The big wet has Brisbane renters tearing apart sharehouses, burning leather clothing and scrubbing walls with clove and tea tree oil, mixed with vinegar and warm water in a battle with an unwanted, microbial, housemate; mould.
Mouldy leather is de rigeur on East Coast Australia this winter
Christine Schindler wrote in Westender last week “The mould ripened, it invited friends and propagated indiscriminately on brick and wood. An odd smell led to bigger questions, who’s responsible – the landlord or tenant?” Tenants Queensland and the Rental Tenancies Authority conclude that that depends, and the widespread and insistent nature of the problem forces tenants to clean up the effects, even if the landlord is responsible for the causes.
Schindler’s recipe? “Dry the place out by creating a well-ventilated space, then add a bucket full of sunshine and not a drop of moisture. Unfortunately, Bunnings does not sell these things.”
Trimmed, with permission, from https://westender.com.au/mould-the-new-housemate/
Professor Jeffrey Sachs addressed NATO this month, begging European nations not to blindly follow the US into a global war with China and Russia. He says US is no longer a global leader, and is in denial about this, leading the West into a dangerous and futile global war. He points out that successive US presidents expanded NATO despite warnings by European and US diplomats that it would inevitably lead to war. <snip> He also spent much of the last two years investigating the sources of CoViD and believes it escaped US biotech laboratory though this is not yet proven. Jeffrey Sachs is adviser to the UN on the Sustainable Development Goals and professor of economics at the Columbia University.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SequPvRFn0
Jeffrey Sachs in Madrid
Jeffrey Sachs started his speech by saying, we are in a mess. A real mess, and we show no signs of getting ourselves out of it. He then rattled off the list of mistakes that we have made in recent years that have brought western economies crashing down and plunged Africa and South America into chaos. His point that US insistence that the world follow its policies is a major part of the problem and, unless we wake up, and start working cooperatively with China and Russia, it will continue to get worse, not better. I have posted a link to his speech on the 4zzzecoradio socials and to Ecoradio.net. Watch it and weep. It makes perfect sense and we have to convince our government to decouple from the US madness and seriously work toward a sustainable future. The alternative is unthinkable.
My Great Notion of the Week this week is the Mount Tamborine Edible Exchange shared by Wavy.
Wavy shows off ginger at the Mt Tambourine Edible Exchange
It’s an honour system where people can bring food to the central roadside exchange and take food away. No money changes hands. They post pictures online so everyone knows what’s in the food exchange. There’s pictures and more details on EcoRadio.net
Wavy submitted that as a contribution to my Make and Taste sessions designed to get different people in a workplace sharing food with their colleagues and showing how they make it. However we activate our food networks, the important thing is that sharing food disengages us from being nodes of consumption and converts us into hubs of production. Now that’s a great notion.
In this weeks show we are joined in the studio by Chris Fullon,Founder of Australian Urban Growers.
Christopher Fullon describes the nutrient cycle in the Aquaculture set up
Jimmy Southwood shows the results of the nutrient fed plants
The low cost growing set up developed by Christopher Fullon
Jimmy Southwood and Dave Whitfield at the entrance to Barrambin Urban Farm
Barrambin Urban Farm at Kelvin Grove State College
We will talk about urban farming and the future of food security, we will also give you a tour of their set-up in Kelvin Grove State College College and the work that Jimmy Southwood is doing to ensure Indigenous practices are the foundation for learning.
Tune in tomorrow at midday on 4ZZZ 102.1fm for all your ECORADio goodness or listen back after on 4zzz.org.au
This system of agriculture has now hit the interwebs.
The rise of the Green-Teal tide on the weekend speaks volumes about environmental politics. Geoff Ebbs reflects on the implications for the Liberals and the Greens
The destruction of the Liberal Party by Scott Morrison has many dimensions including integrity, misogyny, gender wars, culture wars and climate wars. Both the Teal independents and the Greens benefited from Labor’s luke-warm stance on any of these issues as they pacify their dominant right wing. Plenty of political commentators will ruminate on those general dimensions of the fundamental shift in Australian politics. This piece specifically focuses on the lessons to be learned from the environmental politics of the last three decades for those of us in a position to shape the future. Two points deserve special attention: the hollowing out of the Liberal Party and the impact of capitalists for climate change (Climate 200) on the environment movement. This article deals with the first.
Howard Hollowed the Liberal Left
Guy Pearse – High & Dry 2008
There is plenty of analysis about the loss of the Liberal moderates and the challenges of the pathway back. The historical part of that analysis has the function of identifying past mistakes to avoid them in the future and to map the path forward. Since Saturday night many Liberals and commentators have identified their pet point: Simon Birmingham nominated Abbott’s choice to blow up the party rather than implement the National Energy Guarantee, Michael McCormack thinks Barnaby may have had something to do with it, others blame Morrison for sacrificing inner-city moderates in a deliberate move to attract outer suburban tradies with huge tax-breaks, injections of cash into domestic construction and dog-whistling on gender politics. In a very nasty outburst on election night, journalist Annabelle Crabbe got stuck into Simon Holmes a Court for interfering in the “normal” political process by funding independents.
All these miss the point that the hollowing out of the Liberal Party was well under way two decades ago under Howard. I interviewed Guy Pearse in 2008 on the launch of his book High and Dry. The snip of him discussing the clearing out of the left of the Liberal Party in the 1990s (25 years ago) and its impact on climate policy is highly instructive. The full version of that interview is available in Part 1 and Part 2 on the EcoRadio website.
Shoulda Been There: There are always more interesting events than hours in the day, but every now and then there is an event that is so interesting, rewarding and inspiring I cannot resist saying, “You should’a been there”.
Tyson Ynukaporta – click for audio
This time, you should’a been at the University of South Australia, or online like I was, to see Tyson Yunkaporta and Jack Manning Bancroft deliver the keynote speeches discussing Indigenous Systems Thinking at a day-long event hosted by Uni SA Yunus Social Business Centre, Wicked Lab, and Catalyst 2030.
The reason that it gets raised to Should’a Been There status is the fact that it directly tackles the yawning gulf between the ambitions of the Sustainable Development Goals and the realities of the global economy and offers an approach that might help close the gap.
Dr Yunkaporta nails the intractable dissonance between the normative agenda of, say, eliminating global poverty and the reality that all western liberal democracies fund their well-being through extraction and exploitation of one kind or another. The 11 minute summary of his keynote speech delivers that message in two parts: a yarn demonstrating the complexity of any specific issue followed by an example of how stark the challenge is when you try to address any single issue in that complex array of issues.
Listen to the summary on Geoff’s Soundcloud.
You can follow more of Dr Yunkaporta’s incisive thinking about issues as diverse as artificial intelligence and the nature of truth on his podcast The Other Others or in his book, Sand Talk.
Jack Manning Bancroft
Tyson describes himself as a ‘glass half empty guy’ and hands over to Jack Manning Bancroft as a ‘glass half full kinda guy’. Jack extends the narrative arc from initially identifying a similar gulf between good intentions and actual outcomes of the colonist process of indigenous recognition through specialist events such as NAIDOC, welcomes to country and indigenous studies; making the point that these activities operate as containers or ceilings rather than liberating opportunities or floors. He then describes the leap that he took in smashing the ceiling by taking poor kids from globally exploited populations and giving them opportunities among the global elite.
You can explore Jack’s work at AIME, Fone Free Web, or his books The Eagle Inside and Mentoring: The Key to a Fairer World.
It is also worth exploring the work done by the Wicked Lab and Catalyst 2030 and the other speakers on the day. I found out about the event through Emma-Kate Rose and Rob Pekin of Food Connect who were presenting on the issue of funding social enterprise.
