Michael Seebeck

Elected Member

I would call myself a lifelong environmentalist, but my career in medicine, from which I retired almost 3 years ago, limited my activity due to time constraints and other demands.

I have also been a photographer all my life and had my own landscape photography gallery on the Esplanade in Cairns, which was successful in its own right. Unfortunately, I was forced to close it when a Syrian billionaire bought the building just before COVID. Overall, I have focused mainly on landscape and wildlife photography, but I was heavily involved in underwater photography for a number of years, especially when I was working on Christmas Island and had the opportunity to travel a lot for scuba diving. I have logged well over 1000 dives over the course of several years.

More recently, I have been concentrating again on landscape photography and increasingly documenting environmental matters, especially the rapid rollout of renewable energy, which is decimating areas of Queensland’s Great Dividing Range and coastal areas. To this end, I have been shooting video footage and have created many short videos and documentaries for social media. So, I would say I am reasonably proficient in videography and video editing as well. I also capture environmental sound recordings and am in the throes of constructing a website specifically for this purpose.

I am currently doing some original research on wind farm impacts on climate with two scientists, one of whom is a European professor. I have also written a few media articles recently but have found them difficult to get published – it seems editors are reluctant to publish anything that questions the zeitgeist. Instead, a few articles have found their way onto my Substack account, and I imagine that is where most of what I write will end up. The market for anything that questions technohopium and elucidates the unsustainability of current economic and population sizes is very limited.

I have been aware of the issue of human overpopulation and its adverse impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity all my life, and am increasingly disgusted with government policies in this respect. I have travelled a fair bit around Australia and globally, and the impacts of population growth are plain to see everywhere and are never good, especially in environmental terms.