You don’t have to be David Attenborough to know that coal mines are “nature positive” in the same way as asbestos is lung positive. The timing of the approvals was egregious, but as an example of governments’ fundamentally dishonest approach to halting and reversing biodiversity and habitat loss, it was entirely on brand.
What does nature positive even mean? Well, it actually means that governments have committed to halt and reverse nature loss by 2030. Only if governments said that plainly, it might encourage expectations to stop things that destroy nature, like new coal mines and native forest logging.
But nature positive is a nice euphemism that allows environment departments to talk about restoring nature in their PR pamphlets, while the resources departments keep up a pipeline of projects that are destroying nature in real life.
Nature is in decline. Logging, land-clearing, invasive species and climate change are devastating threatened species and the habitats they live in. In Australia alone, the Black Summer bushfires killed or displaced nearly three billion animals – mammals, reptiles, birds and frogs – almost triple the original estimate, according to scientists commissioned by the World Wide Fund for Nature.
My oma would read me Aesop’s fables as a child because she believed stories should always teach you something. And that something was always easier to learn through the lessons of someone else.