The Sydney family protesting with Greta Thunberg in NYC

For six-year-old Lila from Sydney, spending a day sailing on New York Harbour as part of a flotilla to welcome climate activist Greta Thunberg was the greatest thrill of her young life.

Lila Hart, 6, on the solar-powered boat in New York Harbour.

Lila was on board a solar-powered boat near the famous Statue of Liberty with her mother and father, Miram Hart and Nick Ward, younger sister Argenta and local children from New York.

“She kept saying ‘this is the best day of my life, the most exciting day of my life, this is what home school really should be like’,” Ms Hart said. “Even when we were on the boat, my husband was teaching science stuff and she was asking a lot of questions about the environment.”

The family has spent the past few weeks in New York, joining Greta and local activists at a protest outside the United Nations and preparing for the Global Climate Strike on Friday.

Read the story from The Age by Caitlin Fitzsimmons - “The Sydney family protesting with Greta Thunberg in NYC.”

Post capitalism: life within environmental limits

It may seem as though capitalism has always been a part of the Western world, but that’s not true. Although the concept has some roots in the Ancient world, capitalism as a system dates only from the 16th century.

If the whole world consumed like Australians, we’d need
 more than four planets to meet our resource demands.

Now, some 500 years later, there’s increasing discussion arguing for, or simply forecasting, a post-capitalist society.

Capitalism is locked into an economics of growth that is undermining the environmental foundations of life on Earth – that is, capitalism is ecocidal. And this has become the defining contradiction of capitalism in the twenty-first century.

As a result, this “growth imperative” alongside our own planet’s limits is likely to bring capitalism to an end in coming decades.

Read the Pursuit story by Dr Samuel Alexander and Professor Brendan Gleeson from the University of Melbourne  - “Post capitalism: life within environmental limits.”

Farmers for Climate Action

Australian farmers are on the frontline of climate change, and we can be part of the solution. 

We call for urgent climate action to ensure a prosperous future for rural and regional Australia. Marian MacDonald, Sarah Sulman, Jim McDonald, and Oscar Pearse are the farmers in our ad, representing thousands of us from across Australia.

From the Farmers for Climate Action website:

As individuals over a few decades, many of us have been repeatedly raising our concerns about climate change. Our growing frustration with the inadequate progress on climate action in Australia drove a group of us farmers and producers to meet in the Blue Mountains in 2015, when we decided to form this group.

We got straight to work. That year, more than 100 farmers signed a letter calling on the federal government to set stronger targets to reduce carbon pollution. Another group ran a crowd-funding campaign to send two young farmers, Josh Gilbert and Anika Molesworth, to the UN Climate Talks in Paris. 

In 2016 we set ourselves up as a formalised group and ran a nationwide survey of farmer attitudes towards climate change and renewable energy. More than 1300 farmers around Australia took part, and in November 2016 a delegation of farmers presented the Australian Farmers Climate Survey results to politicians and industry leaders in Canberra.

In 2017 our board was able to employ a CEO thanks to our supporters, and some of our most active members worked together to help set our direction. Our 2017 year in review shows what a busy year it was supporting farmers on the ground.

Learn more about Farmers for Climate Action here.