Author: Sarah Day

Great Forest National Park: The quest to protect what we have left

Great Forest National Park: The quest to protect what we have left

Posted by | 24 Aug, 2014 | 2 |

Forget all the diet articles and ads on news sites, instructing us to eat or avoid eating grains, meat, round fruit, purple vegetables, cooked or solid food. Want to lose weight? Just read the actual news. If you care about the environment you’re guaranteed to lose your appetite or indeed spray green smoothie half way across the room in daily fits of apoplectic disbelief and appal. Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority approves dredging (choke). New South Wales conservation reserves open for logging (gag). Government gives the go-ahead for Australia’s biggest ever coal mine seven times the size of...

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Apocaloptimistic: the psychology of climate action

Apocaloptimistic: the psychology of climate action

Posted by | 19 Apr, 2014 | 0 |

A few decades ago, when it was recognised that men have empathy, some jolly person came up with the term Sensitive New Age Guy to describe the male who cares about people and things that are not himself—what PickUp website describes as having “feminine characteristics such as being very timid”. It is said that many a SNAG can be found in the environment movement. It is also said that the environment movement is home to the SNAG’s diametric, the strong effective woman or, what PickUp fans would call the AWFUL BITCH. In truth, of course, the movement’s more diverse...

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I got the Polyethylene Terephthalate Summertime Blues

I got the Polyethylene Terephthalate Summertime Blues

Posted by | 23 Jan, 2014 | 2 |

Ah summer, my sweet sweaty friend. My barefoot companion and sunny soul mate. How sandy your shores, how salty your sea. How colourful the plastic debris, a-washed upon your periphery. Of all the poems inspired by summer – capturing the way it beckons us outdoors and the sense of freedom it brings – I’ve yet to read one that includes an ode to plastic pollution. But as I walk along Australia’s south eastern coastline I get the impression we’ve accepted this scourge as an inevitable and barely noticed part of our travels. Unsightly but benign. Something you pretend you...

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Climate change: Why ask for action when you can take it?

Climate change: Why ask for action when you can take it?

Posted by | 27 Nov, 2013 | 2 |

Climate change. What more is there to say? For anyone still under the impression there’s some kind of debate (a belief easily achieved by reading The Australian) NASA reports that 97% of climate scientists agree – it’s people causing the planet to perspire. But then again, why trust NASA? All them fuzzy headed lentil munching astrophysicists would be out of a job without their self serving greenie conspiracies. Same goes for The American Chemical Society, the International Monetary Fund and The World Bank, advocating their whimsical carbon abatement waffle. And The International Energy Agency (hippies) who reckon we’re on...

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A tall story: From Gondwanaland to clear-fell logging

A tall story: From Gondwanaland to clear-fell logging

Posted by | 24 Sep, 2013 | 0 |

A few hundred million years ago, Australia resided down south near the pole stuck together with most of the southern hemisphere, its landmass covered in lush rainforest. It’s hard to imagine our dry red centre crisscrossed with rivers, shrouded in mist, and bursting with tropical life, and even harder to picture the same across Antarctica. But that’s how it was until Australia drifted north and encountered a drier climate (Antarctica meanwhile was encircled by icy sea currents and stirred into one gigantic Mojito). Remnants of subtropical Gondwana can still be found on the New South Wales-Queensland border. This fragment...

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