minority voters, but what is available suggests that people of colour care about environmental issues. A 2017 poll found 91 per cent of African Americans and 90 per cent of Latinos are concerned about climate change, compared to 68 per cent of whites.

How political leaders communicate about climate change influences public perceptions about this issue and public willingness to support needed actions. In this age of fake news, it is too easy for leaders like Trump to sway public opinion by being selective about the scientific facts and data relating to such a complicated issue, surrounded by so many uncertainties. But a recent summary of public opinion suggests that climate change will be a wedge issue in the 2018 midterm elections, especially for younger and minority voters. •

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The government wants a deal the Coalition can unite behind — one so nuanced that both its realists and its climate change deniers can support it — while convincing the public that the policy will actually reduce prices, improve network reliability and reduce emissions.

To achieve that, the plan has to win the support of the electricity industry — which, by and large, it has done — the states, which appear to be holding out, and probably the federal Labor Party, which is yet to declare its hand.

Long negotiations have seen the plan’s details change repeatedly, and there will be more changes ahead. The silliest comment being made now is that this is “the only plan on the table.” Yes, this week, it is. But before that we had many other plans — the Finkel report’s clean energy target, the Climate Change Authority’s emissions-intensity scheme — as well as many variations of this one, with more to come.

The negotiations that really matter have been within the Coalition. They have been between the Liberal Party and the Liberal Party — and, of course, the National Party. The Turnbull government and its Energy Security Board have made numerous concessions to try to win over those in the Coalition ranks who are opposed to doing anything to tackle climate change. The most important of these concessions is that it offer no concessions to Labor.

So far, Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg have offered no significant compromise to win the support of federal Labor or the Labor-run states. That may change in the weeks ahead. But right now it is asking them to give bipartisan endorsement to a deal that has been negotiated entirely within the Coalition, tramples on Labor’s own policy, and would mean that Australia effectively abandons our share of the Paris agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions worldwide.

There are differences within Labor ranks over what to do, at least ultimately. In the short term, they are playing for time, and demanding that the Commonwealth decide its position first — in the Coalition party room — before asking the states to come on board.

The Turnbull government is insisting that the states agree to the plan first before it goes to the Coalition party room — where it could well be changed. The Labor states, not unreasonably, are insisting that the Coalition should decide first what its policy is, before putting it to them.

Who will give way? Would the government dare to put the plan before the party room before it has got the Labor states to commit? If not, why not?

If it does intend to make concessions to try to get a genuine bipartisan agreement, this might be the best time to reveal them. Otherwise, why expect Labor to endorse a policy that is radically different from its own — above all, one that would cut emissions from the electricity sector by only 26 per cent between 2005 and 2030 — which it had no say in drafting?

The consequences matter. In Paris in 2015, the Abbott government committed Australia to cut its total emissions in 2030 by at least 26 per cent from 2005 levels. While Tony Abbott wants Australia to now walk away from that, the Turnbull government still officially upholds that pledge.

But the cheapest place to cut emissions is in the electricity sector, where old emissions-intensive coal-fired power stations can be replaced with emissions-free energy from the wind and the sun — backed up by batteries and hydro storage. It would be prohibitively expensive to make similar cuts in Australia’s other major sources of emissions: agriculture, transport, industry and mining.

The emissions target for the NEG means that Australia would effectively abandon its commitment under the Paris agreement. If emissions in the electricity sector are to fall by only 26 per cent, it will be impossible to meet our commitment to reduce total emissions by 26 per cent.

The government’s own figures show how Australia’s emissions have progressed since 2005:

Emissions from electricity generation in the second half of 2017 were about 10 per cent below 2005 levels and declining. But combined emissions in industry, transport, agriculture and mining were up 15 per cent and rising. It is completely unrealistic to expect that they can decline at the same pace as emissions from electricity generation — as the NEG targets imply.

Those who argue for the NEG as it stands — all the business groups and the mainstream media — are effectively calling on Australia to abandon its Paris commitment. They never admit that, and nor does the government, but it follows inescapably. How could Labor agree to that?

Well, Labor too is in the business of trying to win elections. And it knows that, above all, Australia is fed up with the climate wars that have divided us for the past decade. Ordinary Australians and the electricity industry just want an agreement, any agreement, that will end the debate, and allow us to move on to something else.

If the government refuses to compromise, Labor’s feet will be held to the fire. If it stands up for the Paris agreement, it will be attacked by the government and the mainstream media for wrecking the so-called “experts’ plan” to end the climate wars — and that could lose it seats and support to the Coalition.

If it accepts the NEG in its current form and effectively abandons the Paris agreement, it will be seen as betraying its supporters, like Kevin Rudd did in 2010 — and that could lose it seats and support to the Greens.

The short-term political equation is that Labor can lose seats to the Greens and still form government. But if it loses seats to the Coalition, it risks its chances to form government.

The longer-term political equation is that if Labor forms a government after accepting the Coalition’s emissions target written in law — as the Coalition is demanding — it will have to try to get the Senate (and possibly the states) to amend that law after the election. That would be difficult, even impossible; as I have argued elsewhere, Labor is likely to face an unfriendly Senate even if it wins comfortably in the House. But it is unrealistic to think that Labor can govern successfully with this policy.

If the Coalition can get the NEG past the Labor states, past the party dissidents, past the Senate, and then win re-election, we would have three years of the policy security its Energy Security Board has promised.

But energy companies will not make long-term investments if they are secure under only one side of politics. Long-term policy security — and the consumer savings the board predicts will flow from that — will come only if there is genuine bipartisan agreement.

This policy is not it. If the Turnbull government wants the NEG to have genuine bipartisan support, it has a number of options to make changes to achieve that. So far, it has rejected the lot.

● The only way to provide certainty to investors is through a bipartisan agreement on Australia’s overall emissions target for 2030. There is room to do so, because Labor’s leaders must be aware that their current target of a 45 per cent reduction in emissions is quite unrealistic. Instead, the Turnbull government has moved the other way, trimming Australia’s Paris commitment to reduce emissions from 2005 levels by “26 to 28 per cent” by 2030 to just 26 per cent.

● The government could have asked Labor to accept Australia’s Paris target, and in return set a realistic target to reduce electricity emissions by 2030 — say, by 45 to 50 per cent — to ensure it is met. Instead, the Coalition has pledged to reduce electricity emissions by just 26 per cent. Since it is not possible to reduce other emissions by 26 per cent, that ensures that Australia will not meet its Paris commitment.

● It could have offered Labor a mechanism that would allow the government of the day to change the emissions target, by setting it as a regulation. Instead, it is insisting that its target be adopted in legislation, so that a future government would need to pass another bill through both houses to amend it.

● It could have allowed state governments to set their own renewable energy targets to provide further emissions reduction. Instead, it insists that the NEG disregard these targets, making them useless, because lower emissions in one state would allow higher emissions in another.

This is not minor nit-picking. The Paris agreement is the most important international agreement of recent years. The commitments each country made are crucial to achieving progress, however inadequate, towards reducing the pace and extent of global warming. Australia already produces the highest per capita emissions of any country outside the Middle East. We cannot walk away from our pledge.

I have repeatedly defended the government’s commitment to cut our emissions by 26 to 28 per cent against criticism from the left that it is too small; in fact, it requires us to halve our per capita emissions in a generation. Yet with each year showing how real the threat of global warming is, it is bizarre that the target is now under attack, openly or surreptitiously, by those who wrote and supported it.

It is misleading to call the NEG “the experts’ plan.” Malcolm Turnbull created the Energy Security Board to sit above the three existing electricity agencies, and brought in his old colleague Kerry Schott, a veteran problem-solver who worked with him for years at the Turnbull Wran merchant bank, to come up with a fix that would meet his political objectives. And that she has done.

The plan is tailored to meet political objectives. And whether it can achieve its professed goals — knocking $150 off the average household electricity bill, guaranteeing electricity supply, and lowering emissions — is debatable for prices and security, and clearly impossible for emissions, where its own modelling predicts it will have virtually no impact.

The technical debates about the merits of the NEG are another story, which I will not enter here. It is certainly true that the plan now has consensus support from the electricity industry, but it is far from clear how great an improvement, if any, it will actually make. The supposed $150 per household saving appears to have been plucked out of thin air. The report’s claim that most of it will come from “unleashing new investment” is contradicted by its own modelling, which forecasts minimal change to generation capacity compared with what would happen anyway.

I can only refer those interested to the best of the criticisms: by Victoria University energy analyst Bruce Mountain in the Financial Review (paywall), by Giles Parkinson in Renew Economy, and by Simon Holmes à Court in the same publication today.

The case for the scheme has been put best by Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox today in the Age. But his argument that the Labor states should just pass it now and try to fix it later really defies the political law of gravity. The time to fix it is now, before it becomes law. It would be much harder to do so afterwards.

The government has rejected other plans that were once the only game in town: the Finkel report’s clean energy target, and the emissions-intensity scheme for the electricity industry (Labor’s preferred option, and in my view the best politically plausible option that has been put on the table). And, of course, it rescinded Labor’s carbon tax, which by now would have seen an emissions trading scheme covering most of the economy.

The government rejected all of these because of opposition from party hardliners. For the same reason, it has refused to compromise with Labor now, even though it knows that without that, it cannot achieve a genuine, lasting bipartisan agreement that will unlock investment.

No company is going to build new coal-fired stations, or gas-fired stations unless gas prices fall. We now have three million homes producing solar power or hot water on their rooftops, but only a fraction of those producing solar power can store it for when it’s needed. And across the country, solar and wind farms have gone up far in advance of the batteries or pumped hydro plants that could store their power to use at peak times. Those crucial storage investments will be in doubt without a bipartisan blueprint to meet Australia’s Paris commitment.

So far, the Turnbull government has not even tried to reach a genuine bipartisan deal. The inescapable conclusion is that the Coalition in its current state is incapable of negotiating an agreement. If Frydenberg offered Labor a deal it could accept, that deal would be rejected by the Coalition’s own backbench.

That will not change until the Liberals and the Nationals have leaders like Gough Whitlam or Bob Hawke who are prepared to take on those in their own party who are blocking the way to a realistic policy. There is no sign of that now. It might be years away. ●

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Victorians will be relieved to hear that the real number is nothing like $1.3 billion. Publicly available information shows that the cost directly incurred by cancelling the contracts was $527,600,000 — a lot of money, but less than half the Age’s figure. That’s $339 million in compensation to the private sector for costs incurred (including compo for losing bids to build it); $81 million in bank fees for a facility set up for the project; $217 million in losses on swaps and other hedges; $600,000 spent by the government on legal and consulting fees to get out of the thing; and subtract from that $110 million in cash returned to state coffers. The figure has shifted a little — some of the bank fees and swaps have fluctuated in price or been repurposed for other projects — but it has remained well short of the billion-dollar mark.

The only way we can get past a billion dollars is if we include sunk costs in the total. While the Liberals were still in power on Spring Street, the government spent $365 million on property acquisitions; $200 million on planning and preparatory works; $1.6 million on policing protests against the project; $1.7 million on defending the project against court challenges; and $15 million on an advertising campaign mostly about East West Link. All that gets us up to around $1.1 billion, though the total will be a few million less by now because some of the acquired properties have been sold.

There are other, less direct sunk costs too. Money and time were “wasted” on East West Link — including the legal fees paid by community groups fighting the project; the cost of local council campaigns against the project; and the time spent on the project by government agencies, including Transport, Treasury, Planning, VicRoads, the Environment Protection Authority, planning committees, the cabinet secretariat and Infrastructure Australia — when they could have been spent on projects that actually got built and paid dividends for the community. All this would push the price tag up much higher, higher even than the Age’s $1.3 billion.

But sunk costs are supposed to be ignored in strict economic calculations, and shouldn’t be counted in the cost of cancelling. In the case of East West Link, the choice a rational actor is supposed to make is between $528 million to cancel, and the cost of continuing, and that choice depends on the return on investment.

When the Liberal government signed the contracts for the project, it claimed East West Link would produce $1.40 in benefits for every dollar invested — a $1.5 billion net benefit overall. If that figure was correct then cancelling was a horrible waste. But the benefit–cost ratio was hotly debated, with critics saying it included all sorts of rubbery numbers. One transport-modelling expert I interviewed for my research on the project says it included assumptions “you could drive a truck through.” And then there were the nebulous “wider economic benefits” added in to get to $1.40 — the benefits of agglomeration (businesses being located closely together in the CBD), for example — the kinds of thing not normally included in benefit–cost analyses by other agencies in Australia.

Transport academics and finance experts assessed the true benefit­–cost ratio at more like 0.8, or 80 cents for every dollar invested. If the state government was stumping up $2 billion in capital for the project, the loss would be $400 million. To this we must add the cost of operating the road. The commercial structure for East West Link would have seen the government pay the private sector to make the road available. These “availability fees” would be offset — but only partially — by tolls collected by the government. Financial experts projected in 2014 that if the average toll were $5.67 per trip (roughly comparable to other tolls in Melbourne) then the annual gap between toll revenue and these availability payments would be minus $251 million per year — and that would continue for decades. Suddenly $528 million doesn’t sound too bad.

Indeed, a startling number of big projects like East West Link are ultimately a waste of money. Analysing hundreds of megaprojects around the world, Danish academic Bent Flyvbjerg has shown that cost overruns of up to 50 per cent are common, and blowouts of more than 50 per cent not uncommon. On the other side of the ledger, benefit shortfalls of up to 50 per cent are very common. These are astronomical margins of error, frequently rendering projects uneconomic even if they intuitively look and feel good. And these shortfalls haven’t declined as our methods of calculation and projection have become more sophisticated. Flyvbjerg concludes that initial benefit–cost estimates are generally pure spin, deliberately inflated by project boosters simply because that is how you get funding to start a project. And once the projects start, they are nearly impossible to stop, no matter how bad the blowout.

So, if you think East West Link was a freakish one-off, think again. There are dozens of megaprojects on the books around Australia right now, and if Flyvbjerg’s averages hold — and there’s no reason to think Australia is somehow immune — they are going to cost hundreds of millions more than they give back in benefits. Whether it’s the West Gate Tunnel or North East Link in Victoria, Snowy Hydro 2.0 or Canberra’s Light Rail, Sydney’s Barangaroo or the Adani coalmine in Queensland, all megaprojects are massively risky propositions, and all are quite likely to deliver much less than they promised and cost far more than budgeted.

They can be seductive, these big builds promising thousands of jobs, huge efficiency gains, and grandeur. But, more often than not, these boondoggles are just not worth it. ●

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Changes in sovereign risk — in its true sense — are important because they influence the credit ratings issued by the major international rating agencies, including Moody’s, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch. More risk generally means a lower rating for a government, and a lower rating means that financiers will demand higher returns when they lend to that government and investors may choose to send their funds elsewhere. Some supporters of the Adani Carmichael coalmine are using the term in its much less precise sense to argue that any attempt by government to kill off the proposal will increase perceptions of sovereign risk and damage Australia’s financial standing.

Why sovereign risk? Throughout history, monarchs — that is to say, sovereigns — have occasionally defaulted on their debts. When that has happened, lenders have generally not had the same options open to them as they would have had if a private borrower defaulted on a loan. One of the earliest recorded examples comes from 1339, when Edward III of England defaulted on his debts to bankers and merchants in Florence, debts he had incurred in order to finance wars in France. Some other sovereigns were happy to follow his example, among them the French kings who defaulted on foreign debts eight times between 1558 and 1788. Later, as cross-border lending became more widespread during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, defaults by governments became much more common.

These days, sovereign risk is one type of “country risk” that investors face when they invest outside their own country. Others include the possibility of assets being expropriated or nationalised by a government (with or without adequate compensation) and the possibility that investors will be prevented from repatriating dividends, profits or capital as a result of exchange controls or other regulations.

This is where the rating agencies come in. To calculate a government’s creditworthiness, they assess a country’s political and institutional framework, economic performance, fiscal position and external financial position — and the capacity of each to cope with “shocks,” either of domestic origin or from abroad. They recognise that democratically elected governments come and go (and they tend to mark down those that remain in power by undemocratic means), and they recognise that policies will change when governments change. They also know that incumbent governments can alter their policies in response to changing circumstances or political pressures. None of these changes is likely to affect a country’s sovereign rating unless it prompts a reassessment of a country’s relative willingness or ability to meet its financial commitments. International banks make similar judgements about lending to Australian governments and businesses based on similar criteria.

Since November 2011, Australia has been one of only ten countries to be rated AAA by all three of the main rating agencies. (The other nine are Canada, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Singapore, Sweden and Switzerland.) Standard & Poor’s sums up why: “Australia is a wealthy, diversified, and resilient economy” in which “institutions are stable and provide checks and balances to power, there is strong respect for the rule of law, and a free flow of information and open public debate of policy issues.”

None of this suggests that Australia’s credit rating would be adversely affected by a change in government policy that stops a coalmine or any other foreign investment proposal from going ahead. In fact, the record shows that our sovereign debt rating has never been affected by a government decision on environmental grounds. Among those decisions are:

● A ban on sand mining (by an American company) in 1977, after the Fraser government used its powers over mineral exports to force the company to cease operations.

● The WA government’s introduction in 2006 of a requirement that all new gas developments in that state must supply the equivalent of 15 per cent of their LNG exports to the domestic gas market.

● State government bans on uranium mining in New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland and Western Australia.

● WA government restrictions on coalmining in the Margaret River region.

● State and territory restrictions or bans on coal-seam gas exploration and development, and/or “fracking.”

● State government restrictions on logging in native forests in Western Australia, New South Wales, Victoria and Tasmania.

Not only did these decisions have no impact on Australia’s sovereign credit rating, they also left untouched the credit ratings of state or territory governments. That’s because none of these decisions were perceived to reduce these governments’ ability or willingness to meet their financial commitments.

In other words, there is absolutely no reason to think that Australia’s sovereign credit rating would be affected if a government were to prevent the Adani Carmichael coalmine from going ahead out of concern for its possible impact on the Great Barrier Reef, or for other environmental reasons.

Nor is it likely that any such decision would prompt international banks to downgrade their assessment of Australia’s “country risk,” given that Australian banks (and many foreign banks) have themselves been reluctant to lend to the Carmichael mine. When a government blocks a project that banks won’t finance themselves, they are hardly likely to increase Australia’s “country risk.”

Recent economy-wide evidence bears this out. Australia has attracted almost $2 trillion in foreign investment (of all types) since 1989, of which almost $830 billion has been in the form of foreign direct investment in the companies’ own wholly or largely owned Australian branches or subsidiaries. Australia has attracted almost $380 billion of foreign investment into mining alone since 2007, most of it in the form of equity.

Data from the UN Conference on Trade and Development indicates that between 2000 and 2016, foreign direct investment inflows into Australia amounted to US$520 billion, the thirteenth-highest in the world. Australia’s stock of inward foreign direct investment at the end of 2016 was equivalent to 45.8 per cent of GDP, higher than most other middle-sized or large advanced economies except for the Netherlands and Canada. And this stock of inward foreign direct investment has risen by 15.2 percentage points of GDP so far this century, less than Canada’s or Britain’s but more than for France, the United States, Japan, Germany or New Zealand.

A decision to prevent the Carmichael mine from proceeding could prompt international coalmining companies to review Australia’s attractiveness as an investment destination. But any such reassessment would, of necessity, consider Australia’s attractiveness as an investment destination relative to other countries with significant coal reserves or export potential.

The largest coal exporters after Australia are Indonesia, Russia, the United States, Colombia, South Africa, Canada, the Netherlands, North Korea, Mongolia, China, Poland, the Philippines, Kazakhstan and the Czech Republic. It’s very difficult to imagine any of these countries, with the possible exceptions of the United States and Canada, becoming “more attractive” destinations for investment simply because an Australian government stopped the proposed Carmichael mine from proceeding on environmental grounds.

Any re-evaluation would also recognise that both the US and Canadian federal and state or provincial governments have from time to time stopped coal-related projects from going ahead on environmental grounds.

Earlier this year, for instance, Canadian company Kinder Morgan suspended the expansion of its Trans Mountain oil pipeline as a result of “continued actions in opposition to the project” by the British Columbia provincial government. There is no evidence to date that Canada’s “ability to attract capital” has been adversely affected by this decision — and certainly there has been no effect on Canada’s sovereign credit rating, or the Canadian currency.

It is quite possible that some investment in energy projects could be deflected from Canada to the United States — but investors would also know that the regulatory environment for energy projects in the United States could change abruptly depending on the outcome of future congressional or presidential elections (as occurred after the 2008 elections and, in the opposite direction, after the 2012 elections).

From an Australian perspective, the key point is that any decision to prevent the Adani Carmichael mine from proceeding would not be setting an international precedent. It would not affect Australia’s sovereign debt rating. It would not have any material impact on Australia’s capacity to attract foreign investment. It would not amount to an increase in the “sovereign risk” of investing in Australia. ●

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To be fair to Bhathal, it was a climate-change forum and she was just sticking to the theme. I, on the other hand, hadn’t read the event announcement properly. There to witness what I had erroneously assumed would be a debate between all Batman candidates, my main point of interest was Cory Bernardi’s man in Batman, Kevin Bailey. Just a few days earlier I’d heard Bailey on ABC Radio, an event the Australian Conservatives website described like this: “The former SAS soldier charged behind enemy lines into the ABC’s Melbourne studios and emerged with a smile on his face and at least one happy listener.”

From listening to the energetic Bailey I get the feeling the smile’s permanent. I also get the feeling he’ll need it when the votes come in. Given the agenda he’s pushing — he’s a keen supporter of the Adani project and laments the invisibility of nuclear power in Australia’s energy mix, for example — and the electorate in which he’s pushing it, the one happy listener might just about be the upper limit of his support.

For no other reason than my own amusement I was hoping Bailey would show up in Northcote and, while we’re going with Cory’s war-games theme, lob a few metaphorical hand grenades into the forum. But alas, it wasn’t to be. It was probably a good thing in the end. The room wouldn’t have taken too kindly to contributions from a member of a party that puts the term climate change in inverted commas on its website.

One place that Bailey might find a constituency, though, is in north Queensland. Just last week, stuck in a traffic jam in Northcote, at the lower end of Batman, I noticed a sign on the front fence of a house that said: I’M VOTING TO STOP ADANI IN BATMAN. I flipped my phone over to my daughter and asked her to get a quick photo and send it to a friend in Townsville with a simple request for comment. The reply, from a person normally sluggish when responding to texts, was immediate. “North Queensland businesses aren’t serving anyone who even smells like a protestor. They are all southerners.” End of transmission.

Of course I had a fair idea of what the word from the north would be. Joh Bjelke-Petersen–era exceptionalism aside, I’m not sure it would be any different if the situation was reversed. Still, the tone of the text was a little unsettling. I have plans to drive to the Great Barrier Reef in the middle of the year and have entertained thoughts of checking out Adani while I’m up there. It seems clear now that I’m going to need some fake Queensland registration plates and a liberal supply of cologne to splash about lest I exude any whiff of eau de protestataire.

Back in Batman, it wasn’t a particularly good night for Queensland enterprise. After Adani, one of the other main topics of discussion was methane levels in the atmosphere, with multiple speakers calling for a shift away from animal-based food production — a major methane producer — to plant-based food production. Queensland is far and away Australia’s biggest beef-producing state, home to 40 per cent of a national herd of more than twenty-five million. That’s a lot of methane. The only joy Queensland meat producers could possibly have taken from the forum is that they account for only around 3 per cent of the nation’s seventy million or so sheep.

As everyone knows, the race for Batman on St Patrick’s Day is between Kearney and Bhathal. The feeling is that the Liberal Party’s decision not to field a candidate is more likely to favour the Greens because Labor’s David Feeney snuck over the line in 2016 courtesy of its preferences. The Greens, for their part, appear cautiously confident that this might finally be Alex Bhathal’s time. It’ll be her sixth attempt to take Batman and, as Inside Story’s Tim Colebatch has reported, she’s overseen an eightfold increase in the Greens’ primary vote in the electorate since 1998. A known quantity, she appears to have weathered the storm of recent bullying allegations made against her and is campaigning relentlessly.

Ged Kearney, though, isn’t David Feeney. She’s an impressive candidate with an impressive CV — “If there’s one thing I know how to do, it’s fight Tories” — and for those looking for a winner out of the climate-change forum, Kearney probably took the points, albeit narrowly. But she struggled at times to convince the room that Adani categorically wouldn’t go ahead under Labor. Given the obvious importance of the issue to many in the Batman electorate, Bhathal’s t-shirt might just win her the day. •

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Since his disappearance in the surf — his body never to be recovered — theories and mysteries have abounded. Why did Holt casually enter such turbulent water? Was he showing off to his mistress, who was watching from the beach? Could the prime minister have been the victim of an assassination plot? Was it an act of suicide by a depressed man? Was he a spy who had a secret assignation with a Chinese submarine offshore? Had political treachery forced him to desperation or listlessness?

Harold Holt is remembered more for his death than for his life. But he had a long and distinguished parliamentary career that culminated in January 1966 when he took over the prime ministership. He had been Robert Menzies’s treasurer and became his anointed successor after sixteen years of conservative rule. Although he was only fourteen years younger than Menzies, he seemed to represent a new generation of leadership. He helped turn Australia diplomatically towards Asia, began to dismantle the White Australia policy and oversaw the successful 1967 referendum that removed discrimination against Aboriginal people from the Australian Constitution. He was a gregarious man who also enjoyed solitude, and he seemed to embody the swinging sixties. He relished spearfishing in the open ocean and was photographed in his wetsuit and snorkel at the surf beach with his bikini-clad daughters-in-law.

Long, boring parliamentary debates offered him a chance to practise holding his breath.

Holt and his wife Zara had a holiday house at Portsea near The Rip at the mouth of Port Phillip Bay. The Rip is the tumultuous stretch of water where two domains meet: the mass of water that comes in and out of the bay as a tide, and the heave and swell of ocean that has come all the way up from the Antarctic. The writer Barry Hill, who lives on the other side of The Rip from Portsea, in Queenscliff, has observed that “the two seas in the act of meeting and exchange create a turbulence as dangerous as anywhere in the world.” It is possible, he says, to see the bay’s water flow upwards as it exerts its will to escape over the southern swell. The turning of the tide in such a place is a moment of danger. It was here — just outside the bay and within the governance of The Rip — that Holt loved to go spearfishing, often alone.

Every Christmas, my parents would take my brother and me for a two-week holiday at Sorrento, where we would hire the basement flat of a house with a vast garden. A regular highlight of the holiday was a trip to Point Nepean, which has since become a national park but was then the site of an operating quarantine station and thus closed to the public. But my father was a Commonwealth public servant at the Government Aircraft Factory and applied each year for a quarantine pass, which we would solemnly present to the soldiers at the gate.

Once that gate was opened, we drove into a magic, mysterious world that was all ours to explore: the limestone buildings of the historic station, lonely beaches and sandy staircases, military bunkers and underground tunnels, catacombs and gun emplacements, and the fort that boasted the first shot fired in the British Empire in the first world war, a shell directed across the bows of a German ship attempting to leave the bay. My brother and I played freely in this sand-and-stone labyrinth, and never saw another soul. Later and rather unnervingly, when the national park was established, signs appeared beside walking paths, declaring: “Beware! Unexploded ordnance. Keep to the path!” Sometimes we would stand, windblown, at the end of Point Nepean, looking out across the tumultuous Rip where we could discern the bones of a sailing ship that had once foundered there, still visible in the jaws of the bay. Appropriately, it was the wreck of the Time.

One day, late in 1964, we presented our quarantine pass at the gate and proceeded into our remote, elemental playground, but this time we were surprised to find another car parked above Cheviot Beach. There was a man sitting alone in the front seat, waiting. When he heard our car, he appeared to wriggle back into his wetsuit and then got out to greet us. My parents exclaimed, “Good God, it’s the treasurer!” I didn’t know what a treasurer was but I suspected it was someone precious. Harold Holt looked cold, damp and famished. He explained that he had locked his keys in the boot of his car and asked if we could give him a lift back to his Portsea home, where he had a spare set. He had gone swimming in the early morning and appeared to have been waiting some hours. It was now early afternoon.

Mum hopped into the back seat with her boys, and our wet skindiver slipped into the front seat beside Dad. We drove the four or five kilometres back to Portsea while I discreetly scrutinised this “treasurer” who wasn’t very good with his keys. On arrival at his home, Holt disappeared inside while we waited in the car. Some time later he reappeared, dressed and devouring a huge sandwich, his first food since dawn. Zara was there, and a son, but Holt did not appear to have been missed. His long absence, skindiving alone at one of Victoria’s most dangerous beaches, had not apparently caused undue concern. He told us that his son would now drive him back to the car and invited us inside his home. My parents, reluctant to impose, declined. We left Mr Holt, eating ravenously and juggling a huge bunch of keys, wondering which of them would let him back into his car.

On the drive back through the quarantine gates and out along the headland, I remember my parents talking animatedly. They had just read The Rulers (1964), an analysis by journalist Don Whitington of Menzies’s long conservative reign, in which Holt, “the logical successor,” was pictured in skindiving gear holding a fish for the camera, with the caption: “Holt — fishing in deep waters.” That image had just materialised in our car, still dripping. Mum and Dad were incredulous that anyone, let alone the treasurer of the Commonwealth, would dive alone on such a perilous stretch of coastline.

My father was a keen body surfer and had introduced us boys to the ocean as soon as we could potter about in the froth. The relentless roar of the surf is one of my earliest memories. Dad would watch us carefully, keeping an eye on the weather and the tide, and taught us how to read a beach and look for currents. On this occasion, as we drove back out to Point Nepean, he spoke passionately of the renowned dangers of Cheviot Beach. He stood with us on the cliff and pointed out the rocks that shaped the three gutters that sucked water off the beach into the turbulent, heaving holes of bull kelp that lay just offshore. He feared for Holt. Thus I learned that there were rips as well as The Rip.

Three years later, when our television program was interrupted by a news flash from that very beach, we shared the shock of the nation but also felt somehow implicated. Shocked but unsurprised. The prime minister was missing. I felt that my father had predicted it.

The police report into the disappearance of the prime minister was completed within three weeks, while there was still some hope that a body or remains might be recovered. The inquiry determined that it was an accidental death by drowning. The report dwelt on the “ordinary domestic pattern” that witnesses disclosed and the good spirits of the prime minister in his final days. There were statements from fishermen about the currents and from Holt’s doctors about his health. It was appallingly simple: the man had misjudged his favourite medium.

But in the decades since, alternative theories have proven irresistible. By the end of 1967, Holt was under increasing pressure from Vietnam war protests and political scandals; on the morning of his death, he had a mysterious phone conversation with his treacherous treasurer, Billy McMahon; after his disappearance, police officers secretly removed papers from his briefcase at Portsea; Mrs Marjorie Gillespie, the Portsea neighbour and “family friend” who had accompanied Holt to Cheviot Beach, was also his lover. Serious, sinister and salacious as these facts might seem, none of them has revealed motives for Holt’s death or suicide. Holt had a record majority in parliament; McMahon was renowned for his scheming (and his use of the phone); the papers were removed from Holt’s briefcase at the behest of the governor-general, Richard Casey, who had written confidentially to Holt about McMahon; and Mrs Holt later claimed that Harold had many mistresses over a long period.

The most sensational conspiracy theory, set out in a book called The Prime Minister Was a Spy (1983), is that Holt worked for the Chinese government and was evacuated in a submarine before his identity could be revealed. But the chief source of the allegation, Ronald Titcombe, has been described as a “professional con man,” and the author of the book, British novelist Anthony Grey, believed that all life forms on earth were genetically engineered by an advanced extraterrestrial civilisation. The spy theory was coolly dismissed as a complete fabrication by Tom Frame in his fine biography, The Life and Death of Harold Holt (2005).

So let us return to the salty reality of the sea, to the cold, famished treasurer who could be absent half a day without raising his family’s concern, to the prime minister who loved the solitude, beauty and risk of the ocean and whose chief relaxation and touchstone of reality was the underwater world. Let us pay attention to the elements rather than to political intrigue or spurious informants.

Harold Holt did love the sea, as his gravestone declares, and as the Harold Holt Memorial Swimming Centre bizarrely honours. His colleague Paul Hasluck, not a fan, actually wrote (without intended irony) that Holt’s greatest asset was his “buoyancy.” But Holt almost drowned twice in the year before his death, the worst occasion at Cheviot Beach when he turned purple and was rescued by companions. He constantly tried to build the strength of his lungs: Zara would sometimes come into the bathroom and find him face down in the water. Long, boring parliamentary debates offered him a chance to practise holding his breath.

Holt was not a swimmer so much as a diver. It was the watery depths that he loved, and they were opened up to him by snorkel, wetsuit and flippers. His friends considered him just an average surface swimmer; if he wasn’t equipped to dive he would generally just have a short dip to cool off. When Zara was told the awful news that he was missing, she asked, “Do you know if he was wearing his sandshoes or his flippers?” On being told that it was probably his sandshoes (as indeed it was), she replied, “Oh, he’s gone!”

When Sunday 17 December 1967 dawned, Holt rose early, walked into the kitchen, looked out the window and remarked to his housekeeper that the weather was puzzling. Local fishermen later testified that “the weather conditions were very bad” and that there were “very rough seas and surf.” Westerly winds were blowing with gusts of fifty to sixty kilometres per hour and there was “a strong flood tide travelling through the heads due to the high westerly winds.” There would have been a strong rip in Cheviot Bay due to the conditions. The nearby Portsea Ocean Beach, normally busy on a Sunday in summer, was closed for the day.

Holt, together with Marjorie Gillespie, her daughter Vyner and friend Martin Simpson, and another guest of the Gillespie family, Alan Stewart, drove in two cars to the old fort at the end of the peninsula to watch the British yachtsman, Alec Rose, come through the Heads. Rose was single-handedly circumnavigating the world in Lively Lady and felt the strength of the currents against his hull that day. After a few minutes viewing the distant yacht and the huge waves rolling in along the coast, Holt’s party decided to have a dip before lunch and drove back to Cheviot Beach. The day was hot and sultry and Holt was concerned about the weather. As they made their way down onto the beach, they observed that the tide was unusually high, and as they picked their way along the narrow remnant of sand, their legs were battered by heavy driftwood in the surf, mainly planks used on ships to secure cargo. There was so much timber in the water that a navy search-and-rescue vessel was later damaged by the buffeting beams.

High water that day was at 11.32am, and it was now approaching noon. The tide was turning. Mrs Gillespie and Alan Stewart said that the sea was higher than they had ever seen it at that beach. Martin Simpson waded cautiously in and retreated after feeling a strong undercurrent. Stewart also went in knee-deep but felt a “tremendous undertow.” Holt reassured them: “I know this beach like the back of my hand.” Having changed into his swimming trunks behind a rock, but still wearing his sandshoes, Holt walked into the water and, without hesitation, plunged in. The observers on the beach thought that he was swimming calmly and steadily away from the shore. But what they saw was a man who could not find a foothold in the unexpectedly deep water and was being swept out by a rip. As his skindiving companion Jonathan Edgar testified, “He would have been intending to swim out about ten to fifteen yards, stand up, brush his hair, and just swim back into the beach.” He had wanted a quick dip after the hot walk down the sand dunes. Holt’s political colleagues considered him impetuous, and he was often reluctant to admit when he was in trouble.

Holt had a recurring shoulder ailment about which he had recently seen two doctors. Sometimes he needed drugs to control the pain. Doctors had advised him to rest his shoulder, but he had nevertheless played tennis the preceding afternoon — although his movement had been a bit restricted and he was below his usual form. Marjorie Gillespie, his lover, told police that the shoulder disability meant that he “could not do an overarm stroke when swimming.” From the beach she watched him drift steadily away from her “like a leaf being taken out.” She could see his head above the water but rarely an arm. Across the breakwater she saw him enter a roiling turbulence and suddenly he was gone.

It is the habit of humans, especially political commentators, to underestimate nature. If my childhood memory has anything to offer, it is to remind us of the awesome power of the sea and the ordinariness and predictability of this Australian beach tragedy. ●

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Last week a majority of the High Court held that they were right. At that point, the environmental history merged with constitutional history.

Political communication

Unlike the US Constitution, among others, Australia’s founding document does not contain a judicially enforceable Bill of Rights. But almost from the moment he joined the High Court in 1975, Justice Lionel Murphy began to argue that guarantees of basic personal rights were implied in the Australian Constitution. Most of his suggestions fell on deaf ears. But in 1977 — not quite forty years before last week’s decision — he argued that “the system of representative government” established by the Constitution gave rise to “an implication of a constitutional guarantee” of “freedom of movement, speech and other communication.” And in 1992, at least regarding “speech and other communication” relating to political matters, his argument was accepted.

From the beginning, the High Court insisted that the guarantee of systemic “freedom” did not protect individual “rights”: its focus was on the necessary conditions for representative government, not on the rights of individual citizens. Even so, the 1992 decision was immediately controversial — so much so that it looked as if it might soon be overturned. Instead, in Lange v Australian Broadcasting Commission — which was decided in 1997, twenty years before last week’s decision — “the implied freedom of political communication” was reaffirmed by a unanimous court.

To determine whether legislation interfering with the freedom was invalid, the Lange judgement formulated two questions that have since evolved into three. As Justice Gageler simplifies their excessively laborious language, the questions now read as follows:

Does the law effectively burden [in other words, limit or hamper] freedom of political communication?

Is the purpose of the law legitimate, in the sense that it is compatible with the maintenance of the constitutionally prescribed system of government?

Is the law reasonably appropriate and adapted to advance that purpose in a manner compatible with the maintenance of the constitutionally prescribed system of government?

The language of this last test has itself been controversial. Though “reasonably appropriate and adapted” is a traditional High Court formula, some judges have preferred a test of “proportionality,” which itself comes in many different versions. The version currently most in favour is among those commonly referred to as “structured proportionality,” and is again broken down into three questions:

Is the law suitable, in the sense that it has a rational connection to its purpose?

Is it necessary, in the sense that there is no obvious and reasonably practicable way of achieving the same purpose with a less restrictive effect on the freedom?

Is it adequate in the balance it strikes between the importance of its purpose and the extent of its restriction on the freedom?

The last question relating to “balance” has been particularly controversial.

The Brown case and environmental protest

The Workplaces (Protection from Protesters) Act of 2014 was a sequel to the Forest Management Act of 2013, and the relationship between the two became the subject of intense and sometimes conflicting analysis. The Forest Management Act already contained elaborate provisions for the “management” of entry to forest areas, including liability to arrest and fine for failure to comply with a police officer’s directions. But the Protesters Act went further, and was aimed specifically at “protesters” (defined, in part, as those participating in “a demonstration, a parade, an event, or a collective activity, that is a protest activity”). Section 6 prohibited any entry to “business premises,” or action on “business premises” or “a business access area,” which might “prevent, hinder or obstruct” the conduct of “a business activity.” “Business premises” were defined to include “forestry land.”

Under section 11, if a police officer “reasonably believes” that a person on “business premises” or “in a business access area” has committed an offence under the Act or might be about to do so, the officer can direct the person to leave. The direction could include a “requirement” not to contravene the Act within the next three months, and if the direction was to a group, it was binding on every member of the group who could reasonably be expected to have heard it.

Under section 8, any person who remained on “a business access area” after being directed to leave was guilty of an offence; and so was any person who entered “a business access area” within four days of having received a direction under section 11.

Business premises? Chief Justice Susan Kiefel and two other judges found the concept vague. Mick Tsika/AAP Image

Section 13 authorised the immediate arrest (without warrant) of any person whom a police officer “reasonably believes” to be contravening the Act or to have done so within the past three months. Part 4 allowed offences to be prosecuted either summarily (with individual fines up to $5000) or by indictment (with individual fines up to $10,000).

The joint judgement delivered by Chief Justice Kiefel (joined by Justices Bell and Keane) focused primarily on the fact that the concepts of “business premises” and “business access areas” were so vague when applied to forestry land that it would “often not be possible” for either protesters or police to know whether particular areas were subject to the legislation or not. The vagueness was underlined by the fact that all of the nine charges so far laid under the Act (including those against Bob Brown and Jessica Hoyt) had been discontinued “because the direction given was not correctly referable to ‘business premises’ or a ‘business access area.’” In short, the absence of any clear definition meant “that some lawful protests will be prevented or discontinued” for no legitimate reason; that “protesters will be deterred from further protesting”; and “that protests will be stifled when they should not be.”

This unnecessary deterrence of protest was what the joint judgement saw as a “burden” on political communication. The fact that the Act was discriminatory (applying only to protesters) was not seen as a “burden” in itself; but it did serve to focus attention on the consequences for their political communication.

The joint judgement conceded that the legislation had a legitimate purpose (to protect “forest operations” against “damage and disruption from protesters”). As to whether the statutory prohibitions and penalties were an acceptable way of achieving that purpose, the judgement moved to the trilogy of criteria associated with “proportionality” — suitability, necessity and balance. Two of the specific provisions failed at the first of these hurdles — the prohibition under section 8 of entry into “a business access area” within four days after receiving a direction; and the possibility under section 11 of “blanket exclusion of a whole group of persons from an area by a single direction of a police officer.” These provisions had nothing to do with a risk of “damage and disruption”; their only effect was the deterrence of protest.

The remaining provisions failed at the second hurdle (“necessity”). Primarily this was because the prevention of “damage and disruption” had already adequately been achieved by the Forest Management Act, which was clearly “less restrictive of the freedom.” While the Protesters Act no doubt achieved an additional level of deterrence, it did so primarily by “extending the areas of its operation” and by the “uncertainty” surrounding those areas. Given the limited legislative purpose (already largely achieved by the Forest Management Act) this was “too high a cost to the freedom.”

Accordingly, the joint judgement found the criteria of “suitability” and “necessity” sufficient to dispose of the case. The question of “balance” was never reached.

Justice Gageler reached the same result, but for very different reasons — not only because of his resistance to an approach through “proportionality,” but also because his perception of the “burden” imposed on political communication had nothing to do with the “imprecision” of the “metes and bounds” of “business premises” and “business access areas.” In his view, the extent of a legislative “burden” on the freedom should be measured simply by the difference it made to “the practical ability of a person or persons to engage in political communication.” Here, primarily because of “the ambit of the discretions conferred on police officers” and “the consequences which flow from the exercise of those discretions,” the burden was “direct, substantial and discriminatory” — not only against “political communication,” but also “more particularly against political communication expressive of a particular political view.”

As to whether the legislative purpose was deliberately repressive (“the prevention of on-site protests”) or protective (against “conduct that seriously interferes with… forest operations”), Justice Gageler was willing to assume the latter. But if that was the purpose, the provisions went far beyond what was reasonably necessary to achieve it — primarily because of “the breadth and severity of the consequences” flowing from the exercise of police discretions based on no more than “reasonable belief.”

In particular, the penalties for breach of a “requirement” not to contravene the Act within the next three months were “nothing short of capricious in their temporal duration of three months and nothing short of punitive in their geographical coverage and intensity.” Under section 6 of the Act, such a requirement would be relaxed to allow participation in “a procession, march, or event… along a business access area… at a reasonable speed, once on any day.” But far from relaxing the severity of the provisions, Justice Gageler saw this as a “Pythonesque absurdity.” The fact that the provisions applied only to protesters (“a targeted segment of the population”) was not in itself decisive; but it was “a factor which weighs against the conclusion that a law is reasonably necessary to achieve its postulated purpose.”

Justice Nettle’s approach was different again. In his view, the mere fact that the Protesters Act reinforced the prohibitions in the Forest Management Act, both by repetition and by heavier penalties, did not constitute a “burden”; but a “burden” did arise, for example, from the fact that directions under section 11 could be given simply on the basis of a police officer’s “reasonable belief.” This was particularly so in the light of Tasmanian history:

[G]iven the history of protests against forest operations…, it is by no means unlikely that… a protester who is otherwise lawfully on forestry land or a related business access area, and is not preventing, hindering or obstructing forest operations or access thereto, could be required to leave the forestry land or business access area because a police officer forms a reasonable belief that the protester has at some unspecified time in the past prevented, hindered or obstructed forest operations…, or seems likely to do so… And that could be so even if the protester has never in fact done so and has no intention of doing so.

So he, too, held that there was a “burden”; and he, too, held that prevention of “hindrances and obstructions of business activities” was a legitimate legislative purpose. But in order to decide whether the Protesters Act was a reasonable means to that purpose, he relied (unlike Justice Gageler) on the trilogy of criteria associated with “proportionality” (suitability, necessity and balance); and he found (unlike the joint judgement) that the issue could not be disposed of simply on grounds of “suitability” and “necessity.” Instead, he found it necessary to proceed to the question of “balance.”

The “suitability” test was not enough because the Protesters Act “does have a rational connection” with its purpose; the “necessity” test was not enough because, although there was “some force” in the argument that the purpose was already adequately covered by the Forest Management Act, the court should not be led into comparing “the relative merits of competing legislative models.” In the end it could not be said “that there are such obvious and compelling alternatives of significantly less restrictive effect as to signify that the Protesters Act was enacted for an ulterior purpose.”

Accordingly, he alone addressed the controversial question of “balance.” But whereas this sometimes seems to refer to a kind of sliding scale — the more urgent the purpose, the greater the permissible degree of incursion on “freedom” — Justice Nettle saw it rather as postulating “an outer limit,” beyond which the degree of incursion should be seen as “manifestly excessive,” “grossly disproportionate,” or going “far beyond” what might be acceptable. The State of Queensland (intervening in the proceedings) had argued that the test should be simply whether legislation goes “too far”; and that suggestion found little favour. But Justice Nettle’s test seems to be a more elegant version of the same idea.

In any event, he held that the test was satisfied. In particular, the four-day prohibition under section 8 of entry into “a business access area,” and the three-month prohibition under section 11 of any infraction (which “might comprise no more than failing to comply” with a direction based on a police officer’s “reasonable, but conceivably false, belief”) were “on any reasonable view… a very broad-ranging and far-reaching means of achieving the stated purposes.” Moreover, the degree of incursion must be weighed against “the apparent public importance of the purpose”; and given the protections already available under the Forest Management Act and under “existing common law causes of action,” “the importance of the Protesters Act is considerably lessened.” Accordingly, the relevant provisions in sections 8 and 11 were “grossly disproportionate.”

Justice Gordon agreed with the majority view that the “blanket four-day exclusion” under section 8 was irrational, and therefore invalid; but otherwise she dissented. Early in her judgement she asserted — as a “fundamental assumption of the Australian legal system” — “that statutes have a definite legal meaning.” The assertion is not as naive as it sounds: she was not asserting that every statute does have “a definite legal meaning,” but only our assumption that, in order to apply a statutory provision, judges must necessarily begin by ascribing a meaning to it.

Even that assumption might be thought to belong in the Begriffshimmel (the heaven of juristic conceptions). But Justice Gordon’s point was more practical. As against the insistence in the joint judgement on the indeterminacy of whether a forested area should be treated as “business premises” or “a business access area,” she was arguing that, in any individual case, the question whether the area in question fell within those descriptions would be judicially determined once the case came to trial; and if those descriptions did not apply, the case would be dismissed. Thus, whatever the initial uncertainties might be, no one could in fact be convicted of an offence unless “business premises” (or “access areas”) were judicially found to be involved.

This, of course, is no answer to the problem that a police officer and a protester, encountering each other in a forest clearing, might have no way of knowing whether they were in “business premises” or not — so that a police officer might mistakenly direct a protester to abandon a legitimate protest, or a protester might mistakenly be deterred from pursuing his or her legitimate plans. The prospect of criminal prosecution might act as a deterrent, even if the prosecution was ultimately destined to fail.

Accordingly, Justice Nettle sought to answer the argument by insisting that what matters is the law’s effect “in its legal or practical operation.” Granted the assumption “that, properly construed, the legal effect… is certain,” it was nevertheless true that the terms of this Act “are of such breadth that the likelihood of them so operating in practice as to burden the implied freedom to a significant extent cannot be discounted.” But Justice Gordon had an answer to that objection, too:

[T]he relevant practical operation of the provisions is the practical operation they have when applied according to their proper construction, not some operation hypothesised on… some misapplication or misconstruction of the provisions or any one of them.

Having thus excluded any extended operation of the Protesters Act through “uncertainty,” she was able to argue that the Act applied only to activities that were already unlawful — not only under the Forest Management Act, but also under the Criminal Code and the Police Offences Act 1935, and the common law of trespass and nuisance. Thus, the additional “burden” imposed on political communication was only “incremental,” confined to “making what was otherwise unlawful the subject of criminal penalties.” If this involved any “marginal extension” of the existing legal provisions, it was only to regulate “the time, place and manner” of activities that were already unlawful.

Accordingly, her final conclusions were confined to the three Lange questions: there was a “burden,” but its purpose, like that of the existing provisions and prohibitions, was confined to controlling activity “that is disruptive or causes damage,” and was therefore “no more incompatible” with representative and responsible government “than the pre-existing wider legal framework.” Any additional “marginal extension” or “incremental burden” was so slight as to be “reasonably appropriate and adapted” to that purpose.

Justice Edelman also insisted that uncertainties in the operation of the Protesters Act could be disposed of judicially: “No matter how ambiguous or uncertain the words of legislation may be, it is emphatically the province of the judiciary to explicate the meaning of legislation.” But whereas Justice Gordon had used the point only to argue that any misapplication of the Act would be corrected when it came to trial, Justice Edelman’s approach was more radical: he insisted that the High Court itself must determine the precise legal operation of the Protesters Act before considering whether it might be invalid. And he did this by holding that, because the purposes of the Protesters Act were the same as those of the Forest Management Act, the unclear references to “business premises” and “business access areas” must be read as referring only to those areas that had been marked off by “signs, barriers, or other notices prohibiting entry” under the Forest Management Act. On that basis, it was literally true that the Protesters Act applied only to conduct already unlawful under its predecessor.

Accordingly, any attempt to establish a “burden” on political communication was stopped at the outset: the prohibition of conduct which is already unlawful cannot be a “burden.” The implied freedom of political communication extends only to “legal freedom,” and there is no “legal freedom” to act unlawfully. The Protesters Act was wholly valid.

Shakespeare’s Cleopatra might have recalled that, as a girl, she was “green in judgement” and “cold in blood.” But if the five majority judges were “green in judgement,” the two dissenters were “cold in blood.”

In any event, the apparent victory for environmental protest in the Tasmanian forests may turn out to be hollow. Since all the judgements agreed that the Protesters Act, to a greater or lesser extent, was merely seeking to advance the objectives already secured by the Forest Management Act, that earlier Act may continue to offer effective limitations on protest. Yet for protests in other parts of Australia, the case may be a significant precedent. On the day of the decision, Bob Brown hailed it in part for its potential benefit to “peaceful citizens protesting [the] Adani mine.” He may have been right.

The Brown case and political communication

Back in 1992, when the implied freedom of political communication was first spelled out, Justice Deane, supported by Justice Toohey, attributed it not to any express constitutional provisions, but to “an underlying doctrine” of representative government, whose ultimate “rational basis” lay in “the thesis that all powers of government ultimately belong to, and are derived from, the governed.” The rhetorical and normative force of that language, potentially extending far beyond freedom of communication, was one reason for the controversy that erupted in the 1990s; and in the Lange case the idea of “an underlying doctrine” was decisively rejected.

Instead, the basis for the implied freedom was cut back to what was necessarily entailed in “the text and structure” of the Constitution: in particular, in the provisions that both houses of parliament must be “chosen by the people” (who must therefore have access to a wide enough range of opinions and information to enable them to make an informed choice). The Lange judgement insisted that this focus on a narrow textual basis did nothing to limit the scope and importance of the implied freedom; but the loss of its original normative force may be one reason why, in the years that followed, the freedom of political communication has had little significant impact.

Yet the focus on “representative and responsible government” also has normative potential, and in recent years there are signs that its potential may be more fully realised. In 2015, in McCloy v New South Wales, the High Court held that various restrictions on political donations in New South Wales did not impose unacceptable “burdens” on political communication. But it did so in terms that stressed the importance of unfettered political communication for “representative and responsible government,” and held that the restrictions were “not only compatible with the system of representative government,” but “preserve and enhance it.” Last week’s joint judgement was equally emphatic:

It is necessary to keep firmly in mind that the implied freedom is essential to the maintenance of the system of representative and responsible government for which the Constitution provides. The implied freedom protects the free expression of political opinion, including peaceful protest, which is indispensable to the exercise of political sovereignty by the people of the Commonwealth.

Similarly, Justice Gageler stressed that “the entirety of the analytical framework set out in Lange” must be “understood as a reflection of the underlying reason for the implication.” That reason was the need to ensure “the efficacy of electoral accountability for the exercise of legislative and executive power.” And Justice Gordon, too, insisted that the court’s approach must “adequately… reflect the reasons for the implication.” Such emphases suggest that the implied freedom may at last be coming into its own.

But another reason for the limited impact of the constitutional freedom has been that, from the beginning, the court was torn between asking whether a challenged law is “reasonably appropriate and adapted,” or weighing its “proportionality.” Some judges have insisted throughout that the two tests mean the same thing. In Lange itself, the entire debate was dismissed as of no importance:

Some judges have expressed the test as whether the law is reasonably appropriate and adapted to the fulfilment of a legitimate purpose. Others have favoured different expressions, including proportionality… [T]here is no need to distinguish these concepts. For ease of expression, throughout these reasons we have used the formulation of reasonably appropriate and adapted.

And yet the debate has persisted. In the 2015 McCloy case, Justices Kiefel, Bell and Keane were joined by Chief Justice French in what appeared to be a decisive commitment to “structured proportionality,” albeit by a bare majority of four out of seven. Since then Chief Justice French has retired, so that last week’s joint judgement framed in terms of “proportionality” was delivered by only three judges; but Justice Nettle, who in McCloy had found it “unnecessary… to resolve such differences,” now makes use of “proportionality” too. So the score is still four out of seven. Yet Justices Gageler and Gordon clearly remain unconvinced; and Justice Edelman, having found that there was not even a “burden,” had no need to embark on consideration of further criteria at all.

It may be that the time has come to conclude, as in a different context the American judge Louis Brandeis once did, that “it is more important that [the question] be settled than that it be settled right.” For that reason, it may be significant that in last week’s judgements the rival approaches appeared to be softening. The joint judgement spoke of its preferred “criteria of proportionality” as no more than “methods of analysis”; and even Justice Gageler saw proportionality as merely “a tool of analysis.” He added that it is not “a particularly useful tool”; the criterion of suitability was “too perfunctory”; that of necessity “too prescriptive”; and that of balance “too open-ended.” Yet he also conceded that his own approach “is not scientific” either, and “can itself be nothing more than a heuristic tool.”

The argument against “reasonably appropriate and adapted” centres mainly on its clumsy wording. As Justice Kirby put it in 2004:

I will never cease to protest at this ungainly phrase “appropriate and adapted.” Just imagine what non-lawyers must make of it? It involves a ritual incantation, devoid of clear meaning.

The argument against “proportionality” centres mainly on its use of the controversial criterion of “balance,” with its dangerous tendency to suggest that the end justifies the means. Yet the idea that there needs to be some proportion between the severity of an incursion on freedom, and the importance of its legislative purpose, is common to both approaches.

Justice Gageler insisted that incursions on freedom of communication must be considered in context (“in the light of history, of precedent and of contemporary circumstances”) and that their assessment “cannot be reduced to… some predetermined all-encompassing algorithm.” He argued that the approach should not be “prescriptive” and should not be “constrained in the abstract.” Yet he also conceded that “patterns emerge as precedents accumulate,” and saw room for “acknowledgment of gradations.” He conceded that not every burden “demands the same degree of justification” or should be “subjected to the same intensity of judicial scrutiny.” The degree of justification required should be “calibrated to the nature and intensity of the burden”; the necessary “degree of fit between means… and ends” should be “calibrated to the degree of risk.” He saw the appropriate “level of scrutiny” as “lying within a spectrum.” In this case, because the impugned provisions “impose a significant practical burden on… the expression of a particular viewpoint,” they call for “very close scrutiny”: the level of scrutiny must be “stringent,” and the legislative purpose must be “compelling.”

Similarly, though Justice Gordon insisted that “balancing” offers no “principled answer,” she contended that because in this case the affected conduct was already unlawful, “the required justification is less and the operation of the law is more readily justified.”

In short, both of the competing approaches appeared to depend in the end on a need for “calibration” or “balancing.” The difference may be that whereas “proportionality” looks to the importance of legislative purpose as justifying a comparable degree of interference with freedom, its critics look to the degree of interference with freedom as calling for a comparably “compelling” importance of legislative purpose. Where there is “a significant practical burden,” the legislative purpose must be “compelling”; where the burden is “incremental” and slight, “the required justification is less.”

It should be possible to locate this kind of “calibration” within a framework of proportionate “balance,” while keeping it sufficiently flexible to avoid the rigid “tiers” or “categories” (each with its own distinctive level of “scrutiny”) that have been developed in the jurisprudence of the US Supreme Court. To seem to be appropriating American doctrine would, of course, be anathema. However much the joint judgement relied on the indeterminacy of “business premises” and “business access areas,” it insisted that it was not adopting the American notion of “void for vagueness”; and however much it emphasised the deterrence of legitimate protest, it insisted that it was not adopting the American idea of a “chilling effect” on freedom of speech. (Yet Justice Gordon was happy to use the American language of regulating the “time, place and manner” of protest; and the words “appropriate” and “adapted” themselves are taken from an opinion written in 1819 by the US chief justice, John Marshall.)

The reason why any direct borrowing from American constitutional law would be seen as unacceptable is that the relevant American doctrines are concerned with the protection of “rights,” whereas the High Court’s concern in this area is only with the protection of “freedom.” A similar objection is often made to the use of “proportionality,” since the differing versions of that idea have their origin in Europe, and particularly in decisions by the European Court of Human Rights. And there is, of course, the added objection that Australia’s common law inheritance should not be polluted by concepts imported from European civil law.

Yet a more significant contrast might be between common law and statute. The generation of judges who have failed to agree on whether burdens on communication must be “proportionate” or “appropriate and adapted” is the generation that has struggled to reconcile the traditions of the common law with the increasing predominance of statutes.

The statutory model seeks precision; the common law seeks principle. The statutory model sees the law as a series of products; the common law sees it as a continuous process. The statutory model aspires to verbal formulae that speak for themselves, independently of context; the common law knows that verbal formulae must always be understood in their temporal, factual and cultural context. The statutory model sees words as monadic packages of self-contained meaning; the common law model sees words as leeways for judicial choice. The statutory model seeks elaborate scaffolding to ensure reliable outcomes; the common law knows that scaffolding is no substitute for personal judgement. The statutory model craves for certainty; the common law knows, with Oliver Wendell Holmes, that “certainty… is illusion, and repose is not the destiny of man.”

To reconcile the criterion of “proportionality” with that of “appropriate and adapted,” it may first be necessary to reconcile these differing approaches to law. ●

The post Green in judgement appeared first on Inside Story.

In later years, Bolton was to look back on this period of his life – around 1981 – as a time when his confidence in his academic career was renewed. In the previous decade he had harboured some self-doubt about his capacity to be a national historian of the stature of his successful contemporaries Geoffrey Blainey and Ken Inglis. He felt his scholarly recognition had stalled, and he was also a bit dissatisfied with the impact of his earlier books. But Spoils and Spoilers was a shot in the arm: it was widely and positively reviewed, and it had span, as Keith Hancock would have put it. It was a national history, a grand narrative, a synthesis. And at about the same time as Spoils and Spoilers was published, Bolton was approached to be general editor of a five-volume Oxford History of Australia to anticipate the 1988 bicentenary.

As a further endorsement of his stature, he was appointed in late 1981 as the foundation head of the Australian Studies Centre at the University of London. Bolton was always grateful for the opportunity to write Spoils and Spoilers, for, as he recalled, it “really got me back into productivity.” He was fifty when it was published, and the book boosted his confidence about tackling Australia-wide questions; it also carried a message about national self-confidence.

Geoffrey Bolton was born into the middle of the Depression years and had strong childhood memories of a society struggling with poverty and unemployment, of people knocking at the door looking for work; such experiences would shape his historical curiosity and compassion. He grew up in a Perth suburban neighbourhood that he remembered as a lively, face-to-face community, with home deliveries by horse and cart. Some of his earliest memories were of domestic spaces, including the chooks, almond tree and grapevine in the family’s productive backyard, though he also vividly remembered horse teams from an early visit to the wheatbelt.

Bolton’s grandfather had taken up farming in Pingelly in 1912 and the family maintained connections with the region throughout his childhood. But he never seemed to regret his suburban upbringing. Visitors to Perth’s Hyde Park can press a button at a heritage installation to hear the voice of Geoff as an elderly man, recalling how his childhood self saw the islands in the park’s lakes as sites of imagination, places where exciting things might happen. His early experience of the urban domestic and material world as lively and absorbing infiltrated many of his histories.

Spoils and Spoilers was a culmination of years of experience and thinking. As a postgraduate student, influenced by Fred Alexander’s Moving Frontiers, Bolton had set out to apply Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis to the Australian setting; in the early 1950s he worked in the Kimberley while researching a master’s thesis on the history of pastoralism. So at the age of twenty-one he found himself in remote rugged country looking at the land, talking to the people and pecking away at his typewriter, getting to the station journals before the white ants did, talking to the old hands before they died. He took the fieldwork seriously, staying in the region for more than three months. He didn’t want to be seen as “just some young bloke trying to take a winter holiday.”

Nineteen fifty-two was a drought year, there was scalded country, erosion on the watercourses, and cattle feed was scarce; Bolton became interested in the unintentional changes to the land as a result of white settlement. He was also fascinated by the local technologies and skills developed by settler Australians as they grappled with the distinctive environment of the northwest. This admiration for settler ingenuity fuelled his emerging conviction, elaborated in Spoils and Spoilers, that many environmental problems arose from the tendency to privilege imported ideas and models over locally derived knowledge and solutions.

In 1954 he won a Hackett Fellowship that enabled him to trade the limestone of the University of Western Australia for the sandstone of Balliol College, Oxford. There, like Fred Alexander and Keith Hancock before him, he read History. Hancock at this time was the director of the Institute of Commonwealth Studies within the University of London. As a student, Bolton had heard about Hancock and read his books, and he “devoured” Hancock’s autobiography Country and Calling when it came out in 1954. He later called himself a “disciple” of Hancock’s, and even his half-century of devotion to the Australian Dictionary of Biography can be seen in part as a kind of tribute to a creation of Hancock’s.

As he left for London, Fred Alexander and a local doctor, Bruce Hunt, provided Bolton with personal introductions to Hancock. The two historians had much in common. Hancock had experience at the University of Western Australia, having worked as an assistant lecturer there in 1919 under Edward Shann, who encouraged him to develop his interest in land use. During those lively days Hancock was also introduced to the Western Australian flora by his housemate Desmond Herbert, an acquaintance from his Melbourne schooldays who had recently been appointed government botanist of Western Australia.

An interest in the land always permeated Hancock’s work and over time, as “environment” emerged as an object of public concern and activism, these themes became more pronounced in his writing. His Australia (1930), though principally an analysis of the cultural, political and economic life of the nation, included a much-quoted section which, in the vein of George Perkins Marsh, railed against the environmental damage wrought by colonial economic development: “in the second half of the nineteenth century tree murder by ring-barking devastated the country on a gigantic scale,” he wrote. Bolton would later take the “invaders’” hatred of trees, identified by Hancock, as a basis for a chapter of Spoils and Spoilers.

Bolton was completing his DPhil when Hancock asked him to take up a research fellowship at the Australian National University in Canberra, where Hancock had recently been appointed director of the Research School of Social Sciences and Professor of History. It was a nourishing environment in which to develop interdisciplinary scholarship. One model was the Wool Seminar, convened by Hancock from 1957 to 1959. Scholars from a range of disciplines – history, economics, geography, political science and the natural sciences – came together to discuss wool, which interested Hancock not only because of its economic importance, but also because of “its talismanic value as an index of Australian distinctiveness.” Bolton later observed that the Wool Seminar “revived and kindled that interest in environmental history already foreshadowed in Australia” and which distinguished much of Hancock’s later scholarship.

In 1959 Bolton also found himself on another northern field trip, with “environment” as a sub-theme of a regional study; he had been commissioned to write a history of North Queensland by the North Queensland Local Authorities Association. Published in 1963 as A Thousand Miles Away, this project helped to sustain Bolton’s broad interest in relationships between people and place. In a preface, he argued that settlers arrived in North Queensland at a time when Australians:

had not yet learned to understand their environment. The result was a prodigal waste of resources… It was only when the newcomers had learned to adapt to their environment, to husband their land and cooperate in planning its development, that permanent white settlement in North Queensland was assured.

The dual theme of settler environmental understanding and adaptation would feature centrally in Spoils and Spoilers. By the mid 1970s, however, Bolton regarded A Thousand Miles Away as engaging insufficiently with environmental issues. In a telling reflection on the way in which understandings of the category “environmental” were being clarified – and narrowed – at that time, he suggested that the lack of attention paid to environment in A Thousand Miles Away put him “no further forward” than the approach of economic historian Edward Shann thirty years earlier. From a contemporary perspective, the value of “land use” studies as environmental histories is clearer.

After Bolton’s return to Western Australia in 1966, his old boss and mentor began to research an environmental history of Canberra’s mountain hinterland. Published in 1972 as Discovering Monaro, Hancock’s book also used the concept of “land use” but drew additionally on botany, forestry and ecology, thus anticipating the cooperative alliance of historians and ecologists that would flower in the “forest history” of the 1980s. Hancock’s work, written in the midst of an archaeological revolution (Australia’s Pleistocene human past was confirmed in the 1960s), was quick to integrate deep time into a regional narrative and to incorporate insights into Aboriginal burning regimes by archaeologist Rhys Jones. Manning Clark, writing in the Bulletin, considered Discovering Monaro “the first significant look at our past through what might be called the ‘pollution or ecology window.’”

In the same year, Bolton completed his social history of the 1930s Depression in Western Australia, A Fine Country to Starve In. In following the distinctive responses of the Western Australian community to a global crisis (and donating all royalties to two charities) it conveyed Bolton’s keen sense of social justice, but environmental themes were not prominent.

But this was a time when environment could not readily be ignored: the Western Australian government had recently established an Environmental Protection Authority, which had immediately acted to prevent development of an alumina refinery in the Swan Valley. Environmental campaigns, including the Great Barrier Reef, Little Desert and Lake Pedder, were making headlines nationally.

It was in this climate that Bolton joined forces with his undergraduate friend David Hutchison at the Western Australian Museum to produce a study of “European Man in Southwestern Australia,” published in 1973. Drawing on the work of local and regional historians and historical geographers, it comprised an early survey of the environmental history of the southwest and a call for further research. While giving a nod to the “subtle environmental awareness” of Discovering Monaro, it was a work of synthesis that would not be followed up with a deeper, more engaged study of Bolton’s native region: whereas the retired Hancock, raised in Gippsland, had pursued his fascination with and desire for attachment to country in Monaro, Bolton was to return to his suburban roots in his first retirement project, a detailed history of the street in which he was raised.

In 1973, on taking up the foundation chair of history at Murdoch, the new “bush university” in the southern suburbs of Perth, Bolton received funding from the US State Department to travel around the United States and see how American Studies was taught there. During this visit he met with Roderick Nash, who in 1970 had launched a course at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in “American environmental history.” Though Nash was later criticised for his parochial neglect of foreign precedents, from the English and French as well as geographers and anthropologists, Bolton was impressed by his efforts to develop the area as a sub-field of American history, later describing him as “the leading environmental historian – young and bright.”

Bolton himself was always quick to acknowledge the pioneering work of Australian historical geographers, who for years had colonised ground ahead of the historians. Graeme Wynn has characterised the late 1960s as a time of introspection and some pessimism among historical geographers in Australasia, in response to the challenge of developing more quantitative and theoretical approaches. However, the early 1970s saw a flourishing empirical scholarship in the field. Perception, evaluation and transformation of land were key themes, evident for example in the work of Keith Moon and Michael Williams on the South Australian landscape, Les Heathcote on arid lands, and Jim Cameron on early colonial Western Australia. In Sydney, Dennis Jeans produced the first book-length historical geography of colonial New South Wales, while in Melbourne Joe Powell commenced a study of land policy in nineteenth-century Victoria.

On his return from the United States in 1974, Bolton attended a conference convened by the environmental scholar George Seddon as part of the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere program. In the proceedings, he mused:

It would be particularly useful if some intrepid scholar were to venture upon a history of Australians acting upon their environment. Such a book would be bound to attract much criticism in detail, but given the right use of written, oral, and photographic material, it would be a stimulus and a necessity. Then we might follow the American examples and introduce the teaching of Australian environmental history in a number of Australian universities.

Bolton would be that “intrepid scholar,” though the teaching preceded the textbook by five years. The historical geographers’ interest in environmental perception was prominent in the Australian Environmental History course he launched in 1976: the brief handbook entry lists “European man in 1788 – preconceptions about landscape” and “Australian visions of Australia” among the areas covered. A second-year course with no prerequisites, it was designed for the kinds of students attracted to the new university in Perth, for Murdoch was consciously innovative and multidisciplinary and many of the students who took the course were studying the environmental and biological sciences. The different perspectives of the science and arts students led to frequent debates, making it what Bolton called “a good lively subject.” The course had legs, running with its original title until 2010 and then onward with a new one.

It began by considering “Aborigines and their effect on the environment.” Aboriginal people didn’t figure prominently in Bolton’s work on the Kimberley: he’d had little contact with them in his youth, and during his fieldwork he felt hampered by his lack of ease with Aboriginal informants. Yet, as he later recalled, he returned from the Kimberley having “learned respect for Aboriginal capacity.” In the mid 1970s this perspective nurtured his interest in recent work on Aboriginal environmental impacts, from Rhys Jones and John Mulvaney in the east, to Duncan Merrilees and Sylvia Hallam in the west. He saw Aboriginal people as key agents in environmental change, anticipating Bill Gammage’s later work in his claim that “the whole of Australia was their farm, and it was a farm which they exploited with care for the needs of later generations.” But he was careful to reject the static and essentialising “ecological Indian” stereotype, pointing out that some prehistoric Aboriginal practices may have led to environmental impoverishment.

Bolton’s conviction about the importance of Aboriginal agency was strengthened by Tom Stannage’s invitation to contribute a chapter on twentieth-century Aboriginal–settler relations to A New History of Western Australia. Bolton worked on this in parallel with Spoils and Spoilers, using WA Aborigines Department records to show how Aboriginal people were not “passive victims” but had often mobilised to provide for their own needs in the face of state exclusion and neglect. The two projects were mutually supportive; both contributed to Bolton’s trajectory of increasing support for Aboriginal rights and later reconciliation, as well as his confidence in the utility and significance of his own historical work.

The invitation to write Spoils and Spoilers came from Heather Radi, a historian at the University of Sydney and a friend of Bolton’s, who was commissioning books for a new Allen & Unwin series of thematic histories on “The Australian Experience.” Radi knew of the environmental history course and, as Bolton later recalled, “it always concentrates the mind if someone says that, ‘We want you to do this and here is a contract.’” Always intended to be a general survey, the book drew on the material gathered for the course, as well as new research. Written partly while Bolton was a visiting fellow at Cambridge, but mostly in a small, tranquil cottage in an orchard near the southwest town of Balingup, it was dedicated to the Murdoch staff and students who participated in the course’s creation.

Curiously, given Bolton’s earlier work, the north of Australia received scant attention in the text, though these experiences of regional and rural history had familiarised him with the most useful types of primary source material. Michal Bosworth, then working on her own groundbreaking environmental history school textbook, which was also published in 1981, unearthed many of the images.

The title of Spoils and Spoilers is enigmatic. It is a phrase that evokes plunder and pillage; a dual sense of destruction and theft in an ongoing conflict between settler Australians and the land. It appears to mark out the work as a declensionist narrative of fall from ecological harmony and abundance, unredeemed by hope. This is, however, at odds with the book’s content, which is rather more balanced and optimistic.

How might we account for this dissonance? The initial working title, appearing in 1977 when the book was contracted, was “Man-made Australia.” As the book neared production in March 1980, Heather Radi looked forward to seeing Bolton with a manuscript and new title; by June it was still undecided, with publisher John Iremonger asking Bolton and Radi, “Has a small muse of fire ascended the brightest heaven of invention and brought you both back a title?” Radi then wrote to Bolton, with some exasperation, that “no one yet seems to have agreed on a title!”, finishing the letter with her hope that they would arrive at a decision between “Cutting down building up” and “Tearing down and building up: Australians making their environment.”

Those versions, invoking both destructive and creative impulses, more accurately reflect the tone of the book than the final title, which emerged sometime in the following two months. In August, while Heather Radi was visiting Perth, Bolton wrote to Iremonger, “The choice of title and sub-title seemed alright to me, so I have not bothered to write about that.” In his reply, Iremonger had Spoils and Spoilers as the subject line, and indicated that he was glad Bolton liked “the final choice of title.” It seems that the title was the publisher’s and while Bolton’s feelings on the title appear lukewarm, he declined to contest it.

Early sales of Spoils and Spoilers were “extremely encouraging,” with more than 800 copies sold in the first two months. Reviews appeared in a very wide range of publications, from Perth newspapers to the Bulletin and the American Journal of Environmental Quality. Reviewers generally saw the book as significant and timely, with the notable exception of George Seddon, discussed below. Having set out to write a book with popular appeal, Bolton would have been pleased with the review appearing in the Daily News, Perth’s “underdog” newspaper for afternoon commuters, which deemed the book “one of the most valuable, stimulating and important Australian books to appear for some time.”

Of all the reviews, that was the only one to identify an “overriding theme” of hope. By contrast, the reviewer for the West Australian portrayed it as an unremitting tale of devastation, ignorance and greed, of settler Australians’ hatred of the land. Most reviewers were struck by Bolton’s gloomy prognosis for the future – of increasing exploitation in a period of economic downturn and steadily degrading urban environments under increasing population pressure – and it appears this coloured their interpretation of the text as a whole.

In an era of proliferating and increasingly obvious environmental challenges, most reviewers acknowledged the book’s importance and utility: this was a history from which we could – indeed, needed to – learn. The Queensland History Teachers’ Association newsletter declared that the subject matter of Spoils and Spoilers “should be central to every course in Australian history or social studies,” while Keith Hancock expressed his hope, in a private letter to Bolton, that the book would “have some impact on the policy-makers.” Reviewers also appreciated its “readability,” achieved through evocative and clear prose, with Edmund Campion for the Bulletin particularly emphasising its literary qualities.

The principal academic reviewers were geographers: Dennis Jeans found it “difficult to think of a more insightful overview” of the forces shaping urban environments over time, while Murray McCaskill was impressed by its “apt and challenging generalisations.” Both criticised the book for its lack of attention to international contexts, though this was no impediment to the sole North American reviewer, a bureaucrat in the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, for whom parallels between the Australian and North American experiences were self-evident.

Other academic reviews were spread across the disciplinary spectrum, from Pacific studies, political science and history to environmental management. The multidisciplinary dimensions of the book were part of its innovation in the new field of “environmental history.” In his integration of ecological perspectives, Bolton was influenced by Hancock’s Discovering Monaro. From the 1960s, ecology had gained power as both a science and a metaphor, and ideas of community, webs and relationships became influential in environmental and social thought. In the writing of his late classic in environmental history, Hancock had walked the paddocks of the high plains with soil scientists, botanists and foresters, and one of his heroes was Baldur Byles, a forester who gathered evidence of soil erosion on his hands and knees and passionately advocated the protection of the mountain water catchments from grazing cattle. In Spoils and Spoilers Bolton referred not only to “land” and “nature” but also to “ecology”and “ecosystems,” and he brought a keen attention to the inter-relatedness of climate, soil, biota and humans – although Hancock wrote to Bolton saying he would have liked to have seen more about soil chemists and agricultural botanists.

By contrast, Geoffrey Blainey’s book A Land Half Won, published in the same year as Bolton’s, was more geographical than ecological and was less responsive to the environmental politics of the time. When Bolton later reflected on the course he taught at Murdoch in the 1970s, he said, “I wasn’t preaching, but some of [my students] did become very green in their thinking.”

Venturing across the science–humanities divide got him into trouble too. Bolton’s friend George Seddon, who had a doctorate in geology, wrote a highly critical review of Spoils and Spoilers which consisted mostly of carping about geological and biological errors made by this trespasser from the humanities. Seddon considered the national historical synthesis to be “premature,” but that was exactly Bolton’s challenge. Bolton himself was generous about Seddon’s inspiring body of work and even his “caustic wit” – and he happily acknowledged the disciplinary breadth and promiscuity of Seddon’s intellect. Seddon’s books Swan River Landscapes (1970) and Sense of Place (1972) were highly original studies, Bolton noted, that built on a tradition of topographical essays in English literature that might be said to go back to Gilbert White’s The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, first published in the year of the French Revolution. Bolton explained that it was “a genre which before the coming of photography required the combination of literary grace and a sharp eye for natural phenomena.” He valued Seddon’s combination of scientific observation with “the good old-fashioned art, the Augustan art, of connoisseurship of landscape.” Bolton and Seddon shared an interest in combining studies of the natural and built environments and in scholarship that enabled intelligent environmental stewardship. Bolton approvingly quoted Seddon’s definition of ecology as “the science of good housekeeping.”

This points us to another, neglected source of strength in Spoils and Spoilers. Bolton drew on an organic, local, vernacular tradition of writing often overlooked by academics. This is what he appreciated about Seddon’s work, for he saw him as working in that nature-writing tradition. So we find Bolton invoking on the first page of Spoils and Spoilers the zoologist Hedley Finlayson, whose book The Red Centre, published in 1934, was one of the great pieces of Australian nature writing; we find him drawing on Francis Ratcliffe, whose 1938 book Flying Fox and Drifting Sand was of the same lineage; and we find him starting a chapter with the feisty zoologist Jock Marshall and his “fine angry title,” The Great Extermination: A Guide to Anglo–Australian Cupidity, Wickedness and Waste (1966).

In an assessment of environmental history influences in Western Australia, Bolton honoured two naturalists who closely observed and described intimate seasonal changes in plant and animal life. One was Vincent Serventy, whose book Dryandra (1970) described a eucalyptus woodland reserve in 1934, and the other was Barbara York Main, an arachnologist whose book Between Wodjil and Tor (1967) became a celebrated piece of scientific prose poetry about the wheatbelt. Bolton was always a strong advocate of local and regional history – that’s where his own career began – and he saw environmental history as a natural development of that literature of place.

Spoils and Spoilers therefore grew out of Bolton’s strong advocacy for local and regional history, which was part of his “view from the edge,” part of his identity as a Western Australian. His doctoral thesis at Oxford had focused on a populace marginal to Britain, the Anglo-Irish of the eighteenth century, and his histories of the Kimberley and North Queensland were both studies (as he put it) of “a frontier society on the margin of white Australian civilisation.” In a 1999 memoir, Bolton elaborated his “Provincial Viewpoint” as being more than geographical; it was also “a habit of mind” that was expressed in an awareness of diversity, fidelity to grassroots sources and a mistrust of bold generalisations. He made fun of his younger self as “a bigoted empiricist.”

Bolton certainly liked to build his arguments from the ground up and was thus intellectually inclined to regionalism. He was interested in the history of regionalism as a political movement and in the writing of regional history, and he saw his study of North Queensland as part of an academic rediscovery of regional history from the late 1950s, as evidenced by the work of Margaret Kiddle on the Western District of Victoria, Duncan Waterson on the Darling Downs and R.B. Walker on New England. Even his work in London, as foundation head of what became the Menzies Centre, had an edginess he relished. As he put it, in London he was pursuing “one of my own persistent themes, that within Australia as a Western Australian, within Britain as an Australian, you are there to stand up for the provincials, for the people on the periphery.” Although he also feared provincialism and occasionally felt the isolation of Western Australia, he was determined to make an advantage of his geography.

Bolton’s early literary models included Lytton Strachey, Edward Gibbon and Thomas Babington Macaulay; he admired good, compelling prose. As a young man he met Miles Franklin, Henrietta Drake-Brockman and Mary Durack and was introduced to the Fellowship of Australian Writers, where he participated in a poetry group. He had been active as a student journalist and took pride in publishing the early poems of Randolph Stow. He recalled a “strong consciousness of trying to keep alive the traditions of Australian literature.” When he sparred with Geoffrey Blainey in the pages of Historical Studies over the reasons for the founding of the British colony of New South Wales, he saw their debate as an echo of Henry Lawson’s literary stoush with Banjo Paterson.

He called himself “the least ideological of creatures” and as a scholar he claimed to be “a tortoise, basically, rather than a hare”; he liked to earth himself in place, period and people and to allow patterns to emerge from that mastery. Thus he respected writing embedded in locale, and wisdom that grew from experience. This spirit underlies Spoils and Spoilers – and it shapes its analysis too, for Bolton told his publishers that the book argued that “Australians have done best when they discarded ideas and models brought from Britain and North America” and that “the worst mistakes have taken place through disregarding the native experience.” By the turn of the millennium, “native experience” included Aboriginal lore, and Australian regional and environmental histories had become essays also about settlers’ relationships with Aboriginal country – as seen, for example, in Tom Griffiths’s Hunters and Collectors (1996), Peter Read’s Belonging (2000), Tim Bonyhady’s The Colonial Earth (2002) and Mark McKenna’s Looking for Blackfellas’ Point (2002).

Another striking aspect of Spoils and Spoilers,read from an early twenty-first-century perspective, is its attentiveness to urban and domestic environments. The cities and the suburbs are the sites of a substantial part of Bolton’s “environmental” history – he takes us into the intimate, noisy, smoky worlds of domestic houses and fenced yards, the streets and lanes of traffic, abattoirs and incinerators. Two-thirds of its chapters are principally or wholly devoted to urban settings and issues.

Sometimes, in describing the development of the field of environmental history, we have fallen into the American habit of saying that urban history was long neglected in favour of forests, “wilderness,” and the preservation of the “natural” world. Yet, for Bolton, environmental history and urban history were seamlessly integrated in a national narrative from the start. Like Hugh Stretton, he suggested that the origins of Australian environmentalism were to be found in the very suburbia disdained by intellectuals. He described how conservation thinking emerged at the same time that Australians were turning the bush into suburbs. So his interest in the built environment, the little blocks and boxes, the nature strips and backyards, is part of his argument about the bush and what the loss of it came to mean. Spoils and Spoilers was written and taught in the same years that Graeme Davison presented his compelling critique of Russel Ward’s The Australian Legend, arguing for the urban origins of “the Australian Legend” – and Bolton’s book also offered a counter-narrative to the Ward thesis.

This urban emphasis seems at first surprising: Bolton had pursued environmental themes most prominently in his work on rural and regional environments – the Kimberley river frontages, the steamy canefields of North Queensland. Look a little closer, however, and a lineage emerges. Bolton’s early 1970s work with David Hutchison on southwestern Australia delves into how Perth’s urban infrastructure and geography shaped the experience of its inhabitants, from opportunities for recreation to class differentiation according to environmental amenity.

This incipient interest was nurtured by a period of frenetic activity in Australian urban history. Tom Stannage was working on The People of Perth, which shocked and dismayed Perth conservatives when it hit the bookstores in 1979. The Sydney History Group’s first publication, Nineteenth–Century Sydney: Essays in Urban History, was launched in 1978, an exceptional year for urban history that also saw the publication of Graeme Davison’s The Rise and Fall of Marvellous Melbourne, Weston Bate’s Lucky City and Peter Spearritt’s Sydney Since the Twenties. Bolton himself collaborated with young Murdoch graduate Su-Jane Hunt, who was working on a history of Perth’s Metropolitan Water Supply, Sewerage and Drainage Board, to produce an article of enduring significance on the early water supply and sanitation of Perth. Beyond the discipline of history, Max Neutze and Hugh Stretton were producing influential works engaging with postwar urbanisation.

Surveying the advent of town life in Australia, Bolton not only described the planning and administration of colonial settlements but also evoked what it felt like to live in these places of unmade roads, rudimentary or non-existent organised waste disposal, and ubiquitous flies. Partly a literary strategy, this approach also yielded new insights: Australians’ failure to develop a Mediterranean “al fresco” culture, for example, arose not from their lack of sophistication but from the sensory deterrents exercised by dust, mud, flies and stench; these elements of the urban environment also shaped, from very early on, a preference for vehicular transport that insulated occupants from the experience of inhospitable streets. Decades before the “material turn” in the humanities, Bolton provided numerous ways in which materiality and embodied experience shaped significant features of Australian cultural life.

Within this analysis is nested a keen sense of social justice, leading to an early articulation of the concerns that would later inform much work on environmental justice. Bolton emphasised the ways in which the material and social processes of urbanisation produced quite different outcomes for rich and poor. For example, writing at a time when the first civil suits against the siting of landfill facilities were taking place in the United States, and drawing on Tom Stannage’s groundbreaking history of Perth, Bolton highlighted the practice of locating rubbish tips in the poorest suburbs. His analysis of urban environmental issues led to an understated yet profound conclusion: “It was the same with environmental hazards always. If they could be kept out of sight of the prosperous and influential, remedial action was slow in coming.”

Drawing both a chapter title and one of the key themes guiding his exploration of the urban scene from J.K. Galbraith’s 1958 classic The Affluent Society, Bolton proposed that the relative neglect of public spaces and infrastructure, aggravated from the mid nineteenth century by the advent of a “weak and lopsided system of local government,” bore hardest on those migrant and working-class families with the fewest resources to invest in their private surroundings. Meanwhile, the seemingly intractable problems of public spaces encouraged many urban residents to devote their efforts to carving out more agreeable private environments in the home and garden – a finding that featured prominently in reviews of the book.

Bolton examines these “private” environments in some detail, pointing, for example, to the fact that in the 1920s most Australians did not have access to spaces that were entirely private. Even bedrooms were shared: with siblings when young, and later with spouses. “This meant that most people seldom had the opportunity of asking: ‘What sort of environment would I create for myself if I were planning for myself alone?’”

Here, “environment” is domestic and intimate: the living spaces and conditions that shaped most Australians’ everyday subjectivities. Household life is evoked in unexpected detail for an environmental history – the manifold daily uses of the kitchen table, the customary prints adorning the walls: “a solitary Arab with his camel gazing over the endless Sahara sands, or a handsome couple in evening dress conversing in a Mediterranean garden.” A lively and sympathetic historical imagination is exercised for analytical ends: Bolton concludes that the lack of opportunity for most suburban Australians to effectively shape their private environments meant that they also had no expectations of controlling the public environments in which they met and moved. Meanwhile, increasing access to beaches and hills meant that many suburban families began to visualise alternative home environments; dreams that were often pursued in the context of postwar prosperity.

The underlying concern here is with how people’s views are shaped in interaction with their immediate surrounds. Similar approaches became popular in the first decades of the twenty-first century, inspired by anthropologist Tim Ingold’s philosophy of dwelling and bodily engagement, among other influences.

Bolton’s commitment to and interest in urban environments increased over time: while he finished the first edition of the book with a hope that Australians might come to regard the earth as their mother, in the 1992 revised edition he accepted that perhaps this tradition “was insufficient in a nation whose environmental issues were increasingly those of the urban environment.” He also took issue with the longstanding tendency of conservation and environmental activists to focus on issues of “wilderness” remote from the daily lives of most Australians. Even in the first edition, he asked, “what if the ACF started to intervene in urban Australia” where most people lived and property rights were most entrenched?

By 1992 the criticism was more overt: conservation was often seen as the protection of “nature” or rural habitats, although the environment was often an artefact, most characteristically in the city and its suburbs. Even the more radical “green” movement of the 1980s and early 1990s concentrated on the preservation of forest or wilderness instead of looking at the problems of the urban environment which was home to most Australians. The “greens,” who at one time had seemed a potent force for change, were in danger of marginalisation.

For Bolton, cities were the big environmental issue, and a failure to address the environmental inequities and challenges in the places where most Australians lived threatened to make environmentalism a concern of a privileged minority. But while Bolton deeply respected the desires and choices of ordinary Australians and the visions of reformers who sought to provide them with a spacious and leafy environment, he also recognised the collective problems generated by “suburban sprawl.” It is a tension that is unresolved in the book, and remains one of the key challenges facing Australian cities.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, leading American environmental historians vigorously debated whether cities should be included within the scope of the field. Were they insufficiently “natural,” or were they important as sites where nature was encountered, transformed, represented and managed? In Australia, while many key environmental conflicts took place outside the cities and the historians tended to follow them there, some, like Bolton, recognised the importance of cities and suburbs as environments. Dan Coward (now Huon), who had worked as a research assistant to Keith Hancock for Discovering Monaro, marked Sydney’s environmental history as a story of pollution and public health in Out of Sight (1988). Inner-urban contagion and pollution also featured in other studies around this time, while George Seddon and David Ravine bucked the trend with their innovative application of art history and historical geography to the study of Perth in A City and Its Setting (1986).

Subsequently, amid debates over urban consolidation and the establishment of federal programs to combat “sprawl,” planning and economic historians pursued environmental themes in work on town planning and suburban expansion. Another factor bringing together the study of cultural and natural landscapes was environmental history’s emergence in the 1980s as an instrument of heritage practice, as a way in which public historians could talk to natural scientists and heritage practitioners across the nature–culture divide. Spoils and Spoilers encouraged that dialogue.

In the early twenty-first century, historians regarded urban en­vironments from a range of angles. A growing number of works on town planning, gardens, political mobilisation and local history ex­plored environmental themes and expanded our knowledge of how urban environments were transformed, regarded and used for liveli­hood or profit. Others aimed to achieve a more integrated storying of urban ecologies and societies: Heather Goodall and Alison Cadzow linked the ecologies of Sydney’s Georges River to its critical role as a centre of networks, enterprise and ultimately survival for Aboriginal people; Graeme Davison with Sheryl Yelland showed how the car was drawn into Australian cultures, where it worked to transform both the structure and the very air of our cities; Grace Karskens, at­tentive to the material culture of the residents of early Sydney, took us into their homes and helped us understand what it felt like to live in a two-roomed hut in the growing township, and to contemplate the vast bush beyond. Andrea Gaynor, with an eye to the future and a notice served by a local council ranger (“Nah, you can’t keep chooks here!”), explored suburban food production as a practice connect­ing minds and bodies to the broader urban environment.It turned out that the eviction of her chooks occurred in the dying days of a middle-class project of suburban modernisation, undertaken over the twentieth century at the expense of (largely) working-class capacity for self-provisioning.

While these works consciously engaged with contemporary environmental problems, they avoided the polemical approach taken by William Lines in Taming the Great South Land (1991). The first national environmental history to appear since Spoils and Spoilers, it lacked the empathy, humour and balance of its predecessor. The revised edition of Spoils and Spoilers (1992) contained relatively few changes, principal among them a new final chapter that combined discussion of the escalating environmental problems and conflicts of the 1980s and early 1990s with a strong critique of economic rationalism as a force increasingly shaping relations between society and environment. A more subtle change involved the subtitle, from “Australians make their environment 1788–1980” to the softening of human agency in “A history of Australians shaping their environment.”

Funding was sought from Film Australia to develop a pitch for a TV documentary based on the book, to coincide with the release of the revised edition; despite much enthusiasm for this proposal around Canberra, it never got off the ground.

In London in 1982, Geoffrey Bolton had a disagreement with Barry Humphries who, in the guise of Australia’s “cultural attaché” Sir Les Patterson, had imagined a rather different representative of Australia in Britain. Bolton’s mission was seriously in tension with that of the comedian. The historian Jim Davidson wrote to Bolton in 1982, saying, “If you manage to bury Sir Les Patterson, you’ll have done a good job.” Ten years later, in his 1992 Boyer Lectures, Bolton continued to ask, “So why do we [Australians] so often succumb to self-hatred and self-mockery, why do we accept Les Patterson and Sylvania Waters as icons of Australia?”

This stand-off between Australian icons at the heart of the old empire reminds us that one of Bolton’s causes as a historian was to foster “a collective Australian self-confidence.” He felt again that his experience in the west and north of the continent delivered an advantage, for they were “regions whose errors have often been errors of too much optimism rather than too little. But some of that quality of optimism is needed in Australia today.” Optimism and cultural confidence could be valuable, he argued, if they strengthened trust in homegrown wisdom and local solutions – and this was very much the message of Spoils and Spoilers.

Australian historians living at the margins of their continent, beyond the “golden triangle” (as Bolton called it), can become serious nationalists and keen students of federalism. Bolton’s view of the robustness of regional identity and the origins of Australia as “an archipelago of city states, each with their own hinterland” led him to argue that “the achievement of the politicians who put together the Australian Federation must be seen as impressive.” He was attracted to a biography of Edmund Barton because he was a leading figure who saw Federation “as a means of reconciling provincial diversity with the establishment of a national polity”; thus Barton enabled Bolton to resolve some of his own tensions between the metropolitan and the marginal. One of his favourite metaphors was “the belly and the limbs,” drawn from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, which argues the interdependence of belly and body. The central belly, or Commonwealth, however much resented for “cupboarding the viand,” does digest and distribute nourishment to the limbs of the states. Throughout his life, he was a strong and thoughtful champion of the federal invention that is Canberra. “Most other nations would be proud of such an achievement,” he declared in his Boyer Lectures. “It is a symptom of the Australian disease of self-hatred that we knock it.”

Spoils and Spoilers, then, was upbeat, ecological, literary, federal and urban. Bolton, like Barry Humphries, drew inspiration from Australian suburbia – but for him it was a source not of self-mockery but of a rather surprising radicalism. When the revised edition was published in 1992 – a time Bolton described as replete with gloom – his publishers assured readers that “Professor Bolton… reaffirms the message of hope from the first edition, that Australians can influence governments and markets to ensure the quality of urban and rural environments.” And he wanted his book to make a difference. He advised his publishers: “Every member of parliament should have [a copy] – at least those who read.” •

This is an extract from A Historian for All Seasons: Essays for Geoffrey Bolton, edited by Stuart Macintyre, Lenore Layman and Jenny Gregor, published by Monash University Publishing.

The post Tearing down and building up appeared first on Inside Story.

But the other risk is that the Coalition, and Labor, will accept it as it is, and saddle Australia with a second-best solution – a solution that will be expensive and contentious to change once it becomes clear that the targets it’s designed to achieve are inadequate.

Finkel’s plan has been sold to us as the cheapest solution, and the one that could at last bring the two sides of politics together. But it is only the cheapest solution if the assumptions under which it was modelled turn out to be correct. That is highly unlikely.

And it will only enable our politicians to bury their differences on climate change if it does deliver lower power prices, energy security, and much lower emissions beyond 2030 – and doing that will probably demand faster change than the gentle pace of emissions reduction assumed in the report’s modelling.

The press gallery, as always, is focused on the politics of the issue, and infighting within the Coalition has given it lots to feed on. But we need to focus on the Finkel report itself, and the blueprint it sets down for our energy and emissions future.

In December, Alan Finkel and his colleagues on the review implicitly recommended an emissions intensity scheme, or EIS. The prime minister promptly ruled it out. So now, instead, the Finkel team has proposed a clean energy target, or CET. Is their second preference as good a way as their first to meet the report’s three targets: lower prices, greater energy security, and lower emissions? If it isn’t, what might be the consequences for us?

We need to walk into this with open eyes and informed minds. So far, the electricity industry and environmental groups have greeted Finkel’s report with relief. Sure, no participants or informed observers apart from Finkel and the government he serves seem to think the CET is the best way forward. Industry and environmentalists alike would prefer the EIS that Finkel and his colleagues implicitly recommended in their preliminary report last December. Environmentalists have made a number of criticisms of the CET, the report’s detailed modelling, its implausibly low assumptions on emissions reduction after 2030, and its clunky and expensive solution to the need to provide back-up storage. We’ll elaborate on them in a moment.

Essentially, though, environmentalists and the electricity industry alike just want to end the debate. They want agreement on a scheme that will work, under rules that both sides of politics will accept. This would remove the political uncertainty that is seen as having blocked the investment we need in new generators (or storage systems) to replace the coal and gas plants closing down.

I share that view, as I’ve argued here several times. It is important to close this long, fruitless debate and move on. But it’s also important that we move on in a vehicle that will take us where we want to go: to lower prices (ideally, much lower prices), greater security of supply, and lower emissions (and that means much lower emissions).

We know from experience that if the CET is adopted and fails to meet one or more of these three goals, we will have to reopen the debate all over again – and it could be politically and financially very difficult to abandon it for a better option. It’s better to get it right first time.

So far, with a few exceptions that have attracted far less attention than they deserve, criticism of the CET has come mostly from the Abbotteer right of the Liberal and National parties. A minority of Coalition MPs want to keep building coal-fired power stations, no matter what their economics, their emissions, or their future viability.

As I’ve noted before, no generator has built a new coal-fired station anywhere in eastern Australia for a decade. The last one in New South Wales opened twenty-four years ago, the last one in Victoria twenty-one years ago. The modelling for the Finkel report concluded that – regardless of whether the government adopts an EIS, a CET, or does nothing at all – no further coal-fired or gas-fired stations will be built within the national electricity market.

Only an ideologically driven government would contemplate adding – or guaranteeing – a new coal-fired station now. The three big electricity firms (AGL, EnergyAustralia and Origin) have made it clear they won’t build one. But to placate the Abbotteer minority in its ranks, Malcolm Turnbull and Josh Frydenberg are now considering offering taxpayers’ money to guarantee the finances of a coal-fired power station, if anyone will build it.

No doubt they’re expecting that it will be a hollow offer, because no firm will take it up. And they’re probably right. But Turnbull and Frydenberg are caught in a wedge of Abbott’s making. If they don’t offer some significant concession to the climate denialist fringe, the Coalition will be split on this issue, with political risks that Turnbull cannot ignore. Yet if they bow to that pressure, it will surely rule out the bipartisanship they are trying to achieve.

Labor, too, has political constraints it can’t ignore. It is far more likely to lose lower house seats to the Greens than the Coalition is to lose them to One Nation. No one could seriously expect it to agree to put taxpayers’ money behind a new coal-fired station.

Indeed, with the Essential poll showing that only 18 per cent of Australians want our future power stations to burn coal rather than use renewable energy, it’s hard to see how it would get through the Senate. It shouldn’t even get through the joint party room. The poll found only 26 per cent of Coalition voters want more coal-fired plants, whereas 57 per cent prefer our future power system to be based on renewables.

The other message that comes out strongly from the Essential poll is how crucial it is that the new blueprint doesn’t add to electricity prices. The poll found 75 per cent of voters would support a clean energy target if it didn’t increase their power bills. But only 41 per cent would support it if it raised prices 5 per cent, and just 21 per cent would support it if it raised prices by 10 per cent.

That is a red line to the government: there is no voter support for a scheme that will raise power prices. And it’s perfectly understandable when electricity and gas will soon cost over three times more than at the start of the century, just seventeen and a half years ago.

As energy specialists Bob Lim and David Headberry argued last week in a terse letter to the Financial Review, the Finkel report made things harder for itself by failing to examine why this catastrophe has happened, and how those price rises could be unwound. Frydenberg took one crucial step this week by terminating the transmission networks’ right to appeal to the all-too-friendly Australian Competition Tribunal against price decisions by the Australian Energy Regulator. He told journalists the Tribunal’s decisions on appeal have already cost consumers $6.5 billion. Good on him, but this is shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. We need a mechanism to wind network prices back – and fast.

The Finkel report’s second weakness in relation to costs has been pointed out by many people. This is the proposal to require new renewable energy plants to arrange their own energy backup for when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine. This is a cumbersome, expensive way to solve a problem that could be resolved more cheaply and effectively by setting up a national energy storage market.

At the National Press Club this week, Finkel argued that he envisaged the government making renewable energy generators arrange security only for 10 per cent of their output. But that only emphasises the limitations of his plan; we need solutions that provide backup for existing plants – coal, gas and renewables – as well as new ones. This way of doing it adds considerably to the cost of new renewable plants, which are the only ones being built. That can only push electricity prices up.

The problems caused by the intermittent output of renewables are real, but this is the wrong solution. Frydenberg should head it off by commissioning his department to look for solutions that will be cheaper and cover the whole electricity market.

But the biggest weakness of the report is that, as Giles Parkinson argued last week in Inside Story, it is clearly aimed at a political end. When his preferred solution of an EIS was swept off the table in a moment of prime ministerial weakness, Finkel and his team then set about making the case for the second-best solution, a CET, and depicting it as if it were really the best option after all.

It isn’t. The shortcomings of the modelling – carried out by the respected Jacobs group, but under instructions from the Finkel team – were well demonstrated in Monday’s Australian by Adelaide economics professor Paul Kerin. Jacobs was commissioned to model only a single, implausibly mild set of assumptions about future emissions targets, and to ignore any consumer response to price rises. Many critical assumptions were not spelt out in the modelling report.

Crucially, the modelling assumes that Australia’s emissions reductions are spread evenly across all sectors, even though the cost of abatement varies hugely from one sector to another. The biggest contributor to Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions is burning coal; we now have cheap ways to replace that. But we don’t have any way to stop cows and sheep burping and farting methane, which is the second-biggest contributor. It is simply not plausible to demand that farmers cut their cows’ emissions by the 28 per cent reduction that is Australia’s target for 2030 – let alone the 60 per cent reduction in emissions the modelling assumes for 2050.

I can’t believe that a Coalition government would try to impose the same emissions reductions on each sector, regardless of cost or feasibility. If it did, it would further increase the costs of meeting Australia’s greenhouse gas commitments, costs that would have to be borne one way or other by households. A sensible government would demand more emissions reduction from sectors in which the abatement costs are cheapest, as in electricity, to protect those sectors (and sub-sectors) where abatement is either expensive or impossible.

Why does this issue matter so much? Because, as Kerin points out, the Finkel report failed to disclose that its modelling found very different abatement costs for the two schemes. With an EIT, it found, greenhouse gas emissions could be reduced for $7.50 a tonne (a mere fraction of the price we expected a decade ago). But to reduce emissions via a CET would cost $10.50 a tonne – 40 per cent more. The gap in resource costs was similar.

Then how did Jacobs find that the CET would be slightly cheaper for consumers than an EIS? The answer is not spelt out in its report, but it appears to assume that the CET creates no pressure to close Victoria’s brown coal stations, which it assumes remain the cheapest coal stations to operate – even after the Andrews government trebled the price they pay for coal. The modelling appears to assume that in 2050 both Loy Yang A and Loy Yang B will still be operating, even though the first by then will be more than sixty years old, and the second well into its fifties.

I don’t understand how anyone in their right mind could take that seriously. Yet the Finkel panel did. If it hadn’t, it would have had to report, yet again, that the cheapest way forward is to adopt an EIS.

The panel’s findings also depend on its assumption of a low level of ambition for Australia’s emissions reductions after 2030. Its modelling appears to assume that Australia will adopt a target for 2050 of emitting about 215 million tonnes a year of greenhouse gases, roughly half as much as in 2030, and a 65 per cent reduction from 2005 levels.

The national electricity market, which generates about three-quarters of our electricity, would still be emitting sixty-three million tonnes of those gases. Under the modelling assumptions, the national electricity market will take until about 2040 to reach the same emissions intensity (that is, average greenhouse gas emissions per megawatt hour of electricity sent out) as the United States and Canada have today. By 2050 it will finally have caught up with the intensity levels of Europe today.

How can anyone accept these assumptions? Or the results they generate, which form the basis of the Finkel report’s recommendations?

I suspect that by 2050 net greenhouse gas emissions from the national electricity grid will be close to zero. The Jacobs modelling itself concludes that the only new plants added to the grid in that time will be renewables – and on current trends, they will be so cheap, and so well supported by storage systems (if needed), that the last coal and gas plants will have long closed their doors.

As Finkel acknowledged this week at the National Press Club, the price of renewables is falling so fast it is almost impossible for decision-makers to keep up. One example: his report’s modelling assumed that electricity from wind power stations opening in 2020 would cost on average $92 per megawatt hour, or MWh.

No, it won’t. Last month, Origin Energy signed up to buy electricity from the proposed Stockyard Hill project near Ballarat for less than $60 per MWh. In real terms, the ACT government will pay a similar price over the next twenty years for electricity from the next expansion of the Hornsdale wind farm, 200 kilometres north of Adelaide. AGL’s ballpark assumptions now are $65 per MWh for wind and $75 per MWh for a large-scale solar project like the 200 MW solar plant the NSW government has just finalised for Balranald, the largest facility of its kind in the southern hemisphere.

No coal plant built now could supply power at that price. That’s why the power companies now focus solely on renewable energy plants. The technical issues that caused last year’s South Australian blackout all have solutions that simply need to be applied. And for twenty-four-hour power security, the costs of large-scale battery storage are plunging, and at this rate it will soon provide the affordable solution to the sceptics’ question: what do we do when the sun goes down and the wind stops blowing?

The technology is progressing so fast that it could sweep the whole debate into irrelevance. But it would help if we adopted the scheme that promises to reduce emissions at least cost, and that can be most easily scaled up to meet bigger targets. That is an emissions intensity scheme. •

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Of course, in the grand scheme of things, what Australia does or doesn’t do counts for little. That’s not a justification for doing nothing or doing the wrong thing – with a couple of exceptions, no single country counts for much. The biggest exception to this rule is the United States, of course, followed by China and India. So the real concern is that the Trump administration is adopting a similarly retrograde position.

The good news is that it’s almost certainly too late for Trump and Turnbull to derail the progress that’s being made towards a decarbonised and sustainable global economy. They are engaged in gesture politics designed to appeal to culture warriors on the right, not a serious strategy to revive coal and nuclear power.

The case of nuclear power is the clearest. The only hope for nuclear power is the adoption of a single low-cost design that can be built in large numbers, thereby achieving economies of scale. France managed this in the 1970s, but no one (including France) has managed to repeat the trick.

Until quite recently, it seemed that the best hope for a modern, safe “Generation III+” design was the Westinghouse AP1000. But over the past couple of months, it’s become apparent that the AP1000 is dead in the water. 

Toshiba, which bought Westinghouse largely for its nuclear power division, is writing off billions of dollars, and seems unlikely to stay in the nuclear business after the remaining projects (all overdue and overtime) are completed. The other candidates in developed countries, including the EPR and CANDU reactors, are in an even worse state.

So the nuclear faithful have turned their attention elsewhere and found a project that is on time and possibly even on budget. It’s being built in the United Arab Emirates by Korean company KEPCO, and consists of four plants using KEPCO’s APR-1400 design. That’s been the basis for some new optimism.

A quick look at Wikipedia’s APR-1400 article suggests this optimism may be misplaced. This is Gen III design, dating back to the 1990s, hasn’t yet been certified as safe in the United States, and may not be. While the UAE project appears to have gone well, projects in South Korea have been subject to delays and cost overruns. The UAE deal was signed in 2009; there hasn’t been another export deal since then. And although more plants were planned for South Korea, they appear to have been shelved. There hasn’t been a new APR-1400 plant started there since 2013.

Programs in China and India are also faltering. It seems highly unlikely that China will achieve its official target of 58 gigawatts of nuclear power by 2020, and India’s flagship program, a fast-breeder reactor at Kalpakkam originally planned for 2010, has been delayed again and again.

In summary, it’s highly unlikely that the construction of new nuclear reactors will keep pace with the retirement of old ones, let alone make a significant contribution to replacing fossil fuels. About the best hope is that Japan might restart some of the reactors closed since Fukushima.

In relation to coal, we see the same yawning gap between global reality and the rhetoric of Australian and American politicians. Large-scale cancellations in China and elsewhere have greatly reduced the number of proposed coal-fired power plants, and global coal consumption has already peaked. Yet Turnbull and Trump continue to hold out the false hope that jobs in coal can be preserved indefinitely, and even that jobs already lost can be restored.

Turnbull’s claims have been boosted, at least for the moment, by the Adani Group’s proposal to build a huge Carmichael coalmine in the Galilee Basin, along with a rail line connecting the mine (and other proposed mines) to the Abbot Point coal terminal.

Back in December last year, CEO Gautam Adani came to Queensland and gave a very positive view of the proposed Carmichael mine. Things went pretty quiet for a while after that, though it appeared that a final announcement on the project would be made in April. Now, premier Annastacia Palaszczuk and a number of lesser dignitaries have been to India and brought back the news that the project will shortly be approved by the Adani board, at least if Mr Adani has his way, which seems guaranteed.

That came as a surprise to those of us who have long argued that the project is hopelessly uneconomic, even on the optimistic view that the current uptick in the coal price will be sustained. But it turns out that there’s an asterisk. The approval will be subject to finance.

Anyone who’s ever sold a house knows that this means nothing is guaranteed. In Adani’s case, the initial stages of the project will need $2.5 billion in bank finance, as well as a concessional loan of up to $1 billion from the federal government’s Northern Australia slush fund. You might think that at least the second of these is a safe bet. But Aurizon (the former Queensland Rail) has come up with a competing proposal that doesn’t have the problems associated with Adani’s opaque (to put it mildly) financial structure.

The real problem, though, is with the banks. Of the big Australian banks, Westpac is the only one not to have ruled itself out. But it will presumably want only a small share of the risk, as part of an international consortium, and there are no obvious candidates. Moreover, given the combination of reputational and project risk associated with a massive coalmine at a time when coal is clearly on the way out, any sane lender would demand a hefty rate of interest and lots of security. It’s hard to see Adani coming up with either.

So, it seems likely that Adani is still playing for time. We’ll probably see a very big announcement with a very small asterisk. Crunch time won’t come until June, when they need to come up with real money.

Why would Gautam Adani do this? One possibility is that he has pursued the process in the hope that governments or courts will block it, raising the prospect of a compensation claim. If so, he looks to be out of luck. Whether feigned or real, the public enthusiasm of the Queensland Labor government, along with that of Turnbull and the Coalition, will make it very hard to find a political scapegoat.

Another possibility is that the project is being kept alive to avoid the need to write off the mine, which is currently valued in Adani’s books at nearly $1 billion. A write-off might lead, in turn, to a credit downgrade or even a breach of debt covenants, though the opacity of Adani’s structure makes it impossible to tell for sure. Regardless, most of Adani’s attention is now focused on renewables, where the prospects look a lot brighter.

In making that shift, Adani is emulating the world as a whole. The rise of renewable energy has not only transformed future prospects but is already having a major impact. For the third year in a row, global carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector have remained nearly stable, despite continued economic growth. 

A lot more needs to happen, but with the cost of renewables steadily falling and awareness of the health and climate costs spreading, there’s every reason to hope that the decarbonisation of electricity supply will happen more rapidly than anyone expected. After that, the big challenge is to electrify transport. The technology is there, so this is mostly a matter of renewed political will.

Meanwhile, Trump’s failure on Obamacare suggests he will have a much tougher time reversing Obama’s climate policies than he expected; the same has been true for Abbott and Turnbull in Australia. Despite the policy shifts, coal-fired power plants keep closing and there is no likelihood of new ones.

The only contribution made by the prime minister and his predecessor has been to create enough uncertainty to choke investment in renewables, thereby reducing the security and coherence of an electricity supply system already in a mess thanks to two decades of misconceived market reforms. Turnbull’s Snowy Hydro proposal, even if it’s only a thought bubble, totally undercuts the free-market and anti-renewables line he and his government have been pushing ever since he capitulated to the denialists to get the top job.

In a few years’ time, Donald Trump and Malcolm Turnbull will almost certainly be consigned to history. They will be remembered for their efforts to destroy the global climate in the service of culture war politics. More importantly, it seems likely that those efforts will be remembered as a failure in a world that has left fossil fuels and nuclear power behind. •

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The only information we have now is from the Australian Energy Market Operator, which publishes a simple graph and table of future projects on its website. It shows committed investment amounting to just 634 megawatts of new electricity generation – 583 MW of wind and 51 MW of solar – within the national electricity grid. Proposals exist for gas-fired stations, but none are definite. And there’s not a single plan for another coal-fired station.

To put that in perspective, the extra wind and solar generation would add a little over 1 per cent to the capacity of the national grid – if the gain wasn’t dwarfed by the 1618 MW of coal- and gas-fired power stations that have recently closed, and the further 3835 MW, overwhelmingly coal-fired, slated for closure. (The closures include Australia’s biggest polluter, the fifty-year-old Hazelwood power station, near Morwell.)

The net effect is that the capacity of the national electricity grid (which supplies about 75 per cent of Australia’s electricity) will shrink from 49,872 MW to 45,053 MW. That’s a reduction of almost 10 per cent in the capacity of a network that had to shut down supplies to parts of South Australia and New South Wales last week because of a lack of operational capacity. And this is happening under a government that boasts its energy policy will deliver energy security. Wonders never cease. 

Power stations are long-term investments, typically planned to last thirty years or more. So an investor today has to plan for the station to be viable until 2050 – under whatever pricing regimes may emerge between now and then. It doesn’t matter how many lumps of coal silly ministers wave around in parliament, or how many times the PM makes silly appeals for companies to invest in new coal-fired stations, company directors can’t choose to do stupid things with investors’ money. If energy security is our goal, then we need a credible bipartisan framework for energy policy.

Exactly that plea was directed to the government this week by an extraordinarily broad coalition of interests. Not just environmental groups, but also the energy-intensive aluminium, concrete and steel industries, the electricity generators, the transmission companies and the big energy consumers. And not only the ACTU and the Australian Industry Group but also the Business Council. (It is worth noting which hard-right business groups didn’t sign the statement: the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, the Minerals Council, and the National Farmers’ Federation – even though the farmers it represents are the biggest victims of climate change.)

The joint statement is short, and worth reading:

No room for partisan politics in energy

Representatives of Australian communities, including civil society, households, workers, investors, business energy users and energy suppliers today challenged all political leaders to stop partisan antics and work together to reform Australia’s energy systems and markets to deliver the reliable, affordable and clean energy that is critical to wellbeing, employment and prosperity.

There is simply no room for partisan politics when the reliability, affordability and sustainability of Australia’s energy system is at stake.

The status quo of policy uncertainty, lack of coordination and unreformed markets is increasing costs, undermining investment and worsening reliability risks. This impacts all Australians, including vulnerable low-income households, workers, regional communities and trade-exposed industries.

The finger pointing will not solve our energy challenges. More than a decade of this has made most energy investments impossibly risky. This has pushed prices higher while hindering transformational change of our energy system. The result is enduring dysfunction in the electricity sector.

We need mature, considered debate. Market reform can’t happen unless the Commonwealth and States agree, and policies can’t last and motivate investment without broad cross-party support. Politicians from all sides of politics and all levels of government need to come together to work through the necessary solutions to our energy market challenges. COAG has already established a strong policy process for this – the Finkel Review. Politicians need to back it and work with it…

As the preliminary report of the Finkel Review correctly notes, many of the technological, economic and consumer trends transforming our energy systems are irreversible. Policy and market designs need to evolve if investors are to deliver the energy services Australians require at a price they can afford. A raft of reforms are needed to encourage and support flexibility throughout the system. The next stage of the Finkel Review should be an opportunity to explore these possibilities and develop a comprehensive and integrated suite of reforms. Policy should be implemented promptly with broad-based political support.

There is broad agreement across Australia’s energy users and suppliers on the urgency of fixing the situation. All sides of politics and all levels of government share responsibility for the current state of our energy systems – and for taking action with the energy industry and its customers to improve it. A collective failure to act would come at a cost to all Australians.

For the business groups involved, it was a courageous statement. It gave Turnbull political cover to change tack, drop the partisan mudslinging, and lead a bipartisan push for a credible, lasting policy that would drive down emissions and give electricity generators the certainty needed for their thirty-year investments. It was another opportunity for Turnbull and Barnaby Joyce to end the point-scoring games and focus on an issue that matters.

But no. Once again, Turnbull and Joyce backed away from mature leadership and went back to bashing Labor up in the schoolyard of Question Time. Treasurer Scott Morrison, equally juvenile, waved around a lump of coal. Forget the gold pass for retired MPs; the real scandal is that we are paying these guys to run the country.

Remember where we are coming from. Australia remains, by some way, the largest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the Western world, and those emissions are growing. While the government claims we are on track to meet our commitment to reduce emissions by 5 per cent by 2020, its own figures show them rising again: from 527 million tonnes in 2013–14 (the last year of the carbon tax) to 537 million tonnes in 2015–16.

Since the carbon tax was dropped, our emissions have grown by roughly 1 per cent a year, mostly from electricity generation. With no carbon tax, coal-fired emissions increased; high gas prices caused gas-fired stations to close, or reduce loads; and a drought in Tasmania meant less hydro generation. In two years, emissions from electricity generation swelled by 4.6 per cent, from 180.7 million tonnes to 189.1 million.

The real disaster over those years was the abolition of the carbon tax (or rather, the emissions trading scheme it was set to morph into). The rest of the Abbott government’s performance on climate change was not as bad as we had feared. Against the odds, Greg Hunt as environment minister and Julie Bishop as foreign minister got the government to agree to a target of reducing Australia’s emissions in 2030 by 26–28 per cent from their 2005 levels; it might not sound much, but it equates to a 50 per cent fall in emissions per capita, in just twenty-five years.

Hunt also secured a Climate Change Authority review to advise how the reduction should be achieved. He preserved the Renewable Energy Target as the main driver of emissions reductions. And his design for the Direct Action policy included a “safeguards” clause allowing the government to order future reductions in emissions in specific sectors – such as electricity. Hunt didn’t get many plaudits from the media for his three years as environment minister, but winning some of those battles in the Abbott government can’t have been easy. He deserved better reviews.

Turnbull was once prepared to lose the party leadership over his support for a bipartisan policy to reduce emissions. Sure, he had promised the Nationals this time around that he would not bring back an emissions trading scheme, but that doesn’t rule out introducing an emissions intensity scheme, or EIS, to drive down emissions from the electricity sector, using the safeguards clause in the government’s own Direct Action policy.

With the election over, and with Labor having moved towards a policy resembling an EIS, the time was right for Turnbull to step up to the plate and bring Joyce, the Nationals and a critical mass of the Liberals to support a “mature, considered debate” leading to reforms that both sides could endorse. (The Greens and One Nation would oppose it, of course, for opposite reasons, but getting a Labor–Liberal–National agreement is what matters.) Labor’s environment spokesman, Mark Butler, has made no secret that this is what he wants, and Turnbull had made an inspired choice in appointing Josh Frydenberg, a bright, ambitious potential party leader, as environment and energy minister.

More support came from the Climate Change Authority, now led by former National Farmers’ Federation chief executive Wendy Craik, with former Coalition heavyweights John Sharp (Nationals) and Kate Carnell (Liberal) as board members. In an admirable report on how to meet the 2030 target, the authority urged the government to adopt an EIS as the central means of switching electricity generation from coal to renewables or other low-emission options. The EIS would require generators to reduce their emissions each year, on a straight line towards zero emissions from the electricity sector by 2050. The operators’ options would include closing units, retrofitting cleaner technology, or buying excess reductions from other generators. And, of course, any new plant would have low or zero emissions.

The report avoided the politically charged subject of state government renewable energy targets, but it did argue that there should be no further extension of the federal Renewable Energy Target, which would lapse in 2030, and the EIS should gradually take over the job of driving emission reductions. This also implies there should be no new state renewables targets.

This is essentially the compromise package that business, unions and environmentalists are now urging, almost pleading for. Please, stop the partisan games and give us a realistic policy. The Coalition should drop its opposition to an EIS; Labor should drop its state-based targets. Let’s have policy set at one level of government, and endorsed by both sides.

With no support from government, the Climate Change Authority’s report sank. In December, it was the turn of chief scientist Dr Alan Finkel and his colleagues to put their view, in a preliminary report on their inquiry into the future security of the national electricity market, set up in the wake of South Australia’s brief power blackout in September 2016. Rather than play the blame game, the review looked to the future:

The transition to a lower-emissions economy is under way and cannot be reversed. Ensuring that the transition is smooth will require major investments in assets with long life spans. Policy stability and predictability is necessary to ensure that investors have confidence to build the assets that will deliver the required stability and reliability of electricity supply.

It, too, endorsed an EIS as the central element – hardly surprising, since Finkel was a member of the Craik review a few months earlier. Frydenberg responded with some sensible, encouraging words of support, but he was immediately slapped down by Turnbull, who proceeded to rule it out. In so doing, he ruled out another opportunity to solve one of Australia’s problems rather than try to exploit it for political ends.

It was the same this week when the business groups tried to offer the government a way out, which it rejected. Instead, the leader who told us in 2015 he wanted to lead adult discussions has tried to imply that South Australia’s renewable energy policies are responsible for 100 kph winds knocking over transmission towers last September, for breakdowns in the Victorian transmission system in December, and now for a series of brief but untimely breakdowns at gas-fired plants that combined with low winds and extreme heat to force another brief interruption to SA’s power supply last week.

Weak leaders can choose to play an issue for short-term political advantage, as Malcolm Turnbull is doing now to shore up his support in the party room. A strong leader, such as Turnbull had hoped to be when he took office, would focus on delivering what is in Australia’s long-term interests, winning political and community support for policy.

Turnbull and the Coalition would win far more kudos by tackling and solving the problems of energy security and reducing emissions than they will by trying to use them as issues with which to thump Labor over the head. They should not be deluded by rave reviews for such tactics from backbenchers and the Murdoch press. Voters elected them to fix the problems, not to blame Labor for them.

This is a test of leadership: both for Turnbull, who is wasting his opportunities, and for Joyce, the man who more than anyone can now make the Turnbull government work, or send the Coalition back into opposition. •

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Great. But what exactly is the Coalition doing about them? On the evidence to date, not a whole lot, apart from blaming renewables for soaring wholesale electricity costs and promoting something called “clean coal,” despite all the evidence pointing to the fact that coal generation is not very clean, and not cheap. They are chasing the wrong target. Australia has experienced some extraordinarily high wholesale electricity prices this summer, and most of these price surges have come in states with little large-scale wind or solar.

It is the activities of the fossil fuel generators that are to blame. This is about competition, or the lack of it, and the fossil fuel generators have been going to extraordinary lengths to get rid of competition.

The Australian Energy Regulator, or AER, has been investigating more than half a dozen “high priced” events, as it is required to do when prices jump above $5,000/MWh. Some of the reports it has already completed make astonishing reading.

Take the events of last 18 November in New South Wales, when the spot price of electricity jumped to more than $11,700/MWh in the mid afternoon, and bids of more than $13,700 were recorded over seven different trading intervals during the course of the afternoon.

These are the sort of levels that have caused conservatives in politics and many in the media to hyperventilate about the level of renewable energy in South Australia, and the proposed state-based renewable energy targets in Victoria, Queensland and even the Northern Territory.

But here’s the irony. So far this year, as the table shows, high-priced events are forty (yes, forty) times more common in Queensland than in renewables-strong South Australia. Did we hear a peep of protest from the Coalition about this? No.

The importance of the November pricing event in New South Wales is that – like so many other similar events – it shouldn’t have happened; but it did, because two players in the market, Origin Energy and Snowy Hydro, without breaking the rules, were able to game the market and eradicate competition.

This is how they did it. According to the AER, a network constraint was imposed on the border between New South Wales and Victoria. These constraints are imposed when there is a risk of a network overload, and the way they work means that the generators in NSW act as sort of “gatekeepers.” If they increase generation, then it forces the Victorian generators out of the market, reducing competition.

This is exactly what Origin and Snowy Hydro did. According to the AER report, they bid 3,000MW of capacity to the price floor, flooding the market. That forced the Victorian generators, and most competition, out of the NSW market. It also put some caps on the output of some wind farms.

At the same time, according to the AER, Origin and Snowy “rebid the ramp rates” of their generators down to the minimum allowable by the rules. That ensured that the Victorian generators were kept out of the markets for as long as possible.

And what happened in the interim? Well, the NSW generators had a party. The lack of competition meant they could force prices up to their maximum level over seven consecutive bidding periods. “The price exceeded $13,600/MWh for seven dispatch intervals from 2.40 pm to 3.30 pm, inclusive,” the AER notes.

This was not an isolated incident. An unplanned outage on the interconnector linking Victoria to South Australia on 1 December created a similar constraint on that link. This was a few hours after a network fault in Victoria caused a widespread blackout in South Australia, leading the government and many in the media to blame renewable energy once again.

According to the AER, Origin Energy unexpectedly fired up its Mortlake gas power generator at 10am, when the link was still under constraint, forcing imports from Victoria out of the market and allowing the South Australian generators to have another pricing party, unencumbered by competition from interstate. According to the AER, Origin Energy’s actions helped force the market price up to the cap, and the price for the thirty-minute interval to $9175/MWh.

The party didn’t last long, though. The Australian Energy Market Operator instructed Origin to switch Mortlake off, because it was causing grid stability issues. Prices then dropped sharply. (You can read more about that in the AER’s report.) This lack of competition was the very same factor that drove prices sky-high in South Australia in July, when the interconnector was restricted for planned upgrades. And it is this similar lack of competition that has underpinned the extraordinary price rises – higher and longer-lasting than in South Australia – in Queensland these past few months.

See that table above again, absorb the fact that prices in Queensland this year have been as high as they were in South Australia last July when the link to Victoria was being upgraded, and wonder about the absence of conservative outrage.

The AER is currently investigating around half a dozen high-priced events. Even though the average of late afternoon spot prices has been more than $1000/MWh in Queensland, a price event is not investigated by the regulator until it gets above $5000/MWh. The market players know this and bid accordingly.

But the data goes to a fundamental point in the debate about electricity prices. This has nothing – nothing – to do with renewable energy, its costs or its variability. It is solely about the pricing power of the fossil fuel generators, most of them owned by the retailers who insist they are acting at all times in the best interests of their consumers.

South Australia and Queensland have typically been the markets with the least amount of competition. But the proliferation of wind energy in South Australia has changed that, and the fossil fuel generators have only been able to party – like they used to a decade ago, when such high-priced events were nearly a daily occurrence – when there are network problems.

Queensland, though, has little large-scale renewable energy capacity, although the construction of half a dozen large-scale solar plants in the next few months may change the market dynamics this year. Maybe that is why the government-owned generators have been so keen to profit while they can.

More renewables, and more competition, will undoubtedly reduce that pricing power. That is a given. But the Coalition and many in the mainstream media simply don’t want to know. They have barely reported on the high-priced events in Queensland and New South Wales, or on the real cause of those events in South Australia. Politics and ideology are at play. •

This article first appeared in RenewEconomy.

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Duration: 15 mins 10 secs

Producer: Peter Mares

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Roberts, a former coalminer and industry consultant, has quickly become Australia’s best-known, most outspoken and, if I may say, most absurd climate sceptic. Anyone who has seen Roberts during his recent TV appearances, especially on ABC TV’s Q&A, will be familiar with his belief that there is “not one piece of empirical evidence” that climate change is caused by humans.

I wonder, does Roberts know what empirical means? Synonyms of empirical include “observed” and “experimental” – both of which are used extensively in climate science – but here, for the sake of brevity, I’ll stick to observed climate evidence.

At the frontline of climate observation is a national and international network of point-based weather observation stations. In Australia, some of these date back as far as the 1860s, with many more set up in 1910. (The United States and Europe have longer-established stations, and a network of British station provides observations from as far back as 1659.) Since 1979, gridded temperature readings, meticulously assembled from the highest-quality stations, have been supplemented by satellite observations. The story all these readings tell is the same: global temperature is well and truly on the rise.

Other observed indicators of current and past climate have also become available. Ice cores, for example, can tell us what the climate was like tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years ago. As new ice accumulates, air bubbles are trapped, and with them the greenhouse gas concentrations at that time, inclusive of carbon dioxide. Since carbon dioxide traps heat in the lower ten to twelve kilometres of the atmosphere, it is a good indicator of past temperature. These ice cores indicate that global temperature is not only higher, but also increasing at a rate faster than any seen during the last 800,000 years (though likely longer).

We also have extensive glacier records, sea-ice observations, sea-level altimeters, and ocean observations. All of these empirical observations are clearly consistent with a warming climate. Glaciers are steadily retreating or disappearing altogether, the Arctic sea-ice level was at its lowest on record last winter, sea levels elsewhere are rising at increasingly faster rates, and the global ocean is steadily warming.

If all this isn’t empirical evidence of a warming climate, then nothing is.

Malcolm Roberts also thinks that scientists have it the wrong way round: that rising temperatures cause carbon dioxide to increase, rather than vice versa. He might need to have a look at the work of nineteenth-century scientists John Tyndall and Svante Arrhenius, who (respectively) demonstrated how greenhouse gases work, and revealed the specific heat-trapping properties of carbon dioxide.

Tyndall’s and Arrhenius’s lab experiments demonstrated that under specific, very cold conditions – conditions that occur ten to twelve kilometres from the Earth’s surface – carbon dioxide absorbs and re-emits particular bands of long-wave radiation that amplify heat trapped in the atmosphere. Their work was undertaken well before anthropogenic climate change was even a “thing,” though Arrhenius did hypothesise that burning fossil fuels could increase global temperatures. In other words, the science of climate change is underpinned by physical, law-abiding, lab-based science.

Another chestnut Roberts relies on is the view that “there has been no global warming for about twenty years.” Well, fourteen of the fifteen hottest years on record have occurred since 2000, each of the past three decades has been hotter than the previous one, and 2016 is forecast to be the hottest year globally, surpassing both 2014 and 2015. Meanwhile, all other indicators of anthropogenic climate change discussed above have continued to get stronger over this period. There is variability in the climate system, of course, and so even with an underlying warming signal, non-record-breaking years are still likely. Manystudies have shown that the lack of a clear trend in global temperature between 1998 and 2014 was due to this sort of variability. Roberts would be wise to realise that this misconception has been debunked many times.

During Q&A, Roberts also said that the 1940s were warmer than now. It’s here that it is clearest how little time and energy Roberts has invested in his research. The 1940s comparison goes back to an old argument over which was the hottest year – in the United States. About a decade ago, there were, ahem, heated discussions as to whether 2006 (and prior to this, 1998) was hotter than 1934 (yes, Roberts even got the decade wrong). In fact, 1934 ranks as the fifth hottest year for the US, behind 2015, 2012, 2006, and 1998. It is important to remember that regional climates change at different rates to the global average, thanks to the mix of influences they experience.

Now comes my favourite – the argument that nature alone determines the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. If, by nature, Roberts means the oceans and the biosphere acting as carbon sinks, then I guess there is some distant truth in the statement, for nature does indeed remove this gas from the air. But all sinks have their limit, and as the oceans continue to warm, their ability to suck up atmospheric carbon diminishes. We are also clearing forests at alarming rates, and re-releasing the carbon they have sequestered for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. On top of this, we’re knowingly burning ancient carbon sinks in the form of fossil fuels – something that nature did not intend.

Not to be outdone by his milder fellow-travellers, Roberts also accuses NASA, the United Nations, the CSIRO and the Bureau of Meteorology of being corrupt participants in a global scam. Honestly, I don’t even know where to start with this one. Roberts believes that NASA put men on the moon yet can’t maintain an accurate global temperature dataset. He thinks that all climate scientists are in on the scam, though I can’t imagine why, particularly when we have to deal with foolish and reckless sceptics like Roberts himself.

In a recent interview, esteemed climate communicator John Cook stated that it is unlikely the plethora of actual evidence will ever change Roberts’s view. But it is disturbing that the fallacies our new senator perpetuates may sway some people. We can only hope that their research into anthropogenic climate change is conducted more comprehensively than Roberts’s. •

The post Malcolm Roberts versus a century and a half of science appeared first on Inside Story.

In my mid twenties and freshly home from my first trip overseas, I therefore wrote a brief letter to Eric Rolls, telling him that A Million Wild Acres was one of a handful of books about Australia that I would like to put in the hands of any visitor to help him or her understand my country. Now I would make greater claims for it. I think it is the best environmental history yet written of Australia, and I would hope it could be read not just by visitors but by all Australians. Eric was seduced by the vastness, mystery and wildness of the forest beside his farm, and by its “scented tunnels.” He ended up writing, as he put it, “the story of a forest which grew up and drove men out.”

I wrote a letter to Eric not because I wanted or expected a reply, but because I had to write it. But he did reply. He told me of the work he was doing on his history of the Chinese in Australia (which became Sojourners), offering me a brief, vivid snippet of his writing life. I now know that Eric got lots of letters like mine, and that he replied to more than I would have thought possible. I’ve been looking at his correspondence in the archives.

Eric’s papers, mountains of them, are in at least three libraries. He conducted a quiet, constant, private dialogue with his readers in parallel with his public writings and presentations. With such letters, Eric continued his quest to educate his fellow citizens, one by one. And among the correspondence you can find testimony from people moved by his books to write to him, even when writing does not always come easily to them. Some people normally unfamiliar with written words are clearly living Eric’s words. One wrote in stumbling script of A Million Wild Acres: “This is the first book I have ever read. Thank you for writing it. I enjoyed it so much I am now going to try reading other books.”

Another correspondent wrote at more length and with spelling difficulties:

Dear Eric,

Just a note or a few words, to say how much I liked your two books, A Million Wild Acres, “They All Ran Wild.” The best I have seen. I will get your other books and read them soon.

I would of liked to been with you, and read all the books and papers, and places you went to-get all the true information. A great bit of work. I do not no how many times I have read “A Million Wild Acres.” I no I have read “They All Ran Wild” twice last month.

… I lived all my early life at Pilliga. I will tell you more later. I like reading History of Australia. And you love the Bush, and no all about it.

… If you are ever over this way call in and have a yarn, and stay with your family. We have plenty of room. I will write again to you soon, hope you get some rain. “And keep writing,” all the best.

Yours truly…

And here are the words of another reader who admitted (like me) that she did not often write fan letters, but in this case could not stop herself: “I enjoyed your book more than I am capable of expressing. You made the Pilliga come alive on the page and I hope you make trillions… On nearly every page I found something to exclaim over (mostly I exclaimed how on earth did this man have time to fit in the farming!).”

Eric often wondered that himself. He wrote of the constant battle between words and acres, between the soil as a source of his originality and the farm as a demanding distraction. He knew that the battle to win time for writing was part of the necessary discipline. When I talked to Eric in his seventy-seventh year, he declared that “unless you feel so intensely about writing that you are prepared to murder anybody who stops you getting to your desk, it’s no use thinking of being a writer.”

In his book Doorways: A Year of the Cumberdeen Diaries (1989), Eric describes his workspace, his desk, as it was at his farm “Cumberdeen” on Pretty Plains. He always wrote with his back to a broad window, the words in front of him, the acres behind. “The imagination works better against a blank wall,” he says. But the sun on his back warmed him, reminding him of the outside world he was trying to capture on paper. Of his silky oak desk, he says: “Everything on it knows its place. Words come to it that I am not expecting.” On that desk were a pile of handwritten notebooks, eleven dictionaries and books of words, and a typed outline of his current book. He added five new pages of writing to the pile each day. Empty blocks of lined A4 paper sat beside him, as did the two fountain pens that had written all his books. In front of him was a large, disconcerting pile of letters that needed answering, and that we now know he would eventually get to. There was also a big splinter of fragrant sandalwood, a tail feather from a swamp pheasant, little soapstone turtles from China, a branding iron and two blocks of mulga.

Let’s imagine Eric there at his desk, wrestling with words and acres in the late 1970s as the book he has always wanted to write materialises into chapters – but never fast enough! He described the battle in letters to Sue Ebury, the editor at Thomas Nelson Publishers with whom he worked on A Million Wild Acres, and also to his agent, Tim Curnow.

In October 1974, Eric offered the idea of the book to his publishers and they accepted it immediately and enthusiastically. He told them he hoped that it might be finished in seven months. But two years later the final writing had hardly begun. On the first of June 1976, with years of experience, observation and research behind him, he took a deep breath: “The frame of the book is already mostly planned – it is only wording to be considered.” Three months later he reported: “I’ve got within a fortnight of beginning to write and am getting excited.” Another year later, in September 1977, Eric explained to his publisher that he had not yet signed their contract because he was “frightened harvest is going to fall on me like a guillotine when there are two chapters still to go. I don’t want to let anyone down and enough money has come in to keep me writing until harvest – so I’ll just do my damndest and see how far I get.” “Most days,” he added, “I read about six hours and write for six – if it is not ready on time it won’t be for lack of trying.”

But the acres continually interrupted the words. Another year later, in September 1978, he explained:

I lost three precious weeks writing when the lad who was working here burnt himself as he began crop spraying – he is still off work but I’m back to the writing. The tractor we use for odd jobs was burnt completely. I had to finish spraying then do the summer ploughing. It is cruel changing over from writing to farming unexpectedly. And I’d been concentrating so hard I was not even living in this century when it happened.

“One nearly gets torn in halves sometimes trying to lead two lives,” he exclaimed. But “Without the farm there would have been no book, even if it delayed publication.” Eric believed that contact with the soil preserves a writer’s essential sense of the ridiculous. As a farmer, he reflected that “Some years one can look back with considerable self-mockery and realise that if one had done nothing at all one would be much better off.” And Eric was never afraid of getting his hands dirty. Instead of writing a general statement like “ploughing killed native plants and encouraged weeds,” he reported: “I have had well-worked cultivation paddocks growing dense weeds up to forty centimetres high. I crawled about them looking for native plants and could not find one.”

In his house, he virtually re-enacted the settlement process he was describing. Just getting the right pioneers into the right places at the right time was a demanding and arduous job. He recalled: “I lined all the men up against one wall – thirty-seven men – each had a pile of papers, each named, all their years, and then I had the map at the other end of the room. I’d pick up a pile and march the man across the room to his place on the map… You had to see him getting there.”

A reviewer of the book, the environmental historian and philosopher George Seddon, later described these early chapters of the book as “like the Book of Genesis, with its endless ‘And Joktan begat Almodad, and Sheleph and Hazarmaveth, and Jerah.’ There is a walk-on-walk-off cast of thousands, and the detail is numbing – but this is the Pilliga Book of Genesis, and I think the author was right to put it all in.”

In July 1979, Eric reflected on a job nearly complete:

The end of the Pilliga book is in sight, thank God. I’m appalled that it has run so long over time. Each estimate I made seemed certain – I know how much I can do a day. Then what seemed certain plans for the farm would come unstuck and I’d have to do a couple of months’ hard work. It is hard not to go on writing and leave it. But one has to be practical. If we went broke in the middle of the book it would cost more time than ever. And there is not much leeway on the land now. Fixed costs are enormous and increasing. As much as I love the farm, it will have to be sold. It will not only cost me too much time but too many books. I’m also afraid it will cost me years of my life. It is excruciatingly difficult each time coming back to an unfinished chapter. So much reading has to be done again – days of it.

And on 4 October that year, 1979, he records: “I’ve just written the last word of the Pilliga book.”

Three years of intense writing, in the available spaces. But for years before there had been the source material of experience, of life with the soil, of walking and talking the forest, collecting scats to analyse animal hairs, learning the names of plants, often for the first time, mastering in words the craft of the timber-getters. And all that correspondence! Eric’s papers spill out with letters requesting and receiving information: To the curator of mammals at the Australian Museum, “How rare is the rat kangaroo?”… and could they possibly, as one old-timer attested, “be seen hopping about in dozens on a moonlight night”? To the Patent Trade Marks and Design Office in Canberra, “Can you tell me anything about early patents for barbed wire in Australia?” To the secretary of RAS Kennel Control, “Can you tell me if there is still a breed of dog known as a staghound?” To the president of the Quirindi and District Historical Society, “Do you know exactly how the old acetylene lights worked?” To Mrs King of the Tamworth Historical Society, “Have you any local information about the construction of George Clarke’s stock yards at Boggabri – near Barber’s Lagoon?”

It is the detail that matters, and it is getting it right that matters, too. “Much of the game of writing history,” he declares at the start of the book, “is keeping it true.” And keeping it true, for Eric, means not just finding out what happened, but also finding a sense of wonder about it, and understanding it in such detail and with such precision that he can make the story live. Use of the active tense – and his books bristle with it – requires quite specific knowledge. The passive tense, by contrast, allows slippage and can mask ignorance. Rolls’s prose is bracing and vivid. “At times,” he says, “I can even smell what I’m writing about.” His books won many awards, but he was particularly proud to win the Braille Book of the Year and the Talking Book of the Year, for he often said, “I write to make people see.” There is also a “swagger” to his style – and he consciously cultivates it – because it enables him to tell a story with conviction. This careful accretion of authentic organic detail generates the power of his non-fiction. But Eric would have refused that division of fiction and non-fiction. As he put it, “There’s imaginative writing and pedestrian writing, that’s all.”

Les Murray celebrated this literary quality in 1982 in a wonderful manifesto called “Eric Rolls and the Golden Disobedience.” Murray grew up near the great forests of the lower north coast of New South Wales, where his father had been a bullock driver and timber-getter, and he remembered his father’s stories of the thickening bush. He therefore seized Rolls’s “prose masterpiece” with a kind of elation because it gave credence and dignity to vernacular experience. Eric’s disobedience, explained Murray, was his freedom to sidestep received literary sensibilities, his ability to transcend the conventional boundaries between fiction and non-fiction and between humanity and nature, and his commitment to ecological democracy. In the early ’80s that unruliness seemed “to be available to non-fiction writers in greater measure than to other writers of literary texts.” “It is even possible,” he continues, “that the novel, a form we have adopted from elsewhere, may not be the best or only form which extended prose fiction here requires.” Murray was describing an Australian style of landscape writing as “made up of strings of vivid, minute fact which often curl up in intricate knottings of digression.” Nicholas Rothwell, working in this tradition and honouring it, sees the method as “a reflection of the bush itself in all its reduplications and its beginning everywhere and nowhere, its undelineated expansiveness.” Murray considered A Million Wild Acres to be like an extended, crafted campfire yarn in which everyone has the dignity of a name, and in which the animals and plants have equal status with humans in the making of history: “It is not purely human history, but ecological history he gives us… one which interrelates the human and non-human dimensions so intimately.” Murray compared its discursive and laconic tone to the Icelandic sagas. Through his democratic recognition of all life, Rolls enchanted the forest and presented us with a speaking land, a sentient country raucous with sound.

One of the book’s heroes is Eric’s beloved tree, the white cypress pine (callitris), especially the magnificent “Old Greys” that come to life in open grassland and die in heavy forest. The cypress pine was a kind of brother creature that also lived life passionately. Rolls wrote that “at pollination time when hundreds of cones go off together with a sharp crack and spurt brown pollen a metre into the air, the whole tree shivers.” “One does not expect a tree to move in passion.” When Eric died on the last day of October 2007, his family and friends had a coffin made for him by a local carpenter – it was a simple, oblong box with silver handles and was made of white cypress pine from the Pilliga.

When I spoke to Eric seven years before his death, he reflected on the writing of A Million Wild Acres:

I began to think that the whole forest seemed to be an animate thing, with voices, and that perhaps I ought to give the trees themselves an identity, and then I thought that’s absolute bloody nonsense, you’ve got a wonderful story to tell, just tell it in a straightforward manner in the best way it can be written. One of the reviews said that the whole book reads as though the trees themselves were telling the story, which delighted me. If I’d tried to do it that way, the book would have been hopeless.

One of Eric’s earliest public performances made nature animate. Every Friday afternoon at his kindergarten in Grenfell, his teacher Miss Postlethwaite used to tell the class stories. She would do this from her slightly elevated stage, with a mat at her feet. But she was rather dull. So one day, five-year-old Eric put up his hand and said, “Miss Postlethwaite, I’d like to tell a story this afternoon.” She said, “All right, come out here.” Eric was prepared. It was sowing time on the farm, so he went up the front and pretended he was a grain of wheat. He jiggled down into the ground and buried himself in the earth, pulling the mat over his body. Then the roots grew and the legs stuck out. Then leaves sprouted and the arms waved. The little boy wriggled and danced. As Eric recalled, “So I grew up, and a header came along and stripped me, and then the sheep went into the paddock and I got eaten.” He started telling stories every Friday afternoon, and adults began to join the gathering, too, making quite an audience. “I realised that telling stories was a good thing to do if you did it properly.”

Born in western New South Wales in 1923, Eric was five years old when his father drove north from Grenfell to Narrabri to take up his own farm. Well, it was not really his own farm; the rabbits owned it. The farm was too far from any school Eric could attend, so he had to wait until he was seven to begin lessons with Blackfriars Correspondence School. He recalled how he “spent two exciting years with a pack of dogs walking about hunting rabbits into burrows and hollow logs” so that his father could chop them or dig them out. He slept on the verandah of the wooden homestead, waking at night to watch the play of moon shadows and in the early morning to see the light come onto the Nandewar Ranges. Eric later won selection to Fort Street Boys’ High School in Sydney, where, as he recalled, he taught the other kids how animals reproduced and they taught him how humans did. He missed the chance to go to university because he got chicken pox just prior to his exams, and then the second world war intervened. After serving in Papua New Guinea he returned to Australia, where he farmed his own land for forty years on the edges of the Pilliga Scrub. Eric wrote more than twenty books, as well as hundreds of articles and essays, mostly in the second half of his life.

As the success of A Million Wild Acres both settled and unsettled his life, he did a stocktake:

On my sixtieth birthday I happened to be working out how many years it would take me to write the next five books: say another three years on this one, eighteen months, two years on that, seven years’ research and writing on the next big one. Then I realised with considerable shock how old I would be. I decided from then on to work words a day every day instead of acres.

The central story of A Million Wild Acres is a simple and compelling one, told richly and persuasively. It is, in Eric’s words, about the growing of a forest. His original achievement was to confront and provoke Australians with the idea that in many areas of the country, landscapes that had once been grassy and open are now densely vegetated, that there might be more trees in Australia now than at the time of European settlement, that forests – which we so readily and romantically see as primeval – could often be the creation of our own act of settlement. How many trees make a forest, he asked? “It is not a paradox that the fires that once kept our forests open should now cause them to grow denser.” Eric brought an observation that was commonplace in local lore forcefully into the scientific and historical literature. Many of today’s forests, Rolls reminded us, are not remnants of a primeval jungle: “They do not display the past as it was, they have concentrated it.”

Eric portrayed them as different and new; he revealed them to be exaggerated communities of plants and animals, as habitats both volatile and vulnerable. As Les Murray put it, Rolls’s work recognised that Europeans arrived in Australia to find a vast parkland, “a paysage humanisé and moralisé which the Aborigines had maintained for untold centuries.” The “wilderness we now value and try to protect,” agreed Murray, “came with us, the invaders. It came in our heads, and it gradually rose out of the ground to meet us.” However that thesis might be challenged in various details and regions, we will not now retreat from the fundamental and enduring truth at the heart of it. Eric offered us not only a scientific insight, but also a poetic one, and the two visions are necessarily intertwined.

Ross Gibson, who (with John Cruthers) made the award-winning film Wild based on Eric’s book, described his history of the Pilliga as an “unruly tract of local history” and “a deliberately feral book.” “Feral” is a fitting adjective for the work of the author of that other landmark book, They All Ran Wild: The Story of Pests on the Land in Australia (1969). “Wild” has often been used to describe nature that is untouched and pristine. But Eric the farmer found “wild” nature to be feral, mongrel and hybrid, nature stirred up, nature enlivened by human presence and intervention; it was dynamic, historical nature. So the forest that he grew in the pages of his book was “concentrated” and volatile.

When Eric’s editor, Sue Ebury, suggested the title A Million Wild Acres, Rolls had reservations: “I’m a bit dubious about another title with wild in it – I am partly civilised.” Eric’s own earlier suggestions had celebrated the novelty of the nature he described: “Pilliga,” “An Exaggerated Country,” “Unexpected Forests,” “Phoenix Forest,” or “Ungentle Men Unsettled Land.” “Wildness” fascinated him: the invaders – the cattle, rabbits, foxes, with their adaptability and sheer vigour even as they wrought damage – and the feral humans, too, the “wild men,” the “ungentle” white settlers of Australia. He was impatient with those who disowned such ancestors. “This book,” he writes in A Million Wild Acres, “is not written by a gentle man.”

A Million Wild Acres challenged the traditional contrasts of European settler thinking about nature. It revolutionised those assumptions that disturbed nature is somehow always lesser nature. Such views brought Eric into conflict with aspects of the green movement. At the same time as recognising the fragility and integrity of native ecosystems, he wanted to acknowledge the creative ecology of invasion. This relish for the fecundity of life and an irrepressible optimism also underpinned Eric’s joint advocacy of the causes of nature conservation, on the one hand, and human immigration to Australia on the other. He was always determined to see the creativity of encounter.

When Rolls was writing A Million Wild Acres, the conservation battlegrounds in Australia were the rainforests, most notably at Terania Creek in northern New South Wales in 1979. As Rolls acknowledges in his final chapter, woodchipping was also an issue and had become shorthand for indiscriminate forest clearing and exploitation. Rolls considered it a necessary industry committed to unnecessary destruction. So his book was written in the midst of those campaigns, when forests were depicted as timeless and primeval, and human disturbance meant the destruction of trees. He wrote a detailed regional study showing that forests could also be the creation of settlement. He wasn’t the first to notice this phenomenon: the anthropologist, naturalist and explorer Alfred Howitt, for example, presented his observations of the increasing density of forests in Gippsland to a scientific audience in 1890. The power of A Million Wild Acres was that it gave voice to a myriad of these earlier observers. And Rolls told a multi-causal story of how it had happened in one region, a place he knew intimately. He saw system and pattern and creativity in it. His book attracted little scientific or green criticism for over a decade-and-a-half, awaiting another political context. By the mid to late 1990s, the frontline of conservation battles had moved from the logging of old-growth forests on public land to the clearing of native vegetation for farming on private or leasehold land. In this new context, Rolls’s argument about the history of tree density was misinterpreted for political purposes by both farmers and scientists.

There was also continuing scientific and cultural resistance to recognising the significance and sophistication of Aboriginal burning. As Judith Wright wrote in her 1982 review of A Million Wild Acres:

It is as strange to me as to Rolls that some scientists and others still dispute the effect of Aboriginal fire-management, or even that there was such management. Again and again in my own reading of stock-inspectors’ reports in the Queensland of the sixties and seventies, there is reference to the change in pasture growth and shrub cover which followed the vanishing of the Aborigines and the fierce protectiveness of squatters for their timber fences, huts, yards and vulnerable slow-moving flocks of sheep. But no doubt such evidence is too much that of laymen to be trusted by academic ecologists.

The politics of this issue are so embedded and have such a long history that they are often unconscious. Scientific disdain for Aboriginal ecological knowledge was once racist; now it is sometimes simply anti-humanist. In other words, the same scientific suspicions can apply to settler knowledge – indeed to local knowledge of any kind – because it is human, anecdotal and apparently informal. So the debate about Rolls’s work sometimes presents itself as a clash of disciplinary styles, a methodological tension between the sciences and the humanities. The very qualities for which literary scholars and cultural historians celebrate Rolls’s book – its vernacular and organic dimensions, holism and narrative power – can be seen by others to diminish its scientific credentials. But Eric himself continually paid tribute to scientists, and his book Australia: A Biography (2000) was dedicated to them.

Eric was never afraid of a dangerous idea. He liked to tell it as he saw it. It got him into trouble, of course. When Pauline Hanson called Aborigines “cannibals,” he responded that she was more savage than any cannibal. When he wrote an article about the damage that cats do to the environment, the Sun-Herald reported that they had never had so many letters and phone calls about anything they had ever published, and Eric received violent threats, including from one woman who threatened to burn his home and his car and to destroy everything he owned. When researching an essay on the use and abuse of water resources for the Independent Monthly in 1992, he told the editor, Max Suich, of how his research had provoked a dark, watery threat: “I had no idea that things are as serious as they are, or that it will take so long to rectify them, or that there are such murderous forces at work opposing change. It is quite startling to be told ‘you better pull your punches or you’ll end up with concrete shoes.’ I haven’t pulled any punches.” He was just as ready to run the gauntlet of the conservationists as he was the developers or the bureaucrats. He was especially critical if any of them were “short on history.”

“People,” declared Eric Rolls, “must always be given hope.” He was an irrepressible optimist. He was prepared to deliver the hard, grim facts when necessary, but he also wanted to inspire action and guide change, and for that, he knew, we do indeed need hope. Historian though he was (as well as poet, farmer, cook and fisherman), Eric also believed that “tomorrow is more exciting than yesterday.” He had faith in the future, and in the capacity of people to meet it; he was a historian whose history had to serve the future for which he was so hungry.

There was a fearlessness about Eric’s work, as well as a swagger. And there is a complexity to A Million Wild Acres behind the compelling narrative power. It is a truly original work, yet it speaks directly to so many people; it is unique and pathbreaking, yet it also seems to represent an organic integrity and a common vernacular. That is Eric’s artistic achievement. That is why readers wrote to him, and why reviewers compared A Million Wild Acres to the Book of Genesis, or a campfire yarn, or an Icelandic saga. That is why it is possible for this to be the first book someone might ever read. •

References:
This an extract from Tom Griffiths’s The Art of Time Travel: Historians and Their Craft, published last month by Black Inc., and full references are provided there. The essay draws on the papers of Eric Rolls in the Mitchell and National Libraries and an interview he conducted with Eric on 19 February 2000. An earlier version of this essay appeared in J. Dargavel, D. Hart and B. Libbis (eds) The Perfumed Pineries, Australian Forest History Society, Canberra, 2001, which was reproduced as an introduction to the thirtieth anniversary edition of Eric Rolls, A Million Wild Acres, Hale & Iremonger, 2011. Other sources quoted above include: Les Murray, “Eric Rolls and the Golden Disobedience,” in his A Working Forest: Selected Prose, Duffy and Snellgrove, 1997; George Seddon, “Dynamics of Change,” Overland, 87, May 1982, pp. 55–60; Nicholas Rothwell, “What Lies Beyond Us,” Eric Rolls Memorial Lecture, National Library of Australia, 22 October 2014, broadcast on ABC Radio National “Big Ideas,” 6 November 2014; Ross Gibson, “Enchanted Country,” World Literature Today, 67 (3), 1993, pp. 471–6; Alfred Howitt, “The Eucalypts of Gippsland,” Transactions of the Royal Society of Victoria, 2, 1890, pp. 811–20; and Judith Wright, “A Chronicle of White Settlement,” Island Magazine, 12, 1982, pp. 44–45. For more on historical debates about vegetation change, see Tom Griffiths, “How Many Trees Make a Forest? Cultural Debates about Vegetation Change in Australia,” Australian Journal of Botany, 50 (4), 2002, pp. 375–89.

The post Golden disobedience: the history of Eric Rolls appeared first on Inside Story.

Heat index might not be a well-known term, but it describes how the weather feels to us rather than how it feels to the mercury. Designed back in 1979, it incorporates the effect of relative humidity, and assumes we’re wearing light clothing. At 50 per cent humidity, 30ºC feels like 31ºC; at 90 per cent it feels like 40ºC. The more moisture in the air, the hotter it seems to us and the higher the heat index.

And there’s an extra factor affecting our perception. For every rise of 1ºC, air can hold 7 per cent more moisture. So the amount of moisture in the air is potentially much higher at 35ºC than, say, 25ºC. This makes 90 per cent humidity much harder to bear at 35ºC than at lower temperatures.

The heat index has variants. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology uses an index of apparent temperature, a mixture of temperature, humidity and wind speed. Although it isn’t reported in the official forecast, the apparent temperature is calculated regularly at most observational sites, and may well be a better indicator of what’s going on outside. Canadian meteorologists prefer the humidex, which directly uses the dew point, the temperature at which the air will be saturated, instead of a derived relative humidity. Then there’s the wetbulb globe temperature, which takes into account radiation, cloud cover and wind speed. While the exact calculations, these indices are effectively measuring the same thing.

Although the heat index is a pretty useful metric, it has its limits. Regardless of the combination of temperature and humidity, the heat index values calculated according to the most up-to-date conversion tables go no higher than 58ºC. So Fujairah’s 60ºC was literally off the charts.

This is not the first time the index has been breached. Bandar Mahshahr reached a value of 60ºC around the same time as Fujairah thanks to a slightly higher temperature but slightly lower humidity levels. And just last year, the same Iranian city reached a whopping heat index of 74ºC, which is 28ºC warmer than the measured air temperature. The highest reading ever was 81ºC in July 2003 in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.

Such oppressive conditions are nothing short of dangerous. Our core body temperature must stay at around 37ºC for us to function normally. If it rises by just 2 to 3ºC, heat stroke is on the cards. Another 2ºC and death is extremely likely. Our main cooling mechanism, sweating, is extremely important here, as it allows our body to cool via the evaporation of water off the surface of the skin. When it is a dry heat, this mechanism is effective. But when the air is hot and humid, this mechanism fails, since the air is near its water-holding capacity, permitting very little, or no, evaporation.

This means you will need to rely on other ways to keep our temperature down if you find yourself in these extreme conditions. Exercising is out of the question, as is working outdoors. If you can, subject yourself to a cool breeze and plenty of shade and don’t move around a lot. Fans are effective in humid conditions or in temperatures below the high 30s, though less so when temperatures climb above 40ºC. Keeping up your water intake is essential, and a cold shower or dip in a pool, of course, will also help keep you cool.

Places like Bandar Mahshahr, Fujairah and Mitribah, as well as much of the Middle East, are no strangers to such sweltering conditions. Although the corresponding heat index was lower than the actual temperature (thanks to the dry desert air), Baghdad declared a four-day holiday in July last year when temperatures reached 50ºC. Many places are heavy reliant on air conditioning – in Dubai, even the bus stops are enclosed and air-conditioned. In Iraq, though, electricity supply is irregular, making it difficult to cool down in these dangerous conditions.

While the recent temperatures and heat index recordings in the Middle East are no doubt extreme, they are expected at this time of the year, at least to a certain extent. But we should not get complacent. The warning signs in recent events should be grabbing our attention.

There is irrefutable evidence that the world is warming, and with that comes the certainty that extreme temperatures will occur more often. A small shift in average temperature is all it takes to see a large increase in extremes. Right now, we’re heading for a globe that will be 3 to 5ºC warmer than before the industrial revolution by 2100. A warming of 7ºC will seriously call into the question the ongoing habitability of some regions; extreme heat stress will no longer be a rare, or once-per-season occurrence. If Bandar Mahshahr, Fujairah and Mitribah are already experiencing intolerable conditions, what will they be experiencing by 2100, and beyond? And how will they cope?

Then there is the rest of the world. Over the past decade numerous deadly heatwaves have occurred in Australia, Europe, Russia, India and Pakistan. Many of the associated deaths could have been prevented by public education about how to stay cool, as well as greater access to enabling resources.

Of course, this is not a one-size-fits-all issue. Developed countries generally have a greater adaptive capacity, but underlying cultural behaviors may be tough to change. In developing countries, on the other hand, cool working environments and dwellings, and in some cases clean drinking water, are in short supply. But one thing is clear – if nothing is done, more lives will be lost. •

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Averaged across March–May, temperatures were 1.86°C above their typical levels. This was also the most anomalous autumn since records began in 1910, the previous record being held by spring 2014, which was 1.67°C above average. All-time record averages were set across half the country.

Let’s take a closer look at this remarkable season.

March started off with a notable heatwave in the southeast, which persisted until the eighteenth of the month. Thanks to a Tasman high – the body of air that’s responsible for most heatwaves in the southeast – warm continental air was directed south, pushing daily maximum temperatures to 12°C above average in some areas.

This heatwave was also responsible for our hottest March day on record, which occurred on the second of the month. But the heatwave’s most extraordinary feature was its duration over inland New South Wales and Victoria: it was the longest event ever recorded for March, and for some regions it almost exceeded annual records.

The northern and western states weren’t spared either. The lack of summer monsoonal rains primed conditions for record-high maximum and minimum temperatures in the Northern Territory, for instance. All in all, March was our warmest on record, with average temperatures 1.7°C higher than normal.

The warm continued in April, making it (at 2°C above average) the second-warmest on record. Very warm daytime temperatures were felt across most of the country, the exception being southwest Western Australia. Queensland broke state records for average, daytime and night-time temperatures, at 2.69°C, 2.92°C and 2.42°C respectively. Coffs Harbour’s longest ever heatwave of fourteen days began on 29 April, with many other locations recording prolonged periods of relatively extreme temperatures (for more detail, visit scorcher.org.au).

Then along came May. Following April’s lead, this was our second-hottest May on record, with average temperatures 1.88°C above normal. Although both daytime and night-time temperatures were high, it was the night-time temperatures that were most exceptional. We broke the warmest night-time temperature on the first of the month, then again on the seventh. All three tropical states set records for their highest night-time temperature, and 50 per cent of Queensland experienced its warmest May night on record. Across many sites, seasonal heatwaves also continued. Had winter decided to hold off for just one more week, we could have broken the previous May record of 2.14°C above average, set in 1958.

The warmth wasn’t restricted to land, either. Sea surface temperatures in northern and eastern waters were at all-time highs, particularly at the beginning of the season, and are still sitting at 2–3°C above normal near the coast.

So what does this mean, and how much should we care?

It is sometimes difficult to communicate why record autumn temperatures are concerning. After all, who doesn’t love an extended beach season? But the impact goes far beyond leaving your ugg boots in the wardrobe for a few more weeks. The effects can be disastrous.

Extreme temperatures in Queensland have exacerbated the drought, with a short reprieve only recently occurring in some locations. The record sea surface temperatures have caused the worst coral bleaching the Great Barrier Reef has seen, with 93 per cent of the reef affected. Algal blooms were reported in the Murray River earlier in the season. All of these impacts knock on to our economy via reduced yield from farms and lost tourism dollars, and even impinge on local housing markets.

And we haven’t been the only ones sweltering over the last few months. India recorded its hottest temperature on record – a stifling 51°C – which was also the third-hottest temperature ever recorded globally. The Canadian city of Fort McMurray experienced extremely hot temperatures in early May, which exacerbated fire conditions, leading to the evacuation of the entire city. March was exceptionally warm for much of the United States and, globally, we had our hottest April on record – the hottest month on record for the third month in a row.

In part, we have El Niño to thank. The most recent event was one of the strongest on record, and El Niños are known to spike both national and global temperatures. With the event now ended, some of the sting will ease. But El Niño is only a small piece of the story. The rest is explained by – you guessed it – climate change. As with phenomenal February, the experience of the last few months points to an increasingly sick planet.

This is what our future will look like, autumn after autumn.

Sure, you might save on your heating bill, but you can kiss the Great Barrier Reef (and its tourism dollars) goodbye. The latest bleaching event would have been almost impossible without human influence. It even caught reef experts off guard; they thought they had another twenty-five years until an event of such devastation would occur. Prepare yourself for autumn smoke hazes – especially if you have respiratory troubles – because they’ll become routine as fire authorities take advantage of warm weather for hazard reduction. Oh, and water crises will become commonplace too.

Temperatures are spiralling out of control, with 2016 clearly standing out. And it won’t just be one for the record books or our distant memories. We will be feeling the heat again with our children and grandchildren before you know it. •

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A tired, conflicted government botched it with ample help from the key protagonists. While the sound and fury had mostly subsided, the Wilderness Society was still camped out in a rogue Labor Tasmanian senator’s office in Parliament House, lobbing grenades.

I was wandering about, finding the halls of parliament both exciting and lonely. I was pretty much ignored by my new employers, and given no sense of my task or the larger strategy. Unlike most in the Wilderness Society, I had no history in either the environment movement or politics. I’d never been to a forest blockade. I saw an ad in the newspaper and applied for the job as a communications officer. I was feeling nostalgic for my previous job in advertising, never mind that I had left it because I wanted to change the world. I was wondering what on earth I was doing there, but I hung around. I was irrelevant; no one stopped to include me amid the exciting flap of daily tactics.

Then Bob Brown waltzed into town. This was before his successful run at the Senate in 1996. I organised some interviews for him and was given the job of driving him to the ABC studios on Canberra’s Northbourne Avenue. It was the first time in three weeks that anyone had actually spoken to me. I don’t remember the details, but he asked me questions about my love of the bush and where I’d come from, and had me blabbing about the mistake I’d made in taking the job. He reassured me that we needed people like me in the battle for Australia’s environment and that my efforts to work out my place in it mattered. It was encouragement that changed the course of my life. Twenty years later, I remain a solid Bob Brown fan.

I have a backpack full of stories of the decades as an environment activist and my tetchy relationship with both the parties of the left, the Greens and the Labor Party. The activist straining for particular policy outcomes is inevitably in conflict with political parties whose interests are mixed up with the pursuit of power.

In the end, however, I joined the Labor Party to run the Labor Environment Action Network, or LEAN. My love of the once-in-a-generation politician and activist didn’t hold me to Bob Brown’s party, even though I had a box seat in watching its emergence and establishment in Australian federal politics. And even though the last federal Labor government hardly provided inspiration, I joined Labor because I believe it is time for environment advocates to talk to the centre.

Put another way, I am keen to bury Margaret Mead and her ubiquitous quote: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world: indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” Those words headed the fundraising letter I received last tax time from one of Australia’s largest environment groups. On protection of the environment, Mead is out of date. Her quote speaks to an earlier stage of the environment movement’s mission.

Environmentalism has won the argument but not the institutions of our democracy. What’s more, with climate change threatening life as we know it, the challenge is huge and can’t be delivered by the morally fearsome few. We must speak to all sectors of society and truly build coalitions across interests. To deliver lasting and deep change we must take most of the society with us; change imposed by minorities is brittle and breakable.

The environment movement did a great job of hectoring from the margins and widening the goalposts, and people across society now recognise that we can’t trash the planet. Sure, there are still powerful vested interests trying to protect their profits. But while middle Australia may not particularly like smelly greenies and our austere, earnest ways, they are on our side. We are no longer a minority group of outsiders pushing from the edge.

My thinking was that it’s time for us to dump the moral superiority of vanguard politics. It is time for environment advocates to talk to the centre, rather than fight it and alienate natural allies. We need to own our status as representatives of middle Australian values, and join centrist institutions and enshrine environmental values in their heart.

So there I was entering the big, powerful institution of the Labor Party, feeling like Dorothy entering the Wizard’s house: tentative and awed, flanked by a few powerless comrades of the brave, brainy, big-hearted variety. We set about rebuilding LEAN and making it a force for change in the Labor Party.

LEAN was set up in 2004 as a cross-factional environment organisation within the Labor Party by Jenny McAllister (who would go on to be party president and a NSW senator) and Kristina Keneally (later premier of New South Wales). After a few iterations, LEAN is once again an active force and has proven the power of cultural subversions by winning its campaign to have the party re-embrace climate leadership, adopt a 50 per cent renewable energy target by 2030, and commit to net zero emissions by 2050 with credible interim pollution reduction targets to get us from here to there.

Of course, as with any campaign, we relied on those uncontrollable external factors that fell our way. Over the first six months of 2015, the build-up to the Paris Climate Meeting shifted the international discussion, and Tony Abbott’s strident opposition to climate action began looking crotchety and regressive. The debate over the Abbott government’s attempts to scrap or hobble the renewable energy target alerted Labor to the popularity of renewable energy in the electorate.

But when we sat down in a room above a pub in central Melbourne in late 2014, the fear that Labor would retreat on climate change was very real. The wounds from the political car crash of carbon pricing under Rudd and Gillard were still fresh and hardheads were arguing that silence on the issue was the best path forward. One of the first hurdles was to ignore some senior figures telling me that if I cared about climate change I would back off and leave the issue until Labor was in government.

LEAN wanted to do three things: put climate change back in the centre of Labor’s offering by winning policy change on renewable energy targets and economy-wide pollution targets; embed within the party the idea that near-complete decarbonisation of the economy was possible; and change the narrative so it wasn’t a greenie imperative but core Labor business.

That meeting of a scraggly bunch of Labor members developed a campaign that included arguments about why Labor needed to make climate change a conviction issue, not a tactical one. We were on strong ground in making the point that the electorate wanted to see Labor showing that it believed in something after the mess of the Rudd–Gillard years. We were careful to frame the imperative in terms of Labor’s key concerns: climate change is a threat to equity, safety and prosperity; and the solution is an opportunity for economic growth, innovation and job creation.

Our policy prescriptions were grounded in the work of ClimateWorks, a climate policy group at Monash University chaired by the former deputy Labor premier of Victoria, John Thwaites. “One of ours” is a powerful legitimacy enhancer in the Labor Party, especially when it comes to green issues. ClimateWorks had released a report in September 2014 modelling a path for the Australian economy to reach net zero emissions by 2050. The report provided a straightforward narrative about what it would take to deliver the changes needed. We pulled from it the timeline for deployment of renewable energy and established our central call for a transformation of the energy sector. To deliver this, we identified that Labor needed to create one ministry for climate change and energy to stop contradictions in the sphere, and a comprehensive approach to carbon sequestration through land use.

In the end, our campaign failed to solidly engage the party in the detail of paths to decarbonisation. Instead, the campaign coalesced around the two headline policy bids: a policy of 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030; and adoption of the carbon pollution reduction targets proposed by the Climate Change Authority, which we short-handed to 50 per cent by 2030. The campaign was titled 50/50, and its target was the Labor national conference in July 2015. Held once every federal term of parliament, the national conference debates and establishes the party’s policy platform.

When it came to strategy, our path to influence was defined by our limited tools. LEAN is one of a number of internal Labor ginger groups, communities of interest around particular issues that seek to push for policy change. Other such groups, most notably Labor for Refugees and Rainbow Labor, were much better connected. They could rely on building a community of powerful figures who were prepared to stand up for the issue among the party’s traditional decision-making elites.

LEAN does not attract the ambitious or the powerful, or their acolytes. Our issue is too tricky and politically fraught – a wholesale restructure of the economy is not bite-sized. What’s more, it explicitly requires conflict with some of the party’s strongest vested interests.

As for the union leadership, most did not answer our calls. Those who did meet LEAN patted us on the head and sent us on our way. The union and party elite’s interest in groups of organised rank-and-file members is understandably small – a disempowered membership has fed the system for as long as anyone can remember. A survey of the tools at hand left us with a single path forward – talk to the membership!

We had no direct access to the membership, so the local Labor branches became our surrogate. Getting our hands on lists of local branch secretaries was our next great challenge. These had to be stolen or handed over – in the digital age version of a brown paper bag – by friendlies in state offices. We cobbled the money together to pay a freelance designer to design the materials: workers and wind turbines beneath the Southern Cross, all in the Labor colours of blue and red. Not a touch of green to be seen.

At state level, we held open meetings to kickstart LEAN. Small groups of people would turn up and form LEAN groups. From this, we built teams of volunteers who met and built connections and skills, and set about visiting the local branches of the Labor Party. LEAN volunteers would give a short presentation, often followed by long debates and lots of questions. When it came time to test the membership’s appetite for climate action by requesting support for our position, there was unequivocal enthusiasm.

Three hundred and seventy local branches passed motions in support of LEAN’s call for adoption of 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030 and credible carbon pollution reduction targets. For a party making much of the need to reform and to include its membership, this was a powerful demonstration of members’ commitment. I did very few of the on-ground meetings, mostly watching from my email account as the list of Labor branches rolled in: a catalogue of Australian places from Balranald, Geraldton and Townsville to Burnie, Mt Druitt and St Kilda. It was a testament to the broad, often slumbering, but still very much alive community of Labor true believers across the country.

As the national conference approached, dodgy photos taken at branch meetings in support of 50/50 tumbled across social media. We had more of these photos than we got around to posting. These images, often of groups of ancient stalwarts with a smiling, green-shirted young LEANer, created a testament to the diverse, ordinary, passionate people who make up the membership, not to mention a catalogue of all the plastic chairs on wooden floors in dark, echoing halls that are the architecture of meetings of the Labor faithful.

Over the next months, state conferences in New South Wales, Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia supported the adoption of the Climate Change Authority’s pollution reduction targets. In New South Wales, LEAN had nothing to do with this; the local branches put it to the conference themselves. Because party conferences at the state and federal levels are the highest policy-making forums of the party, this theoretically meant that a large section of the party had already committed to the pollution reduction targets.

LEAN also engaged with the party’s official policy development process. The previous national conference had established the National Policy Forum with the intention of enriching and broadening the policy development discussion before the conference. The National Policy Forum was a group of sixty people, twenty each from the federal parliamentary party, affiliated unions and the party membership itself. Its members were charged with consulting across the party before meeting for two face-to-face seminars to formally propose policy changes and additions to the existing national policy platform.

LEAN had no representation on the Policy Forum but we started turning up anyway. We wrote a comprehensive submission on the environment and climate change policy as well as making suggestions to embed climate impacts and mitigation across portfolios. Many of our suggestions were adopted. We headed off some worrying proposed changes to Labor’s nuclear policy, strengthened the commitment to environmental law reform and included acknowledgement of the scientific consensus on the need for developed nations to deliver net zero emissions by mid century. Needless to say, the National Policy Forum didn’t support our proposal that our renewable energy target and specific pollution reduction targets be included in the national policy. It was, however, an important setting – with most of the party’s key players in the room – to prosecute our argument.

As the campaign strengthened in the branches, LEAN talked with people across the party. A number of trips to Canberra were arranged with fairly open invitations for anyone actively involved in LEAN to join us to visit Labor MPs. Democratising access is another of my passions, so the fact that ordinary members were allowed to front up to their politicians and talk to them about the campaign was a small victory. One evening, shadow climate change minister Mark Butler hosted LEAN drinks in Parliament House and an array of Labor MPs turned up. After leader Bill Shorten and I had spoken, Joel Fitzgibbon – not a natural ally of environmentalists – jumped up to assure us that he and Gary Gray were attending not as spies but as people who recognised we had to get along and sort out these issues cooperatively in the party.

Opposition from the powerful CFMEU was always a concern. Shifting energy generation away from coal-fired power to cleaner sources would have deep structural impacts on the union’s membership and the industries they work in. National president Tony Maher had nevertheless been remarkably progressive on the issue, recognising the inevitable threat to his members and trying to ensure workers were protected in the transition. The CFMEU had supported the climate package of the former Labor government and embedded themselves in the negotiations, ensuring their interests were well defended while also allowing the reforms to occur.

But a couple of months before the conference, the CFMEU responded to our campaign with an open letter to all federal Labor MPs and the union leadership expressing its opposition to our call for 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030. This was a moment when the campaign nearly derailed. We had no structural power; the CFMEU had loads. We wrote an open letter in reply, stating our opposing view on what costs the transition would impose on consumers and workers, as well as the larger imperative of modernising our energy system. We minnows had no choice but to remain determined. Luckily, we were backed by a huge swath of rank-and-file members and their branches.

At a meeting of the national Left a couple of weeks before the conference, I stood to outline LEAN’s proposal. As we were still negotiating with the CFMEU, no one was supporting us – overt opposition to the CFMEU is not a common habit on the Left of the Labor Party. As I was speaking I saw CFMEU national secretary Michael O’Connor raise his hand for the floor after me. When he rose, O’Connor said he wanted the room to be aware that the CFMEU knew climate change was happening and was committed to responding, and that it had some differences of view with LEAN that we were working to resolve. He thanked us for showing respect and not calling the union’s members rednecks.

Having come up against the CFMEU over decades in the forest debate, that exchange most powerfully illustrated the value of being “inside.” The ability to resolve the conflict came only because environmental concern was an organised and legitimate stakeholder within the party. In return for support of the 50 per cent aim, the CFMEU negotiated strong undertakings from the party to protect its members. The resolution on the floor of the conference that pledged Labor to 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030 included a commitment to establish an agency to redeploy affected workers, implement structural adjustment strategies and invest in affected communities.

Resolution 214R was put to the conference by Bill Shorten and seconded by Tony Maher. It was passed unanimously.

And that’s the happy ending. At the 2015 National Conference in Melbourne in July, Bill Shorten proclaimed climate action a key differentiator between Labor and the Coalition, and the conference adopted a 50 per cent renewable energy target for 2030 a commitment to credible pollution reduction targets before the next election. As the Sydney Morning Herald put it, “The Shorten approach follows a strong and well-coordinated campaign inside the ALP by a group calling itself the Environment Action Network and backing a ‘50/50’ campaign in favour of 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030.”

Newly elected national president Mark Butler, who was a consistent supporter of LEAN, generously acknowledged the campaign: “In my nearly thirty years in the party, I have not seen an organising effort on a policy issue like LEAN has delivered. It was phenomenal.” Shadow finance minister Tony Burke, a senior figure on the party’s right, said, “It’s the most effective grassroots effort I’ve seen within the ALP. The leadership consulted widely to work out what needed to be done and then campaigned relentlessly in every party unit to push Labor’s commitment as far as possible. They campaigned hard at the grassroots while also enhancing a strong relationship with the party’s leadership.”

In November 2015, just before the Paris climate conference, Bill Shorten formally delivered the second part of our campaign with a Labor commitment to delivering net zero emissions by 2050 and at least 45 per cent pollution reduction (on 2005 levels) by 2030. Climate change policy is now central to Labor’s differentiation from the Coalition. Shorten attended the Paris conference and consistently talks of climate action’s role in delivering economic opportunities and a modern, dynamic Australia.

LEAN demonstrated that the membership could be organised to force change on the parliamentary leadership. We proved, too, that the members care about the environment. But one good campaign does not a reformed party make. This is the bigger challenge. •

This is an edited extract from ’s contribution to How to Vote Progressive in Australia: Labor or Green? edited by Dennis Altman and Sean Scalmer (Monash University Publishing).

• Andrew Giles MP (Labor) and Ellen Sandell MP (Greens) will speak at the launch of the book in Melbourne on 15 June.

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