Professor Corey Bradshaw is the Matthew Flinders Professor of Global Ecology at Flinders University, where he leads the Global Ecology Laboratory and heads the Flinders Modelling Node of the Centre of Excellence for Australian Biodiversity and Heritage.

Corey was lead author of a recent perspective article titled ‘Underestimating the Challenges of Avoiding a Ghastly Future’. This paper discusses the major environmental issues that have regrettably received little attention but require urgent action. Anyone with a passing interest in the environment knows things aren’t great, but just how bad are they really? Professor Bradshaw is not here to appease the masses with a watered-down message, but rather gives us a well-needed reality check and urges us not to look away from the mess we have created. An overview of this research was published in The Conversation.

We are living on borrowed time by taking more from the planet than it can take. Scientists are no longer talking about avoiding environmental problems, but rather how to best deal with them. Irrespective of what we do now, the future is going to be ghastly – but just how ghastly depends on the path we take moving forward.

In this episode we discuss:
• How Corey’s childhood shaped his relationship with the environment and inspired his journey to academia
• The subject matter of Corey’s previous books Killing the Koala and Poisoning the Prairie and The Effective Scientist
• The silos in academia, lack of connectivity and why this model won’t deliver adequate solutions for the wicked problems we face
• The catastrophic loss of biodiversity and the detrimental impact this is having on ecosystem resilience
• How humanity is driving the sixth mass extinction
• Why the rise of the right-wing populist movement, the weaponisation of environmentalism and ongoing political donations have led to political impotence on climate change
• The ignorance of wanting unlimited economic growth in a finite world
• The potential solutions we can all consider, individually and collectively
• Corey’s must-subscribe blog Conservation Bytes
• And a WHOLE lot more - there’s a lot of knowledge dropped in this one folks!

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