Greer kicks off writer's festival - The West Australian

Greer kicks off writer's festival - The West Australian: The results were an absurdly inflated currency, exorbitant food prices, unaffordable housing and ecological degradation, she said.

"What will be kept when the mineral wealth has all been shipped away? The answer is nothing. Mining doesn’t bring development unless governments make it bring development."

"All mining brings is holes in the ground."

Our real inheritance should be bio-diversity, not bricks and mortar, she said.

Women had historically been at the forefront of the environmental movement but Professor Greer called for the women of today to do more and follow the unlikely example of the growing activism of the Country Women's Association against coal seam gas projects in Queensland and New South Wales.

Having been subordinated by men for centuries, women better understood the natural world was ordered from the bottom up, rather than the top down, she said.

"We have to mobilise as if resisting the bombardment of an invader."

Humans shared their DNA and depended for their survival on slime moulds, mycorrhizal plant fungi, bacteria and tree frogs, she said.

"We are all earthlings," she said.