Sustainability

A treaty between the nations of the Murray-Darling Basin could help in the lobbying for Indigenous rights to water. (Picture: Melissa Macgill)

Sofie Wainwright ABC Broken Hill 12 August 2016

Representatives from almost 50 Indigenous nations across the Murray-Darling Basin have begun talks to develop a treaty. [node:read-more:link]

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]

Tony Abbott tells us that his northern development obsession "will benefit every single Australian" but a Research Fellow in Anthropology at Australian National University writes that while this may be good news to developers, it makes many First Nations people in the region very anxious.
Today it's much harder for First Nations people to support development, as many are now able to see clearly how the costs and benefits associated with large-scale development in the region are distributed unequally. [node:read-more:link]

Stephen Mayne Crikey 2 February 2015

The 2013-14 political donations data confirms a long trend in Australian politics, with the ALP still fundamentally reliant on the union movement and the Liberal Party in the thrall of big business, rent-seekers and a few wealthy families. [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]

Researchers established that Lake Mungo's high water mark was five metres higher than previously realised, and results of an international study has revealed that the iconic lake situated 90 kilometres north-east of Mildura, was actually a mega-lake, almost 20 per cent bigger than thought before. "Traces of people's activities are actually embedded in sediment, so that tells us that people were relying on watercraft to get around to exploit what was on the island in terms of animals to hunt," said La Trobe University archaeologist Nicola Stern. [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]

Going without food, or going without nutritious food, has heavy consequences for Indigenous people, as we learnt on a recent research trip to the West Kimberley. Indigenous Australians are already twice as likely to have a disability or chronic illness as non-Indigenous Australians; poor nutrition compounds these problems, leading to further illness and secondary impairments.Aboriginal people consistently reported alleviating food insecurity by going crabbing or fishing on traditional lands. Though this accounted for a small portion of total dietary intake. [node:read-more:link]