This morning I watched Al Gore’s new film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’. Gore illustrates the facts and figures of climate change in a way which brings clarity. Here is a man who knows the steps of the white house better than most people, who is a member of the privileged WASP American, square-jawed set, and yet who also knows that to be an intelligent and ethical man at this juncture in history means to be out of kilter with the majority of his countrymen. Thankfully we have Al Gore and his new film around, because in it, step by step, and with comic relief, Gore shines light onto the single most important issue on planet earth at the start of the twenty-first century. You may have read a thing or two about climate change. You can read that, for example, the overwhelming majority of the scientific community agree that climate change is real and is caused by humans, but until you see on Gore’s slide screen a representation of all the scientists who back the climate change consensus, compared to the number that don’t, then you’ve not fully grasped that really everybody who counts thinks its real. You might know that glaciers are retreating, but until you’ve seen these images from Greenland, you’ve not really understood how far we’ve already pushed the planet into a new shape. This film is a shaft of strong and steady light, striking into the miasma of public understanding about the changing of the atmosphere. I’d call the release of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ an important event in world history, and I’d say that if you don’t get yourself along to watch it then you are neglecting your duty as a citizen. I can’t put it any more lightly.
You can click on the icon above and pledge to go and see the new film about the heating of the atmosphere.
This is a dimly lit grove of sheoaks, or allocasurinas to use their latin name, near Walpole in the south-west of Australia (they are actually Karri Sheoks). Of the 45 species of casurina trees found in Australia, most are endemic to Western Australia. However there are some of these trees in Indonesia, and one species is found in Madagascar and Reunion Island.
So casurina trees ring the Indian Ocean. When the wind blows through their thin, needle-like leaves it creates a high, whistling sound just like the sound of wind blowing through the rigging of yachts with their sails down. They are important trees to me because they are marker of continuity between Reunion Island, where I stayed a few years ago, and Perth, to otherwise entirely different locales. When I see one, or when I hear the sound of the wind in its needles, I can be transported to the hot, volcanic sands on other side of the sea.
My dad built this chest of drawers out of casurina timber. Perhaps the English saw another line of continuity with the similarity to the grain of the oak of the British Isles, and that’s why they called this tree ’sheoak’ (after I wrote this blog entry my brother told me quercus robur, or oak, was sometimes called the ‘He-oak’ in English dialects, due to it’s manliness). All I know for sure is that its fine, amber-coloured veins make it the most beautiful wood in Western Australia.
[Photo by Jackson, Courtesy of Fandango Australia and Vertigo Productions.]
I watched the film Ten Canoes the other night. In the opening shots of the film the camera pans over the Arnhemland wetlands, that part of Australia where one third of our bird species live. One instinctively holds one’s eyes wide open to this expansive, green, bird-buzzing, wilderness. The film turns out to be a story told by a canny and humorous old Aboriginal, set in the time of his ancestors. The film follows a tribe who go through revenge, love, battle, laughter and gathering goose eggs on a swamp, among other things. In the above photo the hunting men avoid crocodiles by camping high in the branches of paperbark trees. It was nice to see a film where the pace and rhythm of life is slow, closer to the daily schedule of the natural world than in most other films. The camera shots often make humans tramping through the landscape look peripheral to the enduring and greater fact of the earth, positioning them at the top edge of the frame for example. And to see bark canoes made with precision and paperbark stripped to carry food and make shelter is to witness important local competencies. So many folkways have been lost with the loss of Aboriginal culture, and indeed some amount of cultural revival had to take place in the making of this film. The first Australians were truly the mastercraftsman of living in the bush. This film acknowledges that fact with quiet accuracy. Although I admire this original Aboriginal culture, I am personally searching for a whitefella dreaming. We white Australians also need representative stories, or cultural myths, which illustrate our living sustainably with the land.
