Phoebe Barnard, PhD

Note: This piece was originally published by my coauthors on this paper, Tom Newsome of the University of Sydney and Bill Ripple of Oregon State University in The Conversation on 5 November, 2019, the day that the World Scientists' Warning of a Climate Emergency paper,...

There's nothing like an extended period of hosting relatives over the family holiday season for gaining some insight into the sometimes tricky links between where we need to go as a society, at a strategic level, and the mundane day-to-day behaviors of individuals that...

This week of impeachment proceedings in the USA has surely been one of those times to reflect hard on where the country is going.

The clash of ideals and ideology, the talking past each other, the pontification, and ultimately, the sheer hypocrisy of the Republican defe...

Phew - it's been a dizzying quintuple-whammy of news over the past month - even for those of us hardened by reading, or writing or filming big news.  Not one or two, but five major events and reports about the climate and biodiversity crises appeared in that time - and...

(Photo: Cristian Ibarra/Pixabay )

In a radical departure from the conservative language that normally defines science, 11,258 scientists from around the world have called for drastic climate action to “avoid untold suffering”.

Sounding the clarion call in high-impact jou...

Today, on Veterans' Day in the USA, I find myself thinking about the Baby Boom.

Like those of so many people born in the 1960s or 1950s, my parents married as wartime sweethearts.  My mother was 18, my father 24.  By 1945, when my eldest brother was born, hundreds of th...

What a tenuous time to be a parent. Is anyone else knocked off-course in this way?

To be a parent on the planet today, in the 21st century, sometimes feels like dancing in a careening circus of horrors - the age of climate crisis, the rise of far-right nationalism, inc...

Rome is burning.  It's been burning all my lifetime.  I was born in 1961 - only a year after most recent environmental baselines for comparison of our predicament.  As a childhood lover of trees, nature, wildness, creatures, volcanoes and adventure, I was destined to t...

A talk at the Boothbay Harbor Yacht Club, Maine, USA (illustrated from the original at http://winslowmyersopeds.blogspot.com/)

Vasili Archipov was an officer on a Soviet submarine near Cuba during the missile crisis of October 1962. American ships were dropping signalin...

 Metrorail runs along the Southern Route to Simons Town through St James, Kalk Bay, Fish Hoek and Glencairn.

[This 2008 article was first published in the free community glossy magazine "Full Circle." At the time, the Cape Town train service Metrorail was mostly safe, r...