The Australian Energy Sector's Response

Fuck you.

Fuck you even to the coalminer's granddaughter.  See, it is rather egalitarian when you think about it ...

Turn off the Lights

Pic by Benjamin Benschneider/Maxine Nagel and The Seattle Times.

One of the pictures above, of the Seattle skyline, was taken by photographer Benjamin Benschneider. The other is of the south Milky Way taken by Maxine Nagel, Treasurer of the Seattle Astronomical Society.

If we weren't so scared of the dark, if we turned off the lights at night, that is akin to what what we would see on every clear night.  We wouldn't need superimposition.  It's what's there.

Here are some interesting stats about outdoor lighting, from the International Dark-Sky Association:

From the International Dark-Sky Association website

The Filters of Culture

Been thinking about filters lately.  Filters in different forms.  Not so much your common water filter or your pool filter because ... well, they're not really all that exciting.  The filters that hinder our views and determine our paradigms - these are maybe as unexciting to some (definitely far more scary), but for me there is something about being reminded that I do not see everything which gives me some sort of comfort, somehow.  It is as if it balances out one of the more terrified voices of The Cast of Thousands which insists, in PTSD fashion, that I must stay vigilant at all time, and see everything.

Reading across the interwebs recently has brought me across several different examples of filtering.  I recently read an interesting account of a writer's group in Tennant Creek, in the Northern Territory.  Composed of indigenous and non-indigenous writers, it was interesting to read about the different focusses in the writing - the indigenous wrote mainly about the land, and the non-indigenous about their feelings, their place in relation to the world.  Ktima Heathcote writes:

The Aboriginal writers mainly wrote about the land, their country, as so evocatively expressed by Maureen O’Keefe and Valerie Nelson, two writers from Ali Curung, a community about 170 kilometres south of Tennant. Unconstrained by the straitjacket of ‘correct English’, there’s a natural rhythm in the way Aboriginal writers express themselves. Sure, it’s raw technically, but the power and beauty of their words is undeniable. Like the surrounding countryside, harsh and uncompromising during drought, green now due to rain, their voice seeps into your skin and ignites an ancient, almost forgotten part of you.

The non-Aboriginal writers of the group showed more structural complexity in their work, focusing more on feelings and how they see themselves in relation to the world. It’s an avenue not commonly explored by Aboriginal writers out here, but excavating memories and personal experience for their rich emotional content is starting to fuel the work of established writers such as Rosemary Plummer and David C. Curtis, both of whom are NT Literary Award winners. Holt said at the time of the retreat she loved the fact that ‘there were whitefellas as well as blackfellas’ in the group. It made for the most enriching experience of literary cultures; using language as a means to move forwards together. She believed the idea of having a well-planned and inclusive writing retreat in an area often overlooked by funding bodies would create a kernel of hope for the literary minds of this region. And she was right. Less than a year later, in July 2010, Barkly Writers’ Ink was born. With the aid of an Arts NT Community grant of $5000 came the opportunity for a core group of writers from the Barkly to meet on a regular basis to write, provide support and professional development, network, mentor each other, and learn about the craft of writing and the publishing industry.

I am a white honky Melburnite, who has never yet made it to the Top End and is thirsting to. That is where you go in this country to find Aboriginal culture because, quite frankly, the first 150 years of genocide was so successful that you will find very little on the eastern seaboard unless it's in small enclaves or being sold as safe art in souvenir shops.

My homeland has long held a duality for me ~ it feels like home.  It has sunk into my bones, so that I feel as if I could blend into the bark of a eucalyptus just about as easily as a kookaburra does.  The ground stirs in my guts.  But I don't know it in my ancestral bones.  The culture I come from clings to the outsides of the continent, scared of it, lives largely apart from it in urban centres.  The differences in indigenous and non-indigenous approaches to the different ways of viewing ourselves is so linked to the history of our country.  The blood from that genocide surely still cries from the ground, making us non-indigenes uneasy about our  place here in our home.  We view it as alien, hostile, inhospitable.  We do not yet know it intimately.

I think also the differences highlight, as Mark Vernon suggests in his post What is Lost When We Learn to Write, the differences between an oral and a written culture.  It is ironic that this is reflected in a writing group in Tennant Creek, but the vestiges of an oral culture still remain.  How could there not be a noticeable difference for a culture which sang itself across the land, which survived for hundreds of thousands of years on such a dry continent, which knew where to dig for water and food.  Knew that the land was full of good bush tucker and beauty.  A beauty which the white honkies couldn't even really see for decades, their eyes filtering beauty via visions of the motherland, of the deep greens that come from a colder climate and more rain.

The more you abstract things out there - into words, into books - which I love, and am grateful for, and adore - the more you give a tiny little piece of yourself away, a piece which was yours when you were the book, and the land was the page.

There's been a conversation going on at Pilgrim's Moon about Can You Create True Community Online?  And here again, I see the same thing at work - because communicating online is also another filter.  In the comments to that post, WOL made the observations that:

No matter what kind of interactions people have, both sides are at least one “remove” from each other–Don’t we always edit and “spin” our face-to -face interactions with each other? Don’t we always have ways of re-inventing ourselves to suit our needs. If you met Dolly Partin without the wig and makeup, you’d probably never recognize her. That’s a kind of filter. — filters between ourselves and the world — I think the online community thing is the same idea, only with one more layer of reality filtering.

That old cartoon of dogs at a computer comes to mind — one tells the other, “On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Because you are not interacting face to face, and you don’t have that immediate feedback, because there are so many barriers between you and who you are interacting with, I think people tend to be more candid, more “up front” because they don’t have that instant visual feedback. I think the internet has a way of lowering inhibitions. People will say things on the internet they would never dream of saying in person — cyberbullying is a case in point.

This is always the challenge - learning to understand what we are ignorant of.  Those technologies and methodologies and all the other ologies which have brought us so far and made life so much easier in some ways ~ they have also filtered our perceptions, changed our paradigms, and in some ways removed us without our knowledge from the simple, beautiful earth and from each other as co-sharers and carers of that earth.  The way back involves learning how to be rooted in the earth, knowing our dependence on it, on the simple, beautiful ways, the ones that cannot be spreadsheeted.

Tree Woman

This is one woman who will endure physical and verbal beating for what she believes. She has gone from living in a dirt floor hut to being awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. (Well, okay, sure, it's lost its lustre since you can now be awarded one for simply not being someone else, but hey, Wangari Maathai has sure earned hers).

It never ceases to amaze me how much one person, or a small group can accomplish - way more than the sum of their parts. Wangari is one amazing woman, and she has had one amazing life.

When the Kenyan dictator of her country, Daniel Arap Moi, decided to build over Uhuru Park, the only parkland in Nairobi, she stood up to him. She incurred his wrath and denigration (ye olde standby - when people start speaking up, demonise them. If they are an oppressed part of your culture (ie women), call them mad, denigrate their worth, call them onto the cultural carpet, tell them they're not behaving how women should behave, respecting their men).

Proving that not much has changed since Nebuchadnezar, Moi was wanting to replace Uhuru Park with "a giant skyscraper, some luxury apartments, and a huge golden statue of himself." Maathai's protests earned her a spot in jail, charged with treason. It took her three years of fighting and death threats and violence before Moi backed down on his venture after international protests began snowballing.

Maathai's Green Belt Movement began in 1977 in an effort to tackle deforestation, soil erosion and lack of water. What began at the grassroots, a bunch of women planting trees, now has seen 40 million trees planted throughout Africa. Inspiring stuff. Grounding women back into the earth that supports them.

Maathai now speaks internationally about deforestation and global warming. I encourage you to check out the Green Belt Movement site and the article in The Independent which first switched me onto this wonderful woman.

As a scientist, Maathai is warning now that man-made global warming threatens to make the rainforests dry up and die, whatever she does in Kenya. She could save them from Moi – but can she save them from us?

"People don't realise how much they depend for their own survival on this ecosystem and how fragile it is," she says, almost pleading. "The world's forests are its lungs. Thick, healthy strands of indigenous trees absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide and keep them out of the atmosphere. If the Congolese rainforests were entirely destroyed, for example, 135 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would be released – equivalent to more than a decade of man-made emissions. So if we lose these forests, we lose the fight against climate change."

The rainforests can be killed from two directions – by the saws of men like Moi, or the warming gases of people like us. That is why she has left the land she loves, armed with the Nobel Peace Prize she won in 2004, and travelled so far: to try to persuade us to let the forests live. "There are moments in history when humans have to raise their consciousness and see the world anew. This is one of those moments. We are being called to assist the earth in healing her wounds, and in the process we can heal our own. We can revive our sense of belonging to a larger community of life. We can see who we really are."

This inspires me even while I feel the futility in a way. (And going deeper, while in spiritual terms I still hold to a tiny naiive childish flicker that the world will be made anew some day, maybe that belief is why we are so languid, who believe such a thing. Why care for the earth when it is going to be made new? Only a people living in our times, as cast adrift as we are from mother earth, would ever be so deluded as to think such things. We are most certainly city kids).

How can things change when it comes down to people who are encouraged within the very fabric of their society, to consume more and more? What happens when climactically the most powerful in the world are ... us?

So often I am overwhelmed by the way everything is set up. Our very cultural fabric, and our riches, our torpor, impede us from getting involved. And so to see people who have broken through that ennui and are willing to stand up is inspiring to me. I was enamoured to see my favourite gardener, Peter Cundall, arrested protesting against Gunn's pulp mill in Tasmania the other day.

It all feels so helpless and pointless because the power is with the governments, and the governments are composed of people who wish to stay in power, who have all sorts of pressures from all sorts of different venues, and who are rich and corrupt despite what they think about themselves, and so what we have is a proposed emissions trading scheme which will see and so what you get when you are hashing out a proposed emissions trading bill is one, the Greens tell us, which will actually will see greater investment in coal in the future. WTF?

But then that's always the way it's been, isn't it. The big people at the top are smothered by their own power, their own position, their own red tape. Even when what's debated is the planet we live on, the air that we breathe, the trees that breathe for us. It is up to people at the bottom to make the real difference. It's always been the way. Power to the people :)

HT to Mike

Green and Gold ~ Hard to Go Green Cos of the Gold?

"The largest turnarounds in carbon productivity are required by Australia, Turkey, Russia and Saudi Arabia. The longer these countries take to achieve these turnarounds, the more costly the eventual transition will be.''

Vivid Economics report, as seen in The Age

Australia has come out the worst placed of the G20 nations to be able to compete economically in a greener world. There is so much change required, and we are a terribly conservative country in many respects. We are so ridiculously over-bureaucratised. The status quo tends to win when innovation is stymied by the 38,692 things you need to do to keep the red tapers happy in the federal government, the state government, the local government.

We are in love with our recovering economy, our coal-based electricity, our aluminium exports. Carbon, yum yum. It would be ironic if it was the conservatism brought about by our wealth that is the cause of our slowness to act, when the very act of changing slowly will determine that we are less wealthy the slower we are to act. Countries like France, Mexico and Argentina are leading the way, and we need to start taking leaves out of their books. Their fast acting will pressure is to change whether we want to or not. This is where competition is a good thing.