[NetBehaviour] Fires in Australia

[Helen Varley Jamieson]

hi alan,

it is truly devastating & catastrophic what is happening in australia, &
outrageous that the government there continues to be so fucking stupid.
i heard that scott morrison (the prime minister, who chose to have a
hawaiian holiday in the midst of it all) would fly out to china to
discuss trade negotiations, including coal mining, immediately after
meeting with fire chiefs. his inability to make the connections is
staggering.

i have many family and friends in australia and everyone is affected in
some way; some have lost property, everyone is affected by the smoke, my
family & friends in new zealand are also seeing and breathing the smoke.
yes, an estimated half a billion birds, animals & insects have died. and
the fires are still burning, many out of control, and no end in sight.
this level of catastrophe has been predicted - but not for another
decade; everything is accelerating.

what can we do? suzon posted this list of donation links:
https://www.abc.net.au/classic/read-and-watch/news/bushfire-donations/11823676
- there are plenty of places to make financial donations & if you are in
australia there are practical things you can do to help.

we can write to scott morrison (@scottmorrisonmp on twitter) and other
australian politicians, urging them to take the climate emergency
seriously (australia is one of the worst countries in the world in terms
of climate policy:
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/australia-s-climate-change-policy-ranked-57-out-of-61-countries)

a related campaign that is well worth supporting is the long struggle
against the adani coal mine - is a major fossil-fuel extraction project
which will contribute massively to global warming as well as being
totally unethical. the queensland government illegally rescinded native
title to allow the mine to go ahead, & the wangan & jagalingou
indigenous people have been bankrupted trying to stop the mine.
https://wanganjagalingou.com.au/pledge-to-stand-with-us/
https://www.acf.org.au/email_siemens_global

it's hard to wish a happy new year in the face of all of this (not to
mention the tragic zoo fire in germany, 30 primates killed thanks to
someone's carelessness) but i can only hope that the scale of
devastation will force politicians to accept that they must act,
urgently, and that we will enter into a decade of positive change ...

h xx

On 03.01.20 20:26, Alan Sondheim wrote:
>
> (Apologies for a 2nd post today; I think the situation warrants it.
> How do we, as a community, respond to this? To the approx. 480m
> killed? To a Ballard future collapsing around us? How do we stop from
> harming ourselves, how can we act intelligently with this like this -
> on top of all the other horrors? Because this is going to spread of
> course; the ash on NZ glaciers accelerating melt. What do we do? What
> do we do as a community?)
>
>
> Fires in Australia
>
> http://www.alansondheim.org/Victoria.jpg (map)
> http://www.alansondheim.org/Victoria.mp3 (radio)
>
> In Pennsylvania, we had house-destroying floods, mine fires,
> highly polluted air. We went back and explored the area (around
> Wilkes-Barre/Kingston) last April. I've had my own things
> destroyed in floods several times, oddly including a storage
> container in Los Angeles, a closet in Providence, my parents'
> house in Kingston. But nothing, ever, like this. Reading Ballard,
> the world's future is spelled out as a scenario for now. Teaching
> "The Year 3000" back in the early 70s, I was face-to-face with
> the statistics. I've continue to talk and write and think about
> this. I was influenced by post-modern geography, and by the
> collapsed flora of the Carboniferous/Pennsylvanian, which I
> collected. I grew up negative. I've been following the fires and
> started interviewing a few people by Skype, people from eastern
> Australia. I'm trying to make sense of this, trying to find
> optimism in a situation which I see as the beginning of something
> problematic, horrifying. (I'll send the interviews out to the
> lists.) I listened late last night (here) to the radio - a short
> segment is above. The map gives some indication of locations.
>
> There was a report that 480 million animals have died in the
> fires. It's inconceivable, as is the number.
>
> Best, hopefully, Alan
>
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-- 

helen varley jamieson

helen at creative-catalyst.com <mailto:helen at creative-catalyst.com>
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.upstage.org.nz

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