Saturday, June 26, 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010
Blogs and diaries usually tell of adventures in foreign places, or in strange situations. Mine is limited to travels and adventures in the mind. The world comes to me via the media, I don’t go to the world. I did that decades ago, and experienced life in remote places in distant continents. I often misinterpreted what I was seeing or doing. Now I sit here, reading or hearing expert accounts of events in distant places. On TV I watch mainly documentaries and analysis, not much drama. I sit watching accounts of disasters like Darfur, the Middle East, and famines and wars, trying to understand why the world is this way, and to diagnose the human failures that give rise to it.
The radio and the ‘quality press’ give me my map of the world. I seek analysis, understanding, not the tsunami of images and second-to-second news and trivia that overwhelms our understanding. I struggle to keep up with it all.
Last year was the year of the Middle East (ME) for me. At the start of the new year 2010, the dominant issue is the state of our planet’s biosphere and atmosphere and oceans and soils, and what we have done and are doing to them. Our leaders assembled in Copenhagen in December 2009 to discuss and try to agree on solutions to the problems we are causing to ourselves by abusing our planet. The human race is in effect on trial, if not for its life, at least for its future. The judge is Nature, natural selection. We are (most of us) pleading guilty, though a few deny that we have done anything wrong, or that there has been a crime against Nature, or even that there is a problem at all.
A lenient sentence means we will be released on a promise of good behaviour. We will have to put up bail, a large amount. How much will each of us pay? Time charges a stiff rate of interest. The longer we wait, the higher the penalty will be. A stern sentence means death, or close to it, during the present century. Our grandchildren will wander, dazed and despairing, through the ruins of our civilisation.
Here is a passionate plea from an outstanding economic manager of our nation. It is trenchantly stated and worth remembering.
Boomers blamed for years of plunder
The Treasury Secretary makes an impassioned plea for the environment
DAVID UREN
ECONOMICS CORRESPONDENT
BABY boomers abandoned their idealism the moment they graduated from their free universities, Treasury Secretary Ken Henry maintains, and did nothing to halt the plunder of the environment or the entrenchment of indigenous disadvantage.
... In an impassioned speech to Australian National University graduates, Dr Henry said he had been among the last group of graduates in the 1970s, at a time when student idealism had focused on social and environmental concerns.
"If we are to judge by outcomes, we would have to conclude that most of my generation left these concerns behind the day they graduated."
Dr Henry, who is known for his wildlife conservation work, particularly among northern hairy-nosed wombats, said his generation had stood by as governments licensed irrigators to extract water from the Murray-Darling Basin, and set quotas for "commercial harvesting" of kangaroos at rates the politicians maintained were sustainable.
"If we're lucky, it will be many decades before we find whether these judgements are well-based.”
"If they are, it will be the first instance in human history of the sustainable plunder of a natural resource." [we all remember the American bison, in herds that took days to pass, the carrier pigeon, whose flocks darkened the sky, now extinct, the Tasmanian Tiger, the Dodo, the Moa, the Asian Lion, God knows what else, AM, ed.]
Dr Henry said his father had been a timber worker, felling ancient trees from the NSW forests, and leaving those with hollow cores, which the timber mills did not like, to lie in waste on the forest floor.
The sawmills only paid royalties on the logs they took out of the forest.
"This was government-sanctioned plunder. Hundreds of trees, hundreds of years old, torn down and left to rot where they fell." [Tens of thousands, surely, (AM, ed.)]
... "Collectively, our ancestors kidded themselves that these resources, and many others, were so plentiful that no rationing was necessary — the rate of extraction would never exceed the rate of reproduction or renewal. We now know how wrong they were."
Dr Henry said this explained how, in 200 years of settlement, Australians had "plundered to extinction" 115 species of native flora and fauna, with a further 1700 species endangered..
Climate change, rapid population growth and the resource needs of India and China would pose even greater challenges to Australia's sustainability, Dr Henry said. Climate change would have "profound implications for the pattern of human settlement on this continent"
KEN HENRY
TREASURY SECRETARY
Reported in The Weekend Australian, 12-13 December, 2009, The Nation, p3.
15 Dec 2009
The reports are coming in to the quality Press, on what happened at Copenhagen, the world leaders’ summit to diagnose and treat the climate and biodiversity problems caused by Man. Most people were disappointed at the almost-invisible outcome. I was not, because I did not expect much from the forum.
Reports that captured my attention include one by Mark Lynas of the Guardian, a highly-respected and moderate British news organisation (syndicated in the Sydney Morning Herald Weekend Edition of 26-7 December 2009, on p7 of its News Review), and Nicholas Stuart’s interpretation on p11 of Canberra Times, Tuesday 29 December 2009 (I usually take a couple of days to a week, to read these reports). They allege that the intentions of the UN Copenhagen Climate Summit were effortlessly frustrated, and action prevented, by the major newly-industrialised countries [later reports sheet responsibility home to the Group of Ninety Nine, chaired by Omar Al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, who is alleged to have come to the summit determined to sabotage it in revenge for the international warrant for his arrest for war crimes].
I am not shocked or indignant, since I expected such an outcome, although I thought it would be sabotaged by Western coal, oil and automobile interests. George Monbiot in The Guardian Weekly, Vol 183 No. 3 (I Jan 2010) p19, says the ‘developed’ nations –the rich, ie the US, the Anglo-sphere, Japan, Europe, the Oil States – presented to the ‘developing’ world (everyone else) a deal that would guarantee rejection, in order to pin the blame for failure on them. An African delegate described the rich nations’ proposal as ‘a suicide pact’. The true roadblock to a solution is 'the US Senate, ... many of whose members are wholly-owned by the fossil energy industry’. So, I might add, are members of other ruling elites like the Australian and the Canadian.
My interpretation? I believe both parties. That ‘the West’ set out to scuttle Copenhagen so as not to have to confront existing vested interests at home. In a word, moral cowardice. That the newly-industrialised nations led the rejection of all practical measures to ameliorate atmospheric pollution for their own reasons. That Omar Al-Bashir took revenge on the world community. It is plausible that the Asian leadership has decided that, since the West had two centuries of compromising the future of humanity and the entire biosphere and getting rich in the process – ‘eating the future’, as Tim Flannery expressed it – China (and India) now must have a period of time in which to get rich without concern for the future of the planet’s biosphere or its human population. The rich countries did it, is the scenario, let them now worry about it for a while, and work to fix it, until the new industrial powers catch up a bit. So I don't blame China or India any more than I blame our own Western society. Each big power, West and East, is saying, 'you must make the sacrifices to save the planet, expecting me to do it is unjust'.
Well, Nature will not distinguish between East and West, North or South, in apportioning blame and imposing penalties. All the tribes of humanity will pay.
The radio and the ‘quality press’ give me my map of the world. I seek analysis, understanding, not the tsunami of images and second-to-second news and trivia that overwhelms our understanding. I struggle to keep up with it all.
Last year was the year of the Middle East (ME) for me. At the start of the new year 2010, the dominant issue is the state of our planet’s biosphere and atmosphere and oceans and soils, and what we have done and are doing to them. Our leaders assembled in Copenhagen in December 2009 to discuss and try to agree on solutions to the problems we are causing to ourselves by abusing our planet. The human race is in effect on trial, if not for its life, at least for its future. The judge is Nature, natural selection. We are (most of us) pleading guilty, though a few deny that we have done anything wrong, or that there has been a crime against Nature, or even that there is a problem at all.
A lenient sentence means we will be released on a promise of good behaviour. We will have to put up bail, a large amount. How much will each of us pay? Time charges a stiff rate of interest. The longer we wait, the higher the penalty will be. A stern sentence means death, or close to it, during the present century. Our grandchildren will wander, dazed and despairing, through the ruins of our civilisation.
Here is a passionate plea from an outstanding economic manager of our nation. It is trenchantly stated and worth remembering.
Boomers blamed for years of plunder
The Treasury Secretary makes an impassioned plea for the environment
DAVID UREN
ECONOMICS CORRESPONDENT
BABY boomers abandoned their idealism the moment they graduated from their free universities, Treasury Secretary Ken Henry maintains, and did nothing to halt the plunder of the environment or the entrenchment of indigenous disadvantage.
... In an impassioned speech to Australian National University graduates, Dr Henry said he had been among the last group of graduates in the 1970s, at a time when student idealism had focused on social and environmental concerns.
"If we are to judge by outcomes, we would have to conclude that most of my generation left these concerns behind the day they graduated."
Dr Henry, who is known for his wildlife conservation work, particularly among northern hairy-nosed wombats, said his generation had stood by as governments licensed irrigators to extract water from the Murray-Darling Basin, and set quotas for "commercial harvesting" of kangaroos at rates the politicians maintained were sustainable.
"If we're lucky, it will be many decades before we find whether these judgements are well-based.”
"If they are, it will be the first instance in human history of the sustainable plunder of a natural resource." [we all remember the American bison, in herds that took days to pass, the carrier pigeon, whose flocks darkened the sky, now extinct, the Tasmanian Tiger, the Dodo, the Moa, the Asian Lion, God knows what else, AM, ed.]
Dr Henry said his father had been a timber worker, felling ancient trees from the NSW forests, and leaving those with hollow cores, which the timber mills did not like, to lie in waste on the forest floor.
The sawmills only paid royalties on the logs they took out of the forest.
"This was government-sanctioned plunder. Hundreds of trees, hundreds of years old, torn down and left to rot where they fell." [Tens of thousands, surely, (AM, ed.)]
... "Collectively, our ancestors kidded themselves that these resources, and many others, were so plentiful that no rationing was necessary — the rate of extraction would never exceed the rate of reproduction or renewal. We now know how wrong they were."
Dr Henry said this explained how, in 200 years of settlement, Australians had "plundered to extinction" 115 species of native flora and fauna, with a further 1700 species endangered..
Climate change, rapid population growth and the resource needs of India and China would pose even greater challenges to Australia's sustainability, Dr Henry said. Climate change would have "profound implications for the pattern of human settlement on this continent"
KEN HENRY
TREASURY SECRETARY
Reported in The Weekend Australian, 12-13 December, 2009, The Nation, p3.
15 Dec 2009
The reports are coming in to the quality Press, on what happened at Copenhagen, the world leaders’ summit to diagnose and treat the climate and biodiversity problems caused by Man. Most people were disappointed at the almost-invisible outcome. I was not, because I did not expect much from the forum.
Reports that captured my attention include one by Mark Lynas of the Guardian, a highly-respected and moderate British news organisation (syndicated in the Sydney Morning Herald Weekend Edition of 26-7 December 2009, on p7 of its News Review), and Nicholas Stuart’s interpretation on p11 of Canberra Times, Tuesday 29 December 2009 (I usually take a couple of days to a week, to read these reports). They allege that the intentions of the UN Copenhagen Climate Summit were effortlessly frustrated, and action prevented, by the major newly-industrialised countries [later reports sheet responsibility home to the Group of Ninety Nine, chaired by Omar Al-Bashir, the President of Sudan, who is alleged to have come to the summit determined to sabotage it in revenge for the international warrant for his arrest for war crimes].
I am not shocked or indignant, since I expected such an outcome, although I thought it would be sabotaged by Western coal, oil and automobile interests. George Monbiot in The Guardian Weekly, Vol 183 No. 3 (I Jan 2010) p19, says the ‘developed’ nations –the rich, ie the US, the Anglo-sphere, Japan, Europe, the Oil States – presented to the ‘developing’ world (everyone else) a deal that would guarantee rejection, in order to pin the blame for failure on them. An African delegate described the rich nations’ proposal as ‘a suicide pact’. The true roadblock to a solution is 'the US Senate, ... many of whose members are wholly-owned by the fossil energy industry’. So, I might add, are members of other ruling elites like the Australian and the Canadian.
My interpretation? I believe both parties. That ‘the West’ set out to scuttle Copenhagen so as not to have to confront existing vested interests at home. In a word, moral cowardice. That the newly-industrialised nations led the rejection of all practical measures to ameliorate atmospheric pollution for their own reasons. That Omar Al-Bashir took revenge on the world community. It is plausible that the Asian leadership has decided that, since the West had two centuries of compromising the future of humanity and the entire biosphere and getting rich in the process – ‘eating the future’, as Tim Flannery expressed it – China (and India) now must have a period of time in which to get rich without concern for the future of the planet’s biosphere or its human population. The rich countries did it, is the scenario, let them now worry about it for a while, and work to fix it, until the new industrial powers catch up a bit. So I don't blame China or India any more than I blame our own Western society. Each big power, West and East, is saying, 'you must make the sacrifices to save the planet, expecting me to do it is unjust'.
Well, Nature will not distinguish between East and West, North or South, in apportioning blame and imposing penalties. All the tribes of humanity will pay.
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