Thesis snippets: the saving grace of water

Water has been the river’s saving grace. This may seem obvious, rivers and water are surely inextricably linked. So let me be a little more precise. The visible manifestations of water, and the life enabled by them, have allowed the Los Angeles River to survive extreme human alteration. Acres of concrete, without water, are just […]

Another day, another protest

  These past few weeks I’ve found myself part of three community protests: first greeting the dawn with anti-fracking campaigners at Bentley in Northern New South Wales, then rallying with more than 8000 other citizens at Sydney’s March in May, all of us reeling from the just-released federal budget, and then pounding the city streets […]

A favourite place

We all have favourite places, right? I want to share with you one of mine. It’s  80 km of heavily reinforced concrete. It’s in one of the world’s mega-cities. It’s a convenient place to film car chase scenes, and also a place to horse ride, to wander, kayak, make art, and find space. It’s the Los […]

Stepping up

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has” – Margaret Mead Imagine where we’d be without those thoughtful committed citizens.Imagine where we could be if more of us felt okay about joining them. I’ve been held back countless times from stepping up. Correction. I’ve […]

No such thing as waste disposal

Our office has plastic cups because washing up after ourselves must be too hard. I recently went to a dinner eaten from plastic plates, where afterwards all traces of our meal were swept into a plastic garbage bag. At a recent function, I reluctantly ate individually plastic wrapped biscuits and sweetened my tea with paper […]

Debating on the dark side

A few Transition Bondi folks and I went head-to-head with an unflinching Centre for Sustainability Leadership team in a halloween-night debate last week which asked “Will community groups lead the change to a more sustainable future?”. We on the Transition Bondi team had to argue against the power of community groups, a beautifully ironic task given […]

"In Sydney, the forest speaks Polish at Easter"

…and Diego Bonetto listens. Last weekend, I had the privilege of participating in an edible weeds walk on the Cooks River. Led by Diego, about fifteen of us spent an enthralled couple of hours discovering some of the culinary and medicinal gems that typically just disappear below our shoes. Some of these weeds are comfortable […]

Balcony gardening revival

The last few weeks have been about re-starting my balcony garden. When I moved house a few years ago, I got caught up in other priorities and never got a proper balcony gardening happening. The main obstacle for me was that buying all the components from a hardware mega-store  (potting soil, mulch, compost, etc) seemed to counteract the goodness of growing food. […]