The Australian government recently shelved key environmental protection commitments indefinitely, including the establishment of an environmental protection agency, and a robust accounting of the nation’s ecological health via an environmental information authority. The latest suspension was announced by the Prime Minister just ahead of a federal election. Australia initially proposed these “nature positive” reforms in 2022 and hosted the first Global Nature Positive Summit in 2024 to great fanfare, but has not implemented any substantial domestic legislation to overhaul its old environmental laws.
Joining the podcast to explain this situation is Adam Morton, the environment editor at The Guardian Australia. In this podcast conversation, Morton details what the Australian government promised, what it reneged on, the potential global influence of its backtracking, and why the nation’s environment will continue to degrade without intervention.
"I think that the message internationally from this term in parliament has been that the resources sector is winning, and environmental protection is losing out. Now, that's a very simple dichotomy, and it doesn't have to be one or the other, but on every front at the moment, that's how it feels in Australia. That applies to fossil fuel extraction. It applies to native forestry [and] logging, which still continues in a significant amount," Morton says.
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.
Image Credit: A koala (Phascolarctos cinereus) in Queensland, Australia. Image by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.
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Timecodes
(00:00) Australia breaks a key promise
(07:30) What does 'Nature Positive' mean?
(16:39) Koala protection sidelined
(20:53) How to 'right' the 'wrongs’
(28:30) Credits
Recent and major shifts in international environmental policies and programs have historical precedent, but the context of global environmental degradation and climate change presents a planetary risk that’s new, say Sunil Amrith. A professor of history at Yale University, he joins this week’s Mongabay Newscast to discuss the current political moment and what history can teach us about it.
" When we look at examples from the past, [societies’ ecological impacts] have tended to be confined to a particular region, to those states, and perhaps to their neighbors. Because of where we are in terms of anthropogenic warming [and] planetary boundaries, I think the scale of any risk, the scale of any potential crossing over into irreversible thresholds, is going to have impact on a scale that I'm not sure historical precedents would give us much insight into," he says.
Amrith is the author of The Burning Earth: A History, which examines the past 500 years of human history, colonization and empire, and the impact of these on ecological systems. In this conversation, he details some historical parallels, what lessons can be learned, and what periods of history resulted in the most peace and prosperity.
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.
Image credit: Deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. Photo by Rhett Butler/Mongabay.
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Timecodes
(00:00) Historical parallels to the current moment
(09:43) The context of ‘planetary risk’
(20:36) Lessons from history
(26:10) Credits
A new framework for considering the needs of the “more-than-human world” when designing human-made systems is “ecological empathy,” the focus of Lauren Lambert, founder of Future Now, a sustainability consulting firm.
Her research, Ecological empathy: Relational theory and practice, was published in the journal Ecosystems and People in late 2024, when she was at Arizona State University. She joins the podcast to detail the concept and its potential for reconnecting humans with nature for mutual benefit.
"Ecological empathy as I define it [is] essentially a framework of practice for how to use empathy as a guide to connect to the more-than-human world, and integrate our interdependence and relationships with the more-than-human world in everyday thinking, everyday practice, and specifically in the places where we work," she says.
Previous newscast guests like Carl Safina, argued for overhauling how humans raise and farm seafood. Ben Goldfarb discussed how road crossings can help humans move toward a less environmentally damaging road infrastructure network in his award-winning book Crossings, which documents what he calls “road ecology.”
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.
Image Credit: A Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (Cacatua galerita) in Indonesian New Guinea. Photo by Rhett A. Butler.
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Timecodes
(00:00) What is ‘ecological empathy’?
(10:50) The limits of feelings
(15:38) The theory of change
(21:22) How do you apply it?
(33:29) Real-world examples
(44:29) What empathy is and isn’t
(52:30) Credits
Middle and working-class citizens in nations across the globe are feeling their purchasing power diminish while billionaires hoard historically high levels of wealth. People are looking for economic solutions out of the inequity that are in line with their ecological values and planetary boundaries.
"People are really hungry for solutions [and] really hungry to find alternatives," says Alvaro Alvarez, the documentary filmmaker of the new BBC documentary Less Is More: Can Degrowth Save the World?
Alvarez joins Mongabay's podcast to detail real-life solutions using the concepts behind “degrowth” in the city of Barcelona, which he highlights in the film and which have garnered widespread interest.
Subscribe to or follow the Mongabay Newscast wherever you listen to podcasts, from Apple to Spotify, and you can also listen to all episodes here on the Mongabay website.
Listen to a previous conversation on degrowth on the Mongabay Newscast here.
Image Credit: La Brugera de Púbol, a sustainable living and educational eco-estate roughly 2 hours from the city of Barcelona operated by Mike Duff. Image courtesy of Alvaro Alvarez.
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Timecodes
(00:00) Degrowth momentum in Barcelona
(06:26) Degrowth and housing cooperatives
(09:01) Growing international support
(13:06) Challenges and criticisms of degrowth
(24:51) Degrowth and global inequality
(32:42) Green gentrification
(39:03) Challenging the ‘wealth=success’ narrative
(42:24) Keeping inside the planetary boundaries