The following is an email sent to ISCAST members and friends on January 13, 2020 following the Executive Director's sojourn and evacuation from Mallacoota during and after the fires. ...
It is Sunday morning January 12, 2020. I am sitting at home where things are externally normal: normal traffic, normal bird noises, normal Melbourne blue sky with clouds, although a little smoky.
The summer of 2019-20 has seen huge and intense bushfires in Victoria and NSW. Some 1.4 million ha in Victoria and 4.9 million ha in NSW has been burned to mid-January. (The areas burned in four years to 2015-16 were 1.0 million ha in Victoria and 1.8 million ha in NSW, some of this being planned burns.)
Most or all of this area had been burned before, particularly in 1983, 2003, or 2006-07, and the vegetation will slowly recover, but there will have been a massive loss of fauna.
ISCAST fellow Michael Clarke was interviewed by the international "Nature" magazine about the Australian bushfires.
"It is deathly silent when you go into a forest after a fire. Apart from the ‘undertakers’ — the carrion eaters like currawongs, ravens and shrike-thrushes — picking off the dead bodies, there’s nothing much left in the forest. It’s a chilling experience.
The following is an email sent to ISCAST members and friends on January 13, 2020 following the Executive Director's sojourn and evacuation from Mallacoota during and after the fires. ...
It is Sunday morning January 12, 2020. I am sitting...
Read moreThe summer of 2019-20 has seen huge and intense bushfires in Victoria and NSW. Some 1.4 million ha in Victoria and 4.9 million ha in NSW has been burned to mid-January. (The areas burned in four years to 2015-16 were 1.0 million ha in Victoria...
Read moreISCAST fellow Michael Clarke was interviewed by the international "Nature" magazine about the Australian bushfires.
"It is deathly silent when you go into a forest after a fire. Apart from the ‘undertakers’ — the carrion eaters like...
Read more
ISCAST fellow Ian Hore-Lacy has published a review of a very highly praised and recent book The Madness of Crowds. See the review here.
Review of Confronting Religious Denial of Science: Christian Humanism and the Moral Imagination by Catherine M. Wallace. Review by Jonathan M. Hanes
Alan Gijsbers introduces the issues and papers from Wicked Problems Symposium, held in Victoria in 2019. The papers are published separtely on the site with links below.
The Antropocene as a wicked problem? Mick Pope describes the nature and history of "the anthropocene" and reflects on our understanding of sin and wisdom.
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Read moreI have been asked to sum up ISCAST Victoria’s conference on Wicked Problems held on September 7 2019. I have done so with considerable revisions from both Richard Gijsbers and Charles Sherlock, which has made this paper much better, but any...
Read moreRichard Gijsbers BForSc (Melb), DipFor (Cres) is an ISCAST Fellow.
In the 1970s social planners vented their frustration about complex social problems. Why couldn't we close the gap between indigenous people’s health and that of...
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