Folk in rural Argentina ask their deity, Pachamama, for permission to take raw materials from Mother Earth for the things they need, I learned at the weekend from the ABC’s Race Around the World.
Like so much else in that show, that little sketch was a reminder that some communities – mostly in parts of the world where know-it-all modernity hasn’t taken over – are deeply and genuinely humble about their place in the scheme of things.
Which may explain why it was drilled into me as a child in a simple bush family to pause before eating and thank God for food on the table and all other good things.
Back then the church was the source of our moral guidance. As religion and saying grace became unfashionable and God faded from our thoughts, the environment movement took up the cudgels on behalf of nature. But in the words of Kermit the Frog, being green isn’t easy. When you serve as the world’s conscience you have to be prepared for backlash.
Both major parties, except in brief periods when the Greens supported one of them in power, have for decades represented environmental advocates as extremists standing in the way of ordinary people just wanting to survive.
Over the decades both Labor and the Coalition – the established centre of Australian politics – have used “green” to mean an attitude standing in the way of progress. It may help them feel better, but does nothing to help people understand the issues in play.
There’s a lot to like about the smorgasbord of readers’ opinions appearing daily in The Mercury, like the debate over the past couple of weeks prompted by John Raison’s 9 July article about forest management – the sort of discussion that should accompany all the big public policy decisions.
Another example was Michael Rowan’s contribution last Friday pointing out how living, growing forests over the millennia have taken up carbon from the air and turned it into something solid and substantial while enabling modern humans to grow food for ever-larger concentrations of people.
As the letter pointed out, carbon dioxide in the air has stayed around 280 parts per million from the end of the last ice age until last century. CO2 levels have since risen by over 50 per cent, pushing global average temperatures to their highest for millions of years. We’re in trouble, up to our necks.
Growing trees to offset emissions from coal, oil and gas is a favoured “net-zero” policy in most countries, but it’s up against it. The UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation says the world is losing millions of hectares of forest each year from logging, drought, disease and fire. We could do with more trees, but we’re not getting them.
So when you hear One Nation’s Barnaby Joyce or Coalition leaders Angus Taylor and Matt Canavan, or any number of media and other commentators, railing about the crushing burden of the “Labor-Green” net-zero target, ask yourself, what are they putting at risk?
Along with fringe players like One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts, these voices loudly belittling net-zero policy have in effect declared they know better than science what’s happening to the climate. Do they really believe that?
Anti-green sentiments – Labor wanting to distance itself from the Greens, Coalition ranting about net-zero, One Nation’s unhinged anti-science propaganda – must be seen for what they are, a clear and present threat to our species’ future. Each of these attitudes is cutting us off from the forces that made us and can unmake us.
Like nature, science keeps getting ignored, but like nature it never gives up. Last week John Hunter, a retired climate scientist I’ve known for years, sent me an article from the magazine of his old Cambridge University college written by a PhD candidate investigating ways to capture carbon dioxide from both industrial emissions and the atmosphere as a whole. Just like plants do.
The researcher, Cerys Walsh, is working on “supercapacitive swing adsorption”, a process where certain charged supercapacitors have been shown to be able to take up carbon dioxide – and nothing else – from mixed gas streams. We don’t yet understand this miraculous electrochemical process, but who knows where it might lead?
Science is the eternal human struggle to understand the many miracles of nature. Over a billion or two years, the shambolic, wondrous process we call evolution has delivered the myriad life forms and ecosystems on which our own single human species depends completely.
Nature conservation is utterly fundamental to our survival on Earth, our only home, yet it’s being presented as an enemy of the people. What’s that about?