With the arrival of the Anthropocene we must now be suspicious of all ideas developed in the last 10,000 years, including James Lovelock’s notion of Gaia which, it turns out, is a child of the Holocene. The Anthropocene is a reversion to the unruly and chaotic conditions before the Holocene’s 10-millennium epoch of calm. Now the unruly Earth juts through into world, an intrusion that cannot be suppressed by the Modern’s technology. Such a realisation is not merely a powerful emotional event but one saturated with meaning. A talk to the AIME Conference, Paris, 29 July 2014.
Australia will not come close to net zero by 2050 under Coalition’s nuclear plan
George Wilkenfeld and Clive Hamilton The Coalition has announced that it plans to commission seven nuclear power stations by 2050. It has said it would