Ross is based in Australia. He is an avid follower of human nature and is particularly excited by the sustainability-based ways that populations can deal with their current environmental and social problems. Ross has been a journalist for the past 10 years and prior to that worked in finance and economics.
Making a mistake isn’t necessarily stupid, but making the same mistake twice is. Thankfully Australia has learned from its past and banned the introduction of Savannah cats, a natural destroyer of the country’s unique wildlife.
The humble ‘moggy’ or domestic cat maybe a cute little family pet to those in the rest of the world but to Australia’s wildlife it is a born killing machine. And once the cats have adapted to life in the wild they are even more devastating.
You could be excused for thinking that Australia is on top of its environmental problems based on the amount of talk that business directs towards the issue. But our regulator’s recent swoop on tyre-manufacturer Goodyear’s inflated sales pitch shows that as green issues become mainstream, you have to be more wary of manufactures’ claims, not less.
It would be nice to think that as the world collectively wakes up to its immense environmental challenge that business could be relied on to direct its muscle and intelligence towards addressing these problems, authentically.
Adventures in the development of truly biodegradable plastics are showing that technology can help us with our environmental challenges, but make no mistake technology on its own will not be able to deliver us from our environmental quagmire. This will only happen when we are mature enough and motivated enough to make positive and voluntary behavioral change.
Some members of the Australian community went into paroxysm when our muddle-headed environment minister toyed with the idea of charging a modest fee for plastic disposable shopping bags that are ordinarily handed out free.
The plastic charge
Being and free and plastic is of course a lethal cocktail as far as nature is concerned. There are roughly 6 billion plastic bags used each year in Australia and this end up clogging up land fill sites or stuck in the throats of hapless aquatic life form, normally the very endangered.
Those against the move argued that people would struggle to get their shopping home, and that a large percentage of the replacement bags that customers used would be made of plastic anyway. It was also argued that the old free shopping bags were great as garbage bin liners and if they were not available then alternative bags, again plastic, would have to be purchased for the purpose.
Note: this article is part of this week’s EcoWorldly cycling series: Cycling and its importance in countries around the world.
Despite more evidence that cycling is universally good, this time in the form of a report showing that it saves the government $227.2 million in annual health costs, there is still no denying there is just one king on the Australian roads—the car!
The fact that the bureaucrats actually have to commission a report into the health benefits of cycling probably tells you exactly what you need to know about the way that Australian governments treat the activity. Does any one really doubt that cycling is healthy? And what do they intend to do with this number now that hey have it?
Australian wave power generators inspired by nature’s know-how are meeting their development goals and have the potential to leave other renewable power sources in their wake.
Biopower Systems is just one of the wave-energy developers gaining attention by meeting its technological goals and backing this up with investment support.
Environmentalists have claimed a victory in Australia where a major investment bank is said to be canceling its funding of a controversial pulp mill planned by the country’s biggest harvester of old-growth forest timber.
Both the financial sector and the environmental movement were abuzz around Australia last week with the same piece of information. It looked very much like the Australia New Zealand bank (ANZ), one of the country’s top four, had pulled out of its pledge to fund a controversial $2.2 billion pulp mill planned for the southern state of Tasmania.
But of course while the finance sector saw doom and gloom and proceeded to wipe 10 per cent of the share market value of the pulp mill’s developer Gunns Ltd, the environmentalist were giddy with delight. If the rumor is true, and they certainly think it is, it could well be the final shot in a battle that has raged for years between Gunns and environmentalists.
