[NetBehaviour] Fires in Australia

Sun Jan 5 15:40:32 CET 2020

Helen,

That's really useful information about the donation links and the Adani 
coal mine. I didn't know about the coal mine before.

As for Scott Morrison and his government, I think there's more to it 
than sheer stupidity. As with Trump and Boris Johnson, there's a 
right-wing populist agenda at play, which is all about protecting and 
promoting the interests of big business, but it sustains itself in power 
by appealing to certain lowest-common-denominator prejudices in the 
minds of the voting public, and serving up what are basically lies to 
reinforce its appeal. So Morrison has now moved on from claiming that 
the link between bushfires and global warming is all in the minds of 
urban woke greeny loony lefties; he's now claiming that he never denied 
that link in the first place; but he's also making out that the 
bushfires are particularly bad because the greeny loony lefties have 
been blocking bushfire hazard reduction measures in the national parks. 
This is rejected as nonsense by bushfire experts, but the claim doesn't 
have to be accurate to make its impact. And that's the problem. Populist 
politics has found the faultline in modern democracy, where things don't 
have to be true, or even make sense, to influence voting patterns; they 
use tactics of misinformation and misdirection as a deliberate policy to 
sustain themselves in power. And the left/green parties haven't yet 
found a way to counteract those tactics, or to tap into the huge 
groundswell of opinion which is undoubtedly building behind 
environmentalist causes, particularly amongst the young. In countries 
like the UK young people just take it for granted that something 
urgently needs to be done about the environment; but they don't have any 
faith in the political parties to deliver the required changes. So their 
convictions don't translate into votes. And you can't blame them. The 
environment hardly featured as an issue in the election we just had.

Things are going to change, I'm sure. But how much damage is the planet 
going to sustain before the changes happen? It's a frightening prospect.

Edward

On 05/01/2020 13:10, Helen Varley Jamieson wrote:
>
> 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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