Climate Councillor Lesley Hughes on the Race To Catastrophe and The Power of Unity

Today's guest is a very wonderful privilege to be bringing to you - Lesley Hughes. Lesley is one of Australia's most distinguished and recognised experts on climate change. Beginning her career as an ecologist where she studied the role ants played in dispersing seeds across landscapes, she turned her attention to studying the climate and its impacts on biodiversity in the early 90s. She was a lead author of the 4th and 5th Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports - including being part of the IPCC group who were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. She was appointed a Climate Commissioner under the Gillard Government, helped found the Climate Council where she remains a Director and Councillor. A Professor Emerita in Biology and Pro-Chancellor at Macquarie University. Lesley has published over 200 scientific papers, she's a Ted speaker and is now a member of the Federal Climate Change Authority. Just to give you a flavour of her remarkable career and life.

Lesley is someone who has made an incredible contribution to humanity's understanding of climate change, in particular how it has, is and will affect human and non human species and ecosystems. This was a true honour for me.

I found this conversation incredible - from the early years of her career conducting research and pushing for public awareness of this problem, to the hopeful years of the 2000s when substantive action seemed possible and likely, to the toxicity and insanity of the early 2010s as someone who had a front row seat on the emergence and escalation in Australia's climate wars, to how she works to stay healthy and hopeful in the face of such despair and grief. It struck me how so much of what has been vital to Lesley has been unity with her own tribe, the sense of belonging and vulnerability that comes with working together, that hope is more than a feeling but about building groups that can take collective action together. Lesley's stories are characterised by courage and perseverance, something many of us are required to exhibit on a daily basis doing this type of work.

The rest of the year's events are all listed and you can get your ticket or tickets by heading to  humanitix.com and searching for finding nature - hit follow so that you get automatically notified of listings and access to ticket sales.

One last place you can sign up is at  findingnature.substack.com where each month I publish a series of contributions from other professionals working in the sustainability and impact fields on what motivates them, their philosophies and how that informs their daily lives. October's theme was help, and the next edition that is coming out this Saturday morning is on the theme of hope.

With everything occurring in our world at the moment, and with the latest COP fresh in our consciousness, where else is there to go but to Lesley herself - “hope has to be a strategy.”

Til next time, thanks for listening.

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