Cinders are the black pieces that are left after something such as wood or coal has burned away. People can also burn. There was a terrible bushfire in southeastern Australia on 6 February 1851. Quoting from the National Museum of Australia: In the hills west of Geelong, a man helping fight a fire disappeared. His […]
I am very privileged to have some wonderful friends, who still take the time to observe nature. Once upon a time we found these people in universities studying the natural sciences, now we are perhaps more likely to find them in film school or at iNaturalist. One of the best ways to know something about […]
The Sun did come out for the first morning – Monday morning. The inaugural conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship was in Greenwich just a few miles downriver from Westminster in London. I hadn’t managed to get any sleep Sunday night after arriving late on a series of flights beginning in Rockhampton (to the […]
There is a tendency, that must be resisted, for 21st century Western scientists to claim every discovery of mass death as a catastrophe and unprecedented – to imagine that the entire Earth is convulsing, when it is not. I am thinking of coral reef scientists such as Terry Hughes from James Cook University who fly […]
It's Christmas Day. An annual event commemorating the birth of Jesus Christ. He was a healer, and in the most empowering of ways. Sometime just through simple touch. He was also an outcast, decried by the elites of his time, he was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate the Roman governor of Judaea under […]
FUNDAMENTAL to the scientific method is the assumption that reality exists independently of our belief systems; that there is such a thing as evidence, and that it matters. There seems to be general agreement on this point from both the left and right sides of Australian politics. Indeed, in an article in The Weekend Australian […]
FIFTY years ago, on 7 July 1967, Time magazine ran a cover story entitled, ‘The Hippies: Philosophy of a Subculture’. Modern environmentalism is in some ways a product of this Flower Power movement, but a still-born version. It has become replete with particular moral codes – right ways of doing things – ostensibly underpinned by a […]
FIRE in the landscape, or bushfire, is Australia’s most lethal and costly natural hazard. Big, uncontrollable bushfires can kill millions of trees and wild animals, thousands of farm animals, and sometimes humans too. Apart from deaths, bushfires incinerate property, such as bridges, farm fencing, homes, and even, a few years ago, an astronomical observatory. The […]
GEORGE Brandis says it is “deplorable” deniers are being excluded from the climate change debate and people who say the science is settled are ignorant and medieval. The attorney general called the leader of the opposition in the Senate, Penny Wong, the “high priestess of political correctness” and said he did not regret his comment […]
