Tag Archives: bushfire

Why Australia is Approaching a ‘Climate Change’ Election

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Image Credit: Tim J Keegan, CC BY-SA 2.0

This weekend, Australia will have a federal election. My country will vote, not on an individual leader, but on the party that will form government for the next 3-4 years. We’ve been led by the conservative Liberals (yes, the right-wing party are called the Liberals, it’s stupid) since 2013, and that time in Australia has not been kind to the environment. A tax on carbon was repealed almost as soon as it was implemented, prioritising large businesses has caused potentially irreversible damage to iconic ecosystems around the country, and a disregard for the potential impacts of climate change have been a trademark of the present government.

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The Shifting of Ecological Baselines

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Bushfires like the ones that have ravaged Australia and California this year could become the new norm for the generation that has been born in the last decade, an example of how our perception of ecological change is defined by what has happened in our lifetime

Bushfires like the ones that have ravaged Australia and California this year, could become the new norm for the generation that has been born in the last decade, an example of how our perception of ecological change is defined by what has happened in our lifetime (Image Credit: dm4244, CC BY-SA 4.0)

It’s no secret that our world has undergone rapid changes in the last few decades. Extreme weather events are becoming almost the norm and species seem to be going extinct every minute. But as depressing as this may seem, the general doom and gloom we hear about the world on a daily basis still only represents a small percentage of the ills we’ve inflicted on our planet since we’ve been here.

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