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Category Archives: Environment

Economically Rationalise this? Yes we can…

The future getting in the way of the economy?

This month’s New Internationalist cartoon:

carbon price LR pic

Taxing Options

Issues cover Winter 2013

Support alternative media – become a member of Australian Options – and get to download copies of the journal. The Winter issue features articles on taxation, climate change and more – including an interview with Frank Stillwell, political economist.

If you thought that Governments reducing taxes, but spending on health, education and the things governments should invest in (not to forget saving the planet), doesn’t add up … you were right.

Here are a few cartoons from the issue:

 

Mug pic  more tax pic privatisation Stillwell pic sorcerers apprentice pic

 

 

 

 

 

 

… on the same planet?

Invisible stuff LRpic

Vibrant Moorabool!

Moorabool Shire Council, in country Victoria, Australia held its Vibrant Communities Conference 2013, in the Ballan Mechanics Institute Hall ,on the 20th of April.

I was there to cartoon the issues and ideas that emerged in the workshops and sessions. Cartooning on the spot, among people passionate about their community and its future is a dose of reality.

It is also a good test for the cartoons. Do they help capture what people are feeling and saying? Do they have ‘yes we can’ positiveness? (Tricky, cartooning lends itself to more negative ways of looking at things). Can they help remind participants of the conference discussions weeks and months down the track?

It is that mnemonic role of cartoons, and other images, that gives them value after the fun on the day.

community group event pic

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Discover Frank Fisher!

 

Frank Fisher, who died earlier this year, was an inspiration to many people, an environmental educator committed to ‘social transformation to a more sensitive self-aware world’.  Among other things he was professor in the National Centre for Sustainability, Swinburn University of Technology, Melbourne.

 

Frank established The Understandascope in 2005, the name coming from cartoonist Michael Leunig’s cartoon. It was relaunched this year as a website www.understandascope.org – to continue Frank Fisher’s vision of ‘a more circumspect, humble and considerate society, increasingly sensitive and responsive to the consequences of our actions upon each other and the rest of nature’.

 

The Understandascope has launched an ebook Everyday Transcendence: the influence of Frank Fisher. Discover Frank Fisher and a link to download the ebook here.

 

Frank Fisher was a committed cyclist. Here is one cartoon from the ebook.

Fisher cyclist pic

 

 

 

 

We are not alone…

Native Australian bees have blue stripes on their back ends – not yellow. Now I know!

This artwork is for a large (3m x 3.5m) panel in the Natural Resource Management’s interactive display at the Adelaide Show this week.

The display includes recordings of the sounds of various native creatures and visitors will match each sound with a creature in the picture. The spider will be tricky.