Eco Issue 15 – Population growth

Eco Issue 16 – Biodiversity (with more content to come over the coming weeks)

Website changes

We have made a few modifications to the site which will hopefully make navigation a lot easier. Please feel free to take a look around and make any suggestions.

IMPORTANT NEWS: Changes to the email subscription service

To stay updated with the latest content regularly delivered to your inbox we now have one simple email subscription.This means when ever we have new content you will receive an email update the following morning.

Click the subscription link for further details.

Eco Alerts (for those of you receiving this email message) will eventually be phased out.

Advertising

We are now seeking online advertisers. Very shortly we will have an online booking form available but in the meantime you can take a look at what is available.

Comments

As usual please feel free to make comments on any articles. Thanks for reading.

The Ed

• Woodford Folk Festival: the Greenhouse
• Cycling to the Woodford Folk Festival
• Denying climate change
• Exploring the Past
• Traveston Dam: looking behind the lens
• Up Close: reconnecting with nature
• Christmas reading list

Woodford Folk Festival: the Greenhouse

About the Greenhouse, interviews with: Hans Baer, Sohail Inayatullah, Andrew Wilford, Graeme Taylor, Jillian Rossiter. Read the interviews here. Brought to you by Brian Rickards.

Cycling to the Woodford Folk Festival

Find out how to make the most of your trip to the festival

Denying climate change

When faced with tragedy, atrocities or grief we humans, it appears, have a wonderful way of dealing with it. Denial. Read more.

Exploring the past

Another selection by Dr Deborah Jordan and taken from a newspaper cutting held in the Palmer Papers. This piece, Caloundra: reasons for being there was first published in the Brisbane Telegraph, 28 January 1928.

Nettie Palmer was born and bred in Melbourne and alive to the differences between the Sunshine and the south. She, too, was city reared so conscious in the process of attunement when she moved to Caloundra in 1925 with her husband and children. She like him, lived by her pen and wrote much about the region. Here she reflects.

Traveston Dam: looking behind the lens

It’s often said that a picture paints a thousand words. Photographs of faces of anguish after the initial announcement, beautiful natural scenes that were so close to being lost forever and finally faces of joy and relief after the simple word, ‘no’ echoed throughout the Mary Valley.

Arkin Mackay’s images made the issue personal. They spawned far more than a thousand words. They brought us face to face with the product of government decisions.

And most importantly they reminded us that although a river can physically divide communities, rivers can also bring people together in a way not often seen before.

Ian Mackay, Arkin’s father, proudly reminds us about the importance of her work. Read more.

Up Close: Reconnecting with nature

Paul and Sally Johnson have both had a long experience with nature through their personal and professional lives. Along with their two daughters, Elly and Jessie, they have been quietly and modestly working towards a sustainable existence.

In this edition we take an Up Close look at their lifestyle and why they decided to home-school their daughters. Read more.

Christmas reading list

Crunch Time: using and abusing Keynes to fight the twin crises of our era (Tony Kevin)

Sustainable Innovators: agents of change on the Sunshine Coast (Dana Thomsen)

The Clean Industrial Revolution: growing Australian prosperity in a greenhouse age (Ben McNeil)

See you in 2009

Thank you to all our readers, online subscribers and contributors. We hope you have a great Christmas and we look forward to bringing you more Eco news in 2010. Have a safe and peaceful holiday.

• Caloundra South development
• Palmview development
• Exploring the Past – Candle Mountain
• Up Close with Ian Lowe
• Traveston Dam: These will not be forgotten years
• Wildlife: Lock up those cats
• Eco Adventures: Booloumba Creek walk
• Book Review: Overloading Australia
• Print Edition

Caloundra South

A city with the population of Gladstone on the Sunshine Coast’s doorstep. Seven-storey buildings may soon welcome our southern visitors courtesy of the State Government’s growth plans. Read the full story.

Palmview

As with Caloundra South, another open space on the Sunshine Coast has been targeted for intensive development. Read the full story.

Exploring the Past – Candle Mountain

In the 1920s, when Vance and Nettie Palmer, the two significant Australian writers, were living in Caloundra, down on the Passage, deeply interested in questions of the human relationship to the environment, they began to ask questions about the land, the place and how it was changing. One time they climbed to the top of Candle Mountain, where they stayed. The air, Vance tells us, was so clear that he could see as far as the Tweed River hills across the state border, in northern New South Wales. Read the full story.

Up Close with Ian Lowe

Ian Christesen, on behalf of Eco News talks to Professor Ian Lowe about the problems associated with the Sunshine Coast’s ever increasing popularity.  A popularity which arises from having ideal temperatures and a stunning natural environment. With developers focusing their attention on large areas of land, poor planning is perhaps one of the biggest threats facing the Sunshine Coast today. Read the full interview.

Traveston Dam: These will not be forgotten years

…“It reeks of politics, signatures stained with tears, who can remember, we’ve got to remember”. These are just some of the words Peter Garret sang proudly in his song Forgotten Years.  However it’s hard to imagine any Mary Valley resident forgetting the years since the proposed dam was announced. Read the full story.

Wildlife: Lock up those cats

… This glider was dead — killed by a cat.  She had two exquisite little joeys in her pouch.  Though they are viable to rear as furless little babies, these two barely weighed three grams, so it was not a pleasant outcome. Read the full story.

Eco Adventures: Booloumba Creek walk

Rugged landscapes, fast-flowing mountain creeks, waterfalls, cascades and impressive forests are all part of a new walk in the Conondale Ranges, several kilometres south of Kenilworth in the scenic Mary Valley. Read more.

Book Review: Overloading Australia

Greenhouse gases going up. Oil and gas depleting. House prices exploding. Overloading Australia explains why — and how to stop it. Read the full review.

More articles will be added online over the coming weeks. Population and Consumption: reduce one, but what about the other?, The value of floodplains, plus more. Be sure to check back regularly.

Print Edition

Eco news issue 13 will soon be on the streets and available at the usual outlets. Digital versions of the print edition are available online and more will continue to be added over time.

Contribute

We will be starting the final edition for 2009 shortly. As usual please feel free to contribute articles, interviews, book reviews or stories you might think will be of interest to our readers. Guidelines can be found online.

• World Environment Day Festival news
• Outrage over Sustainable Planning Bill
• Latest Group Profile – PAGE
• Eco Adventures – A tale of two mountains
• Carbon, climate and koalas
• Eco watch – clean coal
• Exploring the past – climbing Mount Coolum in 1927
• Whales and eco tourism
• Other articles
• How to contribute
• The latest print edition
• Past print edition downloads
• Help promote Eco online

For our Queensland readers: Catch up on all the latest news on the Sunshine Coast’s World Environment Day Festival.

Outrage over Sustainable Planning Bill

“Major amendments to the Integrated Planning Act 1997, carrying implications for local planning powers and the critical assessment of applications, have become yet another hallmark of the Bligh Government’s mantra of growth at all costs.

Minister for Infrastructure and Planning, Stirling Hinchliffe said the Sustainable Planning Bill 2009, approved by Cabinet on June 9, will result in the biggest reform to planning approvals in over a decade.” Sunshine Coast Environment Council Manager, Narelle McCarthy reports. Read the full story.

Group profile

PAGE – the useful acronym doubling for the Powerline Action Group Eumundi and People Advocating Green Energy – was formed in 2007 in response to a proposal which threatens the communities west of Eumundi with high voltage powerlines and pylons marching across an idyllic landscape. Read all about their struggle to protect their local environment.

Eco adventures

Mount Coolum and Mount Ninderry are two very striking peaks visible from many parts of the Sunshine Coast, close to each other – only 10 kilometres as the crow flies – but very different in character and offering very different experiences for the eco adventurer. Read more about John Burrows’ latest adventure.

Carbon, climate and koalas

Recent findings by the Australian National University show that the Eucalypt forests of Australia are some of the richest carbon sinks in the world. The greater the size and density of these koala food trees and the forests they are found in, the greater the carbon sink and the more carbon dioxide that is absorbed. Read the full article by Sophia Walter.

Eco watch

Federal Environment and Climate Change Ministers jointly announced that there was less than 8 hours to submit solar rebate applications before they were stopped 3 weeks before schedule. Environment Minister, Peter Garrett is now clearly in the running as the most disappointing and underachieving environment minister in recent years. Guest writer Lindsay Holt reports.

Exploring the past

Climbing Mount Coolum in 1927. In this breezy account of a clamber up Mount Coolum, Vance Palmer, one of Australia’s most significant writers of the time shares his experience. The story is selected by Dr Deborah Jordan, and is taken from a newspaper cutting held in the Palmer Papers.

Whales and eco tourism

Sunshine Coast Environment Council President, Dr Valerie Lewis takes a look at the growing tourism industry built around whales.

Other articles …

Other articles are available to read online,with more being added in the coming weeks. Read the latest stories from our wildlife carers, green loans and more.

Contribute

If you would like to contribute a story, an image, or a story idea, then feel free to contact us. Contributor’s guidelines are available online.

The latest print edition

The mid-winter print edition, Eco news Issue 12, is now out on the streets. For our readers living outside the distribution area, the digital version will be available for download in July.

Past print edition archives

We are constantly adding more print edition archives for download.

Available for download now are: Issue 1, Issue 2, Issue 3 and Issue 11. Visit our Past Print Editions page for details and download links. If you have any problems with downloads please let us know.

Help promote Eco online

Have your own website or blog? Perhaps you would like to promote Eco online? We have now provided some graphics for you to download and use on your site.

Eco online recently experienced some difficulties after being hacked over the ANZAC Day weekend. Without getting into the details, we lost a lot of information, but we are now back online with a new and hopefully improved format. The new layout gives you multiple ways to search the site and find the information you’re looking for. We are hoping the layout is cleaner and easier to follow, but your feedback is always welcomed.

Latest Content and Updates

The latest content includes a new addition to Eco online – Exploring the Past. In this section we will feature an ongoing series of writings from the early part of the 20^th century.

Kindly supplied by Dr Deborah Jordan, a Research Fellow with the School of English, Media Studies & Art History at the University of Queensland she writes:  “The The Sunshine Coast was home to two gifted writers, Vance and Nettie Palmer, from 1925. In those days when few white people were exploring  the bush, they were out most days, glorying in the earth and sea and sky.

These were the years of their daughters growing, running free among the heath and sheoaks; the time of struggling as poets and freelance writers to find a voice and to write of the land; the time of learning how to get across their political message about how the bush was being whacked, and how a sheoak is not a sheoak unless the child is reared to name and love it.

The Palmers went on to be one of Australias most important literary couples in the 1940s and ’50s. Vance was novelist, dramatist, cultural critic and political commentator; Nettie was journalist, literary critic, historian, biographer and essayist. Some of you will know Vance’s  novel The Passage. Through their early environmental writings, drawing directly on their experiences, we can begin to see another dimension of our landscape, of our society in transition from the pristine environment while cared for only by Aboriginal custodians to the skyscrapers of the present. Read the full story here.

Keep an eye out for future updates and more tales from the early years of the Sunshine Coast.

Print Editions of Eco news

We are currently in the process of providing online copies of the past print editions of Eco news. You can now download the latest issue of Eco news, Issue 11 and the very first edition, Issue 1. In the near future we hope to bring you more archives from previous editions of Eco news.

Illustrating the Issues

Over the past few editions, Eco has been fortunate to have some fantastic illustrations supplied by local graphic designer, Alex Mankiewicz. Take a look at some of her work under Eco Images.

The Next Print Edition

Eco news Issue 12 is underway and as usual always feel free to offer contributions. Until next time…

Inside this edition we focus on one of the biggest issues facing society today – peak oil. Follow this link to go straight to the website.

As usual we have our regular features with some great articles supplied by our contributors. Without their hard work ECO would not exist. So it’s a big thank you to everyone involved.

For our previous readers you will notice some additions and alterations have been made to the website – hopefully making browsing a little easier and even more informative.

We hope you enjoy this edition and as always, please feel free to make comments on individual articles or under the ‘Your Say‘ tab.

Until next time.

In this edition we explore sustainable housing with examples and solutions for existing owners, new builders and renovators. We hope you enjoy reading ECO and don’t forget you can make comments on articles or suggest new themes to cover.

ECO news (print version) will be on the streets soon. Keep an eye out at the usual locations around the Coast. You’ll also notice that we are changing the look of ECO and continuing to search for great, new content. The print version features even more articles with a special centre-spread feature where we ask local experts their views on sustainable development.

Go straight to ECO online or click on the individual links below.

Inside this edition

Lead Article

Housing debate misguided

The argument for sustainable urban development is about more than housing design and density, says energy expert Alan Pears. Ann White reports.

Featured Articles

Sustainable housing a must

Sustainable housing design and development must come out of the too-hard basket if greenhouse emissions are to be seriously combated. This edition of Eco brings sustainable development home, exploring the issues of housing in a changing climate. Ann White reports.

Affordable eco houses

Building a house using traditional methods can result in waste and large environmental footprints, but a number of local building companies are rethinking how it’s done.

Decentralised water and sewerage

New housing developments need not link to centralised water and sewerage systems, according to a Sunshine Coast surveyor and town planner.

Water wise on the Gold Coast

It might come as a surprise for many that part of the Gold Coast is leading the way in planning for environmental sustainability, especially with the use of water, writes Brian Rickards.

Living smart homes generates change

Signing up to the Living Smart Homes Project has proved a catalyst for deep changes in how one family view the environment, writes Ann White.

Regulars

Up Close

Wildlife

Life etc

Schools

Local issues

Eco explorations

Book Review

Sustainable business

To find out what’s on or what others are saying don’t forget to look at our letters page here.

In Issue 8 we explore consumerism. With Christmas approaching ECO looks at the problems associated with our love for consuming and most importantly we examine alternative gifts and other ideas for those of us who want a buy a gift with real meaning. Click the image below to read ECO online. Happy reading and don’t forget you can make comments on each of the articles.