DEAR XR
I'm nearly 38 and I'm too old for this. I need to focus on myself. I can't listen to the same obvious solutions that are never implemented. It's been 20 years and I'm done. I won't be one of those tottering seniors who unfatiguably attend meetings with younger folk, I want a home and a homelife. I was always the only one without a car, and always the most left out. I lived in poorer suburbs where activism doesn't happen, ironically. When activism is the activity of the exclusively affluent, it is more pantomime than representative. XR is trying to shock with art, when what is shocking is the distance in worldview between the activist who stops a train and the citizen who intervenes. Keep fighting the general apathy if you like, but the environment I grew up in is already not the same anymore. Queensland is drought afflicted and yet votes go to mining interests while farmers and the reef suffers: I feel there is something cognitively wrong with that. Tassie's protected forests have been threatened for too long, the repitition in the media is more than a mind can bear. Every forest under threat, every sacred site threatened, every river at risk: it is too much! I have been involved with the Greens in two states and both times party focus was on equality for women, I posit at the expense of economic equality. With no car I supported the Greens at two elections in a hostile Central Queensland seat. Without the ability to contribute financially to the party my efforts were impeded, and I was not alone in this situation. Now a generation has grown up under below poverty NewStart payments, what is their worldview? What value does the intangible quality of wilderness hold for the unemployed? Accessing forests is already an activity of the financially empowered. The difference between a person with no car and one with a 4WD is as sharp as the difference between a 4WD and a private helicopter. These economic disparities between ingroup activists and outgroup observers should be ameliorated for the success of the eco-socialist mobilisation. Life under lockdown is basically how much freedom one has with no car. Hence the barrier to involvement.
GLADSTONE In Gladstone Queensland I was the volunteer secretary and co-convenor of the Central Queensland branch of the Greens before the federal election. Given that the port of Gladstone is a major export point for Australian coal and also an access point for the southern Great Barrier Reef, I was and am alarmed by the lack of local environmental awareness there. A lot of national focus is given to the planned mines in the northern Galilee basin, but the basin actually extends south and inland to current and planned mines in central Queensland. These southern mines export to Gladstone and not the Abbot point terminal. Perhaps the lack of attention to the port of Gladstone is because of the coal being coking rather than thermal? Still I am concerned that the Gladstone area, being an area of diverse ecology protected but threatened by development, is overlooked by the national level discussion of climate change impacts. The Stop Adani campaign is heartening and brings hope. I would...
Comments
Post a Comment