Melody has been an environmental journalist working in Asia for 20 years. She had post grads in Tropical Public and Environmental Health. COVID captured in Australia, she has been busy writing eco-fiction for young adults.
Climate scientists and neuroscientists are concerned, for slightly different reasons, that the risk of fires is increasing in scale, frequency and spread.
Diseases once confined to the tropics, like dengue fever, will find the warming conditions conducive to southerly migration. Currently dengue is confined to sites 200kms north of Brisbane.
I recently stopped at the huge Rong Kluea market on the Thai-Cambodian border. These border markets are a mecca for smuggled goods, so when I saw a solitary stall at the end of a row displaying tiger's teeth on leather thongs, ivory bangles and tusks, I wasn't surprised. The guy selling the stuff looked like a typical Thai gangster: tattoos, scars, bad teeth and only one eye. It was almost comical. The ivory bangle, he…
Review(s) of: Banana punk Rawk trails: A euro-fool's metal punk journeys in Malaysia, Borneo and Indonesia, by Marco Ferrarese, (Strategic Information and Research Development Center, 2016).
Australian involvement and the Shan's resistance. SMEC, an Australian-based services company that morphed out of the Snowy Mountains Engineering Corporation, was recently handed a petition containing 23,717 signatures opposing a giant dam on the upper Salween River at Mong Ton that would effectively divide Myanmar's warshocked Shan state in half. It was not the first time it had been told the idea stinks. Undeterred, SMEC went back to the protesting villages and continued its work.…
