Ok listen up. Abbott wants to forcibly shut down outback Indigenous communities in remote areas of Western Australia that just happen to coincide with a bunch of mining exploration leases. Our government – whom we as a people elected and are responsible for – are about to move off their immemorial lands a people who have been caring for and cared for by this Country of theirs for longer than any other peoples on earth. They are the oldest living civilisation and have survived genocidal intrusion, deliberate and mass kidnappings of their kids and jailings of their men. What is happening is the most ancient traditions on Earth are being shoved aside to make way for a depleting, exploitative mining industry that is rapidly falling into obsolescence. That is, the world’s oldest living cultures are to be replaced by technologies which are merely outdated. Now is the time we all need to be Idle No More. Make yourself heard.
Tag: mining
-
what’s mined is ours
I think mining is a really primitive way of making a living. You gouge it out of the earth and you ship it away. It can never be sustainable: unlike a forest, where you can say “Well, we plant two trees for every one cut and we leave behind the nests and the habitats, we use the forest for eco-tours and to teach about local Indigenous culture.” Once it’s mined it’s gone, it can never grow back: the uranium, ore, oil or copper and the mountaintop as well. We call them ‘mines’ when really they are ‘ourses’ or even ‘earth’s’. Australian Conservation Foundation point out the mines in Western Australia make close to a billion dollars profit a week taking minerals “they didn’t make, out of land they don’t own.” Mining turns irreplaceable materials into disposable products; it fuels industries which have not caught up with the parlous state of the poisoned world; it’s a primitive, dangerous occupation and I think it attracts primitive, dangerous people.
-
tom-tom cruise
Why such strong reactions to this week’s cruise ship melodrama? Could be because as spoilt Western people with our five-planet lifestyle we resent other spoilt Western people exposing the scam? I am tasting an element of that in my own responses. I feel like: these Americans have finally experienced a thin glimpse of what it feels like for the majority of folk alive right now, who have no running water, no ‘staff’ to remove their bags of poo, etc. But I am aware I am not super keen to give up the luxurious amenities of space, privacy, and a home in order that the rest of the world can share more equally in the goodies we’ve colonized, stolen, enslaved and mined. Far easier to blame those richer or more obviously pampered than ourselves.
