Ten years ago, on this day, January 17th, 2015,the brilliant cartoonist David Pope delivered another brilliant cartoon. You are now leaving the Holocene… Below please find an interview with him, conducted via email a couple of weeks ago.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 401ppm. As of 2025 it is 425ppm, but check here for daily measures.
1. Who are you and how did you get into cartooning?
I drew cartoons for the peace movement and other activist causes when I was younger. Then I started drawing them for the Labour Studies Briefing in Adelaide, while I was a student there. Pre-internet, the Briefing used to produce short summaries of the latest articles and academic research on labour relations and the economy, for trade unions. The unions started to reproduce the cartoons in their own publications, and eventually I decided to devote more time to it.
2. When and how did you get switched on to environmental concerns?
Again, in Adelaide, I started drawing some cartoons for the national magazine of Friends of the Earth. I think I drew my first cartoon on “the greenhouse effect” in 1990, but in the 80s, the possibility of a nuclear winter was more pressing on my young consciousness, and connected to that, the campaign against uranium mining.
3. On the cartoon, do you remember any of the thought processes or the inspiration behind it? Were there any particular responses to it?
No, I have no memory of what prompted that cartoon at the time. Perhaps there was a climate report or interview that was trying to introduce the concept of the Anthropocene to a wider audience. It was reprinted in a few scientific papers and presentations, so I presume it did the job in conveying some sense of epochal transition.
4. Anything else you’d like to say – Chance to plug any books, exhibitions or anything else that you’ve got going on…
I make posters available through RedBubble
https://www.redbubble.com/people/hinze/explore?page=1&sortOrder=recent
Many of those focus on the environments of the high country and the coast near where I live, and are a foil to the daily and more didactic political cartoons I draw for The Canberra Times and ACM. I don’t publish collections of my political cartoons, but some of them make it into Scribe’s excellent annuals, “Best Australian Political Cartoons”, available at most bookshops.
<END OF INTERVIEW>
See also this blog post on my personal website.
Cartoons, catastrophe and the “long” view (even a generation seems as much as we can cope with)
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.
Also on this day
January 17, 1970 – The Bulletin reprints crucial environment/climate article
January 17th – A religious perspective on climate action
January 17, 2001 – Enron engineers energy “blackouts” to gouge consumers