Here are some photos from the last few weeks:

at the environment collective cake stall at sydney university:

In the SRC:

The ties that bind

This advertisement in today's Weekend Australian illustrates the uncomfortable ties that the mining industry forges between itself and affected communities.

In this case, it is art: one of the main alternative sources of economic development for remote Aboriginal communities other than mining that does not compromise the integrity of Country, and often encourages self-determination.

Note the language used: "Emerging young artists": does this fit into the cultural role of art in Aboriginal communities? who is emerging, and who are they being judged by? Is it the Western Romantic figure of the unique and inspired artist-individualist, detached from their communities, and climbing that precarious ladder to fame?

For me, its funny that the word 'emerging' carries associations of 'entering into the light': like a miner does at the end of a shift (the old fashioned form of board and pillar coal mining, that is). Funny that a coal company is doing this.

Like so many other 'community projects' that mining companies facilitate, the prize increases the dependence of Aboriginal communities on mining companies. (to play on words, it binds them to the mining underworld, and prevents their emergence into other more diverse and sustainable economies).




(graphic from the Sydney Morning Herald, 2006)






When I studied the role of companies such as Coal and Allied in Muswellbrook in the Upper Hunter Valley, I saw the role of the companies in 'conspicuous generosity'- sponsoring the local sports teams, the local school gifted and talented program, the local rotary branch- and before long, the company has created a dependent relationship- at least, psychologically- in which it is unthinkable to imagine the town without the donations of the company- all the institutions would collapse, because they have forgotten how to sustain themselves independently!

Such dependence presents extra challenges for planning just transitions towards more sustainable economies.

beds are burning- thanks Rawan!

Rabbi Michael Lerner, speaking about Cindy Sheehan's resignation from leadership of the US Anti-War movement:

People tell me that they believe most of my generation "sold out" after the 60s because they wanted the material advantages of the society. But in my experience the most talented, caring, sensitive and creative people I met in movement activities, particularly those who were willing to take the extra personal risks involved in becoming leadership and spokespeople for peace and justice, left the Left not because of a desire for material success, but because they felt abused by others on the Left and in the liberal world who, while agreeing with their ideas, nevertheless found ways to be inhumane, insensititve, and put-downish to others in their movement.

Rumors were spread that claimed that the most idealistic of these people were "really" just out for power, fame or ego-gratification of some sort, and that undercut the effectiveness of these leaders because others responded to them not by listening to their ideas, but by treating them as suspect because of "what they had heard."

Few of those who spread these negative stories really bothered to get to know the people about whom they gossiped, and few ever bothered to acknowledge how destructive this behavior was. But for those who were the objects of this kind of abuse, the feeling of being undercut by people who should have been allies caused personal pain and eventual despair that anything really could ever change. A few of us hung in and remain involved, in my case at least sustained by a personal spiritual practice, but for each 60s activist still involved, there are thousands who are not, who could not stand this way of being treated, and who, when they stick their nose into the dynamics of the present movements of the first decade of the 21st century, quickly discover the same kind of dynamics operating in the Left and in the liberal world.

A relevant poem from the Open Spaces e-list:


this is an excerpt from a new work just completing, "Conscious Becoming".

Whether we like it or not,
Whether we approve of it or not,
whether it makes sense or not,
things are the only way they can be
given all that came before.

And if in the process we realize
that what we do right now
is what will come before next,
we discover our power, and dwell
in a calm sense of possibility.


Jack

--
Jack Ricchiuto

Facilitating learning & engagement with organizations & communities
Author of the recent "Mountain Paths: A Guide On Our Journey Toward Discovering Our Potential"
www.DesigningLife.com /

social change.... how does/can it happen?

how can activists stop being the dull noise in the background?
or the 'squeaky wheel' - that always complains when given an opportunity...

You know, I think there is a massive disconnect between the public image of activists and their self image.
And i don't even know which one is more accurate.

The self-image of activists is constructed by the urgency of the situations they find themselves in.
"I am holding the fort: I am holding the dam wall to stop if from bursting; I am the one who makes the difference."

This is the kind of motivational talk we give ourselves all the time:

"If i just do one more task, one more meeting, ten more leaflets...

And i clicked into that frame of mind again yesterday. I had been avoiding it for such a long time!!

I sat with Diana in the cafe, and she offloaded all her troubles and challenges onto me. She is organising BUSES to PERTH, and fundraising for poor students to get there! and whilst doing this, she is also grieving for her deceased father!!!

And i really felt the weight of all her troubles (I had to organise buses to Perth a few years ago). And it all came flooding back- the feelings of hopelessness (i was slightly incompetent)- and desperation that desirable social change would happen soon.

and all of a sudden i felt so tired.
i came home after being in the SRC for a few hours and mumbled something to my mum - and she got all worried about me, and gave a defensive speech to me, thinking i was annoyed at her. it's all so dysfunctional!!

Analysis by anecdote

What is reality? A lot of it is relational. I think we can gain a good understanding of everyday interactions through thinking about relationships.

This is through thinking through our interactions with others, and gaining insight through interpreting what this means about society, relationships and our place within these.

I am very interested in embodied knowledge: in the knowledge that people can gain through a thoughtful approach to everyday life, that prompts questions and deeper intellectual inquiry.

This knowledge becomes manifest through people skills: in being able to listen to and engage with other people in their difference and incompletion.

There is so much that is revealed by body language!! i just wish i knew how to enter into dialogue better with people about their beliefs, anxieties and values, based on their body language.

The closest intellectual discipline i have encountered that values this approach is phenomenology, a discipline within philosophy, that sees 'reality' as something dynamic, constituted through intersubjective interaction.

(this was prompted by speaking to Phil McShane, an Irish philosophy professor (who writes books about economics), who teaches by anecdote. Mum convinced us to go to his talks at which we were among the only people in the audience... he had some pretty hilarious anecdotes, made funny through his sharp observation skills. He spoke about the example of a man who invited a woman on a date, but conveys his disinterest through having three beers by the time she meets him. Thus, he is not sensitive to how she is : he does not listen to her: all he wants is to come across as relaxed and not to betray his anxieties- which is really a very self-centred approach, that cannot result in a deeper connection- rather it builds barriers!!)

and another thing...

Reflecting on his wonderful, very human (what a funny adjective) way of educating, It is a constant puzzle for me to understand why such large sections of the Left have such authoritarian educational methodologies, when for many decades a major project of liberatory people has been to create liberatory methodologies, such as this man. I guess some people think that commitment and discipline precludes the possibility of non-authoritarian educational practices.

Militarism and government policy

here is an ad for recruiting British Aerospace employees from The Australian newspaper that says a thousand words!

It is within the domain of military that the parameters of foreign policy debates are defined. You can see this working by comparing different policymaking institutions in the US. The US congress is underfunded. It only has around 600 employees, who deliberate on policy. The place where the bulk of policy deliberation takes place is the Pentagon, with tens of thousands (i think 30 000 employees).

BAE (British Aerospace) is one of the largest military companies in the world. It influences global geopolitics through providing military capability that supposedly stimulates economies, in a way that is beneficial to the broader big business corporate sector.

The ad depicted above implies an even more concerning dimension of the above situation of underfunded policy development: that policy innovation in 'determining the future' is in several ways 'outsourced' to military companies themselves.

US government representatives often make it clear to companies that their operation is on their behalf. For example, the Clinton Defense Secretary William Cohen was quoted in the magazine Covert Action as saying "The prosperity that some companies such as Microsoft enjoy could not occur without having the strong military that we have". (see Anup Shah's article).

Noam Chomsky has a lot to say about this kind of thing, explaining the relative benefit of social spending and military spending to corporate and political elites: here in the interview on morality and humanism, Chomsky talks about war as the preferred means of stimulating economies, rather than public spending:

Social spending vs. military spending. 1998 (you can see that it's dated by the hypothetical talk of war!!!!!!!!!)

TOR WENNERBERG: Given the risk that the world economy might spin out of control completely now, and considering that last time, in the 1930s, it took a world war to overcome the depression, how worried do you think we ought to be about the prospect of war?

NOAM CHOMSKY: "The prospect of war is much less, but for other reasons. Europe is, in modern history at least, the most violent part of the world. One of the reasons why Europe conquered the world is that it created a culture of war, based on centuries of mutual massacre and slaughter -- both a culture of war and a technology of war. But that largely came to an end in 1945, and for a very simple reason. Everybody could understand that the next time we play this game, we're all dead. The techniques of destruction had reached such a point that war is simply not an option for rich and powerful countries. If they try it once more, that's the end. Now, somebody may be irrational enough to do it anyway, but within anything remotely like the domain of rationality, where you can at least begin to talk about prediction, there isn't going to be war among the powerful countries. And this is understood.
"For example, right in the middle of the Gulf War, somebody at the Pentagon leaked to the press -- which buried it -- an interesting document. When any new administration comes in, the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency and so on give them a kind of intelligence assessment of the world, a strategic analysis of the world. Someone leaked part of the Bush administration strategic analysis (this would have been from early 1989), and one part of it dealt with war. Here is approximately what it said:
"In case of a conflict with "much weaker enemies" (implication: that's the only kind of conflict we're ever going to get into), we must defeat them "decisively and rapidly," because anything else will "undercut political support."
So no more bombing of South Vietnam for fifteen years, and certainly we don't go to war with any major power.
This was well before the Gulf War. In fact at that time Saddam Hussein was a great friend, so he wasn't contemplated as a target -- but that's what you can do. You can invade Panama, kidnap Noriega and get out in a couple of weeks, bomb the Sudan, bomb Libya, bomb Iraq from a distance, very fast, and don't get involved in more than a few days of fighting. That kind of thing you can do with a much weaker enemy, rapidly and decisively, but nothing else. So as long as you're within the domain of rationality, the chances of war involving major powers I think, are extremely slight, unless they're fighting a much weaker enemy. And even that's not so simple anymore.

"But to return to your other point, what actually overcame the depression was not so much the war as the semi-command economies. The British economy started to pick up in the late 1930s, when it semi-deliberalized and became a kind of semi-command economy. The U.S. was barely at war. But the wartime economy not only overcame the depression, it flourished as industrial production tripled, and so on. But that was a semi-command economy, highly coordinated from Washington, run by corporate executives, with wage and price controls, industrial policy deciding what would be produced, and so on. And that worked like a charm. Just like it worked in England -- England in fact out-produced Germany and came close to the United States.

"So the mobilization of the economy did overcome the depression. The war was taking place and that was the justification for it, but the war was not what overcame the depression in itself. This was pretty well understood. The consensus among American economists and businessmen and others in the mid-forties was that with the government-coordinated economy declining, after the war, they were going to go right back to the depression due to market failures. And so there was an interesting discussion in the late forties, quite open. It's on record in the business press, and I've quoted from it at times. There was recognition that we've got to do something to get the government to stimulate the economy again or else we'll go back to the depression.

"It was understood -- you didn't have to read Keynes to figure it out -- that you could stimulate the economy in a lot of different ways. You could stimulate it with social spending, or you could stimulate it with military spending. There was a perfectly sane discussion, in Business Week actually, of which to do. And the conclusion was: social spending is not a good idea, and military spending is a great idea. The reason is that social spending has a downside. Yes, it can pump the economy. But it also has a democratizing effect, because people are interested in social spending; they want to know where you're going to build a hospital or a road or something, and they become involved. They have no opinions about what jet plane to build. Social spending also gives people more security and better conditions, better education, more means of communicating, more ability to withstand threats of unemployment. It makes people, workers, more powerful, that is, and thereby better able to win higher wages and better conditions.

"So social spending has a democratizing, redistributive effect, and it's not a direct gift to corporations. Military spending, however, has none of those defects; it's non-democratizing -- on the contrary, people are frightened and they shelter under the umbrella of power. And while it aids corporations it doesn't directly improve the lot of workers; it rather tends to reinforce workplace discipline. So it's a direct gift to corporations. It redistributes upward. And it's easy to sell if you terrify the public. So what emerges is a Pentagon-based industrial policy program, one which is now buckling a bit, due to the excessive liberalizing of capital movements, and thus, one which has to be repaired a bit, so that it once again benefits the rich, as intended."

Ethical dimensions of climate change

For Lou Micallef

Louise,

You were alway curious,
but i never thought you would find out what lay that side of death
until many years hence.

so it feels peculiar to talk about you as one lost
from this moment, this world, this biosphere

i know that you meditated often, but you were always present here in the 'now'.
it feels so wrong to speak about you in the past tense.

Can't we meet up again?
I want to see you. and talk.

I want you to come, and we can watch the ducks
and marvel at the blades of grass
and the coincidences of life.

I want you to embody that joy that i see in you everywhere you go
closing your eyes, holding the precious moment in your embrace of the world.

You died, a sheet of metal wrapped around a tree. A victim of that which you love, and the drudgery of long country roads.

That image is too much one of cruel finality. i can't leave it there- I can't accept that to be true.
You left your trace- spreading your spirit like glitter everywhere you went.
I'll retrace those steps, and try to spread it all further, so that the world glints like wet pavements in the sun.


---------------------------
I have a story.

Last month, I sat in the Fair Trade Cafe in Glebe with Lou, - we were wet from rain and had taken shelter from a thunderstorm that had evicted us from sitting beside the pond in Victoria Park.

Lou was telling me a story about their work with farmers in the Hunter bioregion (as the BeansTalk co-operative obtains regional fresh food.)

Bek Spies and Monique Wicks came in to the cafe, so I asked Lou to repeat the story to them.
It goes like this:

The BeansTalk food co-op has established such strong links with farmers, that they know when farmers are in distress.

With the drought, there was an organic strawberry farm in the Hunter that was in crisis, to such an extent that they could not afford to employ strawberry pickers to take the crop.

So what did the BeansTalk co-op people do? They piled in a minibus and brought everyone up to the farm. They picked the strawberries themselves, and paid the farmers for them.

The farmers were soooo grateful.


isn't that beautiful???

(maybe someone else knows the details of the story better, so fill in the blanks!)

If you wanted any evidence that the unrestrained market is forcing us to sleepwalk to the edge of a cliff (like that crazy drug stillnox), this photo on the front page of The Australian is it.

action alert

Dear Global Solidaridadders,

URGENT ACTION ALERT: Write to Tony Burke and Kevin Rudd!

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
LABOR KEEPS CHRISTMAS ISLAND GUANTANAMO
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

In just two weeks time, the Labor Party will have its National Policy
Conference at the Darling Harbour Convention Centre in Sydney, and while
many good policies will be promoted and hopefully endorsed during that
weekend, Labor will maintain the horrendous Christmas Island Detention
Centre and the Orwellian Excision Zone amongst its policies, because it
supports a policy of "stopping the boats" - as if this is the "normal state
of affairs".

Australia, in signing the UN Refugee Convention, has promised to keep its
borders open to unannounced asylum seekers, also those arriving by boat.

See http://www.safecom.org.au/alcatraz-downunder.htm

+++++++++++++++++++++++++
LABOR KEEPS EXCISION ZONE
+++++++++++++++++++++++++

By maintaining the Excision Zone, people who land on one of the 4,600
islands inside the zone, do not have to be treated in accordance with the
obligations Australia has under the Refugee Convention. They do not have to
be provided with independent lawyers to help them with their refugee claim.
They can be deported by Australia to "anywhere", such as Nauru, Manus
Island, Indonesia, or any other country that does Australia's bidding.

See http://www.safecom.org.au/alcatraz-downunder.htm

Even while Labor promises not to do that, and says that they will process
everyone on Christmas Island, we should not feel too relaxed about this. The
new Christmas Island detention centre is a maximum-security Guantanamo-style
prison, microwave controlled, with doors and compounds remotely lockable -
wait for it - from Canberra!

See http://www.safecom.org.au/alcatraz-downunder.htm

This is the reason we at Project SafeCom have launched our biggest ever
e-campaign from our website. Through one of our familiar "form pages" you
can now compose your own letter to the Opposition leader Mr Kevin Rudd and
Immigration spokesman Tony Burke MP.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++
500 LETTERS within 36 HOURS
+++++++++++++++++++++++++

Since our campaign started 36 hours ago, almost 500 people sent their letter
to the ALP via KEvin Rudd and Tony Burke - please join them!

Several paragraphs have already been written, and while we recommend you
include all these paragraphs also in your letter, you can preclude them from
being added to your own writing. For both MP's you can add your own
additional paragraphs in the two boxes provided. We have provided a
background page also to inform you why it's so important to write your
letter.

See http://www.safecom.org.au/alcatraz-downunder.htm

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
LABOR WANTS TO "STOP THE BOATS" - WE SAY "THEY MUST COME"
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

We embarked on this campaign to help Labor see that mandatory detention
seriously undermines several International conventions, and to help them
undo the horrors we created during "the Howard years" when we punished
"boat-arrivals" for the way they come to our country.

Australia, in signing the UN Refugee Convention, has promised to keep its
borders open to unannounced asylum seekers, also those arriving by boat.

See http://www.safecom.org.au/alcatraz-downunder.htm

This e-campaign is the largest one we at Project SafeCom have launched in
our 5½ year history, and by participating you can help it grow even more. At
Project SafeCom we are fully prepared for this fight, and we cannot stop our
work before Australian social justice policies and asylum seeker policies
are fully compliant with the United Nations Refugee Convention and all other
conventions.

http://www.safecom.org.au/alcatraz-downunder.htm

Please help us to end these shocking laws. Since the 2001 "Tampa stand-off"
we have seen, heard and read thousands of awful stories of the suffering of
asylum seekers and refugees on TV, Radio and in newspapers, magazines, and
even at the movies. We do not want this kind of Australia any longer.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No more Horror Stories of the Howard Years under Kevin Rudd!!
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Australia, in signing the UN Refugee Convention, has promised to keep its
borders open to unannounced asylum seekers, also those arriving by boat.

Please visit this web page and click on the red button to write your letter:

http://www.safecom.org.au/alcatraz-downunder.htm

best regards

Jack H Smit
Project SafeCom Inc.
http://www.safecom.org.au/
P.O. Box 364
Narrogin WA 6312

interesting person : William Hazlitt.

Since I first read about Hazlitt in Heat 12, in James Ley's wonderful essay, I've been wanting to learn much more about him.

Hazlitt was part of the English Romantic Movement, inspired by the ideals of the French Revolution, and was a committed Radical all his life, in contrast to his friends Coleridge and Wordsworth. He wrote essays that were widely revered as the best of his time.

As Ley states, 'Although he was a believer in objective truth, Hazlitt saw truth as an active principle. 'The mind strikes out truth by collision', he wrote, 'as steel strikes fire from the flint'. He argued that pure rationality was, in fact, a form of irrationality, because it was lifeless and inhuman. In this he is quintessentially Romantic: he valued energy and spontaneity; he lothed any attempt to deny the importance of the emotions as a vital, defining part of existence.'

later Ley writes:
'he was fascinated by the way character informed opinion. When he addresses his subjects he is looking to understand not only their ideas but also their psychology.'

In other words, a very interesting person.

So here are my first attempts at discovering more:

wikipedia article

The Hazlitt Society

sacrifice and the climate

i think that the majority of people in Australia care about climate change to the extent that they are willing to make sacrifices and take austerity measures to prevent the worst of it from happening.

We as a society need to take such measures stoically and determinedly, pouring our resources and support together. There is a beautiful call to action here, that uses the urgent words of Martin Luther King as its point of departure.

However, many people are, understandably, wary of making sacrifices alone, especially where they cannot be assured that it will make a difference, and when freeloading has been made acceptable by the actions of Australia and the US.

In the words of Nicholas Stern (in the SMH on the Weekend) Kyoto "was an important symbol of international collective action and responsibility, and any one country not signing - particularly a big country like the United States or a respected country like Australia - encourages others to think freeloading is unavoidable". By freeloading he means getting the benefits of slowing climate change without signing up for the costs.

Take for example, voluntarily reducing household emissions, or buying green energy. If an economic unit (say a company or a household) decides to buy clean energy (in the absence of a bigger plan to reduce energy use), of course they are setting themselves back economically, in a market that is based on spending on investments that grow. But if everyone does it, there is a collective ethic of 'this is the right thing to do'.

Unless there is a broad, society-wide consensus on a plan of action, and punishment measures endorsed by many (both formal, eg fines and informal eg public shaming), it will feel pointless to take individual action.

On the same token, there has to be the same commitment by the corporate world to reducing emissions as there is among society. For too long, society has borne the burden of 'externalities'- all that bad stuff (such as pollution) that economic activity generates. Company directors should no longer get away with taking ever-rising profits, whilst spreading out the losses to society and the environment.

Everyone has to be willing to shoulder similar economic burdens from the adaptation and mitigation of climate chaos.

Russ Grayson from the community gardens network has a great article about relocalisation on Online Opinion...

Here is an extract where he talks about peak oil (the proposition affirmed by many energy experts that in the next few years, the global rate of consumption of oil will outstrip the rate of supply):


Four qualities needed for success

Peak oilers act in a competitive marketplace for ideas, and to be successful they will have to carefully craft their key messages to have three qualities.

First of all, they need to distance themselves from apocalyptic thinking, from the doom-and-gloom messages associated with past pseudo-disasters. Going back to the late-1960s, these include Paul Erlich’s “population bomb” scenario, nuclear winter, environmental collapse and the Y2K computer glitch. Being seen as yet another disaster scenario does little to empower citizens to act in their own lives and to take the kind of collective action necessary to make positive changes.

Another quality is that of not putting full responsibility for adaptation to peak oil and global warming on the shoulders of households and individuals. It is unlikely that peak oil and global warming will be successfully dealt with without concerted government and industry action. To put responsibility onto individuals and the community alone is to ignore the reality of policy and international accords and the responsibilities of government and industry.

The third quality is that the ideas relocalisers propagate need that difficult-to-define property that makes them “sticky” enough to capture the public imagination and adhere to it. In this, the relocalisers have done reasonably well so far, given that they are really only a proto-social movement at this stage. Their message now needs to be taken further into mainstream society.

Oh, and also, I found the official website of open spaces!! yay for that!

i had to reproduce a picture from the greencampusnow website. It's just so cute!! its of greenies in the quadrangle at Sydney Uni saying that Research, that sacred cow, won't stop climate change. shock and horror!!

and i can't help thinking that the white thing dangling from the umbrella is a lightening bolt!

---

here are some more greenies, at O-week for Sydney Uni last week. Fifty people turned up to the first environment collective meeting on Monday, apparently, which is extremely exciting!

Newcastle Rising Tide and the Gotan Project

I feel like crying with joy for the brilliance of some climate activists in Newcastle, whose parody website of the NSW Minerals Council advertising campaignhas just been resuscitated (SMH article) by an Afghan webhost.... or maybe i'm just overcome by the beauty of music, because I just came back from the Gotan Project at the Opera House!!

the delicate activist flame

One of the most common topics that seasoned environmental activists talk about is burnout.

It's related to something that Don Alexander writes about in this article - that activists, (if they've got a martyr complex), sacrifice more than they get back from activism.

A good analogy of the difficult side of activist experience is being dumped by a wave, and struggling to reach the surface to breathe- that kind of disorientation that comes when the pace of change is fast, and everything in your worldview is questioned and turned on its head.

I guess that's why i've been treading warily amid the student activist milieu since i've come back from overseas- wary of committing to anything that will consume me and drag me under.

So i've been a bit of a contemplative for the last few months- valuing time alone to think- especially walking long distances (eg sydney uni to town hall), and the commute to work and from uni...

Videos from Labor Party coal action!

Here are two videos of the action blockading the ALP offices on Tuesday morning, for crimes against the climate:

One from me:

If you observe the barrier that the woman sitting down is locked on to by her neck- that's a big slab of plywood that was carried up NINE FLOORS in order to get to the office! just shows the commitment of Rising Tide folks. We sang a few Paul Spencer songs when there, eg Banner drops and lock on pipes: "I hate the liberal party with a passion deep and hearty so i voted for the labor party man, but the lying little weevil turned out just as bloody evil, its clear they're out to get us if they can...." as well as some other songs.

Another (better) video is on the Sydney Morning Herald website (Windows media- can't be viewed on Macs). here is the article that accompanies this on the SMH website.

No more coal power, says NASA

From correspondents in Washington
February 27, 2007
A MORATORIUM on coal-fired power plants is key to cutting carbon dioxide emissions that promote global warming, NASA's top climatologist says.

"There should be a moratorium on building any more coal-fired power plants until the technology to capture and sequester the (carbon dioxide emissions) is available," said James Hansen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

"This is a hard proposition that no politician is willing to stand up and say it's necessary," he said at the National Press Club in Washington.

The build-up of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases in the atmosphere increases the so-called greenhouse effect, which warms Earth by letting light in, but blocking the heat from escaping the atmosphere, much like glass in a greenhouse.

Mr Hansen said the technology to capture carbon dioxide "is probably five or 10 years away".

By then, "all coal-burning power plants that don't capture the CO2 will have to be bulldozed".

Electric power plants and transportation are top emitters of CO2, which has been largely responsible for increasing Earth's temperature since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, which brought a sharp increase in the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil.

Recent dramatic photographs of Earth's melting polar ice caps have convinced many sceptics that global warming is here to stay.

"The assumption that it takes thousands years for ice sheets to change is very wrong," Mr Hansen said.

"Because of the melting of the ice sheet, the sea level is now rising at the rate of about 35cm per century," he said.

"But the concern is that it is a very non-linear process that can accelerate," he said.

"The West Antarctic ice sheet in particular is vulnerable and if it collapses, that could make the sea level rise by 5 or 6m - possibly on a time-scale of a century or two."

Other articles:

Palestine: How to live with Hunger
Irish Bishops: Israel has turned Palestine into a large prison (Haaretz)

Julia Butterfly-Hill

This is a wonderful short video of Julia Butterfly Hill talking about sustainable solutions in our world. I know of many exuberant environmentalists in Australia, who embody their love of life in their actions. Julia reminds me of them.

Glimpses of a better world

I'm planning to maintain a list of inspiring initiatives that create better social relationships, that I will add to as time progresses:

1. Initiative:Alternative currencies in Europe Why? Because this currency encourages local consumption, and discourages the accumulation of funds, and supports local NGO's. There are fundamental problems with our current monetary systems, which i will outline at a later date.

2. Initiative:Community garden networks in Australia. Why? Community gardens fulfil many purposes: encouraging urban agriculture, building local communities among them.

Some recent Indig articles:

John Tracey: Greenies and Murries. Paradigm Oz.

John Pilger: Mourning a secret Australia
Z Magazine.

ANTAR : winding back native title rights- again InterContinental Cry

Gould's Book Arcade

Here is a composite picture of Goulds Book Arcade in Newtown: amalgamated from 6 photos.


And see if you can spot Bob Gould himself (it's like wheres wally!)

Actually I just found an excellent article by Bob about the rally against the bombing of Lebanon last year...

creativity

here is an interesting article about the power of creating new worlds through acting in the world.

George Bush and many other movers and shakers have learnt a lot from Marx: that whilst the philosophers have interpreted the world, the point is to change it. By changing and acting on the world, you alter reality (often in unexpected ways).

But (perhaps) in contrast to Marx, the basis of Bush's success was to recognise that logic is relatively unimportant in shaping human aspirations and understanding of the world (maybe i'll take that back- actually... Marx was quite an artist- it was his followers who were ultra-rationalist).

In many ways, the intellectual tools needed for living and acting in the world are quite different to what the enlightenment logic toolbox equips us with. In terms of global power relationships, surrealist theatre can sometimes depict a recognisable reality better than empirical analysis.

Most human thinking is associative rather than rational. And that's not necessarily bad. Most people's motivations for doing things are not primarily rational- usually people act because of their relationships with other people, their gut reactions, or because of a common consciousness. Yet this doesn't mean such motivations are non-valid. They just need to be grounded from time to time with feedback and evidence.

Effective activists can be like ARTISTS in many ways- deepening or interrogating peoples' associative frameworks (making them better connected to the world), and creating the imaginative and practical infrastructure needed for possible futures. This is where utopian thinking has played a role in the past...

One example is a collective of activists who see themselves as artists (in their role in developing peoples' associative logic) : the group "Platform London".

A.

On The Australian's opinion page: just about all ideologically right wing (especially global warming deniers) articles except perhaps one:

Editorial: Cool heads needed on red-hot topic
Pamela Bone: The Left is onside with hate
Nick Minchin: Prosperity is no accident
Mike Steketee: Iemma's banana republic
Cut & paste: Tim Flannery's baseless hysteria over global warming
Editorial: Judges should not be their own juries
John Hirst: An unaffordable luxury
Daniel Donahoo: Kindy no place for the three Rs
Wesley Aird: Key to unrest is policy failure
Jennifer Marohasy: Reef may benefit from global warming
Cut & paste: How a right-wing, pro-Howard cabal is stifling debate

sydney...

Sydney has been described as possibly the most vacuous city in the world!!!

I always knew we would make the grade.


here is an article (smh) about it (and another one, and below are some quotes from the smh blog:


Of course there are grounded, generous, happy people in Sydney - I'm sure I met one once - but, generally speaking, I think James has hit the nail on the head. I've lived in cities all over the English-speaking world - in London, in Cape Town, in Auckland -and I can truly say Sydney is the most beautiful, and the most vacuous.
Posted by: John at February 2, 2007 7:13 AM

"It reminds me of a quote from Clive Hamilton (didn't his Affluenza book come out 2 years ago?) about "people doing jobs they hate, to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't like". That's Sydney isn't it?
I have been living outside of Australia for a couple of years now. From the outside looking in, the perspective is frightening.
However, even leaving the shores is no guarantee of immunity. I find it funny that you meet ex-pats who are overseas expressly to make enough cash to go home and get a mortgage!"

When my husband and I first moved into the neighbourhood, I baked cakes and offered it to various neighbours hoping to make friends and to get to know my neighbours. People were happy to accept the cake and ocassionaly the organic home grown herbs but never once we were invited for a drink or a BBQ. It has been more than two years now and we still don't know our neighbours. People are polite and civilised but there is no real interest to interact as neighbours. I have lived in many big cities much much bigger than Sydney and in all these places I have always known my immediate neighbours. We socialised. I have a personal relationship with my fruit and veggie vendors as well as the people at the bank. It felt like living in a community. I feel very alienated here in Sydney to the point that I want to move back overseas.

I grew up in Sydney, left for 16 years, came back couldn't stand it because of the pinning of meaning onto possessions, contacts or activities driven by a fear that any sort of meaning to life would collapse under scrutiny. There is a lso a terrible rigidity of thought and people think they are sophisticated if they order the right sort of coffee. Nobody questions anything and ignores what doesn't suit them.

without a doubt sydney is the most vacuous city i have ever been to. just getting out and travelling makes you realise how shallow and pointless most sydneysider's lives are.

Oh he is so right. Combine that with the vacuous generation Y and wow what a sad city.
And why on the subject of vacuous there is Iemma to consider as well.
Sydney has so far to go till it becomes even remotely sophisticated and world class.
Posted by: Paul at February 2, 2007 6:28 AM

Years living in Sydney as well as the other capitals have convinced me that it the most vacuuous city in Australia. Some overseas, however, cities would be much worse; Hong Kong is a prime example.
Posted by: PCN at February 2, 2007 6:30 AM

Yep.
Or at least, one of them.
Wherever you find a city, or a country for that matter that is being run by a bunch of deluded economists, who operate on the highly flawed theory of infinite growth in a finite world, then you will have a profound lack of humanity, as evidenced in Sydney.
Time for a big change human race.
A big change.
Posted by: daz at February 2, 2007 7:01 AM

train of intention

in the library, at a desk. They are typing, the aircon a constant white noise.

pursuing their rational endeavours.

balancing on the narrow track of their academic disciplines.
perhaps one day emerging from the long tunnel
but submitting to what rationality prescribes for them today.

may i interrupt?
may i interrupt your silence? can i say the unthinkable?

can i involve you in a common subjectivity?
can i bring into being the 'we' that still does not recognise itself?

"What are we going to do?" what are we going to do? what can we do? what do we have the motivation to do? what kind of work is to be done?

the question buzzing between the lines of the newspapers
the question in the hopeless naming of crisis.

the question of madmen in train carriages.

can we democratise the train carriages?
can we animate the libraries?
can we live and let live?
can we emerge from this hole?

Australia: fundamental problems

An article on Frews blog talks about the fundamental faults with the Australian legal system, being based on Positive Law, rather than Natural Law.

It's very interesting for me at this time, because i've been thinking about the temperament of Australians, their lack of idealism, and their strong cynicism, taking for granted a 'lowest common denominator' view of humanity and of the world- being willing to sell out our values for money and privilege, when we see it as inevitable that someone else will.

(My sister told me about a recent article in the Herald by an Australian woman bemoaning the observation that all her fellow countrymen and women at Harvard became those in their year who most willlingly took the unethical big corporate jobs, rather than jobs to help people).

I've been talking to my sister about the role Australia has been playing internationally, as the secretly evil one, who plots away behind the scenes to undermine important legislation such as the Kyoto Protocol, and the UN convention on the rights of indigenous peoples.

We are SUCH a machiavellian society- I just can't believe it.

Some other observations from another intellectual friend, Christina, who is fleeing this redneck country- (who I fortuitously ran into on the bus at 1am last night), is that

1. it is hard to meet intellectually interesting people in Sydney. (or rather, to find spaces where the 'interestingness' of people can be expressed). Appearance of 'normality' is valued highly by many. [There is also a strong sense of an 'ingroup thought police', that i experience as the 'judgemental gaze'- that looks you up and down in the street- I notice this when feeling ultra-sensitive, and feel much more at ease in this regard in Melbourne].

2. Sydney has a Mediterranean climate, but a Nordic streetlife- we go inside at about 7pm, and don't celebrate life on the streets as many people in mediterranean cultures do.- Except, i must say, at Sydney Festival time. I went to Symphony under the Stars last night, and it was wonderful, as always.

But so beautiful!! i'll post a picture of sydney i took 2 years ago here.

This extract is from a statement by the Commission of Venezuelan Indigenous peoples in Defense of the Land.

Translated by the indigenous solidarity working group of Rising Tide North America, a climate action group.

The statement raises issues of the inherent contradictions of OIL, -funding good social programs in the Bolivarian Revolution, but having serious environmental and social implications.

Addiction to oil must be addressed if social justice and environmental sustainability is to prevail.

We Are Native Venezuelans,
And We Want To Continue Existing As We Are.

Our words summoning Help with our independent struggle to Defend our Land,
to realize our Right for self-determination,
to Unmask and Defeat the neo-liberal, genocidal energy policies of the "Bolivarian Revolution."

Written by Wayuú (native Venezuelan) professor Jose Angel Quintero with the Commission of Venezuelan Indigenous Peoples in Defense of the Land, representing Wayuú, Barí, Yukpa, Pumé, and Pemón indigenous Venezuelan nations

The loneliness of our struggle becomes big and heavy, because we have to fight against the imposed silence of our words and protests in the mainstream news networks. We've had to fight against the campaigns of defamation on the part of the mining and oil companies that try to discredit us and our leaders, and try and take our land by way of concessions given out by the government of the fifth republic. We fight against the ignorance of those who merely do not know- but at other times we must clearly confront the accomplices, the intellectual sectors, the social movements, and even brother and sister natives, indigenous blood, in other countries, who have not been able to understand how it's possible that a government whose main reputation is its popular discourse against Bush and imperialism, and at the same time, internally, yields to the appetites and impositions of imperial multi-national corporations, including those that the Bush family has stock and interest in; capital. And if that wasn't enough bitter ironies, all this comes at the detriment of us, the indigenous- us who Hugo Chavez publicly says he is "defending." full article here.

a litmus test indicator of the GORE that drives newspaper sales in australia is the top 10 articles on the sydney morning herald website:

Many distressing words and themes: 'revenge', 'beheading', 'decapitate', 'rape', murder, etc. Less celebrities than usual...

except one good thing- i like the 'Burquini' story...

Members of my family always threaten to cancel our newspaper subscription, cos they get too upset from it all.

personally, i don't think that murder stories and the like should be on the news. The rate of murders and crime in sydney apparently is exactly the same as it was 10 years ago- yet we keep on hearing about crime all the time, and thinking the world is so dangerous.

TODAY'S TOP 10 ARTICLES

1. iPhone skins irk Apple
2. The Queen is crowned
3. 'Burqini' comes to Aussie beaches
4. Prostitute's revenge on farmer who wouldn't pay
5. Charged star loses rich radio job
6. One MP's very dirty laundry
7. Vet's beheading motive mystery
8. Saddam's brother decapitated in hanging
9. Teen charged over rape and murder of baby
10. Why didn't Shawn try to escape?

Quoting from 'Against Paranoid Nationalism'

I found a great passage from Ghassan Hage's book Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society..

Until recently, the capacity of the great majority of migrants to settle in Western societies was dependent on the availability of a Western 'surplus of hope'. This surplus is the precondition of all forms of hospitality. But it is clear today that while the West is producing a surplus of many things, hope is not among them. As Bordieu points out, while society is certainly defined through its capacity as distributer of 'meanings of life', any society's actual capacity cannot be taken for granted at any time, and hope and meaningfulness are not always offered. Capitalist societies are characterised by a deep inequality in their distribution of hope, and when such inequality reaches an extreme, certain groups are not offered any hope at all. 'One of the most unequal of all distributions, and probably, in any case, the most cruel, is the distribution of symbolic capital, that is, of social importance and of reasons for living,' he tells us. For him, 'there is no worse dispossession, no worse privation, perhaps, than that of the losers in the symbolic struggle for recognition, for access to a socially recognised social being, in a word, to humanity'.

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What characterised neo-liberal economic policy in his eyes was not that it was shaped by a society marred by inequality, but that the very idea of society, of commitment to some form of distribution of hope, was disappearing. This has been perhaps the most fundamental change that global capitalism has introduced to Western and non-Western societies alike. In the era of global capitalism, the growth of the economy, the expansion of firms and rising profit margins no longer go hand in hand with the state's commitment to the distribution of hope within society. In fact, what we are witnessing is not just a decrease in the state's commitment to an ethical society, but a decrease in its commitment to a national society tout court. Many social analysts today debate the decline of national sovereignty and national identity as a result of 'globalisation'. Yet the greatest casualty, and the one that has most bearing on the quality of our lives, is the decline neither of sovereignty or identity as such, but the decline of society. This is hardly ever mentioned. When the society of the past saw the possibility of social death, the welfare state intervened to breathe in hope, for there was a perception that all society was at stake wherever and whenever this possibility arose. Today, not only does the state not breathe in hope, it is becoming an active producer of social death, with social bodies rotting in spaces of chronic underemployment, poverty and neglect. We seem to be reverting to the neo-feudal times analysed by Norbert Elias, where the boundaries of civilisation, dignity and hope no longer coincide with the boundaries of the nation, but the boundaries of upper-class society, the social spaces inhabited by an internationally delineated cosmopolitan class. Increasingly, each nation is developing its own 'third world', inhabited by the rejects of global capitalism.

From Hage, G. (2003) Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for hope in a shrinking society. Pluto Press, Sydney, pp.17-18.

It's exciting to discover a book that records the debate between Chomsky and Foucault about human nature.

So many ideological debates actually come down to different view points on what is human nature.

Chomsky's position in this debate is close to my own. I believe that there are universal notions of justice that are hard-wired to human development (just like Kant's 'categories' of causality etc that naturally emerge in the human brain).

Chomsky's position coincides with the idea of the 'justice motive' that psychologist Melvin Lerner writes about (I discovered this book whilst hanging out in the library all year for honours)-

Yet I don't know whether i'd call myself a Cartesian as Chomsky does. It sounds too linear to me!!!

BTW in the course of a google search, I found a biographical site for Noam Chomsky. It's really interesting.

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From Amazon.com:

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature Editorial Reviews:
Book Description:
Two of the twentieth century's most influential thinkers debate a perennial question.

In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world's leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Edlers to debate an age-old question: is there such a thing as "innate" human nature independent of our experiences and external influences?

The resulting dialogue is one of the most original, provocative, and spontaneous exchanges to have occurred between contemporary philosophers, and above all serves as a concise introduction to their basic theories. What begins as a philosophical argument rooted in linguistics (Chomsky) and the theory of knowledge (Foucault), soon evolves into a broader discussion encompassing a wide range of topics, from science, history, and behaviorism to creativity, freedom, and the struggle for justice in the realm of politics.

In addition to the debate itself, this volume features a newly written introduction by noted Foucault scholar John Rajchman and includes additional text by Noam Chomsky.

About the Author:
Noam Chomsky is Professor of Linguistics at MIT and a world-renowned political thinker and activist. The author of numerous books, including On Language and Understanding Power (both available from The New Press), he lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Michel Foucault (1926-84) held a chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. The New Press has published three previous volumes of his work as well as a collection, The Essential Foucault. John Rajchman is a professor of philosophy at Columbia University and author of Michel Foucault. He lives in New York City.

Foucault's Chomp, November 27, 2006
Reviewer: Mr. Bloom

It is now widely conceded among post-modern/post-structuralist circles that Foucault broke the back of linguist-political scientist Noam Chomsky in this televised debate on Dutch television. Perhaps this conception further contributed to Chomksy's disdain with the French intellectual community entire in subsequent years. Nevertheless, regardless of one's political/philosophical disposition, this is an endlessly fascinating debate, between two thinkers working as "tunnellers through a mountain working at opposite sides of the same mountain with different tools, without even knowing if they are working in each other's direction" (2), to use the moderators' description.

The debate begins technically, Chomksy addresses his discoveries within the domain of cognitive linguistics, and Foucault outlines his historical research into the sciences in Western civilization. Chomsky is a self-described rational `Cartesian,' a philosophical disposition largely rejected by post-modernity after the detruktion of Western philosophy by Martin Heidegger. Foucault, on the other hand, (who began as a major Heideggerian) seems to adopt a Nietzschean disposition; he rejects Chomsky's assertion that a genuine concept of human justice is rooted biologically in the human species. Rather, that our knowledge of morality and human nature are always necessarily rooted in social conditioning. Chomsky actually fails (here as well as elsewhere) to really confront the philosophy of Nietzsche, who necessarily put a dent in all forms of socialism, whether democratic, libertarian, or totalitarian. To illustrate Chomsky's elusiveness: "FOUCAULT: it seems to me that the idea of justice in itself is an idea which in effect has been invented and put to work in different types of societies as an instrument of a certain political and economic power as a weapon against that power. But it seems to me that, in any case, the notion of justice itself functions within a society of classes as a claim made by the oppressed class and as justification for it. CHOMSKY: I don't agree with that. FOUCAULT: And in a classless society, I am not sure that we would still use this notion of justice" (54-55). But Chomksy replies by reasserting his belief that there must be an absolute basis in which notions of human justice are "grounded" (ibid), however, he relies once again solely on his partial knowledge of what `human nature' is.

2 Comments on this Review

J. D. Shockley

Ridiculous. Foucault got owned. Scientists like Marc Hauser have proven that we do have a moral grammar wired in the brain. Foucault's belief that every action driven by our sense of justice, freedom, love etc is in reality a "will to power" is so simplistic and idiotic, that any 12-year-old kid can refute it. Chomsky has proven over and over again that most intellectuals are servants of power. Those French elitist intellectuals have to spout fancy words and engage in endless mental masturbation and obscure/pretentious/complicated rhetoric to appear like they're smart and maintain their status, but Chomsky kicked their behind hands down, and exposed their game to their face (that's why he's hated) Like Chomsky says, the notion of human beings as selfish blank slates is one that appeals to authoritarian ideologies.
Reply

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Variations on a Theme: urban nature

Today in the US-based online Grist magazine there is an excellent article about the need for nature writers to focus on urban areas. I will willingly comply with this writer's hopes- in photography. Already on this blog i have documented the proliferation of organisms in my front and back yards!! Perhaps i will continue with this, and post pictures on this theme!!

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a kookaburra:

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Some native Flannel flowers on the ceiling at Petersham

More media commentary, this time on the US escalation of bombing.

From this Reuters newsfeed from SMH,

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US launches new air strike on Somalia

US forces hunting al-Qaeda suspects launched a fresh air strike on southern Somalia today, a Somali government source said.

"As we speak now, the area is being bombarded by the American air force," he told Reuters, giving no further details.

The latest attack followed a US strike in the area on Monday which Somali officials said had killed many people, prompting criticism from around the world including new UN chief Ban Ki-moon.

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oh, so they've gone hunting in Africa, have they? And it's a 'fresh' set of bombs- i mean, 'air strikes'. How considerate. One could almost forget that there are human beings being bombarded and their lives threatened.

Mystery crustaceans

These crustaceans appeared spontaneously in a bucket in our front yard, after rain!! They measure about 8mm long. Aren't they amazing?

Christopher Pearson: 'Real Christians are social conservatives'.

It's very interesting to note that some of the most strongly conservative, pro-market, anti-Left commentators/ politicians these days used to be trotskyites or had some involvement with the radical left in Australia.

What is wrong with the Australian Left? - It creates such monsters- such bitterly sectarian, legalistic and insensitive people !!

For example, Michael Costa used to be a trotskyist. So did Paddy McGuinness.

On the Leftwrites blog, there is an excellent dissection of Christopher Pearson's article on Kevin Rudd.

Pearson is a conservative cheerleader in The Australian. Yet he cut his political teeth campaigning for law reform on homosexuality in South Australia, before converting to Catholicism. Yet his style of catholicism is foreign to me, seeming deeply symptomatic of self-hate. His tirade against Kevin Rudd's Christianity ("Rudd needs to learn real Christians are social conservatives") is bizarre to say the least, considering Pearson identifies as Gay:

There are other important issues where Rudd so far hasn’t let his faith inform his values. In the same interview he told Doogue that: "On the question of homosexuality, I can’t find a single teaching of Jesus of Nazareth which rails against homosexuality." Any competent theologian – and most educated laymen – could have told him that 2000 years ago the Jews took a very dim view of homosexual acts and the fact that they deplored them went without saying.

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On the other hand, Tim Costello, director of World Vision Australia welcomes Rudd's moderate Christianity. Other Sydney Anglicans worth reading are Rachel's friend Byron, whose post on corporate growth as cancer is gold! Also, the review of the film The Queen (that I saw on Friday night) on the Sydney Anglican website is excellent.

26 Jan- Sovereignty Day

yay!

I just got back from Peats Ridge festival, and it was a lot of fun.

here is one picture of the oconnell street crew: