Ana,
As for Bolsonaro, it's my belief, and has been for many years, that if
the West expects a country like Brazil to preserve rainforests and
biodiversity on behalf of the whole world, then they have to pay them to
do it, and I mean serious money. It should be worth more financially to
preserve the forests and export oxygen for the benefit of the rest of us
than to cut them down and plant palm oil or create beef farms or
whatever. Then there wouldn't be any argument.
Bolsonaro is an arsehole, but wagging a finger at him in the style of
Macron isn't going to make him budge.
Edward
On 05/01/2020 15:05, Ana Valdés via NetBehaviour wrote:
Thanks for sharing so important inputs and thoughts! I feel a growing
frustration about how politicians are handling this issues. In the
worst draugh a province in Australia sold the common water to a
private enterprise.
And neither Bolsonaro or Morrison or Trump are acting as leaders in
time of a crisis. They carry on and on and on not relating fires to
capitalism and its ways, fracking and mining.
They despise the knowledge of scientists and of the aboriginal ways to
live and work they blame the people speaking about climate change.
I assume many on this list are familiar with Donna Haraway. Her
writings about the Anthroposcene a new age where we, Mankind, are
responsible for disasters and ways to live which unsettle Nature and
the natural order are very important and give advice and explanations.
Ana
El El dom, 5 de ene. de 2020 a la(s) 11:43, Edward Picot via
NetBehaviour <[email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>> escribió:
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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