Posts tagged 'environment'

The Dolly Parton show is in town and so it’s a good occasion to pay tribute to the veteran country singer’s work to promote literacy among poor kids. Since 1996, Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library USA has mailed every child under five in participating counties a book every month until their fifth birthday.

Should YouTube have a literature channel? It’s a question raised by the blog The Fiction Circus (brought to our attention by Media Bistro). Needless to say, we endorse the campaign wholeheartedly so that videos such as this one may find their true home. But then again, we would say that, what with our own YouTube channel and all.

One of our favourite collective nouns is ‘murmuration’, in reference to groups of starlings. Murmurations used to be a more common and more spectacular sight in Europe, but starling numbers have dropped some 70% since 1970. It refers to the sound made by the great clouds of starlings that flock together on late wintry afternoons in northern Europe. We found this YouTube video of murmurating starlings hypnotic for all kinds of reasons. It’s a promotional video for a book on economics, although you wouldn’t know it from the footage, which inspires in the narrator all kinds of grandiloquent philosophising. Do murmurations of starlings have something to teach us about the future of humanity? We’ll reserve our judgment on that, but enjoy the spectacle. (More murmuration.)

(Click to watch video.)

Historian Bill Gammage’s recent Lunchbox/Soapbox event was subtitled ‘How Aborigines made Australia’. In the course of his address, Gammage gave the audience a bird’s eye overview of what central Melbourne would have looked like when Batman and co first arrived in 1835, using eyewitness accounts of the time.

North of the Yarra, the land was ‘park-like’, ‘open grassy forest, rising into low hills’. But it was not all the same. Imagine a line from the bottom of Swanston Street to Flagstaff Hill. Southwest, hill and valley were grassy with scattered trees. Northeast was eucalypt woodland, open but with dense forest patches. One patch east of Swanston Street and south of Bourke Street perhaps shielded a dance ground, while at Fitzroy and Treasury Gardens open forest suddenly gave way to ‘dense gum forest’, mostly manna gum. Hilltops varied. Flagstaff Hill was ‘covered with a beautiful grassy surface … [It] had the appearance of a large lawn’. Batman’s Hill (Southern Cross Station) was grassy but topped by sheoaks.

A creek down Elizabeth Street separated two hills, ‘rising and picturesque eminences … on the verge of a beautiful park’, one cresting east at Spring Street, the other west at William Street, each burnt differently. ‘The Eastern Hill was a gum and wattle tree forest, and the Western Hill was so clothed with sheoaks as to give it the appearance of a primeval park’. Both were ‘lightly wooded’, which means regular fire, the west topped with mushrooms, the east with a grass clearing between the Museum and Parliament House. Along the river stood tea-tree patches, as you’d expect of a shallow stream choked with debris and flooding easily, but the patches alternated with grass, which you wouldn’t expect.

All this, Gammage argued, was to promote grass and suppress tea-tree to encourage animals such as kangaroos to feed, and all of it was a landscape managed by just a few families. Gammage’s book, The Biggest Estate on Earth, systematically outlines for the first time how the Australia European settlers found from 1788 on was not a wilderness but in fact a continental-sized garden carefully tended by Aboriginal Australians in a mosaic pattern to maximise its natural abundance.

(Click to watch video.)

The passing of a raft of bills associated with the carbon tax through the House of Representatives this week earned Prime Minister Julia Gillard a place in the Atlantic magazine’s list of the top 50 Brave Thinkers of 2011. The prime minister rubs shoulders alongside Barack Obama, recently deceased Apple demigod Steve Jobs and filmmaker Terence Malick for, in the words of the US magazine, “betting her job on a plan to tax greenhouse-gas emissions”. A profile of the PM on the magazine’s website adds that “80 percent of the country’s electricity comes from coal, helping to make Australia the worst per capita carbon polluter among wealthy nations. Australia is also the world’s leading coal exporter, and vocal factions of the powerful mining industry say the tax scheme will destroy jobs and sink the economy. Such fears help explain the prime minister’s horrendous job-approval numbers.”

Also on the list is Richard Muller, a prominent physicist who was considered a climate change sceptic determined to debunk the scientific consensus on climate change. Muller led a team of researchers – called the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project (BEST) – on a thorough review of the science behind anthropogenic climate change… only to testify before the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology that the science was credible.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott has pledged to scrap the tax if and when he is elected. Layer and climate change policy analyst Fergus Green argues on Crikey that this pledge might be made than kept.

Meanwhile, the New York Review of Books has published a review by John Terborgh of Tim Flannery’s book Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet that puts the global environmental situation in stark terms. Titled Çan Our Species Escape Destruction?‘, Terborgh writes, “Estimates of how bad the situation is, or course, differ, but various assessments agree that the global economy is consuming resources at a rate equivalent to 1.3 to 1.5 times the earth’s capacity to supply them sustainably.”

Image of Melbourne’s effort courtesy Michael Green

Today is PARKing Day, where across the world devoted park enthusiasts wake before dawn and go about taking the ‘car’ out of ‘carpark’ by transforming a carpark space into a mini-park. PARK(ing) Day is an annual, worldwide event that invites citizens everywhere to transform metered parking spots into temporary parks for the public good. It was born in San Francisco in 2005 and has since grown into a global urban beautification movement. Its manifesto is subtitled, ‘User-generated urbanism and temporary tactics for improving the public realm’.

In Melbourne, PARKing Day volunteers were out at 7am working on a metered parking space on Little Lonsdale, between Russell and Exhibition (closer to Exhibition). The little plot was decked out with chairs, pot plants, a mini picket fence, Scrabble, a beach brolly, hula hoops, picnic lunch and nice company. The space was metered until lunchtime.

The carbon tax debate is amping up ahead of Julia Gillard’s announcement of the long-awaited carbon tax specifics, to be broadcast nationally on Sunday night. Gillard has said that almost 70% of households will be compensated.

The government’s chief economic adviser, treasury secretary Dr Martin Parkinson (pictured), is on the record as a supporter of a carbon tax. He succeeded Ken Henry in the role only a few weeks ago after heading the government’s Department of Climate Change. In March, he weighed into the debate on a carbon tax, speaking before a Senate committee earlier this year, when he voiced his doubts that the Coalition’s direct action policies could achieve the target of a 5% cut of 2000-level carbon emissions by 2020.

Speaking at an emissions trading panel during the Deakin Lectures last year, Dr Parkinson said, “We conceptually have a choice between a carbon price and regulation.” (View the video here.) To meet our bipartisan target, said Parkinson, we need to take into account that, at current rates, our carbon emissions in 2020 will be 121% of 2000 levels, so in fact what’s required is not a 5% cut but a cut of 26%.

“Any effort to achieve the targets that we have adopted bipartisanly [sic] in Australia that relies on regulation essentially relies on bureaucratic prescience… Now that by itself is so patently unrealistic it should give us all cause for pause when we come to think about regulation. The second thing that’s important in thinking about regulation is just the sheer magnitude of the abatement task in front of us.”

The choice, in the Treasury chief’s view, is a no-brainer. “These are incredibly ambitious targets… So the bottom line for us is, can we meet these bipartisan targets without a carbon price? In my mind, there is absolutely no chance we can do so.” Maybe so, but some commentators, such as Bernard Keane writing in Crikey, wonder whether the proposed tax will achieve any emissions cut at all, questioning the wisdom of so many handouts to households and business.

(Click to watch video.)

Australia has a proud tradition of gardening, and of gardening literature. In this video, ABC Radio National’s Ramona Koval leads a discussion on the reading habits of three prominent gardeners.

Stephen Ryan, Terry Smyth and Michael McCoy talk about Gertrude Jekyll, Christopher Lloyd, Edna Walling and the ‘right way’ of gardening in Australia.