The latest commentary on the CO2 Newsletters comes from my friend Susan, who was ‘elfdock’ on Bluesky until very recently. It’s brilliant.
I was born in 1953, post WW2 years. Society was still very conservative, religion was big. Liberal politician Robert Gordon Menzies was Prime Minister from 1939 to 1941 and from 1949 to 1966. The free-thinking Beatniks, who rejected the conformity and consumerism of mainstream society, were fading out, to be replaced by the Hippies. That was my generation. We had had a gutsful of war and religion and rejected both. My older sister, a beatnik, was a student at Melbourne University, and living in Carlton. She took me to the Vietnam Moratorium rallies in 1965 and onwards. I was very fortunate to have such an intellectual sister, she sent me good books to read. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, John Griffin’s Black Like Me, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Dharma Bums, among others.
I was living in Balaclava in 1971 when I first saw a visitor wearing a climate change T-shirt. It had a cartoon type drawing on it of a sweating Earth. The words around it said, ‘Mother Earth’s A Bitch And She’s On Heat’. Another time he wore a T-shirt that had a very polluted looking Earth, with an onion line of business men in suits and bowler hats that said, ‘Stop Fucking Mother Earth’. I’m really sorry in hindsight I did not ask him about them, but they certainly stuck in my memory.
My two daughters grew up going to rallies in the mid and late 1970s. Anti Uranium rallies, Stop The Franklin Dam Rallies. They were huge, 100,000 plus people, probably many more, not accurately reported by the MSM. I met David Bellamy, by accident, while we were walking through the Botanical Gardens after one of these rallies. Sadly he did not talk with us about climate change, because he was a denier. Instead he lectured us about not letting the government close down the free Dental Hospital. While free dental care was important, it was not as important as climate change. At this time Bellamy was one of the best known faces on tv. If he had talked about climate change at the rally, I’m sure many people would have listened and acted to stop it. It was a huge opportunity we missed to save life on Earth, including us.
I could never understand why the government failed to act to stop climate change. When I saw the ‘Mother Earth’s A Bitch And She’s On Heat’ T-shirt in 1971 I didn’t fully realise what I was looking at. Apparently there was a professor teaching his students about climate change at Monash University. If he knew, then I’m sure the government knew. To me, it was logical that the government should have educated us, as it did later, with the hole in the ozone layer. But our government was bought and owned by the fossil fuel industry, we didn’t have a hope in hell. And hell is certainly on the way in the near future.
Reading Barbat’s 1981 newsletter, was an eye opener to how governments and scientists refused to act on the CO2 problem. Instead of stopping the use of fossil fuels and switching to renewables, they decided to wait and see until there might be an effect in early 2010/20. By then it was too late to do anything, except, perhaps, mitigate some of the worst effects for coming generations. In 2026 some of the largest fossil fuel projects were given approval in Australia. Many of the young people say they will not be having children because of climate change.
I felt astonished by what Barbat wrote. The level of stupidity by the governments running our only life support system failed miserably. That emails of climate scientists were hacked, selectively edited and then printed in the gutter press, (especially Murdoch), driving some scientist to near suicide, horrifying. Choosing to breed animals that could withstand climate change, instead of stopping it, stupid. Genetically modifying, and taking out illegal patents on seeds stolen from arid countries, anything was better than treating our biosphere with respect.
The First Nations Peoples here have lived with, and in, their environment for 50,000 years at least. They have nurtured and been part of it, instead of thinking of themselves as superior to it. Western people call them ‘primitive’. Since the Industrial Revolution in about 1750 we have almost managed to destroy the entire environmental system that supports life on our planet. The Fafocene is well and truly on the way.