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Section: Environment

  • ENVIRONMENT

    Tony Windsor's Murray-Darling prescience

    • Tony Kevin
    • 19 October 2010
    7 Comments

    Irrigated agriculture systems, like electric grids and city roads, trigger a government's duty of care to the human communities that they sustain. Particularly when they were built with the blood, sweat and tears that went into building our Murray-Darling Basin irrigation communities.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Human stories of IVF

    • Catherine Marshall
    • 07 October 2010
    17 Comments

    In seeking to fill a mother's empty womb, Nobel Prize winning biologist Robert Edwards developed a solution. In so doing he confirmed what all innovators know: that progress doesn't occur in a neat and orderly vacuum, and nor should it be halted for fear of what it might produce.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Bushfire blame misses the point

    • Paul Collins
    • 04 August 2010
    16 Comments

    Sadly the Commission played the blame game. This happens after every major fire and originates in the need to find scapegoats. Neither Christine Nixon nor the others who copped the blame could have known they were dealing with a whole new era of firestorm.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Taking science back from the scientists

    • T. J. Martin
    • 20 July 2010
    17 Comments

    I believed it was not right to manufacture human embryos for research, but I decided to use scientific arguments against this. In fact that made the task easier. It was truly astonishing to see how regularly very bad science was presented publicly by scientists who wanted to do such work.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    How to survive the next five billion years

    • Jeffrey Nicholls
    • 09 July 2010
    3 Comments

    Every year we mine about a billion tonnes of iron ore. If we keep this up for five billion years, we will have dug up the whole earth to a depth of about 10 km. Here is a guide to how human existence might continue until the sun dies.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Reviving climate hope

    • Tony Kevin
    • 21 June 2010
    9 Comments

    The new Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Christiana Figueres is well qualified to help heal the wounds of Copenhagen. If the West can learn the lessons of those failed talks and move forward with modesty, flexibility and sensitivity, we may hope for progress.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Organic carrots and grocery store ethics

    • Alison Sampson
    • 09 June 2010
    11 Comments

    People in my own city are hungry, people across the world are starving, yet here I am buying local organic olive oil, ten times the price of a good oil from Crete. The first time I tasted an organic carrot, I realised that every other carrot I had ever eaten was a mere shadow. 

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Bushfire commission's climate denial

    • Tony Kevin
    • 28 May 2010
    9 Comments

    The Black Saturday Royal Commission seems to be ignoring scientific evidence that climate change was a major causal factor. The possibility that Victoria's cool mountain ridges and valleys are drying out and that such ferocious fires are the way of the future might be a truth too much to bear.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Shame under Howard and Rudd

    • Tony Kevin
    • 27 May 2010
    29 Comments

    The Howard years made me feel ashamed to be Australian, and I felt about his electoral defeat the way East Germans felt about the Berlin Wall coming down: as a kind of cleansing. Rudd disappoints for a different reason.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Climate action after Rudd

    • Tony Kevin
    • 04 May 2010
    24 Comments

    Rudd is technically correct that the opposition parties stymied his CPRS bills, but the buck stops with his disappointing climate policy leadership. Upon the failure of Australian parliamentary politics, we need now to find the courage to support mass non-violent public action modelled on Vietnam War protest.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    High-tech health in the bush

    • Ben O'Mara
    • 14 April 2010
    3 Comments

    New technology can improve health care for geographically remote and ethnically diverse Australians. But it won't make much difference unless these people know how to use the technology and are involved in its design and implementation.

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  • ENVIRONMENT

    Choosing the sex of your child

    • Kevin McGovern
    • 08 April 2010
    3 Comments

    The media has reported that Australia's ban on couples using IVF to choose the sex of their children might soon be lifted. Some of the supporters of sex selection for non-medical reasons are fertility doctors for whom there is a considerable financial incentive.

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