Climate change
Bob May – Professor of Everything
I have known two “professors of everything”: George Seddon and Robert May. Seddon, who ended his days in Fremantle, Western Australia, had chairs in geology, English, environment,…
Parallel plotlines: The evolving stories of climate change and corona
I am writing this from inside an apartment in Melbourne, Australia. A crisp, cool breeze ripples in through the window, as it has done in all autumns past and will do in autumns…
Winds of change: Rethinking disaster relief after Cyclone Harold
Wind speeds over 215 kilometres per hour, more than 180,000 people affected, communities and their infrastructure hit hard, and countries in lockdown – Cyclone Harold is the most…
Solastalgia: A malady for our age?
Some words capture the zeitgeist, or the spirit of the times. We’ve been talking about “globalisation” for decades now, until it’s become a comfortable part of our intellectual…
Learning from extinction
They called the last one Martha. I’d never heard of the passenger pigeon until a couple of years ago, these small birds that once flew in great nomadic flocks across North America…
Japan has struck low in climate ambition
Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzo has repeatedly pledged that his country would lead global efforts to address climate change. Increasingly, however, Japan is facing scrutiny…
Economic diplomacy: Two big-C issues
Change of pace
If Australia’s bushfire crisis has done one thing to inadvertently calm the national zeitgeist during the holiday season, it is in the way climate change has…
Jakarta is flooding and its governor is sinking
Jakarta welcomed the new year with a new record — the heaviest rains in decades. The deluge left parts of the Indonesian capital under 5 metres of water, which triggered…
Climate leadership: An idea whose time has come?
Julie Bishop’s seemingly belated call for Australian leadership on climate change has drawn some predictable criticism. Why, it might reasonably be asked, didn’t she do something…
Best of The Interpreter 2019: The rising climate chorus
The annual Lowy Institute poll has tracked Australian attitudes on the environment for more than a decade, a mirror of the political vicissitudes in the country. The 2019 results…