Michael Green

Writer and producer

Unburnable carbon

In Environment, Social justice on

This is an edited version of a talk I gave at the Wheeler Centre on June 6, 2013

AWAY from the glare and confusion on climate change, there is a deeper conversation going on. It is changing the way climate activists plan their campaigns, and it is changing conversations behind the doors where money talks.

Here is one example: on Tuesday, I went to a lunchtime meeting at Goldman Sachs, at 101 Collins Street, the swankiest office building in town.

In Rolling Stone, in 2009, journalist Matt Taibbi described Goldman Sachs like this: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

But, arguably, this meeting on Tuesday was an unusual one. It was organised by the Investor Group on Climate Change. There were about 100 people from the superannuation and fund management industry, in a big teleconference in Sydney and Melbourne, and they were there to talk to the American climate activist Bill McKibben.

Now McKibben, who is touring Australia this week, also writes for Rolling Stone. In one article last year he wrote this: “We need to view the fossil-fuel industry in a new light. It has become a rogue industry, reckless like no other force on Earth.”

McKibben got arrested twice last year for his climate activism. The event went for nearly 2 hours – McKibben gave a short spiel, and then there was an extended discussion session with a panel of super fund managers and investment analysts. Why were they engaging with this guy?

Watch this video at the Wheeler Centre website

Before I get to why they’re all willing to be there, I want to offer one small update on our current climate projections.

Turn Down the Heat: World Bank report

Late last year the World Bank put out a report called ‘Turn Down the Heat’ report, which stated that even if all nations fulfill their pledges to reduce emissions, we’re still on track for 3.5 to 4˚C warming by the end of the century.

A 4˚C world means: “Extreme heat waves, declining global food stocks, loss of ecosystems and biodiversity, and life-threatening sea level rise.” They concluded that there is no certainty that it’s possible for humanity to adapt to a 4˚C hotter world.

It’s a terrifying thought – put out by a very conservative public institution. It’s also hard to really comprehend what kind of changes that would involve, and what kind of suffering it would entail. But one thing it makes me think is that we need to do a better job of avoiding that situation.

Carbon budget: we’re blowing it

And that’s why I come back to that meeting at Goldman Sachs. The reason I was there and those finance types were there, is that a different way of thinking about the climate crisis has sharpened the debate. It’s the idea of a carbon budget. In 2009, scientists from the Potsdam Institute in Germany produced a set of emissions scenarios together with their likely influence on global temperatures.

Their paper says that to keep an 80 per cent chance of staying at 2 degrees or below, we can only release about one-fifth of the carbon dioxide in current proven fossil fuel reserves.

It’s worth noting that at the rate we’re going, we’ll have blown the budget by mid next decade. And of course, the fossil fuel industry is always searching for more.

Even for a 50-50 chance of going over 2 degrees, the report said, two-thirds of our coal, oil and gas must stay in the ground.

Subsequently, a British organisation called Carbon Tracker added to that analysis. They released some research saying that the reserves held by the world’s 200 largest listed coal, oil and gas companies alone is more than enough to exceed that threshold.

The moral case

Since the carbon budget idea has become more common, there have been two kinds of responses: the moral case and the business case. I’ll cover each one, and then the way they cross over, because that’s particularly unusual and relevant for us as citizens.

As I’ve mentioned, Bill McKibben is the person most associated with the moral case. Simply put, his argument goes like this: “if it’s wrong to wreck the planet, then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage”.

Based on the unexpected popularity of his Rolling Stone article, he and others started a new campaign for calling for universities, churches, cities and pension funds to sell out of fossil fuel companies. It’s called Go Fossil Free, and it’s spread like wildfire across the USA. In just over six months there are already several hundred campaigns, and a dozen or so institutions have agreed to divest.

The argument isn’t so much that they’ll bankrupt the companies, but that they’ll undermine their social licence, and that open up room for regulation.

People are working on this moral divestment case here already. If you haven’t seen any yet, you can expect to. As with the US, it’s not only targeted at universities, but also churches and local councils, and for banks not to fund new fossil fuel projects.

They’ve had two wins so far: the NSW Synod of the Uniting Church has announced plans to divest from fossil fuels. And a couple of years ago, ANU students successfully campaigned for the university to sell stocks in a coal seam gas company called Metgasco. Those students are a cheeky bunch – they’re part of the national Lock the Campus campaign and they’ve since filed FOI requests for all the details of the university’s fossil fuel holdings. Now they’re moving onto the ACT government.

But most of all, the campaign here is aimed at superannuation funds.

There’s a campaign called the Vital Few – which is run by an organization chaired by former liberal leader John Hewson. It hasn’t had much success yet, but they say it’s early days. The Vital Few campaign says that across the super industry, about 55 per cent of funds are held in high carbon investments and only 2 per cent in low (although there’s no standard definition for what that means).

One plank of their campaign is a moral call to action for citizens: there’s no sense in greening your home if you’re investing in climate change all the while. You’ve got to change the way you invest.

All these campaigns have different approaches and different targets, but share a common thread – there’s a moral reason not to invest in fossil fuels, both for us as individuals and for our institutions.

The business case

But there’s another way to look at those numbers, and it’s this: “Holy heck, if four-fifths are going to stay in the ground, then someone is going to lose a lot of money.” Essentially, the argument is that investing in fossil fuels is risky, and you’ll want to sell down your stake, because if you don’t, at some point you’ll lose it.

In the case of listed companies, the value of their reserves is factored into their share price. Those reserves are assets on their books, and investors currently have an expectation that they will deliver an income stream in the future. And of course, it’s not just fossil fuels – all kinds of industries have a lot of assets tied up in the carbon economy.

Climate risk

This is one element of a broader set of risks that are described as “climate risk” – the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change.

The first, as I just mentioned, is the “carbon bubble” or the “unburnable carbon” scenario. It’s the prospect that we’ll get our act together to prevent emissions, and fossil fuels will lose value. That could be due to tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing or regulations, here, in China or elsewhere.

There are other kinds of climate risk too. For example, the risk that cheap clean technology will out-compete fossil fuels. Or, curiously, if you’re a long-term investor, there’s a risk in the possibility that others will switch away from fossil fuels.

Then there’s the mother of all climate risks: the physical impacts. At the lower end of the scale – which, as we’ve seen around the world already, is by no means low – perhaps it’s a flood that destroys infrastructure. But remember the World Bank’s scenario of a 4-degree hotter world: it’s safe to assume that a climate to which humanity can’t adapt is not consistent with steady returns for investors.

Reports on reports on reports

When I started researching this stuff, I was overwhelmed by the vast quantity of reports on it. The finance world is rife with warnings about it. Most of the words spilled have been about climate risk in relation to “asset owners”: pension funds, super funds, insurers and sovereign wealth funds, such as the Future Fund. Among investors, they have a uniquely long-term perspective. In Australia the average super member has 20 years before they’ll retire.

Last year, the Asset Owner’s Disclosure Project – the organisation chaired by John Hewson, and which also runs the Vital Few campaign – released ratings of the way the funds are dealing climate risk. Australia had six of the top ten funds around the world (Local Government Super, CareSuper, Cbus Super, VicSuper, UniSuper and AustralianSuper).

But there’s no cause for celebration. The report concluded that no fund had “accurately assessed or managed its climate risk”. The highest rating fund, Local Government Super, estimates that it has about 10 per cent of its money in low-carbon assets, and 45 per cent in high.

The head of sustainability for Local Government Super, Bill Harnett, was at that meeting at Goldman Sachs, and he said this: “There is an inescapable logic that there are more fossil fuels on balance sheets around the world than we will ever be able to realize in our investments. There is an inevitability. We don’t know when, but we know it will come.”

And yet, his fund’s portfolio is still a long way from investing in a way that is consistent with limiting global warming to 2 degrees.

Why isn’t there change?

At that meeting at Goldman Sachs, everyone in the room accepted the broad numbers that McKibben stated – that four-fifths must stay in the ground. I’m assured that all the big Australian superannuation funds accept that this risk exists, in a broad sense.

Much of the discussion was about how they don’t know how to evaluate it. A couple of large financial analysts have tried. In recent months, HSBC in London did some modelling that showed a deflating carbon bubble could nearly halve the value of coal assets on the London exchange, and knock three-fifths from the value of oil and gas companies. Citi Research did a similar exercise for the Australian stock exchange and found that 14 per cent of value of the ASX200 is in coal, oil and gas, and related industries.

But the superannuation funds in the room say they don’t know how to incorporate those scenarios into their investment decisions.

Ian Wood from AMP Capital said there are two broad reasons. One is that conventional financial modelling gives greater weight to short term earnings. Future dollars are discounted, so if a coal project is making money now, then that matters more.

The other reason is the immense uncertainty about how those scenarios could play out. What will government policy be, here and around the world? If the carbon price spreads, what will it be? When and where will it be brought in? What will happen to technology? What will China do?

Here’s the upshot: for the time being, almost all of our superannuation funds are taking a position that that we won’t limit warming to 2 degrees. They’re betting that we’ll exceed the safe threshold for human civilisation. And they’re not just betting on the game, they’re playing it as well. Their investment policy helps shape that 4-degree world, and helps us on course for a world where they won’t get a good return on very many of their investments.

With a couple of minor exceptions, they’re all just sitting there, watching each other and saying they accept that it’s all true, but they can’t do anything about it.

Bad news and good news

I left the meeting with two conflicting thoughts. The 100 people there that day, they’re the ones in the whole industry who are the most engaged. And even they can’t find it in their modelling to take account of a risk they all acknowledge to be real. They’ll figure out a way at some stage, but it’s clear the change isn’t happening fast enough. Right now, the business case isn’t enough to convince super funds to change.

But there was something else. The really interesting thing about that meeting on Tuesday was this: McKibben was in the room. And the fact that he was in the room made the climate risk more significant for everyone there who was listening. The same goes for all of the campaigns, both the moral and business ones, the civic and corporate pressure.

As McKibben put it at Goldman Sachs: “For our purposes the fight is as good as the win.”

There’s a kind of vicious cycle in the way we’re investing at the moment – it reinforces the systems that cause climate change.

But the carbon bubble idea is so uncertain at the moment, and public policy is so uncertain, that the more people are talking about the carbon bubble, the more likelihood there is one.

So there’s a virtuous circle too. If these big institutions move their money, and if individuals badger their funds and their friends about it, then it becomes more of a reality for the people who are deciding how money is invested. It becomes more likely that governments will implement policy and regulations consistent with 2-degree warming.

Because of the nature of investment decisions, the tipping point isn’t the day when all governments sign off on a radical climate justice agreement. It’s the day when enough people think that significant action is possible. Or when they believe that China really is shifting away from coal. Or when they accept that the cost of solar panels has come down so fast that our centralised, fossil fuel energy system is going to change. Or when they get frightened that others are going to trade out first.

There is a deeper conversation occurring, and it is one that accepts the science, and one that includes both climate activists and market analysts. It has the potential to shift rapidly. It is happening – the only question is whether citizens can make sure it happens in time. 

Read this article on the Wheeler Centre website

Read this related article: ‘Bursting the carbon bubble’

Energy use portals

In Greener Homes, The Age on

Quarterly bill shock could become a thing of the past – if you can pay attention instead.

WHEN a smart meter was installed at Tim Forcey’s house in Sandringham in March, he decided to turn the extra expense into information.

He signed onto the free ‘Energy Easy’ web-portal offered by electricity distributor United Energy.

Mr Forcey is a chemical engineer and a member of the Bayside Climate Change Action Group. With his family, he’d already made some changes – installing insulation, external awnings, double-glazing and solar panels, and switching halogen lights for LEDs, among other things.

But the portal helped the Forceys understand even more about their bill. “You can compare your electricity use hour-to-hour, day-to-day, week-to-week and month-to-month. And you can also compare your use against a neighbourhood average,” he explains.

Their usage in May – about 16 kilowatt-hours per day, for four people – was about average for their suburb. But in the details, they found motivation to do better. With the help of hourly consumption data, Mr Forcey twigged that he’d been running two modems day and night. He switched one off, and put the other on a timer.

The new information also gave him a reality check. While he’d been “hunting for watts here and there”, he figured out that the family’s spa accounts for half their energy use. “People with pools would find similar things,” he says. “Those luxury items use a lot of electricity.”

Smart meters will be installed in every Victorian household by the end of the year. Retailers are beginning to offer flexible pricing, where you can choose to pay different rates at different times of the day. Depending on your capacity to understand and alter your habits, it will prove an opportunity or a threat.

Dr David Byrne, from the University of Melbourne, says most of us don’t have a good idea of how much we electricity use.

“People tend to underestimate their own energy consumption, relative to others’,” he says. “But there’s significant error on both sides. There’s a decent number who overestimate as well.”

He expects our knowledge will improve, as better billing information becomes a matter of competition between retailers. “We’re going to be more informed about our bills – there’s going to be much less scope for bill shock,” he says.

So far, several electricity retailers and distributors have launched web portals, of differing quality. You can find more information and links on the state government’s Switch On website.

Together with his colleagues in the economics department, Dr Byrne has been studying the way householders use Billcap, an electricity information portal used by retailers Click Energy and Australian Power and Gas.

Drawing on smart meter data, Billcap allows customers to view their usage, set energy budgets, estimate bills and compare consumption with similar and efficient households. It can also offer tailored conservation tips, as well as incentives to help shift peaks in demand.

Dr Byrne says that the households who were offered the service reduced their daily usage by 3 per cent, on average.

Those customers who used the site regularly did even better. “If you’re actively looking at the information, we found a 7 per cent reduction in daily energy usage,” he says.

The researchers are working to identify exactly how the participants cut back their usage, and who engaged most. “We’re digging further into the data, but these estimates are consistent with what has been found internationally,” he says.

Read this article at The Age online

Gelato at Brunetti’s

In Culture, Environment on

“I am always drawn back to places where I have lived, the houses and their neighbourhoods.” That’s the first line of Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote.

Me – I am always drawn back to Breakfast at Tiffany’s, the sentences and their paragraphs.

Every autumn, for the several years I’ve rented a room on an elm-lined street in Carlton, I get an urge to read the novella. I want to read it sitting in my terrace courtyard in the waning sun; on a stool in the window of a busy café; on my grandmother’s old armchair in my room, looking out to the yellowing trees.

It’s an autumnal story, gentle and sad, lonely and tender, its scenes fluttering with falling leaves. It begins and ends in fall, and the narrator first meets Holly Golightly in September, on “an evening with the first ripple-chills of autumn running through it”. It barely wisps through winter and spring, and Holly “hibernates” in summer.

The narrator she calls “Fred”, after her brother, or sometimes Buster or Cookie, and who shares much with a young Capote – and something with me, too – says he doesn’t care much for springtime; autumns, rather, “seem that season of beginning”.

I’ve never thought about the book all that much, about what it means, or why I like it so. I just want to read it when the mornings are crisp.

But this year, I was drawn to it before the leaves alerted me, by the New Yorker, which carried a dismissive review of a new Broadway adaptation. The critic adores the novella, however: it is “so extraordinary a work,” he wrote, “that it incites not writerly envy but pride”.

Yes, I thought, that’s true. When it was published, Norman Mailer said Capote was “the most perfect writer” of his generation, who wrote “the best sentences, word for word, rhythm upon rhythm”. Mailer said he “would not change two words” in the book. Yes, I should read it again. Maybe its sentences will rub off on mine?

That was in early April. Normally, the leaves on my street would have begun to fall by then. One summer during the drought they fell at Christmas and we all worried it was the end for the trees. But the council installed all kinds of sprinklers and mulched around the trunks, and gradually they recovered. And this year, autumn arrived late. The hottest summer on record stretched deep into March and April: an extended, gelato-summer, my evenings still punctuated by the short walk across the park and around the corner to the ice-cream counter at Brunetti. Beneath those balmy days and mild nights the trees remained green. 

***

I do not know how many times I’ve read the book; less than ten, I’d guess. But I do remember when I first heard of it. I was in a crummy bar in Canberra, visiting an old friend, my first housemate when I moved there after university. He is several years older, a contrary character, alternately passionate and ambivalent about day-to-day life.

The bar has a sour smell, sourer every time I return. There were three of us: my friend and an old comrade of his – a socialist turned sensualist with a large tattoo of a rat on his forearm. We were drinking beer and talking about books; or rather, they were talking about books and I was listening. The socialist adored Breakfast at Tiffany’s. My friend agreed: “It’s a gorgeous story,” he said and his eyes grew moist, as they do in all the conversations with him I like best.

I thought it improbable. I’d never seen the movie – still haven’t, as a matter of fact – but I had the notion it was a swooning romance. I was suspicious of the book. Nevertheless, I bought a copy, one of those cheap, orange, Penguin classics. It contains the novella and three short stories, same as the first edition in 1958. It is pleasingly slim, enough to fit in your pocket.

The story isn’t a romance, I found out – not that sort, anyway. It’s all memory, belonging and loss, and a platonic kind of love. A decade on, Fred recalls the cycle of seasons he spent living above Holly Golightly in a New York brownstone; at first captivated, then burned and finally, warmed, by her reflected glow.

It was wartime, 1943, and young Fred had moved from the south with a fancy to be a writer. Before he’d even met her, the card above the girl’s mailbox nagged him “like a tune”:

Miss Holly Golightly

Travelling

Holly is a society girl, not a prostitute, though she understands the gossip; after all, she admits, “I’ve always thrown out such a jazzy line”. Assorted unpleasant men exchange generous tips for her company; Capote described his creation as an American geisha. She’s only 19, escaping her past, but always remembering it – playing sad country songs in the fire escape while her hair dries – and then inventing herself anew.

I’m not one for recalling plots, and I know it. But even so, Breakfast at Tiffany’s surprises me every time. By the end, yet again, all I have is a shimmering sense of her, and an impression of the writer too, the outsider upstairs, sometimes writing, often listening in, wishing he were nearer.

This year, though, I noticed a few things along the way.

It’s the ’40s, sure, but Holly stumps for marriage equality. She’s settled down some by this stage, and tells Fred she loves her man just fine, but he’s not her “guy ideal”. And who is? Jawaharlal Nehru, say, or Greta Garbo: “Why not? A person ought to be able to marry men or women or – listen, if you came to me and said you wanted to hitch up with Man o’ War, I’d respect your feeling. No, I’m serious. Love should be allowed. I’m all for it. Now that I’ve got a pretty good idea what it is.”

Man o’ War was a famous thoroughbred horse.

This too: I discovered – again surely – that Fred’s birthday is 30 September, the same as mine. And Capote’s. Not only that, but it’s also the day on which everything unravels: “So the days, the last days, blow about in memory, hazy, autumnal, all alike as leaves: until a day unlike any other I’ve lived.” That’s how Fred described our birthday. It was really the three of us there, you know: Holly, Fred and me.

But most of all, I thought about Holly and the “mean reds”. Not the blues.

“No,” she tells Fred, slowly. “No, the blues are because you’re getting fat or maybe it’s been raining too long. You’re sad, that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.”

Her only cure is to hail a cab to Tiffany’s and look in the windows. “It calms me down right away, the quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there, not with those kind men in the nice suits, and that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets.”

Holly yearns for a real-life place that makes her feel the way Tiffany’s does, maybe in Mexico by the sea, when her lost brother returns from the war. She went there once – they’d raise horses, and he’s good with horses. But even as she says it, Fred and Holly and me, we all know it’s an impossible dream.

***

In my street, the first heavy leaf fall came on May 1, the first day of the last month of the season: there was a cold wind and the yellow leaves fell like a storm. But then it got warm again, and once more I went for gelato. In most respects I’m an advocate for variety, but when it comes to ice cream, I’ve settled on my gelato ideal: two scoops in a waffle cone, chocolate and lemon.

This autumn Brunetti moved around the corner from Faraday Street, where it had been for nearly 30 years, and into the space on Lygon Street vacated when Borders died.

I visited the new store on a Saturday night, on a date. I had the mean reds that day, shot through with the blues: I knew well the cause. I’d been writing about climate change – the worsening disaster projections now, next decade, throughout my lifetime and beyond, together with the profound absence of either prevention or preparation. Nothing new, I know, but nothing tolerable either, when you think about it. In a recent journal article, a speculative “future history” by respected American science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, I read a throwaway line: “The human populations of Australia and Africa, of course, were wiped out.”

The store was alive, teeming and hollering like an old-time trading floor in a stock boom. As we entered, it became clear there were two kinds of people. Dozens of waiters strode after their errands, wearing bow ties and black waistcoats or else slim black aprons tied in a cross at the back, while all around the rest of us tottered, distracted and enraptured by the cakes, tarts, chocolates and macaroons, and the mirrors, the bonze trim, the patterned tiles and the blown-up, black and white photographs on the walls. We gaped alongside infinite desserts, we stared at the baristas on the central podium and we swept past pastries and savouries, croissants and paninis, until we stopped before a huge, tiled pizza oven.

I was agog. Sparkle-eyed. I turned to her and gestured toward all the people, sitting, talking, waiting, laughing, fattening: “Isn’t it wonderful?”

To our left there was a roped-off section commanded by a waiter in a headset. Straight ahead, the gelato, more flavours than ever before. “Maybe,” she replied slowly. “But it’s so much. It’s awful. It’s madness – it’s everything that doesn’t make sense.”

I agreed: awful. And wonderful. We slipped out of there, without gelato this time, and back into the autumn Carlton night.

***

I read the novella for a second time, writing this story, but the moment had passed. I’m done with wistfulness, for now. Everything – endless summer and falling leaves, apathy and indulgence, reds and blues, bad governments and worse; brown coal, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and humanity – it all has its season.

Read this article at the Wheeler Centre website

Police have no leads in delayed investigation

In Social justice on

THE State Coroner has heard that the police have no leads into the death of a man who was found in the Maribyrnong River in July 2011.

Michael Atakelt was 22 years old when he went missing on 26 June 2011. His body was retrieved from the Maribyrnong River in Ascot Vale eleven days later, on 7 July.

In February, the Coroner suspended the inquest into his death and directed the police to reinvestigate with a different detective in charge.

In a hearing yesterday, Acting Senior Sergeant Peter Tatter-Rendlemann, from the Hobsons Bay crime investigation unit, told the Coroner’s court that there were no witnesses or evidence about what happened during the period Atakelt was missing. “I have nothing so far that can shed any light as to what may have occurred,” he said.

Atakelt’s father, Getachew Seyoum said he now believed the inquest would not provide any answers about how his son died. “From now, my hope to find the truth is diminishing,” he said.

The police initially claimed that Atakelt had entered the river near the Smithfield bridge in Footscray, several kilometres downstream from where the body was found. But at the inquest in February, Sergeant George Dixon, from the water police, said it was not possible for a body to float such a distance upstream.  

The case has been controversial, especially among the Ethiopian and other African-Australian communities, ever since Atakelt’s body was found nearly two years ago.

In December 2011, the assistant commissioner responsible for the north-west metro region, Stephen Fontana, assured a public meeting in North Melbourne that the original brief prepared for the Coroner was “a very thorough investigation”. He said it had been overseen by both the homicide squad and the ethical standards department, and that he had “total confidence” in the Footscray police officer responsible, Detective Senior Constable Tim McKerracher.

However, the Coroner heard today that CCTV footage from various locations near where Atakelt went missing was no longer available. It was not accessed during the original investigation.

Last month, the police made a new appeal for any witnesses to provide information through Crime Stoppers and displayed posters around Flemington and Ascot Vale. But Acting Senior Sergeant Tatter-Rendlemann said no new witnesses had come forward.

The inquest has been scheduled to re-commence on 26 August.

For background, read the other articles I’ve written about this matter: ‘Between two oceans’, ‘Watching a hearing’, ‘Coroner tells police to reinvestigate death’ and ‘Changing a whole system : racialised policing in Melbourne‘.

The living fossil

In Environment on

It’s as old as the dinosaurs, grows in a top-secret location and – until the early ’90s – was only known through 150 million year old remains. This is the story of the Wollemi Pine.

Published in Smith Journal, Volume 6

ON a cool, clear day, in early spring 1994, David Noble rested for lunch deep in a canyon in Wollemi National Park, 130 kilometres north-west of Sydney. The meal was nothing special; he’d brought standard bushwalking fare – sandwiches, muesli bars, nuts and sultanas. But the location was extraordinary. One-in-150 million, or thereabouts. He just didn’t know that yet.

Noble was 29, fit and wiry, and renowned among local bushwalkers and canyoners for exploring uncharted, inaccessible territory.

Earlier that morning, high above the gorge, he’d slung his rope around a thin sapling that clung to the rock face, tested his weight against it, then whizzed over the ledge. It was just another weekend adventure, together with his regular exploring buddies Tony Zimmerman and Michael Casteleyn.

The three men travelled light: they wore footy shorts and t-shirts and carried no camping gear, just their ropes and harnesses. They’d scrambled down the cliff, pushed their way through bushes and ferns along a rocky creek, and abseiled again, trying to stay out of the icy water.

They stopped at the end of the canyon, and while they ate, Noble looked around. It was a dark, narrow rainforest, moist from the water dripping down the cliff walls and flowing in the nearby creek. There was no direct sunlight; even the air seemed tinged with green.

Noble peered at the trees above him, but didn’t recognise the species. He’d taken botany courses in his environmental science degree, so he knew a thing or two about plants. They were conifers, shaped like a storybook Christmas tree, but the mature trunks had a strange, bubbly bark, which looked like Coco Pops. The tallest among them stood nearly 40 metres. Noble snapped off a small branch, put it in his backpack, and promptly forgot about it.

Within months, the trio’s lunch-spot hit newspapers all over the world. It became the most sought-after and jealously guarded view in the whole country. Nearly two decades later, its location remains secret. Only dozens of people have ever been there. If all goes according to plan, few more ever will.

***

It’s a misty, prehistoric kind of morning, early in summer, and Noble is picking his way along the neatly manicured paths of the Blue Mountains Botanic Gardens. He’s leading me towards a single Wollemi Pine – Wollemia nobilis – planted on a grassy hill.

The species is named for him, and for the national park in which he found it. Nearby, inside the information centre, there’s a large display about the tree, including a 150-million-year-old fossil that matches the pattern of its needles.

The Wollemi Pines are living fossils. Noble’s discovery was like a twitcher spotting a pterodactyl.

He strides ahead, arms and pack straps swinging in time with his springy, splayfooted gait. But just as I’m admiring his nimbleness, he stops abruptly. He’d gotten us lost, momentarily. “I’ll bring the map next time,” he says, with a wry smile.

Truth is, he’s much happier without paths at all. And certainly without journalists and photographers hanging around. In front of the camera, those free-swinging hands lose their rhythm and clasp one another awkwardly in front of his waist instead.

Noble is now 47, and a long-time park ranger. He’s a walker, not a talker. And nobody understands this landscape like he does. In the late 1970s at Katoomba High School in the Blue Mountains, while other kids were playing school cricket, he chose bushwalking. As the years went by, he kept exploring new corners of bushland in anyway he could: caving, canyoning, kayaking and hiking.

By the early ’90s he was working with National Parks, building walking tracks near Blackheath, the town where he grew up. On weekends he ventured into the Wollemi wilderness. A huge expanse of bush, the park traverses some of the most rugged terrain in New South Wales. No one knows for sure, but the best estimate is that there are about 500 canyons within its boundaries.

On expeditions with his friends Noble has named over 200 places previously unnamed and unexplored.

“I like to go somewhere and get to know it well,” he explains. “Most people travel the highways, but when you go off the track and have to use maps, compasses and a GPS, it’s a little bit harder. You need technical equipment to do it, so you get to go places even the Aboriginal people wouldn’t have seen.”

***

It wasn’t unusual for Noble to take a cutting of a plant he didn’t recognise. His father was a keen amateur botanist, and the two would often nut out the identification together.

If they couldn’t figure it out, he showed the plant to his friend Wyn Jones, senior naturalist with National Parks. “Usually he rattles them off pretty quick,” Noble recalls. “This time he said, ‘Leave it with me’. I thought there was something suspicious about that. And away we went: the longer it took them to identify it, the more likely it was something different.”

Jones, together with botanist Jan Allen, set about listing the characteristics of the tree. They cross-checked their findings with other species in the Araucariaceae family, including Kauri pines from New Zealand and Monkey Puzzle trees from Chile. They didn’t match. It was something new.

And something very old. The first conifers evolved more than 300 million years ago, a time when Australia was part of the ancient super-continent, Gondwana, along with Africa, South America, Antarctica and India.

The Wollemi is thought to date from between 90 and 200 million years ago, during the Jurassic and Cretaceous periods. The pine, and its close ancestors, once blanketed the landscapes of the southern hemisphere, while the Earth was hotter, wetter and steamier.

As the climate grew cooler and drier, those great conifer forests fell back, bested by flowering plants – the newer, more versatile kids on the botanical block. Epochs passed, day-by-day, and the Wollemi retreated to its one hidden crevasse.

Noble wasn’t privy to all the probing over the plant’s classification. But as snippets of the findings reached his ears, his excitement grew and grew. The buzz reached a peak with the public launch of the tree in Sydney. He was interviewed by every television station, including an “horrific” live-cross for Channel Ten news.

When the story of the tree’s existence was announced, enthusiasts around the world clamoured to know where it grew. But the authorities held fast – they would only reveal the location to scientists on genuine research projects. Even Noble hasn’t been back since 1995.

The mystery makes for an enthralling anomaly. In the era of Google maps, smart phones and satellite tracking, its location remains an otherworldly secret.

***

Why go to so much trouble? Is the tree really anything more than a curiosity?

It’s unlikely that many other critters still rely on the pines for their survival, because there have been so few of them for so long. But Noble says it’s too soon to tell. “There’s much more study to be done; these things can take years to figure out. Whether it’s a cure for cancer or a different sort of fungi that lives on the tree, we just don’t know yet.”

The extinction of an individual species has been likened to removing a rivet on an aeroplane. This one or the next might not matter, but one day, when too many have gone, the whole thing will come crashing down.

But when it comes to threatened species, there’s something beyond pragmatism at play. Scientist and author Tim Flannery argues that extinctions are a matter of morality. And, unfortunately, we feel it most keenly when the creature is cute and fluffy, or in the case of the Wollemi, towering and majestic. Other species aren’t so fortunate.

“The demise of a bat may not weight greatly in the balance of human wellbeing, but it speaks volumes about the human soul,” he wrote, in a recent Quarterly Essay. “Do we wish to be despoilers and executioners of the natural world? Or do we want our children to have the opportunity to enjoy a world as bountiful and diverse as the one our parents bequeathed to us?”

The Wollemi is listed as “critically endangered”: the second-last breath before extinction. A single bushfire could turn them to ash – but in their private rainforest, at the bottom of a wet canyon, they’ve protected themselves well.

As with so many other threatened species, the biggest threat is humanity. We’re living in the Anthropocene, the epoch in which humans have come to dramatically influence the Earth’s systems. By our hands, biodiversity is vanishing and the climate is transforming.

The Wollemi pines are particularly at risk, because they’re identical. One of the researchers’ most curious findings so far is that each one has the same DNA as the next. So the main reason the gorge remains secret is to protect them from us, or most likely, from our boots. The invasive plant pathogen Phytophthera, which hitchhikes on the soles of our shoes, could wipe out the lot in no time at all.

“It’s not Jurassic Park where you can get the genes from a mosquito, and bring them back,” Noble says. “Once they’re lost, they’re lost forever.”

But he isn’t so worried about the tree’s survival. After all, it has proven astonishingly resilient; it was here before us, and there’s a good chance it’ll be here after we’re gone. It waited patiently in its canyon, and now, it has taken advantage of an unusual opportunity to spread again. There are official Wollemi Pine distributors in 16 different countries. In Australia, a seedling will set you back $50.

At his place, on 100 acres of bush in the Blue Mountains, Noble is growing three – one in a pot, for a Christmas tree, and two in the ground. He was given them when the pines were first released for sale: his own trees bearing his own name.

It’s one of the few things in his life that have changed since his “lucky discovery” – that and the occasional interviews with the press. With or without it, he’d be a park ranger. And with or without it, he’d still be exploring new canyons. In 2005, he was named the Australian Geographic Adventurer of the Year.

He swears he’s slowed down in recent years, since having a family – his two daughters, and the orchard and vegie patch having moved up the order of priorities – but the supporting evidence is scant. He still goes canyoning with his old explorers, Zimmerman and Casteleyn, though not so often. Now his regular partner is his wife, Jules. He estimates they’ve explored more than 300 canyons together.

“I didn’t make a million dollars, so maybe I went wrong somehow,” he laughs. “But it has allowed me to be an advocate for the pine, and for threatened species as well. And for adventure: for showing people that things can still be discovered.”

The word “Wollemi” derives from a word in the Darkinjung language, which means “stop and look around”.

“It’s a appropriate, because that’s what I did: stop and notice what was near me, rather than just barging on through.”