Featured
Culture, Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Summer 2021
Facebook lets the world burn
It was never going to go well. Attempting to prop up the media sector while reigning in the tech giants with one bill was always going to be chaotic, but even then, the impact of Facebook’s Australian news content ban last Thursday was more widespread than almost anyone anticipated. The government passed their revised News Media Bargaining Code through the... 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
Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Summer 2021, Peace, Social Justice
Beirut burning
Some of the worst wildfires ravaged through the mountains of Lebanon in 2019, caused by extended drought, wind and unusually dry weather. The government’s response to this crisis mirrored every government service in the country, at best inadequate, and mostly non-existent. In 2020 more than 100 wildfires spread again throughout the mountains in the southern Chouf and in the northern... Read More
Culture, Democracy, Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Summer 2021
Sparked by love and rage: An interview with Holly Hammond
Holly Hammond (she/her) is a social movement educator and librarian. She is the Director of the Commons Social Change Library which includes a vast array of resources including a wellbeing collection. She has worked to strengthen social movements and promote activist wellbeing for many years through training, facilitation, coaching, and writing via the Plan to Win and Plan to Thrive... 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
Democracy, Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Summer 2021, Social Justice
Burning debate: Building consensus from the ashes
During the summer that preceded COVID, my family left me home alone and set off on the five-hour annual road trip to Nowa Nowa, not far from Lakes Entrance in East Gippsland. As flames spread across Victoria and New South Wales, my partner, daughter and son were evacuated the next day. When the area was declared safe, they returned home.... 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
Featured
Into the fire: Summer 2021 Edition call for contributions
We’re calling for contributions for our Summer 2021 edition of Green Agenda: On fire in politics and policy. Submit your short pitch to contribute to the debate on sustainability, social justice, peace and nonviolence, and democracy. This earth, I never damage. I look after. Fire is nothing, just clean up. When you burn, new grass coming up. That means good... Read More
Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Spring 2020
Where to from here? Imagining a post-Covid future
There are lots of people, elbows out, trying to shape what Australia’s post-Covid future looks like. Scott Morrison would have us double-down on gas, conveniently forgetting climate change remains an existential threat. Around the country, state governments have taken the opportunity to ramp up police power, investing in unprecedented police numbers, more equipment, more arrests. Investment in industries including public... Read More
Democracy, Featured, Green Agenda Quarterly Journal Spring 2020, Social Justice
‘Now is the time for bold decision making’: Senator Siewert on the lessons of 2020
What a strange year 2020 has been. We entered it under a fog of smoke with parts of the country barely able to breathe, and growing community anger as fires burned. The links were being made stronger than ever, the fires were due to climate change – surely there would finally be decisive action taken, surely there was no choice... Read More
