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The Sustainable Hour no. 603 | Transcript | Podcast notes
What happens to a species when hardly anyone knows it exists? In this week’s Sustainable Hour, we look beneath the familiar stories of climate change and extinction to something deeper: the stories that determine what we value, what we protect and what we allow to disappear.
Environmental journalist and author Anthea Batsakis joins us to explore Australia’s extraordinary world of overlooked wildlife – from a blind snake known from a single specimen to giant Tasmanian freshwater crayfish wandering across roads and paddocks. Her message is wonderfully simple: be curious.
. . .
CHANGING THE STORY
The Hour begins with historian and philosopher Yuval Noah Harari reflecting on one of humanity’s most remarkable social transformations: the feminist revolution.
Harari argues that societies can change dramatically when the stories people believe begin to change. Power does not always have to be overturned through violence. Sometimes a different story about who we are, and how society should work can gradually transform the world.
Mik connects this with conversations sparked by his recently published book Man of Earth. People around the world have been contacting him with reflections on masculinity, responsibility, predatory greed, patriarchy and the deeper cultural roots of ecological breakdown.
Climate change is usually discussed through carbon emissions, economics, technology and temperature graphs. Underneath all of that sits another layer – culture. The values and stories that determine how we relate to one another and to the living Earth. And unlike the laws of physics, culture can change.
. . .
COLIN MOCKETTS GLOBAL OUTLOOK
Colin Mockett OAM once again scans the international news – and finds little reason for complacency.
• Canada is battling severe wildfires, including major fires across British Columbia, with firefighters arriving from Australia and New Zealand to assist.
• Europe continues through an extraordinary summer of heat and fire, with France, Spain, Greece, Italy and Türkiye among the countries affected.
• Colin looks at the latest Climate Change Performance Index, where the first three positions remain deliberately empty because no country is doing enough to deserve them. Denmark ranks highest at number four, while Australia has fallen four places to number 56.
• The United States has dropped close to the bottom of the climate rankings following the Trump administration’s reversal of climate policies.
Colin turns to another enormous source of emissions that rarely features prominently in climate discussions – the world’s military forces and their supply chains.
The documentary Earth’s Greatest Enemy, directed by Abby Martin, examines the environmental footprint of the US military and the wider consequences of warfare and military production.
The conversation comes home to Geelong, where considerable political energy is being directed towards developing the region as a defence manufacturing hub.
Mik adds another uncomfortable dimension: while communities increasingly pay the financial and human costs of climate disruption, some of the world’s largest fossil fuel corporations continue to generate enormous profits.
. . .
GIVING FORGOTTEN ANIMALS A VOICE
Our guest this week is Melbourne-based environmental journalist, editor and author Anthea Batsakis.
Anthea is currently writing two books about Australian wildlife conservation. One is a children’s book profiling 20 threatened Australian animals with remarkably low public profiles. Some are barely known to science. Her second book, being written for CSIRO Publishing, goes deeper into the question of why some animals receive enormous conservation attention while others receive almost none.
There is even a scientific term for it: Taxonomic bias. Certain animals are easy to love. Koalas, whales, dolphins and colourful birds attract attention, donations, tourism and political interest. A tiny brown lizard, an underground snake or a spider living in a cave has a much harder public relations job. Yet ecosystems do not function according to popularity contests.
THE FASSIFERN BLIND SNAKE
Among the animals Anthea introduces us to is the Fassifern blind snake. Blind snakes are small, worm-like reptiles that spend almost their entire lives underground. The Fassifern blind snake is particularly mysterious. Only one scientifically confirmed specimen has ever been found, discovered beneath a rock in south-east Queensland in 1992.
Scientists have searched for another for decades. The original specimen remains preserved in the Queensland Museum. Somewhere beneath the soil, the species may still exist. Or perhaps it has already disappeared. We simply do not know.
MEET LUTARALIPINA
Then there is a considerably larger character – lutaralipina, the Tasmanian giant freshwater crayfish. It is the world’s largest freshwater invertebrate.
Anthea shares some wonderful stories of these remarkable creatures wandering away from waterways, appearing beside roads, attempting to climb fences and even apparently attracting the attention of curious cattle. It is exactly the sort of animal children might fall in love with – once somebody tells them that it exists.
And therein lies much of Anthea’s argument. Before people can care about something, they first have to notice it.
WHAT IS A SPECIES WORTH?
Our conversation moves into more difficult territory when Anthea challenges the economic framework often used to justify conservation. Nature increasingly has to demonstrate its economic value.
A koala can attract tourists. A wetland can provide ecosystem services. A forest can store carbon. But what about a small cave spider that lives nowhere else on Earth?
Beneath the Nullarbor Plain are immense cave systems containing highly specialised invertebrates that live their entire lives underground. They may never attract tourists. They may never contribute visibly to GDP. They may have no obvious economic value whatsoever. Does that make their existence less important?
Anthea argues that this question reveals something deeply wrong with the way modern society sees the living world. Species have an inherent place within ecosystems. Each disappearance removes another thread from systems that have evolved over immense periods of time. Keep removing threads and eventually the fabric itself begins to unravel.
CLIMATE CHANGE MAKES EVERYTHING HARDER
Climate change rarely acts alone. It magnifies existing pressures. Changing temperatures alter vegetation. Weeds move into new areas. Alpine animals retreat higher up mountains searching for suitable conditions until eventually there is nowhere higher to go.
Fires, floods, habitat destruction and extreme temperatures combine with land clearing, pollution and invasive species. For animals already surviving within tiny pockets of habitat, another disruption can become the final one.
OPENING OUR EYES
Anthea offers a surprisingly achievable response. Start noticing. Look again at the small brown lizard crossing the path. Look at the spider. Look at the insects in the garden. Take photographs. Learn their names.
Upload observations to citizen science platforms such as iNaturalist. Get involved with Landcare or citizen science projects. Create an invertebrate-friendly garden.
For species that exist only within tiny geographical areas, the actions of one local community can make an extraordinary difference.
Anthea describes how little effort it sometimes takes to make people interested in unfamiliar wildlife. Show somebody an animal they have never noticed before, tell them its story, and curiosity begins to grow. From curiosity comes knowledge. From knowledge comes care. And from care can come protection
→ Anthea’s article Skink on the Brink in Australian Geographic tells the story about the search for the Long Sunskink, as well as discussing data-deficient lizards in Australia and why these knowledge gaps are important to fill.
→ Flora Fauna Fire is a project Anthea and her colleagues worked on at The Conversation that tracked the recovery of wildlife in the aftermath of the 2019-2020 bushfires.
→ iNaturalist is a citizen science effort for people to upload photos of wildlife.
→ Invertebrates Australia is the body that advocates for Australian invertebrates and runs a range of citizen science projects, such as the Christmas Beetle Count. Another brilliant citizen science project is FrogID, where people can upload recordings of frog calls they hear.
→ You can keep updated with Anthea’s work on her LinkedIn and Instagram accounts.
. . .
BE CURIOUS
At the end of every Sustainable Hour we ask our guest to complete the sentence: What should we be?
Anthea’s answer: “I think we should be curious.”
It is becoming something of a recurring answer from our guests. Perhaps there is a reason for that. Curiosity opens doors. It encourages us to look beneath the obvious, challenge familiar assumptions and discover the extraordinary living world that has always been around us. Sometimes changing the world begins simply by noticing it.
. . .
SONG: TAKE ACTION FOR EARTH
The Hour concludes with the original song ‘Take Action for Earth’, telling the story of Tasmania’s critically endangered swift parrot and the ancient forests it needs to survive. The song asks a simple question about the choices being made today: When future generations look back, who will history remember as standing for life – and who turned away? Take action for Earth!
→ More songs from The Sustainable Hour on www.climatesafety.info/music
“There is a lot of animals that are going extinct. Every time an animal dwindles towards extinction, every time they begin to vanish, we lose kind of another thread that keeps the ecosystem intact. We just keep chipping away at this foundation of our ecosystems until eventually it is just going to collapse. Even if that is a little spider in the cave, you know. I think we just need to change the way we see nature, generally.”
~ Anthea Batsakis, freelance journalist and author
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We at The Sustainable Hour would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land on which we are broadcasting, the Wadawurrung People. We pay our respects to their elders – past, present, and emerging, and extend that respect to all First Nations people.
The traditional custodians lived in harmony with the land for millennia, nurturing it and thriving in often harsh conditions. Their connection to the land was deeply spiritual and sustainable. This land was invaded and stolen from them. It was never ceded. Today, it is increasingly clear that if we are to survive the climate emergency we face, we must learn from their land management practices and cultural wisdom.
True climate justice cannot be achieved until Australia’s First Nations people receive the justice they deserve. When we speak about the future, we must include respect for those yet to be born, the generations to come. As the old saying reminds us: “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” It is deeply unfair that decisions to ignore the climate emergency are being made by those who won’t live to face the worst impacts, leaving future generations to bear the burden of their inaction.
“The Indigenous worldview has been marginalised for generations because it was seen as antiquated and unscientific and its ethics of respect for Mother Earth were in conflict with the industrial worldview. But now, in this time of climate change and massive loss of biodiversity, we understand that the Indigenous worldview is neither unscientific nor antiquated, but is, in fact, a source of wisdom that we urgently need.”
~ Robin Wall Kimmerer, weallcanada.org
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TRANSCRIPT
of The Sustainable Hour no. 603
António Guterres, United Nations Secretary-General: (00:00)
Cooperation over chaos. We are all in this together.
Jingle: (00:14)
The Sustainable Hour. For a green, clean, sustainable Geelong: The Sustainable Hour.
Tony Gleeson: (00:24)
Welcome to The Sustainable Hour. We’d like to acknowledge that we’re broadcasting from the land that’s been nurtured by the Wadawurrung people for millennia. We’d like to acknowledge their elders – past, present, and those that earn that great honor in the future. We’re broadcasting from stolen land, always was and always will be First Nations land. We do this each week to acknowledge the oldest existing culture on the planet that exists here in Australia. In nurturing both their land and their communities for millennia before they were invaded by colonisers, they accumulated a great amount of ancient wisdom. The same ancient wisdom that we’re going to need to navigate the climate crisis.
Yuval Noah Harari, video reel on Youtube.com: (01:29)
All the problems we face, we also have the resources to deal with them. Whether it’s climate change, whether it’s the rise of AI – we have the resources. What we usually lack is the motivation and the ability to cooperate with one another. I mean, you know, some people think that to solve the big problems you always need to use violence, like, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’. But when you look at history, it’s absolutely not true. You think for instance about the feminist revolution. After thousands of years, of a huge injustice, feminism made a huge change in the social structure of humanity without starting any wars, without assassinating anybody, no guillotine in City Square.
So that’s one of the hopeful examples of how people can just by changing the story also change the world. I mean, the idea that stories kind of fuel history there is a positive promise there that you know if it’s all about power, the only way to change power structures is with violence. But if it’s really at least in part about the stories people believe, then potentially by talking with people and changing the stories in which in which they believe, you can change the world.
Mik Aidt: (02:49)
Says Yuval Noah Harari, who is a philosopher – and a person who gives TED-talks and so on – in a YouTube clip. And I really believe he’s right, and I have sensed that so much since last week when we talked about the new book that I have put out. I have been contacted by so many people who are on that same pathway of changing the world through the stories that we tell and the conversations that we have with one another.
A lot of people have been asking me: ‘You know, Mik, we know you as a as a climate activist. Why are you suddenly writing a book about men and masculinity? What does that have to do with climate?’
And I’ve really found in this week evidence that it turns out quite a bit because of all the reactions I’m getting in social media from people from around the world, psychologists and climate experts, journalists, writers, and so on, who have been in a similar exploration of this, you know, the deeper level of why do we even have a climate crisis?
How come that people have absolutely no responsibility and they’re only thinking about profits? And it’s interesting certainly for me now to be in touch with so many people around the planet who, you know, have come to a similar conclusion. Someone wrote to me that she thinks that testosterone, the male hormone is the most dangerous chemical on the planet right now.
Because of its… you know, how it is driving the patriarch system, the predatory greed, and eventually the climate collapse. There is a story there, a story underneath the story about money and economy and science, temperatures and so on, which is a story about our culture – and about things that we actually can change.
I’m not saying it’s going to be easy, but they can be changed. Because it’s not written in stone that our culture should be in a certain way. We’ve seen, like with the feminism, that things can change. And they should change. So that’s why, you know, I’m ending the book with saying, ‘Men, let’s get to work!’ Changing the world through the stories that we tell. Which is very much what we have been doing in The Sustainable Hour now for 13 years, isn’t it? This sort of bringing people together around a story.
So we’ll continue doing that, but first quickly let’s get the news from around the world. For that we have Colin Mockett OAM, who is constantly scanning what’s going on. And last week wasn’t good news. What do we have for us this week, Colin?
Colin Mockett’s Global Outlook: (05:29)
You will love this, Mik, because I like to be consistent so it’s more bad news. Because our roundup this week begins in Canada, where the whole province of British Columbia was declared a state of emergency last week because of the number of out of control wildfires. Among the more than a thousand firefighters that are employed in just that one state are 55.
That were flown in from Australia and New Zealand. And after an initial appraisal, they arranged to stay for the next five weeks. That gives you an idea of the size of the fires that they’ll be combating. British Columbia is very large, larger than France and Germany combined. And that’s a neat segue into Europe. The Canadian fires are part of the more than 300 out of control fires that are tracked by NASA and reported last week. That’s three hundred that are happening worldwide at the moment.
Most notably in North America, Central Africa and Europe. Europe has suffered a horror summer of heat waves and fires this year. Plus it was named the fastest warming continent and the most affected by climate change. This week’s news is, I’m sorry to say, more of the same.
Western Europe is still battling its worst wildfires in modern history. It began with the out of control fires in France and Spain, which have forced another three hundred thousand people to move. Around four thousand firefighters have been battling blazes around the cities of Bordeaux in France and Madrid and Valencia in Spain, including volunteers from Australia and New Zealand. But fires also broke out this week in Greece, Italy and Turkey. Three Greek firefighters died while battling blazes on the islands of Crete, and in the Peloponnese region, in the mainland of Greece. During a visit to Bordeaux on Monday, French President Emmanuel Macron said that the nation faced its toughest situation since World War Two.
We need to realise that we’re facing a totally unprecedented fire, he said. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who visited the Castillon region of Spain, where 16,000 people have been evacuated, told reporters that this climate emergency is exceeding every threshold and scale that scientists have warned Spain and Europe as a whole about.
As of Monday, the fires in France that had destroyed a record one hundred and sixteen thousand hectares of forests. That’s compared with an annual average of fifteen thousand hectares. The fires which have been blazing since July the twenty second have destroyed hundreds of homes and killed at least eight people, including six firefighters. Europe has already experienced three heat waves this summer.
They have been linked to more than ten thousand heat related deaths. A spokesman for the Catholic University of Louvain told France 24 the scale of this heat wave and the scale of these wildfires is really exceptional. It really shows that we are not only in a fire crisis, we are in a climate crisis.
Now to Germany where the World Climate Change Performance Index is calculated and published annually. The team of scientists based in Bonn evaluate the effects of 63 countries and the European Union annually and list them in order of effectiveness in combating climate change.
They released the rankings for 2026 earlier this month, and once again, as has been the case for 18 years, the top three places are empty because no country has earned the the number one position or number two or number three, where all every nation on the planet is not meeting its what its requirements are.
The best place country in fourth position is Denmark. That’s ahead of the United Kingdom, Morocco and then Chile, which is this year’s highest performing nation [strongest improver], raised five places in the ratings.
The top ten is completed by Luxembourg, Lithuania and the Netherlands. The European Union as a whole is rated in 27th place, but the biggest loser this year is the United States, which slid to just two places from the bottom of the rankings.
The US is in 65th place. That’s following President Trump’s policies, the US received low to very low markings on all three areas that are studied. That’s emissions, energy use and climate policies and renewable energy. After the US, there’s really only Iran and Saudi Arabia as the bottom two.
The 2026-rankings show that France has moved ahead of Germany for the first time. They’re in 21st and 22nd place respectively, while Australia has dropped four places to 56. We’re now behind China and Belarus, both of which nations are now moving upwards. Now this is despite our climate change Minister Bowen.
Going on record about how well we’re doing. And if you want to check the world nations and see just how we’re going and how we’re tracking, you simply go online at ccpi.org.
Now incidentally, the nation that beat Australia in hosting this year’s COP Talks, Türkiye, is up one place to 52nd position, four places higher than us.
Now to a newly published report in Forbes magazine, which states that globally armed forces and their supply chains are among the worst emitters of greenhouse gas on the planet. And that’s in peacetime. It doesn’t include the emissions from their explosives when they’re used in warfare. The world’s military, the article says, generates an estimated 5.5 to 6 per cent of the planet’s emissions.
It concluded that if the world’s armed forces were a single country, they would rank as the fourth largest emitter on Earth, with more than double the footprint of global civil aviation. So if we think civil aviation puts a lot of CO2 in the atmosphere, the world’s armed forces double that.
Forbes is an American based business magazine. It focuses on investing and technology. As such, it’s a pro business institution. Politically centre right and not noted for its environmental stances. Its calculations are generally conservative, so when it quotes figures comparing emissions from leading countries to those of the military, they’re generally well founded.
The Forbes article says that if military emissions were mapped onto nation states, their footprints would come forth behind the top emitters China, the US and India. And that puts them ahead of nations like Russia or Japan in total volume. Military operations and equipment manufacturing like fighter jets or naval fleets and armoured vehicles.
Use energy at a rate roughly three times higher than the global economic average. It adds that military emissions have increased every year, with no apparent effort to restrain them anywhere. And it concludes that their rate can only increase with the Trump presidency, which is insisting that all nations lift their military budget to five percent of GDP.
And just to seal the whole concept of that, a new documentary film has been released in America. It’s titled Earth’s Greatest Enemy. It’s produced and directed by filmmaker Abby Martin with former US soldier Mike Prysner. And it claims to reveal the hidden truth that the US military is the world’s largest institutional polluter. Now I haven’t seen the film. But it claims to uncover how US forces have poisoned ecosystems, contaminated bases, and accelerated global warming everywhere. It’s an Empire Files production. It runs for 120 minutes, and it’s available on streaming platforms.
You can find details of it by visiting www.earthsgreatestenemy.com. It is showing in selected cinemas in Australia, apparently. And that piece of nasty but not entirely unexpected news ends a pretty grim roundup for the week.
Jingle: (15:36)
Listen to our Sustainable Hour – for the future.
Tony: (15:42)
Thanks for that, Colin. The… yeah, that movie has been around in Melbourne anyway. I’m not sure how how widely it’s been shown, but yeah, getting getting a lot of critical reviews, positive reviews I should say, about just the truth-telling that’s involved in it. And yeah, rattled a lot of cages, I think, especially in the military.
Colin: (16:10)
Not just in the military, it has to reflect on arms manufacturers. And and their use and the fact that when they do manufacture defence, that’s the euphemism used for attacking nations. When you do look at what we’re spending on defence, it’s obscene in my view. And then it’s it has no relation at all to looking after the planet. It’s the opposite. Every single little bit of it. They don’t look at it and say, we’ll build a a nuclear powered submarine that’ll use less fuel than than another one than than the current crop of submarines that that we’re not using anyway. You know, we’ve got a couple of submarines that they’re not very good, so we don’t use them.
So we’re buying some new nuclear ones and we probably won’t use them either, because warfare has moved on and everybody’s using drones and missiles and so we’re completely out of touch everywhere with everything when it comes to the military. As soon as the military says we want something, governments say, yeah, fair enough. And they give it to them regardless of anything. We have several military manufacturing companies in Geelong. And we often every couple of years we have the Avalon Air Show, which is sold to the people as hey, come and look at the pretty planes, which is basically selling arms and missiles to the rest of the world.
Tony: (18:03)
Yeah. Well, it’s one of the biggest industries there is on the planet, the armaments one. And you talk about the Geelong area. Well, our local member and deputy prime minister Richard Marles, he’s pushing very hard for armaments and for the Geelong area to be known as an armaments-making hub. And yeah, without facing any scrutiny really about, yeah, the consequences of that. And there’s campaigns that are mounted that are going have been going for a while now to change that.
Mik: (18:45)
There’s one additional aspect to what you have mentioned, Colin, with all the bad news that you listed up there, which is the absurd situation. the news came out now that, you know, in the second quarter, I talked about some weeks ago that in the first quarter there were so and so many billions of dollars made in profit by the oil and gas companies. Now in the second quarter that profit has doubled.
So we are now talking about c very close to one million dollars per minute of profit. These are just among the the biggest of the I think it’s about the five or the eight biggest companies dealing with oil, coal, and gas. One million dollars per minute in profit. And do they pay tax from that? Well, not here in Australia anyway. So that’s the situation, that’s the absurdity of the situation that we’re in. There’s some people who are really profiting both from war and from climate misery. And we are paying the bill. I don’t know why we put up with it?
Tony: (19:59)
Yeah. Well, we are less and less, Mik, and I think I just wonder how the firefighters in Europe and Africa and United States feel about that. Because the science is able to draw a a direct connection between those profits and and their consequences. And you know, like we said last week or the week before, that the bills coming in. They keep coming in. And they’ll be coming in in our summer as well, the same thing. It’s not that we’re psychic. It’s just there’s there’s a pattern that needs to be accepted.
Colin: (20:38)
And I’ll add to that that one million dollars a minute buys an awful lot of misinformation to mislead people. There are still people who think, no, I’ll keep my car, it’s much better than an electric car. Or no, no, no, I’m not getting rid of my gas heater because or my gas cooker. You cook better on gas. And it’s all just misinformation that’s fed to us and we c carry on with it. Yeah, it’s really – Huh. Yeah. I get on a high horse and it’s very difficult to come off.
Mik: (21:14)
All right, on with the show, Tony?
Tony: (21:18)
Our guest today is Anthea Batsakis. Anthea keeps herself very busy. She’s a freelance journalist, an editor, and author at the moment of a couple of books on wildlife conservation. So, Anthea, thanks very much for coming on The Sustainable Hour. Tell us your story, how how what the books are about and just your background, just generally.
Anthea: (21:46)
Yeah, sure. Thank you so much for having me. so I’m, as you said, I’m a journalist, mainly specialising in the environment. and I’m currently working on two books. So one is a children’s book that profiles 20 underrated animals that are threatened with extinction in Australia. So these animals have a really low public profile. and some of them are really not even known to science, or barely even known to science so I’m really excited to be able to put the spotlight on these species for kids. and that’s coming out, you know, it should be coming out next year sometime.
And then the other book is a nonfiction book with CSIRO publishing and that is a grown-up book that looks at this issue of some animals being neglected by conservation a bit more deeply, you know. and for that one I’m interviewing scientists and advocates and political analysts and artists and First Nations knowledge holders, to kind of tell the story of how neglected animals that are neglected in conservation, how that manifests in the extinction crisis. And that that concept is called taxonomic bias, to put a you know, jargon onto it.
Mik: (22:56)
Again, what was it called?
Anthea: (22:58)
Taxonomic bias. So it’s a bit of a mouthful.
Colin: (23:01)
It makes it sound, Anthea, like you’re going to stuff them afterwards. Could you could you just let us know what taxonomic means?
Anthea: (23:10)
Sure, so taxonomy is the science of classifying wildlife. So it’s, you know, it’s the science of working out which animals are a species and which is not a species, I guess. And so how how we separate how we categorise animals in the kingdom. So, you know.
Colin: (23:31)
It’s a cataloging system.
Anthea: (23:33)
It’s a cataloging system, that’s a very much cleaner way to put it.
Colin: (23:36)
Now can you let us know first up the the endangered animals that are in are in your children’s book or one or two of them and then one or two that the the second book, the adult book, also says and we’ll we’ll know which taxonomic areas you’re dealing with.
Anthea: (23:57)
Sure. Okay, so one example of a reptile that I’m profiling the in the book is called a Fassifern Blind Snake. And not many people know that what blind snakes are in general, but blind snakes are these teeny tiny snakes that look almost exactly like worms. They live entirely underground, unless it rains and then they come out into the sunshine like a lot like worms. so they’re really hard to find. So we know next to nothing about them in in Australia, and there’s quite a few species of them.
And the Passifern Blind Snake is one species of blind snake. And it’s only one s of this species has ever, ever been found, and it was near Brisbane. It was found under a rock next to some forest. And that forest and that was in the nineties. And that forest has since been cleared. So scientists are pretty worried about its conservation status. It was critically endangered when they found it because they said, Well, we’ve only ever found one and we’ve never found another. And now what we think was its habitat, which is the forest it was next to, now that’s all been raised. So we’re not sure if it’s extinct or if it’s still around. but, you know, they’ve been looking for about thirty years and they still haven’t found another one. And that single specimen of a Fassifern Blind Snake is preserved in a jar at the Queensland Museum like like a pickle. Hmm. So that’s one example. So another example, That’s for the children’s one. Yeah, keeping it light, you know. Pardon?
Colin: (25:26)
Is that for the children’s one or the other one? Do you have a name? Do you give them names? No to give names to their animals.
Anthea: (25:38)
That’s true, yeah. Yeah, Bob the Blind Snake, but no.
Colin: (25:40)
He’s a male, is he?
Anthea: (25:43)
No. That’s a good question actually.
Tony: (25:45)
Exactly.
Colin: (25:46)
Thinking… under a rock close near to Brisbane, I would call it Pauline.
Anthea: (25:49)
Maybe. I honestly I don’t know. It’s a good question. Another animal that is in the children’s book that I’m really I think my favorite one is called the Lutaralipina. Which is, yeah, another now mouthful. So that is the world’s biggest freshwater invertebrate. It’s a crayfish, and it’s like about the size of a brick, and it’s got these massive claws that can kind of wrap around a big man’s calf mussel and apparently some people have used it to like open beer bottles and and things like that and they live in the kind of creeks and rivers around northern Tasmania.
And I think like for locals, they know the Lutaralipina really well, but most other Australians haven’t really heard of it. What I love about this crayfish is that it tends to just like wander off outside of its habitat. So people in northern Tasmania have seen Lutaralipina like on the side of a road so it looks like they’re hitchhiking.
One was like lingering outside a fish and chip shop, probably wanting an easy meal. There was one that was like trying to climb a a fence, like a cyclone fence. I don’t think it was successful, but I think it had a good red hot go. and there’s one so the person I interviewed for this, you know, to hear these stories, he told me that a farmer told him that one of these crayfish would walk onto a paddock, stand by the gate and then the farmer would come in, open the gate, and then it’d keep walking along, walking along through the paddock, and then the cows would follow the crayfish. and then the crayfish would turn around and like, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ And it’d start waving its pincers in the air, and then the cows would freak out and then it’d turn around and then, you know, keep going along, and then the cows would keep following, yeah, go on.
Colin: (27:37)
Anthea, I can’t help suggesting that you’ve got it in the wrong category. That’s the one that the children’s book should be about, a a crayfish that’s leading the cows and climbing fences and getting up to all kinds of mischief. That that’s your gotta be your next book, hasn’t it?
Anthea: (27:56)
That’s in the children’s book, sorry. So the second book, which is the grown-up book, the proper nonfiction one, that’s more looking at the concept more generally and more deeply. So it looks at policy and extinction around, you know, what happens when we neglect so many animals and only fund, you know, the only fund a select few animals, you know, in conservation and then neglect the rest. So that’s what the CSIRO book is about.
Colin: (27:58)
Yeah, natural right.
Anthea: (28:26)
The children’s book is the one that profiles twenty of these underrated animals. Does that does make sense?
Tony: (28:34)
Yeah. And we’re part of the chain. Yeah, part of the nature. We’re connected with those species that are going extinct.
Anthea: (28:46)
We are, I mean, as you know, we’re connected with every animal and we’re part of the ecosystem and I think it’s easy for us to forget that, and as a result, we end up treating animals as you know, our conservation tends to look at animal by animal rather than ecosystems as a whole. And we forget that. And another thing I kinda want to mention about that point that you just made is we treat animals as kind of like economic investments almost.
You know, when we the the animals we we fund tend to be the ones that we see as contributing to the economy, you know? So, okay, yeah, we love koalas and they get orders of magnitude more funding than any other animal. But we often talk about them in terms of how many tourists they can bring into Australia, you know? We don’t ever kind of value nature inherently, even though we’re part of it and even though we need it to survive and, you know, breathe and eat. So yeah.
Colin: (29:49)
That’s really only up to a point, isn’t it? I mean, to the world Australia is known as being the home for kangaroos because we’re the only place where kangaroos are. And as such they should be a great tourist drawer in the wild. But in the wild we shoot and feed to our pets, which is completely the opposite of what you were saying. We humans are not part of the ecosystem.
We dominate it. And whatever we do has got an effect somewhere on the habitat and life of of all of the other species in our region. But that’s just a comment. I’m sorry, Anthea, I stopped you there. keep going. You had a lovely stream of consciousness going there and I stopped you.
Anthea: (30:41)
I think no, I think I think that’s a really good point. I think that this idea of us dominating the ecosystem and the environment has only been in since colonisation as well.
Tony: (30:54)
Yep, exactly. We start off each show with acknowledging country and and acknowledging the the depth and width of of ancient wisdom that’s been accumulated by nurturing. Yeah, just the way they chose to live. Just that nature was they’re the centre of nature and rather than there to dominate it, they’ll a part of it and the idea was do no harm. Which we could. Yes, as we face up to the climate crisis it’s very much something we need to take notice of.
Anthea: (31:29)
Yeah, absolutely. And when we see animals in this kind of Western capitalistic lens, there’s just a lot of holes in this approach. Like on the one hand, okay, yeah, you can use it to inspire business people to fund nature protection and you can use it to inspire government bodies to fund nature protection. and that’s a lot of ways that you know, scientists appeal in in their grant applications. But there are a lot of animals that one, we don’t know enough about, so we don’t know what their contribution is, and two, don’t really have a direct contribution, when we think of it that way, to the economy.
So for example, there are like beneath the Nullarbor Plain there’s this beautiful massive honeycomb network of caves, and in each of those caves there are these ecosystems of invertebrates and there’s cave spiders and cave crickets and and they’re all kind of silvery and blind ’cause they live in the dark and and they’re kind of amazing but nobody sees them because they’re underground and in the nullable. They kind of just live and die in these caves.
Like, under the system that we apply, under our value system towards what we determine, you know, what animals to save and what dies, why should we save any of those invertebrates in the caves? And they are under threat, you know, there’s a massive renewable energy project slated for the for the Nullarbor Plain, which could put their habitats under threat, so this this question of like what does it matter if some animals live or die is is a question that invertebrate scientists get asked a lot because invertebrates have been neglected so much more than vertebrates in in the media. And which is an an example of taxonomic bias, you know, and it’s super frustrating for them. And that’s because we’re not valuing the inherent, you know, inherent place of of nature and our and our part to play in it.
And there’s a lot of animals that are going extinct that you know, every time an animal dwindles towards extinction, every time they begin to vanish, we lose kind of another thread that keeps the ecosystem intact, you know. We just keep chipping away at this foundation of our ecosystems until eventually it’s just gonna collapse. Even if that is a little spider in the cave, you know. I think we just need to to change the way we see nature, generally.
Mik: (33:53)
Speaking of climate change, which we do a lot in The Sustainable Hour, what’s the effect of climate change on the animals that you’re studying?
Anthea: (34:05)
Climate change kind of exacerbates all of the problems that animals face. So climate change is creating more weeds, you know, it’s bringing in more weeds that you know, animals need, some skinks live in forests and they rely on specific types of plants and then weeds are overtaking those plants and then they can’t really use those habitats anymore. Climate change is just mainly bringing it’s making alpine areas hotter.
And animals require a really niche temperatures to live in and they keep climbing higher and higher up the mountain until, you know, there’s no more left nowhere left to climb because they just keep getting you know, temperatured out, if that’s a word. Those are just two examples, but there’s there’s plenty of examples.
Colin: (34:54)
Just getting back to basics if you don’t mind, Anthea. What’s the names of your books and how can our listeners access them? Can we get them online?
Anthea: (35:06)
So I I don’t know if I should say the names of the books just yet because they’re not I’m still in the middle of working on them and they’re not out until for the next year or so. When they’re out, you know, they’ll be in bookshops and definitely you can buy them online. And but yeah, you can keep an eye on my my LinkedIn or my Instagram to see when they’re out. And I don’t have an exact date yet either.
Colin: (35:30)
Well, we’ll carry your details on our podcast.
Tony: (35:34)
Yeah, you’re very it coming across to me you’re very much being a detective, Anthea, in the books. Do you have a preference to the other or tare you finding they complement each other as you’re writing them?
Anthea: (35:49)
Ooh, they definitely complement each other. I don’t know if I have a preference. They’re completely different though. Like for example, the children’s book I’m writing more, you know, in a fun way for kids and you know, the editor has been really helpful to kind of sh encourage me to use a lot of humour in my writing, which in my background as a journalist I’ve never really used humour in my writing before. And so that’s been a really fun exercise and I’ve kind of just thrown everything at the wall and then we’ll see what sticks …It’s a bit absurd, the kind of humour in the children’s books. So that one’s been really fun.
This nonfiction book is a lot meatier, you know. It’s I’ve been talking to so many people, and I’ve learnt so much and it’s really nice to you know, these are my very first books. I’ve never written a book before, these and it’s also like the longest thing I’ve ever written. and that in itself is is something I’m really proud of, because I’ve never had an opportunity to kind of investigate something so thoroughly as I am with this and I think it’s just such a rare thing to do nowadays when everything is so relegated to really short snippets. It’s nice to just go really deep on something, and look at it from all angles, from from the arts, from policy, from science, you know, from First Nations communities. yeah, it’s been a real privilege to be able to do that.
And I should say as well, I want to mention that in the children’s book, you know, a lot of these animals aren’t really known to science, like I said, very well. So I’ve had to be going, I’ve interviewed something like sixteen, seventeen scientists to find out what are the kind of the most interesting parts of these animals that I can bring out for kids and I’ve had to read papers and I’ve had to look at conservation listings and things like that. So I feel like I’ve taken a real journalistic approach to a children’s book. But that’s also all I know how to do. I don’t know I don’t know if there’s another way I shouldn’t be doing it.
Colin: (37:50)
How long have you been working on these books, Anthony?
Anthea: (37:54)
That’s a really good question. I think I started properly working on the nonfiction book for about since the start of the year and then that’s due, you know, early next year, so it’ll be about a year’s worth of work to write the manuscript. And then the children’s book, that’s illustrated and so that’s it took me about four months to write that one. Now I’m waiting on the the illustrations to come through. My friend Wes Mountain is doing the illustrations. We used to work together at the conversation and he is amazing. So I’m really excited to see that.
Colin: (38:31)
Good. Which one came first?
Anthea: (38:33)
Children’s book came first.
Colin: (38:34)
Children’s book came first. You’ve completed the children’s books, you’re now waiting for it to be?
Anthea: (38:40)
Yeah. And now I’m waiting for the for the illustrations and they’re looking amazing, honestly. I’m so excited.
Tony (38:43)Terrific. And Anthea, how did you choose the the 20 species that you you’re writing about for the kids?
Anthea: (38:56)
That’s a good that’s a really good question. So a little bit of backstory is I used to work at The Conversation. I was the Deputy Environments and Energy editor and I had a series there called ‘Am I Not Pretty Enough’? Which is basically the same idea. So I would commission wildlife scientists to profile animals that didn’t have a high public profile that needed more attention. And I spoke to a few of the scientists who wrote for that series.
To kind of get a list of about 40 species that they kind of recommended. So it’s mostly been from kind of my network of scientists that have made these recommendations. And then from those 40, I kind of picked the ones that I thought were either the most kind of a mix of thing of animals that were like dull looking, I guess, because that’s a factor that makes animals less known to the public, and ones that were kind of exciting and and that kids would find interesting.
Because I wanted there to be a mix. I didn’t want it all to just be, you know, little brown lizards and crayfish and, you know, tiny flies. I wanted it to also be animals like the lutaralipina that are really interesting in their own right, but people just don’t know about them. You gotta start somewhere, you know. Just finding ways to make the animals that people don’t yet care about, you know, something that people want to care about.
Colin: (40:24)
In the meantime, how are you how are you getting by? What are you working at – to pay the bills?
Anthea: (40:33)
Yeah, well if you know anyone hiring, you let me know. Currently just doing the odd freelance job here and there. But yeah, no, I need a job.
Tony: (40:46)
Anthea, getting back to your to your journalist days, or putting your journalist hat on, was there any article that you’re particularly proud of that came out with your name?
Anthea: (41:02)
That’s a really nice question. Yes. So well I’ll say two things, because they’re both kind of things that have been recognised, I guess. So one is a is a feature I wrote for Australian Geographic, again on this, you know, topic of taxonomic bias. So that was about a the long Sunskink. And the Long Sun Skink is this tiny little skink lives in the New South Wales table lands and hadn’t been seen for about nine years.
People kind of were presuming that it was extinct, and so I spoke to the herpetologist who was going out looking for it and managed to find something like 23 of these skinks. And then that was an example of a skink that was called that’s data deficient. So there’s not much data about it and there wasn’t enough data to say whether or not. It was at risk of extinction. We just didn’t know.
So this particular herpetologist went out, found the skink, found all the data that was necessary, and then got it listed onto Australia’s Environment Laws to be protected. And that story was was a really beautiful one. And I was so lucky to be able to tell it. The other one was when I was at The Conversation, this was a a group effort was we we did massive coverage on the aftermath of the 2019-2020 bushfires.
And we looked at all the animals that we looked at the recovery six months on of the animals that were considered, you know, priority species to for conservation to be looked after. So that project was called ‘Flora, Fauna, Fire’, and it was really impactful. Yeah. So I was really proud of that one.
Colin: (42:47)
And which which magazine did that one go in?
Anthea: (42:50)
That was in The Conversation. Yeah.
Mik: (42:54)
Having spent so much time focusing on strange animals living in dark caves and so on, has that influenced your relationship with the animals around us, you know, in the house, like the flies, the ants, the spiders, and so on?
Anthea: (43:10)
Yeah, it really has. before I started specialising in the environment I was, you know, pretty pretty scared of all bugs and spiders and everything and you know. now I, you know, see them with a lot more respect. There’s one person I’ve spoken to, she’s a macrophotographer, which means that she takes photos of of insects and tiny animals and makes them just so beautiful. Her work has really kind of changed my perception around bugs in particular because she makes them look really beautiful and especially her photos of parasitic wasps, which I don’t know if you if you know, but parasitic wasps they lay their eggs in other insects and then the eggs hatch inside that insect and then the larvae then eats their way out and it’s kinda horrifying and it was the inspiration for Ridley Scott’s “Aliens” franchise.
But her photos just make them look so beautiful. They make that she makes them look like fairies. She’s kind of like changed if you just look at them, you’ll change your entire perception of them. So it’s not just about learning the facts, I think it’s also just about seeing them in a different way or seeing them presented in a different way. You know, seeing them eye to eye rather than from us as like hulking, you know, megafauna and looking down at these tiny bugs and being like, ew, and immediately squishing them. So it’s been a learning journey.
Tony: (44:36)
Yeah, it’s obvious what it’s meant to you.
Colin: (44:40)
And with your close study, Anthea, getting back to climate change, we know that we are heating the planet and you’ve said that animals are going further and further to higher latitudes and with the warming. Surely the warming will also affect even those that live underground. And under the under the Nullabor,, is it a constant temperature under there? Or is that being affected by climate change too?
Anthea: (45:13)
That’s a good question. I’m not sure. I imagine… I don’t know if this is right or wrong, but what I can guess is that the cave systems across Australia, including the ones beneath the Nullarbor, have a pretty constant temperature. I mean, that’s one of the reasons that the species that live in caves tend to be really ancient species because they survive lots of ice ages and lots of, you know, a history of climate changes as well. So they might be a bit better shielded from the temperature extremes of climate change that’s happening now, but also I’m not sure because yeah, I’m not a scientist.
Colin: (45:54)
Because a part of the climate change is floods as well, isn’t it? And fires.
Anthea: (45:59)
Absolutely. Yeah. That would be a major factor, I’m sure. Yeah.
Mik: (46:05)
Any advice to us who’ve been listening to your story and heard your enthusiasm, some action points for us? Is there something we can all do to help?
Anthea: (46:16)
What I found really heartening in my experience as an environmental journalist is just how little effort I need to put into getting people excited about nature. You just kinda have to put a little picture in or just a mention of an animal that they wouldn’t have thought to look at before and suddenly people are really keen to learn.
And so I think having I think I guess opening your eyes wider to the sheer diversity of wildlife that we have in Australia, you know, so, I think doing that, just kind of like taking a second look at a little brown lizard on the footpath would help kind of raise the bar of ecological literacy in Australia and when we raise that bar, we get more people to care about nature and then that affects, you know, who we vote for and, you know, the conversations we have around the table, and you know, what we would spend our money on. On a more practical level. I guess that’s an abstract answer, but on a more practical level, if you like to take photos, you could you could take photos of things that you wouldn’t normally take photos of.
Like, maybe you go bushwalking and you see a little rodent, you might take a photo of that and pop that on iNaturalist, which is a citizen science website. So that’ll really help raise the amount of data for animals that don’t have very much data. So getting involved in citizen science projects, especially like checking out the citizen science projects that are on Invertebrates Australia because they do such amazing work, Invertebrates Australia, at, you know, advocating for the little bugs and spiders and and things like that.
The other thing I want to mention is just how important community is in in these situations. A lot of the animals that tend to get neglected are what are called short range endemics. So these are animals that live in a really, really tiny pocket of habitat like a cave, and then nowhere else. So they’re they’ve got really high endemism. And a lot of these animals, a lot of invertebrates are really have really high endemism but near communities. And a lot of lizards are the same. They have high endemism but near, you know, an urban area maybe. And so community effort can make such a world of difference to like one whole species.
Does that make sense? So things like planting a invertebrates friendly garden or getting involved with your local land care group or things like that, you know. And there are plenty of examples of like local communities that have made differences to a whole entire species that only live near them and nowhere else. There’s a there’s a festival for trapdoor spiders at a remote town in Western Australia, for example. Have you heard about that one?
And they, you know, they did a big survey effort and they found something like eighty spiders around the community and these trapdoor spiders. They probably don’t live in many other places. But that effort that’ll be it you know, that’s a huge difference for that one species. Even though it’s very you know, it’s just a day for us. So yeah.
Mik: (49:26)
That’s how much love of and respect for nature we could fit into one sustainable hour. Thank you very much, and we’ve reached now what we call the Be-section because we always ask our guests to say what should we be? What do you say?
Anthea: (49:45)
I think we should be curious. I think that’s the best way we can open our eyes wider to to the diversity of wildlife in Australia.
Mik: (49:54)
Hm. If there was a vote it sounds like we’re the ‘Be curious’ is the winner of the year. We’ve had many guests saying exactly that.
Colin: (50:02)
What about: Be aware of blind snakes?
Anthea: (50:09)
We should all be aware of blind snakes. I mean we probably can’t see them ’cause they’re underground
Colin: (50:13)
And tree climbing invertebrates!
Anthea: (50:15)
Yeah!
. . .
SONG (50:31)
‘Take Action for Earth’
Verse 1:
The parrot
Green wings cutting southern skies
Across the strait, off it flies
The fastest parrot ever known
breeds in this one place alone
Tasmania’s forests, ancient and wide
hollows where the swift parrots hide
But chainsaws roars through the trees
Profit to be made, families to feed
Bridge:
Less than a thousand birds left in the sky
The sawdust rises while the parrots die
Money speaks louder than Earth
Profit decides what life is worth
Chorus:
Stand for the forests
Stand for the truth
Stand for the future
we owe to our youth
Take action for Earth!
Jenny: “Take action for Earth”
Colin: “Yeah, take action for Earth!”
Jenny: “That is my daily mantra.”
Verse 2:
A hollow tree a hundred years
Falls in seconds to market gears
Shipped away as chips and boards
Sold through warehouses and corporate doors
A bird that crossed a thousand seas
Returns each year to these same trees
But every season fewer come
till deathly silence beats the drum
Bridge:
Less than a thousand birds left in the sky
The sawdust rises while the parrots die
Money speaks louder than Earth
Profit decides what life is worth
Outro:
Bob stands in the forest
Eighty-one years strong
Defending a species
Correcting what’s wrong
Then history’s pages
Will one day say
Who stood for life
And who turned away
We rise for the forest
Take action for Earth!
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
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