Climate change

'Requiem for a Species'

Clive Hamilton launches his book at ANU

ProfessorClive Hamilton public lecture and book launch at The Australian National University on 29 March, 2010. The lecture is introduced by Professor Will Steffen, Executive Director of the ANU Climate Change Institute.

Clive Hamiltons book, Requiem for a Species is about why we have ignored the climate change warnings. It is a book about the frailties of the human species: our strange obsessions, our hubris, and our penchant for avoiding the facts. It is the story of a battle within us between the forces that should have caused us to protect the earth, like our capacity to reason and our connection to nature, and our greed, materialism and alienation from nature, which, in the end, have won out.

And it is about the 21st century consequences of these failures, and what we can do now.

Clive Hamilton is Charles Sturt Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics. He is based at The Australian National University. For 14 years until early 2008 he was the Executive Director of The Australia Institute, Australias leading progressive think tank, which he founded in 1993. He has held a number of visiting academic positions, including at the University of Cambridge and Yale University and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts. He is the author of a number of best-selling books, including Growth Fetish, Affluenza (with Richard Denniss), Silencing Dissent (with Sarah Maddison) and The Freedom Paradox. His new book, Requiem for a Species: Why we resist the truth about climate change, has just been published by Allen & Unwin.

This launch is presented by the ANU Climate Change Institute and the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of the ANU, Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne.

Introduced by Professor Will Steffen, Executive Director of the ANU Climate Change Institute.