The film about the artist forgotten in Australia and feted in France
One of the most controversial Australian artists of the 80’s, avant-garde, poet and dramaturge, Christopher Barnett turned the literary and theatre worlds on their heads, and then abruptly left for France where he has lived for the past 20 years and where he has won many followers and admirers including the current prime minister.
With project development assistance from Screen Australia, South Australian Film Corporation and Screen NSW, I saw an urgent need to go immediately to France and start making a documentary that rediscovers the work of this significant Australian, giving him his due recognition as one of our great artists. We have some French finance and a French broadcaster on board to be able to return to France to continue shooting. However, we need to raise the finance to shoot and post the Australian content. We are asking your support to assist us reach our target of $25K. We’re so close but only with your support we can make this happen! Visit the website
Weather is not the climate
But extreme weather is increasingly common
Climate chaos is here to stay.
We can pretend that it is someone else’s problem (and party while they die),
that technology will fix it (and keep consuming as we burn)
or we can take responsibility (and build a robust, resilient world).
The Greens plan for the long term,
The Greens build for future generations
The Greens govern honestly and wisely
This week the National Climate Data Center confirmed what most had long believed: 2012 was the warmest year on record for the United States. Ever. And not just a bit warmer: a full Fahrenheit degree warmer than in 1998, the previous high. In the land of climatology statistics, that is immense. In the understatement of one climate scientist, these findings are “a big deal.”
AN AQUATIC veterinarian critical of the dredging project in Gladstone Harbour has attacked testing and reporting methods used by authorities.
Dr Matt Landos has written a long list of criticisms of testing by Gladstone Ports Corporation (GPC) and the Department of Environment and Heritage Protection (EHP).
Those departments yesterday went on the front foot, delivering lengthy answers, and rejections, of Dr Landos’s criticisms.
The Green movement is founded on simple beliefs that resonate with a broad section of the community. Despite this, voters’ lack of confidence in Green economic policy has stopped them turning to The Greens at the ballot box.
“The Australian Labor Party is associated with the carbon tax and with these nutty fruity ideas …
“The Labor Party was a good, proper organisation, a decent organisation. But the trouble is, as a motor vehicle it looks great but when you lift up the bonnet there is a little green donkey in there.”
Senator Barnaby Joyce, Nationals Senate Leader,
Monday March 26 2012, Radio National Breakfast
In typical style, the lad from St George has created an accurate and perceptive metaphor with little understanding of what he has uttered into existence.
Without permission of the honourable Joyce, the little green donkey might well discard the dilapidated carcass of the ALP and release its inner dragon to successfully and wisely govern a post-materialist, resource-constrained future.
Such a transformation requires significant pain. Since voters will not willingly inflict pain on themselves, the transformation has to take place in the party itself.
The transformation of the political landscape demands a clear and unambiguous vision of the Green future. The transformation of the party demands a frank analysis and a roadmap of the internal and external obstacles to achieving that vision.
A series by Laurie Stubbs – first published in the Nimbin Good Times
The series sets out a trial set of values based on the principle Life Develops Itself (LDI)
Take anything you want from the Earth and use it, but when you have finished with it return it to the Earth in the same form as when you took it.
Natural breakdown and change of all things on Earth happens on a rational and predictable base. Interference by humanity upsets rationality, produces massive problems. To fail at recycling robs Earth of what it needs to continue to sustain life. Here again the LDI principle is directly involved.
Industrial and mining wastes must be fully recycled. Minerals will always be taken from the earth’s crust, but the earth must be restored to the function level that applied before the mining. Equally, the junk which most of these minerals become must be recycled as resources for repeat products — not merely buried or put out of sight. For example, nuclear wastes are a huge potential for damage temporarily locked away in one form or another. Humanity has so far baulked at the cost of reprocessing but allows an unrealistic profit to be taken today.
Taking materials from the earth in future carries an obligation to reprocess whatever wastes are involved and return them safely to the earth. Action is — in the long run — agreed to (or allowed) and therefore is done by the people as a whole whether the immediate actor is Governments or corporations.
We must review collectively what is done in our name.
Do whatever you like on the Earth as long as it does not change the systems that make the Earth our home, nor deprive a species of its livelihood.
This is an extension of the value above Take anything you want from the Earth and use it, — but includes a wider framework so as to maintain earth systems, and existing species. The current example is global warming, and its effect on weather change. In turn, weather change could be catastrophic.
Take any living thing for food, but acknowledge your debt to it, and do enough work to replace it.
All living things ‘work for a living’. Ant and termite colonies function to allow the breakdown of materials into a form plants can use. Bacteria, insects fish, reptiles, mammals and all the rest have interrelated functions in a marvellously complex chain of action that works to allows all to survive as species. Complexity and diversity is part of the way life develops itself. But humanity has the choice to decide whether a particular person may work.
Though the meaning of “work” changes when we look at mankind, it is still input to a complex exchange between humans and the environment. But some humans do not work, and so are denied the self respect and status which comes from the western idea of work. If such a person were to create a vegetable garden and grow what they eat, they would have stepped outside the conventional wisdom, would have “worked” within the work notion of this value.
The work of growing is a process of understanding a personal relatedness to the earth and all its species. That relatedness is the essence of the work idea contained in this value. One life form preys on another throughout the gamut of species. Today’s human numbers don’t accept that foodstocks have a life. An element of human balance has thus been lost.
Accepting the contribution of other living things to our lives recognises our dependence on other species and the planet’s interlocking systems. All living things contribute in one way or another to the lives of all the rest.
Resources are conserved; used carefully without wastefulness or selfishness.
Natural use of and changes of materials from one form to another sets the standard. Humankind must conform to this natural law.
Human wastes are returned safely to the soil.
What comes from the earth must go back to the earth. All natural life forms do it. Man is no exception.
Regard the Earth as held in trust by you for your descendants.
It is axiomatic the LDI principle insists on preserving the earth in good shape. That it can be preserved is shown by Australian Aboriginal experience. As a value it is in direct contrast to the conventional Western resources to rubbish paradigm; many of the worlds problems have origins which flow from that outlook.
Weather is not the climate
