richardslaughter.com.au

One of the best of the currrent crop of books about the growing threat of runaway climate change due to global warming. Posted in the Best Books section.

Tim Flannery is one of Australia’s leading environmental scientists and a recent Australian of the Year. His 2008 Quarterly Essay is another welcome contribution to a vital debate. Having read it carefully, however, I felt that the framework he was using needed to be expanded to include the human and social factors that he touches on rather too lightly. The essence of my response is that for ’sustainability’ to have any real meaning we need to look beyond the ‘hard’ sciences and fully include the ‘human and social interiors’. Why? Because it is here, rather than in the external physical world, that the issues confronting civilisation have their origins and also their possible solutions. It is posted in the general futures section.

This article provides a response to the five papers that were published in Foresight vol 10 no 4, 2008. It appeared in vol 10 no 5, 2008. It is posted in the general futures section.