RICHARD KINGSFORD: You'll hear when we're coming into a wetland, I'll give you the number of the wetlands. You need to put that into your tape recorder. You need to say ‘Start of the count. End of the count’. 

DAN ILIC: Professor Richard Kingsford is standing on the tarmac of Bankstown Airport briefing his team. 

RICHARD KINGSFORD: The other thing is, if you've got lots of birds, it's good to concentrate on the large numbers and sort of try and pop the smaller ones on the other side of your brain. 

TEAM MEMBER: Yes. Yeah.  

RICHARD KINGSFORD: And pick them up afterwards after you're away from the wetland or you've got a bit of time to take a breath. 

DAN ILIC: This small but enthusiastic group are about to board a light aircraft and fly across New South Wales on the fourth leg of the 41st annual Eastern Australian Waterbird Survey. 

RICHARD KINGSFORD: So the first one on the list is Burrendong Dam. And then we fly along the Macquarie River. And then we've got pretty much a 4 to 5 hour trip out to Broken Hill, ending up with the Menindee Lakes, which will be very busy because there's a lot of water out there.  

DAN ILIC: After many decades of research Richard has become a kind of God in the world of ecology. His work with UNSW is all about ecosystems; figuring out how much trouble they're in and attempting the delicate task of restoration. He heads up some of the world's leading rewilding projects, including the reintroduction of the platypus to the Royal National Park near Sydney, and attempts to bring the critically endangered Bettong back from the brink of extinction in the deserts of South Australia. 

But today he's counting waterbirds. 

RICHARD KINGSFORD: I think a lot of the value of birds is they're easily observable. Insects, invertebrates or even small nocturnal mammals, it's very hard to get data on those. Whereas birds sat around during the daytime, often out there showing off their colors. And so you can do the sort of surveys that track what's happening over time.  

UPSOT: Have you got the log sheets? John’s explained all that? I think we're all good to go.  

RICHARD KINGSFORD: If you like, you're using the Pelicans to say what's happening to the fish populations, or you're using the swans to say what's happening to the vegetation, you can actually use these, what we call high order species, and immediately provide you, if you like, with multiple lines of evidence about what's happening to the whole ecosystem. 

DAN ILIC: Once in the air, Richard directs the pilot across the landscape, making sure they approach each waterway so that counting can happen from both sides of the plane.  

RICHARD ON PLANE COMMS: If you could come a bit tighter on the shoreline. So just go down this western shoreline.  

PILOT: Rightio.  

DAN ILIC: When they near a river or dam, the plane dips down, flying low across the stretch of water. The birds take off - which allows the team to identify and count them. 

RICHARD KINGSFORD: We have these digital tape recorders and they’e really important because we're flat out watching these birds trying to work out what they are - you’re just pouring out that information a bit like a race caller.  

RICHARD ON PLANE COMMS: 20 large, pied cormorants, four pelicans, one great black cormorant, one large pied cormorant, one little black cormorant.   

RICHARD KINGSFORD: And essentially that information that goes on to that tape recorder. It's all brought together in the two counts, and you get a total.  

RICHARD ON PLANE COMMS: Those were freckled duck. 

TEAM MEMBER ON PLANE COMMS: The freckled duck there I picked.  

RICHARD ON PLANE COMMS: You got them?  

TEAM MEMBER ON PLANE COMMS: Yeah there’s about 20 come under the wing. 

RICHARD ON PLANE COMMS: Yeah. Great.  

RICHARD KINGSFORD: Those of us who are experienced get used to seeing what ten birds looks like, what 50 birds looks like, what a hundred birds look like, but a thousand birds look like. And sometimes we have to count up to a thousand. There could be so many on a particular wetland.  

RICHARD ON PLANE COMMS: You pick those ones Kurt?  

TEAM MEMBER ON PLANE COMMS: Am I correct in saying they’re brolga?  

RICHARD ON PLANE COMMS: Correct.  

TEAM MEMBER ON PLANE COMMS: Yeah, I love those. They’re one of my favorite birds. We’ll have to ask Heath to do his brolga call one day. 

TEAM MEMBER ON PLANE COMMS: (Brolga call immitation) 

RICHARD ON PLANE COMMS: That’s pretty good.   

DAN ILIC: It takes the team about 24 days to fly over some 2000 waterways, crisscrossing Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland - a huge area with a total flight distance just short of a round the world trip.  

It can seem like slightly crackerjacks this thing that Richard's doing... and the fact that he's been doing it for 40 years also seems a touch bonkers. 

I mean, who sticks at anything for 40 years? I can’t even go the gym three weeks in a row. 

RICHARD KINGSFORD: It's really about how do you collect rigorous data. We as scientists are trying to use the same technique over those 40 years so that we've got that comparability. And that is because long term data sets are the things that really unlock the understanding about what's going on. And because it's such a large area and covers so many rivers, it's a substantial amount of information that informs on the health of the environment. 

DAN ILIC: So, with four decades of data in the bag, what is it that the birds are telling us? 

RICHARD KINGSFORD: Oh, they're sadly telling us that we've got this long term decline. We've probably lost about, in terms of numbers of birds, probably about 70% of our waterbirds. It's a big decrease and that's happening because, you know, these major floodplain systems on the Murray-Darling, much smaller than they used to be. They're not getting the floods. Those floods are being caught in the large dams in the top of the catchments. That's why, you know, the environmental flows in the rivers are so important because much of our biodiversity depends on those large floodplains. 

You really only understand a river if you see it through its whole length, which can be 1000km. And most people just see a little bit of a river. They don't see where it goes eventually, what it floods. And then the other lens is understanding what changes happen to rivers over 50 to 100 years, particularly when you build large dams. 

Those impacts are slow and inevitable. So we do have floodplains that die over 100 years. And trying to understand that or even collect evidence for that, or worse, convince politicians and communities that something terrible is going on if it's happening over a cycle that's well beyond the bounds of our political cycle or even our own lives. You know, it's challenging. 

DAN ILIC: I'm Dan Ilic and this is Preppers, a podcast which asks the question, are we getting ready hard and fast enough for the climate changes that are coming?  

In this episode, are ideas about ‘the end of the world as we know it’ really the stuff of mad paranoia? Or is it something we're living through right now? And if environmental and societal collapse is on its way, can we do anything to prepare for it?  

You might have heard of extinction events. These occur when 75% of the world's species are lost in a period of less than 2.8 million years – a relatively short space of time... if you’re a geologist. The Earth has seen five major extinction events, the last taking place around 66 million years ago when an asteroid hit the Earth. This is the really famous one that wiped out the dinosaurs, with the exception of one class: birds. 

It's thought that birds survived because they were relatively small, they had a varied diet, and they could pick up and fly to wherever there was food. But knowing birds are so adaptable to change makes Richard's waterbird survey results seem even more troubling.  And his data set is just one of many worldwide that are returning similar results.  

That breathtaking 70% population loss figure applies not just to waterbirds, but wildlife across the board. It's this research, alongside accelerating extinction rates, that has many ecologists believing that we're either close to, or already witnessing extinction event number six. Lucky number six! That’s what we’re in folks! 

You may have noticed that carbon emissions and reduction targets dominate conversation about the environment. It's easy to see how the warming of the planet is and will continue to impact our lives.  

But what the loss of waterbirds has to do with our own survival is perhaps less clear. And how things like biodiversity or the health of the ocean are connected to the control of carbon in the atmosphere, takes a bit of a back seat. In short, the complexity of the Earth and how its interconnected systems support life isn't the stuff of easy media soundbites. 

In an effort to simplify this complexity, a team of internationally renowned scientists, led by Stockholm University, came up with the ‘Planetary Boundaries Framework’, an at-a-glance way to demarcate a safe operating space for humanity on planet Earth. 

TOMMY WIEDMANN: You can really think of the planetary boundaries as something like a blood test in medicine. 

DAN ILIC: Professor Tommy Wiedmann, the climate expert we met in episode one, likens the planetary boundaries to the way we might think about our own health. 

TOMMY WIEDMANN: When you go to your doctor, they take your blood, and then they run it through a number of tests and they just see on by looking on these different parameters, how your health is in general. And that's exactly what the planetary boundaries are doing for the planet as a whole. 

DAN ILIC: Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the Earth had been experiencing a period of relative climate stability. A 10,000 year window, also known as the Holocene, that had allowed humanity to flourish. 

TOMMY WIEDMANN: That is, we have developed agriculture. We have grown our cities. We have developed all our culture that we currently enjoy. So this is where humanity can thrive. 

DAN ILIC: Each of the nine planetary boundaries represent a system that needs to be kept within a safe zone to ensure this stability be maintained; that humanity remain within the safety of the Holocene.  

TOMMY WIEDMANN: We are looking at domains like the global climate, the state of biodiversity, the use of land, the use of water, the pollution. We are looking at ocean acidification. There is one planetary boundary that's called ‘novel entities’. So these are all the chemicals that humans are producing that have never been there before in the natural environment. 

DAN ILIC: Back in 2009, when the framework was first published, we'd already transgressed three of the nine boundaries, pushing them beyond the safe operating space and into the danger zone. 

TOMMY WIEDMANN: Transgressing boundaries basically means that we are moving further away from that stable Holocene period into a state that is much more influenced by humans. 

DAN ILIC: But we've had 15 years since then to reverse the trend. So how are we doing? 

TOMMY WIEDMANN: Last year, I think when the last scientific assessment was done, there were already six planetary boundaries that were transgressed. That's basically like your doctor saying, ‘Oh, here's your blood test back. And three quarters of all your parameters are in the red and they're in the dark red. So look, your health is not good. You really need to do something urgently because your blood test says, you know, this is really a bad situation’. 

And that's where we are in with our planet, with planetary health. That's how bad it is. 

DAN ILIC:  While climate change is just one of the 6 boundaries which has been pushed well beyond the safe zone, it’s the one we hear most about.  

DAN ILIC: You may be familiar with the name James Hansen – he’s the US scientist who, in 1988, addressed the world from the floor of the US congress giving the first high-profile warning about the dangers of a warming planet, which pushed the issue onto the international agenda. 

That same year, the International Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, was established by the UN General Assembly – their job? To digest the latest scientific research from around the world and provide it to governments to help them develop much needed climate policy.  

Now, that was 1988. It took until the Paris Agreement of 2015 for the IPCC to get an international commitment to hold the increase in global average temperate below 1.5 above pre industrial levels. This was largely the result of lobbying from the Alliance of Small Island States, who knew from the scientific literature, that the 2 degree limit that had been in place since 2009 was not good enough and represented an existential threat.  

Now 83 years of age, James Hansen is still hard at work. His latest research suggests that global heating is accelerating - we’re likely to exceed 1.5 this decade and push the temperature to 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2050. the dire effects of which will first be felt by those small island states – and will push us into tipping point territory. 
 

TOMMY WIEDMANN: So in the global climate system, a tipping point would be a point in time when a certain abrupt change occurs that is irreversible, that changes a system that has been stable over time into a new state, so that could be an ice sheet collapsing. That could be the Amazon rainforest turning from a lush green rainforest into a savanna-like forest. So it's an abrupt change, and they could shift so rapidly that we are not able to adapt to them. 

DAN ILIC: There are, as always, mixed views about this in the scientific community. There are those who say that Hansen is just plain wrong. But there are also plenty who agree. 

MARK DIESENDORF: It's surprising to see that many people are still talking about keeping the global warming temperature below one and a half degrees. 

DAN ILIC: Dr Mark Diesendorf is a sustainability expert with the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW and the author of the book The Path to a Sustainable Civilisation. 

MARK DIESENDORF: The reality is that climate scientists are now saying that we have stuffed it up totally. It is too late, and it will be a huge struggle to keep the increase in temperature below two degrees and increasingly in the scientific literature, climate scientists are acknowledging this. But many of them hesitate to say this publicly because they fear that they will be accused of fear mongering. 

DAN ILIC: Acknowledging failure - owning up to something so incomprehensibly huge as environmental collapse is a really difficult and terrifying thing to do. ‘The end of the world as we know it’, as a place that supports human civilisations as we've built them, can sound crazy and implausible. How could this possibly be real? But for experts like Mark leaning on scientific uncertainty is no longer an option. We need to understand how we arrived here and do our best to solve the problems that we've created. 

MARK DIESENDORF: Thanks to our present, dominant economic system, our political decisions are governed by the notion that we can have endless growth on a finite planet. 

And astonishingly, that piece of ideology, which has no serious scientific basis, dominates the really important decisions of many governments of the world, including the Australian government. If we continue in that state then human, civilization and society cannot continue in the long term. We've put the whole natural system out of balance. 

DAN ILIC: For Mark, a big part of the problem is the singular focus on a solution that the whole world is counting on. 

MARK DIESENDORF: Well, for climate solutions, the dominant discourse is that technological change alone is sufficient to save us. 

ANTONIO GUITERRAS: We have the technologies to avoid the worst of climate chaos if we act now. And renewable energy is the gift that keeps on giving. It's good for our planet, our health and our economies, connecting millions of people to affordable electricity as renewable energy has never been cheaper.  

MARK DIESENDORF: And it's true that the potential for this substitution is huge. It is technically feasible. It's one of my main research areas and I'm strongly in favor of it. But sadly, what I have to say is that it's not going to do it quickly enough because what is happening is, as the economy grows, energy consumption keeps increasing. And as a result, while renewable energy can replace fossil fuels, it has to catch up with energy growth. 

DAN ILIC: So just how badly are renewables doing in this game of catch up? In 2009, 80% of global energy consumption was provided by fossil fuels. Ten years later, despite the massive growth in renewable energy, that figure remained stubbornly unchanged –  and still refuses to budge. While growth in energy consumption has slowed of late, it's still increasing by around 2% a year. Renewables will catch up eventually, but time is not on our side.  Plus, we have to build a grid that can actually cope with all the renewable energy that will be produced.  

This is already an issue, particularly in South Australia which has so much rooftop solar that at times, it can produce enough power to meet the state's energy needs.  

But - issues with grid stability mean that just because the energy can be produced, doesn’t mean that it is.  

Here's Dr Kerry Schott, Chair of the Carbon Market Institute explaining this phenomena at a UNSW Engineering event in 2023.  

KERRY SCHOTT: “If you’ve got a solar panel and you think it’s being charged by the sun in the middle of the day in Adelaide, it probably won’t be because it will have been turned off because they need to get power in that system from the grid to stabilize it. So there’s all sorts of inefficiencies happening and huge engineering challenges not just in transmission but in the distribution network.”  

DAN ILIC: Sorry Adelaide, but on the sunniest of days your kettle is not boiling courtesy of the lovely solar cells on your roof, but rather, by the burning of gas. Which brings us to the subject of fossil fuel project approvals. In the last couple of years, around 400 new fossil fuel projects have been approved – 116 of them are expected to begin production before 2030, right here in Australia. 

According to the UN, governments plan to produce around  110% more fossil fuels in 2030 than needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees. 

__________________________ 

The rolling out of renewables charge is a very public-facing thing – governments will tell you how well they’re doing at that all the time. But here’s the thing - when places like the International Energy Agency and the IPCC plot out scenarios that imagine us achieving the goal of 1.5, they not only assume a rapid rollout of renewables, but also the success of carbon capture technologies. 

MARK DIESENDORF: But the problem is that these technologies, at least the hardware technologies, do not exist. And for 25 or more years there have been attempts. And it turns out that all the methods so far have enormous energy consumption and enormous cost. And again, it's worth researching, but so far, there's no indication that this could be done on a large scale without completely destroying the global economy. 

DAN ILIC: So if the road we're on now is not taking us to where we need to be, how should we change course? Mark’s suggestion is to upend pretty much everything, by taking growth from the top of the tree and replacing it with the environment. 

MARK DIESENDORF: We have to throw out most of conventional economics and replace it with what we call nowadays ‘ecological economics’. Its main feature is that, unlike conventional economics, which places economic efficiency as number one ecological economics is, number one is the survival of the planet, the protection of our natural environment upon which human civilization actually depends. And social justice or social equality. 

DAN ILIC: Leaving behind our growth-based economy would mean adopting what's known in economics as a ‘steady state economy’, which means no growth in energy use, no growth in materials or land use, and no growth in population. Any progress made in science or technology would have to satisfy the requirements of environmental protection. In short, degrowth would require a complete overhaul of our culture and politics and a significant shift in the way we spend our time and in what we value. 

MARK DIESENDORF: Instead of aiming for a high monetary wage, people will have what we call a social wage. Money will still exists, markets will still exist, although they will be more constrained. But there will be less need for people to struggle to earn a high income – to own two, three, five houses as investments because they’ll have the basics.  

DAN ILIC: Along with a social wage, degrowth sets about equalizing the living standard of the whole population by providing universal basic services.  

MARK DIESENDORF: Improving public housing, public education, public health, public transport, public parks, aged care, child care – all the things that in fact, a few countries of the world are actually doing already, particularly in Scandanavia. And I should say that a steady state economy is still a dynamic system because within it, green industries will certainly be growing very rapidly. There will be the need for great innovation. There will be the need for lots of employment. So we're not talking about a Stalinist state. We're not talking about collapsing to caves and trees. In fact, we're trying to avoid a collapse. We want a transition to a better civilization, not a utopia, but one that is better, that is environmentally sustainable and more socially equal and safer. 

DAN ILIC: If, as Mark says, the aim is for a just and equitable world, then degrowth comes with a bit of a counterintuitive catch. Because while the developed world needs to stop growth in its tracks, the developing world still needs the opportunity to catch up to our quality of life. 

MARK DIESENDORF: If we take that into account, it means that the rich countries are going to have to undergo a planned degrowth in this physical sense - in energy, materials, land, population, because otherwise there's no room for the poorer countries, the low income countries to actually develop, because economic growth is still important for the poorer countries, as long as it's done the right way, as long as it's green growth, and as long as it closes the gap between the rich and the poor. 

DAN ILIC: On the odd occasion that degrowth makes its way into mainstream conversation, it's often met with derision. While some commentators might agree that growth isn't doing us any favors, they also think degrowth is a fantasy – a fantasy that if implemented, could make the situation worse.  

Mark accepts that degrowth is unlikely to be embraced voluntarily.  

MARK DIESENDORF: Well, realistically, the kind of political changes that are needed will take decades, and we may not have decades. So it is very important to do the kind of groundwork to build a knowledge base so that when the opportunity for change occurs, when capitalism collapses, there is a better system waiting instead of anarchy. 

JEM BENDELL: Things are going so wrong so quickly that it's going to shake the foundations of our societies. It's going to have huge not just economic impacts, but huge impacts on our psyche, on our emotions, as we realise that we've just got trouble ahead, no matter how many wonderful policies are adopted, it's still just going to get worse. 

DAN ILIC: In 2018, Jem Bendell, a professor of sustainability leadership at Cumbria University, took a year off work to undertake in-depth review of the latest scientific literature on climate change. He ended up writing a paper and, as he’d done hundreds of times before, submitted it to an academic journal for review and publication. The reviewers asked Jem to make substantial changes, which he refused to do, believing them to be ‘impossible’ or ‘inappropriate’.  

Nevertheless, Jem’s work became something of a viral sensation. The paper, downloaded over 600,000 times, is called Deep Adaptation: A map for Navigating Climate Tragedy. It begins: 

“The purpose of this conceptual paper is to provide readers with an opportunity to reassess their work and life in the face of what I believe to be an inevitable near-term societal collapse due to climate change.” 

JEM BENDELL: That's an awful thing to accept. Particularly people also in climate science and climate policy, don't want to accept that. They want to argue that we can, humanity, all 8 billion of us change rapidly, reach net zero, and that will stabilise the climate. I think that's a gross misrepresentation of the science, and it reflects that how they don't want to admit to themselves or publicly that we should do as much as we can to reduce the risk, but we're no longer in control so we don't know whether it will work. 

DAN ILIC: Jem's conclusions mean that adaptations like building seawalls or growing drought resistant crops will be entirely superficial and inadequate. He argues that we need to think about preparation differently – that we need a new approach to adaptation.   

JEM BENDELL: So deep adaptation meant well, let's go deeper in terms of how we're going to cope emotionally, psychologically, how we're going to avoid making things worse by getting panicked and angry, how we can go deeper into what caused this tragedy, learn about what caused the tragedy, and try and create something better as societies breakdown around us. 

DAN ILIC: Jem is well aware that his ideas are difficult to stomach. And following the huge response to his writing, he wanted to help people find a way to process it. 

JEM BENDELL:  We think that we'll just be in a pit of despair and going nowhere, and yet we need to talk about it. So I thought, well, how do we start that then? And also how do we start talking about it in a way where we don't rush to solutions - who's going to fix it and so I can calm down again and get back to work. So I wanted to have a much more open ended, deliberative set of questions. 

DAN ILIC: The questions Jem developed sit within a framework he calls ‘the four Rs’ of deep adaptation.  

First up, ‘Resilience’. 

JEM BENDELL: What is it that I value that I most want to keep? And it can be to do with basic needs, but it can also be to do with how we are as people and our values and abilities and human rights and fairness in society. So I call that resilience. It was a simple one. So that's the first ‘R’ of adaptation. 

DAN ILIC: Next: ‘Relinquishment.’ 

JEM BENDELL: Then the second question, which will kind of the opposite of that, which is well, what should we let go of? Because if we cling on to certain privileges, comforts, expectations, that's only going to make matters worse. You can start with really simple things ironed shirts, but also relinquishing ideas of a very, well-to-do retirement that we would say so that you could relinquish all sorts of things. 

DAN ILIC: The third R is ‘Restoration’. 

JEM BENDELL: What did we used to have in our lives or in society, going back ten, 20, 30, maybe 100 years? What are those things that we could bring back that will help us? It can be as simple as well this wouldn't have been so scary to me, this news, if it had been like earlier, 50 years ago, when more than half my food came from my garden or my neighbor's garden. 

DAN ILIC: And the final R - ‘Reconciliation’. 

JEM BENDELL: We basically can't talk about this topic without our own mortality and the mortality and the risks of death to those we love. And so can we surface that and actually talk about death, risk suffering. And with that in mind and have a conversation about reconciliation. With whom and with what could we make peace with as we recognize our shared mortality  in this more uncertain and increasingly dangerous situation? 

If you respond in a panicked way, it can lead you into all kinds of aggression. So it calls for a far deeper commitment as activists, as citizens, as professionals, a deeper commitment to do what's right, even without any certainty that it's going to make much of a difference anymore. There’s a courage in there when you don't have certainty of outcome. 

DAN ILIC: In a culture very much attached to the idea that things can only get better, Jem’s ideas have been received with a fair whack of skepticism. 

  

JEM BENDELL: There's a sense within culture that that's negative, as in reflective of some kind of dark mental attitude. Perhaps, how someone doesn't believe in humans enough, doesn't believe in the capability of technology and capability of human society to conquer difficulties and progress forever, and therefore it's somehow misanthropic and unloving.  

It's precisely because you think that things are going to get worse you can be motivated to be your best self. You can stop postponing what's in your heart and stop pretending that, oh, you'll get to that later, because now you just got to focus on earning your money to pay your mortgage and progress up through the career. And so this pessimism can really shake you to the core. It's like, ‘Okay, if things are falling apart or what's really important to me, what do how do I want to live?’ That can be a positive pessimism rather than a nihilistic, apathetic, misanthropic version. 

DAN ILIC: Since publishing his book Breaking Together in 2023, Jem has quit his professorship at Cumbria and moved to Indonesia to help start a regenerative farm school. He's decided to live his values and prepare for ‘the end of the world as we know it ‘– or, as he would have it: an ‘uneven ending’; a collapse that is already in motion. 

 

JEM BENDELL: There's good evidence that it's all started since 2015, 2016. Around then, when we, the majority of countries worldwide have begun their persistent decline in standard of living and quality of life. And because it's global and because it's just being driven by fundamentals in food systems, climate systems, energy systems, money systems and so on. That, oh, it's not going to turn around. So the collapse has already begun. Its’ a process, ongoing. It's not helpful to think of some sort of cutoff date where everything suddenly stops. There will just be bits and bobs falling off society and breaking and not working. There's going to be all manner of disruptions and societies come under greater strain.  

If I’m right this changes everything for you. There’s no aspect of your life it doesn’t touch. So study it for yourself. It took years for me to change my life, for some people it takes 24 hours.  

DAN ILIC:  The collapse of civilizations is nothing new. It's played out many times throughout human history – and the patterns, the common denominators that have shadowed these events - be it for the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Myan's, the Romans - factors like complex systems, inequality, political instability, environmental degradation – do ring quite a few bells. But whether we can outwit nature, outrun the damage we’ve caused - and keep our nukes in our pants while we’re at it – well that remains to be seen.  

If Jem is right, if Mark is right – if all we can do is prepare for a very different kind of life – to change our expectations and ask ourselves some pointed questions - and teach our children to do the same – you might be comforted by knowing that you’re not alone and there are tools out there to help us prepare - to help us find some light in the dark.  

In the meantime, capitalism isn’t going anywhere – but efforts are being made to build some of the principles of ecological economics into the system that has for so long rejected it. Can putting a price on nature help us prepare for climate change?  

MIRI (MARGAET) RAVEN: How can that little coin or that piece of plastic money equate to a tree? That’s the abstractness of it. And there’s a lot of abstraction trying to create a value.  

DAN ILIC: That’s next time, on Preppers. 

Thanks for listening. 

If you’ve found any of this interesting why not tell someone about it? And we’d love it if you could follow, rate and maybe even write us a review.... it’s supposed to help other people find us. 

Preppers is a production of the UNSW Centre for Ideas - produced and written by Sabrina Organo with production support by Cassandra Steeth. Sound mix and design by Julian Wessels. And presented by me, Dan Ilic. 

This episode was made on the lands of the Bidjigal, Gundungurra, Tharawal, Durug, Tubbagah and Wilyakali peoples.