Climate Change Part 2: It's personal

I have this memory from when I was a kid of asking my mother why people used to smoke in the olden days when smoking is bad for you. Her answer was simple. "They didn't understand that smoking was bad for them. That's why people used to smoke in the olden days". I accepted it, at the time. But years later it occured to me; people did understand. As early as the 1960s everyone knew that smoking wasn't doing them any favours, health wise. But they were addicted.

Just ask these guys.

Anyway, I saw these ads from the Copenhagen Summit in 2009 which made me wonder. Will I, one day, have to explain to my kids why we didn't do something about climate change when we had the chance? Will I have to explain that people drove cars everywhere and threw out food? That we scorned politicians who tried to introduce legislation to tax carbon and that we demanded cheap electricity over renewable energy?

 And most importanly, will I be able to look them in the eye and say 'we didn't understand'? Because I'm just not sure that'll be a good enough excuse. We do understand. And if we don't, we really should.

The information is out there. It has been for a long time.

But just like smokers, we're addicted to our decadent lifestyles. We don't want to quit, and we don't want to believe that we have to. And there are some pretty powerful corporations who have a strong financial interest in keeping us hooked.

The world is going to change. It's inevitable. It always is.
The real question is, are we going to take a measure of control in the direction things go, or will we just be swept along in the consequences?

Climate Change Part 1: It's political

I'm doing a subject on environmental politics at the moment. It's fairly chilling. The inevitability of the massive changes to our current way of life that are going to occur over the next 50 years of human history ... well, it's nothing short of daunting. I have no intention of making a case for the truth of man made climate change here - it's been done so many times in so many different ways I honestly don't know what I could say to change the  mind of someone set on denial. But the biggest thing I've learnt from the course is that, like everything in the world, the environment is not above politics.

One of the reasons there are so many climate sceptics in Australia is because its severity (and indeed, its very existence) is debated daily at the political level. 

Most of the nations that are in a position (both economically and developmentally) to best tackle climate change have leaders who are democratically elected, and election cycles of 4 years or less. This creates an incentive toward short term policy, which is woefully inadequate when it comes to the environment.

The reason European countries like the UK and Germany have far more extensive climate change policies than Australia is that in the 1980s when climate change first became an issue they had conservative governments, lead by politicians with a scientific background.* This meant that they understood the science and took it seriously, and when a change to a non-conservative government occurred the environmental policies already in place were improved upon, rather than scaled back.**

The 'ClimateGate' scandal highlighted that even the world's most respected climate scientists have felt the pull of politics, going so far as to manipulate their scientific findings to make them more politically persuasive and/or palatable.

There are more examples, but for the sake of brevity I'll leave it there. The point is, though, that the political debates surrounding climate change debate can explain a lot about it.

Believe it or not, Europeans aren't all climate change believing, sustainability achieving, bike riders. (Until I read The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo I thought Sweden was full of philanthropists who lived in sustainable apartments, ate organic food, and loved paying taxes. Turns out they have corporate tycoons just like anywhere.)




*Margaret Thatcher studied Chemistry at Oxford before going into politics; West Germany (and later united Germany) was led by conservative Chancellor Helmut Kohl, with environmental expert Klaus Töpfer as Minister for the Environment, Conservation, and Nuclear Safety.
**I unashamedly stole the idea for this dot point from Peter Christoff, lecturer at Uni Melb and actual Climate Policy expert.

If life gives you salt lamps ...

 I bought a salt lamp at one of those Ishka warehouse sales a while back. I've always wanted one - they make such pretty light! - and this one plugs into my computer, which is handy. Plus it was half price.

ooh, salty!

  Sadly, though when I turned it on for the first time I discovered that instead of a plain coloured light bulb which would shine naturally through the salt and make my room into a new age wonderland, the lamp was electric blue. I tried pulling it apart to see if there was a coloured filter I could remove, but no luck.


 

This photo actually does it too much justice -

in real life the colour is far more offensively bright.

Initially I was disappointed, but I've decided to embrace the weirdness of it. I mean, it's a salt lamp designed to correct the imbalance of ions in the air caused by evil technology. But it's the colour of a disco light. New age hippy meets dancing queen.

Anyway, this whole experience has led me to a point where I'm trying to be more positive about things. Rather than despairing when life gives me the proverbial electric blue salt lamp, I intend to dance to techno versions of Bob Dylan songs while wearing a sequined kaftan.

Proverbial sequined kaftan, that is.

songs for the ages

Little girl, do you know who I mean?
Pretty soon she'll be seventeen

From the moment when I first laid eyes on you
All alone, on the edge of seventeen

She's nearly twenty and so very old

She's twenty years of snow
Twenty years of strangers looking into each other's eyes

The world's got me dizzy again
You'd think after twenty two years I'd be used to the spin

three more poems

Degrees of Certainty

if you’d studied nursing, you’d be at work by now

not attending a lecture on an abstract noun

studying with a degree of uncertainty

certainly

the work would be hard, the pay low

(patients require much patience, according to medical shows)

but at least you’d have the Degree

caring is practically a universal language

unlike the philosophical abstractions which

you can never claim to understand with certainty

certainly

you’d have to work the night shift

but your husband could tell the children you’re a witch

and they’d laugh and say “she’s not!” while secretly believing it, to a degree

but it does no good to imagine when

decisions made upon a whim

commit you to a Degree of Uncertainty

About a ring

I bought a ring to replace the one I lost

now my finger feels complete

if only I could say the same                                

Northern Territory Intervention

Because of the intervention

the town was filled with them.

They were camping in the Todd

taking advantage of its dry sandy bed

(we would later see their campfires

as we drove back from a local restaurant).

But during the day they simply

leaned against trees    shops    churches

sat on grass    steps    pavement.

It was meant to be a holiday.

Two weeks away.

Learning about the red centre.

Hands on. Adventurous.

But first – tired from the

flight – we found some

local markets and wandered around.

Because of the intervention

it was hard to look at them.

I wanted to say something,

let them know I was on their side.

“I am ideologically opposed.”

But I was awed by the

insufficiency of my words –

my own ignorance – my political mindset,

so divorced from the reality of their lives.

Because of the intervention

I forced myself to look at them.

I made eye contact with an old man.

He was leaning against a tree,

watching the busy market.

I made eye contact, but he didn’t.

He looked through me

but in his eyes I saw a landscape,

and I moved on hurriedly

unsettled by his stillness

so incongruous with my own

fast paced world.

It didn’t last, but for a second

I understood.

And I mourned for the

souls that were left behind

when we conquered this land.

three poems

Lawyer
my father
wearing a suit of
grease

sitting

cross legged
in the bonnet
of his car

patiently polishing
the space where
the engine should be

Dementia

my grandfather
in his chair

resting his eyes

surrounded by family

even though

there's no one there

Reprise

my sister

singing in the

bathroom

greeting the morning

with music full of

words; joy

ful of sorrow

goalposts

I was thinking the other day about the last time I made a goal and fulfilled it. I'm not a very goal oriented person, usually. And when I do make goals they're usually halfhearted and I don't end up doing much about them. In year 12 I set myself the goal of getting a good enough score to get into law. I didn't particularly want to do law, I just thought it would be a good way to motivate myself. Anyway, I didn't get the score, but I wrote a letter to the law faculty telling them how lucky they'd be to have me and got accepted from that. And then I decided I didn't want to do law at all. So really, the whole setting a goal thing was pretty much a waste of time.

But for some reason, I remembered yesterday the last time I fulfilled a goal. I was about 9 or 10 years old, and I played the recorder in an ensemble, and I set myself the goal of getting into the highest level recorder ensemble at my music school by the time I was 12. And I did it. Not that it really required much effort on my part (in fact I'd forgotten about the goal altogether and only rememberd it later), but since it's the last goal I can remember fulfilling I'll just let that bit slide.

I don't have any goals at the moment. Well, if I do they're very short term ones. For example, my goal tonight is to write another section in the essay I'm working on. And even then, I may just end up watching a few more episodes of Buffy. Whenever she has goals, they're usually along the lines of 'stop the world from ending'. That'd probably be a better motivation than 'hand in essay on time or lose 10% per day'.

Ah Buffy, so much anguish.

poetic justice

I'm taking a class in creative writing this semester. I write a fair bit, on and off, but I've never studied it before. Also, it's a poetry subject. Which I've never written. Ever. Sometimes I write prose which I feel is quite poetic, but it's not poetry. So I'm a little nervous.

I do write songs, though, which is a bit like poetry. And over the past year or so my grandfather has been a little obsessed with figuring out the difference between poetry and lyrics. (And by obsessed, I mean that he's mentioned it to me every time I've seen him, which isn't that often since I live in a different city.) But it sort of got me thinking - what is the difference? The first thing that comes to mind is that it's easy to get away with shit lyrics in a song, because you've got the music to distract the listener. You don't have that luxury in poetry. The words sit starkly on the page. They have to speak for themselves. In a song, you can set the mood with a pretty accompaniment, or link unrelated thoughts together with a catchy riff. You can also repeat words or phrases over and over to go with the music, which can be a good or a bad thing. It can be mediative, or it can be lazy. I suppose you can actually do that with poetry too, but probably not a whole chorus - just a line or a word or something. Also there's no standard length for poetry, not like the 3minute song, so the incentive to repeat things just for the sake of it isn't there.

Anyway, in my first 'workshop' (Creative Writing's answer to the tutorial) last week, we were discussing what makes a poem a poem, instead of just a collection of words on a page. And I had this brainwave of comparing poetry to modern art. Like, what makes a red square on a page art, and not just some shit I could've done myself. (This afternoon I discovered that my 'brainwave' was almost exactly the same as a comment in the required reading for the week, which I failed to do in advance. I'm still claiming it as my own, though.) I didn't really come up with an answer at the time, but I've been thinking about it a lot and I think that what makes the red square on a white canvas 'art', despite the fact that I could've painted it, is the fact that I didn't. I didn't think of painting a red square on a white canvas. No one did. Until someone did. And even though it isn't technically (technique-ly?) very difficult, when it was created it was conceptually new. And that's what makes it art.

Someone else (or maybe the same guy, don't remember) in the reading this week said that 'every time you write something and call it a poem, you answer the question "what is poetry?"'. Which is what I've been doing this afternoon. Trying to write a poem. I'm not sure if it's any good yet. It's definately not finished. But I'm giving it a crack.

op shopping

The other day I went op shopping for the first time in ages. Actually, that's not true - I recently bought a whole lot of furniture from op shops for my bedroom. But this was the first time I've been op shopping for clothes in awhile.

While I was in the Women's Tops - Sleeveless section I overheard a girl complaining to her friends that she could never find anything good at op shops. And I thought of the advice I'd give her if she asked me. But she didn't ask me, so I'm posting it here.

Look for colours you like. Op shops don't display things in attractive ways like regular shops do, so you have to try harder to spend your money. Searching for colours you like to wear is a good way to start.

1. Be creative - don't just view the clothes as they are, think about what you could wear them with, or how you could alter them to make them more attractive.
2. Try stuff on. A lot of clothes in op shops have weird styles, so it's hard to know if they'll look any good til you've tried them on.
3. Be patient, and go often. It's the only way to find the best stuff.

In hindsight, it would have been pretty random if that girl had asked me for advice on op shopping. Nonetheless, I was ready to answer her questions if she chose to direct them to me, as I have demonstrated above.


* As a post script, I should probably add that it's important to note that there are certain things you can't get at op shops (and not just underwear). Nice, plain, simple tops in classic colours are really hard to find because no one ever throws them out, they just wear them til they fall apart. And yep. That's all my advice. In case anyone's interested.