Coal-loving colonials put Australia on the road to cooked. Now it's time to turn the heat down

In the Anthropocene we humans have become a geological force, a “force of nature” – and a self-defeating one. But this crisis in climate and extinction was first kindled by coal-fired colonialism and its ethos of extraction and elimination.

By 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons had
 already declared coal “the factor in everything we do”.

Here in Australia the historical coincidence of colonialism and coal sticks out like a porcupine at a nudists’ colony. Watts’s coal-fired steam engine was invented just two years before the first fleet arrived in Sydney Cove. Coal mining began near Nobbys Head in Newcastle in the 1790s, with the first coal shipment leaving now the world’s largest coal export port in 1799.

This period also saw the march of the Australian frontiers on little cloven hooves, shepherded by settler shock troops dealing death and disease. Fleeces from these rapidly expanding pastures supplied the Lancashire wool mills, just as the steam-powered loom began to replace the hand loom. The use of coal on a commercial scale from the late 18th century powered an explosion in manufacturing between 1760 and 1840. Coal-fired industrialisation and colonial expansion were a voracious twin-headed beast.

Read the story from The Guardian by Liz Conor -“Coal-loving colonials put Australia on the road to cooked. Now it's time to turn the heat down.”