Shhh! The Aussies are Sleeping!

Are we passively accepting what others wouldn’t?

Local governments around the United States last year laid off a total of 66,000 workers, mostly in the fields of health and education.  Most would recall the protests against staff cuts in teaching that took place over the past year in the States, most particularly in Michigan.  The United States has a population of over 308,000,000 people, so that makes the job losses around .021% of the population.

By comparison, the recent job cuts by the Newman Government here in Queensland, said to be 14,000 (but still in progress) have been visited on a population of just over 4,000,000 people.  This means that the losses account for around 2.8% of the population, which is, rather astoundingly, more than 100 times the amount of jobs that local authorities in the United States have vaporised.

The indignation of US citizens at the cuts made there is obvious.  It fired up the Occupy movement, and has been a focus of the current Presidential debate.

Here, in sleepy old Queensland, we shrug and resign ourselves to wait longer in queues, to crowd our children into larger classrooms, to pay through the nose for otherwise unavailable medical services.  The march to corporatocracy is happening in our country beneath our very noses and yet, we do not seem to care. Distraction is always at hand.

Just saying.

Byndy Stork

THe Hours – DVD Review

Directed by Stephen Daldry, The Hours depicts a day in the life of three women connected by the novel Mrs Dalloway. Virginia Woolf (Played by Nicole Kidman) is writing the novel while battling depression and mental illness. Laura Brown (Julianne Moore) is reading Mrs Dalloway while struggling to create a birthday party for her husband with her young son. Clarissa Vaughn (Meryl Streep) is preparing an awards celebration for her poet friend who is dying of AIDS. Clarissa’s connection to the novel appears tenuous until the film reveals that her dying friend calls her Mrs Dalloway as a nickname. Clarissa is the embodiment of the character that Woolf is creating.

Kidman, brilliantly, plays Woolf as repressed and skittish in her country house, driven to manipulate the servants while yearning for life back in London. Her husband Leonard is trying to help her overcome her mental illness by following doctor’s orders for confinement in the country. Woolf’s suicide is known to the audience from the beginning of the film making her impassioned speech about the control that she desires over her life more compelling. She chooses not to kill the character Clarissa Dalloway in the novel that she is writing, but she kills herself.

Laura is a housewife preparing a birthday party for her unwitting husband. Moore plays her with beautiful fragility; every smile is stretched to falseness. After making a cake for her husband, her neighbour comes to visit her and reveals that she is going to hospital for a hysterectomy. Laura’s helplessness is evident in the way she kisses her neighbour, a vast overcompensation of motherly sympathy and nurturing. The way she treats her own son furthers the depiction of her lack of control she feels over her life. Her choices seem to be made for her, her life almost predetermined.

Clarissa Vaughn is a successful publisher who lives with her partner Sally in New York. As she prepares for the awards celebration, her worry for her dying friend Richard becomes more apparent. Clarissa is holding an extravagant party in honour of Richard, who does not care about the poetry award or the celebration, because of the intense history between them, revealed in their conversations and Clarissa’s ongoing distress as the film unfolds (played beautifully by Streep). Ed Harris gives a compelling performance of Richard. While his suicide is expected, the scene is nonetheless heartbreaking.

The film deals with the themes of depression, mortality and what it means to make choices in life. Although these themes are evident in each of the three women’s lives, the film is not morbid. The story successfully explores the consequences of choice and how people justify the intensity of existence. Woolf chooses to take her own life, Laura chooses to live hers. Clarissa, the only character who seems to have complete control over her life, is utterly affected by Richard’s illness and suicide. She has no choice in regards to Richard’s desires. The party is cancelled.

This film is beautifully acted, scripted and entirely thought-provoking. Watch it if you feel like something heavy and be prepared to want to talk about it at length afterwards.

-Mairead Shanahan

World View

We are all deceived

To misconceive

Mistakenly grieve

We find it hard to breathe

We want to leave behind this deception

Preconceived inspection

Looking in the wrong direction

Stuck in our ordained section

Erection

Impotence

Misguided reference

Unguided deference

Sexual preference

Constant pain

Gone insane

Wandering a darkened lane

Injured

Gone Lame

Damaged by the game

Held in constant shame

Diverted from the aim

Feeling strain

Family slain

Life ripped apart

Alone from the start

Cold and empty heart

Bodies piled in a moving cart

Designated martyr

Unwilling starter

Revolution

Kill the political pollution

War, is it the final solution?

Or an easy resolution

Created by human institution

Nuclear fusion

Chemical confusion

Combined delusion

Put your shoes

Follow the pack

Struggle out of the gap!

-Patrick Greene

Sister Kevin… Part IV

Sister Kevin does unwilling justice to the tradition of Eliza Doolittle in Part IV of our epic saga by Gil Douglas…

am Sister Kevin the Confusedly Aberrant. Sister Barrie Cradshaw the Socialistic Scribblist—she who philosophises for the farm, hunting and pecking to scratch out her mental musings for the Barnwall Bugle—has taken me under her wing.

‘Please, I am lost,’ I entreated as she clucked and fretted, circling me with an appraising, professional interest…

Now she is preparing me for entrée into the society of the farm: the hub of all intercourse in the sexless city at the forefront of all things modern and steeped in chooxist dogma. Exotic breeds and standard stock mix here in a multi-specious conflagration as all manner of four- and two-legged beasts cohabit, confined in their exclusive estates; penned ghettoes.

Through the midst of all the hububbing activity, my self-appointed mentor leads me, transporting herself with an air of self-conscious affectation and amused resignation, swivelling her bony, angular head from this side t’other; all the while conveying the impression of benevolent acknowledgment for their imagined regard.

We entered a cavernous Barncoop, strewn with metal artefact, rusted and tortured; alien machinery and implements of unimaginable purpose and origin. I trailed behind my confident paramour, overawed, nearly running into her quivering tail-feather extensions as she paused in a musty, cobwebbed alcove.

‘Ah,’ sighed the winsome broilerette, ‘don’t you just adore art? But here, sadly, there is never the time to dawdle and absorb its resonances. It is nearly Cocktail hour and we must hurry to make you presentable. As my ward and project, I can offer you a choice selection from my private cache. Help yourself, my dear. Go crazy.’

Sister Barrie pointed with a blocky claw at a pile of coloured cubes festooned with alphabet glyphs, abandoned in a dusty heap. I approached trepidatiously, ignoring the juiceless carcass of an old spider attached to the mound, and experimented with the foot furniture she proffered. Mounted, I felt an awareness above my natural state, teetering on the brink of a consciousness hitherto unperceived.

‘Charming,’ she crooned and I ventured a cautious step en bloch.

‘Aaaeerk, it hurts,’ I cried, clutching the unwieldy wooden bricks, certain of toppling into the dirt.

‘Bhark buk buk,’ cackled she with gay effusion, seeming to include a crowd of similarly amused onlookers. ‘Pain is of no consequence,’ she condescended. ‘You positively screech of backyard Coop, poor pullet, plain as a partridge and I consider it my prideful duty to rectify your tragic homely condition. This I avow,’ she turned to address her phantom audience, ‘or my name isn’t Sister Barrie Cradshaw—trendsetter, individualist and range renovator extraordinaire!’

In a miserable daze, I followed my tormentor through to the outside perimeter where an ornate bed lay profuse with floral extrusions. It was clear this was to be my next painful appointment in the introduction to artifice.

‘Something understated and, er, demure, would be suitable, dearest,’ she smirked. ‘Like this one,’ said she, indicating a bloom of titanic proportion in a lurid pink, with a stiff protruding central stamen, erectly proud.

‘But how do I…’

‘Fashion is for the determined, you funny chicken. Align yourself,’ and she wound some ropey denuded frond about my neck region, affixing the suffocating accessory with quick, ever-tightening rotations, expounding all the while. ‘This confirms an up-to-the-minute couture awareness and à la mode sensibility. All the qualities desirable in a modern chick on the go—avaricious aspirational acquisitivity and an uncompromising dedication to a profound fashionism spurning the backward, oppressive ways of the reactionary Sistersects. Foliage over forage!’ she concluded with a squawk of satisfaction and stood back to admire her exertions.

‘Ah, Sister,’ she singsonged, misty-eyed. ‘I see it in you already… the relinquishment of small town preconceptions; those that have kept you dowdy and oppressed. Here in New Yolk you can be free from such shackles and discover the secrets of devoted obsessional ostentation for nothing but its own sake. Utterly liberating!’

‘Come, my little chickadee. Follow me for further instruction as the hour is upon us. Yes, you are to meet my Clutch for Cocktails. Delicious borewater flavoured with a delicate algal bloom, straight from the trough. Onward, my desperate little debutante, and upward.’

Porn Vs Erotica at The Brisbane Writers Festival

I love the Brisbane Writers’ Festival, I always have and would even if I were not an aspiring writer with a love of words strung together – with or without a higher purpose – and a person who smells books and sits on the carpeted floors of bookshops to read blurbs. I love Brisbane and love that I live here but there is no denying that often you have to dig in the dry dirt to find the well of art and expression sometimes.

But at the writer’s festival there are those who have an art spark, a book love, a creative streak, or a learning yearn. Now I am lucky, I have an oasis in the desert, I live in the aptly stereotyped West End and get plenty of culture in all its forms (right down to playing hide and seek on the street with the local clown posse at 3am when the pub closes).

The Brisbane Writers’ Festival is held at the State Library in South Bank and this year had its 50th birthday (although there was some contention as to that fact). I was worried this year about the survival of this event under the current administration but never fear it went ahead as usual and literary loving Brisbanites once again emerged from the woodwork. The Writers’ Festival hosted novelists, illustrators, poets, essayists and academics from across the globe including several of our own teachers and students here at USC.

The most arousing discussion I attended (pardon the pun) was one entitled Censorship, Pornography and Erotica. The panelists included Jeff Sparrow, Krissy Kneen and Deborah Robertson, all of whom are writers interested in, or not afraid of , sex in literature. The discussion was hosted by Paul Barclay and aired on ABC Radio National, with many warnings about adult content.

Jeff Sparrow is a writer and the editor of the Overland Literary Journal, his most recent book Money Shot: A Journey into Porn and Censorship made him uniquely qualified to participate in this discussion. Krissy Kneen, Brisbane (thrice published) author and book seller has never shied from the sexual or sensual and has a reputation for well written, very transgressive sex. The final panelist Deborah Robertson, also an author, is of the belief there is nothing wrong with erotica or porn in literature as long as it’s well written.

First things first of course: what’s the difference between porn and erotica? Well Sparrow says ‘porn is what you like and erotica is what I like’ or as Woody Allen put it ‘erotica uses the feather while porn used the whole chicken’. The discussion started with a question regarding the latest mainstream foray into erotica 50 Shades of Gray dubbed by the media fever surrounding this book as ‘mummy porn’. Kneen was disappointed by it, claiming it was no more transgressive than Jane Austin: they still end up painting the ‘red room’ pink, getting married and have a baby and ends up alienating any woman (or man, I suppose) who doesn’t want to get married. That and the fact that the erotica is few and far between. The fairy tale is all there; the billionaire prince comes along and saves the young helpless heroine.

My ears pricked up at a mention of this book: I had a burning question and being the only person who put their hand up at the end session I got to voice something that’s been bugging me for years. So I piped up (and got a microphone) and gave a little background first:

“I’m studying writing and in one of my courses the set text was The Bride Stripped Bare and as I read it I was appalled that at university level this text was being held up as literature. I felt that it was Mills and Boon in second person and was horrified. I guess what I want to ask the panel is: do they think that The Bride Stripped Bare is on par with 50 Shades of Grey’?”

Well I think I ranted a little more than that but that was the gist. Kneen said that yes she agreed and went on to say that TBSB was basically suggesting that if you stray from the marriage bed then you will die.

My vindicated opinion aside, the discussion on censorship and its affect on the development of young people was interesting. The panel suggested that having safe spaces, such as erotica or porn, to open a dialogue about transgressive behaviour will allow for more transparency and avoid the condemnation that creates a discourse of shame.

It was agreed that stringent laws about censorship simply drive the public to look elsewhere for what is censored and thus shady underworlds are created; places where the ethics of a situation are not often considered. Literature is a place where erotica can have a place because there is not close scrutiny, however porn is an area where conservative organization and governments feel they can implement the harshest of condemnation.

The discussion called for a social openness about sex and desire without condemnation.

– Lilla-belle

There is Something in the Air

They have been used to save lives, to watch lives, and to take lives. Drones, no matter what you think of them, are here to stay.

Drones are being increasingly used in civilian life for all sorts of purposes: in agriculture for aerial spraying and property monitoring; in all sorts of commercial applications from aerial photography to journalism; in law enforcement for monitoring illegal activity (such as illegal fishing); in the mining industry for surveying, and even by the Surf Lifesaving Association which is currently undertaking a trial of drones to maintain safety at beaches right here on the Sunshine Coast.

The benefits of drones are loudly and frequently applauded, but they also have a dark side, namely the potential to carry weapons and the potential to invade privacy. As such, drones raise the question of the dual nature of humanity. The American military machine can now wipe out an entire town without a single human involved in the act, beyond one controller sitting in an ergonomically designed desk chair in another country making a few small movements with a mouse. On the other hand, a lone swimmer could be saved on a formerly unpatrolled beach after being spotted using a drone.

The use of drones in warfare is an ethical minefield, with the strong double imperative of economics and personnel safety on the side of the ‘good guys’ (of course).

Human rights advocates, however, are horrified with the advent of armed drones attacking real-life targets. Also of enormous import is the threat to privacy, with drones as small as mosquitos making it almost impossible to know if you are being watched. At present there are around thirty different prototypes of drones being created in laboratories around the planet, and they are now available online. Current laws are not comprehensive enough to protect citizens’ rights to privacy.

The potential for either misuse, or questionable state-sanctioned use, of this invention is enormous: military action, surveillance, monitoring, spying, stalking, the delivery of payloads (of any nature) are all issues that require open debate, and honest acknowledgement. Yet the increasing embrace of the drone into civilian life means it is finding more proponents and less opposition.

The drone is a Pandora’s Box of possibilities. Yet the question remains: are humans capable of holding out a Pandora’s Box, and opening it only to remove the beneficial aspects to play with? Indeed, Pandora herself could exercise neither choice nor restraint in the matter…

– Lynda Sampson

Willing to do Whatever it Takes: Tony Abbot the Political Animal

Carl Olive critiques an essay about our possible next illustrious leader…

“The loud mouth bigot … the homophobe, the blinkered Vatican warrior, the rugger-bugger, the White Australian and the junkyard dog of parliament are all, he would have us believe, consigned to the past.”

These words, now much publicised, appear on the third page of David Marr’s recent Quarterly Essay on Tony Abbott, Political Animal. The essay is littered with similar quotes from Marr revealing Australia has reached a critical moment.

The nation is on the cusp of electing the most conservative Prime Minister in post-war history. It seems that in less than 12 months Tony Abbott will be the Prime Minister of Australia.

As such, Marr’s comprehensive investigation into Tony Abbott’s character is as timely as it is terrifying. Australia is about to elect a political opportunist who regularly trades on the human misery of refugees to gain popularity and grossly exaggerates and embellishes the truth to score political points.

Marr’s essay leaves the reader certain that Abbott is a man prepared to do anything for power. Marr’s standing as an Australian journalist leaves no doubt to the veracity of the work; the research is beyond reproach. Marr’s previous work, Dark Victory, should be a seminal text forAustralian political science students.

The only criticism that could be made of Marr’s latest contribution relates to the central argument. Marr’s contention that there is a moral and a political Tony Abbott both striving for supremacy (shades of the real Julia) dismisses the very name of the essay. The political animal cannot be masked. This is of course no error on Marr’s behalf. The author astutely identifies the two driving elements of Abbott’s character; his political savagery and his deep religious morality. The true message of the Marr’s work is that Abbott is profoundly conservative and intensely religious. Abbot is on a mission from God. He is not afraid to utilise the apparatus of government to serve and protect his religious values. This is demonstrated in his willingness to commit billions to a parental leave scheme that does not remotely envisage the economic rationalism that defines current debate.

In government, Abbott will be socially regressive, overtly racist and homophobic. Abbott believes that homosexuality is an ‘intrinsic moral evil’. This view is emblematic of Abbott’s dogged determinism to supress and ridicule any lifestyle that is not white and middle class.

Abbott believes in family values right out of a bad 1950’s sitcom. Mums should stay at home baking cookies, we should all live in the suburbs (complaining about our power bill), kids should go to private, catholic schools and we should all head off to church bright and early on Sunday morning.

If you are a sole parent, gay, single, unemployed, disabled, Asian, atheist, Muslim (or just not white) then expect further marginalisation.

Abbott’s appeal is that these xenophobic, ethnocentric views sometimes align with traditional working class attitudes. Marr acknowledges this with discussion of Abbott’s political origins in the DLP. In fact, the essay may be an appeal for Abbott to hold fast on his family values and stare down the party on further economic rationalisation.

However, given Abbott’s tendency to flout the moral convictions he holds so dear there is little likelihood of this. Abbott wants to win. Two years screaming about the carbon tax reveals a desperate man prepared to do and say whatever it takes.

Abbott is a political stereotype from the top drawer of all comedians. The man is the antitheses of what this country is crying out for. Labor’s greatest fear is that the opposition is forced to change leaders… to anyone. A positive agenda from a ‘reforming’ Julia Gillard v the Political Animal remains Labor’s greatest hope of winning. For much of the last two years there has only been one politician in Australia more unpopular than the Prime Minister, the man who hopes to replace her.

– Carl Olive

The Dream and The Matrix

I dreamed I was back at the university sitting in a lecture hall while the teacher wrote arcane and incomprehensible formulae on the board. The symbols wouldn’t stay still, but it didn’t matter, we only needed to remember the conclusion, a certain number with a strange Mayan sounding name. This magical number, we were shown, when looked at correctly, resembled the word ‘Africa’. It was Pythagorean mystery school, music of the spheres, the hidden mathematical orders of the cosmos revealed to the ancients, and so forth. I asked how this number relates to Africa exactly, what did it measure. The lecturer didn’t know and thought the question impertinent.

After the lesson I was in the library trying to get up some narrow stairs which had a gaggle of students draped over them. These were the insolent, dead-head hippy types Clint Eastwood was always dealing out rough justice to in the 70s. Turns out now I’m the angry whitey getting wild over no-good-punks. Get out of the bloody way. Oh you don’t wanna go up there man, they smirked, everyone’s in their cubicles, it’s a prison for the mind. You don’t say, just get

out of the fucking way. There was a great deal of cussing and veiled threats and nothing was resolved because I suddenly realised I no longer had my mobile phone in my pocket. Quite unreasonably I started taking it out on these guys with even more terrible cussing, they looked on amused, maybe a little stoned. I must have left the phone in the lecture hall.

Back at the table at which I had sat there remained the ‘skeleton’ of my mobile, a piece of punched tinfoil, it had been stripped clean. There were still some others in the room and I started accusing them of the crime. Hey man, lay off, anybody could have done that; these days people can strip a phone bare in a few minutes. Insolent hippies again, I wasn’t going to get any sense out of these punks, but I was raging now. This place is full of deadbeats, thieves and liars, I ranted, this is a terrible university, the fucking architecture is appalling, all concrete and corridors, barefaced bloody opportunism and on and on I went. They also looked bemused and didn’t reply. The least you could do is stand up for the fucking place, you chose to be here. The more conscious part of the mind, Descartes’ theatre, the bit that is always observing and preventing us from becoming dream zombies incapable of self referentiality, noted wryly that I must have also made that choice. Then, I thought, someone has the SIM card and is probably making long distance calls on my account. I have to cancel this card quick, I need a pay phone, but where are they?

In the cafeteria were some complicated apparatus with screens and no handsets. They may have been for internet access only, I couldn’t tell, and besides they weren’t cheap and my wallet was feeling remarkably thin. Technology was really bugging me today. Out in the courtyard, on a pole, was a pay phone but there was a crowd about it. I waited in line, but this line was really a mob mesmerised by some really tall fellow talking about god. I asked them to move, I needed the phone, it was important. Nothing is as important as the moral fibre of your soul my son, the tall guy rolled his eyes and peered down at me. By this time I was way too angry to sleep any more, I was sick of the whole bloody overheated mess…

I watched the Matrix with my daughter recently. She hadn’t seen it. We noted how the Matrix, the dream world, the illusion is at first represented in socio-cultural phenomenal terms, with capitalism and conformity (unsurprisingly) the prime culprits. The Matrix is all around you, it is there when you go to work, pay your taxes, watch television, and so forth. We are revealed as slaves entranced in a dream not of our making, but one imposed by a powerful master class, machines

of course, to extract our energy, our life essence. We learn later that the Matrix is a fine grained experiential totalising illusion in a primitive way, lacking the subtle reifications and under handed manipulations of a hegemonic order, or even the ruthlessness of some social-class bog-ordinary ideological dogma packaged as the common good. No, more of a stage upon which we play our un-scripted parts, largely incapable of seeing beyond the ever-pressing demands of our role in our own biographies.

But this is the interesting bit. The Matrix is an urban landscape. Presumably it also encompasses the rural landscapes and the wilderness, but we are not party to this. The inhabitants of the Matrix are urban workers, all playing their roles, all, we are told, potential enemies of freedom. This mass illusion is presented to us as watching television, going to work, etc, (in Fight Club, also consumerism) all within an urban, that is, constructed environment. We are not given to understand the matrix as the feeling of the sun on one’s neck, climbing a tree, making love, going for a walk and so on. When we came to appreciate it was all this as well, the horror dissolves into a philosophic game concerning the question of ‘the real’. One really can die in the matrix even though one doesn’t really eat, unlike in our world where the deceptions of the flesh merely house the immortal soul of the religious, who can never die, really. Following closely the (albeit primitive) theological denial of the reality of our material experience, the matrix, our world, is only a dream.

Some things can feel like dreams and some do not. Some kinds of experience contain a ‘depth’ of truth to them and the question of their truth status is more likely to question the sense of the distinction between truth and fiction, the real and the construct (as Cipher does, savouring an illusory stake, but as the evil traitor he had sold his soul for the illusions of wealth, very biblical).

Other kinds of experience have a thinner quality to them; they present more directly to the conscious mind, sieved, cogitated, interpreted, named and filed, quite possibly the stuff of dreams or of Descartes’ evil demon. The difference is that dreams are primarily experientially visual and auditory not (or rarely) tactile, one is far more likely to admit that one had imagined seeing or hearing something than saying one has only imagined that pain or that orgasm even if these were ‘only’ psychosomatic, that is, their truth is not predicated upon causes but effects because they are not interpreted, their reality is simply felt.

Our dreams are constructed more as stories or mazes through which we negotiate our way, as through streets and

corridors, our relations are verbal and emotive, they build this cognate narrative into a believable domain but we hardly ever ‘feel’ this world, it is a tele-visual spectacle that is happening to us.

The somatic, tactile, proprioceptive, vestibular world does not simply happen to us. We happen with it, the feel of the world is never so separate from our own being that we can draw such a distinct line between the world experienced as such and self as being-in-the -world. Yet sight and sound do seem to happen to us, today through tele-visual streaming, more than ever.

But I don’t think this is entirely a modern schism wrought by the incapacity of technology to project a full sensory domain. The language struggles to describe the full panoply of the sensation that constitutes our being from sex (its great) to a headache (it hurts here), but think of the linguistic dominance of the visual, followed by the auditory world.

Our house of being is one of light and sound. Naturally, all the stories we ever tell ourselves, all the myths, religious fables, assorted fictions, all the alternative realities, all our conscious dreaming is conveyed in a language given over almost exclusively to the empire of the eye and ear. The primary discipline of our education is to extract us from a sensuous, tactile, and god help us, erotic universe and condition us to accept the deeper realities of the symbolic constructs that inhere in the language of imagery and sound, for that which must be interpreted (with the gracious help of the relevant authorities) is within a domain of control (at least until teenagers discover sex).

What becomes of a work of art, of a road trip through the mountains, of the presentation of one’s body, one’s home, one’s self, the ubiquity of the camera lens, the screens, the speakers and earphones, the music and chatter, of what can we speak, of what is intelligible, of what comes to us at last as constitutive of reality. And yet, from the essential seductive lesson of our dreaming, what may not need be reality at all, too thin a construct, too easily manipulated, an idea, an artifice, I think therefore I am but in what terms can one think to secure the self, the mind goes a-wandering, the mind as the conquered territory of sight and sound.

The average urban professional, information processor, maze negotiator, bug-eyed, ears out, watching for the traffic, the next train, the next affair, paying taxes and watching TV, the matrix would seem a simple enough possibility, a plausible model of reality, one really quite easy to live with.

Modern lives are profoundly technologically mediated, between the

earphones and the screens, the agitated, overheated brain is already locked into a fantasy. For Latour we and the artefacts are both actants in a network, all automatic responses, everyone take your places please (a matrix but with nobody in charge, a hopeless cause indeed).

A sense of unreality pervades politics, science, the media, who to trust, what is real anyway; language is everywhere, slippery, unreliable. We have always been in communion with the natural world, but now, more than ever, we are in communion with ourselves, as Heidegger noted in the age of technology everything becomes a reflection of the human will, it is a world of our dreaming. Who’s dreaming? Not mine or yours I would guess.

People made those sidewalks which instruct us where to walk; the city tells us how to walk. The characters in the film ricochet around the city streets, fleeing, searching, reacting faster, always faster, speed is all that counts now, the machines set the standards (yet the artefacts are expressions of our will, we set the standards, we the inhuman, the increasingly artificial), the gauge of being, the quickest wins; it’s a video game, a construct in which we play our roles suspicious of the possibility of an alien order, the secret rulers of the world (the Bilderbergers, Illuminati, bankers lizard men, or is it the machine?) to which we can only react to faster, always faster, to keep our jobs, our relationships, our lives.

The body rebels. Like Miniver Cheevy, born too late, we dream the medieval romance.

– Gerard Burke

Strange and Genius Thought: Meet the New Eco Warriors

The Next Eco Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men who are Saving the Planet is one of the non-uni books I am reading at the moment. It is a selection of essays written by people aged between their 20’s and 40’s describing their experience in doing their part to save the world.

I am only halfway through, but as I have read the intro and quite a few of the stories, I feel I have adequate knowledge of the book to tell you all about it. I have been, in fact, telling everyone about this book. My roommate is ready to lock me out I go on about it that much.

“Did you know the author is only 26, her Father was a co-founder of Greenpeace!” (She responds “really? Cool.”) Cool I say COOL! This book is more than COOL, it’s a fucking portable revolution I’m carrying around! It is splendi-fer-maxingly-a- fucking-stounding! And I’ve gone too far. But this is how much I love this book.

One man spent five years creating a film about sharks to raise people’s awareness to their plight (100 million sharks are killed each year, leading to sizable population decreases). He caught diseases, was chased by border patrols, and had attempts made on his life in the process. But he kept making this film because he loves sharks that much.

Another man, an Australian man, jumped on board a moving Japanese whaling vessel, was locked up on it for a couple days and was finally released, but made a huge impact on the whaling industry that year. This selfless activism is inspiring to me, as I see so much complacency in those around me, and I constantly hope not everyone will just stand back and let humans destroy the Earth and each other so easily.

The Eco-warriors within the book are warm, loving, peaceful people who use their intellect and channel their anger into positive action in order to make small notches. These small notches are important so that others can follow, and hopefully wear away at these notches, to gouge them into stairways we can all walk up with ease.

The book is significant culturally as it gives shape to the emerging generation, our needs, our hopes, our fears, and our purpose. All of the beautiful men and women featured in the book are eloquent, as they all speak with honesty, and do not over glorify their victories and losses. And the book is filled with losses, maybe more than the victories, possibly to act as an amplification of the Earth’s need for humans to act on her behalf. As I read about Tasmanian forest devastation, and the group attempting to halt it, tears well up and I cry. I cry for the trees and for the people in Sudan, and for the overfished oceans and for my parents who are far away. What an awesome emotional release. During the story about the Yes Men, a climate comedian group who pull stunts such as dressing in a giant inflatable ‘survivaball’ in large groups in random places, and impersonating politicians on TV so that news crews interview them and think they are real, I giggled for ages.

Because the stories are told by different people, it encompasses all different points of view from around the globe, and so serves as a new myth for my generation, which entails selflessness and caring versus apathy and mindless constant ‘happy happy’ time (my boyfriend’s father’s Indonesian girlfriend’s term for young people rave partying every weekend). This is important to me as I constantly feel inundated by media which clashes with my personal, social and global identity.

When typing the book’s title into Google, the first several links are to this book, so hopefully it will reach a wide audience. However, the book is filled with radical ideas and strong constitutions and so might scare away anyone even on the fence about environmental issues. This is sad but for those who do read it, the book can serve as a connection to likeminded humans who care enough about life to reach out and touch others.

All of the warriors are normal people, and often their battle is for their own community’s safety, showing me that being an eco warrior doesn’t necessarily have to be about chaining myself to a tree, but can be about my family and friends. It may be cheesy but it inspires me to make small actions to affect change and just do what I can, and that this can make a difference. I am already a very environmentally and socially conscientious person, but this book has motivated me to get on top of my eating habits, become more informed, volunteer more for local charities and be more hopeful and optimistic. Some beautiful quotes are used throughout the book which connects the warriors with other famous warriors throughout history, helping readers to view The Next Eco Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men who are Saving the Planet as culturally and globally

relevant.

One such quote sums up the book’s message very simply, and although it is overused, I still find It a goodie: “Never believe that a few caring people can’t change the world. For, indeed, that’s all who ever have” (Hunter 2011, p. 1)

I love this book and I think everyone everywhere should read it, as it is inspiring, sad, funny, uplifting, informative and evocative of strange and genius thought.

– Cassidy Maier

Hunter, Emily 2011, The Next Eco Warriors: 22 Young Women and Men who are Saving the Planet, San Francisco, Conari Press. 

A Hungry World…

As the hunger for energy grows around the planet, and  supply begins to fall  short of demand, many societies are turning to  dangerous sources, and questionable practices, often to the detriment of communities.

“Dear Sister,

We hope this letter finds you well.  We write this to you in hope and anguish. Hope because we still believe that our country being one of the largest democracies in the world will listen to our voice of appeal and peace to continue living in this coastal village of ours safely and securely. Anguish because we are afraid of the Police force surrounding us, of our men and sons being booked in false cases and taken away, of our surroundings being contaminated by the deadly nuclear radiation…”

This is an excerpt from a letter sent to Sonia Gandhi and other women at the helm of power in India, by the  women of the community of Koodankulam, in the Tirunelveli district of the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. The area is about to have a nuclear power plant switched on, on the shores of their coastal village, without a single shred of consultation by either government or industry.

The fight facing the people of this small community is not unique, as sovereign powers from around the globe begin to seek energy supplies from unsuitable or dangerous locations, or unhealthy sources.

Japan begins to re-start nuclear power stations, despite the frightening toll that the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami took on the safety of the entire world. North America goes on adding to the nearly half million gas wells right across the continent, despite the clear evidence of the enormous environmental, social and health damage wrought by the shale gas industry, whilst moving further and further into pristine waters and deep ocean in search of oil. Canada continues to wipe out acre after acre of ancient arboreal forest for an almost zero energy gain (although it offers some profit to some body). Africa offers itself to the highest bidder, despite the massive oil spills, politically induced famines and unrest, and environmental degradation. South America is drowning the lungs of the world with giant hydro dams to feed the energy needs of its citizens.

And here in the sunburnt country, we are digging, and scraping, and drilling and draining to keep up with the growing demand, whilst our collective global gaze turns hungrily and greedily toward the melting ice caps, salivating at the thought of what bounty lies below. All around the world, The Corporation deems it to be so, and so it is…

Yet The Corporation does not act alone.  The Corporation would not exist without the consumer. All around the planet, day in, day out, The Corporation’s products and services are bought, and sold, and hired, and used, and the many beneficiaries of The Corporation’s activities grow rich and round from the upwardly spiralling economy.

Some of the inhabitants of the globe have unlimited access, while others have but a little. Ironically, those with the least advantage are still exhorted to play the game through seductive and often inescapable mass media saturation. They typically have borne the burden of environmental and social destruction while they create the capital with which The Corporation  has fed the global north. It seems the unspeakable fallout from the consumptive life has always been relegated, out of sight and out of mind, to the undeveloped, and the developing worlds… until now.

We’re waking up to the fact that we are running out of ‘over theres’, and that, as Julia Butterfly Hill says, we are discovering, afterall that on our small blue dot “there is no such place as away”.  And right alongside it, we are discovering that our energy sources are moving inexorably toward zero energy return on energy invested, our global pantry is thinning, and our usually reliable food growing climate is dancing with us. The current impending arrival of the super trawler in Tasmanian waters is a massive warning that our world fishstocks are on the verge of collapse, yet, despite the venture having almost zero social license on the Apple Isle, once again, The Corporation has deemed it so… and so it is. Our cleverly crafted international trade agreements have given The Corporation the ultimate right over sovereign law… all it needs is the dollar deal to make it happen.

Should we throw our hands up in despair? Should we take up arms against the oppressor? We may find that The Corporation makes a formidable enemy, when it holds the people co-opted in its own dance of death. The key to the future is not so much resilience, as adaptability. To that end education is a prime key, and a willingness to understand and expand our minds is vital in helping ourselves and our communities cope with the inevitable withdrawal from oil that will occur in the direct future. Tim Flannery believes that the world has turned the corner. With over thirty countries now set to introduce carbon pricing, and more and more people waking to the reality that we have  both a very real energy crisis and a climate catastrophe on our hands, he says we have moved into the next stage of our journey towards renewable energy.

The path forward is a journey in stages. We are currently in what some call an ‘Awareness’ phase, and stepping out towards a ‘Transition’ stage, with the ultimate ideal outcome being a state of energy and resource self sufficiency. Where we go to from here, and how it all unfolds, is the process of history in the making. How long will the journey remain civil?  That’s anyone’s guess… Such is life in a hungry world.

-Lynda Windsor