Tree spiking = Beheading ergo Environmentalism = Terrorism

Moral equivalence is among the standard logical fallacies identified by philosophers. “It seeks to draw comparisons”, goes a definition, “between different, often unrelated things, to make a point that one is just as bad as the other”. For lecturers in logic seeking a perfect case study, one has just been published by the federal government […]

The Technofix Is In: A critique of “An Ecomodernist Manifesto”

The world’s best scientists are warning that the world is warming inexorably, the oceans are becoming acidic and have turned into a “plastic soup,” and we are in the middle of the kind of mass extinction event not seen on the planet in millions of years. But don’t worry — a new breed of environmentalists […]

The New Environmentalism Will Lead Us To Disaster

The New Environmentalism Will Lead Us To Disaster So-called ecopragmatists say we can have a “good Anthropocene.” They’re dead wrong. Clive Hamilton Published in Scientific American, 19 June 2014 Fourteen years ago, when a frustrated Paul Crutzen blurted out the word “Anthropocene” at a scientific meeting in Mexico, the famous atmospheric chemist was expressing his […]

Can humans survive the Anthropocene?

So profound has been the influence of humans that Earth system scientists have proposed that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. The new epoch marks the end of the Holocene, a 10,000-year period of climatic stability and clemency that permitted civilization to flourish. What does it mean for humankind to inscribe […]

ASIC and the Great Coal Hoax

Will anti-coal activist Jonathan Moylan receive justice if he is charged over his hoax? ASIC, which will formally interview Moylan next week, is under enormous pressure to “make an example” of the 24-year old. It is expected he will be charged with breaching Section 1041E of the Corporations Act, which outlaws false and misleading statements […]

ANZ imposter takes up new climate tactic

Yesterday an anti-coal activist, Jonathan Moylan, issued a media release purportedly from the ANZ Bank withdrawing a loan from a coal company. The hoax wiped $314 million from the value of Whitehaven Coal, although the share prices recovered after the ruse was revealed. ASIC has announced that it is investigating whether Moylan has contravened provisions […]

Rio+20 and the New Sorcerer’s Apprentices

Scientific thinking has changed radically over the last two decades, so that what we used to think of as “the environment”-the natural world spread around us-no longer exists.  So the default position is no longer how to minimize our impact on the environment, but how best to intervene. The goal can no longer be to […]

Love Your Scapegoats

A response to Bruno Latour’s “Love Your Monsters: Why We Must Care for Our Technologies As We Do Our Children” [1] If Frankenstein is to serve as a parable for “political ecology” then Mary Shelley’s plot must be reworked. In the revised version Dr Frankenstein is no more than an inquisitive but anxious assistant to the […]

Environmentalism: The Way Forward

A talk (by videolink) to the National Climate Action Summit University of Melbourne, 9 April 2011 The difficulty and importance of the global warming campaign is many times greater than every other environmental struggle. Controlling carbon pollution requires a wholesale industrial restructuring and defeat of the most powerful industry coalition ever assembled. Yet in the […]