What do you do to be involved in the community? I belong to the local tennis and table tennis clubs and help out with fund raising and clean up days. I play an instrument [not as well as I'd like] in the local community band. I attend many local events, agitate for change where I … Continue reading Community matters
Category: nature
Well…
What activities do you lose yourself in? Many. Thank the celestial teapot that bushranging isn't one of them.
HAIKU
Grandmother oak falls Leaving room for her children to scale the sunlight Image by Nico Wall from Pixabay
The real value of socialism
We are our best self when genuinely connected with others and the natural world. Connections matter, not networking.
Just what is overpopulation?
Another extract from another book for all those intelligent 10 to 12 year olds out there, and that's all of them. Overpopulation is a word that gets all its meaning from the over bit. Population is good, so the story goes (unless it’s nits in your hair), overpopulation isn’t. Overpopulation means you’ve gone over the … Continue reading Just what is overpopulation?
Foreword from a draft non fiction text
The fossil fooled I began to write this book on the first of January 2020, hoping this will be a year and decade of better vision than we have shown so far (forgive the pun). As I write, much of Australia burns. This fire season began in August 2019, some say July. The fires are … Continue reading Foreword from a draft non fiction text
Greta and the trolls
Isn't it fitting that Greta should hail from a nordic region, more-or-less the homeplace, I think, of trolls and other things nasty, like Ragnarok. What is it that brings them out whenever she gets a post or mention on social media.
Figment of imagination
I once could not imagine that someone human could not respond somehow, at some time or another, to the natural world. Impossible, I would have said. No matter how entrenched in the urban one was, how enmeshed by the artificial, surely the whir of a bird’s wings, the flash of a butterfly’s colour, the shape … Continue reading Figment of imagination
Are we locked in a dance to the death (economically anyway) with fossil fuels
factors other than the purely economic must be taken into account. The problem with our purely economic thinking is that it is tainted with neoliberalist assumptions about worth. Humans, certainly all the ones in the first world, have been programmed to accept the notion that economic growth, most particularly at the personal level, is essential. To challenge this paradigm is to adopt the denialist annoying Greta Thunberg ‘how dare you’ stance. But in fact what we do need to do - if you factor anything other than pure Homo economicus thinking - is to do away with stuff. Perhaps take a significant dip in our GDP rich life. Give up some goods, some cargo, some economic cudos. Will we be poorer for it? Will our health go into decline? Will our world become much smaller? Perhaps we’ll travel less, the carbon load of flying is prohibitive. But will we be poorer? Will our air and waterways be cleaner? Will some of the wilderness be restored? Will we rediscover community? I don’t know, but I don’t think we can continue with business as usual. Because business isn’t (despite what they tell us) everything. We can choose to remain fossil fooled or we can choose not to be.
Letter to our first grandchild…
Corporations run governments. That seems to be a truth pretty much universal. Corporations determine policies; the chief democratic will of most nations at present is one which does not want to divest itself of the making of profits and greenhouse gases. Our economies are well oiled. Coal seamed. Denial of our climate emergency is a well-funded industry.