Coal-loving colonials put Australia on the road to cooked. Now it's time to turn the heat down | Liz Conor

Climate change is colonialism's final frontier which is why land rights are the first order of climate justice

In the Anthropocene we humans have become a geological force, a "force of nature" - and a self-defeating one. But this crisis in climate and extinction was first kindled by coal-fired colonialism and its ethos of extraction and elimination.

Here in Australia the historical coincidence of colonialism and coal sticks out like a porcupine at a nudists' colony. Watts's coal-fired steam engine was invented just two years before the first fleet arrived in Sydney Cove. Coal mining began near Nobbys Head in Newcastle in the 1790s, with the first coal shipment leaving now the world's largest coal export port in 1799.