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Section: Environment

There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.

  • ENVIRONMENT

    A crash course in climate literacy

    • Brian Matthews
    • 23 October 2018
    3 Comments

    Drought creeps, infiltrates, sometimes seems little changed day after day, then tightens its grip on this or that paddock, unveils the slowly splitting bottom of a never-before-empty dam ... Even still, according to many of the experienced, crisis-hardened men and women on the land to whom I've spoken, this drought is different.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Opera House ads are not 'food for everyone'

    • Francine Crimmins
    • 12 October 2018
    5 Comments

    There are a few ways an individual can interact with a public space. The first is to sit in or walk through it while crunching an apple. The second is to inhabit it, grow an apple tree and share it with others. The third is to grow the tree, pick the apples behind your neighbours' backs and sell them to Woolworths for a profit.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Ideology and idiocy in national energy policy

    • Cristy Clark
    • 27 September 2018
    8 Comments

    In light of the evidence, a national energy policy prioritising renewables should be uncontroversial. But is seems ideology is impermeable to evidence. Instead, we have the government continuing to try to pressure AGL into keeping the Liddell coal-fired power plant open despite clear-cut economic and environmental reasons for its closure.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Drivers, not phones, are pedestrians' main threat

    • Amelia Paxman
    • 07 September 2018
    5 Comments

    Older people are among the most vulnerable pedestrian groups, and people over 85 are eight times more likely to be hit by a car in a car park, on a footpath or in a driveway than people aged 13-64. This is likely because they are less agile in terms of moving out of the path of a car — not because they're addicted to Pokemon Go.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Christian PM should have a heart for climate

    • Cristy Clark
    • 30 August 2018
    12 Comments

    When Parliament resumes on 10 September, I hope Morrison leaves his lump of coal at home and takes his Christian values to work. He could start by adopting a 2030 emissions reduction target of at least 50 per cent below 2005 levels and ensuring that environmental considerations are central to all future development approvals.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Truths for Trump on South African farmers

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 28 August 2018
    2 Comments

    In the 17 years since, farm murders have dropped dramatically. At face value, this is a triumph in the fight against violent crime, and a resounding riposte to people like President Donald Trump and our own Peter Dutton and Tony Abbott, who have seized on the issue in order to sow racial hatred among their own constituents.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Marchers unite against federal nuclear dump

    • Michele Madigan
    • 27 August 2018
    11 Comments

    In the 26 August ministry reshuffle, Senator Canavan retained his portfolio. As Resources Minister, he often repeats his assurance: 'Australia's nuclear waste facility will not be imposed on an unwilling community.' The marchers across the Port Augusta Bridge bore banners printed with a single word: UNWILLING.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Among the ghosts of Chernobyl

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 15 August 2018
    5 Comments

    The earthworms and bees were the first to know, wrote Nobel laureate and Belarusian native Svetlana Alexievich. The bees stayed in their hives; the worms buried themselves so deep that fishermen digging for bait on the banks of the Pripyat River were perplexed that they couldn't find any. The humans were slower to learn.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Laying waste to waste

    • Cristy Clark
    • 02 August 2018
    2 Comments

    It is all too easy to make daily choices that negatively affect the environment, and there are many incentives for us to do so — cost, time, social norms. This is where policies like plastic bag bans come in — they change the incentives and not only help us to do the right thing but also to normalise it within our culture.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Ethical eating demands more than veganism

    • Lika Posamari
    • 20 July 2018
    11 Comments

    If vegans are indeed recognising that 'the protection of the planet is fundamental to protecting both humans and animals', merely taking on a label such as vegan is not enough. We need to consider plants and people along with animals and environmental factors. We need to consider what kind of eaters we want to be.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Not owning but belonging to the land

    • Fatima Measham
    • 19 July 2018
    7 Comments

    There are severe limitations in the western ways we tend to think about land. Land is conceived in terms of ownership and property — ideas that are implicated not just in colonial histories, but in extractive industries and concentrations of wealth. In this model, land is a fulcrum of power.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Don't bag plastic bans

    • Fatima Measham
    • 05 July 2018
    13 Comments

    We can speculate on the reasons for the recent rage against plastic bag bans. We don't like change. We don't like being told what to do. We don't like having to think about alternatives and solutions. But at the heart of it, being mad about this particular inconvenience is about refusing to accept one's part in improving the collective lot. This is the one planet we have. There is no Plan B.

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