Articles & Columns
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The next black gold? A lithium coup d’Etat
You’re all set to buy the latest iPhone or its Android equivalent, the last thing on your mind is the recent overthrow of Bolivia’s government. Why should it be?
January 23, 2020 | Echonetdaily | 5 -
Editorial: Watch out! It’s biased
Everyone has a bias – it’s a natural human condition. It’s always a surprise to hear a political actor complain that The Echo is biased. The issue is really about fairness, not bias. Let's take holiday letting, like on Airbnb as an example...
January 23, 2020 | Hans Lovejoy | 2 -
Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: Close To Home
This week, my family was victim to a home invasion. It’s not anything you can be emotionally prepared for. We are changed forever. When strangers attack you unexpectedly in your home, because you are in your safe space – the trauma is incomprehensible. This was our sanctuary. If you aren’t safe in your home, then where are you safe? Afterwards there is only exile, the home that once held you is forever gone.
January 22, 2020 | Mandy Nolan | 16 -
Cartoon of the week – January 22, 2020
Letters to the editor We love to receive letters, but not every letter will be published; the publication of letters is at the discretion of the online and print letters editors. The deadline for the Byron Echo newspaper is noon Friday and letters... Read More →
January 22, 2020 | Echonetdaily | 0 -
Storylines: Do not give us Invasion Day as a day of celebration
Echonetdaily is proud to launch Storylines – a series of monthly articles by Indigenous writers.
January 20, 2020 | Echonetdaily | 14 -
Thus Spake Mungo: Evolution
It was almost a throwaway line. In the course of his friendly chat welcoming David Speers to the ABC, Scott Morrison mused that his climate change policy was ‘evolving.’
January 20, 2020 | Mungo MacCallum | 14 -
Stalag 13 revisited; closer than we think
The Xmas, New Year break is a time to celebrate, acknowledge a religious event or perhaps take a break and recharge the batteries.
January 20, 2020 | Echonetdaily | 2 -
Editorial: We don’t need a war and we don’t need the oil
So long as we keep burning oil to power our machines, we are at the mercy of rival powers in the Middle East, the richest being the Saudis, led by the murdering Prince Mohammad bin Salman, who has a deal with the crooked Prince Trump of America.
January 17, 2020 | Echonetdaily | 3 -
Ten years of missed opportunities
How to sum up this decade of politics in Australia? Numbers-wise, we had six prime ministers (counting Kevin twice), three National Party leaders, ten budgets, seven environment ministers, two apologies, one plebiscite and a Herculean-load of hubris.
January 17, 2020 | Echonetdaily | 2 -
Priceless books at your fingertips to inspire citizen science
The young lemon tree’s future is at risk. I find this stout caterpillar, a deep green with short sharp spines. It sports three very small legs in front, four stumpy prolegs behind and a clasper at the rear. I watch the monster eat an entire leaf as big as itself in under a minute.
January 16, 2020 | Mary Gardner | 1 -
Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: The Benefits of Fire
if immediate systematic change isn’t achieved, then we’ll just burn again next year, and the year after that and the year after that, until our green planet is just a lump of charcoal orbiting the sun with a go-fund-me to Mars.
January 15, 2020 | Mandy Nolan | 6 -
Cartoon of the week – January 15, 2020
Letters to the editor We love to receive letters, but not every letter will be published; the publication of letters is at the discretion of the online and print letters editors. The deadline for the Byron Echo newspaper is noon Friday and letters... Read More →
January 15, 2020 | Echonetdaily | 0 -
Planet Watch: Farmers, forests & climate change
Farmers, forests and climate change: The way that humans use and change the land and its vegetation can have a profound effect on the climate, and can either counteract or exacerbate climate change.
January 13, 2020 | Echonetdaily | 13 -
Thus Spake Mungo: The Sacrament
The sacrament is torn, the veil of the temple is rent in twain. The sacred surplus is sacred no more. It is defrocked, excommunicated, cast into the outer darkness.
January 13, 2020 | Mungo MacCallum | 4 -
Editorial: Psychonaut of the week
‘Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third storey window. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behaviour and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong.’
January 10, 2020 | Hans Lovejoy | 2 -
The big good things we got in the decade gone by
When Galileo said that the Earth went around the Sun, not the other way around, priests tortured him...
January 9, 2020 | Echonetdaily | 3 -
Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: Change for Scott Morrison
Scott and Jenny hosted an exclusive dinner party to watch the Sydney Fireworks – meanwhile 500,000 animals burnt, 17 people died, and 28 are missing. At least 10.1 million hectares of country has burned. More than 1,000 buildings are lost.
January 8, 2020 | Mandy Nolan | 44 -
How big should the future economy be?
Anyone who has never studied economics would be excused for the common-sense belief that the economy cannot grow forever, but those who have been indoctrinated with an economics education know otherwise.
January 7, 2020 | Echonetdaily | 7 -
Thus Spake Mungo: more to come
For the last three months the headlines have been dominated by bushfires, and the grim prospect is that this will continue for at least another three months to come.
January 6, 2020 | Mungo MacCallum | 6 -
It’s time to tap and go – for enviro action on the run
When I was a kid there was no such thing as bottled water. Water lived in the tap. Everyone drank tap. You turned it on, and water came out. It still does apparently.
January 3, 2020 | Mandy Nolan | 0 -
Living in the Pyrocene
As one of many bushfire refugees in Australia and beyond this year, I was faced with that classic question – what do I take and what can be left behind?
January 2, 2020 | David Lowe | 3 -
Mandy Nolan’s Soapbox: The Setting Son
You’d think that you’d get used to your kids leaving home. But you don’t. Every time one of them leaves it’s as heartbreaking as it was when the first one went.
January 1, 2020 | Mandy Nolan | 20 -
Will Byron Shire achieve an ecologically sustainable future?
We are in a crucial time of species extinction and destruction of our natural environment.
December 31, 2019 | Echonetdaily | 10 -
Brain dissection for everyone
As I contemplated my seventy-fifth Christmas through the bottom of a glass, I realised that I still have no idea how my mind works. Or if it is ‘my’ mind. Or even if there is such a thing as ‘mind’
December 31, 2019 | David Lovejoy | 4 -
Thus Spake Mungo: onwards to 2020
Our Pentecostalist Prime Minister may have been a little disappointed by Christmas. No wise men showed up bearing gifts…
December 30, 2019 | Mungo MacCallum | 41
