First, thanks to all those who have liked and/or retweeted some of the recent posts on AOY – two have had quite a lot of digital love recently – one about the January 17 1970 article in The Bulletin (it got an initial boost thanks to Simon Holmes à Court) and now January 27 1967 about James Lovelock being asked to keep quiet about climate change by his employer, Shell. And thanks to those who have shared stuff in the past – you know who you are!.
This post will tell you
- a little about me
- what the site is, why it is, how I do it (lots of help) and where to find info
- how YOU can help.
Again, thanks to all those who’ve sent encouragement, ideas, corrections etc. Staring into the abyss long-term requires that sort of support, and I am very grateful.
Who am I?
I grew up in South Australia (the streets are so wide, everybody’s inside…), with some time in the UK too. I was at the “right” age to be influenced first by the news of the “Ozone Hole” and Amazon deforestation, and then the “Greenhouse Effect.” I have been very very privileged in my life, and acquired two undergrad degrees (a BA and a BSc) and also a PhD at University of Manchester (no Masters). I’ve lived in Australia, the US, Denmark, Mozambique and Angola. I was an aid worker, a physiotherapist (amputee rehab) and am now a jobbing academic. Influences include Noam Chomsky, Donna Haraway and many many other folks. Fave magazines would include Peace News, the London Review of Books, Private Eye and Viz (I’ve had letters in all four). Married to a brainiac, we have three cats. That is *quite* enough about me. You need more info, check out my website www.marchudson.net (but seriously, life is short and the termination point(s) beckon…
This site
I have always liked “on this day” sites. I tried to get AOY going twice – in 2014 and 2017, but on both occasions ran out of steam – in September and July respectively. Something changed (the pandemic?) and at the end of 2021 I decided third time lucky. By this time I’d build up a big database of events, from fairly assiduous note-taking when reading academic articles, newspapers, books, websites. And I’ve supplemented that with archive dives (I love archives).
The thing I want readers of it to understand is that in 1988, when the issue exploded onto the public agenda, (James Hansen’s testimony, George HW Bush on the campaign trail, and then Margaret Thatcher at the Royal Society), there was already A HELL OF A LOT of material – much of it in the mainstream media (radio, television, newspapers). Going back thirty years. You can read an article I had on The Conversation about that, celebrating the work of Canadian physicist Gilbert Plass.
That means, really, the problem is only very partly a question of “information deficit”. It is much more a problem of social movement organisations being able to maintain their ability to push, poke and prod bureaucracies, politicians and corporations to not just promise the right thing, but to actually do the ‘right’ thing.
So, this is the third year of All Our Yesterdays. I almost didn’t continue, but the kind words and support of a few key people tipped the balance. Thanks to them, especially to my staunch proof-reader Sam (all remaining errors are of course my responsibility). Thanks to my wife, and to the moorhens on the canal (I narrated the 450+ posts that go up this year while feeding them, ran the recordings through voice recognition software, tided and sent to my proofer.)
There’s a search function at the top, and I also have made (manually!) a chronological list from 1768 to the present day (I haven’t yet updated for the posts that have gone up this year) and also for each month of the last two years – go to resources and the pull down menu for this, at the bottom where it says “years and years.” And beware of the leopard….
How you can help
a) keep tweeting, sharing etc. It encourages me to keep going.
b) use the info on this site in newsletters, or when you are doing talks., events etc. There are posts for every day of the year, so you can always find one to be able to say “24 years ago today,” or “19 years ago today” or whatever.
c) invite me on your podcast/TV show/radio show whatever. I can talk about the site, climate politics, social movements, carbon capture and storage and some other things too (Doctor Who, for example).
d) suggest things that happened that deserve coverage (I will probably do 2025, if civilisation is still standing). especially if these things don’t involve white people in Australia/USA/UK doing/saying things. The race (and gender) skew in the existing posts is appalling.
e) write a guest post or do an interview (I will supply the questions). Some (all) of the very best posts on this site are interviews or guest posts.
f) tell me when I have got things totally wrong or a little bit wrong/incomplete.
g) if you are a film maker, or a cartoonist or whatever, get in touch if you can share some of your expertise/skills. I do not have any budget though – sorry…
The main thing that is missing from this site (and will probably only kick if/when I do another) is answers to the “What is to be Done?” question.
For now, here’s a couple of pieces. One is from Peace News, about “how we blew it again” and the other is a downbeat thing from my own site about the dynamics within social movement organisations, and their incentive structures. As James Baldwin said “not everything that can be faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”