Tim Flannery has narrated 3 audiobooks on Listento.it by 1 author. The most-rated is Here on Earth.
Quarterly Essay 48: After the Future: Australia's New Extinction Crisis
Summary
When it comes to the natural world, Australia is home to a disproportionately large share of the world's riches. That means we Australians are caretakers of a unique natural heritage in a land which tolerates few mistakes. So how are we doing? In Quarterly Essay 48 Tim Flannery says: we're often failing nature. In the clash between money and conservation, money usually wins. State governments have begun allowing mining and other incursions into national parks. A new wave of extinctions is taking place. Politically, conservationists and conservatives are at odds. But why? Surely conservatives and conservationists should be able to find common cause when it comes to preserving our natural heritage? And given that we have never known more about how to protect biodiversity, shouldn't it be possible to halt the march of extinctions? This essay is both a wake-up call to the consequences of unrestrained development, and an examination of the underlying thinking - the view of the natural world that sees it as something either to be put to use or traded off. By contrast, Flannery asks, how might we best understand, conserve and co-exist with the natural world?
©2012 Tim Flannery (P)2012 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd
Quarterly Essay 31
Summary
Sometime this century, after 4 billion years, some of Earth's regulatory systems will pass from control through evolution by natural selection, to control by human intelligence. Will humanity rise to the challenge? This landmark essay by Tim Flannery is about sustainability, our search for it in the 21st century, and the impact it might have on the environmental threats that confront us today. Flannery discusses in detail three potential solutions to the most pressing of the sustainability challenges: climate change. He argues that Australia has a special responsibility when it comes to climate change, and that our prime minister could be a critical player on the global stage in Copenhagen in December 2009 - but only if we take swift and effective action and make sharp cuts in emissions. Brilliant and terrifying, Now or Never is a call to arms by Australia's leading thinker and writer on the natural world. "Throughout the latter part of 2007 and into 2008, I found it increasingly hard to read the scientific findings on climate change without despairing.... I think that there is now a better than even chance that, despite our best efforts, in the coming two or three decades Earth's climate system will pass the point of no return." (Tim Flannery, Now Or Never)
©2008 Tim Flannery (P)2011 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd.
Here on Earth
Summary
Tim Flannery’s first major book since The Weather Makers charts the history of life on our planet. Here on Earth, which draws its points of departure from Darwin and Wallace, Lovelock and Dawkins, is an extraordinary exploration of evolution and sustainability. Our success as a species has had disastrous effects on many of the Earth’s ecosystems and could lead to our downfall. But equally, Flannery argues, we are now equipped as never before to explore our true relationship with the planet on which our biological, economic and cultural futures depend. Here on Earth is not just a dazzling account of life on our planet. It will change the way you live.
©2010 Tim Flannery (P)2010 Bolinda Publishing Pty Ltd