“The bad news is that everyone is a potential victim / But the good news is that everyone is a potential solution.” So begins a recent song from Ugandan reggae singer-turned-lawmaker Bobi Wine, who has spent years singing about urban poverty and injustice. The new song,...
At the beginning of this century, a review paper (Daszak et al, 2000) highlighted the importance of the consumption of wildlife as a major source of a series of dangerous new “emerging” pathogens. The most well-known of these is the AIDS virus that was first recognized...
As I sit here tapping out this essay, one thing on my mind is how best to respond to the latest proposal on cats being promoted here in Hawaii by the conservation community. Here in Hawaii, on the island of Kauai, conservationists are pushing the...
Most of us will have had an occasion to rescue an injured or ill wild animal, whether it be a mouse that the cat has caught, a bird that has flown into a window or something more exotic. I suspect that we then scramble to...
I remember seeing a quote some years ago that distilled the problems we face as a human society down to one fundamental reason - viewing other people and other species as less than ourselves. I’ve continued to think about this as the harm we cause our...
For those interested in data and understanding current global challenges but who have not yet visited the website, Our World in Data, we would strongly urge spending some time browsing the site. This January a new article appeared addressing the very confusing issue of the...
In the search to explain the world around us, there have been occasions where a particular set of observations produces a narrative that appears to provide an elegant explanation of what is happening, even though it might not be entirely accurate. One such story is...
The New York Times (19 January 2020) reported that Australia has shifted from being a donor country to a charitable recipient nation in the face of its current wildfire emergency. To make matters even worse, the wholesale burning of Australia's landscapes has set the country...
The Federal Government in Australia was warned by a group of ex-fire chiefs early in 2019 that the country was facing a potential fire disaster scenario that was in part due to the ongoing and significant effects of climate change. The group asked for a...
The summer fires in Australia mark a cataclysmic reminder that climate change is hurting our planet and that we need to recognise it and plan for a future that minimises the risk to humans and wildlife. [caption id="attachment_7320" align="alignright" width="378"] Burned Australian Forest,, Photo by D....
