Thirty six years ago, on this day, May 9th, 1989 the Canberra Times pointed to sea level rise as a thing.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 353ppm. As of 2025 it is 430ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that by mid 1989 you could not move but for documentaries, newspaper articles, magazine articles about the Greenhouse Effect, at least in Australia. This was part of that.
What I think we can learn from this is that we got all the warnings we needed.But “we” – civil society – was never able to overcome its own inertia and fears, the resistance of the state and the corporates. Not even able to really try, unless you count manifestos, marches and other meaningless maunderings in the absence of sustained, iterative, reflective praxis – and who has the mental, financial, emotional or temporal bandwidth for any of that?
What happened next. The August 1990 invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein knocked the issue of The Environment from its perch (something had to – journalists and readers were getting bored!). It turns out we cannot easily – in the words of Donna Haraway – “stay with the trouble.” And then the denial campaigns properly kicked in and everyone settled into a generations-long game of kayfabe, of pretend. Eventually though, by the late 2010s onwards, the consequences of previous failure began to catch up with us. Mephistopheles was knocking on the door, waiting to collect…
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:
May 9, 2009 – Another white flag goes up on the “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”