Environment
Culture, Democracy, Environment, Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Winter 2021, Social Justice
Policing dissent, enforcing consent
You can’t do it that way! When Extinction Rebellion protesters spray-painted “duty of care” across the front of Parliament House the morning after the latest IPCC Report was released, drawing national and international attention to the fact that the Minister for the Environment is appealing a court decision finding she actually has a legal duty of care to future generations... Read More
Economy, Environment, Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Autumn 2021
Security for the Big Polluters: Plantation forestry for carbon offset delays action on climate
There is now growing acceptance – even amongst some of the most ardent of once anti-environmentalists – on the need for urgent action to curb global greenhouse gas emissions, stabilise the earth’s atmosphere, and limit the worst effects of global climate chaos. At the United Nations climate negotiations, a disparate group of nation states, First Nations, civil society, and along... Read More
Environment, Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Summer 2021, Social Justice
Green Agenda Summer 2021: Into the Fire
As I sit in my study writing this piece, I look outside to the trees in our street and the clean Canberra air. It is a far cry from what it was like just over a year ago. From November 2019 to February 2020 our beautiful city was shrouded in smoke. With fires to our north, east and west, we... Read More
Culture, Environment, Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Summer 2021
Fire and fiction: Reading and learning empathy and connection through bushfire fiction
On both sides of the Pacific Ocean, 2020 will be remembered as the year that a new kind of wildfire burned across the pyrophytic landscapes of south-east Australia and the western United States. Twelve months down the line, the figures are still hard to comprehend; Australia’s Black Summer bushfire season killed or displaced more than 3 billion animals, and destroyed... Read More
Environment, Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Summer 2021, Peace, Social Justice
A fiery trifecta
We are in the midst of a fiery trifecta of crises: climate, covid, nuclear. They’re all connected, and all capable of great damage, and of great transformation. The climate crisis just keeps getting worse, as governments refuse to take the bold and necessary actions to limit global warming to 1.5%. This challenge has been sneaking up on us for more... Read More
Culture, Environment, Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Summer 2021
A thesis, fire, and the telling of stories
In the summer of 2019-20, my view of the world was skewed by fire. At the tail end of a Masters in Sustainable Development, I was working on a thesis. Exploring the issue of climate change reportage meant that a pine table in our home was cluttered with books and research papers tackling the subject. Volumes on climate change and... Read More
Economy, Environment, Featured, Social Justice
Blak Leadership, Green Politics: An Interview With Senator-elect Lidia Thorpe
Ahead of her swearing in as Greens Senator for Victoria, Senator-elect Lidia Thorpe spoke to Green Agenda editor, Felicity Gray, about the activist history that propels her, her plans for the Senate, and decolonising green politics. Felicity Gray: Congratulations on your recent pre-selection as a Greens Senator for Victoria. Very exciting. Lidia Thorpe: Thank you. Felicity Gray: It’s quite a... Read More
Environment, Featured, Social Justice
Why We Need a Decolonial Ecology
As Malcom Ferdinand explains, environmental destruction is inseparable from relationships of racial and colonial domination. It stems from the way we inhabit Earth, from our sense of entitlement in appropriating the planet. All of which means we must recast the past. His book, Une écologie décoloniale (A Decolonial Ecology), won the Foundation for Political Ecology literature prize in 2019. In this conversation,... Read More
Environment, Peace, Social Justice
Post-COVID: Will Our Better Angels Prevail?
I know I shouldn’t sit up late at night scrolling through the 24-hour coronavirus news coverage. I know reading countless horror stories about those impacted by the pandemic only makes me unnecessarily anxious, yet I do it anyway. While my biggest concern is for those losing their lives and loved ones to the virus, what also strikes me is that... Read More
Democracy, Environment
How The Greens Won Budapest
Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz party seemed unbeatable until a progressive breakthrough at the Budapest mayoral elections. As he made me coffee in his kitchen on the train to Budapest, the chatty chef said something surprising: “there is a fashion now to hate the president”. Orbán would, he guessed, lose the next election. On my previous trip to Hungary, just 15 months... Read More
