There are more than 200 results, only the first 200 are displayed here.
Some have argued we shouldn't discuss climate change during this bushfire emergency. Yet when children previously tried to protest climate change they were told to 'stay in school'. The statement denies the evidence that our normal routines are already being disrupted by climate change.
As fires obliterated large swathes of Australia, I was largely oblivious to the news — though tenuously connected to events as I travelled through oven-hot, tinder-dry national parks in Southern Africa. It was only when I reached the airport in Johannesburg that the extent of the catastrophe became apparent to me.
Miners are not the enemy. In fact, those who once worked in mining are key to implementing change. After all, renewable energy isn't going to build and maintain itself. Our coal-fired power stations are starting to reach the end of their life cycle, and many countries are rapidly divesting from coal. We owe it to our nation’s workers to plan for the future.
Any Australian who believes in four seasons is engaged in a form of climate denial. Spring, summer, autumn and winter are colonial constructs, not an objective truth. I recently visited a school which has the largest Indigenous student population in Melbourne. The kids made a mural depicting the eight seasons of greater Melbourne.
It is up to business to determine what the market wants. And business is being given a very clear message of market sentiment, through people protesting. For government to attempt to regulate this is a burden on freedom of speech and a significant imposition on the market mechanism, the very thing Morrison says he is trying to protect.
The scene I have described was more than purely peaceful. In these iron days, to write about or seriously discuss the world of nature and its phases and complexions can be a political act, 74 years after Orwell wondered about that very same point in 'Some Thoughts on the Common Toad'.
In a time when bad news stories seem to abound, it is welcome news that someone's audacious plan to tackle a seemingly insurmountable environmental problem is having such success. Of course, Slat's clean-up project is just a drop in the ocean (if you'll excuse the pun) in relation to fixing our global problem with plastic waste.
Ruling out an individual's efforts simply because they aren't perfect seems to be a fantastic way of discouraging people from joining what is an incredibly important movement. But climate action doesn't have to be about perfectionism — it's about doing the best you can, and sometimes even small changes can make a big difference.
No-one should be fooled: the politicians and commentators who condemn civil disobedience are the same politicians and commentators who attack the UN for passing resolutions on carbon; who tell scientists to get back to the lab when they speak out on politics; who do everything they can to keep climate out of the parliament.
In The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert explains that we have placed animals in a lethal double bind: they have to move due to the effects of climate change and habitat destruction, but their pathways are blocked by roads or occupied by humans. Some might ask why this mass extinction should matter to us, but we ignore it at our peril.
Reflection on the demonstration and the criticisms made of it prompts a more radical and subversive question. Who actually were the adults here? When assessed by conventional wisdom about the path from childhood to adulthood, it might seem that supposed adults were behaving like children and children like adults.
These strikes aren't solely sites of protestation but rather a chance to step out of the individual grey loneliness to come together for our collective future in intergenerational solidarity. There is something powerful and visceral about putting your body on the street, in the public forum, with other bodies and being vulnerable together.
13-24 out of 200 results.
x
Subscribe for more stories like this.
Free sign-up