Paul Mees, passionate campaigner for public transport and researcher into transport planning, is back with his most cogent, convincing work yet, Public Transport for Suburbia: Beyond the Automobile Age. After being sacked by Melbourne University for criticizing Victoria’s archaic, petrol-focused transport bureaucracy, Mees has found a home at RMIT, and a real sense of peace [...]
Eric Maisel is a humble, brilliant writer on creativity, a guru (though he would argue against the very term) to the stumblers like me. Brainstorm: Harnessing the Power of Productive Obsessions breaks no new ground but instead takes Maisel’s notions of ‘making meaning’ and living through creativity to prod us towards obsession. Not the destructive [...]
Before Bill McKibben started 350.org, his grassroots organization (he makes quite explicit it’s for young people, implying us older folks have dropped the ball) campaigning to roll back global warming, he asked climatologist James Hansen what number he should choose. Having just read James Hansen’s compelling semi-memoir Storms of My Grandchildren (see my review), as [...]
Of course one should read books by one’s heroes, both as homage and for inspiration. James Hansen is that rare scientist, brilliantly geeky yet driven by conscience to enter the fields of politics and persuasion. In spite of his own preference to stay in the lab, he was one of the first scientists to leap [...]
I missed out on Elizabeth Kostova’s bestselling debut The Historian but I heard so many readers praise it that I was looking forward to The Swan Thieves. The opening promises high entertainment: into the care of Andrew Marlowe, an institutional psychiatrist and hobby painter, is thrust uncommunicative Robert Oliver, a successful painter caught trying to [...]
Jonathan Hiskes at Grist enumerates recent coal and oil disasters, which don’t include the Barrier Reef oil spill. Unfortunately, my experience is that the world has learned to look the other way. We’ve become acclimatised to the normal damages caused by the fossil fuel industries. I remain convinced that the key to cutting out fossil [...]
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Strong writers’ voices make all the difference: The debut novel by Australian-born Evie Wyld, After the Fire, a Still Small Voice, tackles the cascading effect of violence, the violence of men at war, through generations. Wyld is an evocative, sure-footed stylist, and her portrait of two Australians, one a Vietnam war soldier, the other an [...]
Hugely disparate in impact and quality: Books that change one’s life are rare (by definition!), so I’m privileged to report the second such in the month of April. Requiem for a Species: Why We Resist the Truth About Climate Change, by Australian author and think-tanker Clive Hamilton, is a tour de force of compression and [...]
Check out this post on Grist about the unheralded advances wind energy made last year in the United States.
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Paul Krugman’s long NYT article ‘Building a green economy’ has aroused tons of debate. If like me you’re a layperson, it’s well worth reading carefully as a wonderfully clear overview of environmental economics (let along climate change itself). What impressed me most is his claim that there is a ‘rough consensus’ among economists on the [...]
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