Showing posts with label Carlton Connect Initiative. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Carlton Connect Initiative. Show all posts

27 September, 2015

Phillip paints word pictures to explain the complexities of climate change


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Phillip Sutton.
ictures painted with words helped listeners understand some of the complexities of climate change and why it is what it is.

Co-author of Climate Code Red, Phillip Sutton, “painted” that picture when he spoke at “Post-Paris: Sketching a new approach” at The Carlton Connect Initiative on Wednesday, September 23.

Phillip, standing before a table of books, all of which he had obviously read, went back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution to begin his illustrative story.

Phillip is an active member of the Victorian Climate Action Network and recently circulated fellow members of VCAN alerting them to a new book.

He said: “Tim Snyder, an historian, has written what I think is a very important book:  "Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning".  In the concluding chapter, where he focuses on the future, Tim explores stress dynamics that could lead to new genocides.  He draws a conclusion that might surprise some of his readers - that climate change might be one of the most serious.

“Tim makes a very powerful argument, developed in the second half of his book, that the ability to rescue threatened people when genocides are underway is terrifyingly limited - so effective prevention is crucial,” he wrote.

A “long read” on the Guardian says, in commenting on the book and discussing the order both those on the left and right fear it says: “In an era of climate change, the rightwing version of anarchy, economic libertarianism, may pose the more pertinent danger.”

Read the Guardian’s long-read story - “Hitler’s world may not be so far away.”

Climate change and collapsing soil fertility


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limate change is the prime difficulty among a host of other challenges presently facing humanity.

And while we wrestle with the complexities of climate change, the other complications are unfolding almost as quickly.

Among them are energy shortage, the exponential population growth and, of course, the deterioration of the earth’s soils.

The latter has not gone unnoticed by the University of Melbourne’s Carlton Connect Initiative which is highlighting the problem, first with a seminar, “Dead Dirt” on Wednesday night and then with a special exhibition, curated by Dr Renee Beale known as “Dirty Secrets”.

Dirty Secrets uncovers the hidden curiosities buried in soil and encourages a deeper search for our connection to the land and its importance to our survival.

It was American novelist, poet, environmental activist, cultural critic, and farmer, who said: “The soil is the great connector of lives, the source and destination of all. It is the healer and restorer and resurrector, by which disease passes into health, age into youth, death into life. Without proper care for it we can have no community, because without proper care for it we can have no life.”