What is our relationship towards the environment and why should we care about it?
In the way we have come to use the automobile, I think we have lost many things - clean air, health, nature, green spaces, and a little bit of our soul. This is my call for us to banish mass private ownership of automobiles from our cities.
We need a change in our culture to enable us to live in an environmentally attuned way, here are my ideas on how we need to change
The animals in the human food system are one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. A lot of different studies have come up with different figures as to what percentage of emissions are attributable to livestock; here I discuss them in the context of the world and Australia specifically.
In only a short time, Australia has been radically changed by European settlement. This is an introduction into the main problems we face.
..in the early 1930s, most people living in cities got around on electric streetcars. Concerned that this wasn't the kind of environment in which they could sell a lot of buses, General Motors, using a series of front companies, began buying streetcar systems, tearing out the tracks and then selling the new, polluting bus systems back to the cities - usually with contracts that prohibited purchase of "any new equipment using fuel or means of propulsion other than gas."...GM was soon joined by Greyhound, Firestone Tire and Rubber, Standard Oil of California (also called Chevrom) and Mack Trucks. In 1949 - after these companies had destroyed more than 100 streetcar systems in more than 45 cities...GM, Chevron and Firestone were convicted of a criminal conspiracy...They were fined $5000 each and the executives who organised the scheme were fined $1 each
— Mark Zepezauer and Arthur Naiman, Take the Rich Off Welfare
Richard Powers
I don't read a lot of fiction, but this was given to me as a present and I heard good things about it. What attracted me more than anything else was to the book was that it is about the intertwining relationships between humans and trees. On reading it you realise it is not just about humans and trees, it is the relationships between trees and all life, and the infrastructure that has made that happen over evolutionary time. The book was so beautifully written, it has descriptive passages that are just a joy to read, and only very occasionally...