Environment and climate

It’s in my nature to be uncomfortable with the very idea of nature, the distinctions the term creates between acceptable and unacceptable behaviours and desires, the value systems it imposes and disguises. For me, nature and gender are both trouble.

Take any one instance of Day’s work, any single essay, and for the sake of comparison you’d struggle to find a writer as impassioned by words, by diction and syntax, and as agog with wonder at natural phenomena at every scale beyond the human.

Summertime makes plain what we ought not need to be told: we are already living in the dreaded future, and that this dreaded future already forms part of our past.

Hope is such a soft and insubstantial thing, slipping in and out of your peripheral vision; I think it’s fair to ask; what is hope even for?

My questions are simple. Enough: How can I live in hope? And what does it mean to be radical? Terrible…

At their core, both Sydney and Signs and Wonders are books that think with what she calls ‘complicated feelings’. This is not simply to say that Falconer writes essays about feeling that are themselves keenly felt. More than this, the essayist determined to see ‘how this world goes’ must see it feelingly, as if mapping the dark room of insight with her hands.

We have been aware for centuries that we are responsible for the earth’s denudation: its ‘cold staring spaces’, as English…

The story of abuse and exploitation by a British firm of a small group of people from a little-known Pacific island may seem like an unremarkable one in the history of the colonial project, but it exemplifies in microcosm the fast-approaching condition of the whole world.

All three books help characterize how and in what ways digital solutions are featuring in environmentalism and to what end. More data about environmental systems and models are certainly useful, but asking how the data animates new forms of collective action is critical.

I can’t quite recall why I stepped off the path on that particular day and headed towards the rocky southern end of Newcastle Beach, where nobody goes.