Environmentalists From Australia

"where George II died and where Queen Victoria was born is still used as apartments for the sovereign's relatives: Princess Margaret, the , and . The State Apartments and suite occupied by Princess Victoria are open."

"proposed as the chief gardener and William Brown as his assistant. Nelson had already 'sailed round the world in my service for the purpose of collecting plants and seeds and was eminently successful in the object of his mission,' wrote Banks."

"... In 1961 she trained as a newspaper reporter and was sent to London to work for the Murdoch papers on . She filed reports from all over the world and interviewed such celebrities as the Dalai Lama, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and PG Wodehouse. The Duchess was despatched on several hazardous missions – notably to war-torn Vietnam and gave a graphic account of a strike mission she flew with the carrying . In 1963, she attended a dinner for in Miami four nights before he was assassinated in Dallas. Two years later, she returned to Vietnam, and was one of the first women to write about the effects of the bombing raids launched from Danang, the top secret centre where the US stockpiled its most deadly bombs."

"There is a that I will probably never send. I would not dare to. It is a cross of Jesus drawn in fresh blood from an animal sacrifice. Although slaughter for sacrifice contradicts a basic belief of Christianity, it is practiced by local Catholics, Greek Orthodox and other Christians at the in the village of , 20 miles from Jerusalem. "Around 70 to 80 lambs are sacrificed here each year," said the Roman Catholic priest, Father Raed. Similar sacrifices are also made in the towns of d, , and elsewhere in the Holy Land. Yet bloodless altars are a distinguishing feature of Christian churches. One of the tenets of the faith is that Jesus was the ultimate and final sacrifice. Christians atone for their sins without the shedding of blood. They look to Jesus as the who made the ancient belief in sacrifice obsolete. It is surely hypocritical of the churches to encourage millions of tourists and pilgrims to visit Jerusalem to see where Jesus Christ was crucified, but not halt this ritualised sacrifice."

"On 1 October 1918, when only sixteen, my father rode into Damascus with the , hours ahead of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), and the colourful . Fighting in the sane campaign were another 100,000 soldiers including the , the only armed Jewish force fighting in Palestine for nearly 2,000 years. From their first steps on the moors of in 1917, these Jewish soldiers were trained to be part of the . After fighting alongside my father on the road to Damascus, some of these fighters went underground to eventually become founding members of Israel's biggest and most effective militia, the , which in 1948 would form the 's original army with a force in mid-May of 35,000 fighters."

"An extraordinary diversity of , , bird and fauna had developed from n ancestors. Small, sharp-fanged marsupial 'lions'; cow-sized browsing s; giant kangaroos, even a kangaroo thought by its dentition to have been carnivorous; and huge, 3-metre flightless birds were all present."

"The late , a Sydney printer and skilled and deservedly respected ornithologist, considered the to breed rarely in in his early days (born in 1904, he died in 1971). But in later years he recorded that some birds were always present and breeding. It seems likely that, in part at least, this change reflected the planting of flowering trees and shrubs in Sydney gardens."

"Watching bouncing, tinkling flocks of es feeding on thistles at once, the American ornithologist Dr guessed he had seen more goldfinches there than even in Europe."

"One of Australia's least savoury wildlife episodes was the long slaughter of s for their fur, which continued in some States to the end of the 1920's. In 1924 over 2 million koala pelts were exported, many under the pseudonym of to avoid the odium of publicity."

"From time to time I get a query about an unusual waterhen people have seen. It's usually described as dark, with red legs — and a cocked tail that makes it look 'like a little '. Some say they have seen it far from water. Most agree that 'it runs like hell'. Over the years I've had more technical enquiries, but there's not the slightest doubt the bird in question in this case is that peculiarly Australian creation, the black-tailed native-hen ('), a species of small ."

"The lawyer-ornithologist tells of removing a 's nest from a 'well-formed hollow' in a in the outer suburbs of ... Two weeks later he cleared out a 's nest from the hollow. Three weeks later he flushed a from a clutch of three eggs in the same hollow. Clearly the starling is causing losses among native birds ..."

"One of the most common forms of denial of women and nature is what I will term backgrounding, their treatment as providing the background to a dominant, foreground sphere of recognized achievement or causation. This backgrounding of women and nature is deeply embedded in the rationality of the economic system and in the structures of contemporary society."

"The inferiorization of human qualities and aspects of life associated with necessity, nature and women—of nature-as-body, of nature-as-passion or emotion, of nature as the pre-symbolic, of nature-as-primitive, of nature-as-animal and of nature as the feminine—continues to operate to the disadvantage of women, nature and the quality of human life."

"Dominant western culture has systematically inferiorised, backgrounded and denied dependency on the whole sphere of reproduction and subsistence. This denial of dependency is a major factor in the perpetuation of the non-sustainable modes of using nature which loom as such a threat to the future of western society."

"Globally, we expect about a billion people will be at risk from coast-specific climate hazards under all emissions scenarios. In coming decades, the risk of coastal flooding will increase rapidly. It could be two to three orders of magnitude greater by 2100, without effective adaptation and mitigation."

"Climate change doesn’t tell the whole story, as extreme rainfall can occur for a variety of reasons."

"Realizing global aspirations for climate resilient development depends on the extent to which coastal cities and settlements close the coastal adaptation gap and take urgent action to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions."

"A large proportion of the world’s population and critical infrastructure is already concentrated along shorelines."

"Art has always been a powerful portal to understanding how we feel about our world. Let’s hope it helps safeguard our climatic future."

"I want to get more people in the water. Manado is a coastal city and people need to see how beautiful it is. If they can see it, they will appreciate it and people protect what they care about and what they are interested in."

"There was a shift in my perception of myself from being heterosexual to bisexual but certainly the biggest shift was just how society treated you."

"I think our children and children everywhere deserve a more positive view of the future and their place in it. They display such disillusionment and despair because they do not see us, their elders, and the politicians in this place, doing enough to guarantee safe custody of our fragile planet to future generations. They see most adults as being too concerned with the immediate, with the dollar, and most of us with no vision for the future."

"We had many years of being outward to the world, of being the perfect normal couple and then suddenly we had the experience of what it's like to be in a same-sex relationship."

"I think our children and children everywhere deserve a more positive view of the future and their place in it."

"It is easy to say that everyone is in favor of nuclear disarmament and that nobody wants nuclear war."

"A very important concept escapes many Australians, including some politicians. It is that our country, knowingly or unknowingly, is engaged in preparations for fighting a nuclear war. There can be no mistake, no delusions and no cover-up about this very disturbing fact."

"We need to be rid of the addiction of militarism, which is wildly excessive, out of control, and which must be confronted or surely it will annihilate us spiritually if not physically, especially because this excess occurs at the expense of present pressing needs of human beings."

"“I was really excited to be doing something to contribute to science. I didn’t think I would get this far with coral. I was thrilled and realized this was for real, it was really happening! I was super excited – especially because it’s an area that’s also my home”."

"I hope that by promoting the unique corals and ecosystems of North Sulawesi, they will want to see what makes being Manadonese even more special."

"As climate scientists, we are disturbingly aware of the threats to society not only here in Australia, but all over the world."

"If all jawed vertebrates, including humans, are nothing more than highly evolved placoderms, then key features of ourselves should be traceable to structures that first appeared in our fishy placoderm ancestors. This would include particular jaw and skull bones and the proportions of our face and brain."

"It is ironic that a government which claims to be doing more for disarmament than any other government encourages the development of Roxby Downs, the largest uranium mine in the Western world."

"In the limestone ranges of Western Australia’s Kimberley region, near the town of Fitzroy Crossing, you’ll find one of the world’s best-preserved ancient reef complexes."

"Here lie the remnants of myriad prehistoric marine animals, including placoderms, a prehistoric class of fish that represents some of our earliest jawed ancestors."

"Imagine trying to identify and compare equivalent bits of anatomy shared between an oyster, a beetle and a blue whale. That is essentially the problem we face with early vertebrate fossils."

"Even as people change the climate by adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, variability will continue to play a large role in Australia’s climate."

"Trees and corals are sensitive to their environments. For example, trees grow less in dry years and more in wet years."

"Australia is the land of drought and flooding rains, and in a recent paper we’ve shown that’s been the case for more than 500 years."

"If we only listened! few of those familiar with the natural heat exchanges of the atmosphere, which go inti the making of our climate and weather, would be prepared to admit that the activities of man could have any influence on phenomena of so vast a scale. In the following paper i hope to show that such an influence is not only possible but us actually occurring at the present time."

"We know that global climate is changing due to human actions, climate has changed in the past but not at the current rate and with present human population and heavily impacted global temperatures."

"At the start of southern summer it was predicted that bleaching would be largely restricted to central and southern parts of the GBR."

"To make negative emission technologies viable, industry needs physical and measurable proof of those which will be most effective and then the means to implement them at full scale. That means large government and private investments in research and development for these technologies."

"Any concerns over costs, though, should be compared to cost of doing nothing."

"There are several so-called negative emissions technologies that could remove carbon dioxide from the air, including those aimed at removing CO2 by enhancing natural forest and wetland uptake, using bio-energy in power production and scrubbing CO2 efficiently from air."

"While bleaching surveys are ongoing, a distinct pattern is emerging, whereby the severity of bleaching declines from north to south."

"Also, if government policies change, how will that affect your operations and what you do?"

"Climate change is a risk management issue and putting in place good measures to mitigate it is a prudent course of action and one which has shown to be very worthwhile in the past"

"There have been a lot of changes in climate policy over the past decade or so. A lot of questions are not clearly resolved and that creates challenges"

"If you are trying to get a handle on the costs of uncertainty, if that cost was fully passed on to households, the average household bill would have been $46–$68 a quarter higher than it otherwise would have been. In our report, we said policy uncertainty was a significant driver of that."

"Before industrial times, CO₂ levels in the atmosphere were 280 parts per million. So a doubling of CO₂ will occur at 560 parts per million."