June 19th 2022 I focused on sea kelp and its virtues to widen the horizon and take us back to the oceans and the role of the marine world in our future and the future of the planet. I try to make connections with those in the northern hemisphere. We seem to be unwilling to see ourselves as one world. Instead we face the fear of Putin’s Russia attacking a sovereign nation it guaranteed to protect when it was proclaimed and willing to threaten us with nuclear weapons. And in USA, it is the NRA and its support for armaments manufacturers and their assault weapons, while Yemen and all the women and children suffering from Saudi attacks. How long has that war gone on? And famine because war, and mining fields to stop planting and agriculture will mean no wheat exports, or fewer wheat exports from Ukraine? So, I remind us about the virtues of sea-kelp in June, and hope that those who care about the future will vote for governments that would care about the future into which we are pushing the children.
May 8th 2022. So far, no takers. What could be happening in Northern Tanzania that matters to us? In Australia, State and Territory and Federal governments would over throw Native Title in the Galilee Valley in Queensland to let Adani, one of the richest men in India, export coal, mined in the Carmichael mine, through the Great Barrier Reef. Subsidised by the Federal government. In the Northern Territory, the Labor government will let Empire Energy, subsidised by the Coalition, exploit the Traditional Owners’ Beetaloo Basin by fracking for LNG. In Western Australia the State government supports Woodside that increases its LNG output. And there is to be fracking for oil on First Nations land in the Kimberleys. Let alone the offshore drilling in the Scarborough Project backed by the Federal Coalition. And we face a vital national election.
In USA the Environmental Protection Agency – or Authority – was trashed by Trump, putting in power a man with no interest in the preservation of the land or respect for the Traditional Owners. How much restoration of respect and control has been handed back to the Native Americans? It is not yet six months from that devastating January 6th Insurrection when democracy was damaged in America.
Why should I put up this plea for the people, the Maasai, of Northern Tanzania? Destruction is very easy. It just takes no interest, no sense of shared humanity, from those in power in the quality of the future – only the wealth to be made by exploitation.
May 1st 2022. No image. I thought long and hard about sharing these words from Russia. But they remind us just how long there have been fears, expressed in literature, about what we have been doing to the world since the different effects of the Industrial Revolutions became known. It has been the Humanities speaking to us about what we have been steadily, without thought of consequences, doing throughout the 20th century and now nearly a quarter of a way into the 21st century. Poets. playwrights, novelists have been warning us for well over a century. Lewis Lapham has brought us this reminder from Chekhov of just how long they have been trying to speak to our hearts and minds. In Australia the cost to students of Humanities degrees have been risen by 113% by the Coalition government which, also, vetoes arts grants already approved by the Australian Research Grants Council. What does it mean when a Coalition government so hates the Arts and Humanities it does this kind of thing? And leaves all our public universities – 36 of them – to be without support in the worst of the pandemic! And lets the international students scramble for any support from charity.
April 22nd 2022. The people of Ukraine are fighting to stay a democracy in this terrible war started with this treacherous invasion by this President of Russia who uses poison, assassination, imprisonment of Opposition leaders, censorship of the media, and is prepared to attack human compassion survival corridors, destroy schools, hospitals and the lives and futures of citizens, kill people for speaking Ukrainian, to place the nation whose sovereignty he guaranteed by treaty, under his dictatorial control. All of this while a pandemic is not over. Climate change is having its devastating impact everywhere. Here, ‘Down Under’ we are facing a national election. Only an island continent, we think we can afford to ignore global warming. There is no mention of it in the electioneering going on.
And the Coalition is not interested in trying to reduce emissions more quickly. 2050 is still their date. Even though they go on subsidizing fossil fuel magnates and corporations with $11.3 billion every year. The young are crying out for us to act on their behalf. I have to hope more of our older citizens are with them. This news about the possible connections between fracking and pregnancies comes at the right time. I hope voters will think carefully who they are putting into power until 2025 when they vote on May 21st 2022.
March 23rd 2022 What it is to be a citizen, to know that in a democracy in Australia where voting is compulsory this is the only time you can make a difference. You can vote out the supporters of fossil fuel profiting at the expense of the future for the children. I chose ‘Solar and hydrogen’ to highlight a development in Far North Queensland that will not require batteries. Up in the tropics with increases in extreme events all the current Prime Minister is interested in is at dam at Hell’s Gate. The water will have to go up over the Great Dividing Range. Run off will affect the Great Barrier Reef. There’s no business case. There’s been no environmental assessment of its impact. But he’s for dams on the driest continent in the world where so much of our water is artesian in the Great Artesian Basin. If the Coalition gets back in on the back of this bribe to the Queensland electorates, we will surely be at the Gates of Hell. I made the connection with the French company. HDF – Hydrogen of France – with which the Queensland group is connected. But he ignores this intelligent development just as he ignores the significance of climate change. The pittance set aside for the GBR is to be spent over nine years! This Prime Minister did not want more of our money spent on renewable energy!
February 25th 2022. So many more reasons for the world to move away from oil and gas. We know why we have been so slow if we only think about it. It is too easy to stay in the past and talk about the need for ‘certainty’ if your nation is a big buyer or seller of fossil fuel and the consumers can be panicked about loss of power and the increase in the price of petrol and its ramifications down the line. In the Australian Coalition’s ‘animated’ – cartoonish – advertisements about their efforts for our future they call it ‘positive energy’, not ‘clean energy’. And only here by 2050. No concern for anything by 2030.
February 7th 2022 Some browsers are visiting different of my blogs. I am trying to help people see that the humanities and the sciences interconnect all the time. We have just been encouraged to separate them academically for all kinds of spurious excuses. I was so glad to see the Nature Conservation Council challenging Sweetman’s supposed ‘green’ credentials. Logging native forest, calling its woodchips ‘biomass’.
Here is another lot of ‘greenwashing’ in a different kind of way.
Do you know Liberty Mutual?
| Lock The Gate Alliance |
TAKE ACTION: Liberty Mutual have sold off the Baralaba South project in Queensland to U.S. coal billionaire Hans Mende and his company AMCI. The threat to the Baralaba community has just multiplied!
Check out our story here and email AMCI to let them know you support our community’s right to say no to this mine!
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6:00am, Jan 24, 2022 Updated: 3h ago
January 10th 2022 I was feeling pessimistic when I wrote ‘AUKUS – Looked at a New Way’. It is very easy to become pessimistic in Australia about the quality and honesty of our National Coalition government’s commitment to climate change when more coal mines are being approved. However, it is important not to stay in the Slough of Despond. ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’ told us about that. So here is a constructive, collaborative global workable way to respond to global warming put forward by the Environmental Defense Fund’s chief economist, Suzi Kerr. The RiAus in Adelaide constantly helps us to think through the issues that face us. The fact that the Royal Institution, London, made this connection with Australia is significant, and with Adelaide in particular, is due to the connection of the Nobel Prize winning Braggs, father and son, with the University of Adelaide.
December 27th 2021. While we are distracted, so much goes on behind our backs. Like this disgustingly named Verdant Earth Technologies logging native forest in New South Wales, Australia, calling it ‘biomass’ and burning it for electricity. That is why I put up ‘Forests are not fuel’. Voters in Australia will not hear the environment mentioned by the ‘shake and bake’ Prime Minister of this Coalition government. Probably it will be ‘baked’ by the electricity burnt from a native forest if we are not willing to care about the devastation he will bring. The time line he will care about is only from 2022 – 2025.
December 11th 2021. I had not intended to follow up ‘Nature and Culture’ so quickly. But today’s Science Show on our wonderful essential public broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, gave to Australians across the nation so much information that is accurate and verifiable that will not come from the Murdoch Press. Like Murdoch’s Fox News in USA, they are not interested in an educated citizenry. We heard from a Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, two Chief Scientists with their base in knowledge and the capacity to think ahead. Alan Finkel reminded us that on-line learning as the substitute for face-to-face study at university will not be good enough. We heard from the Editor of ‘Cosmos: The Science of Everything’ produced by the Royal Institute – Australia, the RiAUs, with headquarters in Adelaide. Their job to help us understand by being the kind of science communicators who know how to appeal across the continent. Their job is to help us to become thoughtful citizens. We heard of Corey Tutt’s reception of the Eureka Prize, a First Nations science communicator bringing ‘Deadly’ Science’ – for First Nations, ‘Deadly’ equals outstanding – to all First Nations groups. Given the inadequate, fossil fuel-based outlook of th Coalition government, as a citizen of this country and caring about the future here and across the globe, I had to move to the question. ‘A Pack of Playboys?’.
November 21st 2021. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation is owned by the citizens of the nation. It is trusted much more than any of our commercial media, too many of them owned by Rupert Murdoch who is really a climate sceptic. He denied climate change for so long and his most objectionable media organisation, Sky News, just given free access across Australia by the Coalition government, has employees who frequently present misinformation. We have to protect our publicly-owned ABC from politicians who would destroy it. It is the reliable source of information about emergencies and climate change is increasing them. There’s no advertising on our ABC.
So early in November we discover that the Coalition with its fossil fuel focus is not even willing to wait until March 2022 when it said oil and gas exploration off our Australian coast could be extended. Read the warning of the ‘Friends of the Earth’ at the end of my last blog. Behind our backs while fear of Covid dominates peoples’ minds, this is what they are doing. We have the facts from The Wilderness Society.
“Every year—year in year out—the Australian Commonwealth government undertakes a process to handover more ocean acreage to oil and gas companies for fossil fuel exploration. The areas are selected based on what the oil and gas industry asks for, with no environmental assessment first.
And if you’re thinking that sounds a bit familiar, it’s because the 2021 acreage was already released in May this year. We shared this with you then—a lowlight was that acreage was released just 5kms from the 12 ‘apostles’, our important standing stones in the sea, in Victoria.
Yet, out of the blue last week, the government released the proposed 2022 acreage early. It’s not even 2022 yet, and companies haven’t even finished bidding on this year’s acreage.
The real audacity here is that it appears that the government has brought forward new acreage release for this climate wrecking industry to coincide with the international climate conference in Glasgow. It says it all really. It wasn’t enough to embarrass the Australian people in front of the world with its non-plan to address the climate crisis—the Morrison government had to also make it clear to their friends in the oil and gas industry that they will double down in our own marine backyard too.” The sheer dishonesty is blatant but the Murdoch press will ensure that very few Australians will know or care about it. We can rely on them to downplay it.
If we are indifferent, we will vote these enemies of the future, indifferent to the lives of chidlren, back in to government in 2022.
On October 27th, I had read the statement by a forward thinking Australian billionaire, Mike Cannon-Brookes about the statement by the Prime Minister of Australia about how the nation is going to reach net zero emissions by 2050. He was appalled and made his disgust plain. The same was true for many of us. We did not recognise what he called ‘the unique Australian way’. I don’t think he mentioned global warming once. I watched him and his Minister for Energy – they explicitly dismissed a direct connection between energy and environment – then I read the list of what the UK national government has been doing and legislating.
In Australia, South Australia, is a world leader in the use of renewable energy and here, we were building the ecological connections with Shakespeare that one of our actors, Alys Daroy had brought back to us. Here was science and the humanities in all their vitality. So, here they are – in the UK and in South Australia.
On October 18th I read that Gautam Adani is trying to get himself on to the speakers’ list at the Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. As the host, whether he is accepted or not is up to the Prime Minister of the UK. The Adani – Bravus – Carmichael coal mine is one of the biggest in the world. It has been backed by the Australian State and Federal governments which shows how inadequate is their planning for and commitment to transitions away from fossil fuels in Australia. I thought it important to remind people, caring about the future for the younger generations, to know just how corporations – and this one is so close to home – work.
On October 8th I heard that an Australian billionaire, Gina Rinehart, in a video, had told girls at her old school that ‘humans do not cause climate change’. She is also wanting to mine coal in the Canadian Rocky Mountains. But she had been challenged. Good.
I had intended my next blog to pick up the danger in the power of wealth to undermine the intentions of governments that appear to have real concern for the future of their nation. The International Monetary Fund is worried. But the fact that this woman, with very great wealth, dared to dismiss all the evidence of climate change as ‘propaganda’ made me decide to concentrate on her actions here – in that video, and against the government in Canada.
I do not accept the view of patriotism that you see when Prime Ministers and Presidents make claims in front of national flags. A nation to be worth our full support needs to be one that shows, through its actions – in a democracy – that it has integrity.
On September 30th, I began to ask questions. Who has heard of ‘green washing’? The abuse of their customers by corporations pretending they are on the right side, the ‘green’ side for the planet. I am in Adelaide, ‘Down Under’ and I have heard of it. A friend in USA has not. I ask people to check on plastics companies that say they are ‘going green’. In Australia, a developer might have got permission to build on a World Heritage wetland. A Minister for the Environment had gone against the recommendation of the experts in his Department and was going to choose the less rigorous regulations to let him do it. We know wetlands are essential for bio-diversity on the coast. Luckily, this time it didn’t happen. But so much can happen under the cover of COVID!
On September 28th I went to sports clubs doing their bit for climate change since the connection of a revised Gettysburg Address – thinking of how Lincoln might see the turmoil we are in and the battle for the planet we are facing – with Glasgow raised no eyebrows. In the UK Forest Green Rovers and in Australia ‘Cool Down’ sports people from 30 clubs doing more to promote positive action about climate change than our national government. That raised no eyebrows.
September 21st 2021. It seems COVID 19 and Delta have taken away any concern we might have for anything else. Those in power who want to bring about changes that advantage one group against another are using this time and this preoccupation to get away with it. Our Prime Minister just got the Prime Minister of the UK to remove any climate concerns from the Free Trade Treaty we have been negotiating with the UK government! We are not vigilant. We are anxious. While modellers of ‘living with Covid’ might give numbers for those who die and those who have been forgotten, they are people. We feel for them. But there is a process going on at the same time that is harming us in a way some of us have yet to feel. I always go back to Shylock, crying out in ‘The Merchant of Venice’. The curse never fell upon our nation till now. I never felt it till now.‘ So, I have moved on from ‘Not Afraid For The Future’, that I hoped would bring the kind of response we need. Instead, in the hope that visitors might feel it, I offer you an alternative Address by a great Australian, Barry Jones, in homage to, and built upon, the Gettysburg Address by one of the greatest of the American Presidents.
September 2021. I should probably have put a question mark after ‘Not Afraid For the Future’. I am trying to be optimistic again as the two Australian professors are. They are the focus of this blog because they are using their knowledge, their concern for the future for everyone, to bring their genius, their capacity of cooperative learning to the fore.
This is at a time when the Australian Coalition government has decided to concentrate on changing partners as far as the provision of submarines is concerned. They are more concerned with submarines than the oceans in which they will hide. Their focus is not on the future of the oceans which are so vital in the writing of Dr Sylvia Earle and Dr Edith Widder. Dr Widder has told us about ‘the eye in the sea’. It is a machine that enables scientists to observe without intrusion. We have done so much exploitation, through over-fishing, deep sea mining and using the oceans as a dumping place. She says, at least, where space is concerned, we have explored before we began to consider how we could exploit it. We know so little about the bio-diversity from surface to the ultimate depths and we care too little about what global warming is doing to our lives.
Two people in USA have gone back to an earlier blog ‘There is Hope in Hell’. We have to hope that is the case. But in democracies, when people can forget the long term climate future, we are subject to how they vote. Fine imaginative novelists can present us with possibilities for the future. That is what Jules Verne did in ‘Twenty Leagues Under the Sea.’ That is what H.G. Wells did. Most of all, just now, that is what E. M. Forster did for us when he wrote ‘The Machine Stops.’
August 2021. Undoubtedly, the Delta variant has taken the focus off global warming and I am not surprised. So much happens across the globe everyday. Earthquakes, political upheavals, a year’s rainfall in two days, and all the events large and small that take our attention off the ‘big picture’, that just goes on.
This time, thoroughly connecting science and poetry, I ask those who visit – if they do nothing else – to listen to Mark Tredinnik’s poem, ‘Litany. En Elegy’. Children born today must deal with the planet we create. We can’t escape to Mars. In Adelaide, a play ‘Hibernation’ is looking at a future for 2030.
July 2021. I have just received a reply from a friend in the UK to my latest blog ‘Civil Society has power’. The title is the result of the interview of Professor Peter Newman of Curtin University in Western Australia by Robyn Williams, presenter of the ‘Science Show’ on Australia’s ABC Radio National. The contrast between an honest public broadcaster and the Murdoch media is so great. In the UK, in Australia, and through Fox News in USA, we have to deal with Murdoch’s Sky News. In the UK, it deliberately ignored the fact of the hottest temperature in Northern Ireland. He also directed me to an article in The New Statesman‘ on ‘The Politics of Lies’.
June 2021. i have made a connection with Sustain blog. They have given me information about the ‘whole-of-government, all-hands-on-deck approach of the Biden-Harris Administration. They know that is what climate change needs. If only we had such commitment and investment from our Federal government here in Canberra.
My blogs appear to be connected with Home/Archives in a way I had not intended. Visitors from other lands go to the blogs and name them. I know what has attracted their interest even if for very short periods of time. I think it is mainly those in Australia from whom I receive no idea of where their focus lies. From USA many care about the ‘third F’ after Flora and Fauna’. I’d like to know where the focus lies. Then I might be able to make further connections that might have an impact, in democracies, on the way citizens decide to vote.
Geoff Boyce has provided this information about me.
‘Erica has devoted her life to advancing the quality of life for all through education.
“Good education is a fundamental part of a fulfilling life.
“I don’t have children. If I had children maybe I’d put my energy into them; but I put it into what I care about most, which is giving everybody, particularly Indigenous people, equal access to education.
“Education allows people to discover what they want to do for themselves. It allows them to change their minds, to understand that error is not a sign of failure and is just part of the process of learning and developing.”
Education, for Erica, means making connections and healing the rift between areas of knowledge rigidified in academic silos. Education means drawing on the reservoir of human understanding, inspiring new life and new opportunities for all.’
I was the Founding Secretary of the SA History Teachers Association and a member of the Social Studies Teachers Association encouraging the cross disciplinary approach connecting economics, social, historical, geographical, political elements to increase understanding of the foundations of contemporary society. Contributed to Social Studies text books in the early 1960s.
Teaching in the UK, Sept 1966 – June 1967, visiting schools in USA 1967, made me aware of the need to connect across disciplines in the humanities and sciences after reading ‘The Two Cultures’. Dangers in separation were made clear by the Cold War. Back in Adelaide, Deputy Principal, Mitcham Girls Technical High School and completing a major in English at the University of Adelaide to add to my Hons degree in History, I decided to change direction.
Encouraged to go to the Flinders University, to pursue an MA in English Literature, from 1970 I taught part time at Brighton Boys Technical High School where the separation of Technical Studies from the study of literature and social studies was apparent in attitudes. This was the beginning of my conviction that ‘subjects as silos’ decreased the avenues needed to develop the quality of community-based connections across a country.
In 1975 the single-sex boys school became the co-educational Mawson High School as a result of the end of the binary – academic or vocational – secondary school structure that had existed from the beginning of secondary public schools. Connecting the academic and the vocational was one of the important possible developments in these comprehensive schools. They were the result of the Freedom and Authority Memorandum of the Director-General of Education, Dr A.W. Jones. Principals could develop curricula appropriate for local needs. For the first time, public schools now had a second Deputy Principal, one for Curriculum. Integrated programs could be taken up by progressive schools.
In 1981 I became the Deputy Principal, Curriculum, to Brian D. Hannaford B.Sc, AM, FACE, who, since 1975 had been changing the academic Marion High School into a comprehensive school offering effective programs for all who attended for the full five years. He understood the dangers of subjects as silos, encouraged connections of different kinds, even establishing a multi-disciplinary resource centre as well as outdoor education and English-Second Language centres, a computing centre as well as the traditional library/resources centre to complement, enhance and counter the narrowing focus of mainstream study. The school had 30 different nationalities. In 1984/85 it was chosen by the Federal government as a ‘lighthouse’ school for South Australia. As early as 1986 schools were aware of the impact of ‘the green house’ gases and environment increased in importance in secondary as well as primary schools.
in 1990 I was elected as a representative of the graduates to Flinders University Council. In 1996 I would be asked to join the university’s Academic Senate and served there until 2002. Efforts were being made to connect across the sciences and the arts through the philosophy of science. From 1998 I had been working with U3A groups – University of the Third Age – on connections between poetry and science.
In 2000, the Australian Council of the Deans of Education had put forward a charter. ‘New Learning: A Charter for Australian Education. It emphasised the increasing necessity for interdisciplinary engagement. And schools increased the process of picking up cross-curricular connections. Awareness of insufficient graduates in the areas of the sciences, technology, engineering and mathematics encouraged – in this acronym driven madness – a focus on STEM.
The Federal Coalition government showed little interest in the information increasingly available about global warming. Members of the government, including the Minister for Science, were not prepared to accept the advice of those who had been studying climate. The story of The Carbon Club, by Marian Wilkinson, published by Allen & Unwin, 2020, tells the story of the collaboration between carbon-producing corporations in Australia and the USA to undermine any progress in decreasing our focus on carbon – coal, gas and oil. Read the opening of it before the Kyoto Conference in 1997. It is a most depressing story of ‘How a network of climate sceptics, politicians and business leaders fought to control Australia’s climate policy’. The Howard government was in office from 1996 – 2006.
The carbon lobby had its impact on the following Labor governments. First Kevin Rudd’s government, then the one led by Australia’s first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, covering the period from 2007 – 2012/2013. There was a decrease in emissions in this period.
In 2008, I felt the time was right to bring back the connections between the humanities and the sciences. In 2010, Robyn Williams, the long time presenter of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Radio National’s Science Show, launched it at the State Library of South Australia. The quality of our emotional response is central if we, in real – sort-of-real – democracies, are to vote for a future that takes into account the impact of global warming. Challenging the Divide: Approaches to Science and Poetry had the support of internationally renowned scientists. I wanted it to help in education to encourage the quality of emotional and intellectual connections in those citizens, the voters, decide future directions.
In 2013 Australians chose a Prime Minister who claimed, as the institute of Public Affairs did, that ‘climate change is crap’. The IPA, with very wealthy donors, had invited sceptics to support that view. The IPA was formed in 1943 and like an American Enterprise organisation, wanted government to favour business at all cost. We have had Coalition governments since then. And the coal and gas lobby still influences Federal government decisions.
In educational terms, the situation was made worse after 2015 by the review of the national curriculum for Australian pre-tertiary schools which rejected the cross-curricular, interdisciplinary approaches considered essential in 2000. For me , it has been as if there has been a deliberate effort to undermine the very thing we need to face the global warming future. Australia’s current Prime Minister since 2019, once brought a lump of coal into the House of Representative and told us not to be afraid of it.
Geoff Boyce understands that, for me, change has to come with knowledge. The acronym STEAM – if we must have these dangerous oversimplications – brings the Arts – the humanities, literature, philosophy, music, visual arts into the story. These blogs are my efforts to encourage connections in the minds and hearts of those voting, at different times, for the future of the nations. How we vote will determine the future for our children who do not have the right to vote. I offer the best information from the knowledgeable and courageous people, opposing these profit-first corporations and governments, about the many inter-connected aspects of our lives and the planet.
Sciences and Humanities 