Science
The ANU Press Science monographs series explicates for specialist and non-specialist readers the story and significance of scientific endeavour, primarily in Australia and its region.
Please note: The following list of titles is sorted by publication date, with the most recent first.
Displaying results 1 to 2 of 2.
Saving the World »
Overcoming the Consumptogenic System and Improving Planetary Health Equity
Publication date: 2027
It can be very easy to succumb to despair. The world today presents us with an almost overwhelming catalogue of suffering. Planetary systems are pushed beyond safe limits, preventable diseases and decline in wellbeing are widespread, and wealth is concentrated in the hands of a few while billions of people scrape by.
And yet despair, however understandable, is not the only story. This book begins from the premise that the harmful consumptogenic system producing these outcomes is not fixed nor universal. It can change. Both history and the present are full of moments when collective imagination conjures a different future, where entrenched power is challenged, and where organised human effort bends the arc of events toward justice. The question is not whether change is possible, but how to make it happen.
This unique collection of writing reaches beyond the usual boundaries — drawing on public health, environmental and social science, non‑Western and Indigenous knowledge systems, and the insight of practitioners working inside governments and communities worldwide.
Scientific, creative, poignant and compelling, the chapters offer new ways of valuing, knowing, being and imagining — ways that point toward planetary health equity: a world where everyone, everywhere, can enjoy good health in a stable Earth system.
From governments daring to lead to economies, businesses and financial systems being reimagined and civil society acting with courage and clarity — this book is proof that a better way of being in the world isn’t just possible, it is underway.
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Pacific Skipjack »
The Remarkable Story Behind the World’s Biggest Tuna Fishery
Authored by: Bob Kearney
Publication date: August 2026
The Pacific skipjack tuna is a remarkable fish. With nowhere to hide in the wide-open spaces of the Pacific, it is one of the fastest and most mobile fish in the world. It is also one of the quickest fish to reproduce, such that the largest tuna fishery in the world, co-managed by more than twenty Pacific island nations, can yield enormous catches of skipjack without threat to the well-being of the species. The south-western Pacific is the only region in the world where all tuna stocks have a ‘healthy’ status. It supports the acknowledged best researched and managed tuna fishery on the planet. With skipjack being the most important renewable natural resource in the region, the fishery is crucial to the economic and wider social wellbeing of Pacific Island peoples, who are now largely managing these resources for themselves.
Astonishingly, while many individuals, groups, organisations, institutions and governments from around the world were involved in the establishment of this gigantic fishery, it came to be successfully managed primarily through the vision and tenacious efforts of a single young Australian scientist, Dr Bob Kearney. In this book, Kearney tells the extraordinary, colourful story of how, beginning in Papua New Guinea at the start of the 1970s, he crossed paths, and sometimes swords, with philanthropists, bankers, fishing executives, scientists, lawyers, government leaders and representatives from many nations, and even the Indonesian military. Kearney personally designed, obtained funding for, administered, managed, and demonstrated the scientific and commercial value of his dream experiment, carried out across more than thirty million square kilometres of ocean.
Pacific Skipjack is co-published with ACIAR (Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research).
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