Writing Country, Writing Climate

1.Introduction

I have felt compelled to synthesise some of what I have read recently and put it out there. Why? In order to collate a number of good references that help better understand our new epoch in which climate change is an existential threat, and to share my enquiry on how people and nature can sustainably co-exist in this changing climate.

Many of these ideas are not my own initiative. Many are attributed to others I have been reading on nature writing, land-use, climate change science and, in particular, an astonishing article in the New York Times Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change by Nathaniel Rich, Aug 2018. If you take anything away from this – please read the NYT article:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html?referringSource=articleShare

My fundamental premise is climate change has occurred and is continuing, and human activity has caused it in the last 200 years since the industrial revolution.[1] This results in creeping ecological change and severe and catastrophic weather events. Second, I believe in choice.[2] We have choice in what we think, believe and do. We are active participants with the Earth upon which we rely for air, food and water + aesthetic, emotional and spiritual engagement.  

Throughout, I remain both concerned and hopeful:

• I am concerned about bifurcation of people and nature, industry and environment.
• I am concerned with our ineptitude to stop doing things that are bad for our planet ergo ourselves and our children and our children’s children.
• I am concerned about our ‘civilized’ bias for short-term economic self-interest, political opportunism and undue influence to preserve the ‘suicidal status quo’ that leads to unfettered depletion of natural resources and climate change inaction, instead of doing what is right to achieve long-term sustainability and wellness for people, landscape, culture and civilisation. 
• I am hopeful that the time for change is ever-present and a combined people-need-nature and nature-needs-people[3] approach to human ingenuity and endeavour will provide us with a solution to the pathway to extinction that we seem to have ignited.

Above all, in the spirit of the Dalai Lama, I invoke Hope – by never giving up, being compassionate and working for peace, and; I revoke worry in the spirit of ‘Worry is praying for a future you don’t want’, attributed to the Iron Man himself, Robert Downey Jr;[4] instead, redirecting my energies into right-thinking and discerning good action.    

*

[1] Human activities have increased greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide began to rise around two hundred years ago, after changing little since the end of the last ice age thousands of years earlier. The concentration of CO2 has increased from 280 parts per million (ppm) before 1800, to 396 ppm in 2013. This history of greenhouse gas concentrations has been established by a combination of modern measurements and analysis of ancient air bubbles in polar ice. Ref. Australian Academy of Science: https://www.science.org.au/education/immunisation-climate-change-genetic-modification/science-climate-change

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology 2016 State of the Climate report states that Australia’s climate has warmed since national records began in 1910, especially since 1950. Mean surface air temperature has increased by around 1.0°C since 1910. Australia’s top five warmest years on record included each of the last three years …Sea surface temperatures in the region have warmed by nearly 1 °C since 1900, with the past three years, …the warmest years on record. The duration, frequency and intensity of heatwaves have increased across large parts of Australia since 1950. There has been an increase in extreme fire weather, and a longer fire season, across large parts of Australia since the 1970s. Regional climate change attribution studies have shown significant consistency between observed increases in Australian temperatures and those from climate models forced with increasing greenhouse gases. By extension, many aspects of warming over Australia are also attributable to the enhanced greenhouse effect.

https://www.climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au/en/climate-campus/australian-climate-change/causes-recent-change/

[2] Encyclopedia Britannica, Choice, in philosophy, a corollary of the proposition of free will—i.e., the ability voluntarily to decide to perform one of several possible acts or to avoid action entirely. An ethical choice involves ascribing qualities such as right or wrong, good or bad, better or worse to alternatives. Ref. https://www.britannica.com/topic/choice

[3] The Nature Conservancy Australia - https://www.natureaustralia.org.au/get-involved/how-to-help/nature-needs-people/

[4] Attributed variously to Robert Downey, Jr, citing ‘I’ve noticed that worrying is like praying for what you don’t want to happen,’ and Jen Sincero, author of Badassery and other inspirations.     

***

2. In the Beginning, we had a fair contract with Nature

Traditional lore established song-lines of simultaneous past-present-future coexistence between people and nature.

We started our human conversation with nature in Australia some 60,000 years or more ago, when people and nature started an exchange of clean air, food and water necessary to survive. In return, our first nations peoples took the long view, and nurtured long-term established programs of land care management. (Gammage, 2011; Pascoe, 2014). All but the megafauna thrived (Harare, 2014), with 60 millennia of empirical knowledge passed down in song-lines for sustainable existence that continue (albeit interrupted) today. The Yolnju community of north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia are one example where a narrow focus and detailed examine of foodstock along their coastal region is viewed within the timeless continuum of a broad landscape dreaming, where stories inextricably link people, landscape and language in a civilised lore, resulting in a pre-contact Aboriginal agricultural economy that has lasted for more than ~1800 generations.[1] In Maypal (James et al, 2016), a contemporary Yolnju ‘bible’ of local shellfish, the continuum of this human-landscape exchange is put simply and reverently: 

We must work to remember the law and stories of the shellfish.

The north wind tells of the ancestors and the time of maypal.

As the seasons change we think of the old people, the ancestors, we think of gathering maypal.

Children you must learn to listen to the wind, the wind will tell you the story of the maypal. You can’t take language away, language is inside.

Later as they grow they will learn the many names of shellfish.

When the wind blows gently from the North-west, softly from the North, the South, you remember loved ones.

When the wind blows gently from the North-west, calming the waves, you yearn for beloved family remembered, through the long generations, this is the time to gather shellfish.

When the wind blows, feelings intertwine joining with memories of loved ones, remember the shellfish and your heart will reconnect with family and friends.

When we hear the wind blow our thoughts turn to our ancestors. 

When the wind blows our fish traps fill with fish.

When the wind blows the distant sea brings shellfish to the islands.

When the wind blows we hear the ancestors of the distant sea creating shellfish for the islands, yielding the food of island people, amen.

In a time of increasing demand for food security and questions asking how to live in arid landscape with a changing climate; how to facilitate an equitable, sustainable exchange between landscape and people; how to ensure our children eat well and are well, surely we can learn from the Yolnju, quieten our spirits, listen to the wind and take heed of what our ancient landscape and climate are telling us? Perhaps through the eyes of traditional practices and contemporary environmental sciences we can learn to have a more equitable and enduring exchange between people and nature?              

*

[1] Based on a very general assumption that 30 generations live in 1000 years.

https://blog.kittycooper.com/2014/05/how-many-ancestors-did-i-have-1000-years-ago/

https://isogg.org/wiki/How_long_is_a_generation%3F_Science_provides_an_answer  

***

3. Then there was unfettered consumption and old farts[1]  

A zero-sum game where nature loses, and we lose.   

For all our cleverness in inventing the agrarian revolution, the industrial revolution, the technological revolution, cities, structures, organisations, religions, currency, blockchain, quantum computing, the internet-of-things and every-other-thing our post-Neanderthal-Homosapien brains have spawned to ensure that we not only survive and thrive, but are defect-less, six-sigma best-of-breed immortals (Harare, 2014), we really have fucked up our exchange with nature.

IF our goal is to be winners, we have failed. Nature wins.[2] Nature may need people, but people need nature more: for air, water, food. Actually, come to think of it, we’re both losers. As nature is depleted and we bite the nipple that feeds us, Mother Nature’s good will and fecundity is drying up like our rivers and countryside, and that’s not just a metaphor, it’s the barren truth: It’s the dry-river reality of the Murray-Darling Basin and the drought-stricken candour of Central Western NSW. Our food-bowls. Our livelihoods. And all the while, as we turn up the heat on Mother Earth with our exponential increase in CO2 emissions, she in turn turns up the heat on us by another degree or two... And so it goes on. We are simultaneously both in the frying pan and the pot, simmering to our hearts’ content. Until they stop.         

Our unfettered consumption of nature and fossil-fuelled farts are killing our planet and our livelihood. That’s a fact.

Our belief that no matter how often it’s depleted, our supply of clean air, water and food reforms itself to be consumed again, is proving to be an ill-conceived story and long term fallacy. Our belief in Mother Nature’s Magic Pudding[3] of endless supply has – like its namesake - turned into a prejudiced comic fantasy. Time is running out and nature’s tolerance is dwindling. We are passing tipping points of climate-warming no-return and ecological devastation. Our prejudices need to change to rebuild nature’s resilience for our human indiscretions – such as dealing with the ‘hole in the ozone layer’ by banning CFC’s as we did in the late 1980’s. Surely we need to stop doing things that are bad for us and nature – like pumping poison into our rivers and skies, then civilly asking them to feed & water us?

<Somehow we need a solution greater than hope. Perhaps this is partly a new consumption pathway based on sustainable metrics of supply of nature’s raw nutrients (resources) to support human civilization’s repair and growth. Certainly it requires us to stop letting off greenhouse gases. >

*

[1] Carbon dioxide (CO2) is a colourless, odourless and non-poisonous gas formed by combustion of carbon and in the respiration of living organisms and is considered a greenhouse gas. Emissions means the release of greenhouse gases and/or their precursors into the atmosphere over a specified area and period of time. CO2 emissions are emissions stemming from the burning of fossil fuels – oil, gas and coal. These ‘farteous’ gas emission are the villain in our story. https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Glossary:Carbon_dioxide_emissions 

[2] In the long run. Every-time. Nature wins, even if it means premature extinction of higher order predators. Despite what Rich points out in Chapter 8 “You never beat the White House’, not even the White House can win against rising 6m tides. Surely not?

[3] The Magic Pudding: The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum & his friends Bill Barnacle & Sam Sawnoff by Norman Lindsay is a comic fantasy and classic of Australian children's literature. The story is set in Australia with humans mixing with anthropomorphic animals. It tells of a magic pudding which, no matter how often it is eaten, always reforms in order to be eaten again. It is owned by three companions who must defend it against Pudding Thieves who want it for themselves. An anecdotal search of Google reveals criticism of violence, racist remarks and anti-judiciary sentiments.

***

4. Mother Nature is on suicide watch

A 21st century drama of extinction and hope 

Julianne Schultz in her introduction to the GriffithReview63 Writing the Country (Schultz, 2018) puts us on notice that Mother Nature is on suicide watch. With a backdrop of our world and natural environment a beautiful place inspiring artists, poets and spiritual significance, climate change has reshaped the environment with extreme weather events and brought to our attention ugly scientific facts and dire predictions that have been known since the 1970’s (Rich, 2018). Our recent observed and lived experience in Australia and across the globe - international weather aberrations such as those in George Steinmetz’s picture essay from the New Your Times that follows (Rich & Steinmetz’s, 2018), all provide us undeniable proof of the inconvenient truth (Gore, 2006) that catastrophic weather events are the new norm and the ramifications threaten the heartbeat of our civilisation. And, scarily, we hold the gun in our own hand, ready to blow another hole in our blue skies.   

Schultz cites ‘a growing body of thought that suggests civilisations are…determined by the relationship between human beings and nature, that societies and culture evolve in response to the environment in which people find themselves. Felipe Fernandez-Armestro argues in Civilizations (Macmillan, 2000) that the relationship to the natural environment, recrafted to meet human demands, is the defining element of social organisation that, at its best, becomes known as a civilisation. From this grows culture, language, social and economic organisation, and the legacy of buildings, stories and knowledge.’ (Schultz, 2018)       

History has shown unforeseeable natural events destroy civilisations. Natural accidents per se. But when catastrophic events are foreseeable, known-knowns, caused by over-exploitation and denial, are they accidents or reckless suicidal tendencies leading to the death of civilisation? Schultz argues the latter and, pausing on causation, asks us to ponder the disconnection between our industrialisation needs and (lack-of) environmental self-awareness and our loss of a heart-felt connection with landscape. Calling out our predatory delay in engaging with this heart-felt narrative, we find ourselves instead in half-hearted-darkness heading up a dry creek with 2-stroke-conviction towards a dead-end: 

“As the great historian of civilisations Arnold J Toynbee is reputed to have quipped, ‘More civilisations die from suicide than murder.’ 

It is profoundly uncomfortable to think that we may be on suicide watch, that country is being destroyed by human activity, but it may be useful to hold that thought. As scientists wrote recently in Nature Climate Change, the physical shifts in nature occurring as a result of unchecked climate change ‘will extend longer than the entire history of human civilisation thus far.’

“At the same time British settlers were trying to make sense of what they found in the Great South Land… the bifurcation of environment and industry did not exist (within our first-nation peoples). Had the new settlers delved deeper, the notion of a unique spiritual connection between people and place would have become clearer.

This is the defining characteristic of the oldest living civilisations, a deeply enmeshed connection between the physical and the human environment, one that informs culture and belief, and makes life sustainable.

Never before has so much been known, never before has the path to preserving beautiful places and a range of civilisations been so sharply delineated, and yet we are captured by what Alex Steffen describes as ‘predatory delay’ as a result of deliberately confected confusion and fear."    (Schultz, 2018)       

It seems the job of enlightened authors, artists and scientists is to turn the light on this confusion and fear so that we can turn off the false and deceptive rhetoric once and for all, deal with the cause of climate change and re-join people and nature. 

***

5. 1979-1989: What’s all this crap about Climate Change?  

We can’t keep applying compound economic growth principles to a depleting resource pool and expect the ancient winds to keep blowing in our favour.    

Nathaniel Rich is one of those enlightened authors who has turned the spotlight on confusion and fear and driven out false and deceptive rhetoric. It’s hard not to simply provide extracts from his 2018 NYT article because it is so compelling, so that’s what I’ll do, in an abbreviated form. Needless to say, the article is best read in its entirety: It is an astonishing account of the history of a decade when ‘everyone knew’ the impact of climate change – in the highest offices of government, science and the military in USA, Russia, Japan and Europe – and no one could bring about effective change to slow or stop CO2 emissions. Rich’s opening remarks in his closing Epilogue provide the following ominous statistics:   

• More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. In 1990, humankind emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. By 2017, the figure had risen to 32.5 billion metric tons, a record. Despite every action taken since the Charney report — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise. (Rich, 2018)

The climate crisis Rich documents was uncontained in the 1980’s and is now like a boogeyman of contemporary dreamtime – existing simultaneously in past-present-future, although unfortunately not an imaginary evil spirit but a living malevolence that occupies our upper atmosphere, causing increasingly destructive weather events across the globe.

Despite its sad Epilogue, the appropriate post-script to Rich’s article is, I believe that a great global debt of thanks is owned to a small group of American climate scientists, activists and politicians led by Rafe Pomerance and James Hansen who tried from 1979 to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. To them I offer my sincere thanks and a vote of gratitude from an Australian voice. 

5.1 Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

By Nathaniel Rich

Extract from Prologue

• The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution.
• The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees.
• The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20.
• If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf.
• The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario.
• Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum.
• Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable.
• The prospect of a Five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.
• ...and we had the knowledge that could have avoided all this.

< JP: Now do we have your attention? >

• …in the decade that ran from 1979 to 1989, we had an excellent opportunity to solve the climate crisis. The world’s major powers came within several signatures of endorsing a binding, global framework to reduce carbon emissions — far closer than we’ve come since…
• Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979. By that year, data collected since 1957 confirmed what had been known since before the turn of the 20th century: Human beings have altered Earth’s atmosphere through the indiscriminate burning of fossil fuels. The main scientific questions were settled beyond debate, and as the 1980s began, attention turned from diagnosis of the problem to refinement of the predicted consequences…Nor was the basic science especially complicated. It could be reduced to a simple axiom: The more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the warmer the planet. And every year, by burning coal, oil and gas, humankind belched increasingly obscene quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
• Why didn’t we act? A common boogeyman today is the fossil-fuel industry, which in recent decades has committed to playing the role of villain with comic-book bravado. An entire subfield of climate literature has chronicled the machinations of industry lobbyists, the corruption of scientists and the propaganda campaigns that even now continue to debase the political debate, long after the largest oil-and-gas companies have abandoned the dumb show of denialism. But the coordinated efforts to bewilder the public did not begin in earnest until the end of 1989. During the preceding decade, some of the largest oil companies, including Exxon and Shell, made good-faith efforts to understand the scope of the crisis and grapple with possible solutions.[1]
• Nor can the Republican Party be blamed… during the 1980s, many prominent Republicans joined Democrats in judging the climate problem to be a rare political winner: nonpartisan and of the highest possible stakes. (Many)… called for urgent, immediate and far-reaching climate policy (and)…the acting chairman of the president’s Council for Environmental Quality, told industry executives in 1981, “There can be no more important or conservative concern than the protection of the globe itself.” The issue was unimpeachable, like support for veterans or small business. Except the climate had an even broader constituency, composed of every human being on Earth.
• It was understood that action would have to come immediately. At the start of the 1980s, scientists…predicted that conclusive evidence of warming would appear on the global temperature record by the end of the decade, at which point it would be too late to avoid disaster… If the world had adopted the proposal(s) widely endorsed at the end of the ’80s — a freezing of carbon emissions, with a reduction of 20 percent by 2005 — warming could have been held to less than 1.5 degrees.
• A broad international consensus had settled on a solution: a global treaty to curb carbon emissions (like that introduced in 1980’s to deal with CFCs causing the proverbial ‘hole in the ozone layer’). The idea began to coalesce as early as February 1979, at the first World Climate Conference in Geneva…Ten years later, the first major diplomatic meeting to approve the framework for a binding treaty was called in the Netherlands…the sentiment was unanimous: Action had to be taken, and the United States would need to lead. It didn’t.
• The inaugural chapter of the climate-change saga was over…we identified the threat and its consequences… We understood what failure would mean for global temperatures, coastlines, agricultural yield, immigration patterns, the world economy. But we have not allowed ourselves to comprehend what failure might mean for us. How will it change the way we see ourselves,…how we imagine the future?
• …we came so close, as a civilization, to breaking our suicide pact with fossil fuels...

<JP: at this point, Rich’s article moves from the Prologue into the main body. I commend you read it. Too much to paraphrase, I will move on to the Epilogue.> 

*

[1] Increasingly in the latter part of the decade intended to mitigate their risk. (Rich, 2018)

***

5.2 Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change

By Nathaniel Rich

Extract from Epilogue

• Ken Caldeira, a climate scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., …and a colleague recently published a paper in Nature finding that the world is warming more quickly than most climate models predict. The toughest emissions reductions now being proposed, even by the most committed nations, will probably fail to achieve “any given global temperature stabilization target.”
• More carbon has been released into the atmosphere since the final day of the Noordwijk conference, Nov. 7, 1989, than in the entire history of civilization preceding it. In 1990, humankind emitted more than 20 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. By 2017, the figure had risen to 32.5 billion metric tons, a record. Despite every action taken since the Charney report — the billions of dollars invested in research, the nonbinding treaties, the investments in renewable energy — the only number that counts, the total quantity of global greenhouse gas emitted per year, has continued its inexorable rise.
• Like the scientific story, the political story hasn’t changed greatly, except in its particulars. Even some of the nations that pushed hardest for climate policy have failed to honor their own commitments. When it comes to our own nation, which has failed to make any binding commitments whatsoever, the dominant narrative for the last quarter century has concerned the efforts of the fossil-fuel industries to suppress science, confuse public knowledge and bribe politicians...
• ...while the Exxon scientists and American Petroleum Institute clerics of the ’70s and ’80s were hardly good Samaritans, they did not start multimillion-dollar disinformation campaigns, pay scientists to distort the truth or try to brainwash children in elementary schools, as their successors would. (Following) James Hansen’s testimony before Congress in 1988 .., Exxon’s manager of science and strategy development, Duane LeVine, prepared an internal strategy paper urging the company to “emphasize the uncertainty in scientific conclusions.” This shortly became the default position of the entire sector. LeVine, it so happened, served as chairman of the global petroleum industry’s Working Group on Global Climate Change (GCC), created the same year, which adopted Exxon’s position as its own.
• The American Petroleum Institute (API), …(from) 1988, including the chief executives of the dozen or so largest oil companies, …set aside money for carbon-dioxide policy …to establish a lobbying organization called… the Global Climate Coalition. It was joined by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and 14 other trade associations, including those representing the coal, electric-grid and automobile industries. The G.C.C. was conceived as a reactive body, to share news of any proposed regulations, (and)… a press campaign, to be coordinated mainly by the A.P.I. It gave briefings to politicians known to be friendly to the industry and approached scientists who professed scepticism about global warming…
• ...In October 1989, scientists allied with the G.C.C. began to be quoted in national publications, giving an issue that lacked controversy a convenient fulcrum. “Many respected scientists say the available evidence doesn’t warrant the doomsday warnings,” was the caveat that began to appear in articles on climate change.
• ...for the 1992 Rio Earth Summit …, George H.W. Bush refused to commit to specific emissions reductions. The following year, when President Bill Clinton proposed an energy tax in the hope of meeting the goals of the Rio treaty, the A.P.I. invested $1.8 million in a G.C.C. disinformation campaign. Senate Democrats from oil-and-coal states joined Republicans to defeat the tax proposal, which later contributed to the Republicans’ rout of Democrats in the midterm congressional elections in 1994 — the first time the Republican Party had won control of both houses in 40 years.
• The G.C.C. spent $13 million on a single ad campaign intended to weaken support for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which committed its parties to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions by 5 percent relative to 1990 levels. The Senate, which would have had to ratify the agreement, took a pre-emptive vote declaring its opposition; the resolution passed 95-0. There has never been another serious effort to negotiate a binding global climate treaty.
• The G.C.C. disbanded in 2002 …But Exxon (now Exxon Mobil) continued its disinformation campaign for another half decade. This has made the corporation an especially vulnerable target for the wave of compensatory litigation that began in earnest in the last three years and may last a generation. Tort lawsuits have become possible only in recent years, as scientists have begun more precisely to attribute regional effects to global emission levels. This is one subfield of climate science that has advanced significantly since 1979 — the assignment of blame.
• In 2015, after reports by the website InsideClimate News and The Los Angeles Times documented the climate studies performed by Exxon for decades, the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York began fraud investigations. The Securities and Exchange Commission separately started to investigate whether Exxon Mobil’s valuation depended on the burning of all its known oil-and-gas reserves. (Exxon Mobil has denied any wrongdoing and stands by its valuation method.)
• The rallying cry of this multipronged legal effort is “Exxon Knew.” It is incontrovertibly true that senior employees at the company that would later become Exxon, like those at most other major oil-and-gas corporations, knew about the dangers of climate change as early as the 1950s. But the automobile industry knew, too, and began conducting its own research by the early 1980s, as did the major trade groups representing the electrical grid. They all own responsibility for our current paralysis and have made it more painful than necessary. But they haven’t done it alone.
• The United States government knew. Roger Revelle began serving as a Kennedy administration adviser in 1961, …and every president since has debated the merits of acting on climate policy. Carter had the Charney report, Reagan had “Changing Climate” and Bush had the censored testimony of James Hansen and his own public vow to solve the problem. Congress has been holding hearings for 40 years; the intelligence community has been tracking the crisis even longer.
• Everybody knew. 

***

6. The End (Part 1): Extract from Rich’s 2018 Epilogue (continued)

• Everyone knew — and we all still know. We know that the transformations of our planet, which will come gradually and suddenly, will reconfigure the political world order. We know that if we don’t act to reduce emissions, we risk the collapse of civilization. We also know that, without a gargantuan intervention, whatever happens will be worse for our children, worse yet for their children and even worse still for their children’s children, whose lives, our actions have demonstrated, mean nothing to us.
• Could it have been any other way? In the late 1970s, a small group of philosophers, economists and political scientists began to debate…whether a human solution to this human problem was even possible… whether humankind, when presented with this particular existential crisis, was willing to prevent it. We worry about the future. But how much, exactly?
• The answer, as any economist could tell you, is very little. Economics, the science of assigning value to human behavior, prices the future at a discount; the farther out you project, the cheaper the consequences. This makes the climate problem the perfect economic disaster. The Yale economist William D. Nordhaus, a member of Jimmy Carter’s Council of Economic Advisers, argued in the 1970s that the most appropriate remedy was a global carbon tax. But that required an international agreement, which Nordhaus didn’t think was likely. Michael Glantz, a political scientist who was at the National Center for Atmospheric Research at the time, argued in 1979 that democratic societies are constitutionally incapable of dealing with the climate problem. The competition for resources means that no single crisis can ever command the public interest for long, yet climate change requires sustained, disciplined efforts over decades. And the German physicist-philosopher Klaus Meyer-Abich argued that any global agreement would inevitably favor the most minimal action. Adaptation* Meyer-Abich concluded, “seems to be the most rational political option.” It is the option that we have pursued, consciously or not, ever since.

<JP: ‘resilience & adaptation’ is the current policy of the Australian government.[1]>

• These theories share a common principle: that human beings, whether in global organizations, democracies, industries, political parties or as individuals, are incapable of sacrificing present convenience to forestall a penalty imposed on future generations…
• If human beings really were able to take the long view — to consider seriously the fate of civilization decades or centuries after our deaths — we would be forced to grapple with the transience of all we know and love in the great sweep of time. So we have trained ourselves, whether culturally or evolutionarily, to obsess over the present, worry about the medium term and cast the long term out of our minds, as we might spit out a poison.

*

[1] ‘Scott Morrison to focus on 'resilience and adaptation' to address climate change.’ The Guardian, 14 Jan20. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/14/scott-morrison-to-focus-on-resilience-and-adaption-to-address-climate-change

7. The End (Part 2): My Hope

In the new millennium we continue our struggle to define what it is to be human. We look to organisations like The Nature Conservancy to help scientists, farmers, political leaders, and communities agree on how to best ‘manage[1]’ agriculture and resources while also protecting nature, and provide guidance on how we can coexist with wildlife and nature.

It is irrefutably proven that our climate has changed due to human causes since the industrial revolution. We have moved on from dealing with incontrovertibility of the science, to the consequences which are now apparent. 40 years after the campaigns lead by Rafe Pomerance and James Hansen described in Rich’s article, we are now seeing the global impacts of climate change on nature and people. The accompanying photo essay by George Steinmetz provides 9 graphic images of crisis events caused by seismic shifts in weather patterns resulting in massive socio-economic, human and environmental loss across USA, Antarctica, Africa, Switzerland, China, Greenland, Australia and Bangladesh. Economic and legal risk and impacts are now being quantified. In October 2019, the Reserve Bank of Australia issued a statement Financial Stability Risks From Climate Change [2] citing:

• “Climate change is exposing financial institutions and the financial system more broadly to risks that will rise over time, if not addressed. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it will take significant effort to limit global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, as targeted in the Paris Agreement. Even if targets are met, this level of warming is likely to be accompanied by rising sea levels and an increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme weather (including storms, heatwaves and droughts). Some of these outcomes are already apparent (refer graph below). These changes will create both financial and macroeconomic risks.”

The RBA notes financial risks arising from climate change particularly for Australian financial institutions include ‘physical: disruptions to economic activity or reductions in asset values..; transitional: the impact of changes in regulation or pricing introduced to facilitate a transition to a low-carbon economy; or liability: an inadequate response to these risks also raises the potential for reputational and legal risk.’ 

Recent headlines across Australia of drying rivers, fish kills, bleaching (death) of the Great Barrier Reef, drought, bushfires and windstorms, have united us with the global community in first-hand experience of crisis events, some resulting from climate change, some from poor resource management, all resulting in an increasing death toll, mass destruction of property and value, and mass animal, species and habitat loss. Joined in misery, we are united in our loss, but not without hope.         

The information in Rich’s article is important for us to acclaim as a demonstration of the pursuit of fact over fiction and its protagonists’ genuine attempts to make change at the highest governmental and societal levels, despite scientific torpor, political inaction and the mischief caused by vested interests.

In an era of fast false fact, it’s important we remember what it is to be well informed, well-considered and articulate in our opinions, and retain the right to share them without fear or favour. Silence, denial and inaction seem poor choices. With extreme and damaging weather events now impacting every aspect of our society; facing high economic, social, political, environmental and reputational risk, to deny climate change in order to maintain the status quo is simply reckless and perilous.  

Write the climate-country contract

I do not have the entire answer to the problem, but I do have some ideas on where to go and what to do to make a difference.* Importantly, I remain hopeful that the time for change is ever-present and a unified people-need-nature and nature-needs-people[3] approach is a good way to start thinking about how we will make changes. New pathways are called for – ones that integrate environmental science and socio-economics and provide balanced supply and consumption metrics for natural resources that equitably support both human sustenance and nature’s repair and growth, thereby creating long-term sustainable wellness for people, landscape and culture.

Notwithstanding ‘climate adaptation’ is seen as the achievable preference of common politics, we must continue to advocate for human ingenuity and endeavour to be focused on long-term socio-enviro-economic solutions. A quantum shift of informed opinion and policy is required to galvanize genuine effort and dedicated resources to come up with solutions that wind-back the CO2 clock with carbon-reduction technology, [4] fast remove our reliance on fossil-fuels, fast transition to renewable power generation, and intrinsically settle a universal brief to complete a fair and equitable contract with nature that underwrites our civilisation and protects our planet.

*For some ideas on what to DO next to make a difference - please read my subsequent article 'Earth Day: Culture, Climate and Care':

https://www.dhirubhai.net/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6658969241208926209/

For three immediate things to do to make a difference:

1. Read 'The Future We Choose' by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac. 
2. Support our local politicians to articulate climate change action and biodiversity loss prevention. Get behind people like #ZaliSteggall and her Climate Change Bill in the Australian Federal Parliament.
3. Follow influencers like #davidattenborough. Watch his 'Life on Our Planet' movie and share it with your kids, family, friends and colleagues. https://attenboroughfilm.com/

And always pursue the Truth and maintain Hope.

Children you must learn to listen to the wind, the wind will tell you the story of the maypal. You can’t take language away, language is inside.[5]

And while we need solutions greater than hope, I am conscious of the heavy baton we are passing to our children and the hot winds in their faces. For my kids I pray for fortitude: 

Never give up

No matter what is going on

Never give up

Develop the heart

Too much energy in your country

Is spent developing the mind

Instead of the heart

Be compassionate

Not just with friends

But to everyone

Be compassionate

Work for peace

In your heart and in the world

Work for peace and I say again

Never give up

No matter what is happening

No matter what is going on around you

Never give up 

H.H. THE XIV DALAI LAMA

***

[1] When I say manage, I mean sustainable coexistence with the environment, rather than exponential control and exploitation of it

[2] Reserve Bank of Australia, Financial Stability Risks from Climate Change, October 2019.  https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/fsr/2019/oct/box-c-financial-stability-risks-from-climate-change.html

[3] The Nature Conservancy Australia - https://www.natureaustralia.org.au/get-involved/how-to-help/nature-needs-people/

[4] Methodologies include carbon abatement and sequestration. For example see McKinsey & Company, How industry can move toward a low-carbon future, Sustainability Article July 2018. (Ref. link in references).

[5] Maypal, Mayali’ ga Wanja: Shellfish, Meaning & Place... James et al, 2016.

***

References and more reading

Much of this content comes from other writers, scientists, sociologists, experts in describing the intersection between landscape, nature, people, culture and science and the occasional deity, artist and actor. Particularly:   

• Attenborough, David. Life on Our Planet. Film published on Netflix. 2020. https://attenboroughfilm.com/
• Downey, Robert Jr, Quotes. BrainyQuote.com, BrainyMedia Inc, 2020. https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/robert_downey_jr_700669, accessed February 2, 2020
• Figueres, Christiana and Rivett-Carnac, Tom. The Future We Choose. Manilla Press. London. 2020
• Gammage, Bill. The Biggest Estate on Earth. How Aborigines Made Australia. Allen & Unwin. 2011.  
• Gore, Al, An Inconvenient Truth. Documentary film series. Produced by Laurie David, Lawrence Bender, Scott Z. Burns. 2006.  
• Harari, Yuval Noah, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. Harper. 2011, (2014).    
• H.H. The XIV Dalai Lama, Never Give Up, No matter what is Going On. c2013.  
• James, Bentley & North Australian Indigenous Land Sea Management Alliance Ltd, Maypal, Mayali’ ga Wanja: Shellfish, Meaning & Place. A Yolnju Bilingual Identification Guide to Shellfish of North East Arnhem Land. NAILSMA Ltd. 2016 
• Lindsay, Norman, The Magic Pudding. Dover Publications Inc. First published 1918.
• Mahood, Kim, Position Doubtful, Mapping Landscape and Memories. Scribe Publications. Melbourne, London. 2016.   
• McKinsey & Company, How industry can move toward a low-carbon future, Sustainability Business Article July 2018: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/sustainability/our-insights/how-industry-can-move-toward-a-low-carbon-future
• Pascoe, Bruce, Dark Emu Black Seeds: Agriculture or accident? Magabala Books Aboriginal Corporation, Broome WA. 2014
• Reserve Bank of Australia, Financial Stability Risks from Climate Change, Oct. 2019.  https://www.rba.gov.au/publications/fsr/2019/oct/box-c-financial-stability-risks-from-climate-change.html
• Rich, Nathaniel and Steinmetz, George Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, article by Nathaniel Rich, photographs and videos by George Steinmetz, New York Times, Aug 2018. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html?referringSource=articleShare
• Schultz, Julianne, Introduction ‘On suicide watch? The enduring power of nature, Griffith Review63, Writing Country. Griffith University with Text Publishing. 2018.

Image credits:

Front & back cover: ‘Death of Country,’ + ‘Ghost Trees near Glasshouse Mountains,’ + various landscapes throughout. JP. 2019. 

Red shellfish - before chapter 1 - extract from front cover Maypal, ... James et al, 2016.

Losing Earth - Southern Hemisphere ozone ..1987, NASA - before chapter 5 - Rich, 2018.

Photographs (and videos in links) by George Steinmetz, New York Times, Aug 2018. Photo subtext by Jaime Lowe.

***   

Related links:

Australian Academy of Science – Q&A on Climate Change

https://www.science.org.au/academy-newsletter/australian-academy-science-newsletter-99/academy-answers-questions-climate-change

Australian Bureau of Meteorology - Climate Change in Australia

https://www.climatechangeinaustralia.gov.au/en/climate-campus/australian-climate-change/australian-trends/

?John Shine AC, President Australian Academy of Science

https://www.science.org.au/news-and-events/news-and-media-releases/statement-regarding-australian-bushfires

Professor John Thwaites, Chairman Monash Sustainable Development Institute & ClimateWorks Australia

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jan/14/its-climate-change-not-greens-standing-in-the-way-of-fuel-reduction-burns

The Nature Conservancy Australia

https://www.natureaustralia.org.au/what-we-do/our-insights/perspectives/australias-bushfire-crisis/

Australian Media: Murdoch & Fairfax Press, et al, deny climate change and re-write the message:

‘It was the biggest, most powerful spin campaign in Australian media history—the strategy was to delay action on greenhouse gas emissions until ‘coal was ready’—with geo-sequestration (burying carbon gases) and tax support.’

https://press-files.anu.edu.au/downloads/press/p303951/html/cover.xhtml?referer=&page=0#toc_marker-1

James Murdoch's climate stance distances him from family empire

‘The declaration that he (James Murdoch) and his wife, Kathryn, felt “frustration with some of the News Corp and Fox coverage” of the climate crisis, particularly the “ongoing denial among the news outlets in Australia, given obvious evidence to the contrary”, focused an awkward light on the family’s businesses – but could help James differentiate himself from his father, Rupert, and brother, Lachlan.’

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2020/jan/15/james-murdoch-climate-crisis-stance-distances-him-from-family-empire