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Tag: environment

Stirling Range, after fire

 

 

At 1,159 square kilometres Stirling Range National Park is “large”, or “small”, depending on one’s perspective.

Four hours drive northwest, Perth – Western Australia’s sprawling metropolis  – occupies more than five times as much ground.

The Stirlings’ “footprint” is less than one 209th of the United Kingdom’s 242, 495 square kilometres.

Botanically, however, the Stirling Range is much the “bigger”/“hotter” place!

It has more flowering plant species than does the entire UK; many of them grow only in or near the Stirling Range.

Two recent “catastrophic” fires seemingly “destroyed” much more than half of what had been growing there…

 

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Word power: Richard Flanagan on “a writer’s achievements”

 

It’s presumed that the author starts with an intention and if the book’s published they’ve succeeded in it. But successful books are ones that have escaped the author’s intentions and become something else. Novels when they succeed are incoherent and contradictory and mysterious. Nothing is more secondary to a writer’s achievements than their original ambition.

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“Paradise” (#15 in “a shining moment” series)

 

Many of us do not Believe.

A non-Believer, however, can still believe in the power of particular places here on terra firma – earthly “paradises” which inspire us, delight us, even heal us.

One uncanny song is named for a place that really did have the same name as the song which so vividly evoked it, and mourned its destruction: Paradise.

We have just lost its author.

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Word Power: planting trees, claiming credits…credible?

In Australia, the unpleasant truth – rarely admitted – is that in many instances, the answer to the headline’s question is “no”.

Carbon credits counted in government projections can, quite literally, go up in smoke and blow out the emissions side of the CO2 ledger.

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