When Shoalhaven City Council abruptly shut down its own chambers last week over fears of asbestos in the air-conditioning, a deep and dangerous wound reopened in our community. by Cat Holloway Asbestos was discovered in a concrete pipe underneath Council’s Nowra administration building, and the doors were shut tight.

Of all the mad stories I've been told and all the crazy people I've met since starting Spark Shoalhaven, nothing beats the saga of Comberton's Shaolin Temple. But it's no joke. It's serious business. by Cat Holloway (With excerpts of

Does composting make you a communist? Are solar panels only for socialists? Will recycling threaten the royalists? Of course not. But party politics and the mainstream media lags way behind the everyday environmentalists already fuelling the core of Australian society. Well-meaning and left-leaning friends have told me: "Greens should

by Cat Holloway /  Persistence, not resistance, is The Greens' real power. I woke up this morning to a third unsolicited, but perfectly legal, Trumpet of Patriots text. Their toxic coal-dusted advertising money is wasted on me. It’s even easier to ignore texts than to bin the paper brochures

The death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday has alerted many within and outside the Catholic Church to the impact of his message of stewardship rather than dominion of planet earth. In 2015, Francis released his ground-breaking encyclical, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, making a pivotal and

Serious questions surround the March 20 approval to increase commercial mussel farming in Jervis Bay Marine Park, despite dramatic footage from local divers of unusual mussel blooms dominating locations throughout the bay.  by Cat Holloway / (with reporting from Lucy Robertson) Even contradictory science and a majority of formal opposition did

New and valuable real estate is being carved into our urban landscapes by the very experts trained to cut away the dead wood. Conservation Arborists on the NSW South Coast are turning their chainsaws and their passion for wildlife to creating tree canopies of the future. by Cat Holloway / Terence

Environmentalists around Australia are thanking Liberal candidate Andrew Constance for single-handedly attracting more than one million dollars of crowd-funding for the Climate 200 “Community Independents” running in this year’s Federal election. by Cat Holloway / Buoyed by the eager gaze of a Liberal-friendly Sky News “Pub Test” audience, Constance was

by Professor Veena Sahajwalla / Highlighting an innovative Nowra recycling project in this op-ed feature, engineer and inventor, Professor Veena Sahajwalla, explains how MICROfactories extract commercial value from waste materials and point the way to sustainability. At a waste depot in Shoalhaven, NSW, 200 km south of Sydney, old mattresses, fabric

by Cat Holloway / Economists have a knack for letting the truth get in the way of a good story. But Dr Cameron Murray’s decade-long investigation into the true story behind affordable housing is as compelling as it is surprising. Do you own, rent or want a home? Do you

by Cat Holloway / It’s common: that sinking, guilty feeling of passing wild animals dead on the side of the road. Vastly worse is the experience if your car is one of the thousands on the South Coast every year that collide with a kangaroo, wallaby, wombat or possum. But