actually I picked environmental justice, which = equity AND sustainability. This being one reason I am a Green, the joy of avoiding false dichotomies and realising that it is possible to craft policy based on an interconnected world.

In response to the rest: -

I’m not an ‘expert’ but I have spent 10 years working on natural resource management & sustainable farming. I’ve had the satisfaction of watching Australian farmers increasingly turn to organic and permaculture farming methods, except that the establishment bias against such terms is so strong that no-one is allowed to say those words. For eg we get “integrated pest management” which is basically planting companion crops and verges that attract good insects, leaving native veg standing for the same reason, and using good insects to attact bad ones, which = organic practice. Organic farmers have been doing that for literally hundreds of years, yet this gets presented as ‘groundbreaking’ at conferences by CSIRO, months after they sacked their only organic ag scientist. Ditto using manure teas, going back to cell grazing, and integrating crops with animals – all old techniques wrapped up as ‘new’ – which hey if it gets them adopted is great, but watching organic being re-introduced, piece-meal, is agonising and will effect it’s overall success.

Like other organic methods, thos above time and again are shown to match or often out-perform industrialised monocultural farming. If you go back and read the Monboit article, you will see the answer to your ‘locust’ question – diversity within crops (something that both industrialised monoculture and in particular the big GM companies campaign relentlessly against) perform far better when the bad times come – which they always do to agriculture.

Yes, there is a huge effort putting into insisting that industrial monocultural farming is superior and the only way to feed the world, and its completely fallacious – not least because food distribution is the elephant in the room. It has managed however to stymie serious research into alternatives (other than GM, which is all about corporate monoply from the seed to the harvest with herb/pesticides thrown in as well) for many years. The FAO is finally openly considering alternatives as the evidence for organic and diversified farming mounts, & the writing on the wall between peak oil and climate change sinks in, hooray.

I’d encourage you to examine the energy balances of industrialised Ag (including GM, although there’s limited evidence on this to date) vs organic. It actually costs us massive amounts of energy to produce food using industrialised agriculture – between the fertilisers, herbicides, pesticides, top soil loss, fuel use and overwhelming reliance on external inputs, industrialised agriculture is a worse than nil-sum game. When you factor in that the top soil lost from this method literally means watching hundreds of years of fertility blowing away, the situation is dire.

What you call ‘subtle prejudice’ against GM, I would call evidence-based application of the precautionary principle.

Greens energy policies – I’d just point out that Garnaut picked up the entire Green policy on energy efficieny pretty much holus-bolus in his final report as one example of how the Greens as usual have been howled at…..and then all of a sudden their policies start quietly appearing as someone else’s bright idea. Not that I’m accusing Garnaut of howling, but he is one expert who thinks Greens energy policies have some of the answers. In sum there is very sound evidence behind the Greens energy policies, and they frankly shit on anything the major parties have on the table. Christine’s national feed-in tariff bill will be a major test for the laborials, given the strong evidence of such laws’ effectiveness in Germany in particular.

As for evidence-based policy -aside from pointing out your own bait and switch moving from quickly between Australian and State Green perspectives as it suits you – I’ve been part of my own state and Australian Green policy making exercises, and while a lot of ideology gets brought to the table by some, the debates almost entirely focus on evidential debate, and ensuring policy is evidence-based. One only has to look at for eg the hysteria whipped up so successfully by Howard and others over Greens drug policy vs what the policy actually said, soundly based on evidence, to see how this is played out in the media though.

Finally, I might be merely 34 Adrien, but when a professed (at best) sceptic ‘challenges’ me to waste my time earnestly gathering together evidence to ‘prove’ something they’ve already stated they don’t agree with/believe, I know better than to take that bait. If you’re genuinely interested in seeing if your assumptions and beliefs about the Greens’ ability to function effectively politically- Australian Greens or otherwise – are incorrect, you’ll do your own homework, not expect someone to do it for you.

There are only about 6 science graduates in federal parliament, and similar ratios at state levels. However, the current or recent past, Green MPs with science degrees include Kerry Nettle, Greg Barber and Lee Rhiannon. John Kaye was an engineer. Out of roughly 20 MPs that is a high ratio, and I don’t know about several of the others.

I’ll take your anecdote and raise you one. Many years ago I was sitting round a table with some pretty high powered Greens party figures (far more high powered than myself) someone said something about science degrees. I made some comment about “yeah as if many of us have science degrees”. It was pointed out to me that of 7-8 people around the table, only one *didn’t* have a science degree.

Kaye aside, engineers are probably a lot rarer, and I think the degrees skew heavily to the biological sciences, but its certainly not true the Greens are all arts graduates.

I’d point out that with Hydro dams now at record lows and have been for the last 18 months, more dams would have done nothing to help us with electricity generation in a climate change world. Building wind farms or getting tidal up and running, or solar farms, rather than investing millions in the loss-making Bass Link would have.

I’m a bit surprised if you are correct in saying B. Brown backed coal – he was absolutely howled out of parliament many years ago (like 20+) for bringing up climate change and making dramatic assertions about many-metred sea level rises.

The quote, on television no less, was the tussle over electricity usage forecasts. The Tassie hydro board had definitely overestimated Tassie usage forecasts, but I saw (might actually have been Bob Brown, long time ago) saying, “even they are right, we could build a coal fired power station to meet that demand”. Even back then, with no one having any idea about GGs and climate change, I would have throttled him right there and then .. yes live on television. Since then the various groups have never managed to change my opinion of them as Lenin’s ‘useful idiots’ for the coal (and oil and gas) companies.

Now if we dammed the Franklin and other areas and Tassie shipped electricity to Victoria so we could shut down the most polluting power stations in the world, then I’d turn the first sod of earth myself. Admittedly I’d shed a tear, but I’d still do it tommorrow.

I dont think, and the various Green parties definately dont think (well have they ever), most people realise what an awful bind we, even in Australia, are now faced with. Horrible climate change with energy shortages, the ultimate lose-lose situation. Forget battery cars everyone, we dont have the power. We, at least in Victoria though nowhere else in Oz is much better, dont even have the spare power for an urgently needed massive increase in electric rail transport.

You couldn’t write a book about this, publishers would reject it as too fantastic. Though on the plus side we have finally answered that old question “are humans smarter than yeast”.