Our laws fail nature. The government’s plan to overhaul them looks good, but crucial detail is yet to come

The Albanese government has just released its long-awaited response to a scathing independent review of Australia’s environment protection law. The 2020 review ultimately found the laws were flawed, outdated and, without fundamental reform, would continue to see plants and animals go extinct.

The extent to which the government implements the review’s 38 recommendations to strengthen the laws will determine the fate of many species and ecosystems – so, how did it go?

As biodiversity conservation experts, we find the plan to be promising. For example, federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek pledged to establish an independent environmental protection agency to be “a tough cop on the beat”.

But some uncertainty remains, and there is also a lot of important detail still to be worked through.

Australia’s Extinction Crisis

Australia has the world’s worst track record for mammal extinctions. The national threatened species list comprises more than 1,700 species and over 100 threatened ecological communities, and more are added every year.

Extraordinary species such as mountain pygmy possums, northern hairy-nosed wombats and regent honeyeaters are hanging on by a thread. Others, such as the white-footed rabbit-rat and the central hare-wallaby, are already lost forever. Previously abundant animals such as bogong moths, which the mountain pygmy possum relies on for food, have become rare.

Australia’s environment law – the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act – is ostensibly wildlife’s best defence against a range of threats to their habitat, such as urban development, mining and land clearing.

But this defence has failed, time and again. In just one example, the extinction threat facing the iconic koala has become worse, not better, since it was “protected” under the EPBC Act.

What The Plan Got Right

We note a few standout positives in the government’s response today. One is the promise to rapidly prepare and implement conservation plans – with strong regulatory standing – for each nationally listed threatened species and ecological community.

There is strong merit in this. We encourage a similar emphasis on developing plans to abate threats such as such as feral cats, foxes, deer, and rabbits, that should also have strong regulatory standing.

We’re also pleased to see confirmation of the formation of the environmental protection agency (EPA). This addresses one of the review’s top criticisms on the lack of resourcing and independent enforcement of the EPBC Act.

The model could be a game-changer: undertaking assessments and making decisions about development proposals at arm’s length from government. The EPA will have its own budget and mandatory tabling of an annual report in parliament.

Another big plus is the government’s pledge to deliver on national environmental standards, overseen by the newly formed EPA. These standards describe the environmental outcomes that must be achieved. For example, the standards could require that decisions result in no further population decline of threatened species.

Crucially, these standards will apply to “regional forest agreements”. These agreements are controversial because they effectively exempt forest logging from scrutiny under the EPBC Act. However, the timeline for imposing the standards on regional forest agreements is uncertain, and currently “subject to further consultation with stakeholders”.

Finally, a regional planning approach will be used to identify environmentally valuable and sensitive areas in which new developments pose too great a risk, as well as places that are more-or-less available for new development. The critical detail of how those zones are determined is yet to be negotiated.

A Major Uncertainty: Offsets

Perhaps the biggest concern we have about the federal government’s approach relates to environmental offsets. Offsets can be imposed by the government as a way to compensate for environmental destruction by improving nature in other places.

Evidence shows offsets have so far been largely ineffective, in part because existing policy is not properly implemented and rules not enforced. They may even facilitate more biodiversity loss by removing ethical roadblocks to destroying ecosystems and habitat for threatened species.

Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek on Thursday emphasised a move away from simply protecting habitat that already exists in exchange for habitat loss elsewhere (so-called “avoided loss offsets”), and instead focusing on restoration. This is a welcome improvement to how offsets are delivered.

However, the government will accept payments into a fund when offsetting is too difficult: for example, when there’s no like-for-like habitat available. This is worrying. If offsets for a threatened species are hard to find, it’s an important signal that we’re reaching the limit of habitat we can lose.

Imagine if a developer cleared cassowary habitat in a Queensland rainforest, and compensated for that by paying for koala tree planting in another part of Australia. Nice for the koala, but we have guaranteed a further decline for the cassowary.

The government’s plan points to the New South Wales Biodiversity Conservation Trust as an example of how these offset payments could be managed. Yet the auditor-general of NSW recently discredited the way this scheme handles offsets, saying it doesn’t lead to enough biodiversity gains compared to the losses and impacts from development in the state.

The national system would need to be very different to the NSW one if it’s to support the federal government’s goal of zero extinctions by 2030. In practice, this would mean avoiding the use of offsets to compensate for the destruction of habitats that aren’t replaceable or cannot be readily recreated elsewhere.

National environmental standards for environmental offsets haven’t yet been finalised. The detail included in these will be crucial to the success of the scheme.

Show Us The Money

Much of the federal government’s overhaul is to be welcomed. But we won’t prevent new extinctions unless it’s supported by serious investment to develop and implement plans, and enforce laws. Increased funding to recover endangered species is also urgently needed, to the tune of A$2 billion per year.

This is nowhere near as much as we spend on, for instance, submarines or even caring for our cats and dogs.

But it’s an order of magnitude more than our current spend on targeted threatened species recovery actions.

By and large, the proposed plan looks set to make a positive difference to Australia’s threatened plants and animals. But a lot of detail remains to be worked through. Getting that detail right could mean the difference between a species surviving, or disappearing forever.

Brendan Wintle, Professor in Conservation Science, School of Ecosystem and Forest Science, The University of Melbourne; Martine Maron, Professor of Environmental Management, The University of Queensland, and Sarah Bekessy, Professor in Sustainability and Urban Planning, Leader, Interdisciplinary Conservation Science Research Group (ICON Science), RMIT University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Repairing gullies: the quickest way to improve Great Barrier Reef water quality

Back-to-back bleaching events have highlighted the critical threat that climate change poses to the Great Barrier Reef. But few people are aware of the network of gullies pumping out about half the sediment that is polluting reef water quality and threatening its World Heritage status.

These gully networks are like miniature Grand Canyons, some with walls up to 20 metres high. They make a spectacular sight but are a disaster for the land, the reef and the rivers that connect them.

In the UNESCO delegation’s latest report on the reef, dramatically scaling up gully repair efforts is the top recommendation.

Along with global warming, degraded water quality is a key threat to the reef. But as the world continues to debate how to combat climate change, the report recognises that fixing gullies will give the reef a fighting chance to survive warming oceans. This is something Australia can do right now.

Over more than a century, land use changes have disturbed fragile soils in grazing country. The unearthed fine sediment from below the surface dissolves like a Berocca tablet when it rains, creating a gully. Left alone, this process will continue for hundreds of years and keep eating into the landscape.

Our team at Griffith university have been researching gullies since 2005. Over the last decade we’ve developed the tools to identify and target the highest priority gullies, and helped design ways to fix them.

Through detailed mapping we’ve found we can identify and target just a few percent of the tens of thousands of gullies to achieve a massive, cost-effective water quality improvement.

More Than 400,000 Dump Trucks Of Sediment A Year

As the planet warms, Australia is already experiencing record heat. For our team working in Queensland’s gullies, temperatures can reach over 50℃ in the midday sun.

Field work in these conditions usually feels about as comfortable as working on the surface of Mars. Nonetheless, our team of scientists keep returning because of the staggering implications of the data we’ve been collecting.

Each wet season, the exposed soils in these gullies turn to a yoghurt-like consistency. Their chemistry primes them to readily erode, which they do with every raindrop that falls on them.

In fact, an individual gully can produce thousands of tonnes of fine sediment each year from just a few hectares of land. If you look at the total flow of sediment from all gullies, on average over 400,000 truckloads are dumped across the reef every year, mostly within the inner lagoon.

As sediment and nutrients travel freely down the rivers, they pollute fragile ecosystems, filling water holes, clouding the water and reducing biodiversity. Once they reach the reef lagoon, they smother corals and seagrasses, which struggle to survive.

As the UNESCO report identifies, degraded water quality severely affects the resilience of the reef, limiting its ability to recover from bleaching and cyclones, and to withstand the changes caused by global warming.

The Most Effective Solution For Improving Water Quality

Stabilising gullied landscapes requires an approach akin to mine site rehabilitation. In 2016, we demonstrated that if you reshape (with major earthworks), recap (with rock, soil and mulch) and revegetate the gullies, you can rapidly repair them. Our research has shown that erosion from priority gullies can be reduced by 98% within a space of one to two years.

We’ve now mapped more than 25,000 individual gullies in three hot spot areas in the Normanby, Burdekin and Fitzroy River catchments.

Remarkably, we discovered that only a small proportion of the mapped gullies in each area are contributing a large proportion of the sediment pollution.

For example, in the Burdekin hot spot, we found only about 2% of the gullies contribute 30% of the sediment load to the reef. Targeting these gullies provides the best and quickest way to improve the reef’s water quality.

But the number of gullies repaired to date is a drop in the ocean compared to what still needs to be done.

So far, our method of identifying priority gullies for repair has been implemented across only 1% of the 44-million-hectare reef catchment. The urgent task, as the UNESCO report notes, is to identify other hot spot areas and rapidly roll out the prioritisation mapping to enable targeted remediation to get under way.

What Needs To Happen Now

UNESCO highlights the critical need to speed up effective action, recommending:

there is a need to secure a greater reduction of [sediment and nutrient] pollutants in the next three years than has been achieved since 2009.

The good news is the research has already been done. The data demonstrates it is possible to achieve this ambitious goal. The implementation of on-ground gully repair works with economies of scale is the quickest and most cost-effective way to do it.

Since 2008, Australian governments have set sediment reduction targets and invested considerable funds to improve reef water quality. The federal government intends to spend an additional A$580 million over nine years, and a further $270 million has been committed by the Queensland government.

Importantly, rapid progress can be made given the current funds earmarked for reef water quality. There are also proven working relationships already in place between our Griffith team, Traditional Owners , government and other stakeholders.

The challenge ahead is delivery. The next step requires a coordinated program to develop a pipeline of targeted gully projects.

The pieces of the puzzle are now all in place and there is no reason for delay.

Andrew Brooks, Principal Research Fellow - Fluvial Geomorphologist - specialising in catchment erosion research, Griffith University and James Daley, Research Fellow, Coastal and Marine Research Centre, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Should we protect nature for its own sake? For its economic value? Because it makes us happy? Yes

Extinction is part of life on Earth. Through much of our planet’s history, species have been forming, evolving and eventually disappearing. Today, however, human activities have dramatically sped up the process. The Earth is losing animals, birds, reptiles and other living things so fast that some scientists believe the planet is entering the sixth mass extinction in its history.

On Dec. 7, 2022, the United Nations will convene governments from around the world in Montreal for a 10-day conference that aims to establish new goals for protecting Earth’s ecosystems and their biodiversity – the variety of life at all levels, from genes to ecosystems. There’s broad agreement that there is a biodiversity crisis, but there are many different views about why protecting it is important.

Some people, cultures and nations believe biodiversity is worth conserving because ecosystems provide many services that support human prosperity, health and well-being. Others assert that all living things have a right to exist, regardless of their usefulness to humans. Today, there’s also growing understanding that nature enriches our lives by providing opportunities for us to connect with each other and the places we care about.

As a conservation biologist, I’ve been part of the effort to value biodiversity for years. Here’s how thinking in this field has evolved, and why I’ve come to believe that there are many equally valid reasons for protecting nature.

Defending Every Species

Conservation biology is a scientific field with a mission: protecting and restoring biodiversity around the world. It came of age in the 1980s, as humans’ impact on the Earth was becoming alarmingly clear.

In a 1985 essay, Michael Soulé, one of the field’s founders, described what he saw as the core principles of conservation biology. Soulé argued that biological diversity is inherently good and should be conserved because it has intrinsic value. He also proposed that conservation biologists should act to save biodiversity even if sound science isn’t available to inform decisions.

To critics, Soulé’s principles sounded more like environmental activism than science. What’s more, not everyone agreed then or now that biodiversity is inherently good.

After all, wild animals can destroy crops and endanger human lives. Contact with nature can lead to disease. And some conservation initiatives have displaced people from their land or prevented development that might otherwise improve people’s lives.

Valuing Nature’s Services

Soulé’s essay spurred many researchers to push for a more science-driven approach to conservation. They sought to directly quantify the value of ecosystems and the roles species played in them. Some scholars focused on calculating the value of ecosystems to humans.

They reached a preliminary conclusion that the total economic value of the world’s ecosystems was worth an average US$33 trillion per year in 1997 dollars. At the time, this was nearly twice the global value of the entire world’s financial markets.

This estimate included services such as predators controlling pests that would otherwise ruin crops; pollinators helping to produce fruits and vegetables; wetlands, mangroves and other natural systems buffering coasts against storms and flooding; oceans providing fish for food; and forests providing lumber and other building materials.

Researchers have refined their estimates of what these benefits are worth, but their central conclusion remains the same: Nature has shockingly high economic value that existing financial markets don’t account for.

A second group began to quantify the nonmonetary value of nature for human health, happiness and well-being. Studies typically had people take part in outdoor activities, such as strolling through a green space, hiking in the woods or canoeing on a lake. Later, they measured the subjects’ physical or emotional health.

This research found that spending time in nature tended to reduce blood pressure, lower hormones related to stress and anxiety, decrease the probability of depression and improve cognitive function and certain immune functions. People exposed to nature fared better than others who took part in similar activities in nonnatural settings, such as walking through a city.

Losing Species Weakens Ecosystems

A third line of research asked a different question: When ecosystems lose species, can they still function and provide services? This work was driven mainly by experiments where researchers directly manipulated the diversity of different types of organisms in settings ranging from laboratory cultures to greenhouses, plots in fields, forests and coastal areas.

By 2010, scientists had published more than 600 experiments, manipulating over 500 groups of organisms in freshwater, marine and land ecosystems. In a 2012 review of these experiments, colleagues and I found unequivocal evidence that when ecosystems lose biodiversity, they become less efficient, less productive and less stable. And they are less able to deliver many of the services that underlie human well-being.

For example, we found strong evidence that loss of genetic diversity reduced crop yields, and loss of tree diversity reduced the amount of wood that forests produced. We also found evidence that oceans with fewer fish species produced less-reliable catches, and that ecosystems with lower plant diversity were more prone to invasive pests and diseases.

We also showed that it was possible to develop robust mathematical models that could predict reasonably well how biodiversity loss would affect certain types of valuable services from ecosystems.

Many Motives For Protecting Nature

For years, I believed that this work had established the value of ecosystems and quantified how biodiversity provided ecosystem services. But I’ve come to realize that other arguments for protecting nature are just as valid, and often more convincing for many people.

I have worked with many people who donate money or land to support conservation. But I’ve never heard anyone say they were doing it because of the economic value of biodiversity or its role in sustaining ecosystem services.

Instead, they’ve shared stories about how they grew up fishing with their father, held family gatherings at a cabin or canoed with someone who was important to them. They wanted to pass on those experiences to their children and grandchildren to preserve familial relationships. Researchers increasingly recognize that such relational values – connections to communities and to specific places – are one of the most common reasons why people choose to conserve nature.

I also know many people who hold deep religious beliefs and are rarely swayed by scientific arguments for conservation. But when Pope Francis published his 2015 encyclical Laudato si’: On Care for Our Common Home and said God’s followers had a moral responsibility to care for his creation, my religious relatives, friends and colleagues suddenly wanted to know about biodiversity loss and what they might do about it.

Surveys show that 85% of the world’s population identifies with a major religion. Leaders of every major religion have published declarations similar to Pope Francis’ encyclical, calling on their followers to be better stewards of Earth. Undoubtedly, a large portion of humanity assigns moral value to nature.

Research clearly shows that nature provides humanity with enormous value. But some people simply believe that other species have a right to exist, or that their religion tells them to be good stewards of Earth. As I see it, embracing these diverse perspectives is the best way to get global buy-in for conserving Earth’s ecosystems and living creatures for the good of all.

Bradley J. Cardinale, Department Head, Ecosystem Science and Management, Penn State

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

How do floating wind turbines work? 5 companies just won the first US leases for building them off California’s coast

Northern California has some of the strongest offshore winds in the U.S., with immense potential to produce clean energy. But it also has a problem. Its continental shelf drops off quickly, making building traditional wind turbines directly on the seafloor costly if not impossible.

Once water gets more than about 200 feet deep – roughly the height of an 18-story building – these “monopile” structures are pretty much out of the question.

A solution has emerged that’s being tested in several locations around the world: wind turbines that float.

In California, where drought has put pressure on the hydropower supply, the state is moving forward on a plan to develop the nation’s first floating offshore wind farms. On Dec. 7, 2022, the federal government auctioned off five lease areas about 20 miles off the California coast to companies with plans to develop floating wind farms. The bids were lower than recent leases off the Atlantic coast, where wind farms can be anchored to the seafloor, but still significant, together exceeding US$757 million.

So, how do floating wind farms work?

Three Main Ways To Float A Turbine

A floating wind turbine works just like other wind turbines – wind pushes on the blades, causing the rotor to turn, which drives a generator that creates electricity. But instead of having its tower embedded directly into the ground or the seafloor, a floating wind turbine sits on a platform with mooring lines, such as chains or ropes, that connect to anchors in the seabed below.

These mooring lines hold the turbine in place against the wind and keep it connected to the cable that sends its electricity back to shore.

Most of the stability is provided by the floating platform itself. The trick is to design the platform so the turbine doesn’t tip too far in strong winds or storms.

There are three main types of platforms:

• A spar buoy platform is a long hollow cylinder that extends downward from the turbine tower. It floats vertically in deep water, weighted with ballast in the bottom of the cylinder to lower its center of gravity. It’s then anchored in place, but with slack lines that allow it to move with the water to avoid damage. Spar buoys have been used by the oil and gas industry for years for offshore operations.

• Semisubmersible platforms have large floating hulls that spread out from the tower, also anchored to prevent drifting. Designers have been experimenting with multiple turbines on some of these hulls.

• Tension leg platforms have smaller platforms with taut lines running straight to the floor below. These are lighter but more vulnerable to earthquakes or tsunamis because they rely more on the mooring lines and anchors for stability.

Each platform must support the weight of the turbine and remain stable while the turbine operates. It can do this in part because the hollow platform, often made of large steel or concrete structures, provides buoyancy to support the turbine. Since some can be fully assembled in port and towed out for installation, they might be far cheaper than fixed-bottom structures, which require specialty vessels for installation on site.

Floating platforms can support wind turbines that can produce 10 megawatts or more of power – that’s similar in size to other offshore wind turbines and several times larger than the capacity of a typical onshore wind turbine you might see in a field.

Why Do We Need Floating Turbines?

Some of the strongest wind resources are away from shore in locations with hundreds of feet of water below, such as off the U.S. West Coast, the Great Lakes, the Mediterranean Sea and the coast of Japan.

The U.S. lease areas auctioned off in early December cover about 583 square miles in two regions – one off central California’s Morro Bay and the other near the Oregon state line. The water off California gets deep quickly, so any wind farm that is even a few miles from shore will require floating turbines.

Once built, wind farms in those five areas could provide about 4.6 gigawatts of clean electricity, enough to power 1.5 million homes, according to government estimates. The winning companies suggested they could produce even more power.

But getting actual wind turbines on the water will take time. The winners of the lease auction will undergo a Justice Department anti-trust review and then a long planning, permitting and environmental review process that typically takes several years.

Globally, several full-scale demonstration projects with floating wind turbines are already operating in Europe and Asia. The Hywind Scotland project became the first commercial-scale offshore floating wind farm in 2017, with five 6-megawatt turbines supported by spar buoys designed by the Norwegian energy company Equinor.

Equinor Wind US had one of the winning bids off Central California. Another winning bidder was RWE Offshore Wind Holdings. RWE operates wind farms in Europe and has three floating wind turbine demonstration projects. The other companies involved – Copenhagen Infrastructure Partners, Invenergy and Ocean Winds – have Atlantic Coast leases or existing offshore wind farms.

While floating offshore wind farms are becoming a commercial technology, there are still technical challenges that need to be solved. The platform motion may cause higher forces on the blades and tower, and more complicated and unsteady aerodynamics. Also, as water depths get very deep, the cost of the mooring lines, anchors and electrical cabling may become very high, so cheaper but still reliable technologies will be needed.

But we can expect to see more offshore turbines supported by floating structures in the near future.

This article was updated with the first lease sale.

Matthew Lackner, Professor of Mechanical Engineering, UMass Amherst

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Sea urchins have invaded Tasmania and Victoria, but we can’t work out what to do with them

While crown-of-thorns starfish on the Great Barrier Reef have long been ecological villains in the popular imagination, sea urchins have mostly crawled under the national radar – until now.

Long-spined sea urchins (Centrostephanus rodgersii) have invaded Tasmania and Victoria from their historical range in New South Wales. Where it occurs, this species dominates near-shore reefs to create “barrens habitat”. This is where at high densities sea urchins remove all large brown algae (kelp), and few abalone and other important species for fishers remain.

Both climate change and over-fishing of its main predators have been blamed for the urchin’s southward extension.

This is a central issue in the ongoing Senate inquiry into climate-related marine invasive species, which has brought the challenges and contradictions of managing the marine estate into sharp relief. The inquiry received over 40 diverse and often contradictory submissions.

It’s clear there is little national consensus about the nature of the sea urchin problem, its causes, or what to do about it. In Tasmania and Victoria, policy directions are clear and being implemented. But managing barrens within New South Wales seascapes isn’t as clear cut. Although a single solution may not be clear now, there is a path forward.

Meet The Long-Spined Sea Urchin

Long-spined sea urchins defend themselves with a menacing armoury of long, hollow spines. By day they are found in crevices or aggregated on the reef, and emerge to forage at night. As with many sea urchins, their roe (unfertilised fish eggs and sperm) is edible and the species is harvested in all three southeastern states.

They begin their lives as minute larvae. Ocean currents carry the larvae to reefs where they settle and grow. Understanding the relative importance of processes that limit them as larvae and as grazing urchins on reefs is crucial to discerning what controls their populations.

In Tasmania and Victoria, the larval supply horse has bolted. Over the last half century, the East Australian Current has pushed further south more often as it eddies into the Tasman Sea. This incursion of warmer water into cooler, southern seas has been attributed to climate change.

Urchin larvae can tolerate a wide temperature range and survive when food is limited, making the species a good coloniser.

Still, in 2009 researchers concluded larval supply was not a sufficient explanation for urchin numbers rising in Tasmania. Rather, they argued the population boomed because a predator, the southern rock lobster (Jasus edwardsii) has been overfished.

More recent research published this year has challenged the notion that southern rock lobster predation limits long-spined sea urchin numbers.

Sea urchins in Tasmania and Victoria are currently managed with a patchwork of diver culling, subsidised sea urchin fisheries and marine reserves. Despite local successes, Centrostephanus populations continue to boom and to expand their geographic spread.

Sea Urchins In NSW

Although it waxes and wanes on local scales, the total area of barrens habitat in NSW has been a relatively stable and prominent feature of reefs for more than 60 years.

But it’s not clear whether the extent of barrens habitat in NSW is “natural” or a long-term artefact of overfishing.

For example, a different lobster, the eastern rock lobster (Sagmariasus verreauxi), has been cited as a missing predator, along with the fabulous eastern blue groper (Achoerodus viridis). Certainly, both lobster and groper eat sea urchins and have historically been overfished, but the evidence for them acting as a controlling influence is weak.

Strong opinions notwithstanding, predatory control of sea urchins in NSW remains an unresolved question for now.

Innovative and committed mitigation programs can make a difference locally. Nevertheless, fishing and/or culling sea urchins has not successfully reduced overall populations in NSW where the geographic range is so large.

Sea urchins, for their part, have just got on with being good echinoderms – colonising, eating and reproducing.

The Stories We Tell Ourselves And Others

If we can’t settle on what’s driving the long-spined sea urchin boom in Victoria, Tasmania and NSW, then it’s no surprise we’re struggling to agree on how to manage them. As in many fields, this is classically a wicked problem.

If you prioritise conservation values, livelihoods, commercial fisheries or, more fundamentally, First Nations communities’ rights and aspirations, you see the problem differently. And so be guided toward different solutions.

For Traditional Owners and abalone divers, sea urchins impinge on a range of economic, cultural and social values. For others, black sea urchins are a natural and important element of the ecosystem.

Along with diverse and incompatible views, legal instruments to manage the marine estate, First Nations rights, and fisheries overlap, further defying simple solutions.

For example, the NSW Fisheries Management Act has traditionally focused on the sustainability of fisheries, while the NSW Marine Estate Management Act has a much broader focus than harvesting marine species.

The urchins may be seen as a symptom rather than a cause of a suite of ecological, institutional and political problems. These larger issues include climate change, marginalisation and lack of voice, conflicting worldviews, and institutional paralysis.

A Way Forward For NSW

The Senate inquiry should prompt new ways to manage the marine estate. We need a form of transparent, flexible and inclusive governance, consistent with fisheries and other legislation.

Structured management experiments to manage the marine estate, including sea urchins, should be implemented in small zones to learn how reefs respond to different management.

A diverse range of people should be brought together to design and implement such experiments. As examples of what may be considered as interventions:

• the urchin fishery should be co-managed with abalone to optimise yields, maximising profitability rather than environmental sustainability

• the abalone industry should be enabled and supported to cull sea urchins and otherwise fish in ways that boost productivity

• First Nations communities should be enabled and supported to manage Sea Country

• and Marine Sanctuary Zones should be monitored, not fished.

Shifting the centre of gravity of managing the issue to those most affected and with the greatest experience creates an opportunity for collaboration. This means marine estate managers, industry, and First Nations peoples need to be at the forefront. Researchers have important, but secondary roles, in monitoring and evaluation.

Although solutions may not be clear now, they will emerge as shared understanding evolves into common purpose. This is difficult work, but in a quote Sir Peter Medawar ascribes to philosopher Thomas Hobbes, “there can be no contentment but in proceeding”.

Neil Andrew, Professor of fisheries and international development, University of Wollongong

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

COP15: three visions for protecting nature on the table at the UN biodiversity conference

With the dust still settling on the UN climate change summit in Egypt, another round of international talks is beginning in Montreal, Canada. The UN biodiversity conference, otherwise known as COP15, will assemble world leaders to agree on new targets for protecting nature.

The loss of biodiversity – the dizzying variety of life forms from microscopic viruses, bacteria and fungi to towering trees and enormous whales – is accelerating. The last agreement in 2010 yielded the 20 Aichi targets which included halving the rate at which species were being lost and expanding protected habitats on land and in the sea by 2020. Governments failed to meet a single one.

A global assessment in 2019 showed that nature was declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history. The forces driving more and more species towards extinction – climate change, habitat destruction and pollution – are all trending in the wrong direction. Nothing less than a transformation of how societies work and the relationship between people and the rest of nature will get us on track.

After two years of delay due to the pandemic and difficulties negotiating a new venue with the country that holds the conference presidency, China, many are relieved that COP15 is happening at all. That relief may prove short-lived as there is much to be done in these two short weeks. The grand objective is the approval of a new global biodiversity framework, essentially a plan for how the world’s nations expect to halt the loss of biodiversity and ensure that, by 2050, society is living in harmony with nature.

30% By 2030

One debate which has dominated discussions so far is how much land and sea should be set aside for conservation. The current text aims for 30% by 2030. Some scientists believe this is insufficient, and that preserving half the Earth for nature is necessary. Others are wary of reviving failed ideas which have tried to boost wildlife by expelling people and erecting walls to keep them out.

Negotiators will debate whether a 30x30 target should be met at the national level or globally. The former would mean each country meeting this standard within its own borders. The latter would prioritise Earth’s most important areas of biodiversity (such as tropical rainforests) but oblige countries with large remaining wildernesses (overwhelmingly in developing countries) to shoulder the lion’s share of conservation work. Many poorer countries foresee this stopping their economic development.

There is also disagreement over what level of protection should be given to these areas and how the rights of people living within them should be recognised. These plans would require a doubling of protected areas on land and perhaps as much as a tenfold increase in the oceans. But they could exclude indigenous people and those who make their living from cultivation, forestry and fishing.

Less Emissions, Less Meat, Less Waste

Instead of concentrating on the total area reserved for nature, recent research highlights the importance of addressing the underlying causes of extinctions and habitat loss, such as greenhouse gas emissions, meat consumption and plastic pollution.

Targeting the processes driving biodiversity loss would shift attention away from where nature is being destroyed to the places where these processes are guided and sustained: boardrooms, trading floors, local planning offices and supermarkets.

The framework under negotiation includes several targets that would restrain the destruction, from eliminating policies subsidising the conversion of forest to cow pasture to halving food waste. These have failed to attract the momentum behind flashier goals like the 30x30 target. Changing how economies and societies function is more contentious and asks more from rich countries with more influence over the drivers of biodiversity loss.

Safeguard Nature’s Services

Yet another approach would safeguard the services nature generates, including flood protection, wood fuel, climate regulation and food provision. And it would identify the natural assets (wetlands, forests, coral reefs and mangroves to name a few) that must endure for these services to continue. This would mean protecting nature close to where it is most needed. A staggering 6.1 billion people live within one hour of such assets.

Good COP Or Bad COP?

While everyone gathering in Montreal agrees that a breakthrough is needed, there are different ideas about what that should look like. For many seasoned conservationists, a good outcome will mean more stringent targets for protecting and restoring nature and more expansive protected areas, plus the money and other resources necessary to enforce them.

Businesses, investors, cities, regional governments and the communities they represent want an agreement that mobilises the whole of society. Some companies have asked that all businesses be forced to report the impacts their activities have on nature. Cities and regions have their own pledges and have asked COP15 to formally recognise their role in delivering national plans.

This could bring the protection and restoration of nature into mainstream thinking around how economies develop and societies are organised, and make the case that much of what is important about nature is not to be found on the other side of a fence. This trend is evident in growing enthusiasm around nature-based solutions to climate change.

The recent UN climate summit in Egypt heralded the potential of such solutions, which include restoring peatlands and seagrass beds. These actions tackle the climate and biodiversity crisis together by expanding refuge for wildlife and drawing carbon from the air. Cities, businesses and investors smell an opportunity to meet multiple measures of sustainable development at once.

Some conservationists worry these supposed solutions are greenwashing and allow companies to exploit indigenous people and communities. Other experts argue that, with the right safeguards in place, these fears can be put to rest.

With much at stake, in seeking to straddle different agendas, COP15 risks achieving none.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
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Harriet Bulkeley, Professor of Geography, Durham University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Loss, decay and bleaching: why sponges may be the ‘canary in the coal mine’ for impacts of marine heatwaves

Marine sponges were thought to be more resilient to ocean warming than other organisms. But earlier this year, New Zealand recorded the largest-ever sponge bleaching event off its southern coastline.

While only one species, the cup sponge Cymbastella lamellata, was affected, a prolonged marine heatwave turned millions of the normally dark brown sponges bright white.

Subsequently, we reported tissue loss, decay and death of other sponge species across the northern coastline of New Zealand, with an estimated impact on hundreds of thousands of specimens. In contrast, we didn’t observe any bleaching or tissue loss in central areas of New Zealand’s coastline, despite extensive surveys.

Our latest research shows the most severe impacts on sponges occurred in areas where the marine heatwave was most intense. The loss of sponges may have major repercussions for the whole ecosystem.

Why Should We Care About Sponges?

Sponges are among the most ancient and abundant animals on rocky reefs across the world. In New Zealand, they occupy up to 70% of the available seafloor, particularly in so-called mesophotic ecosystems at depths of 30-150m.

They serve a number of important ecological functions. They filter large quantities of water, capturing small food particles and moving carbon from the water column to the seafloor where it can be eaten by bottom-dwelling invertebrates. These invertebrates in turn are consumed by organisms further up the food chain, including commercially and culturally important fish species.

Sponges also add three-dimensional complexity to the sea floor, which provides habitat for a range of other species such as crabs, shrimps and starfish.

Sponge Bleaching, Tissue Loss And Decay

Like corals, sponges contain symbiotic organisms thought to be critical to their survival. Cymbastella lamellata is unusual in that it hosts dense populations of diatoms, small single-celled photosynthetic plants that give the sponge its brown colour.

These diatoms live within the sponge tissue, exchanging food for protection. When the sponge bleaches, it expels the diatoms, leaving the sponge skeleton exposed.

Tissue loss occurs when sponges are stressed and either have to invest more energy into cell repair or when their food source is depleted and they reabsorb their own tissue to reduce body volume and reallocate resources.

Tissue decay or necrosis on the other hand is generally associated with changes in the microbial communities living within sponges and growth of pathogenic bacteria.

Bleaching, tissue loss and decay in sponges have all previously been associated with heat stress, but didn’t necessarily result in sponge death. In other places where such impacts have been observed, they were much more localised, compared to what we saw in New Zealand.

The Impact Of Marine Heat Waves

Marine heatwaves are defined as unusual periods of warming that last for five consecutive days or longer. Some can last from weeks to several months and extend over hundreds or thousands of kilometres of coastline.

The sponge bleaching and tissue loss or decay in New Zealand matched the duration and intensity of marine heatwaves to the north and south of New Zealand during the summer of 2021/2022. The Hauraki Gulf, where sponge necrosis and decay was reported, was in a continuous marine heatwave for 29 weeks from November 2021 to the end of May 2022, with a maximum intensity of 3.77℃ above normal.

In Fiordland, a prolonged marine heatwave developed in early February 2022 and persisted for more than 16 weeks into May, with a maximum intensity of 4.85℃ above normal temperatures. In contrast, the Wellington and Marlborough Sounds regions experienced only short (weeks) marine heatwaves with a lower intensity and we did not observe any impacts on sponges.

These extreme heat events can result from a combination of changes in the heat exchange between the air and the sea, wind patterns and ocean currents. Their likelihood is also influenced by large-scale climate patterns such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO).

What The Future May Hold

Most global research on climate change impacts has focused on experimental studies exposing organism to temperatures predicted for 2100, often 2-4℃ higher than current temperatures. But the occurrence of marine heatwaves means organisms are already experiencing these temperatures, sometimes for several weeks or months. By 2100, marine heatwaves will become even more extreme.

For bleached Cymbastella, recent anecdotal reports suggest many sponges have recovered their colour, which is good news. However, observations immediately after the bleaching indicate many sponges were being eaten by fish, possibly because their symbionts may provide chemical defences against predation.

For bleached corals, studies have shown impacts on spawning success for many years after the event, likely because their energy reserves have been depleted.

We don’t yet know if this is the case for sponges. For sponges with decayed tissue the outlook is even less clear, as many probably died.

Sponges are not the only species to be affected by marine heatwaves New Zealand experienced in 2021/2022. There were reports of seaweed die-offs and changes to normal distribution patterns of tuna and other ecologically and commercially important fish species.

Marine heatwaves should be front of mind when thinking about climate impacts. They are happening now, not in 50 years, and we don’t know enough yet to determine if sponges may be the canary in the coal mine.

This is especially important because New Zealand’s northern coastlines are already experiencing almost continuous marine heatwave conditions, with the ongoing event forecast to extend into the coming summer.

James Bell, Professor of Marine Biology, Te Herenga Waka — Victoria University of Wellington; Nick Shears, Associate Professor in Marine Science, University of Auckland, and Robert Smith, Lecturer, University of Otago

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

A China-backed dam in Indonesia threatens a rare great ape – and that’s just the tip of the iceberg

In 2017, scientists described a new species of great apes – the Tapanuli orangutan. The species, found in the Batang Toru ecosystem of North Sumatara, Indonesia was listed as critically endangered soon after.

The population of the species has declined by 83% over the past 75 years, largely due to hunting and habitat loss. Just 800 Tapanuli orangutans remain – and their last known habitat is threatened by a slew of infrastructure projects.

Chief among them is the Chinese-funded Batang Toru hydropower dam, which threatens to fragment and submerge a large chunk of the orangutan’s habitat. The project is just one of a staggering 49 hydropower dams China is funding: mostly across Southeast Asia, but also in Africa and Latin America.

In new research, my colleagues and I show the substantial risk to biodiversity posed by the sheer number of Chinese-funded dams. And yet, environmental regulation of these projects has serious flaws.

Big Dams, Big Risks

Hydropower is expected to be an important part of the global renewable energy transition. But the technology brings environmental risks. Dams disrupt the flow of rivers, altering species’ habitat. And dam reservoirs inundate and fragment habitats on land.

Traditionally, financing of hydropower projects in low-income countries was the preserve of Western-backed multilateral development banks. China has now emerged as the biggest international financier of hydropower under its overseas infrastructure investment program, the Belt and Road Initiative.

Yet little is known about the scale of China’s hydropower financing or the biodiversity risks it brings. Whether adequate safeguards are applied to the projects by Chinese and host country regulators is also poorly understood. Our research attempted to remedy this.

We found China is funding 49 hydropower dams in 18 countries including Myanmar, Laos and Pakistan.

The dams are likely to impede the flow of 14 free-flowing rivers, imperilling the species they harbour. The first dam on a free-flowing river is akin to the proverbial “first cut” of a road into an intact forest ecosystem, causing disproportionate harms to biodiversity.

We also found Chinese-funded dams overlap with the geographic ranges of 12 critically endangered freshwater fish species, including the iconic Mekong Giant Catfish and the world’s largest carp species, the Giant Barb. The dams exacerbate the threats to these species and may push them closer to extinction.

Almost 135 square kilometres of critical habitat on land is also likely to be inundated and fragmented by the dams and their reservoirs.

Lax Environmental Rules

Despite the biodiversity risks, we found serious gaps in the environmental rules applied to Chinese-funded dams.

A previous analysis found six Chinese state-owned banks – which together contribute most financing for Belt and Road projects – had no safeguard standards to limit biodiversity damage.

Complementing this analysis, our investigation found Chinese regulators also did not require hydropower projects to mitigate environmental damage. Some regulator policies, however, contained non-binding guidelines.

A number of Chinese government policies defer to host country laws on environmental protection. But our investigation found in most countries where the dams are being built, regulation to limit environmental harms was absent or still developing.

This poor governance leaves species and ecosystems in these countries vulnerable to environmental damage from dams.

A Spotlight On Sumatra

The Batang Toru dam aims to bolster North Sumatra’s energy supplies. Its proponents say the dam uses environmentally-friendly technology that requires only a small area to be flooded.

Two multilateral development banks, however, distanced themselves from the project after concerns were raised about potential impact on the Tapanuli orangutan. The Chinese state-owned Bank of China also withdrew its finance offer after international protests. Chinese financier SDIC Power Holdings then stepped in to fund it.

Habitat destruction has confined the few remaining Tapanuli orangutans to a fragmented 1,400 square kilometre tract of rainforest in North Sumatra. Scientists say the Batang Toru dam further threatens this habitat.

Constructing the dam requires digging a tunnel in an area where most Tapanuli orangutans live. Experts also say the project will permanently isolate sub-populations of the species, increasing the risk of extinction.

The case illustrates the potential destruction hydropower projects can cause in the absence of appropriate planning and safeguards.

Need For Holistic Planning

The sheer number of Chinese-funded dams presents significant biodiversity risks. It also presents an opportunity.

China is funding several hydropower projects in single river basins. This puts it in an advantageous position to carry out “basin-scale planning”.

This involves making decisions about dams not based solely on an individual project, but by considering it in the context of other projects within the basin, as well as in the broader context of communities and the environment.

This type of planning also means dams can be configured to have the least impact on critically endangered species, and other irreplaceable and vulnerable biodiversity elements.

Such “system scale” planning is a key recommendation of international initiatives such as the World Commission on Dams and the European Union’s Water Framework Directive.

It also involves determining whether a proposed dam is the best way to meet energy needs, or if alternatives – such as wind or solar – could do so with lower environmental risks.

In the case of the Batang Toru dam, a 2020 report by a leading international consulting firm found the dam would not “materially improve access to nor the regularity of power supply” in North Sumatra, which in fact had a power surplus.

Given the huge damage dams can cause to biodiversity, it is crucial that only those dams that are really needed get built – and any associated damage is minimised.

The many Chinese-funded dams on the horizon must undergo rigorous vetting if serious biodiversity damage is to be averted. 

Divya Narain, PhD Candidate, The University of Queensland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Clashing laws need to be fixed if we want to live in bushfire-prone areas

It’s almost bushfire season. Yes, even though floods are still racing through parts of eastern Australia. Fire conditions are above average including in inland New South Wales and Queensland.

When we switch back to a neutral or El Niño climate cycle, our fire risk will likely intensify, given the huge vegetation growth during these rainy years.

As we prepare for the next major fire season, it’s vital we take a close look at our laws. Why? Because these laws can clash in ways that make it harder for us to prepare.

Governments have always struggled to balance laws protecting nature with laws protecting us from bushfire.

In recent years, planning laws have been changed to make it easier to fell trees and clear vegetation to keep our homes safe. Some of these came out of the review of Victoria’s catastrophic 2009 Black Saturday fires, where many houses nestled in bush burned. But these changes to the rules about clearing native vegetation can also make it harder for us to preserve habitat – and can give us a false sense of security, encouraging us to settle deeper and deeper into the fire-prone bush.

Why Do Laws Matter For Bushfire Preparation?

My colleagues and I recently mapped out Australia’s legal “anatomy” for fire. By anatomy, we mean all the different parts of the legal framework, including those that affect fire preparation.

Why? To optimise our system of laws to be ready for the ever-more-intense fires expected as the world heats up.

Here’s what a clash looks like. It’s now common to undertake prescribed burns and burn vegetation to reduce fuel loads and reduce the chances of a major bushfire.

But prescribed fires cause smoke. Fire agencies must comply with smoke pollution laws designed to keep vulnerable people safe. These two different risks – bushfire, and smoke-related illness – are managed under two different areas of law. Finding the balance is really hard.

We already know our environmental laws are failing to adequately protect nature.

Bushfires add to this as a serious and growing threat to our distinctive wildlife and ecosystems. The Black Summer megafires of 2019–20 killed huge numbers of animals and pushed many species closer to extinction, including mountain pygmy possums, native bees and rare frogs.

As fire seasons worsen and get longer over coming decades, fire agencies and local governments will be called on to clear and manage fuel loads – essentially, trees, plants and leaf litter – close to communities in the bush.

You can see the issue. Bushfire fuel is also habitat. Our international and domestic obligations to protect threatened species and habitats will come into increasing conflict with the need to preserve our settlements and farms.

Better, clearer laws would help balance these issues. Last year, the Victorian government announced plans to make bushfire planning provisions clearer and more understandable. Reviews like this should clarify where homes can and can’t be safely built, as well as preventing development in sensitive habitat.

Laws Around Fire Need To Be Considered Separately

Emergency planners often group floods, storms and bushfires under the blanket term “all hazards”. This is done to help emergency services to plan efficient and coordinated responses to all kinds of extreme events.

We believe laws about fire also deserve specific attention, particularly in Australia, where many of our ecosystems have evolved alongside fire. Not all fire is equal and not all fires are emergencies.

In fact, laws governing protected areas in some states actually require parks agencies to use fire as a conservation tool. Using fire carefully is front and centre in the new plan to look after Tasmania’s Wilderness World Heritage Area.

Not only that, but some areas need small fires lit in a mosaic pattern. Why? To encourage moorland plants to put out the flowers and seeds the critically endangered orange-bellied parrot relies on.

Or take the growing importance of cultural fire management and traditional land management. Victoria’s cultural fire strategy describes cultural burning as a “responsibility” and an example of “living knowledge”, but not as an emergency.

Some laws, like arson, only apply to fire. There’s no equivalent crime for floods. Improving arson prevention could help cut the estimated A$1.6 billion in damages annually from fires being lit deliberately.

While arson is not as common as it used to be, cutting arson further will reduce the number of fires Australian firefighters have to respond to.

We Have To Make Laws Intersect Better

In the wake of destructive and lethal fires come the reviews and inquiries, which often recommend changes to emergency management laws.

These post-disaster inquiries also often recommend streamlining rules around native vegetation, to let landholders clear more trees and shrubs around their houses. That’s understandable, because these inquiries are intended to find lessons.

But if we look across the whole range of laws governing or touching on fire, we might find new ways to help us adapt.

Over the last century, Australian governments have launched hundreds of inquiries and commissions after major bushfires.

We don’t need to wait for the next fire and inquiry. We can find ways of optimising our web of intersecting laws right now – and prepare ourselves and nature for what is to come.

My co-authors Professors Jan McDonald and David Bowman, Associate Professor Michael Eburn, Dr Stuart Little and Dr Rebecca Harris contributed to the research on which this article is based.

Phillipa McCormack, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Adelaide

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

New food technologies could release 80% of the world’s farmland back to nature

Here’s the basic problem for conservation at a global level: food production, biodiversity and carbon storage in ecosystems are competing for the same land. As humans demand more food, so more forests and other natural ecosystems are cleared, and farms intensify and become less hospitable to many wild animals and plants. Therefore global conservation, currently focused on the COP15 summit in Montreal, will fail unless it addresses the underlying issue of food production.

Fortunately, a whole raft of new technologies is being developed that make a system-wide revolution in food production feasible. According to recent research by one of us (Chris), this transformation could meet increased global food demands by a growing human population on less than 20% of the world’s existing farmland. Or in other words, these technologies could release at least 80% of existing farmland from agriculture in about a century.

Around four-fifths of the land used for human food production is allocated to meat and dairy, including both range lands and crops specifically grown to feed livestock. Add up the whole of India, South Africa, France and Spain and you have the amount of land devoted to crops that are then fed to livestock.

Despite growing numbers of vegetarians and vegans in some countries, global meat consumption has increased by more than 50% in the past 20 years and is set to double this century. As things stand, producing all that extra meat will mean either converting even more land into farms, or cramming even more cows, chickens and pigs into existing land. Neither option is good for biodiversity.

Meat and dairy production is already an unpleasant business. For instance, most chickens are grown in high-density feeding operations, and pork, beef and especially dairy farming is going the same way. Current technologies are cruel, polluting and harmful to biodiversity and the climate – don’t be misled by cartoons of happy cows with daisies protruding from their lips.

Unless food production is tackled head-on, we are left resisting inevitable change, often with no hope of long-term success. We need to tackle the cause of biodiversity change. The principal global approach to climate change is to focus on the cause and minimise greenhouse gas emissions, not to manufacture billions of parasols (though we may need these too). The same is required for biodiversity.

So, How Can We Do This?

Cellular agriculture provides an alternative, and could be one of this century’s most promising technological advancements. Sometimes called “lab-grown food”, the process involves growing animal products from real animal cells, rather than growing actual animals.

If growing meat or milk from animal cells sounds strange or icky to you, let’s put this into perspective. Imagine a brewery or cheese factory: a sterile facility filled with metal vats, producing large volumes of beer or cheese, and using a variety of technologies to mix, ferment, clean and monitor the process. Swap the barley or milk for animal cells and this same facility becomes a sustainable and efficient producer of dairy or meat products.

Animal cruelty would be eliminated and, with no need for cows wandering around in fields, the factory would take up far less space to produce the same amount of meat or milk.

Other emerging technologies include microbial protein production, where bacteria use energy derived from solar panels to convert carbon dioxide and nitrogen and other nutrients into carbohydrates and proteins. This could generate as much protein as soybeans but in just 7% of the area. These could then be used as protein food additives (a major use of soy) and animal feed (including for pets).

It is even possible to generate sugars and carbohydrates using desalination or through extracting CO₂ from the atmosphere, all without ever passing through a living plant or animal. The resulting sugars are chemically the same as those derived from plants but would be generated in a tiny fraction of the area required by conventional crops.

What To Do With Old Farmland

These new technologies can have a huge impact even if demand keeps growing. Even though Chris’s research is based on the assumption that global meat consumption will double, it nonetheless suggests that at least 80% of farmland could be released to be used for something else.

That land might become nature reserves or be used to store carbon, for example, in forests or the waterlogged soils of peat bogs. It could be used to grow sustainable building materials, or simply to produce more human-edible crops, among other uses.

Gone too will be industrial livestock systems that produce huge volumes of manure, bones, blood, guts, antibiotics and growth hormones. Thereafter, any remaining livestock farming could be carried out in a compassionate manner.

Since there would be less pressure on the land, there would be less need for chemicals and pesticides and crop production could become more wildlife-friendly (global adoption of organic farming is not feasible at present because it is less productive). This transition must be coupled with a full transition towards renewable energy as the new technologies require lots of power.

Converting these technologies into mass-market production systems will of course be tricky. But a failure to do so is likely to lead to ever-increasing farming intensity, escalating numbers of confined animals, and even more lost nature.

Avoiding this fate – and achieving the 80% farmland reduction – will require a lot of political will and a cultural acceptance of these new forms of food. It will require economic and political “carrots” such as investment, subsidies and tax breaks for desirable technologies, and “sticks” such as increased taxation and removal of subsidies for harmful technologies. Unless this happens, biodiversity targets will continue to be missed, COP after COP.

Don’t have time to read about climate change as much as you’d like?
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Chris D Thomas, Director of the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, University of York; Jack Hatfield, Postdoctoral Research Associate, Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, University of York, and Katie Noble, PhD Candidate at the Leverhulme Center for Anthropocene Biodiversity, University of York

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Lots of ‘breakthroughs’, still no cure. Do the new dementia drugs bring us any closer?

We often hear about “dementia breakthroughs” in the news – new genes being discovered, new blood tests being developed, new drugs being tested.

However, there remains no effective or accessible cure for dementia. This is of great frustration to people living with dementia, and their carers and loved ones.

Two new “breakthrough” drugs have been in the news. While they may not bring much relief to those living with the disease today, we are learning more about dementia, and getting closer to a treatment.

A Bit About Dementia

Dementia is an umbrella term to describe a group of conditions characterised by a loss of brain function. This includes the ability to remember, plan and make decisions.

In Australia, dementia is the second leading cause of death. For women it’s the leading cause of death. Older age is the greatest risk factor for dementia. But dementia is not an inevitable or normal consequence of ageing.

Up to 70% of all dementia is attributed to Alzheimer’s disease. Other types of dementia include vascular dementia, frontotemporal dementia, and Lewy body disease. Because Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, most “dementia breakthroughs” often refer to “breakthroughs” in Alzheimer’s.

Searching For Treatments

Alzheimer’s disease takes a long time to develop, up to 30 years or more. For a long time, scientists had only a limited understanding of the disease. To develop the right drugs, it’s crucial to have the right tools to be able to understand how the disease progresses.

Over the past 20 years, breakthroughs in brain imaging, brain fluid analysis and, more recently, blood tests, have enabled us to measure key Alzheimer’s proteins – amyloid and tau – in living people. This has allowed scientists to understand how these proteins develop over time.

We have also been able to clarify which risk factors – age, sex, genetics, environment, lifestyle – contribute to the development of cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s. This provides important insights into who and what to target.

Studies now suggest Alzheimer’s begins with the buildup of amyloid in the brain. As amyloid builds up, tau then begins to develop. Researchers think it’s this tau buildup that leads to brain cell death and cognitive decline. Some scientists refer to amyloid as the “trigger”, as once the trigger has been pulled, the “bullet” (tau) is on its way.

Stopping the buildup of amyloid, or removing it, became a key strategy in attempts to develop drugs for Alzheimer’s.

Two New Drugs

Two drugs that have received a lot of attention in recent weeks are aducanumab (marketed as Aduhelm) and lecanemab. Both drugs showed substantial reduction in amyloid in the brain. But whether this reduction in amyloid resulted in a meaningful benefit in memory and thinking is less clear.

In two aducanumab trials, patients did not show any meaningful benefit. But six months later, the drug maker Biogen released and subsequently published new data reporting participants on the highest dose had 22% slower cognitive decline compared to participants on a placebo.

The Food and Drug Administration in the United States granted accelerated approval for aducanumab as it thought the drug would improve or slow Alzheimer’s symptoms.

Recently, drug companies Eisai and Biogen announced the results of a lecanemab trial. Around 1,800 participants with early Alzhemier’s were given the drug or a placebo over 18 months. They found a reduction in brain amyloid and tau levels in those taking the drug when compared to participants taking a placebo.

Importantly, lecanemab resulted in a 27% slower decline in memory and thinking ability. This was also accompanied by greater quality of life, as reported by participants and their caregivers.

This translates to roughly a six-month benefit in memory and thinking ability. This is not much. In addition, questions have been raised about whether the drug may be less effective for people with higher risk of developing Alzhemier’s, including those with certain genes, women, and culturally and linguistically diverse populations.

There are also substantial side effects that accompany both drugs. Of most concern are brain swelling and small brain bleeds as detected on brain scans. These were observed in 21-40% of participants. The risk of these side effects will need to be an important discussion between patients, their families and their doctors.

Another consideration is the cost. The price of lecanemab has not yet been announced, but aducanumab costs US$28,200 (A$42,000) per patient per year. Additional costs for brain scanning will also be required to monitor side effects. This makes it inaccessible to most people to purchase privately.

It also has consequences for the availability of the drug to be considered under Australia’s Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). Around 150,000 people with mild Alzhemier’s would currently be eligible for aducanumab if it were available. If all of these people received the drug, PBS expenditure would increase by 50%.

Companies that develop drugs must provide evidence of their effectiveness to the government health authorities in each country in which they intend to make it available. The governing body in Australia is the Therapeutic Goods Administration. This process has not yet been completed for either drug in Australia.

So Why All The Breakthroughs, And Still No Cure?

Since Alois Alzheimer first described an “unusual disease of the cerebral cortex” in 1906, we have learned a lot about the disease and its progression.

But we still have a long way to go. Because Alzheimer’s symptoms take decades to develop, studying and tracking brain and cognitive changes from early in the disease has been difficult. Beyond amyloid and tau, a range of other biological, genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors can also contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.

It’s unlikely any single one of these factors alone can fully explain why someone develops the disease. It’s likely the disease manifests when several of these risk factors coalesce. For example, someone with a genetic predisposition may be more likely to develop the disease in the face of poor cardiovascular health.

Disentangling the contribution of these risk factors can be challenging. This is why large numbers of people are often required to participate in research.

Given the prevalence of the disease in the community, every advance is seen as newsworthy. And from a scientific point of view, they are.

However these findings, or “breakthroughs,” have not been enough to offer relief to people living with Alzheimer’s or their families, for whom life gets harder every day. Their hopes are dashed when reported “breakthroughs” still haven’t translated into a cure or an effective treatment.

We now have multiple drugs that show some effect in slowing memory deterioration, but the effects are small. Outcomes of more drug trials will be announced in the coming years.

While these advances may not come fast enough to help people living with the disease now, they’re an important incursion in the war against this devastating disease. They show we’re getting closer.

If you are interested in learning how to reduce your dementia risk by changing health behaviours, please join us at the BetterBrains Trial. We are actively recruiting Australians aged 40-70 with a family history of dementia.

Yen Ying Lim, Associate Professor, Monash University and Emily Rosenich, Postdoctoral Research Fellow (Neuropsychology), Monash University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Tantrums to tinsel: why I love the curious and festive tradition of the Santa photo

In April 1995, my uncle secured a lucrative job in Saudi Arabia. He and my aunt left their home in suburban Sydney and relocated to a western compound (a residential gated community for expats) in Jeddah. My aunt shares stories of life under Saudi’s strict laws and how she craved her western freedoms. One such freedom was the celebration of Christmas.

Hailing mostly from Australia, the UK and America, the compound residents organised their Christmases by smuggling in decorations and creating homemade Santa suits. They even staged the photographic rituals with mums and dads disguised as the shopping centre Santa Claus.

My aunt’s eagerness to recreate this photographic ritual with her children stems from her own childhood posing with Santa. My siblings and I were also photographed every year on Santa’s lap and we continue the ritual with our own kids.

As a photographer, I have spent years studying my curious desire to participate in this photographic custom. While I do not celebrate Christmas on religious grounds and bemoan the increasing consumerism of the season, I participate with overzealous enthusiasm in the Santa Claus photo.

This is evident in the careful way I have cultivated the collection of my children’s Santa photographs between 2009-2018, and kept guard of my family’s collection from the 70s and 80s that portrays me alongside my siblings and, on one rare occasion, with my parents.

I use myself and my family as a case study. Analysing details like my mother’s obsession with dressing my sister and I in identical outfits, and then the ways I consciously made my children dress themselves.

The Santa photo feeds my photographic penchant for overly staged family portraits that signal to the camera “we are posing together for a photograph”.

Perfect Kodak Moments

In Photography A Middle–Brow Art, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu famously observed in his 1965 study of amateur photography, that the family represents itself in “ideal moments of celebration” in order to secure its honourable social standing.

The Santa photos certainly fit this schema, tied to the so-called “Kodak moments” where everyone says “cheese”.

Instagram, which today operates as a public family album, reveals a searchable hashtag archive. Across #santaphoto, #santaphotos, #santapictures and #vintagesantaphoto you’ll find thousands of images of children sitting nicely on Santa’s lap.

Like most family photographs they serve a nostalgic function to take us into our pasts (with rose coloured glasses) and make us laugh at ourselves, at how we used to look, our hair styles, fashions, poses and reactions.

Today there are even photo sessions for pets, and “sensitive Santa photo sessions” for children with special needs.

With the rise of COVID-19, we see action packed beach Santa photos proving popular. In the shopping centre, the 1.5 metre social distancing rule is captured for posterity.

But Santa photos capture more than just the idealised moments of family life.

Hilarious ‘Santa Fails’

If the perfect family photograph is where the children are well dressed and everyone is posing and smiling happily, the “Santa fails” resist the ideal.

Santa fails show children reeling from Santa, throwing tantrums, back arching, crying and demanding to leave. Search #santafail on Instagram to see the truth of the matter: we happily and freely deposit our children onto the lap of a total stranger.

The artist Julie Rrap recently shared a story with me about her father who was once employed as a shopping centre Santa. He often reported coming home with a saturated lap from children having wet themselves while seated.

The comic relief that comes with such stories and the Santa fails are over time another ritual enjoyed among family members. But my attraction to the Santa photo goes deeper than comic relief of fearing Santa.

A Work Of Art

As a migrant family in 70s and 80s Australia, we interpreted the Santa photo as a fun and unpretentious custom that assimilated us into the middle-class values of suburban Australia.

Participating in this ritual made us feel and appear more Australian, if only to ourselves.

I’m also interested in the Santa photos as a photographic typology. As a photographer, I have done what Bourdieu describes and “elevated the ordinary photo into a work of art”.

Through my training I have linked the seriality of Santa photographs to Rineke Dijkstra’s photographic portraits of Olivier and Almerisa. Photographing the same people over many years, Dijkstra captures the subtle changes in their appearance, mood and fashion style, as well as their social and political status.

I am also reminded of the playful fictional photographs of Christian Boltanski where the title of the work – 10 photographic portraits of Christian Boltanski 1946-1964, 1972 – leads the viewer to think they are looking at portraits of a boy growing up, when in fact they are reconstructions.

Like these artworks, Santa photos mark time, revealing what is imperceptible in everyday life. Through the repetition of a performance, a scene and an image we confront ourselves and the people we love changing.

Children and animals are notoriously the hardest subjects to photograph. The training a photographer receives with Santa photography is a baptism of fire. Moving subjects, crying babies, a toddler’s inability to sit still, scared children that won’t smile and toddlers engaged in escape attempts all combine with the parent’s consumer expectations that the photographer should get the right shot.

Remember, the next time you take your children, pets or yourself to have a Santa photo, keep in mind that the “right shot” and the best Santa photos are often not the ones where they’re smiling. 

Cherine Fahd, Associate Professor of Visual Communication in the School of Design, University of Technology Sydney

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The first photograph of the entire globe: 50 years on, Blue Marble still inspires

December 7 marks the 50-year anniversary of the Blue Marble photograph. The crew of NASA’s Apollo 17 spacecraft – the last manned mission to the Moon – took a photograph of Earth and changed the way we visualised our planet forever.

Taken with a Hasselblad film camera, it was the first photograph taken of the whole round Earth and is believed to be the most reproduced image of all time. Up until this point, our view of ourselves had been disconnected and fragmented: there was no way to visualise the planet in its entirety.

The Apollo 17 crew were on their way to the moon when the photograph was captured at 29,000 kilometres (18,000 miles) from the Earth. It quickly became a symbol of harmony and unity.

The previous Apollo missions had taken photographs of the earth in part shadow. Earthrise shows a partial Earth, rising up from the moon’s surface.

In Blue Marble, the Earth appears in the centre of the frame, floating in space. It is possible to clearly see the African continent, as well as the Antarctica south polar ice cap.

Photographs like Blue Marble are quite hard to capture. To see the Earth as a full globe floating in space, lighting needs to be calculated carefully. The sun needs to be directly behind you. Astronaut Scott Kelly observes that this can be difficult to plan for when orbiting at high speeds.

Produced against a broader cultural and political context of the “space race” between the United States and the Soviet Union, the photograph revealed an unexpectedly neutral view of Earth with no borders.

Disruption To Mapping Conventions

According to geographer Denis Cosgrove, the Blue Marble disrupted Western conventions for mapping and cartography. By removing the graticule – the grid of meridians and parallels humans place over the globe – the image represented an earth freed from mapping practices that had been in place for hundreds of years.

The photograph also gave Africa a central position in the representation of the world, where eurocentric mapping practice had tended to reduce Africa’s scale.

The image quickly became a symbol of harmony and unity. Instead of offering proof of America’s supremacy, the photograph fostered a sense of global interconnectedness.

Since the Enlightenment, mapping and map making had emphasised man’s superiority over the Earth. Working against this hierarchy, Blue Marble evoked a sense of humility. Earth appeared extremely fragile and in need of protection. In his book Earthrise, Robert Poole wrote:

Although no one found the words to say so at the time, the ‘Blue marble’ was a photographic manifesto for global justice.

Blue Marble’s Afterlives

It is impossible to examine Blue Marble and separate it from the urgency of today’s climate crisis.

It quickly became a symbol of the early environmental movement, and was adopted by activist groups such as Friends of the Earth and annual events such as Earth Day.

The photograph appeared on the cover of James Lovelock’s book Gaia (1979), postage stamps, and an early opening sequence of Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006).

The ways we have viewed and visualised Earth have changed over the decades.

Commencing in the 1990s, NASA created digitally manipulated whole-Earth images titled Blue Marble: Next Generation, in honour of the original Apollo 17 mission.

These are composite images composed of data stitched together from thousands of images taken at different times by satellites.

Space-based imaging technology has continued to advance in its capacity to render astonishing detail. Art historians such as Elizabeth A. Kessler have linked these new generation of images picturing the cosmos with the philosophical concept of the sublime.

The photographs create a sense of vastness and awe that can leave the spectator overwhelmed, akin to 19th century Romantic paintings such as Thomas Moran’s The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1872).

In 1995, the Hubble Space Telescope revealed mountains of gas and dust in the Eagle Nebula. Known as the Pillars of Creation, the image captures gas and dust in the process of creating new stars.

Earlier this year, NASA released the first images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope.

Building on the Hubble’s discoveries, the Webb is designed to visualise infrared wavelengths at a unprecedented level of clarity.

These advances in technology might help explain the photograph’s enduring charm from the vantage point of 2022. The first photograph of our planet was remarkably lo-fi.

Blue Marble is the last full Earth photograph taken by an actual human using analogue film: developed in a darkroom when the crew returned to Earth. 

Chari Larsson, Senior Lecturer of art history, Griffith University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

In Australia and South Africa, construction has started on the biggest radio observatory in Earth’s history

Construction of the world’s biggest radio astronomy facility, the SKA Observatory, begins today. The observatory is a global project 30 years in the making.

With two huge two telescopes, one in Australia and the other in South Africa, the project will see further into the history of the Universe than ever before.

Astronomers like me will use the telescopes to trace hydrogen over cosmic time and make precise measurements of gravity in extreme environments. What’s more, we hope to uncover the existence of complex molecules in planet-forming clouds around distant stars, which could be the early signs of life elsewhere in the Universe.

I have been involved in the SKA and its precursor telescopes for the past ten years, and as the chief operations scientist of the Australian telescope since July. I am helping to build the team of scientists, engineers and technicians who will construct and operate the telescope, along with undertaking science to map primordial hydrogen in the infant universe.

What Is The SKA Observatory?

The SKA Observatory is an intergovernmental organisation with dozens of countries involved. The observatory is much more than the two physical telescopes, with headquarters in the UK and collaborators around the world harnessing advanced computers and software to tailor the telescope signals to the precise science being undertaken.

The telescope in South Africa (called SKA-Mid) will use 197 radio dishes to observe middle-frequency radio waves from 350 MHz to more than 15 GHz. It will study the extreme environments of neutron stars, organic molecules around newly forming planets, and the structure of the Universe on the largest scales.

The Australian telescope (SKA-Low), in Western Australia, will observe lower frequencies with 512 stations of radio antennas spread out over a 74-kilometre span of outback.

The site is located within Inyarrimanha Ilgari Bundara, the CSIRO Murchison Radio-astronomy Observatory. This name, which means “sharing sky and stars”, was given to the observatory by the Wajarri Yamaji, the traditional owners and native title holders of the observatory site.

Tuning In To The Universe

After decades of planning, developing precursor telescopes and testing, today we are holding a ceremony to mark the start of on-site construction. We expect both telescopes will be fully operational late this decade.

Each of the 512 stations of SKA-Low is made up of 256 wide-band dipole antennas, spread over a diameter of 35 metres. The signals from these Christmas-tree-shaped antennas in each station are electronically combined to point to different parts of the sky, forming a single view.

These antennas are designed to tune in to low radio frequencies of 50 to 350 MHz. At these frequencies, the radio waves are very long – comparable to the height of a person – which means more familiar-looking dishes are an inefficient way to catch them. Instead the dipole antennas operate much like TV antennas, with the radio waves from the Universe exciting electrons within their metal arms.

Collectively, the 131,072 dipoles in the completed array will provide the deepest and widest view of the Universe to date.

Peering Into The Cosmic Dawn

They will allow us to see out and back to the very beginning of the Universe, when the first stars and galaxies formed.

This key period, more than 13 billion years in our past, is termed the “cosmic dawn”: when stars and galaxies began to form, lighting up the cosmos for the first time.

The cosmic dawn marks the end of the cosmic dark ages, a period after the Big Bang when the Universe had cooled down through expansion. All that remained was the ubiquitous background glow of the early Universe light, and a cosmos filled with dark matter and neutral atoms of hydrogen and helium.

The light from the first stars transformed the Universe, tearing apart the electrons and protons in neutral hydrogen atoms. The Universe went from dark and neutral to bright and ionised.

The SKA Observatory will map this fog of neutral hydrogen at low radio frequencies, which will allow scientists to explore the births and deaths of the earliest stars and galaxies. Exploration of this key period is the final missing piece in our understanding of the life story of the Universe.

Unimagined Mysteries

Closer to home, the low-frequency telescope will time the revolutions of pulsars. These rapidly spinning neutron stars, which fire out sweeping beams of radiation like lighthouses, are the Universe’s ultra-precise clocks.

Changes to the ticking of these clocks can indicate the passage of gravitational waves through the Universe, allowing us to map these deformations of spacetime with radio waves.

It will also help us to understand the Sun, our own star, and the space environment that we on Earth live within.

These are the things we expect to find with the SKA Observatory. But the unexpected discoveries will most likely be the most exciting. With an observatory of this size and power, we are bound to uncover as-yet-unimagined mysteries of the Universe.

Cathryn Trott, Research Fellow in Radio Astronomy, SKA-Low Chief Operations Scientist, Curtin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The folk philosophy of Bob Dylan: riffs, grifters, history – and a terrific playlist

Bob Dylan, sing-songwriter and Nobel laureate, has spent a career confounding expectations. What, then, should one expect of his new book, The Philosophy of Modern Song? Firstly, “modern song” should read “American modern song”, since almost all of the 66 songs discussed by Dylan are American. And by “modern”, we are talking mid-century, mostly from the 1940s to the 1960s. Stylistically and generically, the songs cover the Great American Songbook, folk, rock’n’roll, country, and so on.

The Philosophy of Modern Song – Bob Dylan (Simon & Schuster, 2022)

Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs – Greil Marcus (Yale University Press, 2022)

In other words, they are the kinds of Americana that can be found on Dylan’s own records. “Philosophy” is the kind of word that can mean anything in publishing contexts, and it should warn the reader not to expect anything so programmatic as, for instance, a history of modern song.

Dylan’s choice of songs forms a mood more than a method. The book is populated by outlaws, grifters, cowboys, gangsters, con artists, and gamblers. There are also references to hucksters like the Colonel Tom Parker (Elvis Presley’s manager) and the 19th-century showman PT Barnum. And to rubes (or those easily duped). So, reader, be aware: this book is concerned with “modern song” on its own terms.

Each song is a springboard for two different kinds of riffing. Firstly, there are eccentric fictions that relate tangentially, if at all, to the particular song (though many reconfigure lyrical elements of the song in question). Written in the second person, these pieces have all the allure of someone narrating a dream, which is to say (for me), not much.

Full of Dylanesque imagery, these dream pieces lack the strangeness (and music, of course) of Dylan’s mid-60s period, but they have that period’s semi-prophetic loquaciousness, mixing the everyday with the apocalyptic.

For instance, the chapter on Everybody Cryin’ Mercy by the jazz and blues artist Mose Allison has you

Thumbing a ride on the Ferris Wheel, shooting ducks and winning kewpie dolls, while all of mankind cries mercy – every race, creed, and color – rich and poor from all quarters, all over creation.

There are some startling moments in these pieces, but cumulatively they have the air of AI-generated prose.

More interesting, are the essays that follow the dream pieces. Like those pieces, the essays are often tangentially related to the song in question. Sure, we learn a little about Townes Van Zandt (his family wanted him to be a lawyer) or the link between Rosemary Clooney, Armenian folk song, and Alvin and the Chipmunks, but these essays are mostly an occasion for Dylan to muse (philosophise) on everything from the movies, polygamy, and lemmings, to language, history, and war. Or, as the dust jacket of the (very nicely designed and lavishly illustrated) book grandly puts it, “the human condition”.

A Gender Imbalance

Like the dream pieces, the essays are associative and riffing in nature, but they are more interested in imparting information.

The essay on Nina Simone’s Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood begins with an account of the problems that the first sentence of the novel L’Étranger (by fellow Nobel laureate, Albert Camus) has given translators, then moves onto a potted history of Esperanto, followed by some notable examples of misunderstanding, before briefly landing on Simone’s recording of the song, which in turn becomes an opportunity to talk about the relationship between art and interpretation. On this last subject, it is hardly surprising that the “mercurial” Dylan should assert that

Art can be appreciated or interpreted but there is seldom anything to understand.

Talking of Simone, she is only one of three female artists covered here. Coupled with Dylan’s thoughts, presumably baiting, on polygamy and feminism, as well as the often-misogynistic representations of women in the dream pieces (climaxing on the Eagles’ Witchy Women), one can only wonder if Dylan doesn’t have a “woman problem”.

But, as always with Dylan, it is hard to know how seriously to take any of this. Is he riffing on the misogyny of his source material or just engaging in it himself? This question brings to mind the arguments surrounding much stand-up comedy (that other source of the word “riff”.)

But all of this makes The Philosophy of Modern Song sound more solemn than it is. The book is filled with genuine, and informed, enthusiasm for many of the songs discussed, such as the Fugs’ CIA Man and the Osborne Brothers’ Ruby, Are You Mad?, the latter of which leads to the unexpected, but not entirely ridiculous, assertion that bluegrass is “the other side of heavy metal”.

Dylan likes these sort of apothegms: “There are more songs about shoes than there are about hats, pants, and dresses combined”; “There is nothing scarier than someone earnest in their delusion”.

A Lot Of Fun

The best parts of the book are when you are in on the joke, or when Dylan is just flat-out funny. Anyone who knows anything about the Grateful Dead would have to laugh at the deadpan assertion that they are “essentially a dance band”. (But since Dylan’s recorded an album with them, perhaps he knows best.) Dylan also does a good satirical side-order in grumpy-old-man-isms. For instance, on food he writes that

There isn’t an item on the menu that doesn’t have half a dozen adjectives in front of it, all chosen to hit you in your sociopolitical-humanitarian-snobby-foodie consumer spot. Enjoy your free-range, cumin-infused, cayenne-dusted heirloom reduction. Sometimes it’s just better to have a BLT and be done with it.

That observation was from the essay on Your Cheatin’ Heart by Hank Williams. There are lots of instances of gerunds (“-ing’ words) missing their terminal g’s in The Philosophy of Modern Song, and not just when it comes to song titles. Elvis (Presley, not Costello) is described as "backwoods-born but city-livin’, truck-drivin’, hip-shakin’ with a feral whiff of danger”. The fact that the complex adjectives get their hyphens makes it clear that Dylan is havin’ fun with his gerunds.

And this book is mostly about fun (though things get serious when Dylan talks about the plight of Native Americans and war). When I ignored the high-falutin’ talk on the blurb and press release, I got a lot of fun (rather than philosophy) from this book.

If nothing else, notwithstanding the gender bias, the book makes up a terrific playlist. I can’t imagine any reader who wouldn’t discover some unknown gems. Two of my favourite discoveries were the book’s most recent songs (from 2001 and 1986): Doesn’t Hurt Anymore by John Trudell, and Old Violin by Johnny Paycheck, just two of the numerous Johns and Johnnies who populate this work.

Much of the milieu covered in The Philosophy of Modern Song converges with the American music that Greil Marcus wrote about in his groundbreaking book, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock’n’Roll Music (1975).

Being a critic, Marcus is more disciplined than Dylan, but, like him, his technique is based on riffing, on finding unexpected connections amid arcane knowledge.

Marcus has written a number of books about Dylan, including a book on the Basement Tapes that Dylan made with the Band, the second edition of which was called The Old Weird America. The America dealt with in Marcus’s latest book on Dylan, Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs, might be less old, but it certainly remains weird.

A Nation’s Shared Vernacular Music

Like The Philosophy of Modern Song, the title of Marcus’s latest book is a little inaccurate, since it is not really a biography of Dylan, except inasmuch as a biography of America is a biography of its national songwriter.

Just as Marcus did in The History of Rock’n’Roll in Ten Songs (2014), and Dylan does in The Philosophy of Modern Song, the songs in Folk Music are launching pads for wide-ranging meditations – in this case about Dylan and American history and culture.

Indeed, Marcus generally seems more comfortable when talking about cultural matters rather than specifically musicological ones. If there are any unifying themes to Folk Music, they are race and history. (It is emblematic that the frontispiece to the book is a 1963 photograph of the African American writer James Baldwin and Dylan.)

Given these themes, it is not surprising that four of the seven songs that make up Folk Music come from the 1960s. The 60s was not just the time Dylan became the spokesperson for the folk-music movement (and later his whole generation), but it was also the period when the American civil rights movement became notably active in the face of long-standing oppression and violence.

The two movements, of course, intersected in various ways, not least of all in the “protest song”, of which two of the most important – Blowin’ in the Wind (1962) and The Times They Are A-Changin’ (1964) – are discussed by Marcus. (The missing g’s seem less quaint in this context.)

Marcus tends to a hyperbolic style, producing a slightly febrile mood, appropriate to the events being related. He also uncovers, or produces, hidden connections between apparently disparate things.

His chapter on The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll (1964) links that topical song (which gives a more-or-less factual account of a white man who killed a black woman and received a six-month jail sentence for assault) with Laurie Anderson’s unlikely art-pop hit, O Superman (1981). These songs have nothing to do with each other, stylistically or in terms of lyrical content, but Marcus brings the two into the same orbit to show how songs can

come loose from their authors … how songs not only mark history, or even make it, but become part of its fabric.

This strange dis/connection of song and history is shown in a particularly disturbing way in the chapter on Desolation Row (1965). One of Dylan’s most celebrated songs, Desolation Row begins with an especially arresting opening line: “They’re selling postcards of the hanging”.

Marcus recounts how when this song was released

few people knew that in the first decades of the 20th century, there had been a craze of postcards of lynchings of black Americans by crowds of white Americans … postcards sent through the US mail, traded among collectors, sold in souvenir shops and at country fairs.

Marcus is not making the case that Desolation Row is about this appalling historical phenomenon, per se, but (in the shortest chapter in the book) he imagines how echoes of that phenomenon might have made their way to the young Dylan.

Marcus ends Folk Music with a chapter on Murder Most Foul, Dylan’s 17-minute ballad on the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963, from his most recent album, Rough and Rowdy Ways (2020). The subject of this song not only returns the milieu to the crucible that was the 60s, but again thematises the strange and complex relationship between history and song. Attending to the way that songs can be in and of history is a way of thinking about that unstable category, the “folk song”.

Marcus’s Folk Songs doesn’t just deal with Dylan’s folk period; he shows – in a digressive, indirect way – the value of thinking about Dylan in terms of history, and the shared vernacular music of a nation. It is not surprising, then, that Marcus is so sanguine about the accusations of plagiarism that have dogged Dylan since almost the beginning of his career.

This is because Marcus sees Dylan, like the abstract figure of the folk singer, as constantly rewriting the national songbook, giving the old songs “new lives to live”. This is, after all, what he is up to in The Philosophy of Modern Song, which is as much a book of remixes as it is a work of music criticism.

David McCooey, Professor of Writing and Literature, Deakin University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

‘I would like to go to university’: flexi school students share their goals in Australia-first survey

Flexi schools cater to young people who have been pushed out of mainstream schools. Some students may have been expelled or struggled to fit in. Some may have been bullied or have learning needs the mainstream system could not meet.

Flexi schools give students a second (and sometimes a third, fourth or fifth) chance to stay or become engaged with schooling.

Demand for flexi schools has been increasing, but we still have little information about the quality of schooling young people receive at these schools, or their long-term trajectories after attending one.

Our new research shows students value the support they get from their flexi school but want the curriculum to challenge them more, and better support their aspirations.

What Are Flexi Schools?

Flexi schools come in multiple forms. Some sit alongside mainstream government high schools. Some are run by community groups, church organisations or are backed by philanthropy.

There is limited recent data on how many flexi schools there are in Australia. A 2014 report estimated 70,000 young Australians were engaged in flexi schools. This number is expected to be higher in 2022. This report was published almost a decade ago now and the sector was predicted to grow because of the demand.

Flexi schools tend to be smaller than mainstream schools, often with fewer than 200 students. They are centred on the young person, their needs, strengths and interests. There is an emphasis on community, relationships and wellbeing. Schools usually don’t require students to wear a uniform and it is common for a student to call their teacher by their first name.

We surveyed almost 500 flexi school students around the country in May to June this year. This is the most comprehensive picture of young people’s experiences in flexi schools in Australia to date.

Flexi School Students Are Diverse

Our research showed Australian flexi schools educate a diverse group of young people. The average age of a student is 15 years old, with ages ranging from ten to 20 years. Our respondents came from 43 different cultural backgrounds. One in three identified as Aboriginal and or Torres Strait Islander.

In such a diverse school setting, 77% of young people said they felt their identity was valued. More than 80% felt their flexi school was a welcoming place. As one respondent said:

If I am experiencing issues, teachers support me, don’t judge and are extremely kind and considerate.

Flexi School Students Have High Aspirations

Many flexi school students have already been labelled as “disengaged” by the sheer fact mainstream schooling hasn’t worked for or accommodated them. But this does not mean they are disengaged from their education or their lives going forward.

In our survey we asked young people to tell us about their career and life goals. Young people told us they had a huge range of career goals from owning a small business to doing a trade or becoming a park ranger, youth worker, primary teacher, author or worker in the mining industry.

Our respondents told us they have have strong aspirations for their futures. As one student told us:

[I want] to grow my [business] into a popular […] local gardening landscaping service supporting houses and gardens that need repairing.

Others told us they want to become “totally independent” and talked about pursuing happiness and community connections:

[I want to] find some work I purely enjoy and just live a normal life. Preferably doing some trade work or contributing to the community.

Young people also specifically spoke about doing further study and going to TAFE or university, to do a wide range of courses from computer science to education and medicine:

I aspire to be a paramedic or doctor when the time comes, I would like to go to university to study medicine.

Flexi Students Want To Be Challenged

It is often assumed young people in flexi schools are not interested in doing intellectually challenging work. Data from our survey shows this is not the case.

Less than half (47.5%) of the young people we surveyed said they experienced learning that was challenging. They told us they wanted “harder work, more future guidance” and “more learning at my age level”:

I learn best when I am given a challenge and have help to understand the challenge when I don’t understand what to do.

When we asked young people what they would like to learn at their flexi school they said more STEM-related subjects (including maths, science, coding and engineering), history and geography, social studies and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Cultures. As one student wrote:

Access to learn more about Indigenous culture and access to learn another language !!! (like Auslan for example)

Our respondents were also keen to learn more about life skills, wellbeing, and vocational education.

There is a lot policy makers, educational leaders and practitioners in flexi schools can learn from this finding. Flexi schools are not just about keeping young people “in school”. They also need to provide a high-quality curriculum and challenging, diverse learning experiences.

The Bigger Picture

In an ideal world, there would be no need for flexi schools because mainstream schools would cater for every young person in society. This is not the current reality and in the meantime, flexi schools play a critical role supporting young people who would otherwise be disengaged from mainstream schools.

Flexi schools need to respond to young people who have diverse needs. The focus tends to be on their relationships and wellbeing. But young people have told us they want a challenging curriculum as well.

As a matter of social justice, young people need a curriculum that adequately equips them for life and further study or training. This is an issue flexi school providers and policy makers must consider as a priority.

Marnee Shay, Senior Research Fellow, School of Education, The University of Queensland; Jodie Miller, Senior Lecturer in Mathematics Education, The University of Queensland, and Martin Mills, Chair professor, Queensland University of Technology

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

DNA from elusive human relatives the Denisovans has left a curious mark on modern people in New Guinea

An encounter with a mysterious and extinct human relative – the Denisovans – has left a mark on the immune traits of modern Papuans, in particular those living on New Guinea Island.

This is a new discovery we describe in a study published in PLoS Genetics today. It further suggests that our modern human diversity didn’t just evolve – some parts of it we got from other, extinct human groups.

DNA From Our Evolutionary Cousins

Humans are the only living species of the Homo genus. But until 50,000 years ago, our ancestors coexisted – and sometimes interacted – with multiple other Homo groups across the globe. Most of them we know only by sparse archaeological remains, which offer tantalising glimpses of our evolutionary cousins.

But for two groups there is something else: DNA. Thanks to technological advances, scientists have retrieved DNA from fossils and sequenced it. As a result, we now have complete genome sequences of the best-known archaic hominins, the Neanderthals, and a far more elusive group, Denisovans.

Although many Neanderthal fossils have been unearthed all over Europe since they were first identified in the 1860s, the number of known Denisovan fossils fits in the palm of a hand – literally!

The genome sequence we have comes from the smallest bone of a pinky finger. It belonged to the 60,000-year-old remains of a teenage girl from a cave in Siberia, the largest known Denisovan fossil until recently.

Traces Of Ancestors

These genome sequences have transformed the way we think about our extinct relatives. For one, they quickly demonstrated that as humans expanded outside Africa, we had sex – and children – with these other populations.

Traces of their genomes linger in individuals alive today, transmitted across hundreds of generations.

In the case of Neanderthals, these traces are in all individuals of non-African ancestry today. In the case of Denisovans, we find small traces of their genome in people from all over Asia – especially in Papua New Guinea, and in the island nations of Southeast Asia, where individuals may owe up to 4–5% of their genome to these ancestors.

But identifying these fragments of DNA in our genomes is only the beginning.

The DNA Makes A Difference

The real challenge is to find the biological consequences of this DNA for the people who carry it – which, it bears remembering, is the vast majority of humans. Our specific research question was to pinpoint the molecular processes that might be affected by its presence.

Studies of Neanderthal DNA have shown that genetic variants inherited from them can alter the levels at which some human genes are expressed, for example. We also know Neanderthals have contributed to our immune systems (including differences in how people respond to infection with COVID-19), and to variation in skin and hair colour.

But it has never been clear whether Denisovan DNA has left similar trends in modern humans.

In 2019, a study revealed the genomic coordinates where Denisovan DNA might be found within the genome of Papuan individuals – that is, the indigenous people of New Guinea Island – alive today.

This led us to begin looking into these regions, to understand the cellular and biological processes that might be affected by Denisovan DNA. We took a hybrid approach to this question, making computational predictions first, and following up with laboratory-based experiments to validate our findings.

In addition, we took advantage of the known Neanderthal DNA within these people to highlight any Denisovan-specific contribution. This gave us a more integrated understanding of how encounters with these relatives left potential biological and evolutionary consequences in modern humans.

A Unique Denisovan Contribution

We noticed that in Papuans, Denisovan and Neanderthal genetic variants both occasionally occur within parts of the genome responsible for modulating the expression levels of nearby genes.

However, only Denisovan variants are consistently predicted to occur and affect elements controlling the expression levels of immune-related genes.

So, these different sources of DNA might contribute to the genetic and phenotypic diversity within Papuans in different ways.

To validate our predictions, we designed an experiment comparing five Denisovan sequences against their modern human counterpart, and tested their ability to actually affect gene expression levels inside a particular kind of immune cell known as a lymphocyte.

In two of the five cases, the Denisovan variants did have a measurably different impact on the gene expression levels than their modern human counterpart. And they impact genes known to be important players in the response to infectious microbes, including viruses.

The fact that Denisovans, but not Neanderthals, seem to have contributed to the immune systems of present-day Papuans, tells us something about these ancient people, too.

Although little is known about how widely through Asia Denisovans lived, it suggests their immune system changed to adapt to the infectious diseases of their environment.

When humans moved in 60,000 years ago, these bits of DNA likely contributed to our success in settling this part of the world.

While our study is the first to elucidate the contribution of Denisovan DNA within modern human genetic diversity, there are still exciting questions to address. In particular, it is not clear whether the overall contributions of Denisovan and Neanderthal genetic variants consistently differ from each other.

It is also important to note we tested genetic variants in immune cells under resting conditions. This means the same or other genetic variants might have different effects out in the environment – this will be an important question for studies in the future.

Irene Gallego Romero, Senior Lecturer in Human Genetics, The University of Melbourne and Davide Vespasiani, Post-doctoral researcher, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Looking back from beyond the Moon: how views from space have changed the way we see Earth

A photograph taken by NASA’s Orion spacecraft has given us a new perspective on our home planet.

The snap was taken during the Artemis I mission, which sent an uncrewed vehicle on a journey around the Moon and back in preparation for astronauts’ planned lunar return in 2025.

We get pictures of Earth every day from satellites and the International Space Station. But there’s something different about seeing ourselves from the other side of the Moon.

How does this image compare to other iconic views of Earth from the outside?

Earthrise

In December 1968, three astronauts were orbiting the Moon to test systems in preparation for the Apollo 11 landing. When they saw Earth rise over the lunar horizon, they knew this was something special. The crew scrambled to find colour film in time to capture it.

Photographer Galen Rowell called the resulting image “the most influential environmental photograph ever taken”.

Six years earlier, biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring drew public attention to how human industries were harming terrestrial ecosystems. The book ignited the environmental movement and laid the ground for the reception of Earthrise.

The economist Barbara Ward, author of Spaceship Earth and one of the founders of sustainable development, said:

Above all, we are the generation to see through the eyes of the astronauts the astonishing ‘earthrise’ of our small and beautiful planet above the barren horizons of the moon. Indeed, we in this generation would be some kind of psychological monstrosity if this were not an age of intense, passionate, committed debate and search.

She saw Earthrise as part of the underpinning of a “moral community” that would enable a more equitable distribution of the planet’s wealth.

Blue Marble

The last Apollo mission took place in 1972. On their way to the Moon, the astronauts snapped the whole Earth illuminated by the Sun, giving it the appearance of a glass marble. It is one of the most reproduced photographs in history.

Like Earthrise, this image became an emblem of the environmental movement. It showed a planet requiring stewardship at the global scale.

The Blue Marble is often used to illustrate the Gaia hypothesis, developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1960s and ’70s. The hypothesis proposes that Earth is a complex self-regulating system which acts to maintain a state of equilibrium. While the theory is not widely accepted today, it provided a catalyst for a holistic approach to Earth’s environment as a biosphere in delicate balance.

The impression of a single, whole Earth, however, conceals the fact that not all nations or communities are equally responsible for upsetting the balance and creating environmental disequilibrium.

Pale Blue Dot

Our farthest view of Earth comes from the Voyager 1 spacecraft in 1990. At the request of visionary astronomer Carl Sagan, it turned its camera back on Earth for one last time at a distance of 6 billion kilometres.

If Blue Marble evoked a fragile Earth, Pale Blue Dot emphasised Earth’s insignificance in the cosmos.

Sagan added a human dimension to his interpretation of the image:

Consider again that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you’ve ever heard of, every human being that ever was, lived out their lives.

Rather than focusing on Earth’s environment, invisible from this distance, Sagan made a point about the futility of human hatred, violence and war when seen in the context of the cosmos.

Tin Can, Grey Rock, Blue Marble

Now, on the cusp of a return to the Moon 50 years after Blue Marble was taken, the Orion image offers us something different.

Scholars have noted the absence of the photographer in Earthrise, Blue Marble and Pale Blue Dot. This gives the impression of an objective gaze, leaving out the social and political context that enables such a photograph to be taken.

Here, we know what is taking the picture – and who. The NASA logo is right in the centre. It’s a symbol as clear as the US flag planted on the lunar surface by the Apollo 11 mission.

The largest object in the image is a piece of human technology, symbolising mastery over the natural world. The spacecraft is framed as a celestial body with greater visual status than the Moon and Earth in the distance. The message: geopolitical power is no longer centred on Earth but on the ability to leave it.

Elon Musk sent an identical message in photographs of his red Tesla sportscar, launched into solar orbit in 2018, with Earth as the background.

But there’s a new vision of the environment in the Orion image too. It’s more than the whole Earth: it shows us the entire Earth–Moon system as a single entity, where both have similar weighting.

This expansion of the human sphere of influence represents another shift in cosmic consciousness, where we cease thinking of Earth as isolated and alone.

It also expands the sphere of environmental ethics. As traffic between Earth and the Moon increases, human activities will have impacts on the lunar and cislunar environment. We’re responsible for more than just Earth now.

Our Place In The Cosmos

Images from outside have been powerful commentaries on the state of Earth.

But if a picture were able to bring about a fundamental change in managing Earth’s environment and the life dependent on it, it would have happened by now. The Orion image does show how a change of perspective can reframe thinking about human relationships with space.

It’s about acknowledging that Earth isn’t a sealed spaceship, but is in dynamic interchange with the cosmos.

Alice Gorman, Associate Professor in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Rutland Roman villa: how we found one of the most significant mosaics discovered in the UK

The discovery of a previously unknown Roman villa in rural Rutland during the 2020 lockdown was one of the archaeological stories of the year.

Villas are emblematic features of the Roman countryside, and many are known across Britain. But this new discovery is unique. It has what could be considered the most significant Roman mosaic discovery in the past century at its heart.

The mosaic was originally partly exposed by the landowners, who were investigating in the field after discovering pottery and tile fragments. A year later I led a team of archaeologists and students from the University of Leicester in fully exposing the mosaic floor.

This summer we returned as part of a joint excavation with Historic England.

The villa was protected as a scheduled monument by Historic England in 2021 (meaning it’s preserved for future generations to study when new techniques are developed that may assist further research), so these were to be the last excavations at the villa for the foreseeable future. We had plenty of questions.

What Did The Team Discover?

The mosaic forms the floor of a triclinium (dining room) at the northern end of what appears to be a main villa building from the third or fourth century AD.

Here, residents would have wined and dined guests, providing luxurious entertainment while showing off their wealth, affinity with Roman lifestyles – and perhaps in this case – their understanding of classical Greek literature.

The mosaic tells a grim tale of revenge from towards the end of the Trojan war, famously described in Homer’s Iliad.

Over three panels it depicts the duel between the Greek hero Achilles and Prince Hector of Troy and the unsavoury outcome of Achilles’s victory.

The mosaic is an incredible find. It is the only representation of the Trojan war from Roman Britain, and tells the story in an unusual “comic strip” style.

The value of this new villa lies not only with the mosaic, however, but in its completeness and the fantastic preservation of the archaeology. A geophysical survey of the field revealed an entire complex of buildings.

New Discoveries

One of the ancillary buildings appears to have initially been a timber barn but was converted to stone sometime in the third or fourth century AD.

At this time, while the eastern end continued to be used for agricultural and small-scale industrial activity, the western end was converted for residential use. The remains of several partition walls and successive layers of floor suggest it was repeatedly renovated.

This reflects evidence from other excavated Roman villas, and provides a good indication of the lifespan and continuing development of this type of building.

On the southern side, the team also found remains of a bath suite. A series of three rooms – hot (caldarium), medium (tepidarium), and cold (frigidarium) incorporated underfloor heating and a water tank which may have been used for collecting rainwater.

Further excavation also took place around the dining room that held the mosaic. Evidence was found for an earlier boundary ditch, provisionally dated to the second or third century AD, built during an earlier iteration of the villa. The ditch lay beneath the mosaic and had caused slumping of the floor over time. Perhaps this led to the room eventually going out of use.

Investigation of the corridors on either side of the triclinium found a collapsed patterned mosaic on the western side and a preserved mosaic in the eastern corridor, which showed a complex kaleidoscope design.

The key discovery was that the dining room was a later addition to the building. Examination of the wall relationships indicated a major refurbishment in the third or fourth century to incorporate the triclinium and Trojan war mosaic.

For now, it’s unclear why this major work took place. It may be that the villa had reached sufficient wealth to afford such a luxury installation. Alternatively, the owners may have desired to reaffirm their connections to Roman culture and its classical background.

Whatever the reason, it seems that the grand mosaic only featured fleetingly in the life of the villa. A fireplace installed in one corner of the room and large areas of scorching across the mosaic indicate that the space was repurposed for more workaday activities, before the building finally fell into disrepair.

Now that the excavations are complete, the trenches have been back-filled and the field will return to pasture. Attention will now focus on the detail of the artefacts and environmental information gathered to try to piece the story of this fantastic archaeological site back together.

We know that Roman villas like this were at the centre of large farming estates. While the buildings may have now been put to rest, we hope to widen the search into the surrounding landscape to understand the bigger picture of what was happening in this part of the Roman countryside.

This will allow us to develop the links we have created with the local archaeological community so we can involve them in discovering further ties to their local heritage.

John S Thomas, Deputy Director of Archaeological Services, University of Leicester

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

I’m going to a classical music concert for the first time. What should I know?

Classical music is surprisingly controversial.

For some, it’s a pinnacle of cultural achievement. For others it perpetuates class inequality and upholds “white middle class social domination”.

To controversy, we can add contradiction! We love to hear the instruments and idioms of classical music in film and television (think of the theme from The Crown or the music from the Harry Potter films), but experience has shown classical music is most effective at repelling loiterers from public spaces.

Engaging with the controversy and contradiction of this music requires more than streaming a minute or two of Mozart. Research shows we make better judgements about music when hearing and seeing it, and classical music was designed to be experienced live.

So are you considering giving classical music a go? Here are some tips for first-time concert goers.

Where Should I Start?

Concerts range from intimate performances by solo players to major works for choir and orchestra featuring hundreds of musicians.

Terms like “chamber” (small ensembles like string quartets), “choral” (choirs large and small), “orchestral” (ranging from larger string ensembles to giant collections of strings, winds, brass and percussion) and “opera” (companies of musicians that include orchestral players, solo singers and sometimes a chorus) describe different groups of musicians.

Each has its own repertoire and a dizzying array of terms (such as aria, concerto, sinfonia, oratorio and cantata) help describe the pieces these ensembles perform.

The more you get to know classical music, the more you’ll understand and appreciate the terminology.

One of the most common types of classical music you’ll come across is a symphony. A symphony is a substantial orchestral work with different sections or “movements”, each with a different character and tempo. Though the term “symphony” became popular in the 18th century, composers are still writing symphonies today. Symphonies differ in purpose and duration. They can be as short as ten minutes and as long as two hours.

Sammartini’s Symphony in F from 1740, for example, has three movements and lasts about ten minutes. Its movements have simple, direct structures that aren’t too far removed from pop songs in terms of complexity and scope.

Mahler’s third symphony from 1896, on the other hand, has six movements and lasts for 90 minutes. Its breadth and complexity are astounding.

I would suggest a first timer selects an orchestral concert with multiple pieces on the program. You will get to enjoy the spectacle of many musicians and many different instruments. You’re also likely to be exposed to the work of composers from different times and places.

If money is a concern, many orchestras put on free concerts.

What Should I Expect?

Classical music is pretty diverse. Just as rock ’n’ roll traverses anything from Buddy Holly to Thundermother, what we colloquially know as “classical music” spans many cultures and many centuries.

Terms like “Baroque” (composed between 1600 and 1750), “Classical” (this time with a capital C, composed between 1730 and 1820), “Romantic” (around 1820 to 1900) and “Modern” (1890 to 1950) help us keep track of when the music was written.

These eras also operate with regional descriptors such as French, German, Italian or Russian.

Overlay this with subtleties of style and the distinct personalities of individual composers and you get a sense of the vast breadth of classical music.

But it is also important to know classical music isn’t only a celebration of dead Europeans. It is a living tradition whose boundaries aren’t fixed.

Classical music readily interacts with other types of music and crosses cultural boundaries to generate new styles and new sounds. Consider the Australian work Kalkadungu by William Barton and Matthew Hindson, a work “designed to explore the transition of traditional song-lines between the past, present and future”.

Though sometimes far removed from contemporary culture, every piece of classical music has something to say about the human experience. So, what to expect in the program? Expect to be surprised.

What Should I Wear?

Wear what makes you comfortable. While it’s not unusual for people to dress up for a concert, it isn’t compulsory, and ordinary casual clothes are fine. In the same way people dress up for the Melbourne Cup, some people wear black tie to the opera. Don’t let it faze you.

When Should I Clap?

While you might be moved to clap right after hearing an incredible feat of musicianship, modern audiences generally don’t clap whenever there is a pause in the music, such as between movements of a symphony.

This reflects the idea that a symphony is a “complete” musical statement – including the pauses between sections.

If you’re uncertain when to clap, wait until others do.

What Else Should I Keep In Mind?

Going to classical music should be about enjoying the concert! Here are some final tips on how to enjoy yourself.

Enjoy the spectacle. There’s much to see at classical concerts. The interactions between the conductor and the orchestra can be particularly interesting. Watch as the conductor, with a flick of the baton, unleashes awesome sonic power.

Appreciate the skill of the musicians. Classical performers are the elite in their field. It takes decades of training to do what they do.

Learn something about the composer and the work. Some classical composers are saints (Hildegard of Bingen) and some may have been psychopaths (Gesualdo). Knowing who the composer is and what they were trying to achieve in their music will add to your appreciation.

Keep in mind that your musical taste expands as you expose yourself to new and unfamiliar sounds. The more you listen, the more you are likely to enjoy.

Oh, and sometimes, if the audience is adequately enthusiastic, there’ll be a short additional piece at the end. Encore! 

Timothy McKenry, Professor of Music, Australian Catholic University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The Past is Present: reflecting on 150 years of Chinese art at the National Gallery of Victoria

Earlier this month, Penny Wong detailed the last 50 years of Labor government engagement with China in her Whitlam Oration, tracing how the relationship’s varying warmth and chill have been politicised.

China – The Past is Present, the new exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), is a wonderful context for this speech.

The exhibition is about the depth and complexity of Chinese culture – visual and wider – as collected by one major art institution here in Euro-centric Melbourne. It is a long history, in collecting terms, undertaken by curators who have spent years working in the area.

In recent decades Mae Anna Pang notably collected historic Chinese paintings and calligraphy. Now curator Wayne Crothers has very creatively and beautifully (it is an overtly beautiful show) brought these traditions into the present.

Crothers’ years living in East Asia have given the ideas and interpretations he brings both a seriousness of intent and lightness of touch not often apparent.

But other individuals are part of this as well. The people who have found, taken, paid for or been given Chinese works of art over the last 150 years and then passed them on.

Long Australian Connections

In her oration, Wong said “when Australians look out to the world, we see ourselves reflected in it”.

The first Chinese object was acquired by the year-old gallery in 1862, the same year the well known and most glamorous of Australians in China was born: G.E. Morrison, son of the first principal of Geelong College. As the Times of London’s correspondent in Peking (now Beijing) from 1897 to 1912, he became internationally known as “Chinese Morrison”.

Morrison’s bequest of mostly court accoutrements, including courtly textiles and ceramics, came to the NGV in 1921.

Serious collectors like H.W. Kent followed. Kent was a businessman in China and Japan, and in 1938 he became the gallery’s first curator of the Asian collection. He built the extensive holdings especially of Song and Tang dynasty works we see in the permanent hang today.

James Mollison, following Gough Whitlam’s ventures, was sent to China in 1976 as a young gallery director of the yet-to-be-built National Gallery of Australia.

He recalled to me negotiating the intended acquisition of over 100 Mao-era posters. In 1985, Mollison also acquired an extensive woodcut collection originally brought together by legendary journalist and editor, and founder of Australian Art Monthly, Peter Townsend.

Mollison further described a visiting Chinese diplomat to National Gallery of Australia saying:

eventually we will have to borrow from you, nothing like either of these collections exists in China.

Today collectors and givers to our institutions range from the high profile Judith Neilson of White Rabbit Gallery with its huge collection of contemporary Chinese work, to Rachel Faggetter, whose donation of Maoist era works to the NGV are well included in this show, and Jason Yeap who has been generous for years in this area.

An Exhibition Of Delight

In The Past is Present, Crothers has created tableaux – like little stage sets – each around an idea important in Chinese culture.

There are a group of works of restrained monochrome spatial sophistication next to an assemblage of bright, smiling, Maoist era odes to workers’ paradises.

Next to this are deep red richly incised containers and portrait busts, next to the tutti-frutti colours of karaoke pop.

The entry tableau says it all: the strange twisted rocks, carved by eons of nature’s winds and water, so valued in traditional China, next to a polyurethane chair carved, it seems, by a blowtorch.

The whole clever display has a moment of dark red tranquillity at its centre, with a wall of 18th century muted painted landscapes facing a 2010 video by Yang Yongliang of Hong Kong-like traffic dwarfed by similar mountains.

Everywhere the contemporary is given depth by the historical, and the historical gives context to the work made now, but it isn’t didactic. You come away thinking it is an exhibition of delight.

Looking To The Future

The works on display here, and in collections around Australia, gathered over decades, have become part of our national fortune. Important in themselves, they also represent our history of engagement.

Part of the overt long-term reality around us and seen in the exhibition is the work of artists of Chinese background, who live in Australia. There are the well known fanciful sculptures of Guan Wei and exquisite porcelain busts of Ah Xian, sitting alongside work by emerging artists like the witty photography of Scotty So and ethereal paintings of Louise Zhang.

How are we faring in our cultural relations with China? Are we asking the current day “Chinese Morrisons” and Peter Townsends for their help to maintain ongoing cultural relationships? To be curious about Chinese culture and keen to engage in a long-term, creative, meaningful way? Are we celebrating Guan Wei and his compatriots?

I would hope so, and maybe Penny Wong’s advocacy is key here, but let us see.

Both in this exhibition and beyond, Chinese art in Australia is about people and connections. Long held, strong working and personal relationships evident even in a formal setting like this. It belies the superficial hostility we witness across the twittering classes.

China – The past is present is at the National Gallery of Victoria until February 20 2023.

Correction: this article originally said James Mollison acquired over 1,000 Mao-era posters for the National Gallery of Australia, this has been amended to over 100 posters.

Alison Carroll, Senior Research Fellow, Victorian College of the Arts, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Indonesia’s new criminal code isn’t just about sex outside marriage. It endangers press and religious freedom

Indonesia’s controversial new criminal code was passed into law on Tuesday, replacing a clunky old code dating back to at least 1918. Lawmakers have tried for decades to replace it. In fact, the last time legislators tried in 2019, it triggered the largest public protests in Indonesia since the 1998 fall of former president Soeharto.

This time, politicians rushed it through at short notice, despite widespread criticism and limited opportunities for public consultation. In the end, the code passed with the support of all but two small parties.

Many of its provisions are dangerously vague and wide in their scope – “rubber provisions”, as Indonesians say – that empower the state at the expense of citizens.

The provisions that have attracted the most criticism are those that impose conservative moral values about sexuality, and those that restrict rights to freedom of expression.

A Probationary Period For Death Sentences

One positive change in the new code is the introduction of a probationary period for death sentences. A death row inmate who demonstrates good behaviour during this period and exhibits remorse can now have his or her sentence changed from death to a term of imprisonment.

This signals a welcome step away from the “no mercy” approach adopted under President Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi). If this provision had been in place in the past, it might have allowed Australian drug offenders Myuran Sukumaran and Andrew Chan to escape the firing squad.

However, this reform is a lonely one. Too many of the changes introduced by the new code are highly regressive, removing or restricting freedoms previously won.

Extramarital Sex And Other ‘Morality’ Provisions

Two provisions have already attracted attention internationally. One punishes extramarital sex with up to a year in prison, and the other says couples who live together without being legally married also face jail. There are fears unmarried foreign couples visiting Bali, Indonesia’s holiday island, might be targeted.

However, these two offences are delik aduan, that is, complaint offences. This means they cannot apply unless a close member of the family – a husband or wife, a parent or child – report the matter to the police. That makes it unlikely the new provisions would ever be deployed against an unmarried foreign tourist couple (although it’s possible they could be used against a foreigner with an Indonesian partner if the Indonesian’s family reports them).

There is more concern about the impact of these provisions on Indonesians, especially young couples. They allow families to use the police and the courts to enforce their views about sexuality and choice of partner.

It is also feared the new law will be used to target gay and lesbian people, who cannot marry under Indonesian law. Homosexuality is not illegal in Indonesia (except in the province of Aceh) but opponents of the new code say it criminalises gay and lesbian people by stealth.

Gay and lesbian people are also likely to be targeted under another provision prohibiting “indecent acts”. This is only very vaguely defined and would probably catch public acts of affection between people of the same gender.

The new code also contains provisions that impose jail terms for the dissemination of information about contraception – even explaining how to obtain it. There are exceptions for government family planning activities, but this provision clearly limits women’s freedom to choose.

Other provisions impose a four-year sentence on any woman who has an abortion, and longer terms for those who perform it (although there are exceptions for rape victims and medical emergencies).

Restrictions On Freedom Of Expression

The new code contains provisions that criminalise insulting public officials, including the president and members of the government. There is no defence of truth. In other words, an offence is committed if the official is insulted, even if the allegations are true.

The chilling effect this would have on open debate and press freedom are obvious. In fact, equivalent provisions were struck out of the previous code by the Constitutional Court as unconstitutional. This is a flagrant attempt to reinstate those provisions, empowering the government to crack down on its opponents.

Other provisions ban the spreading of teachings that contradict the state ideology, Pancasila. This could also be deployed against government critics.

Human rights activists are also concerned about press freedom implications of two other provisions. The first prohibits the broadcasting and distribution of fake news (which is undefined) resulting in disturbance or unrest in the community and imposes a sentence of up to two years.

The second is even more dangerous for journalists. It states any person who broadcasts or distributes news that is unverified or exaggerated or incomplete (terms that are also not defined) will also face jail.

Other very controversial provisions deal with blasphemy. The code introduces increased restrictions on religion and religious life that will strengthen and expand the bases on which minority religious groups can be persecuted. This will aggravate a growing problem in post-Soeharto Indonesia.

Constitutional Court Challenge

This deeply flawed new criminal code is likely to meet with stiff opposition from lawyers and activists, including protests, even though the new code bans “unannounced demonstrations”. And it’s inevitable it will end up in the Constitutional Court, which has certainly been willing to strike out legislation that contradicts the Constitution in the past.

However, activists are now worried the recent dismissal of a Constitutional Court judge by the national legislature may have changed this.

Lawmakers claimed Justice Aswanto, who had originally been nominated by them, had acted contrary to the legislature’s interests by doing his job and striking down unconstitutional laws. Without a clear legal basis, they had him “recalled” and President Jokowi swore in a replacement.

Some predict this will make the remaining judges much more cautious when the code comes before them.

A Long Campaign

Most Indonesia-watchers agree democratic regression has increased over the last decade. The new code certainly fits that pattern. But it may also be linked to the hugely important presidential and legislative elections scheduled for February 2024.

President Jokowi is in his second term and cannot run again, so the elections will likely result in a major recalibration of power and wealth in Indonesia that will last for five or even ten years (if the new president wins a second term).

Politicians are already jostling for position and some have begun campaigning. The identity politics of religion and morality have played a central role Indonesia’s bitterly fought electoral contests in recent years, and the new code reflects this.

It allows the politicians who backed it to claim a “law and order” success where others had failed for years, and to assert conservative morality “family values” they think will resonate with their voters. This is particularly important for nationalist politicians seeking to bolster their religious credentials.

And, of course, the new code also delivers the government potent new legal weapons it can deploy against its critics.

Tim Lindsey, Malcolm Smith Professor of Asian Law and Director of the Centre for Indonesian Law, Islam and Society, The University of Melbourne

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Build-to-rent is seen as affordable, but it’s unlikely to help those most in need

Australians desperately need more affordable homes, particularly homes for rent. The prospect of home ownership is rapidly receding for many people, especially younger generations (as the chart below shows). More people than ever are being forced into a tight rental market.

Making things worse, many traditional providers of residential rentals, the “mum and dad” investors, are selling their investments to take the capital gains.

Adding to the demand for housing, households are getting smaller. The estimated shortfall of homes needed to house new households will be nearly 165,000 by 2032. An extra 20,000 dwellings a year need to be built to avoid that housing deficit.

So what can be done to provide more housing that households can afford? One emerging idea is build-to-rent developments.

Build-to-rent generally involves developing residential accommodation with a view to it being a long-term investment offering long-term homes for renters rather than home buyers. These developments are usually units and townhouses, owned by an institutional investor.

Our research project is investigating the opportunities to improve housing affordability in Australia. We have found broad agreement among leading players in the build-to-rent sector that these developments are affordable when the rent generated is right for both the households and developers. But there’s a catch: our interviewees considered the rents affordable only because they are set at a reasonable cost for their target group, middle-to-upper-income households.

So this “reasonable cost” is a market perspective. And most current build-to-rent developments are a premium product in city-centre locations. As one person in state government explained:

“It’s a market process and they do their due diligence and they work out that there’s sufficient people who can pay what they need to pay and people who are perhaps willing to pay a premium for a better product and some greater security of tenure, because they know that it’s going to be continued to be offered as a rental. The landlord’s not going to go, ‘I want to move in’, or sell it.”

So Where Does This Leave Low-Income Renters?

Build-to-rent is well established overseas but relatively new to Australia. Unsurprisingly, there is still no single definition of exactly what it means, especially as an affordable housing option.

For example, a recent study analysing 685 media articles and housing industry reports suggested build-to-rent may not be what it seems. It might be just another way for investors to make financial gains while masquerading as a solution to the critical shortage of affordable and social housing (available at below-market rents).

It’s not yet clear whether built-to-rent will be an effective solution for people who most need affordable housing. They include low-income and vulnerable households, and those with special needs.

With this in mind, we interviewed 26 leading practitioners (CEOs, chairs of boards, national directors and state government departmental directors) across the field of affordable housing and build-to-rent in Australia to collect their views on what it is.

We found the market perspective is at odds with the needs of lower-income households. It’s quite different to the welfare approach to housing, which focuses on the needs of those with lower incomes. Many households in the bottom 40% of incomes are suffering housing stress as a result of spending more than 30% of their income on housing (known as the 30:40 affordability indicator).

To make inroads into the housing affordability crisis, built-to-rent developments will need to provide homes to all, including those falling under the 30:40 indicator, not only to the relatively wealthy.

Can Build-To-Rent Help Solve The Affordable Housing Crisis?

Participants agreed build-to-rent developments can ease the affordability crisis. To support lower-income households, however, they said incentives, via tax concessions and inclusionary zoning, will be needed.

Tax concessions provide incentives to develop affordable housing by, for example, offering land tax credits. Inclusionary zoning either mandates or creates incentives so a set proportion of a development is affordable housing. The incentives typically include changes to development controls and planning standards and processes to reduce costs and obstacles to build-to-rent developments.

How, then, can we ensure built-to-rent delivers housing that’s affordable for all households? Our analysis points towards two main conclusions.

First, a legal or statutory definition of “affordability” in relation to build-to-rent should be established. This will allow better framing of the sector’s role in a national housing strategy. As a CEO with 40 years of experience in policy development and the provision of social and affordable housing told us:

“[Build-to-rent] settings are acutely hampered by the fact that we don’t have a national housing strategy, therefore, nobody’s really bothered to resolve the difficult issues about the definition […] that will put housing costs basis into a frame that says, is it reasonable, is it suitable, is it affordable and, once you paid for it, can you afford a reasonably decent standard of living?”

A national housing strategy should allow development of tiers of build-to-rent housing. Each tier would match the level of risk and return within a given section of the spectrum of housing types and tenures. So, these tiers represent both levels of rent and a range of housing types – high-rise, low-rise, townhouses etc.

The aim is to deliver diverse housing options with a focus on affordability and universal housing (designed to meet residents’ changing needs over their lifetime).

A senior economist overseeing nation-wide research into housing and mixed-use development said:

“So we could potentially look at a grade A BtR [build-to-rent], grade B, grade C BtR asset classes and in different locations. We need to be working more towards different kinds of BtR asset classes, like they have in the USA, UK and Canada.”

This approach will help make build-to-rent developments more predictable, replicable and scalable to match varying levels of affordability. And that will help create the confidence and enthusiasm the sector needs to produce better affordable housing outcomes.

Johari Amar, Lecturer in Property, Bond University and Lynne Armitage, Associate Professor of Urban Development, Bond University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.