Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: climate

  • good reef

    I spend a lot of time in this household running downstairs to close the door and just breathe. I duck out to coffee houses and get sane again. I spend time among the trees, or failing that, among the pot plants. This morning a friend of my father’s, a gracious fellow whom Dad first met when they were seated side by side in the first year of Norman Park State School, came to visit and I made him some coffee and offered a slice of the cake another of their friends had brought. I was thinking how lovely it is that my folks’ friends come to visit even though Dad falls asleep on them, how they have friendships stretching back decades from living thirty years in the same place. My father went to school and grew up here, and has friendships going back to childhood. I was thinking how this will not be the case when I am 77. We had a fascinating chat about Sir John Monash, whose biography this man has been reading, and about the anti-Semitism in Melbourne that kept Monash out of the Melbourne Club. Dad’s friend volunteered the view that Murdoch, an enemy of Monash, even back in those days acted like he ran the world. I said how this was in evidence every time we have an election. I was thinking of the photos of Tony Abbott clasping a puppy, etc, paired with a front page picture of his rival Kevin Rudd with mouth half open which was titled, “Does This Man Ever Shut Up?”

    This led very quickly to a lecture from my father’s friend about the errors of environmentalism, which he perceives as a kind of conspiracy theory. He has holidayed recently on Heron Island and says grandly, “Heron Island is just as good as it was in the 1960s.” Oh good, I said: so all those acres of coral bleaching must just be a bit of a furphy. Well, he said: 7000 years ago the whole Barrier Reef was above water. Now it’s not so bad as that, is it? “Oh no,” I agreed, picking up my cup of tea, my notebooks and my cat and standing up to go. I kissed him on the cheek. “All just a big natural cycle.”

    These natural cycles are all but overwhelming me at the moment. The slow sleepy death of my father, whose eyes are rarely open and who will take no nourishment but ice cream and milk. The frantic collisions of my mother with a series of administrative chores which she sets herself, needing to gain back some form of control over her life, and which subsume her grief and dread, I think, driving her into a frenzy of impatience and a series of spills of papers and pens onto the floor as she is kept waiting on the phone line by the bank, the electricity company, the phone people themselves. Our larger darker howling emotions. It’s hard to live in them. It’s harder to live alongside them… I feel.

  • knowing one another in the dark

    Knowing one another in the dark: this is life in the wintertime, in Germany. Three days ago the late summer turning purple in Central Park; tonight the moist grey soft air, the dark day, the lighted bicycles on the path. I have only just realised in Berlin we are on a latitude with Alaska; New York is on a latitude with Spain, a far sunnier prospect.

    It felt strange to me, coming home to a home that is no home at all, where I’ve lived less than three years in total and always in spates, looking over my shoulder to the next project which had to be done in Copenhagen or in Madrid, or back in Brisbane. My father has cancer there and I’m here. My nephews are growing up there and I’m here. My cat lives over there and I’m here. For a cat who spends her afternoons tormenting tiny tropical lizards and basking in the endless pouring caramel sun, I remind myself: relocation to an indoor apartment life in northern Europe would be cruel. But she’s so soft and we used to sleep tucked into one another. When I was ill and alone once and could not very often struggle out of bed, this cat licked me, with great earnestness and a harsh tongue, all over, like a giant kitten until to her satisfaction I was clean. She is a wonderful companion but a horrible correspondent. I mourn about it over the phone to my mother in Brisbane, to make her laugh: all these months and not one phone call… Not a postcard… “She is scuffling at the receiver,” my mother says, and I hear soft scratching sounds. “She hears your voice.”

    At JFK airport everybody was white. Everyone except the wait staff, the security personnel, the cleaners and the guy emptying the trash. At the security gate he lifted a large plastic bag of plastic bottles of water from the bin and carried it away: I watched the glinting light that is really a terrifying form of the endless dark that will take us all underwater sift through all that plastic and bobbling trucked water and thought, America… it’s be part of the solution, not part of the dissolution. We ate a meal and the waitress brought us so many paper napkins my knife and fork fell off the top of the pile. Wait, she hadn’t brought a second set of – yes, she had. A second tower of waste paper stood across the tabletop and this tree graveyard was all for me. They hand you napkins when you order a coffee. They use polystyrene. Let’s not talk about that.

    At length in our airplane by which I am responsible for far more pollution than any squanderer of napkins can ever claim we left the land behind, at Nova Scotia, and began our crossing. The dark Atlantic. Thickened up with polystyrene chunks that never break down, only into smaller chunks of polystyrene foam. And roofed, increasingly, with a dully cluttered sea foam of plastic bottles, mostly the bottles in which Americans have bought water.

    Germans buy water too. Recycling the bottles is only a partial improvement. We landed at Tegel, the gloriously Soviet styled airport which was actually part of West Berlin. Germans streamed past with their big square heads looking serious yet warm. They recycle. They carry their empty bottles back to the place they were purchased and retrieve tiny amounts of loose change. There are no returned soldiers sleeping on subway platforms. Instead, in Berlin there is a Coldness Bus that travels round on frigid nights collecting homeless people who might otherwise perish in their sleep. There is something here to learn, for you, America, I think, and also for us, Australia, where we lock up desperate families behind razor wire and have turned landfill production into a sport. The clouds of pollution and damage are closing around us and we need to learn to know each other in the dark.

     

  • the cold, the dark, the spots on my apples

    So cold outside that I can keep cheeses and yoghurts fresh by stowing them in between the inner and outer window. So warm in my room that I can ripen bananas by just letting them sit on my table. Not that there’s anything at all strange about that, Europe.

  • state of sunshone

    Queensland. The Sunshine State. Skin Cancer Capital of the World. Spending as much time in the hammock under the trees as I can possibly afford, trying to absorb enough warmth and light and birdsong to slingshot me over the sudden cliff face of winter. A friend writes from Berlin: it is near zero. And I read this in all kinds of symbolist ways. Meanwhile another friend over there has made a grim art project: photos of Berlin skies and of London, side by side: who has the most sunlight? In Berlin they measure the hours of sunshine, in winter, and announce it as part of the weather report: when I was living there, in January there were 22 hours of sunshine for the month. That’s right, the month. We didn’t crawl into Spring until early May, at which time I spoke to my Mum on the phone. “It’s 20 degrees!” I told her, excitedly. I had had to go buy new, lighter socks and scour the second hand shops for a t-shirt. “Oh, I know,” said Mum, “it’s only been 21 here. We’ve had the heater on.”

    How I pored over the Queensland complaints sprouting all over Facebook. “Ooh it’s chilly!” “Had to wear my cardigan on the bus to work this morning.” How I longed to move back and become one of those Queenslanders who complains when they have to put socks on. How I quail before the bellowing fire in my lungs that comes of walking on the stone streets of an iron nation steeping in ice for three-quarters of the year.

  • climate chains

    God, I feel so depressed about the American midterm results today. What seems clear is: the more frightened people become about the horrors of climate disaster, water wars, drought refugees,  the more they vote for these cowboys in the big hats who say: The Lord spoke to me personally, and told me… how to save us all.

    No matter how many studies associate extreme Conservatism with lower IQ… no matter how clearly we know that intelligence is dimmed by terror… we still reach for the Big Man’s Salvation in a crisis. Crises deepen and worsen on every side. Therefore we leap straight from 100% denial into “well, there’s nothing we can do about that now, it’s too late… batten down the hatches.” When oh when will we allow the love that is in us to rule our hearts, our world, our hearts?

  • lies over Baghdad

    Yesterday I entered into a conversation with someone asking, Why don’t the moderate Muslims speak out against terror? I provided link after link as her evasions & demands grew more particular. Those were Americans, how about an Australian. Oh but that’s an Australian woman, why aren’t the Muslim men speaking out? Oh, that was a young man, why don’t we hear from the Muslim elders?

    She discredited the testimony of one peace-loving Muslim because he was ‘wearing a Benneton t-shirt.’ I gave her a string of direct links to the Islamic Council of Victoria, the Council of Imams Queensland, and finally His Eminence, Professor Ibrahim Abu Mohamed, Grand Mufti of Australia, who said: ‘It is utterly deplorable for extremists to use Islam as a cover for their crimes and atrocities.’ At last she wrote to me privately. ‘I feel my heart filling with hate. Am I missing something? Why can’t the moderate Muslims speak out?’

    This plea from a stony-minded racist unable to hear direct replies which undid all her questions moved me. We must respect one another as human beings, no matter what. I left her with yet another google search turfing up dozens of investigative essays on the media’s stolid determination to ignore repeated denouncing of violence by peaceful Muslims, and turned away. Now: watch here as our Minister for Education deflects accusations with one ruse after another & the Opposition calmly, continually answer and defeat him. At the end of this mash-up his voice is heard, trebly and childishly gloating: ‘My comments get on the telly, yours don’t! You can’t be heard!’

    This government, this media are arrogant and they lie. Their arrogance and lies are damaging our climate, our community, our minds. The real jihad is the assault on our planet’s liveability, sidelined by these posturings of hatred. Read widely. Think deeply. Speak out.

  • replanting

    “Aw!” ‘What?’ “Aw just… somebody’s torn this little plant out, and now it’s gunna die.” I could hear my surprised, injured tone of voice, high like a disappointed child. My friend stopped and I had already squatted in front of the dismal garden bed built round the trunk of a tree, in which someone had planted four or five tiny evergreens and a wilting marigold. It was two degrees this morning; I had on leather gloves. Ideal for scraping out a hole in the soil. Took up the tiny shrub, lying on its side in what seemed to me a foetal position, and stowed it in it new hole, tucking soil around its roots and talking to it as I pressed the dirt into place. “There you go, that’s better…” I stood up, brushing my gloves against one another, and turned back to my friend and our conversation. A woman on a bicycle had stopped to watch. She gave me this head-tilting, compassionate look with two very very slow blinks of her eyes, acknowledgment.

    At home on my kitchen windowsill I have a shred of pelargonium stolen from someone else’s window box, a present for a friend who cannot keep sprigs of basil from the supermarket alive yet dreams of being a gardener. He only has a tiny, bricked-in, West-facing balcony that looks dismally over a supermarket car park. I’ve shown him photos of how, in an Australian climate at least, you can grow a lot of food in such a space. When I saw this still-flowering window box with not just red and pink but also the darker, sultrier, more sophisticated velvetty maroon flowers, I filched a bit, peeled from the undermost hem of the plant where the person caring for it would lose least enjoyment. A few paces further on I found an empty plastic cup. Scooped up a cupful of leaves for the bottom layer and then a handful of rich dark friable soil. Stowed the incipient plantmonster in there and will nurture it until it has begun to send out some roots, hopefully before I leave Berlin, so then it can be passed on to its new owner with hopefully some chance of surviving the grey winter.

    As a child in the tropics I used to worry about the trees, who seemed to me buried to the neck in hot, foetid soil, unable to move, >trapped!!< It took me years to work out that this kind of simple projection is not really compassion, does not help anyone. Years, and some lambasting from a Tibetan Buddhist nun who yelled, “You have too much compassion & no wisdom! No wisdom!” In any case one imagines suffocating heat is less of a problem for a German tree.

    H2O HoL white river flowers