Ian Gibbins, former Professor of neuro-science at Flinders University, now video poet who lives in Adelaide, South Australia writes: ‘Well, this is something really wonderful… The video I made with Tasos Sagris and Whodoes The Life We Live Is Not Life Itself won the top prize for Avant-Garde films in the Fotogenia Film Festival. The whole Festival has been a magnificent feast of diverse forms and voices. The finalist list included some of the best videos I’ve ever seen. So to come out on top is incredibly humbling.
Massive thanks to Tasos Sagris and Whodoes for entrusting me with their fantastic words and music and the Institute for Experimental Art in Athens for supporting the project.’
A special way of connecting. This work is taking me, and I hope others, beyond the frustrations of continuing political intransigence, at least for a time.
Robyn Williams, presenter of The Science Show on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National, November 21st, expresses this concern and asks this question about this pledge from Brazil.
Amazon deforestation pledge. ‘The Amazon is being burnt and turned into grazing land. The world’s biggest rainforest influences weather systems in South America and climate even further afield. Brazil signed an agreement at the recent COP26 meeting to wind back its destructive practices. Will they stick to it?’
We are suffering in so many ways from the indifference of governments to global warming. Callous indifference in their approach to people in the interest of powerful fossil fuel corporations.
Australia, China, India, Russia are showing their indifference to the future. Coal, oil and gas are only to be ‘phased down.’
Why the humanities must come in now. How long have the humanities been trying to help us?
Back in 1959, Walter M. Miller wrote A Canticle for Leibowitz
‘A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalypticsocial science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man’s scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.’ This novel has never been out of print. Note! It spans thousands of years!
In 1897 H.G. Wells War of the Worlds was published serialised. Right at the time when there was an increase in the late 19th century anarchist movement! See any comparison in our contemporary world?
In 1909. E.M. Forster, The Machine Stops imagined a time and situation when the society, relying on ‘the machine’ for everything in their survival, had to live underground.
In 1932 Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World took us to a government where people were made passive with SOMA sedation, keeping people under control at the least expense.
The ‘Getting of Wisdom’ was discouraged, just like Australia today with the cost of Humanities degrees – in the arts, literature, history, politics, drama, music, – raised by 113%. Rejecting creative and critical thinking.
Now, in Australia, we have Clade by James Bradley, first published in 2015 by Hamish Hamilton. The meaning of ‘clade’ comes from biology. It is ‘a group of organisms believed to comprise all the evolutionary descendants of a common ancestor’ – From ‘great apes to human clades’. In 2013 Australia’s Prime Minister, Tony Abbott, attacking effective emissions reductions, and stopping them, had called climate change crap.
Like the rest of the world, Australia has known about global warming for decades. The less frightening term ‘climate change’ was brought in by those determined to protect their carbon-fossil fuel profits. Read The Carbon Club by Marian Wilkinson which details the way Australian and American corporations worked so well to deprecate, slow down, dismiss – as Rupert Murdoch did with his media empire – to stop the elimination of fossil fuels. James Bradley has looked ahead to imagine how some will live in Australia, the UK and China.
This is not a ‘sci-fi’ novel. This is a ‘cli-fi’ novel. Such storms. Such fires. Bird die-offs . Massive fish kills – think of the Darling River here – worse droughts and floods hit the globe.
Look up the review of this speculative novel when global devastation has occurred. Reviewed by Jane Housham in The Guardian Thursday 14th September 2017.
Now – The latest from ‘The Friends of the Earth’ –
Is this the ‘right’ way, the ‘Australian way’? This Coalition’s Prime Minister of Australia says it is.
With the federal government continuing to push its ‘gas led recovery’ agenda, their support for the fossil fuel industry remains a major blockage to Australia taking meaningful action on climate change. In mid June 2020, it was announced that more than 80,000 square kilometres of new offshore acreage is being offered to oil and gas explorers in Australian waters. The 21 blocks range from the Browse, Carnarvon and Bonaparte Basins off Western Australia, and other basins off Victoria and Tasmania.
Bidding on the blocks is due by March 3, 2022
If even a handful of these areas are developed, it will lock in many decades of greenhouse pollution. This is a watershed moment, where many investors are shifting from fossil fuels, the industry is struggling for social license and faces the threat of investing in what are likely to be stranded assets.’
Sciences and Humanities 