Climate Change and Sustainable Living - some resources

The U3A (University of the Third Age) group that I’ve been facilitating since 2023, now called ‘Climate Change - Living Well and Sustainably’ has been looking for ways to develop and store resources.

We are trying to find systems aren’t owned by the ‘billionaire tech’ class. It’s pretty challenging, so I’ve decided to go back to using this blog for the time being, to keep some of the resources that members are finding and sharing, as well as ones we develop ourselves. 

• Here’s a couple on bushfires, insurance and rebuilding:

Resilient Building Council 

- includes a recently launched app for rating your home’s bushfire resilience

Green ReBuild Toolkit

- published by Renew: “resources to help … people rebuild their homes and increase resistance to future climate disasters”

• Here’s an interesting article on the vexed issue of flying (not really a vexed issue in my view, we need to cut down dramatically, but we’ve discussed in the group that there’s a lot of resistance to this)

Pilot who quit flying due to climate change now living life as a baker

• A broadcast on protecting biodiversity and a beloved bird species

Changing Australia: Michael Mulvaney and protecting Red Hill and the Gang-Gang Cockatoo 

Emu Bay

Work in progress - Looks like I didn’t complete this at the time! 

Well the blog has been inactive for a couple of years while the Climate Change and Sustainable Living Group tried out a few different ideas for storing our resources and information. 

However I’m going to restart it now - at least temporarily - so I’d better complete whatever this post was going to be. It was probably intended as a record of the time I spent living at Emu Bay in 2024, while Chris facilitated the CC and Sus group (as we call it for short). 

The property at Emu Bay is a revegetation property I’ve owned since 2006, with a little stone hut on it which my family and I have fixed up as a place to stay for camping holidays.

I stayed there for several months in 2024, planting, weeding and working on the hut (with the help of brother and son-in-law). I made a presentation to the CC and Sus group during this time (when I was back in Melbourne visiting family) which I’ll try to add later.

In the meantime here’s a couple of photos of revegetation progress - in a area near the hut, which is more like a garden and where I’ve had to extensively protect plants from the kangaroos and wallabies. 

(Photos to come)

Revegetation on other parts of the property was by direct seeding (with a grant from the SA government) and natural regrowth - it’s about 50% revegetated now and I intend to leave some of it cleared. I have a dream of re-establishing native grasses but that’s a huge project.