October 9th, 2006
Every spring Western Australia gets one of the largest floral displays on planet earth, up there with the profuse flowerings of California. In fact, because this part of Australia has been a stable bit of land, with not much going on in the way of mountain building and the like, for the past 250 million years, and because the soils are leached of nutrients so that not too many big trees shade out the little heath plants, species of flowering plant have just kept joining the party, century after century. We’ve got to the point where the southwestern corner of WA has more species of flowering plants than almost anywhere else in the world. The Everlastings above were found in King’s Park.
This flash fire of yellow I saw on the north shore of the Swan River in one of Fremantle’s only remaining pockets of uncleared nature.
October 31st, 2006
Sir Nicholas Stern is a former chief economist at the World Bank, which means that as economists go, this man has impecably good credentials. He has just released the Stern Report in the UK, declaring that the globe now must reduce emissions or face a depression greater than that of 1930 and the world wars combined in the coming years. Tony Blair calls it the most important report ever to come over his desk.
The report has got Britain moving into a brave new era of political action on the climate crisis. In Australia, Howard’s complicity with the fossil fuel industry has backed his government into a corner. The only way the world can deal with the climate crisis is to have carbon taxes. Howard’s compromised position means he must repudiate this, and instead he wastes our tax dollars on $100 million of what is, boiled down to its essential nature, window-dressing. The solution? Among other things, vote in the next federal election at the end of 2007 for regime change in Canberra.
One day you might be asked, ‘How come you did not know what was going on?’
‘Why did you not fight?’
‘Fight!’ you’ll say,
‘that’s a word that never occured’,
the very word brings tears.
It will dawn on you after all those painful years
that to fight is one of the most beautiful,
simple and useful ideas.
- Michael Leunig
