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Sleep Australia Sleep

Environment
#1

Flashback to the beginning of February when Australia was reeling from the impact of the bushfires, Canberra was suffering from appalling air quality from bushfire smoke (and had been since a wind change on New Year’s Eve which had people racing to the chemists for facemasks) and for a brief moment climate change and especially its impact on native fauna, was actually being talked about. This song by Australian singer/songwriter Paul Kelly still gives me goosebumps

Western Australia has just had its warmest winter on record https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-02/western-australia-posts-warmest-winter-on-record/12618714 and it has been the 6th warmest overall for Australia with a 30% below average rainfall nationally http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/current/season/aus/summary.shtml.

With all the focus on COVID-19 we just can’t drop the ball on this…

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#2

Jesus JMC - what a powerful video. I struggled to get to the end.

and we lose track of counting
as the corpses keep mounting

Damn.

I could not agree with you more on this. For a brief moment, the covid story and the environmental story came together when it shocked everyone how much relief to the environment a collective decision to stay home, and shut the factories meant.

We cannot continue on this insane path. We cannot come out of lockdown and go back to business as usual. Business as usual is killing us, and countless species along with us. We have to face up to the catastrophe squarely, and we cannot take our eye off the ball for covid or anything else.

I watched a tv news interview with Roger Hallam a week or so ago, and the focus (of course) was “how can XR go out protesting during Covid - isn’t it going to spread the pandemic?”

And I watched as the newsreader, having delivered this knockout punch, sat back in his chair and switched off, refusing to pay any attention to the reply, which is that this pandemic is part and parcel of our climate catastrophe. We can’t solve one problem without solving the greater one.

No-one listened.

Now Roger Hallam is in Pentonville Prison, on hunger strike.

No one is listening.

I was reading a lot of Jem Bendell the other day - have you come across him? He got a lot of flak from, let’s call them traditional environmentalists, some of which is valid and some which completely misses the point. Jem’s whole approach, called Deep Adaptation, invites people to take a long hard look at the reality of our situation, of the amount of heating already locked into the system, the feedback loops that are on the verge of triggering a whole series of tipping points (some or many of which might be irreversible), and to ask ourselves some important questions about what that means for how we want to live our lives, collectively and individually. As the radical feminists from the 60s onwards used to say

The personal is political

How we choose to use our time, to live out our days, to direct our efforts. What we choose to learn, to save for posterity, to share with our neighoubourhoods, to build as resilience.

We don’t have time to waste anymore. We need to answer these questions ASAP. And keep asking and answering them.

I want to talk with folks more about deep adaptation. I feel like this is possibly the most important discussion of our lifetimes…

You can find more about Jem and DA here:

Thanks so much for the post J. This stuff is crucial.

Cheers
PP

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#3

You might find this interesting J

The mystery of the Murray-Darling’s vanishing flows

It might be the biggest whodunnit — or what-dunnit — in Australia.

More than 2 trillion litres of water — enough to fill Sydney Harbour four and a half times — has gone missing from our largest and most precious river system — the Murray-Darling Basin.

And it’s happened in what was already one of the driest periods the basin has seen.

According to an investigation by some of Australia’s top water scientists, shared exclusively with the ABC, 20 per cent of the water expected to flow down the rivers from 2012-2019 was simply not there. That’s despite almost $7 billion being spent to protect the health of the system’s rivers and ecosystems that rely on them.

Was it stolen? Was it lost? Has climate change made it go up in steam? Or was it simply never there in the first place?

There are clues scattered up and down the rivers but one simple message is clear in the scientists’ findings. For the first time, they provide evidence that the Murray-Darling Basin Plan — the most expensive environmental program in Australia’s history — is delivering much less water than was expected.

And the implications could be huge.

Continues at this link

#4

P, that Jem Bendall piece to which you link contains, in its turn, a link to a piece by the ever-steady, ever-insightful Richard Heinberg, summarising how he believes both DA and XR have a deal of right on both their sides, and how we should best deal with the prospect - increasingly obvious and unavoidable - of widescale socio-economic collapse, appearing raggedly in many places over this century; already happening in fact to some of the most wretched of the Earth - but not everywhere all at once, as the most lamentable doom-nightmares suggest.

I reckon Richard says it for me too. (link below)

Add in the wise and widely-enlightened JMGreer’s picture of a world steadily healing itself of the “Single Giant Pulse event in Earth’s history” (h/t Prof. Richard Duncan) of industrial ‘civilisation’, in the course of John’s envisaged Long Descent over the next two to three centuries.

Add in also the simply extraordinary, and instant, healing work that Mam Gaia rushes in the moment we stop with our damaging habits - think of the re-wilding of the Pripyat region after Chernobyl, and the goats of the Great Orme ( :slight_smile: ), for a couple of instances.

Add in too the long paleontological viewpoint, reassuring us how often Mam G has overcome crises far worse than the present one, re-fecundating her planet every time…

And taken altogether, I see a strong prompt for active commitment, both to XR-style amelioration as far as practicable, and to DA prepping at the same time; indeed, they should be seamless. But I see no place at all for ultimate despair:

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