Forces of nature
From colonisation and climate change to urban development and the landscapes of the future, explore our round-up of essays that consider our relationship to the natural world.
Crossing the line
IMAGINE AN AIRPLANE flying north from Brisbane to Cairns. In just over two hours, it will cover nearly 1,400 kilometres of Australia’s eastern coastline and add 340 kilograms of carbon dioxide to each of its passengers’ personal carbon footprints.
Mud reckoning
THERE IS NO such thing as bad Country; there just happens to be bad custodians.
Transforming landscapes
I stood rooted to the ground, for I realised this almost certainly would have been the first time in 150 years of degrading European management that a reed-warbler had returned to this valley. The powerful song of that small bird became a metaphor of hope for me. It was a symbol of the power of regeneration and the capacity of self-organisation in a landscape. It was a living example of what could be achieved.
Fire words
To understand why our language about fire is so poor, it is interesting to look at a history of how this language developed.
Recovering a narrative of place
At the conclusion of the project, a group of young global citizens, many of them labelled ‘disadvantaged’, many of them previously silent or ignored, shared a common belief, one as simple and yet complex as the difficulties we face in dealing with one of the great challenges of our time. The students agreed that we must listen to those who have lived with Country for thousands of years without killing it, and in order to live with a healthy planet we need to tell stories of our experience with it, and our love for it.
Touching the future
As defined by Norbert Wiener, an American mathematician, cybernetics was ‘the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine’, and also in society and in the individual. In particular, for Wiener and others, it was about the study of feedback mechanisms and circular causal systems, including in the newly proliferating space of computers.