Welcome to issue #39 for April 2026.

Get involved…

“Saving civilization is not a spectator sport” (LR Brown, 2008), so here are a few things you can get involved with this month:

• Join PECAN’s monthly meetings, starting at 5:30pm, on the last Wednesday of each month at the Port Phillip EcoCentre. See you on 29 April – all welcome!
• Friday 10 April – Sunday 12 April – join the 20th anniversary of the Australian Garden at Royal Botanic Gardens Cranbourne. It is a great place to visit
• Saturday, 18 April, 10am, Join the Melbourne Electrification Roadshow: Does a Battery Make Sense for Me? in the Hawthorn Arts Centre
• Saturday 18 April, 9:30am-12:30pm, Westgate Park Volunteer Day with ACF Macnamara
• Wednesday, 22 April, 7:30-9:00pm, join the Victoria’s Big Gas Challenge seminar with Lily D’Ambrosio, Minister for Climate Action and Energy & Resources in Marwell Centre, 9 Marwell Avenue, North Balwyn
• Thursday 23 April, 6-8:30pm, Electric Vehicle Mythbusters Evening at Brighton Town Hall, hosted by our friends at BCCAG
• Visit the Port Phillip EcoCentre events page to see what events you might like to join. The Friday Gardening Group that plants seedlings and shares healthy seasonal lunches sounds particularly interesting, as does the Nature Mindfulness event. The EcoCentre is also running a series of kids holiday fun educational activities during early April – check the events page for details
• Visit the City of Port Phillip Have Your Say page and give feedback on a consultation that interests you, e.g. the draft Foreshore Management Plan should interest many
• Join the regular Friday Vigil at 12:30pm outside the office of Josh Burns MP in Barkly Street St Kilda to protest against new oil and gas developments
• Complete the Heartscapes Online Street Gardening Course, which looks very good
• Spend one hour/month cleaning a beach with your local Beach Patrol group, which are organized by postcode
• Consider adding your voice to:
• • ACF’s email campaign for Prime Minister Albanese to properly tax Big Gas greed
  • Environment Victoria’s call for a Basin Plan that truly restores the Murray–Darling
  • Solar Citizens call for lower energy costs for households
  • Save Our Marine Life’s call to stop seismic blasting in Australian marine parks
  • Environment Victoria’s survey on feral deer and other invasive species
  • The Australian Marine Conservation Society’s call to add traceability measures to the government’s framework to stop illegally-caught seafood entering Australia
  • if you or family members are renters, you may want to join the Solar Uprising being organized by Solar Citizens
  • Birdlife Australia’s email campaign to ban native bird hunting in Victoria

Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.

Mohandas K. Gandhi

We are living and working on the unceded lands of the Yalukit Willam people. We pay our respects to the traditional owners of the land and their ongoing connection to land, waters, sky and culture.

Call for volunteers – opportunities to support climate action

At PECAN’s annual planning day we decided that we need to do more community outreach. We need expert volunteers to help

• increase PECAN’s social media presence
• revitalize PECAN’s website, and
• organize events.

Come to our next monthly meeting – 5:30pm, Wednesday 29 April at the Port Phillip EcoCentre – to join our team.

Around Melbourne…

Very sadly, the avian botulism outbreak among the birds at Albert Park Lake continues, with nearly 1,300 animal deaths so far, mostly ibises.

We don’t see anything like Sydney’s living seawalls along the coast in the City of Port Phillip, but maybe we should. There seems to be a lot here we could learn from Sydney and other places. And the molds used to make Sydney’s living seawall panels are even made in Melbourne!

Read how STREAT and other social enterprises are repurposing waste food from the Queen Victoria Market and elsewhere. Amazingly, the typical Australian household spends about $2,000/year on food that is then wasted.

Management of Westgate Park has transferred from Parks Victoria to the City of Melbourne – it is a great place to visit, but be mindful of snakes.

The Beacon Cove Neighbourhood Association is calling on the Federal and Victorian governments to require ships visiting Station Pier and other Melbourne ports to use 0.1% Sulphur fuels to align with international and other state standards.

The Bicycle Network’s Super Tuesday commuter bike count has shown that a total of 600 riders took the Veloway route between 7am and 9am on March 3 2026, where 132 were riding ebikes. By contrast, only 32 riders took the road route alternative that the Veloway replaces. A very popular piece of new biking infrastructure.

Recently seen…

Very disappointingly, the three major parties have blocked Senator Pocock’s call for an inquiry into why our government collects more from beer excise than it gets from oil and gas exporters as PRRT payments. Senator Pocock was supported by the Greens, independents and Pauline Hanson, among others.

This very good podcast explains the importance of Australia enacting a substantial gas export tax and the NSW Government’s decision to ban new coal mines.

Many people complain about the very poor state of Australia’s regional rail system, especially when compared to Europe and parts of Asia. This good video explains the historical and other origins of the problems. And the same author’s high speed rail in Australia video is also very good.

Some may feel a bit sad reading about how they are culling feral horses from the Kosciuszko National Park, but the park does seem to be recovering from the damage they caused, although it will take many years. The people who originally introduced the major invasive plant and animal species into Australia have a lot to answer for.

We are starting to hear more and more about the dangers of heat stress, especially for old and young people. This can be particularly bad for older people when they are sleeping. This Sweltering Cities Summer Survey Report can help you understand where you stand regarding heat stress. We need to remember that the human body’s cooling mechanisms get overwhelmed once temperatures reach the 40s coupled with high humidity. Also at temperatures below 10 people can also quickly die from hypothermia which can be a real problem in poorly insulated buildings in winter. And we should remember that our pets (cats, dogs and birds) are mostly less heat tolerant than humans.

This fascinating video which shows how rooftop solar panels can become architectural features, rather than eyesores, using the new Sydney Fish Market to illustrate the idea.

This video gives a good explanation and practical examples of how science/technology can help us fix our destruction of the natural world. The author makes the point that our whole global economy is based on mining and growing things, so that we are committing suicide by letting our economy destroy our natural world, and it is already coming back to bite us!

Tattoos are very popular in Australia but a new research study shows that our tattoo inks contain carcinogenic organic chemicals and toxic metals at levels that wouldn’t meet existing European safety standards. Again, Australian regulators don’t seem to be protecting us.

not so much about the environment, but…

Everybody seems to be promoting humanoid robots as the future – a home butler to do all the chores. It seems that scientists and business people have been working on this idea for 50+ years, with remarkably little success and it may be another 50 years before they get one to really work. Nonetheless, specialised machines may arrive much quicker –  autonomous taxis, for example, and the ubiquitous robot vacuum cleaner which is already here. This video gives a good analysis of the issues.

Design for maintainability

This is a good video explaining how good design for maintainability principles can greatly affect the lifecycle of products we use every day. Design modularity, parts standardization, improved manufacturing workflows and simplifying product maintenance activities are straightforward in many instances, but very rarely adopted in practice. In the 1990’s I was part of the Hong Kong Productivity Council’s Industrial Automation Taskforce where I visited local manufacturers to help them improve their product design and manufacturing and found it very easy to identify ideas to significantly simplify products and streamline their manufacturing. I am still a mazed at how little these concepts are used in practice, and this needs to change.

Combining solar panels and agriculture

The world is going to install many, many more solar panels in the coming 50 years because they are the cheapest, “greenest” and most flexible method for producing energy we know of. Researchers and businesspeople around the world are also finally figuring out that installing solar panels significantly changes the micro-climate of the land underneath them – they provide shade and surfaces to increase condensation (which also keeps the panels cool to increase their electrical output). With thought and planning, this can significantly increase associated agricultural productivity. It can also rejuvenate degraded landscapes and protect water bodies, but it can also damage fragile landscapes. The important synergies and potential improvements are explained in this good video.

Why aren’t we dealing with the Urban Heat Island Effect

Here is the paradox. Australia is a major contributor to global research on urban heat. Australian researchers are developing national tools to measure and mitigate urban heat, and studies from cities such as Melbourne have quantified urban heat island intensity and investigated how urban design can influence heat stress. Additionally, Australia already has the technologies to cool cities, from reflective coatings and heat-resilient pavements to advanced shading systems. Yet many of our cities remain dangerously hot. The issue isn’t a lack of solutions, but the failure to roll them out at scale. Learn more here.

Sugarcrete

Over-use of sugar causes many health problems, especially for young children. Nonetheless, sugar is the largest global agricultural crop, and generates 600,000,000t/year of bagasse waste, which is often burnt to provide power for sugar processing mills. There is a much better use for it – sugarcrete – an excellent, very low greenhouse emissions, construction building block that researchers are learning how to make and use effectively. At the end of a building’s working life this construction material can also be readily recycled to make more sugarcrete. This seems a very productive use for sugar production waste. Learn more here.

There is nothing clean or natural about LNG, and it can never be truly “net zero”

The strongly research based, and always informative and thorough, Engineering With Rosie youtube channel concludes that “clean” natural gas that is truly “net zero” is impossible to achieve and is just marketing speak. It can only come close to being “clean” for scope 1 and scope 2 emissions, and the scope 3 emissions that come from burning it cannot be eliminated and actually account for 70+% of the CO2 (equivalent) released from gas use. Even for scope 1 and 2 emissions, it is very clear that gas “leakage” from pipelines and other equipment can never be economically eliminated and new research, like this, continually shows that much more leakage is happening than the industry admits. If you believe Rosie, anybody who suggests that we can have clean natural gas that is “net zero” is mostly parroting industry talking points that are largely misinformation.

A bit of fun…am I ready for genetically modified purple tomatoes?

Australian regulators have approved genetically modified purple tomatoes for local sale. It seems that the the Purple Bliss tomato was bred to include genes from the snapdragon flower to boost the fruit’s antioxidants, flavour and colour. Humanity has been fiddling with plant and animal genomes for thousands of years, so hopefully, we know what we are doing, but I am not sure. Learn more.

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