Alan Roberts

ecologist, scientist, revolutionary democrat, socialist

Main Content

Read the book in pdf form

Download the book »

The Self-Managing Environment

Alan Roberts has good claims to the title of Australia’s first ecological thinker. Certainly no other Australian could point to an earlier collection of essays on environmental subjects than Alan’s book The Self-Managing Environment, published in London in 1979.

Alan Roberts was among the first to see the necessity of injecting ecological thinking into socialism, as Janna Thompson writes in her review.

Read her critique, as well as excerpts from the book and other information on it in this section.

Read more »

New worlds and the nuclear age

by John Hinkson   Reflections on the social form of the scientific age The fear of the power of nuclear weapons since 1945 has been widely shared by publics everywhere. Suddenly, after the unrelenting horrors of six years of world war, people were confronted by destructive powers they had no way of comprehending: previous forms of […]

Alan

He had the appearance of wire, stripped of its casing, thin, straight, finely detailed. Whether in overalls, tennis whites, or army-disposal shirts and pants—that uniform of postwar left- wing men—Alan Roberts projected energy, electricity.

Read the full article »

He had the appearance of wire, stripped of its casing, thin, straight, finely detailed. Whether in overalls, tennis whites, or army-disposal shirts and pants—that uniform of postwar left- wing men—Alan Roberts projected energy, electricity.

Egalitarian democrat – and his approach to science

John Hinkson, one of the editors of Arena, highlights the core egalitarianism which is at the centre of all Alan’s intellectual work – and the renewed prescience of his warnings on nuclear war.

Read the full article »

John Hinkson, one of the editors of Arena, highlights the core egalitarianism which is at the centre of all Alan’s intellectual work – and the renewed prescience of his warnings on nuclear war.

Nuclear Power and the Bomb

From a little bang to a huge blockbuster is not that difficult: the spread of nuclear power makes proliferation easier, writes Alan Roberts in The Age

Read the full article »

From a little bang to a huge blockbuster is not that difficult: the spread of nuclear power makes proliferation easier, writes Alan Roberts in The Age