Category: Interviews

One of the best things about running this site is it offers the excuse to ask smart people to write about their lives and perspectives. This is a long (unedited) interview that I think deserves and will repay your close attention.

1. Tell us a bit about who you are – where and when you grew up, and how and when you first learnt about climate change,

Answer: My name is Anthony Negus, known to many people by my second name, Shane, and I was born in Beverley (Ballardong Noongar name: Wergijan), Western Australia in 1957 to the farming couple Geoffrey and Shirley Negus.. My Australian settler-colonial forebears on both sides were almost all farming people, back to the 1830s on my paternal side and the 1850s on my maternal side.

As we have been in Western Australia so long, I am of mixed ancestry, which made my family rather unusual in those times inasmuch as many of these forebears married across both religious and class lines: free settler Presbyterian Scots with Irish Catholics of convict stock (a taboo subject when I was a child, convict ancestry being widely seen still as a stain on a family’s reputation and standing in small country communities). Welsh non-Conformists and Church of England members wed and bred and some of their offspring went on to marry Catholics who had converted from Judaism. None of this was easy in Beverley/Wergijan at the time for those who crossed sectarian divides, which also usually meant crossing the class divide: landed gentry who lived on large farms and “Nobs Hill”–for snobs, I guess–versus the hoi-polloi of lesser pedigree and far less wealth in most cases, certainly those who were Catholic. However, there was a plus in this situation for me: our family was by and large much more tolerant of difference and diversity than was typical of country Sandgropers (Western Australians). All this religious bigotry and animosity faded gradually from the early 1960s onwards but I still recall kids from the state school and those of us at the convent school taunting each other with ugly shouted insults and chants such as ”Catholic dogs stink like frogs, in and out of water logs”. This made for an interesting transition for those of us enrolled in the state school after the convent school closed. Happily, it all went pretty smoothly.

Less fortunate by far were the Noongar kids who attended Beverley Junior High. This was very much still the era of white supremacy pervading every aspect of the laws and culture of WA society, symbolised most tellingly in the White Australia Policy and the infamous WA Aboriginal Act 1905, a major influence some decades later when a newly elected racist government in South Africa legislated the country’s apartheid regime, drawing much of its inspiration and specific measures that would segregate the races from longstanding segregationist laws in both WA and Queensland. I witnessed the appalling living conditions for Noongar people at the Beverley native reserve. The poverty and lack of even the most basic services or amenities shocked me. My parents were hardscrabble farmers who lived with three children in a house that would be today considered very basic, if quite comfortable by the standards of the day. But we had running water; the Noongars on the reserve did not; we wadjellas (Noongar: non-Indigenous people, overwhelmingly whites of British and Irish ancestry then, as now) could move freely in the community but the Noongars had to abide by a curfew every night; by law, employers were permitted to pay Noongar workers a much lower wage than their wadjella co-workers doing the same job; and certainly the cruellest and most unjust thing the state government’s Native Welfare Department bureaucrats did, usually carried out on the ground by policemen was forced removal of so-called “half caste” Noongar children from their families, after which the littlies, some just babies, went into missions run most often by Christian denominations of one sort or another. This happened to a close friend of mine, now a much respected and outspoken elder, a woman who, as a young girl was used by a number of Benedictine priests, in her words, as a “sex slave”. She wasn’t the only one and many decades later the report issued by the Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that the New Norcia schools run by the Catholic Church represented one of the worst hotspots for such abuse in all Australia, a veritable paedophiles’ picnic.

I attended school locally at the Beverley Convent School, which closed in 1966 due to falling enrolments, then attended the Junior High School from Year 5 in 1967 to 1972. After that, I attended Aquinas College in Perth/Boorloo as a boarding student and completed my Leaving Certificate in 1974, achieving matriculation, which meant that I could apply to enrol in one of a wide range of courses at the University of Western Australia because my examination results were high enough to qualify me to do so. Our family farm was small, just 1000 acres on hard country and with three children to support on a very modest income, made more difficult by a bad drought in 1969 and death duties levied on my grandfather’s farm following his death in 1968. The farm was now managed by my father and he was faced with inherited debts, impending death duty liabilities and a harsh drought which resulted in a poor crop. If it wasn’t that I won a Commonwealth Student Scholarship at the end of Year 10, my parents wouldn’t have had the money to enrol me at Aquinas College.

This financial struggle for my parents during the whole of the 1970s prompted me to take what was known as a student teacher bond. This scheme enabled students to obtain a Teachers Certificate at very low cost because the WA government paid for one’s course without requirement to repay the money received, on one proviso: that a bonded graduate would serve for a minimum of three years somewhere in the state. As I wanted to become a secondary school English, History and Media Studies teacher, I seized the opportunity to sign up for the bond, thus greatly reducing the financial contribution my parents would have had to have made towards my tuition at WASTC and boarding costs at a university residential college. In fact, my father made it very clear that if I couldn’t find my own means of paying to attend three years at the teachers’ college, I’d have to abandon the idea because he didn’t have the money to support me for so long.

As a fairly solitary farm boy I spent a lot of my time until I was 15 walking through bushland and along the banks of the local river, the Avon (in Ballardong, Gugulja Bilya), observing very closely the native plant and animal species; which I continued doing when back home on holidays from Aquinas in 1973 and 1974.

My siblings and I grew up witnessing regular flooding events, the worst of which caused major damage to roads, bridges and buildings. There were a lot of heavy rainfall events from April onwards, through to late spring. Frosts were a part of everyday life on most winter mornings, some of them ‘black frosts’ which were colder and more penetrating than lighter frosts, so did more damage to frost-sensitive plants kept under cover on verandas. The upside was that fruit trees such as apples and pears, which require at least 300 chill hours, that is hours below 7-degrees Celsius, across autumn-winter-spring, did well and fruited heavily. Frosts are now significantly less frequent or severe, with an occasional cold snap perhaps lasting a few days, but nothing like we experienced in the mid-20^th century.

Bureau of Meteorology weather records taken since the 1950s show that annual rainfall has declined in the south-west of WA by at least 20 percent and frosts are much less common than they were. It’s also now much warmer across all seasons on average. The early signs of the impacts of anthropogenic global heating began to become evident from the mid-1970s on, especially to those of us deeply connected to the local natural environment and involved in maintaining healthy, productive domestic gardens. The climate simply wasn’t what it used to be.

In 1977, I became the first member of my family in Western Australia to obtain a tertiary education degree, which happened when I graduated from the Western Australian Secondary Teachers’ College. I was employed by a leading Catholic school named John XXIII College, which had only come into existence that year following an amalgamation of the all-girls Loreto Convent and the Jesuit-run all-boys St Louis School. It was the beginning of a long and successful career at John XXIII College, during which time I rose from a fledging first-year teacher on probation to serve for five years as deputy principal, from 1994 to 1999, after which I gained employment as an educational consultant and, finally, researcher at the Catholic Education Office of WA. I left education in 2005 and retrained as a horticulturalist, a career I pursued until I retired from the paid workforce in 2023.. The last ten years of that period was spent working as a sole trader, offering horticultural services to customers back  in my Wheatbelt town where I’d relocated from Perth/Boorloo in 2012, largely because I wanted to live close to my elderly parents and to do some caring for them (cooking meals, driving them to medical appointments in Northam, a regional hub for the Wheatbelt and very often to the ‘big smoke’.

As a horticulturist living and working back in my hometown, the impacts of global heating on the environment were clear for all to see: massively increased bushfire risk, depletion of plant and animal species, the aforementioned much reduced annual rainfall, annual temperature increases across all seasons, very rare flooding events (and those that occurred weren’t so much during winter, as in the 1950s to 1970s, but as the result of summer thunderstorm events.)

Long before all this, though, I was coming across reports in the news about the theory of human-induced global warming and predictions of super-cyclones if our species kept emitting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at the rate then taking place, since much accelerated by the burning of ever-increasing amounts of fossil fuels such as coal, gas and oil.

Climate scientists were already modelling the changes in climate and probable adverse impacts of AGW on the climate of south-west WA. This was in the mid-1980s and they were warning of much more severe impacts in coming decades unless the burning of fossil fuels wasn’t drastically reduced, not just in WA but across the entire world. I had no hesitation, like my colleagues, many of whom also grew up on farms in the State or “over east”, of teaching students in Social Studies classes about global heating and what the future held for them and future generations of AGW wasn’t dealt with by the world’s governments.

We are certainly paying a heavy price for that inaction in the south-west of WA, our largest population centre by far, with mass tree deaths in the Jarrah and Karri forests due mostly to having not received ANY significant rainfall during the hottest summer on record.  My 92-year-old mother had to get though night-time temperatures in her house of over 30C for days on end during repeated power outages in January and February. She couldn’t sleep, having not even a fan to cool her off a bit. As a result of this experience, she asked her three children, of whom I’m the eldest, to put her house on the market so she could move into a modern air-conditioned aged care facility that has back-up power storage if there’s a system blackout. The house sold quickly and she’s now happily ensconsed in a new beaut facility.

A farmers’ wife who used to read The Australian (a Murdoch newspaper) and believe their climate denialist commentary and reports has become utterly convinced that human-induced global heating is real. I’d expect the penny has now dropped for hundreds of thousands of Western Australians who swallowed the News Corps lies about climate change—the evidence of its massive impacts is now staring them in the face and many have endured a summer they would never want to go through again but are certain too. The alarming thing is that we are only at the early stages of a rapidly warming planet and much worse is to come.

Certainly it’s a massive issue for most voters in Kate Chaney’s federal seat of Curtin where trees and shrubs are dying as they’ve reached the point of terminal wilting and commuters into the city centre and home again are in peak hour traffic, crawling past tree after tree that are either dead or clearly dying. The weather forecast is for another three months of above average maxima and minima, and with very little rainfall in prospect until late June, early July. If relieving rains do come, it will be far too late save millions of trees in state forests and along street verges in the Metropolitan area. I’m observing all this around the leafy—or should I say, increasingly much less leafy—western suburbs of Perth/Boorloo, in the heart of Curtin, once a jewel in the crown of the WA Liberal Party, the membership of which is rapidly decreasing and Kate Chaney’s prospects of being re-elected at the 2025 federal election are looking better by the day, unlike the fate of our vegetation and animal species acutely impacted by the prolonged, truly unprecedented drought.

It’s really very depressing yet our state Labor government is gung-ho about developing more huge gas projects in the north and mid-west of the state, knowing full well that the IEA, WMO, NOAA and more than 99 percent of the world’s climate scientists, as well as many scientific bodies around the world, have declared that no new fossil fuel projects can be opened from here on if we are to avoid catastrophic impacts of AGW in coming decades. It’s nothing less than state capture by the big gas companies such as Woodside, Santos and the Stokes’ family’s interests in gas companies like Beach Energy. The full influence and power of WA’s monopolistic SevenWest Network is all but total and neither major party dares to defy the damage that could be inflicted by Stokes using Network Seven and his newspapers as an organ of propaganda for Big Gas or deployed them to campaign against any party which says it will take real action to lower WA’s GHG emissions.

 2. When did you first start to see changes with your own eyes? What were they? What changes have you seen over the decades? Do you think the pace and/or scope of change is increasing?

As stated above, I’ve been noticing the impacts of AGW on our climate in the south-west of WA, both in the Wheatbelt and here in the city, since at least the early 1970s.

Much can be gleaned about my perspective on this issue from this letter I wrote, published in The Farm Weekly back in May 2019, another very hot year, just as it was to be during the black summer fires over east in late 2019, early 2020…

Last Thursday, an out of control bushfire raged in the hills near Mundaring on a day which reached a maximum of 30-degrees Celcius. It is mid-May, WA has recorded its hottest autumn on record, and we’ve yet to receive any significant rainfall.

It is little wonder to me, then, that 23 former fire and emergency services chiefs from across Australia, people with over 600 years of combined experience, recently warned that “the burning of coal, oil and gas is worsening extreme weather events, including hot days, heatwaves, heavy rainfall, coastal flooding and catastrophic bushfire weather.”

Having grown up in heartland Country (National) Party territory, I’m well aware that many primary producers are leery of meta-scientific theories such as anthropogenic global warming. Therefore, I offer the following argument for a paradigm shift based on a conservative rather than progressive perspective.

What do the following pragmatic conservative institutions, corporations and organisations have in common?

The British royal family, Bank of England, Insurance Council of Australia, National Farmers Federation, U.S. Defense Department, Exxon Mobil Corp, Catholic Church, Reserve Bank of Australia, and the centre-right governments of the UK, Germany and many European nations.

Answer: they all accept the scientific consensus on human-induced global warming and the need to take urgent action to both reduce the rate of future global temperature increases and to ameliorate the effects which now cannot be avoided because of carbon emissions already locked into the world’s atmosphere.

That so many leading conservative entities across the world have reached this position on climate change should come as no surprise. One of the bedrock principles of conservatism is to protect, conserve and be good stewards of the environment on which human civilisation and prosperous economies depend.

True conservatives also adhere to the precautionary (or prudential) principle of making fact-based decisions calculated to minimise the risk of avoidable and potentially catastrophic events in the future. Hence the insurance industry’s longstanding acceptance of the science on climate change.

I’m an ardent republican but I couldn’t agree more with Prince Charles, our likely next monarch: “We should be treating the whole issue of climate change and global warming with a far greater degree of priority than I think is happening now.”

3. What changes do you think are coming to your part of the world?
Please distil my answer to this question from all I’ve said above. In a phrase, we are facing a real and imminent existential threat.

4. Beyond “all of us”, who is to blame?

That’s a toughie because the culprits for a very large percentage of GHG emissions across the world cover their tracks with obfuscation, dodgy science done by their hireling scientists, massive positive PR campaigns about their bogus claims of taking real action, mobilising Australia’s media to regurgitate the propaganda sent them by Big Carbon outfits (to say nothing of the threats of losing advertising dollars if particular media companies go hard on the issue—thank God, not a big problem for the likes of The Guardian Australia and The New Daily).

But I remember seeing a recent article somewhere, probably The Guardian, which reported that something like 60% of all GHG emissions are produced by a surprisingly small number of giant companies across a range of industries. Ah, found it…
The majority of fossil fuel companies produce more emissions after Paris Agreement than before: report – ABC News

And I have to say, too, living as I do in a small, very conservative rural community where upwards of ten percent of voters cast their ballots for Pauline Hanson’s mob of drongoes and a much larger percentage for the climate-denying Liberal MHR for the seat of O’Connor, Rick Wilson, there’s still a big number of people, mostly baby boomers and older, who loudly and aggressively denounce climate change as a hoax.

The pig-ignorant opinions of these people, most of whom have never heard of the scientific method, let alone ever respected the “eggheads” who do, pose a real encumbrance, if not menace, to our society by encouraging the climate deniers in politics to obstruct any real climate action even more boldly, aided and abetted always by anti-science, anti-expertise-in-any-field populists like Hanson, Dutton, Palmer, Stokes and his media lackeys. Their influence extends so far that Labor has been far too timorous in its policy settings on bringing down GHG emissions—and, worse, it is waving through the opening of new fossil fuel developments and expansion of existing projects across the country, all the while disingenuously claiming it is fair dinkum on tackling AGW.

5. What is to be done, beyond bracing for further impacts?

It will mark a big shift in Australian politics when the Millenials become the largest voting bloc, displacing us baby boomers and the so-called Great Generation in the near future. The centre of political gravity on climate change in Australia will lurch, if not altogether towards the Greens, then certainly towards independents like Kate Chaney demanding far more ambitious climate change mitigation and adaptation policies.

It’s going to be very difficult for people in this region of Australia to brace for the enormous impacts that are already unfolding at an alarming pace. The only glimmer of hope I take from our current environmental calamity is that it will make the job of climate denying politicians extremely hard, trying to sell a dog of a policy to promote nuclear power generation to an already VERY sceptical public, given that we’d be unlikely to see any form of reactor, small or large, built and operating, this side of 2040, even if the technology were viable as a part of our energy mix at a commercially competitive price, which it most certainly isn’t as things stand.

The reality is that the federal Coalition is just stalling for time to help their mates out in Big Carbon, major donors to the Liberals and Nationals and likely employers of many a retired politician looking for a handsomely renumerated job lobbying for the likes of Woodside, Gina Rinehart, Kerry Stokes, etc. It’s an incredible fact, related to me by Dr Colin Hughes, a former public health administrator in this State and passionate campaigner for far more ambitious action, that every single retired resources minister across Australia, both state and federal, Coalition or Labor, has landed a job with a fossil fuel company since 2001. It’s state capture like this makes me realise that only people power expressed through protests, shareholder activism, Extinction Rebellion actions, voting for Greens and independent candidates, etc, that we have any hope of overcoming Big Carbon’s capture of the major political parties. I assume you are across what happened at Woodside’s AGM last week—a hopeful development, though unlikely to shift the Executive’s and Board’s heedless disregard for the damage they are threatening to do to the prospects of our young ones here in south-west WA living anywhere nearly as well, safely and securely as my generation and my parents have. Woodside is facing a rapid, sharp reduction in their social licence as things get worse in coming years here.

Though pancreatic cancer will probably claim me in the next few years—unless I defy the odds as Eric Idle has—I’m desperately worried about the impacts AGW is going to impose on the lives of my children and grandchildren. For one thing, Western Australia is sparsely populated and the shores of our north-west regions will be a tempting destination for the vast hordes of climate refugees from places like Bangladesh, the Maldives and other low-lying countries in our region. I shudder to think what an Australian government might do to prevent their arrival. Never mind that Australia has been one of the most recalcitrant of climate laggards—no, too generous, hopelessly irresponsible—in dealing with an existential threat that is likely to affect Australia more severely than anywhere else, as demonstrated by the record flooding events in the east and the unprecedented big dry, certainly since Europeans have been here in WA.

I’m doing what little I can during my cancer treatment to make fossil fuel companies and their media company enablers/collaborators/hirelings realise that they will be remembered as climate criminals in years to come, even by many of their own children and grandchildren. To that end I’ve been making hard-hitting comments about both individuals and companies committing these egregious climate crimes, even daring them to sue me for defamation so I can mount a truth defence argued by barristers representing me pro bono and the many distinguished climate scientists and international bodies like the IEA, WMO, NOAA, Professor Michael Mann and many others who’d be more than happy to give evidence as to the dangers posed by fossil fuel companies continuing to expand their activities with massive projects such as the Scarborough gas project, on which these scientists have belled the cat…
Why this new climate case against the high-polluting Scarborough gas project is so significant (theconversation.com)

The latest interview with a reader of All Our Yesterdays. If you want to do an interview, or want to nominate someone to be interviewed, let me know via drmarchudson@gmail.com

1.  Who are you and what do you “do” around climate change campaigning (can answer both ‘personally’ and professionally 

Hi, thanks for asking. I’m an OBGYN and began reading about the climate crisis in 2008 –the year my twins were born. I lived in Southern California from 2010 until 2021 and during that time I saw marked changes in the landscape and hydrology in the area, and very few people talking about it. In 2020 the Bobcat fire raged behind my house and for weeks we were told to be ready to evacuate, the air quality was horrific and we truly couldn’t even walk outside save for essential transport, like going to work or the grocery store. The fire eventually burned 115k acres and it really scared me, physically and mentally. I had been working the majority of my career as a physician on issues around gender equity, and I realized that there was a necessary intersection between women’s and maternal health equity, reproductive justice, and the climate crisis, and decided to focus my efforts in my spare time learning about how temperature affects preterm births, how wildfire affects lung function, how phthalates in plastics affect birth weight, preterm birth, and cancer, and many other consequences to living in a society dependent on fossil fuel, whether as energy or as consumer products, and that both were having profound effects on human health. Another doctor and I started OBGYNs for Sustainable Future focused on assisting the medical field to decarbonize and study the intersection of the climate and fossil fuel crisis and human and maternal health. 

2. When and how did you first hear about climate change and when and how did it move from an “ooh, that sounds bad” to “holy fucking SHIT”

Great question, I used to have nightmares when I lived in California, that I would get into the shower and no water would come out.  And I had that dream over and over again.  I remember in 2006 hearing about climate change and drought on the NPR show Marketplace, but it was far off.  The first time I started thinking about in a serious way was about 15 years ago – it was an article about ocean acidification, and I remember thinking that based on the math, the Great Barrier Reef would be nearly dead by the time my kids graduated high school, nor would I spend the jet fuel, CO2, to go see it. And that was a revelation: that things in this world will disappear soon, in our lifetimes, due to our consumptive extractivist lifestyles and our absent understanding of ecology.  I’ve been reading more and more since that article, listening, learning.  Now I lecture on the topic of climate change and health. The question is: how many people have felt the terror of all that we are poised to lose?  I would argue not enough.  Not a fraction of enough. 

3. What can we learn from the long long history of unsuccessful campaigning and scientific warnings (a theme of All Our Yesterdays).  What do campaigners/activists/concerned citizens need to do differently? 

Another excellent question. I do think talking to people (friends, neighbors, colleagues) helps.  I know I feel reenergized especially when I speak to others that understand the severity of the situation. Call us doomers, call us climate realists, I don’t care what the label is, I care that people understand the science and are willing to speak openly about the implications of the science. To be sure children and young adults may need some protection from the catastrophe unfolding, but adults?  Nah.  It makes me furious when I see smart people downplay the severity in the name of keeping the public calm.  Like we’re children?  If civil society is going to break when they understand what is inevitable, then that society wasn’t built to endure, which, I would argue, our society is very fragile and not built to endure. Would you not tell a patient whose MRI shows invasive cancer that she doesn’t have cancer?  No, you wouldn’t, that would be paternalistic.  I think civil disobedience helps, and I have given hundreds of dollars to Climate Defiance for their work, I think it’s impactful.  I think the media could do a much better job, as we saw media coverage of the crisis in the U.S. was down in 2023, the hottest year in 125,000.  Make that make sense?  We need more stories connecting the world of Dune and that of Earth, what would a world devoid of plants and water mean, and how many people could it support?  Spoiler, not many!  I think the language of degrowth needs to get louder.  People need to be shown that an economy (maybe 1/10000000th of the size) could exist without extraction. 

4.  What projects/events have you got coming up in the near future that you want to give a shout out to.  

I am doing a local talk at a library in April.  I’m interviewing an expert on the connection between phthalate exposure and preterm birth, among other ills when we eat, breathe and are constantly ingesting plastic.  I’m also working on an editorial, that may become a book, about how essential it is to equate climate justice and reproductive justice.  Contraception and education are imperative so that women and girls have the ability to choose if and when they want to have a child in this crisis.  People say, “but having a child is an act of hope,” but hope can’t feed you when crops fail due to drought and floods.  The patriarchy, a system that has operated for 10,000+ years, cannot continue. We cannot continue to subjugate women and girls to a system that has forced or encouraged them to have children for the church, for the state, for capitalism, for tribal government and systems. Reproductive justice is climate justice.  Women and girls’ bodies are not anyone’s to write a personal or societal agenda on.  People complaining that society will collapse if women stop having children… who will support the old people?  If the system can’t support elders because too much is siphoned off in profits for a tiny minority, then the problem is the system, not women.  A universal income would go a long way to supporting the elderly.  But we can’t have universal income because then how would Mark Zuckerberg afford a 300 million yacht.  The top 1% in the world own 30% of the world’s wealth.  That is a system designed to collapse.  Not the problem of women and girls to fix for ya’ll.  I want to give a shout out to Nandita Bajaj at Population Balance. I’ve been taking a course through Antioch University with her and others and I’ve learned a lot of about capitalism, forced birth, pronatalism, speciesism, ecocide and what it would mean to downsize in order that natural ecosystems can flourish alongside human flourishing.  

Ben King is a teacher, based in Devon, and a regular retweeter of All Our Yesterdays tweets. He kindly agreed to answer some questions…

1. Who are you, what do you do and how/when did you become aware of climate change specifically?

I’m Ben King, born in South Derbyshire 50 years ago, and I probably first heard about changing climates during my undergraduate Environmental Science degree at Stirling University (1991-95). During my soil erosion PhD research at Exeter University (1995-1998) I made no mention of climate change and I don’t remember much focus on the issues. My awareness grew through engagement with other scientists and teachers on Twitter from around 2010. Since then I have done my best to self-educate and also to impart an understanding of climate change to the thousands of students I have taught at Churston Ferrers Grammar School – especially since my involvement with EduCCate Global since 2019.

I was approached by Melanie Harwood of eduCCate Global (via Twitter) in 2019 and she encouraged me and thousands of teachers across the World to take the accredited United Nations courses on Climate Change and to push for whole-school change; this led to my school TLR position as Co-Lead for Sustainability and I also talked (via Zoom) at the COP26 Climate Change conference. Since then, I appeared on local TV with my Year 11s, and I have presented to various interested groups in Devon, from Totnes Town Council, Torbay Council, our local river catchment management group, Devon Youth Parliament and a group of amateur astronomers. My involvement with eduCCate Global also led to a BBC Radio Devon interview, about Climate Change Teachers. Great to get the word out there!

2. What’s been your experience of Climate Twitter- what is useful, what is not so useful….

Climate Twitter is very useful to me, in keeping up to speed with the facts and in tagging resources for my GCSE and A-level lessons in particular. Also for my regular lunchtime Sustainability Club at CFGS. We recently joined-up with another local school and local film-maker Les Veale to show his short film based on Climate Futures and to hold a live Q & A session with George Monbiot.

3. You teach young people – what is your sense of their thoughts, and (how) have their views on climate change evolved over the years you’ve been paying attention?

Most of the children I teach really care about C C, but they feel helpless. In fact, when we study climate change, many of them struggle to focus on the issue; I put this down to their feelings of anxiousness and powerlessness. I therefore focus on positive framing and how everyone can make a positive influence in the World. I am very proud of some of our most active Sustainable Leaders, who have campaigned for reducing meat consumption, for more efficient lighting at school, and many of our younger students have worked with my fellow Sustainability Lead, Jo Parkes, to organise pre-loved Clothes Sales, raising money for environmental charities.

4. Tuba? When? How?

Tuba playing started for me at the age of eight. For over 40 years it has been a brilliant companion and a way for me to switch-off from my academic studies and my teaching. It’s a wonderful way to meet people and it has given me some amazing opportunities.

The weekly interviews resume! A couple of weeks ago I met a wonderful person at a very good public meeting. She kindly agreed to answer some questions…

a) Who are you?  Where were you born, where did you grow up and when did you first start to think that there were serious environmental problems ahead?  Was it a book, a TV show, a friend?

I am a baby boomer, born in 1947 in Adelaide.

b) When did you first become aware of the climate element of the environmental problems, and how.

 I had assumed that one day I might have a child or two, but when a colleague introduced me to books he was using as resources to teach geography in 1971, I started reading them: The Club of Rome’s ‘The Limits to Growth’ and ‘The Population Bomb’ amongst them. Paul Erlich visited South Australia around that time and has been several times since on speaking tours and, each time, I have been to hear him. He is utterly inspiring, and he was absolutely correct in his predictions in the late 1960s, for which he was derided at the time.

c) You mentioned that you chose not to have children because of the population crisis. That must have struck a lot of people as crazy, back then. What sorts of responses did you get. Given that you were only a woman, in an intensely patriarchal society, presumably a lot of the responses involved telling you you’d change your mind, that you were being hysterical etc etc?

I subsequently married the above mentioned colleague and we decided that, knowing what we knew, it would be irresponsible of us to make more people. At that time the ZPG movement was quite strong in South Australia, and we hoped that it might result in some sensible population policies from our government. It didn’t!. It fizzled. And since then I have been gob-smacked to go to environmental rallies where I see youngish couples trailing a swarm of children behind them. Don’t they understand that you can’t have a small footprint if you make more feet?!   Several of our friends also realised, in the 70s and 80s, that population was a serious issue, but all of them eventually bred, leaving us on our own to bear the comments and criticism, such as being labelled selfish!!!!! Personally, I can’t think of an unselfish reason for having children. In fact, we both joined a short course being run by a woman doing research for her PhD on ‘voluntary child-free couples’. Most of the participants said they would probably have children, many of them saying they wanted to have someone to look after them in their old age!!!!  They deserve to have their children migrate to the moon!  

d) We don’t seem to have made a lot of progress, as a species, on these problems. What do you think are the reasons for that, and what is there that we could/should still do differently?

No. We haven’t made a lot of progress on population. I have had people say things like: ‘What difference can one person make?’ I saw a wonderful little cartoon a few years ago, showing a large crowd of people, each with an individual thought bubble above their head with the words ‘what can one person do?’  

Movements like GetUp have started to shift awareness in certain sections of the population and created a movement in which we can pool our energy and resources to make a difference (so much so that Murdoch’s media have run relentless campaigns to bad-mouth us). I have also tried to explain to my friends, when asked where I’m going for my next holiday, that I haven’t had a passport for over 20 years and I don’t fly because it’s not good for the environment, to which some have replied: ‘I’m not giving up my OS holidays!’ However, they are all keen to look at my newly acquired Hyundai Ioniq 5 EV, and that is a great introduction to the whole subject of trying to save the planet.

e) anything else you’d like to say.

It seems to me that the problem is so big that people can’t relate to it personally, or understand that a small change in their habits could make a contribution. When the east coast of Australia burned so fiercely in 2019, 2020 and 2021, and then flooded devastatingly, it woke up a lot of people. We’re going to see a lot more of those events. The most recent federal election was really encouraging in that so many ‘safe’ Liberal seats were lost to independent candidates standing for the environment.  So it’s not all doom and gloom, although I’m glad that I’m not likely to be around for more than another 20 years, but I fear for future generations.

Interview with the person behind @CodeRedEarth

1. Who are you, when did you first think of climate change “wow, this could be seriously bad news”?

I’m a nearly retired woman, who used to do web design and owned social media quote sites.

I’ve been aware of the Climate problem since the late 1970’s. My father was a Civil Engineer who worked for the government and he designed some of the first solar panels on government buildings in Canada *old style rubber tubing, and so there were discussions about energy conservation and sustainability in my family home. I remember writing an essay in high school on the destruction of the Amazon Rainforest. I became a “mostly vegan” in the 1980’s because I believed our agricultural systems were not sustainable. I would tell people that and I’d get a blank stare, but now it is understood to be the truth.

I went to University to study Nutrition and Biochemistry at Guelph and I was very interested in aspects of food production relating to veganism. It had a very good agricultural college and I was what they call an “Aggie” – as the food and nutrition program was part of that. I left University at the end of my 3rd year to raise my child and never went back. She had special needs and I wanted to be with her all the time growing up. I wanted to focus on her.

It hit me how bad it had become, the Climate Emergency, when I came on Twitter in 2016, I started reading more articles from independent journalists. When they called Code Red at the UN I started to read even more – started following more and more of the scientists and activists and then it really hit me. The thought was that this is “way out of control” and if I didn’t really understand – others didn’t yet know.

2. When did you start gaining expertise in memes/image making, and when did you decide to ‘specialise’ in climate emergency stuff?

When I was raising my daughter I started studying on my own web design and graphics. It was at first a hobby. For fun I created an ecard site for people connecting online – many romantic greeting cards and pop culture cards such as Austin Powers.. I got noticed by one of our big papers and got suddenly very popular and I just kind of went with it. I designed myspace layouts and had quote sites. I made a bit of money of the ads and I also worked the retail trade as a manager.

I had not made graphics for about a decade until I came on Twitter. First I was meme’ing the fascism in the States. Like many, Trump’s election threw me into a state where I seemed to need to know what was going on. How did this happen? Is the world really this far gone? I joined Twitter the day after he got elected. Then I realized it wasn’t the real big issue here. That yes, the fascism is of course horrifying but it has nothing on the Climate Emergency, so I switched gears.

3. What are some of your memes that you’re proudest of and why (technical difficulty, the impact they had etc).

I’m highly critical of my design work – honestly. I’m the first to say I’m a self-taught hack and I do “borrow” some imagery. If you see a crazy collage though with people on top of melting icebergs – that’s all mine. I make those when I just want to go somewhere calm. They are kind of like my knitting. A lot of work but the actual work is quite relaxing.

I just hope I honor the people and truth I meme. And I hope it helps people understand that might not know how bad it is and keep the narrative alive on Twitter and other places about what we are actually facing here.

What memes I find popular are when the scientists speak out about how bad it is. Those seem to be some of my most popular memes. I think I see an even greater increase in popularity lately. It’s a hard paradigm shift to go from believing a lot of the propaganda out there and then getting to the real truth about it. It isn’t like people don’t know there is a problem but when they see the “rates of change” and find out things like the models don’t include feedbacks and such – a lot of people are probably surprised like I once was. When they realize it is true they want to share. I think it’s important we still keep sharing as we hopefully continue to get more active out in the world with protest.

I do personally love to do digital portraits of activists and journalists etc. I follow. Some of the scientists are surprised to be meme’d and I’m thinking – oh my God you are heroes to the world. They should be our celebrities. Same with the activists. Scientists are becoming more and more active – I love this. We need to lift up their voices because main media won’t. . People who are organizing protest like Roger Hallam , those are the voices I love to meme for example as well. . Anybody who speaks the truth I might meme. You don’t have to be famous. I’m really impressed by the wisdom and hearts of people who really want to help and have taken the time to understand. My heart aches somedays at how hard we are all trying. I can sometimes break down in the middle of a meme, or reading a tweet.

4. What advice would you give other meme-makers?

I wouldn’t. Because I’m not professionally trained. I used to hang in a graphics room with a bunch of professional designers and they gave me some advice, but then I never seem to follow it. I guess I’m just stubborn. But anyone CAN make a meme and for free. I’m working on a cheap ASUS computer and I use a site called pixlr.com . It’s free! If you like to play with words – all you need is a background.

5. What is the number one thing that (Australian?) politicians don’t understand about climate change?

Oh I’m of the mind that the politicians know just as much as we do , even more sometimes. I don’t think any of them are dullards. I just think they are ambitious. I think they are just in the “game of politics” – that power is their thing . I’m with Greta and many others that politicians are not going to save us. They service corporate power. This is the bane and tragedy of neoliberal politics for decades where we’ve let the market economy trump science and nature and human well being and here we are. “Fire, famine, toil and flood. Plastic in a baby’s blood.”

6. What next for you (and anything else you’d like to say).

I have no idea what’s next. I’ve never had a plan here. I just go from day to day. Sometimes things go awry and I think – oh this could be it, I might not be able to continue. But a miracle always seems to come and I do want to continue. I want to get involved more locally and with protests. That’s one of my goals.

6. Anything else?

No. I just want people to keep going to try to fight to save life. Everything matters in this moment. Follow the science. Understand the science of our survival. Let’s build up our resistance and create some change. Keep telling the hard truths out there

Alastair McIntosh, the Scottish writer and activist, kindly did an interview last month, the first for my “Groundhog Day or End of Days” project (see here).

You can (and in my opinion should!) read the transcript here, but here’s a few clips to whet your appetite.

And then I started to notice, you know, when I got involved with some CND type stuff, and so on, I noticed that every one of these campaigns would have a kind of half-life and it would rise very sharply and everybody would be saying, “Oh, this time we’re gonna do it. This time. We’re going to force the government’s hand, or whatever.. This is the big one. This is the breakthrough.”

And you know what? Kingdom never come. Not in that worldly sense of “thy kingdom come by” thy community come, thy opening up the way be done on earth as it is in heaven. Because it reaches a point of an apparent breakthrough and then it collapses.

So I learned that if I wasn’t going to become disillusioned whenever this happened, I had to anticipate it. And I frequently, my writing uses the metaphor of a surfer – that a surfer swims out and doesn’t waste time and energy grabbing every little wave that comes their way. The Surfer swims out. And I’ve never done it but I’ve watched my son doing it. And will maybe hang around for up to an hour, hoping for the perfect wave to come. And then surf in on the chosen wave.

and

marc hudson 45:27

You’ve kind of answered the question just there but I’ll ask it anyway. Besides burning out and selling out, then what other problems does this boom and bust cycle create?

Alastair McIntosh 45:43

It also creates false premises. So XR, have a big thing “Tell the truth.” But you’re not actually telling the truth when you’re misleading people as to how activism works. And I take XR as a presenting case, but it’s the case much more widely. It’s the case in politics. It’s all over this…

and

It leads to false hope. Which leads to the wrong kind of disillusionment. I say this because in my first book on climate change, Hell and High Water, that came out in 2008. I recommend what the Victorian Scottish preacher Oswald Chambers calls “The discipline of disillusionment.” Where he says we must become disillusioned. We must strip away our illusions of false hope in order to touch a deeper truth from which we can work realistically. So this is, what we’re talking about the activist world is not a disciplined disillusionment, it’s an indisciplined disillusionment that leaves people cast out as flotsam and jetsam on the beach. Sometimes quite psychologically damaged as you’re probably aware.