ECOANIMAL

DAVID STUDDERT—In a 1982 interview I said that Australians can’t continue to live in Australia unless we adapt and learn from the indigenous culture; we need to learn from them, how this land IS. Of course literalists and the Murdoch press will parody this as wanting to live in a gunya, wander from place to place, eat witchetty grubs and throw boomerangs. This type of nonsense is their stock in trade. Any idiot who thinks we should wilfully deny ourselves the help of the great technology we now possess is truly a fool.

PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS—Consider the extinct and vanishing species of animals, insects, reptiles, birds. Why did we do this? For no other reason than a few rich people could be a bit richer. They didn’t need the money that erased animals, plants, forests, clean water, fish and marine life, birds, butterflies, bees and large numbers of insects.

UMAIR HAQUE—I read today that koalas in Australia were begging human beings for water — fleeing a burning continent. Can you imagine that level of fear and suffering? That kind of abject terror and subjection? Isn’t that, too, a kind of genocide? That’s a picture above — of a firefighter and a koala, standing side by side, watching their worlds turn to embers. It’s an aching, heartbreaking snapshot of a troubled age.

NATYLIE BALDWIN—Arctic ice, receding at a record pace, revealed five new islands in the Russian far north this year that had been hidden under the ice sheets for all of recorded human history. Russian scientists aboard a research ship near the northern coast of Siberia last week were amazed to discover a massive eruption of methane bubbles from the ocean floor. The huge clouds of the super-greenhouse gas suggest that the underlying permafrost is melting faster than anyone could have anticipated.

RAINER SHEA—The momentum of the climate’s destabilization is unstoppable, and the fascistic political forces that have emerged amid the crisis aren’t going away. However, my message with this essay isn’t to become apathetic in the face of what’s happening to us, but to embrace a worldview of realism that allows us to actually combat the problem.