Biodiversity

The first shipment of Australia's nuclear waste to be returned from re-processing in France has now left a French port, and will arrive on our shores by the end of the year. The return of the 25 tonnes of nuclear waste is putting renewed pressure on the Federal Government to find a location for a permanent waste dump. The shipment began its journey just a day after senior Aboriginal women gathered in Adelaide to mark their fight against a proposed dump in South Australia in the 1990s. The women say they will fight against any new move to put the waste on their land. [node:read-more:link]

Ancient Indigenous Australian bush-burning could be used around the world to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions, according to United Nations research, which also challenges Prime Minister Tony Abbott's refusal to embrace the purchase of international carbon credits. Abbott has previously said buying overseas offsets sends money "offshore into dodgy carbon farms in Equatorial Guinea and Kazakhstan".

The government this month delayed considering the measure until 2017 or later, saying it would rather make cuts domestically. [node:read-more:link]

Our brains were our great evolutionary advantage, conferring massive memory, curiosity, inventiveness and observational powers ... By applying our acquired knowledge and insights, we could deliberately choose a path to avoid danger or trouble, and to exploit opportunities. I believe foresight was a huge evolutionary advantage for our species. And that's what is so tragic today when we have all the amplified foresight of scientists and supercomputers, which have been warning us for decades that we are heading down a dangerous path, but now we allow politics and economics to override this predictive power. [node:read-more:link]

Capitalism could not flourish without crushing the resistance of people who wanted to live differently ... wage labour and the drive to accumulate capital were incompatible with Aboriginal society. That incompatibility was the basis of the genocide. Across a vast stretch of northern Australia, extending at least from Borroloola to the Kimberley, Aborigines tell the tale of a murderous white man. He stands for whites in general, and is seen as an invader. As quoted in a paper by anthropologist Deborah Bird Rose; "shooting all the people [and] getting ready for the country, trying to take it away". [node:read-more:link]