tom m wilson

Today at Murdoch University in Western Australia Satis Arnold, Director of Policy and Planning at Murdoch, gave a presentation on climate change to the assembled students and academics at the Institute of Sustainability and Technology Policy. Satis’ forceful and vibrant delivery, combined with his detailed knowledge of the science and politics around climate change, put many a more measured and boring academic to shame. Satis has recently been on a study tour of North America, meeting the people behind California’s inspirational Climate Action Team, and visiting the Earth Institute at Columbia in New York. Satis’ power point presentation is a whirl wind tour of climate science and a lesson on the greatest threat to humanity. We should all see it. Let me know if you are living in Perth and are interested in seeing the presentation and I’ll let you know next time he’s speaking. If you know of a public venue where you think he could appear, again, let me know. WA now has its own ambassador for the truth that the planet is heating up.

A modified excerpt of the following article was published last weekend in The Perth Voice and will also be published this weekend in Fremantle’s local paper, The Herald.

Australia has warmed 0.9 Celcius since 1950, with most of that taking place in the last twenty years. This is because our species has used the atmosphere as a sewer for CO2.

What’s coming?

First let’s remind ourselves that life could be pretty great in 2050. If there is major action from governments in the next five years around the globe we will be fine. In fact there will be even cleaner air to breath than we have now. Joseph Romm in his book Hell and Highwater (2006) says the world needs to do a few things, including: starting to build 1 million large wind turbines, making buildings much more energy efficient, increasing the efficiency of power generation, building 700 large nuclear power plants (and no, he doesn’t say that Australia needs to build any nuclear plants), making the world’s cars much more energy efficient, and stopping all tropical deforestation. WWF suggests we have five years from now to act. Romm thinks we have ten years. James Hansen of NASA also says we have ten years to get it right.

There are and will be plenty of government initiatives around the globe to tackle climate change, of this I have no doubt. But considering that a rise in over two degrees will flip the earth into a (self-generated) hotter and hotter state, tackling climate change becomes an either/or question. Either we stop the earth getting over two degrees hotter, or we don’t. So the question becomes, will we get the aggressive government-led regulations and frameworks that are required to do the job?

In Australia the Labour government that is (probably) in power for the next three years, starting in a few weeks time, isn’t looking flash. Currently they have an aspirational target of 60 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050, but not enough policies on the table to get us on the track to reach that point. Going into the 2007 federal election in Australia on 24 November the Greens have a target of 80 per cent reductions by 2050, as well as a comprehensive set of policies to get us there, starting immediately.

But with all this talk of climate change, let’s be honest about what will happen if we don’t act.

If we don’t act, the world will continue to get hotter, probably getting 2 degrees warmer in Perth by roughly 2050. This is a conservative IPCC derived figure – it could be higher. In the south-west of Australia rainfall has already declined by 25 per cent since the mid 1970s. This decline is the most drastic in all of Australia. It will continue to be the most drastic. Already the crowns of Wandoo trees in the south-west are turning brown here and there because of water stress. Perth has built one desalination plant, and another one is planned (both getting their energy from wind turbines). But nobody is going to build a desalination plant for nature. There will be no efficient reticulation installed along the floors of the majestic karri forests. By 2050 the plants and trees, along with the animals that use them as habitat, will be dying everywhere in the south-west. I will be an old man in 2050, and soon to die myself. The land high up in the Stirling Ranges, a living museum of strange and beautiful endemic plant species, will be a mausoleum. Max Dupain’s ‘The Sunbaker’, that iconic black and white photograph of the bronzed man with his head on his arms lying on the sand, along with the beach itself that he lay on and that is such a part of Australia’s sense of itself as a nation, will soon be gone with rising sea levels. There will be no wheat production from the ‘wheat belt’. The WA Wheat Belt will be called the WA Dust Bowl. Because Australia is rich, people will not starve to death in Perth (like they will be starving in their millions in other less developed parts of the world), but food will be many times more expensive. An increasing number of people will die each year from heat stroke, their internal body temperature going over 41 degrees on frighteningly hot days in February, and putting them into a coma. Figures like John Howard will be considered, looking back on history, like Chamberlain, someone who delayed an inevitable confrontation and lost us time. I won’t hear much birdsong anymore.

Get it? No water.

I’m not sure I want to have children now, as they will be around in the 2070s, when the rise of three degrees celcius has triggered positive feedback systems in the global biosphere, and the earth is moving, decade by decade, into an unpleasant and largely uninhabitable state. In my darker moments I’m not even sure I want to stay living in Perth in the next few years because of the grief I’ll have to go through seeing the death of nature in the south-west through permanent water-scarcity and consequently rampant and fierce wild fires while I’m in the last years of my life.

If you open the pages of the newsletter of the Australian Greenhouse Office, the government publication that tells us what our leaders are doing about the problem, you’ll see large colour photographs of the minister for the environment smiling warmly. In his smiling face you can see no hint that he has bad dreams at night.

But then we might expect that from a government that for the past 11 years has been blatantly corrupted by the involvement of members of the fossil fuel industry in the writing of cabinet submissions and ministerial briefings (see Clive Hamilton, Scorcher, 2007 and Guy Pearse, High and Dry: John Howard, climate change and the selling of Australia’s future, 2007).

More importantly, do most university educated Australians know that we have five to ten years to stave off the slide towards the end of our country as we know it, a slide that will happen in a handful of decades? The answer is no. If you pick up a newspaper anywhere in Australia tomorrow morning, will the front page treat our predicament as tantamount to how America saw the bombing of Pearl Harbour in December of 1941? Have a look. You can get back to me. The earth goes into glacial periods every few thousand years and is quite a bit colder than it is now. We are in a warmer, inter-glacial period. It is sad that the species Homo sapiens is going to probably make its cradle and its only home, already pretty warm, just too hot to live in. Can we at least get the word out that this is starting to happen right now? Surely we can at least go some way to remedy this colossal ignorance, an ignorance still widely encountered among even educated, well-meaning, left-wing people?

You might ask why I don’t get apathetic? I’ve had a good think about this. As I write this in 2007, there will still be nature around for the rest of our life times, here and elsewhere. If we fail to convince governments to govern on climate change, and this struggle isn’t yet lost, then, even then, it isn’t all over. Although they will be diminished in their extent and diversity as the decades go on, there will still be forests and ecosystems there to inspire and invigorate us. Nature, in some form, will be there to give us solace for the rest of our lives. This is undeniable. What is more, it will always be part of the meaningful human life to engage in ethical action. It will always be part of the well lived life to engage in the defense of nature. To really understand this I encourage you to read How Should We Live? by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

In the last 11 years of the Howard government’s rule, there have been plenty of ministers and lobbyists who, as we’ve now found out through leaked minutes or insider reports, have been scared of the effects green lobbying can have on public opinion. Which brings me to another great reason to raise your voice against government inaction on preventing global heating. Against the background of the corrupt ties between the Australian mining lobby and the Australian federal government over the last decade I would say:

‘You know you’re not wasting your time when your activities are clearly making corrupt politicians uneasy’.

We should all contact our elected representative at a state and federal level and ask them what they are doing to make sure our country reduces its emissions by 80 per cent (compared to 1990 levels) by 2050, as it must to avoid run-away climate heating globally. The technology is there to make that change, from energy efficiency improvements, to wind farms, to halting the destruction of forests. California has taken the first step down this visionary path.

I used to think that letter writing to politicians was a waste of time. However I recently talked to a friend who has worked with members of parliament in Canberra. According to this person, when individually written, polite yet forceful letters start to arrive in their hundreds or thousands, politicians can get scared and then start to listen. I’m going to write one of these letters to Jim McGinty, my state representative for Fremantle, and Melissa Parks, the soon to be federal Labour representative for Fremantle. I am going to tell my local member that I will not vote for a government that allows Australian greenhouse gas pollution to keep rising. It is admirable and important that we all reduce our carbon footprint. However, it seems that at this late hour in world history writing this kind of letter is more important than reducing your personal carbon emissions.

The future has not arrived. We can help to make the future. But we need to understand the obstacles to change. George Marshall has said that “Climate change lends itself to a psychological phenomenon called the bystander effect… By and large people are conformist- they look to the wider values to set their own moral compass. People take the general lack of response to climate change as the norm and the basis for their own position. The individual bystander sees a lack of action by the other bystanders and feels that their own decision not to become involved has become validated. And so we all sit around and wait.”

But what if the individual bystander looked around and saw me or you contacting their elected representative to call for fast and deep cuts in overall greenhouse gas emissions?

What if they saw you or me at a protest rally?

Rapid and positive social change is not an impossibility. The drum beat of public outcry is building. It is getting louder and louder. Let’s start demanding real action from government.

I’ll be on the Esplanade of Fremantle at 1pm on 11 November, along with thousands of other Australians, at the ‘Walk against Warming‘.

In the words of the reggae band Fat Freddy’s Drop:

‘Hope for a generation. Just beyond my reach. Not beyond my sight.’

Thousands of Western Australians marched down the main street in Fremantle today, despite the temperature going up into the high thirties.  They were calling for action from the federal government on climate change.  This jester shouted the key message…

I couldn’t help feeling some empathy for this little lad who can’t vote in the election in two weeks…

High Street in Fremantle was bursting to the brim with thousands of ordinary citizens who don’t want to see Australia dragging its heels when it comes to looking after the climate…

Who put the coal in the Coalition?

It is all terribly confusing when you’re little.

The following is a review I recently wrote of A Landscape for Learning: A History of the Grounds of the University of Western Australia by George Seddon and Gillian Lilleyman (UWA Press, 2006). A much shorter version of this review will be published in the journal Studies in Western Australian History in mid 2008. Unless you have had some association with Perth and UWA you may not be intensely interested in what follows. For those who are interested: sorry UWA Press but I suggest that this is the kind of tightly synoptic review which makes reading the actual book redundant.

What makes a landscape for learning? In the opening pages of the book, Seddon calls UWA the most beautiful campus in Australia. He seems to think that this campus is what a site dedicated to the seeking of wisdom should look like. It does makes you relaxed to be in a pleasingly set out green environment such as this one, and a state of relaxed mental alertness is a perfect state to learn it. Perhaps Seddon is right to designate the grounds of UWA a ‘landscape for learning’.

Above: Youth leans on age. I left the garden path and looked upwards in the ‘tropical grove’ in the Great Court.

Prior to learning about the legacy of Sir John Winthrop Hackett, we are taken back to the original state of the site. Before white settlement was felt there, the campus site was covered in marri and jarrah with big old trees dotted here and there of the kind you are hard pressed to find today in the metropolitan area. In the south the site was thickly timbered with sheoak. There were banksias, tuarts, paperbarks and Christmas trees. The site had a shallow water table and relatively fertile clay soils, like the property of the Bussell family, ‘Cattle Chosen’. The Swan used to flood regularly – it does not do so any more because of more recent human changes to the river. The Crawley site was often flooded prior to 1829, and over the millennia the floodwaters had dropped plenty of their sediment load in the area. Sand, silt and organic debris enriched the soil of the site. It was this that made it a more fertile location than is commonly encountered on the Swan coastal plain. For this reason UWA may be considered the closest Western Australia has to a traditional botanical garden.

Seddon notes the importance of the site as a gathering place for the Nyungar people. There was much native food on the site that could be gathered: in seasonal swamps there were frogs, marron, tortoises and snakes. In the waters of the shallow bay there were mullet, salmon, schnapper, cobbler, tailor, shellfish, turtles, crabs and prawns. In 1827 Charles Fraser remarks on the Swan River: ‘Without any exaggeration, I have seen a number of swans which could not have been estimated as less than 500 rise at once, exhibiting a spectacle which, if the size and colour of the birds is taken into account, and the noise and rustling occasioned by the flapping of their wings previous to their rising, is quite unique in its kind’(p.13). The Nyungar women dug for tubers. Zamia nuts were stored for use, and banksias flowers were soaked in water which was to be drunken. There would have been quokkas, quendas, bilbies and tiny honey possums scurrying about the place. It was the site’s plentiful food supply that made it a cultural gathering place for the Aboriginals. While today cricket is played today on James oval, hundreds of years ago boomerangs may have been thrown in the same spot, demonstrating a pleasing continuity of human usage.

The lands biodiversity was not noticed by early white society. In an epithet which prefaces the volume Adam Armstrong in an advertisement to sell nearby land at Dalkeith cottage writes: ‘As a goat run it is not surpassed by any in the Colony.’ (1838) Fruit trees adorned the site around a small farm, and plenty of melons were grown. Gillian Lilleyman traces the history of the site as a farm for goats, fruit and vegetables in the first decades of settlement.

Later, in the choosing of the site the senate were not all convinced. The site was five kms from the Perth town hall, and sand and bits of limestone were blown across it off the unsealed road running from Perth to Fremantle. Leslie Wilkinson advised on the layout of the campus in the 1920s. His preference was for a ‘wooded park’ of trees and grass. Especially mature marri trees (Corymbia calophylla), for example, were retained, but most of the flora was removed from the site. From 1922 gelignite was used to blow up the bigger and older marri and jarrah trees. Henry Campbell, superintendent of the grounds, went on to plant rows of palms in the Great Court at the end of the 1920s. In 1928 he planted the oaks of the Oak Court.

The book does not provide a broad-brushed botanical tour of the campus, as I would hoping it would. However, on pages 64 and 65 the book contains a plan and key of all the trees in the Great Court, which will be of interest to those who would like to know what they are looking at while they wander around the most immediately botanically impressive area of UWA. Indeed, for my own uses this is the most valuable part of the whole book. It is a great pity that the numbers 96 to 158 have been left off in the right hand margin in the printing of the book. Interestingly of the trees Campbell planted half, by species, come from the eastern seaboard of Australia. As the authors point out, so did half the human population of Perth at the time of their planting.

I don’t want to belittle the contribution of Seddon in this book. He and his coauthor have performed an accurate and detailed work of local history in this volume, and more generally Seddon’s books have taught me more than anybody else about my home place, the soils and plants of the Swan Plain around Perth. However, in discussing the trees of the campus Seddon never invites the reader into a lyrical and affectionate relationship. In discussing the trees of the Great Court he writes: ‘Some trees grow too well and are out of scale. Others struggle, even after the best care. Off with their heads!’(p.169). In my experience Seddon is more a historian and a scientist than a writer attuned to the poetics of the natural world. In my own view some of the most impressive trees on campus come from Queensland: the towering white and muscular trunks of the lemon-scented gums besides Reid Library, and the rod-like heights of the kauris. Seddon, in typical, taxonomically snobbish form, prefers the most rare specimens, for example the Karrir plum in the Tropical Grove (p.l67).

Some romance… Henry Campbell died in 1930, and his younger protégé, Oliver Dowell moved in to take his place. Dowell had an appreciation of the native flora. The karri in the north-west quadrant of the Great Court with the iron seat around known as the honeymoon tree is so called because Dowell collected its seed in the south-west on his honeymoon. In the early 1940s the US Navy established at base on Matilda Bay and used some of the University buildings to house the personnel. Because of the black-outs required at night Whitfield Court began to be used as a ‘trysting’ area, and complaints were made – the behaviour was said to be upsetting the caretaker’s sensibilities.

In the 1950s around fifty sheep grazed the lawns in place of mowers, and were even shorn for a profit by the grounds staff. The university would have been a much more peaceful place without noisy mowers and leaf blowers doing their job here and there.

Carting hay in the early 1930s on campus. Horses were important members of the UWA work force till the 1950s. Although Seddon fails to mention it, there is no technical reason why they could not be so again in 2007, making the campus quieter and less polluting.

So, let’s return to the title of the book. What makes a Landscape for Learning? Despite the wonderful clay soils of UWA, and the enjoyment provided by floristic diversity, one wonders if native plants aren’t more appropriately planted in the grounds from now onwards considering declining rainfall in the south-west and CSIRO projections of continuing decline in precipitation due to climate warming. Western Australia is not eastern Queensland, despite the Umbrella tree being a feature in so many gardens of the Western suburbs. In the absence of such native plantings coming to dominate the UWA campus, as they did a hundred years ago, perhaps we will see another instance of a university not practicing sustainability while its courses increasingly preach it. The more university institutions perpetuate a radical disconnect between course content which stresses the importance of environmental sustainability, and buildings and grounds which do not enact this philosophy, the less seriously Perth’s young undergraduates will take the advice of the memorial besides Reid Library to: ‘Seek Wisdom’.

On Saturday Australia voted for a new federal government. For the first time in eleven years we have a government that is not worthy of contempt. Those educated, left-wing Australians in their late twenties or early thirties have had a mean shopkeeper, a man whose stunted ideology of materialism they detest, leading their nation for all of their adult lives. Now he is gone. We no longer have to cringe when we hear or see that cretin on tv or the radio. We no longer have to think about moving to New Zealand.

Millions of Australian men and women voted for the Liberals on Saturday. We live in a democracy, and they lost.

I was working at a polling booth in Fremantle. While we counted votes after the doors had closed and the sun was sinking the news came through that the Australian Labor Party had won and that a sad chapter in Australia’s history had come to an end. People started to cry out ‘Howard’s out!’, and ‘Labor’s won!’ and their were smiles everywhere among those assembled. Then I went down into Fremantle with some friends and people were shouting ‘Howard’s history’ in the streets, and yahooing to strangers (including me).

I’ll remember those moments for a while to come. John Howard is history. I repeat, John Howard is history.

The Greens have five senators which means they now have party status and will get increased funding (which means more research staff). So there was good news on that front as well. Interestingly while counting votes I found that the overwhelming majority of votes which had been made below the line on the senate ballot paper were made for the Greens. A suggested conclusion? Those who think reflect deeply about politics vote for the Greens.

I noticed a well known Australian academic voting on Saturday. He is an august looking man with grey hair, and his much older looking mother was there voting as well. He helped her into a seat where she could fill out the ballot papers in comfort. She was very frail and she asked her son politely how to make sure she was giving her vote to the Greens. These were not fringe-dwelling hippies with flowers in their hair. These were intelligent, educated, compassionate and respectable citizens.

There are real differences in personality among different individuals, reflected, for example in the differences we find in the ability of different people to recognize novel stimuli (political conservatives are not so good at this). Amongst the stream of wealthy, blank faced, and often impatient Liberal voters – the Liberals won the vote in this polling both – this respectable older man and his frail old mother stood out for me. For a moment I realized that even if the Greens never form a government at least we can know that they represent the opinions of those complex, well-rounded and compassionate individuals who have truly thought about what makes a good nation. Such people may always be a minority, but they exist.

Time to sound biblical… Whatever happens on this earth, and whatever happens to this earth, the righteous shall stand tall.