The people in the book

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It’s odd when a prominent person tells you they’re proud their parents were locked up, but that’s how Andrew Blakers described his reaction to the arrest of his parents during the Franklin Dam protests.
He would go on to a series of groundbreaking advances in solar technologies at the UNSW labs with Professor Martin Green.
Today, Andrew Blakers is Director of the Australian National University Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems, and a leading authority on pumped hydro electicity storage.

When Simon Sheikh became director at GetUp!, it was a small but energetic organisation. When he left a few years later, it had become a political force. But celebrity has its dangers, as he was to discover. Instead of giving up, he changed his focus and is now founder ethical super fund, Future Super 

This is Charlie Prell, a fifth-generation farmer on his property near Crookwell, NSW. He's pointing to a wind tubine just going up. The struggle of Charlie and Kris Prell as they fought drought and financial ruin is a harrowing story. At one point he told me, "bugger these guys, I'm going to fight back".
Now Charlie is a force behind the Australian Wind Alliance and Farmers for Climate Action. In the conservative heartland of farmers and the current federal energy minister, they cannot be ignored.

Sometimes, profound changes in our lives occur in the most mundane ways. In the early 1970's, Monica Oliphant was washing the dishes when she had an epiphany. The world was facing an energy crisis when Middle East cut off the supply of oil. As she scraped food off the plates, Mcfarlane Burnett was talking on the radio. The world would not be in this situation and facing war, over renewable energy.
Now, a senior lady, AO and SA Senior Citizen of the Year, she is a major powerhouse, pushing renewable energy in South Austalia and around the world.

The mood of parliament in 1996 was sombre. Martin Bryant had run amok at Port Authur, killing 35 people in Australia's worst gun massacre. John Howard had just won office for the first time, and should've been celebrating.
Among the new Liberal members, was Susan Jeanes. She accompanied Robert Hill to the Kyoto Protocol negotiations and was a key force behind Australia's Mandatory Renewable Energy Target.
She soon earned a reputation for her principled stands on issues such as voluntary euthenasia, duck hunting and Pauline Hanson. One commentator dubbed her The Independent Member for Kingston (SA).

 

The final years of the Austalian car industry were fraught while governments were promising to reduce or freeze taxes. So how did an unknown character, a person outside government and industry convince them to spend time and money, planting trees?
Meet the artful salesman, Leonard Cohen. Leonard is part Moari , jewish and yes, he plays guitar. He founded the group called Canopy to initiate carbon farming.

 

Would you eat maggots? Probably not, but the Black Soldier Fly larvae make excellent animal feed. And you would like to know that so much food waste that now goes into landfill could be used for something better. Today, we throw away huge amounts of a valuable resource.
Olympia Yarger founded Goterra to solve this very problem. But how she got there, is a long and amazing story. Remarkably resilient and adaptable, Olympia is helping to reshape the future of agriculture.

Inez Harker-Schuch's earliest memories are seeing Darwin destroyed by Cyclone Tracey. The violence of that storm is a clue to the immense power that weather - climate - can unleash and is a lesson for us today. Through many unexpected turns, including years as a professional model, Inez saw her future as a teacher.
But how does climate work, how do you teach kids a complicated subject? Her answer: the climate game CO2peration   

Imagine you're the Victorian Environment Commissioner. You and your team have been hard at work on a climate change report when a new government is elected. They tell the public service: you are not to use the phrase Climate Change - from now on, you'll say Climate Variability.
The minister summons you to his office: "What can I do if I don't like your report?"
Read the book to find out how Professor Kate Auty skewered the politician. 

 

A great pall of gloom hung over the auditorium after the speaker delivered a dire catalogue of  the ways in which we are dismantiling our our life support systems, tipping us towards a global scale crisis. What would you say if you were the next speaker?
Dr Siwan Lovett recounts how she faced this very situation. The theme of her chapter is hope. She describes how she and Australian River Restoration Centre are working with communities to rescue degraded watercourses. She shows why it's important and what we can achieve when people work together. 

 

In post-war Australia, returning service men were granted farming lands - they were our "Soldier Settlers". The dream was to transform the land, usually with the idea of making it more like England. They were paid to clear trees as fast as they could. There were "acclimatisation societies" who spread European plants and animals everywhere they went. They'd carry packets of blackberry seeds so they'd grow across the countryside.
What a disaster that was.
Margie Fitzpatrick's property, Australind (near Lake George), shows the scars inflicted on the land by these tragically ignorant ideas. With trees gone and the soil laid bare, the watercourses were degraded.
Now, working with Siwan Lovett and the team, Australind is being restored to something like its more natural state. There was joy in Margie's voice as she talked about what they'd achieved.