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In July 2024, all eyes will turn to Paris for the Summer Olympic Games. Spectators from around the globe will converge on the City of Light to watch athletes compete and to soak in the culture, romance and history of one of the world’s most recognizable cities.

But an iconic Paris landmark, the Notre Dame cathedral, will still be under renovation after a devastating fire that ignited in the cathedral and burned for 12 hours on April 14, 2019. When the last embers were extinguished, most of Notre Dame’s wood and metal roof was destroyed, and its majestic spire had vanished, consumed by flames.

Notre Dame is nearly 1,000 years old and has been damaged and repaired many times. Its last major renovation was in the mid-1800s. The massive beams that framed the structure were fashioned from European oak trees harvested 300 to 400 years ago.

Today, these trees are common throughout north-central Europe, but few are tall enough to replace Notre Dame’s roof lattice and spire, thanks to centuries of deforestation. Planners had to search nationwide for enough suitably large oaks for the restoration.

French foresters harvest centuries-old oak trees for the reconstruction of Notre Dame’s roof framing and spire.

As an archaeologist, I study long-term human interactions with nature. In my new book, “Understanding Imperiled Earth: How Archaeology and Human History Inform a Sustainable Future,” I describe how addressing modern environmental crises requires an understanding of deep history – not just written human records, but also ancient connections between humans and the natural world.

Many people assume that the devastating impacts humans have wrought on our planet came about with the industrial era, which began in the mid-1700s. But people have been transforming conditions on Earth for millennia. Looking backward can inform our journey forward.

From deforestation to reforestation

To see how this works, let’s consider the shortage of tall trees for Notre Dame from a wider perspective. Deforestation in Europe dates back at least 10,000 years to a time when early farmers swept across the continent, felling forests and creating agricultural and pastoral lands to form the landscapes of today.

Based on archaeological evidence, pollen-based modeling and written records, scientists have determined that forest cover across northern, central and western Europe reached its highest density about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, followed by a gradual decline over the intervening millennia. By AD 1700, people were farming on 250 million acres (100 million hectares) of agricultural fields, most of which had been created by clearing native European forests.

Volunteers plant native trees in a reforestation project in Scotland.

Millions of acres of timber became fuel for domestic hearths, and then for furnaces and boilers during the Industrial Revolution. This process was so transformative that renowned British geographer H. C. Darby, writing in 1954, called it “probably the most important single factor that has changed the European landscape.”

Most of these forests were lost long before scientists could study them, but historical detective work can fill in the missing information. By identifying charred plant remains from ancient fire pits and analyzing pollen from lake and soil cores, archaeologists can map where ancient forests once flourished, determine which species were represented and reconstruct what forests looked like.

Today, European nations are working to restore forests across the continent in order to slow climate change and species loss. With historical information about past forests, modern scientists can make better choices about which tree species to plant, select the best locations and project how the trees may respond to future climate change.

Understanding what’s possible

In the past 50 years, the rate and scale of human impacts on Earth have intensified. In what scholars have dubbed “the Great Acceleration,” human activities such as clearing forests, converting lands for farming and development, overharvesting wildlife and fisheries, and warming the atmosphere through widespread use of fossil fuels have altered conditions for life.

For people born during this era of dizzying change, it can be hard to picture life on Earth before humans remade it. Scientists have pointed out the danger of so-called “shifting baselines” – the widespread tendency to assume that the current depleted state of nature is how things have always been. Knowing how ecosystems used to look and function, and how human actions have changed them, makes the scale of conservation tasks more clear.

History offers insights into how the world once looked, long before globalization and industrial activities reshaped the planet. Discarded animal bones, charcoal fragments, broken stone tools and other flotsam and jetsam of the ancient past provide clues about the sizes and abundances of animal species, the location and composition of native forests and landscapes, and fluctuating atmospheric conditions. They also indicate how humans, plants and animals responded to these changes.

Informing a resilient future

The past can help modern societies confront today’s environmental challenges in innumerable ways. Understanding how takes careful historical detective work and scientific creativity. Here are a few examples:

Tracing where Indigenous fisherfolk collected black abalone for over 10,000 years can guide restoration efforts for this endangered species. Numerous examples of effective Indigenous strategies are emerging from recent archaeological and anthropological research, showcasing innovative land management, sustainable agriculture and community resilience practices that have been honed over centuries.
Understanding the history of deforestation and land conversion patterns can help health experts anticipate future pandemics. Many infectious diseases move from wildlife to humans, and human activities such as deforestation and urbanization are increasingly bringing humans and wildlife into closer contact. This heightens the risk of zoonotic disease transmission.
Museum collections can help scientists document and understand species declines and build effective strategies to fight the loss of global biodiversity. For example, museum collections of preserved amphibians have allowed scientists to track the spread of the deadly chytrid fungus, aiding in the development of targeted conservation strategies to protect vulnerable frog species.

DNA analysis of passenger pigeons in museum collections indicates that genetic factors may have contributed to the bird’s extinction, along with massive overhunting by humans.
Tim Evanson/Flickr

Humans can slow and, perhaps, reverse the ecological harms that they have caused, but Earth will never return to some past pristine state.

Nonetheless, I believe that history can help humans save Earth’s remaining wild, natural places that, along with cultural icons like Notre Dame, tell the stories of who we are. The goal is not to go backward, but to create a more resilient, sustainable and biodiverse planet. Läs mer…

In the past few years, the city of Austin, Texas, has approved the construction of thousands of windowless rooms in new apartment buildings next to The University of Texas at Austin.

Most of these rooms are being leased to UT students, resulting in a deterioration of their well-being.

In April 2024, the Austin City Council finally voted to ban the construction of windowless bedrooms.

As a professor at UT’s School of Architecture, I see this ban as a belated but welcomed development. For 25 years, I have given my students an assignment called “My Window,” where I ask them to draw a section of the window in their bedroom. In 2021, some students started to tell me that they did not have a window in their room.

I was shocked because, as a practicing architect, I had always assumed that windowless bedrooms were illegal. Some students started to share with me photographs of their rooms and what dozens of students have described as their terrible experiences living in them.

Adverse effects on mental health

A common complaint is “messed up circadian cycles” and the development of “depression and fatigue.” They try to avoid their rooms as much as possible. One student told me about experiencing “unbearable loneliness and claustrophobia caused by the four solid walls.” Another one lamented waking up “with anxiety every morning.”

As soon as I learned that windowless bedrooms were being built in Austin, I started advocating to ban them. I have asked the City Council to act, via letters and in op-eds. I have educated myself on the issue and shared my views with architects, professors and students in multiple venues.

Students have mobilized, too. In the spring of 2023, they ran a survey to compare students’ experiences living in rooms with and without windows. Students who lived in rooms without windows scored lower in all the categories on a well-known scale that measures well-being.

In a September 2023 [letter to Austin’s City Council], 762 students demanded a ban on windowless rooms. “Our city’s negligence to defend its citizens is being weaponized by developers as a means of profit,” they wrote. They also pointed out that windowless rooms are illegal in cities such as New York City and Madrid.

Not legal elsewhere

Indeed, in New York City – as in major cities around the world – windowless bedrooms are illegal. A percentage of the room’s floor area, set in each city’s building code, determines the minimum window size. In New York City, every bedroom must have a window area at least 10% the size of the room’s floor area; in Madrid, 12%; and in Mexico City, 15%.

In Austin, the number has been 0% until the recent ban.

Why? There is a simple reason: Austin, like most cities in the U.S., follows the International Building Code, and this code has a glaring loophole. Its lighting section states: “Every space intended for human occupancy shall be provided with natural light by means of exterior glazed openings in accordance with Section 1204.2 or shall be provided with artificial light in accordance with Section 1204.3.”

The code then goes into great detail on the specific requirements for each situation. But the word “or” leaves the door open for some developers to interpret the code to mean that natural light is optional.

To protect themselves against those developers, cities such as Chicago and Washington, D.C., have closed the loophole by simply replacing “or” with “and” in their adopted codes. Austin is finally doing precisely that. The recently approved code revision will ban windowless bedrooms when it takes effect on May 20, 2024.

Putting profits first

Unfortunately, developers have already exploited the loophole and built thousands of windowless bedrooms that soon will no longer be legal to build but will be legal to continue to be leased.

Windowless rooms have not resulted in lower rents for students in Austin. Moreover, during my two-year campaign to ban windowless rooms, no developer has spoken in their favor in front of the Austin City Council.

They have been quietly building them for as long as they have been able to because student housing is very profitable, and more so when windowless rooms are allowed.

How come? Because a bulky building, with interior rooms away from the facade, can capture more interior space with a smaller ratio of exterior walls, which are more expensive to build than interior walls.

A vulnerable population

Namratha Thrikutam, a UT architecture student, sums up the predicament of her peers living in windowless rooms: “Students are a population that developers know they can take advantage of.”

A University of Texas at Austin student’s windowless room.
Juan Miro

“We don’t have as much money. We don’t have as much standing in the world. We don’t have as much experience about things that we’ve been through, so it’s very easy to take advantage of us,” she told the Daily Texan, UT Austin’s official newspaper.

Lured by the proximity to campus, students in windowless rooms try to cope with abundant room decoration, circadian rhythm LED lighting, mental therapy or medication.

For example, an exchange student from Spain who had unknowingly leased a windowless room contacted me asking for help. She told me that, being illegal in her hometown of Barcelona, it never crossed her mind that the room she had leased before arriving in Austin could be windowless.

She described her anxiety and deteriorating mental health after just a few days in her unit. When I wrote on her behalf to her building manager requesting a room with a window, they responded: “We do not promise windows in any of our rooms. Like other buildings in the Austin area, windows are not promised.” Shockingly, their leases do not disclose the absence of windows either.

Much like immigrants in New York City’s tenement buildings in the 1850s, UT students have been left to fend for themselves. Austin has failed them by approving the construction of thousands of windowless units.

UT, a top-tier public university, has failed them by not providing enough university housing and by remaining silent during the campaign to ban windowless rooms. The university’s position is based on the fact that West Campus “falls under the city of Austin’s jurisdiction,” according to a statement obtained by The Conversation.

My position is: Yes, but these are your students asking for help.

And architects have failed students by willingly designing windowless rooms. In doing so, architects have ignored one of the core guidelines of the American Institute of Architects: “to consider the physical, mental, and emotional effects a building has on its occupants.”

Some UT students walk this hallway in a new building in West Campus to access their windowless rooms.
Juan Miro

Changes sought

The experiences of students living in windowless rooms in Austin should serve as a cautionary tale for authorities who control building codes. If windowless rooms are already illegal in your city, keep it that way. If they are not, ban them as soon as possible. If not, students and other vulnerable populations such as immigrants, seniors and low-income people would always be a potential target for developers.

In the meantime, and to protect these populations, I am working with other concerned architects across the U.S. in closing the loophole at the source, by directly modifying the International Building Code instead of assuming that each city will close it by amending their codes locally, as Austin just did.

It is a slow and bureaucratic process, but, ultimately, the message should be clear: Having natural light in buildings should be a human right, not a developer’s choice. Läs mer…

Video games are big business. The value of the global market is pushing the US$200 billion mark (£158 billion): bigger than the music industry and Hollywood combined. But the gaming industry has also been facing challenges. The market is shrinking from its peak at the height of the pandemic, and there has been a rash of layoffs and studio closures.

In this uncertain environment, game developers are, more than ever, looking to create experiences that stay with their players. A great deal of effort goes into visual elements, including the appearance and overt behaviour of characters, for example. But at the level of subjective experience, the inner worlds of gaming characters are not so often explored.

This is where the science comes in. My research over the last 30 years has been about inner experience: the things in our minds that we are conscious of, such as thoughts, memories, inner dialogue, visual imagery, feelings and emotions. Traditionally considered impossible to study because of its private nature, inner experience is becoming established as an important field of cognitive science. And it has the potential to transform gaming.

In so many ways, video games just keep getting better and better. With the shift toward mobile gaming, the question for studios has become less about how to persuade people to buy this product (they may be downloading it for free) but to keep coming back to it.

Graphics are becoming ever more vivid and lifelike. What studios are doing with audio design is stunning. The player feels they are actually there in that medieval village or that rainforest or on that spaceship travelling between galaxies. And yet a common criticism of many games is – still – that they are just like watching a film.

That’s a puzzle, because of how gaming, more than other media, creates so much potential for a truly interactive experience. You are not just watching that ship sailing across the galaxy; you are captaining it. You can choose your body shape and physical skills, and see them depicted there on the screen in astonishingly lifelike detail. But these qualities are mostly on the surface, at the level of appearance and overt behaviour.

How could gaming go deeper into inner experience? Here’s one example. Many people report having a silent, internal conversation with themselves for much of the time. Our research has shown that inner speech comes in several different forms and has varied functions in thinking, planning and emotion regulation. But when inner speech is depicted in video games, it tends to lack the qualities and variety that make the experience so different between people.

All minds are different.
Lewis Tse/Shutterstock

Another example is the kind of memory we have for the events of our own lives. Autobiographical memory can take different perspectives, vary in vividness and show a range of multisensory qualities. Memory does not work like a video camera, but instead brings together sights, sounds, smells and other kinds of information in a dynamic, endlessly shifting way. We are even beginning to understand how these different qualities of memory are realised in the brain.

Opening the black box

Making a game is fundamentally about creating an experience – seeding an experience in the mind of its player.

When we do get to share a game character’s inner experience, it tends to lack the variety and nuance that the science tells us is there: the different qualities of inner speech, the various features of memory and visual imagination. The inside of a game character’s mind is often a black box.

There are of course exceptions to this rule. In Disco Elysium, for example, you can play with the main character’s thoughts and mental attributes in an unusual way. This text-based game was, however, limited in what it could do to depict the subjective qualities of inner experience – the colourful pageant of the everyday mind.

To give an example of a game I consulted on, Hellblade is the multi-award-winning story of an eighth-century Pictish warrior, Senua, whose inner experience is distinctive in that she hears voices and has other unusual perceptions and beliefs. In the first game, Senua’s Sacrifice, and in its just-about-to-be-released sequel, Senua’s Saga, Senua experiences psychosis, and you as player share these experiences with her.

I think the gaming industry can only benefit from understanding inner experience better. What I hope we’ll see is a more fluid, realistic, immersive gaming experience where the inner worlds of gaming characters live and breathe as much as their actions in the game world.

As well as having the potential to create new, interesting and memorable takes on the gaming experience, this work has real-world implications for accessibility, mental health, neurodiversity and sensory inclusion.

In fact, our starting point is that there is no such thing as a “normal” mind – we are all different, and our own minds differ from moment to moment. Rather than just taking your own mind into the gaming experience, gaming provides an exhilarating opportunity to experience a different kind of mind while you are there.

Gaming has incredible potential to work for good. Most of all, it’s not about some worthy educational ideal. Games are – and should be – about having fun. Beyond opening up creative possibilities for game developers and players, I believe that knowing more about our own inner experience can be helpful, restorative, even therapeutic. Gaming is a powerful way to push that ideal forward. Läs mer…

For decades, people who want to end their life with the help of a doctor, and who have the means to do so, have travelled to a handful of countries, commonly Switzerland, for euthanasia.

But gradually, more countries around the world have begun to permit some form of assisted dying. Politicians in a number of others, including Ireland, Scotland and France, are now seriously debating it.

In Canada, where medical assistance in dying (Maid) became legal in 2016, the government intends to extend eligibility to people whose sole reason for ending their life is mental illness. But that planned expansion, now twice delayed, is deeply controversial.

In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak to a leading psychiatrist about the situation in Canada and why he’s a vocal opponent of the expansion.

When Karandeep Sonu Gaind began working as a psychiatrist more than 20 years ago, there were no assisted dying laws on the horizon in Canada. He never envisaged his role as a doctor would extend to helping patients end their life. “All of that changed quite recently, and in a relatively short space of time,” he said.

In 2016, Canada passed a law allowing medically assisted dying for people who were dying or terminally ill. Alongside his role at as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Toronto, Gaind was then chief-of-psychiatry at the city’s Humber River Hospital.

He became chair of the hospital’s Maid panel, setting up policies around the new law and initially having an oversight role of clinical cases. “I did believe there were some circumstances in which we could compassionately offer this pathway for people to avoid a painful death,” said Gaind. But he’s deeply concerned about the expansions that have happened since.

A court case led to the 2021 extension of Maid to those whose illness or disability is not necessarily fatal, but is incurable and causes unbearable suffering. Then the following year, the Canadian government announced plans to extend Maid to those suffering solely from mental illness, also known as psychiatric euthanasia.

The expansion was due to come into force in March 2023, but was delayed until March 2024. Then in February, a few weeks before the new provision was due to start, the government announced a delay until March 2027. If this is eventually happpens, Canada will join a handful of other countries – the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland – in permitting psychiatric euthanasia.

Read more:
Should people suffering from mental illness be eligible for medically assisted death? Canada plans to legalize that in 2027 – a philosopher explains the core questions

Those in favour of extending eligibility to those solely suffering from mental illness argue not to do so is a form of discrimination and restricts a person’s autonomy.

But Gaind says these arguments overlook what he believes are distinct differences between assisted dying for those suffering from physical and mental illness – for example, around whether a particular condition is irremediable, or whether the person has a medical condition that will not improve.

We need to be able to assess and predict for each patient whether or not they will get better from their medical condition. And unlike things like cancer [and] other medical conditions where, especially when they’re at an advanced stage, their outcome is far more predictable, for mental illnesses, all of the evidence across the world shows us we simply cannot make those predictions with any honesty.

In 2022, the last year for which numbers are available, more than 13,000 people ended their life through Maid, 4% of all deaths in Canada. (For comparison, in the Netherlands, where assisted dying has been legal in some form since 2002, it accounted for around 5% of all deaths in 2022.) Gaind believes Canada is already an outlier in the way its expanding eligibility, and he’s concerned about the reasons people are seeking to end their life.

It’s led to a situation where people are able to get Maid fuelled by all sorts of life suffering. And we’re seeing this, including things like poverty, including things like lack of access to care.

Listen to the full interview with Karandeep Sonu Gaind on The Conversation Weekly podcast, plus an introduction from Patricia Nicholson, health and medicine editor at The Conversation in Canada.

A transcript of this episode will be available shortly.

This episode of The Conversation Weekly was written by Gemma Ware and produced by Mend Mariwany and Katie Flood. Sound design was by Eloise Stevens, and our theme music is by Neeta Sarl. Stephen Khan is our global executive editor and Soraya Nandy does our transcripts.

Newsclips in this episode from Global News.

You can find us on Instagram at theconversationdotcom or via email. You can also subscribe to The Conversation’s free daily email here.

Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feed or find out how else to listen here. Läs mer…

A Coalition government would drastically slash migration as its main way of freeing up more than 100,000 homes over five years, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has promised in his budget reply.

A Dutton government would reduce Australia’s permanent migration program by a quarter – from 185,000 to 140,000 for the first two years “in recognition of the urgency of this crisis”, Dutton said.

The program would then increase to 150,000 in the third year and 160,000 in the fourth.

In making the cut, the Coalition would ensure there were enough visas for those with building and construction skills to support house building.

The refugee and humanitarian program would be cut back to 13,750 from its present 20,000. “Excessive” foreign student numbers would also be reduced.

Based on Opposition Source.

Also, a Coalition government would impose a ban for two years on foreign investors and temporary residents buying existing homes.

“We believe that by rebalancing the migration program and taking decisive action on the housing crisis, the Coalition would free up more than 100,000 additional homes over the next five years.”

The Albanese government is already committed to a big reduction in migration. According to Tuesday’s budget papers, net overseas migration is forecast to fall from 395,000 in 2023–24 to 260,000 in 2024–25.

Immigration and the housing crisis were central themes in Dutton’s address, around the slogan of getting the country “Back on Track”, and delivered to the House of Representatives on Thursday night. Dutton said under Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, “the great Australian dream of home ownership has turned into a nightmare.”

Inflation ‘a huge problem for Australia’

Dutton labelled the budget “irresponsible” and declared inflation “a huge problem for Australia”.

“On comparative inflation, Australia is worse than the US, Singapore, Germany, Spain, Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, South Korea, Canada, France, and the entire Euro area.”

Dutton said any further rise in interest rates and inflation “rests squarely on the shoulders of this prime minister”.

He condemned “magic pudding spending and A$13.7 billion on corporate welfare for billionaires” – a reference to budget tax breaks for green hydrogen and critical minerals processing. The Coalition will oppose these subsidies, which are not due to start until 2027.

The Coalition would not spend this money, Dutton said. “These projects should stand up on their own without the need for taxpayers’ money.”

Dutton confirmed the opposition would support the budget’s $300 universal energy relief but said the government was “treating the symptom, not the disease”.

“To alleviate cost-of-living pressures, we need to get inflation down.”

A Coalition government would wind back inflationary spending and Labor’s intervention, remove the complexity and hostility of Labor’s industrial relations agenda, provide lower, simpler and fairer taxes, deliver better competition policy and ensure Australians had affordable and reliable energy.

Dutton promised the Coalition would extend the value of assets eligible for the instant asset write-off to $30,000 and make this ongoing for small businesses.

Dutton recommended nuclear power but did not provide any new details, beyond what he has said before.

He also recommitted to allowing people dip into their superannuation for housing.

On “law and order”, he said a Coalition government would work with the states and territories to develop uniform knife laws. Bail laws would be tightened.

Online crime would be tackled – it would be made an offence to post criminal acts online.

Labor-Greens deal to pass PRRT and fuel efficiecy standards

Labor, in a deal with the Greens, won agreement to finally secure its legislation to bring forward revenue on the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax.

The deal also covered support for the fuel efficiency standards legislation. In return, the government agreed to shelve changes relating to the handling of offshore oil and gas approvals. Läs mer…

Climate change is making the symptoms of certain brain conditions worse, our new review has found. Conditions that can worsen as temperature and humidity rise include stroke, migraines, meningitis, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease and Parkinson’s.

Our brains are responsible for managing the environmental challenges we face, especially higher temperatures and humidity, for example by triggering sweating and telling us to move out of the sun and into the shade.

Each of the billions of neurons in our brain is like a learning, adapting computer, with many electrically active components. Many of these components work at a different rate depending on the ambient temperature, and are designed to work together within a narrow range of temperatures. Our bodies, and all their components, work well within these limits to which we have adapted over millennia.

Humans evolved in Africa and are generally comfortable between 20˚C to 26˚C and 20% to 80% humidity. Many of the components of the brain are, in fact, working close to the top of their temperature ranges, meaning that small increases in temperature or humidity may mean they stop working so well together.

When those environmental conditions move rapidly into unaccustomed ranges, as is happening with extreme temperatures and humidity related to climate change, our brain struggles to regulate our temperature and begins to malfunction.

Some diseases can already disrupt perspiration, essential to keeping cool, or our awareness of being too hot. Some drugs used to treat neurological and psychiatric conditions further complicate the problem by compromising the body’s ability to react – reducing sweating or disturbing the temperature-regulating machinery in our brain.

These effects are made worse by heatwaves. For example, heatwaves disturb sleep, and disturbed sleep makes conditions such as epilepsy worse. Heatwaves can make faulty wiring in the brain work even less well, which is why symptoms in people with multiple sclerosis can get worse in the heat. And higher temperatures can make the blood thicker and more prone to clot due to dehydration during heatwaves, leading to strokes.

So it is clear that climate change will affect many people with neurological diseases, often in many different ways. With rising temperatures, admissions to hospital for dementia are more common. Seizure control can deteriorate in epilepsy, symptoms worsen in multiple sclerosis and the incidence of stroke rises, with more stroke-related deaths. Many common and serious psychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia, are also worsened and their hospital admission rates rise.

In the 2003 European heatwave, around 20% of the excess deaths were of people with neurological conditions.

Unseasonal local temperature extremes, larger than usual temperature fluctuations across the day, and adverse weather events, like heatwaves, storms and floods, can all worsen neurological conditions. These consequences are further complicated by particular circumstances. The heating effect of city environments and lack of green spaces, for example, can amplify the harms of a heatwave on neurological and psychiatric diseases.

The global scale of those with neurological and psychiatric conditions that could be adversely affected by climate change is huge. About 60 million people have epilepsy worldwide. Globally, about 55 million people have dementia, with over 60% living in low- and middle-income countries. As the world’s population ages, these numbers are projected to increase to over 150 million by 2050. Stroke is the second-leading cause of death and a leading cause of disability worldwide.

A lack of green spaces can amplify the harms to people with neurological conditions during a heatwave.
Marc Bruxelle /Alamy Stock Photo

Offering help

The broader need to tackle climate change itself is clear. Mitigation measures led by governments with international coordination are needed now. But it will be years before serious efforts start to make a real difference. In the meantime, we can help people with neurological diseases by providing tailored information about the risks of adverse weather events and temperature extremes.

Doctors and public health experts can explain how to reduce those risks. We can adapt local weather-health alert systems to neurological diseases. We can also work with those affected, their families and carers, to ensure weather-health alerts and responses make sense for affected communities and can be implemented.

Unless we start addressing climate change as part of neurological care, the benefits of scientific advances being made are at risk of being lost. Perhaps most importantly, neurological diseases offer insights into what could happen to the healthy brain pushed beyond evolutionarily derived boundaries and the behavioural capacity to adapt.

This possibility grows increasingly likely as we continue to fail to tackle climate change. To continue to live the lives we want, we should pay more attention to the sensation that it is getting too hot and act against climate change. We depend on our brains: climate change is bad for them. Läs mer…

This week’s budget was Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ third and – for practical purposes – final for the current parliamentary term.

Even if the 2025 election is delayed long enough to give Labor another budget, that speech would represent more of an election manifesto than any deliverable legislation.

We are therefore now in a position to assess the Albanese government’s record on public spending and taxation.

Most strikingly, the Albanese government’s electoral strategy has constrained it to do little more than tweak the policy settings it inherited from the previous government, and adopt them as its own.

There’s nothing new about opposition parties campaigning on a “small target” strategy. Howard, Rudd and Abbott all did the same. But on attaining office, those prime ministers all became notably bolder.

In stark contrast, the Albanese government appears to have acted less ambitiously in office than it did when seeking election.

Read more:
At a glance: the 2024 federal budget split four ways

Constrained on both income and spending

This softness is likely due in part to the size of the commitments Labor made to eliminate any policy differences that could have cost the party votes in the 2022 election.

On the revenue side, Albanese rejected all the revenue-enhancing measures Labor had fruitlessly taken to the 2019 election.

What remained were the massively expensive Stage 3 tax cuts, which ensured the ratio of tax revenue to the size of the economy would shrink over the government’s term in office. This was only exacerbated by a decline in export earnings for coal and iron ore.

The restructuring of the Stage 3 tax cuts – hastily announced in the lead-up to the Dunkley by-election – did make them much less regressive.

But the modified version will only partially offset the the expiry of the low and middle income earners tax offset, and by my calculations will still deliver big gains to the top 40% of earners. More relevantly, at least in the budget context, the cuts’ cost in terms of tax revenue was unchanged.

The federal government has allocated more than $2 billion to the AUKUS project in just the next financial year.
Aaron Bunch/AAP

The government is also constrained on the expenditure side. Albanese’s enthusiastic embrace of the AUKUS agreement commitment has loaded the budget with hundreds of billions of dollars in future commitments, with several billion already allocated in the current budget.

The failure of successive governments to find new sources of funding for the National Disability Insurance Scheme has only added to these difficulties.

Yet despite all these constraints, the government has been unable to resist a few (it hopes) vote-grabbing extravagances. Perhaps the most lavish was the decision to provide federal funding for a new football stadium in Hobart.

More recently, the government announced it would spend a billion dollars to chase the dream of a quantum computer, one of those revolutionary technologies that has been “just over the horizon” for decades.

And of course, the headline item in the current budget, a once-off $300 discount on every household’s energy bills.

Labor doesn’t look like Labor anymore

Welfare payments again missed out on a boost in this year’s budget.
James Ross/AAP

The combination of these constraints with an imperative to deliver budget surpluses means little – if anything – has been put aside to pursue the traditional goals of a Labor government.

Instead, we’ve seen largely symbolic measures puffed up to appear impressive. Most of these are better viewed as adjustments to keep policy set by the previous government on course.

An automatic inflation adjustment for welfare benefits was touted by the prime minister as “the biggest increase to the pension in 30 years”.

But meanwhile, the government has steadfastly resisted pressure to raise Jobseeker benefits to a liveable level, reluctantly squeezing out an extra $20 a week last year (Scott Morrison gave $50).

Read more:
The budget couldn’t include every ’good idea’ but not boosting JobSeeker and the Youth Allowance were obvious misses

The Housing Australia Future Fund is presented as a $10 billion program to deliver over 30,000 houses. But it will be delivered as a modest subsidy of just $500 million annually, enough to build perhaps 2,000 modest homes per year. The program has since been overtaken by more extensive action at the state level.

For university students, the government has materially changed the HECS indexation formula. But it has left in place the Job Ready Graduates fee structure, a poorly thought out increase in the cost of degrees in the humanities and other subjects pushed out in the dying days of the Morrison government by Education Minister Dan Tehan.

On top of this, the underfunding of public schools has if anything become worse, with the ambitions of the Gonski program indefinitely deferred.

Read more:
Funding might change, but Job-ready Graduates stays for now. What does the budget fine print say about higher education?

On health, the government has taken measures to arrest the alarming fall in bulk billing which began under the Morrison government. But it’s yet to return rates to the levels present when it took office.

Rates of bulk billing have steadied, but remain at worrying lows.
Dave Hunt/AAP

More ambitious proposals – like free cancer treatment and dental care for pensioners – were abandoned after the 2019 election, and have not resurfaced.

No guarantee of a second term

The “three-term” theory pushed by the Albanese government’s supporters was that a solid performance in the first term of office would lay the groundwork for more transformative policies in the (assumed guaranteed) second and third terms.

Leaving aside the fact that a second term no longer appears certain, there seems to be no evidence this is actually happening. Läs mer…

At Cumberland City Council in the western suburbs of Sydney, one man – Councillor Steve Christou – persuaded the council to ban books about same-sex parenting from the council’s libraries.

The change was short-lived. People fought back. More than 40,000 signed a petition to lift the ban.

Only two weeks later, the Council reversed its decision, voting decisively (13-2), following impassioned pleas by residents, and with many people protesting on the streets.

Librarians under attack

Librarians are leaders in the fight against book bans. They have faced significant backlash for their efforts. Australian Library and Information Association CEO Cathie Warburton has reported that

people are going into libraries, grabbing books off the shelves, reading them out loud and saying “These shouldn’t be here”, calling librarians horrible names and threatening doxxing and physical violence. It’s incredibly distressing.

Book banning efforts are often highly coordinated. People distribute lists of books that may (or may not) be in the collections of their local libraries. These culture-war attacks on libraries and librarians are often motivated by grievances against progress, such as LGBTQ+ visibility and acceptance, and other forms of diversity.

But they are also part of a wider reactionary movement. The issues extend beyond the specific content of individual books. Calls for book bans are evidence of a broader moral panic that presents a real danger to individuals and society at large.

Libraries and librarians are common targets because they are easy for the public to access, and because they represent (and foster) learning, ideas, imagination, equality, choice and barrier-free access to information for all.

Would-be book banners have very rarely read the books they challenge. When books are read, they are far less likely to be banned.

Histories of censorship

The Cumberland episode is only the latest in the global struggle for freedom of information access. Such censorship dates back at least as far as Shakespeare. The first American book ban occurred in 1637, when Thomas Morton’s New English Canaan was suppressed for its criticisms of Puritanism.

The issue remains highly contentious in the United States. PEN America’s latest report shows a 33% rise in the number of book challenges in US public schools, with almost 6,000 instances of books banned since 2021.

The Alabama House of Representatives recently passed Bill HB385. If it passes the Senate, the bill will override libraries’ book challenge policies. Librarians would have seven days to remove contentious material or face criminal penalties.

Australia also has a long history of censorship. Many titles we now consider “classics” faced bans, including Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, James Baldwin’s Another Country and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. As literary historian Nicole Moore documented, it was once “routine to have your suitcase searched [for obscene materials] on the way into Australia from another country”.

More recently, in March 2023, Maia Kobabe’s award-winning memoir Gender Queer was removed from a Queensland library, and faced many other challenges, globally. Bernard Gaynor, the conservative Catholic activist who led the call to ban the book, is taking the Minister for Communication and the Australian Classification Review Board to the Federal Court of Australia. The decision will come later this year.

Censorship remains a local – and global – concern.

In Australia, many titles we consider ‘classics’ were once banned.
Lotus Studio/Shutterstock

Information access for all

Professional librarians have battled these kinds of challenges for decades. The American Library Association, founded in 1876, issued its first anti-censorship notice in 1939, in response to Nazi book burning and other international attempts to suppress information.

In 1953, the American Library Association issued their Freedom to Read statement, with ongoing support for libraries challenging book bans across the United States.

In a joint statement, the Australian Library and Information Association and the Australian Public Library Alliance explain that libraries “defend equity of access to information” and “cater for all members of the library community”.

This position reflects global standards for information access upheld by libraries worldwide. It includes the key principle that the “perception that material may offend or cause controversy to a person or a group of people is not, of itself, a reason to limit purchase or provision of an item containing that material”.

The International Federation of Library Associations states that censorship “runs counter to Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights”. Libraries are expected to:

provide collections and services that are free of intentional censorship
base decisions on professional considerations (e.g., quality, currency, format, cost, etc.), rather than limiting based on political or religious considerations or cultural prejudice
educate people on issues of censorship and encourage them to practise freedom of expression and freedom of access to information
advocate for removal of censorship restrictions affecting libraries and society at large.

Policies and procedures

Librarians do more than handle attempts to ban books. They develop policies and procedures designed to ensure free access to information, for everyone. They are expert professionals, whose jobs often require difficult selection decisions and challenging conversations with angry or offended community members.

Libraries already have established processes to handle removal requests. They apply guidance from professional associations, including resources like the Selection & Reconsideration Policy Toolkit for Public, School, & Academic Libraries.

Requests to remove materials often start with informal conversations to address concerns and educate complainants about the library’s mandate for equitable access based on the whole community’s needs and interests. A formal process often requires a written submission. Library staff will then reconsider the book in light of the library’s collection policy.

Removing books from a collection does happen, as librarians must ensure the collection remains useful and relevant. Libraries routinely consult with community members and seek feedback to ensure collections match community needs. They also review materials to ensure outdated works (for example, older editions) are replaced with texts that include current information.

These are some of the routine, behind-the-scenes tasks, which collections librarian Scarlet Galvan explains are critical to ensure “collections are for use, not reinforcing assumptions”.

The need for community involvement

Librarians rely on individuals and communities to stand up and oppose censorship, as residents did in Cumberland. Vocal community and government support for libraries is critical to battling book bans. Many other professions, such as journalism and teaching, also play critical roles in documenting censorship and countering book challenges.

So how can you help? By signing petitions, speaking up at council meetings, volunteering to serve on a library board, voting for candidates who support libraries, and borrowing books about diverse families to ensure they have a circulation record of being used and valued.

As the outcry over the short-lived Cumberland City Council ban shows, everyday Australians value libraries and the information they provide to their communities. Public support is needed to defend against future attacks and to send a message to governments that banning books is not acceptable. Läs mer…

HIV prevention was allocated A$43.9 million over three years in this week’s federal budget. Some $26m of this is for “PrEP” for people without access to Medicare.

PrEP means pre-exposure prophylaxis – the preventative use of antiretroviral medication in people who don’t have HIV, but who are at risk of it.

Antiretroviral medications are the drugs used to treat HIV, but if used before exposure, can prevent someone acquiring the virus.

Here’s why this extra funding is so important, what it means for people at risk of HIV, and for public health more broadly.

Why take PrEP?

PrEP is highly effective at preventing HIV. It does this by stopping HIV replicating in the body, preventing the establishment of a chronic (long-term) infection.

It has some major advantages over other ways to prevent acquiring HIV, such as condoms.

First, it allows people to plan their HIV prevention ahead of time and not have to use something in the heat of the moment. Second, it enables a person who has receptive sex – whether anal, vaginal or both – to be in control of their own protection, and not have to rely on the actions of their partner(s).

There are different types

Currently, there are two ways to take PrEP in Australia – as a daily pill or “on demand”. There is an injectable form, but this is not yet widely available.

“On demand” involves four tablets. You take two pills immediately before sex, one a day afterwards, and another the day after that. It is fiddlier than daily dosage, but good for people who have risky sex periodically.

For most gay and bisexual men, the efficacy of these three types of PrEP is roughly equivalent. But “on demand” PrEP is less effective for vaginal sex because the drug concentration is lower in the vagina. “On demand” PrEP is also not useful for people with chronic hepatitis B, because the episodic use of PrEP drugs could increase the risk of resistance to hepatitis B treatment.

There are different types of PrEP for preventing HIV.
Daisy Daisy/Shutterstock

Is PrEP on Medicare?

PrEP is currently subsidised under the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme for people with access to Medicare. And there are high levels of uptake in Australian-born gay and bisexual men.

But access for overseas-born gay and bisexual men has been an issue. Many temporary residents and visitors to Australia are not eligible for Medicare. This is a problem not only for someone who might be at risk of acquiring HIV, but also for public health.

Funding PrEP for people not eligible for Medicare is part of a suite of interventions that aims to optimise Australia’s HIV response.

Australia is aiming to eliminate HIV transmission by 2030. This means reducing HIV transmission to below 91 new cases a year, at which point it is deemed no longer a public health threat.

Early diagnosis is vital

While HIV diagnoses in Australia are low, 44% of them in 2022 were classified as “late” diagnoses. This means that by the point of diagnosis people had already sustained significant immune damage, indicating they had likely been living with HIV for some years.

Early diagnosis of HIV means people can access effective treatment. This treatment stops immune suppression, meaning people can live long, healthy lives. Treatment also means they can’t transmit HIV to their sexual partners. But a late diagnosis means people did not seek testing for many years, did not know they were living with HIV, and may have inadvertently exposed others. This is bad for the individual, and for public health.

HIV testing, then, is the cornerstone of an effective HIV response. The provision of new money in this week’s federal budget to expand testing options is therefore welcome.

One of these initiatives is $3.8m to make HIV self-tests from vending machines more widely available. Another $2.5 million has been allocated to expand self-testing kits available by mail.

Both these programs provide a discreet way for people to access testing without having to face another person. They are intended to address the barrier of shame or stigma some people may fear in accessing in-person services. They also avoid the expense of seeing a GP for testing.

How our HIV response has changed

Over the past 40 years there have been major highlights in the response to HIV: the advent of combination therapy, which transformed a life-threatening infection to a chronic, manageable illness; the discovery that antiretrovirals could work as prevention; and the treatment that prevents people with HIV from transmitting to sexual partners.

In comparison, these new initiatives may seem modest, but that would underestimate their importance. In responding to barriers that could exclude people from the prevention and care services they need, this funding supports the lofty goal of eliminating HIV. Läs mer…

New Caledonia’s capital city, Noumea, has endured widespread violent rioting over the past 48 hours. This crisis intensified rapidly, taking local authorities by surprise.

Peaceful protests had been occurring across the country in the preceding weeks as the French National Assembly in Paris deliberated on a Constitutional Amendment that would increase the territory’s electoral roll. As the date for the vote grew closer, however, protests became more obstructive and by Monday night had spiralled into uncontrolled violence.

Since then, countless public buildings, business locations and private dwellings have been subjected to arson. Blockades erected by protesters prevent movement around greater Noumea. Four people have died. Security reinforcements have been deployed, the city is under nightly curfew, and a state of emergency has been declared. Citizens in many areas of Noumea are now also establishing their own neighbourhood protection militias.

To understand how this situation has spiralled so quickly, it’s important to consider the complex currents of political and socioeconomic alienation at play.

The political dispute

At one level, the crisis is political, reflecting contention over a constitutional vote taken in Paris that will expand citizens’ voting rights. The change adds roughly 25,000 voters to the electoral role in New Caledonia by extending voting rights to French people who’ve lived on the island for ten years. This reform makes clear the political power that France continues to exercise over the territory.

The death toll has now increased to four.

The current changes have proven divisive because they undo provisions in the 1998 Noumea Accord, particularly the restriction of voting rights. The accord was designed to “rebalance” political inequalities so the interests of Indigenous Kanaks and the descendants of French settlers would be equally recognised. This helped to consolidate peace between these groups after a long period of conflict in the 1980s, known locally as “the evenements”.

A loyalist group of elected representatives in New Caledonia’s parliament reject the contemporary significance of “rebalancing” (in French “rééquilibrage”) with regard to the electoral status of Kanak people. They argue after three referendums on the question of New Caledonian Independence, held between 2018 and 2021, all of which produced a majority no vote, the time for electoral reform is well overdue. This position is made clear by Nicolas Metzdorf. A key loyalist, he defined the constitutional amendment, which was passed by the National Assembly in Paris on Tuesday, as a vote for democracy and “universalism”.

Yet this view is roundly rejected by Kanak pro-Independence leaders who say these amendments undermine the political status of Indigenous Kanak people, who constitute a minority of the voting population. These leaders also refuse to accept that the decolonisation agenda has been concluded, as loyalists assert.

Instead, they dispute the outcome of the final 2021 referendum which, they argue, was forced on the territory by French authorities too soon after the outbreak of the COVID pandemic. This disregarded the fact that Kanak communities bore disproportionate impacts of the pandemic and were unable able to fully mobilise before the vote. Demands that the referendum be delayed were rejected, and many Kanak people abstained as a result.

In this context, the disputed electoral reforms decided in Paris this week are seen by pro-Independence camps as yet another political prescription imposed on Kanak people. A leading figure of one Indigenous Kanak women’s organisation described the vote to me as a solution that pushes “Kanak people into the gutter”, one that would have “us living on our knees”.

Beyond the politics

Many political commentators are likening the violence observed in recent days to the political violence of the 1980s evenements, which exacted a heavy toll on the country. Yet this is disputed by local women leaders with whom I am in conversation, who have encouraged me to look beyond the central political factors in analysing this crisis.

Some female leaders reject the view this violence is simply an echo of past political grievances. They point to the highly visible wealth disparities in the country. These fuel resentment and the profound racial inequalities that deprive Kanak youths of opportunity and contribute to their alienation.

Women have also told me they’re concerned about the unpredictability of the current situation. In the 1980s, violent campaigns were coordinated by Kanak leaders, they tell me. They were organised. They were controlled.

In contrast, today it is the youth taking the lead and using violence because they feel they have no other choice. There is no coordination. They are acting through frustration and because they feel they have “no other means” to be recognised.

French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal leaving a meeting in Paris where a state of emergency for New Caledonia was declared.
Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA

There’s also frustration with political leaders on all sides. Late on Wednesday, Kanak pro-Independence political leaders held a press conference. They echoed their loyalist political opponents in condemning the violence and issuing calls for dialogue. The leaders made specific calls to the “youths” engaged in the violence to respect the importance of a political process and warned against a logic of vengeance.

The women civil society leaders I have been speaking to were frustrated by the weakness of this messaging. The women say political leaders on all sides have failed to address the realities faced by Kanak youths. They argue if dialogue remains simply focused on the political roots of the dispute, and only involves the same elites that have dominated the debate so far, little will be understood and little will be resolved.

Likewise, they lament the heaviness of the current “command and control” state security response. It contradicts the calls for dialogue and makes little room for civil society participation of any sort.

These approaches put a lid on grievances, but they do not resolve them. Women leaders observing the current situation are anguished and heartbroken for their country and its people. They say if the crisis is to be resolved sustainably, the solutions cannot be imposed and the words cannot be empty.

Instead, they call for the space to be heard and to contribute to a resolution. Until that time they live with anxiety and uncertainty, waiting for the fires to subside, and the smoke currently hanging over a wounded Noumea to clear. Läs mer…