Making the connection between ANZAC Day and climate change

-      by Robert McLean.

It seems appropriate on the eve of ANZAC Day to make some observation about its connection to climate change.

Many might argue that such a correlation is tenuous and to do so demands the “drawing of a long bow”.

Maybe there is no immediate or obvious link between ANZAC Day and the human-induced damage to Earth’s climate system, but the underlying philosophies of both have undeniable similarities.

Both exist because of unrestrained human wants; wants that ignore public needs and loaded with a perverse sense of right, people engage in war to control physical space and within that the lives of others, while in another form of exploitation man has applied its knowledge and intuition in an attempt to control nature.

Logically, neither can ever succeed.

War only ends when everyone is dead, or one subdues another and that, rather than a solution is little more than a hiatus allowing the beaten to recover, reaffirm their reason and return to the battle.

And nature never rests; subdue it in one place and it will simply rise up in another, probably in an unexpected fashion.

It has always been those unrestrained human wants or hegemonic desires, our hubris and arrogance, our misplaced and uninformed longings, and a simple misunderstanding of our environment that have led to war and beyond that, those same failings have taken us deep into the dilemma that is climate change.

Frequently, have underestimated those we were to call our enemies and equally frequently, we have underestimated and misunderstood  our dependence on nature and the environment it brings to keep us alive.

It was a tragedy that the men and women of Australia ever donned a uniform, took up arms and crossed the oceans to fight; equally, it has been and is, a tragedy that a century after the ANZAC experience propaganda has kept the myth alive and tomorrow Australians everywhere will lie prostrate (figuratively speaking) before a distorted memory.

Immense sums have been spent to keep the ANZAC myth alive in the populist mind and so keeping it at the forefront of national climate change, distracting the “responsible men” from actually doing anything about preparing Australia for climate change, a threat far greater than anything that confronted the nation a century ago.