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But golfers expressed their displeasure at the proposal, saying the sport provides a healthy outdoor activity, particularly for the elderly.
Other critics warned that converting golf courses could eventually see them being re-zoned for use as residential blocks, thus losing some of the city's most prized open spaces.
"The only reason these gems exist as open space is because they were once set aside as golf courses," said commentator Miranda Devine in Sydney's Daily Telegraph. "Remove their useful purpose and eventually we will lose the land."
In a report outlining its vision for the area, the Botany Bay council proposed creating a "massive new park" by converting the local Eastlakes golf course, an 85-year-old public course just a 10-minute drive from the city centre.
"This proposal is sure to be controversial - but… a major new park will benefit thousands of residents and restore public access to the wetlands," the report said.
"While the wetlands were once broadly accessible, they are now the hidden gem of our city, largely locked up within golf courses and commercial estates."
Other councils have been considering similar moves, particularly as land values have soared in Sydney's booming property market. The residential land value of courses near the city could reportedly be worth as much as A$2 billion (S$2 billion).
In April, a course in Strathfield, about 14km from the city centre, sold a parcel of its land, covering a clubhouse and practice fairway, for A$52.5 million. The land will be converted by developers into units and townhouses.
The popularity of golf has reportedly waned in Australia in recent years, with about 1.2 million playing in 2010 - a 5 per cent drop from 2001. But Golf NSW, the state golfing body in New South Wales, says the number of rounds played has grown and that there are growing numbers of social players who do not belong to cl...
Golfing bodies will no doubt be hoping that the spectacular victory of Australian Jason Day in the United States PGA Championship last weekend will help to inject new life into the sport.
"Golf is not for the 'privileged few' and is cheaper to play in Australia than in many countries around the world and, in particular, the Asia region," the association's head, Mr Stuart Fraser, told The Straits Times.
"A round of golf at Eastlakes midweek can cost as little as $A25."
Prof Phibbs also noted that a round of golf in Australia tends to be cheaper than in many other countries and said that the sport is largely in keeping with the nation's egalitarian ethos.
He said the courses have environmental benefits, but that some could consider converting from 18 holes to "nine holes, with a larger public recreational element".
"I think it is a trend that will happen," he said.
"There is an opportunity to reduce the number of courses - the economics will do that. But if you are a golfer, it is a wonderful experience. It is almost a rural experience in the middle of the city."
Colombia's constitutional court has banned mining in the country's moorlands, also known as "paramos".
It argued that mining for gold and oil in the fragile ecosystem could cause irreversible damage.
The court overturned a previous ruling that allowed mining companies which already held licenses to continue operating in the moorlands until their licenses ran out.
Officials said the court's decision would void about 350 mining licenses.
The "paramos" are mainly found between an altitude of 3,000m (9,850ft) and 5,000m.
Covered by grass and shrubs, they act like vast sponges, storing water in the rainy season and releasing it in the dry season.
Their conservation is considered key to guaranteeing the water supply for Colombian cities such as the capital, Bogota.
Environmental activists welcomed the ruling.
Congressman Alirio Uribe Munoz, who was among a group of politicians who brought the case before the constitutional court, said it meant "life first, business later".
The court said that under no circumstance should mining or oil exploration be allowed in these areas.
Smoke from the devastating Camp Fire in Paradise, Calif.
As climate change prods, tugs, and gnaws, what’s a parent to do?
Dave Cohen is an integrative psychotherapist in Brattleboro (davecohencounseling.com), specializing in approaches in mind/body modalities and ecopsychology. He is also the founder and director of VBike (vbikesolutions.org), an advocacy group dedicated to promoting new bicycle technologies and designs to help inspire a ...
This past Halloween, I had a terrific concept for a ghoulish costume. However, before I took it a step further, I decided to pass the idea by my wife.
“Do you think that will really help?” she asked.
That’s after I revealed that I wanted to dress up as the latest Intergovernmental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) report about the terrifying state of our planet. I had concocted a plan to spook the heck out of parents with it.
Perhaps it was an interesting idea, but do we really need more fear?
I totally understand that many parents have real concerns about climate change and that some are even taking action. However, what really got me going on my Halloween theme was a recent gathering, where I heard multiple parents — politically and socially active people in the Brattleboro community — talking about their ...
In light of the IPCC report, I had lots of questions.
Don’t get me wrong — staying connected with family, exploring the world, and having fun are all really important things. But a part of me was more focused on all the information that was left unspoken.
Under what energy source did you get there and at what cost to our world? Can we really continue to live like this? What will that look like for your kids and our world if we do? Why do we suppress so much important information about what we do and what it really means? Can we at least talk about these things?
I kept these questions to myself, but I ask them now, in lieu of an appearance with my proposed scary IPCC Halloween costume.
As each year passes and as climate change hastily presses down on our world, it’s becoming evident that the relationship between our everyday behaviors and the devastating ecological realities that we and our children face are mounting heavy upon us. There’s just far too much evidence, and it’s prodding, tugging, and g...
And I can’t think of any group that’s more impacted by climate change, and with more to lose. than parents. I can only imagine the fear that lurks behind all the “lifestyles as usual” talk.
As a dad and a mental-health professional actively engaged in work around climate change and community transformation, I often look to the field of psychology to gain a foothold into what’s going on here.
Unfortunately, mainstream psychology has largely been mute about climate change. In the not-too-distant past, I even had a supervisor who believed client concerns about ecological loss were not within the purview of psychotherapy.
Talk about those tricky psychological defense mechanisms at work.
Thankfully, some in the profession are thinking, writing, and acting on the issue. One of them, Lise Van Sustern, a forensic psychiatrist in Washington, D.C., describes something she calls “pre-traumatic stress condition” (PTSC), regarding our relationship to climate change.
Each year, we are being exposed to more climate disasters in the news and on social media — the devastating hurricanes, floods, and horrific fires, like the recent ones devastating California.
However, for those of us experiencing PTSC, it differs from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in that we haven’t personally experienced a disaster yet, although we are conscious that climate-caused calamities are in part created and amplified by us and our actions. It’s also knowing somewhere in our minds that clim...
Stress from climate change can cut in diametrical ways. At one end of the spectrum, it can motivate us to be agents of change, to imagine the impossible, to be honest and real, and to connect us so we can begin transforming our communities.
As author Rebecca Solnit writes, “Taking action is the best way to live in conditions of crisis and violation, for your spirit and your conscience as well as for society.” This can be a powerful response, one aligned with the best notions of what it means to be a warrior, one that can join others to heal and remake the...
On the other side of the spectrum, this climate change stress condition can shrink our imagination to fit only how we are living right now and to cling fearfully to a way of life perhaps modeled for us by our parents and the mainstream culture.
What looks like inaction may actually be an intense activation of our industrial-strength psychological defense mechanisms at play.
And even though it sometimes appears as if many parents have gone post-emotional about the state of our world, I know what’s at work here is mostly fear masquerading as avoidance, powerlessness, and hopelessness.
So, if you’re tending toward this, what’s a parent to do?
It turns out that there is a great movement — a spark of hope — for parents right in Vermont: Mother Up!: Families Rise Up for Climate Action.
Mother Up! is a program of 350 Vermont, and it’s name is a call to action for our planet. Think of “man up” flipped around and turned inside out to mean something we totally need. Think Earth-warrior parents.
With groups meeting monthly in Brattleboro, Burlington, Montpelier, and Middlebury, Mother Up! has a vision to build across Vermont locally based parent networks that not only participate in climate justice work but also to turn out leaders.
The program is a great place to learn, bring your ideas, come together, and have you and your kids get engaged in a way that makes sense.
Best of all, it’s working!
As a parent, I experience the fear and trepidation, and that’s why joining Mother Up! has been so important to me.
There’s just too much to deal with here. The personal choices we make are one thing, but then there’s also holding corporations and our political leaders accountable.
In addition, we have to contend with the toxic grip of the fossil-fuel industry and a particular walking climate disaster in Washington, D.C. And then, in October, scientists were basically telling us that time’s up with the frightening IPCC report, and now we’re seeing the signs almost daily.
But gloomy soothsaying, pessimism, fear, and even scary climate reports don’t really inspire me to action. Really, in hindsight, neither would have my crazy Halloween costume idea.
What hits the spot for me is working with others. It’s seeing parents bringing their best selves to envision and manifest something restorative and beautiful for life on our planet and for our children.
That’s why Mother Up! is so inspiring. In fact, parents just might be the sleeping giants that this moment has been waiting for. Think about it again: Who has more at stake?
That quote perfectly sums up the type of “active hope” work of Mother Up!. So does Dr. Martin Luther King’s idea about resistance and “creative maladjustment” from his stunning “Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution” speech.
We all have this one chance to be part of the repair, redirection, and transformation of our culture. And most of us know, at least at some level, that this moment is calling us.
That’s why it is so powerful to witness parents engaged and charting a course of collective action and resistance against all odds, while shining a light on hope.
So, perhaps taking sincere and authentic action on climate change should even be considered a fundamental parental responsibility.
Imagine what that would do. And don’t be fooled into thinking this is about just changing light bulbs or driving electric cars. This is about monumental, radical change and positioning ourselves as warriors for deep transformation.
At this crucial point in time, tell me: What’s the orientation of your spirit?
I would like to see many, many more bike/walking trails that go to schools and town centers from peripheral areas (maybe reviving old roads?). I live only 5 miles (maybe only 3 miles as the crow flies) from Putney village but have to take Rt. 5 to get there. It's not a safe road for cargo bikes. I'd also like to see an...
Great article and I would add that raising children to camp and hike and swim, garden, cook, and be more resilient and make less of a carbon methane footprint is FUN and easy to do if you are lucky enought o live in or near rural areas. Using second hand shops, public libraries, parks, swimming pools and schools instea...
Originally published in The Commons issue #487 (Wednesday, November 28, 2018). This story appeared on page D1.
You can see surface winds—the stuff you feel, standing there on the surface of the Earth as the mere mortal you are—in white. The bright white circles you see over the Atlantic Ocean and the East China Sea are cyclones. Meanwhile, the colored streaks represent upper-level winds at an elevation about 33,000 feet above t...
To encourage more websites to adopt the secure HTTPS protocol, Google makes it a factor in its search result rankings.
Google wants websites to become more secure and is using its search results ranking as incentive.
In a blog posted on Wednesday, Zineb Ait Bahajji and Gary Illyes, Webmaster Trends analysts for the search giant, said that they've been tweaking their search ranking algorithms to incorporate whether sites use secure encrypted connections. So far, the team has seen positive results.
A URL that lists HTTPS as part of its address, for example, https://www.google.com, is an indication that the site uses Secure Sockets Layers (SSL). SSL is a security protocol that relies on certificates to ensure that any communication between the site and the Web browser is encrypted and therefore less vulnerable to ...
As a results of the positive results of Google's test, the team said it's now using HTTPS -- which stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure -- as a ranking signal in its search results, though the effort is just getting started.
"For now it's only a very lightweight signal -- affecting fewer than 1 percent of global queries, and carrying less weight than other signals such as high-quality content -- while we give webmasters time to switch to HTTPS," the Google team said. "But over time, we may decide to strengthen it, because we'd like to enco...
For webmasters and developers who want to make the switch to HTTPS, the team included a list of steps in its blog post, such as deciding the type of certificate you need, choosing a 2048-bit key certificate (which offers a strong level of encryption), and checking out Google's Site Move article for details on how to ch...
Blue World Travel's Festival at Sea 2018 group photo on the sun deck. Everyone is wearing a shirt color representative of their friends, groups, and home-towns.
Festive electric slide lines, soul food options, gospel brunches, step dance lessons, and more grace the scene of an ethnically inspired cruise line. All of this happening while attendees have the pleasure of traversing the world. This cruise is the first of its kind to cater to a community of attendees representing th...
It would be 130+ years after pleasureful cruises were created in 1844, that a cultural experience of this kind would grace the cruise landscape .
The journey to creating this experience was one that morphed from founder Patricia Yarbrough's previous endeavors at her company Blue World Travel, an organization celebrating its 41st year in business. The company specializes in corporate and entertainment travel, as well as cruise vacations. While originally a Corpor...
The rewards from her journey to creating these experiences were bountiful and have touched the lives of so many. Read on to learn more about Yarbrough's story where she shares the beauty of a people and her vision for rewriting how they historically once encountered ship experiences.
Brittany Chambers: What sparked your passion for travel and sharing it with others?
Patricia Yarbrough: As a 17-year-old high school student, I just wanted to go to Africa! My love for travel began when I was one of 5 students from Woodrow Wilson High that was selected to represent the San Francisco Chapter of the American Red Cross on an incredible journey. Our mission was to travel to West Africa an...
Chambers: Was there one person or experience in particular that gave you your first start on the travel scene?
Yarbrough: I attended the University of San Francisco in the early ’70s. One of my instructors was Elizabeth Parker, who taught a Black History class entitled “The Black Man in Latin America and the Caribbean” Elizabeth wanted to teach a class in the Caribbean and my dream was simply to go to Jamaica! I told her, if yo...
Chambers: What inspired you to start Blue World Travel?
Yarbrough: After graduating from college, I began working as a Corporate Travel Agent and also began developing clientele in the African American community. In 1978, after 5 years of learning almost every aspect of the travel business, I decided it was time to open a company where I could create a work environment that...
A Festival at Sea cruise group that docked into Labadee, Haiti and is getting ready to go zip lining. Photo taken during our beach party.
Chambers: How has your travel company grown since it was founded?
Yarbrough: Blue World Travel continued grown and prosper. As we think of travel these days, it is probably hard to believe that 40 years ago, there was no internet or the ability to go online and book your own travel reservations. To get on an airplane, you needed a physical paper ticket because electronic airline tick...
Chambers: What inspired you to create the first-ever Black cultural based cruise experience of its kind?
Yarbrough: Twelve years after our opening, Blue World Travel had also developed a substantial African American cruise clientele. We’d organize groups of 60 or more people to enjoy an amazing vacation option. However, once onboard, there was a lack of the African American cultural experiences including music, dancing an...
Chambers: What cruise features are unique to this cruise's cultural experience?
Festival at Sea's yearly annual step show where African American Sororities and Fraternities showcase their talent and traditions. This event draws many viewers whom cheers for their friends and family competing in the step competition.
Chambers: Were there any hurdles or barriers you had to overcome on the journey to creating a cultural travel experience?
Yarbrough: From an industry perspective, when we wanted to charter our first ship, the cruise line we booked our large groups with would not allow us to charter even though I had been in business for years and had a track record with our Festival at Sea product. At that time their reasoning was that they did not “chart...

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