Why the Climate Emergency needs a National Imagination Act

What a few weeks it’s been in terms of the sense of urgency and proportion in relation to climate change and the world’s unravelling ecological crisis. Extinction Rebellion, Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, the Welsh and Scottish governments declaring a climate emergency, then the UK and Irish parliaments. There appears to be a new, and long-overdue, sense of ambition and momentum, of tectonic plates finally shifting deep below the surface.

A public meeting organised by Bologna’s ‘Civil Imagination Office’.

Last week, Caroline Lucas and other MPs argued that all new laws should need to pass a ‘compassion threshold’ before being enacted to ensure that they make society a more compassionate place, not less. It would ensure that legislation acts in the interests of future generations as well as present ones. It is a powerful and inspired idea. But I would like to propose something I believe could be even more impactful, a ‘National Imagination Act’.

As I argue in the book I’ve just finished writing, ‘From What Is to What If’: unleashing the power of imagination to create the future we want’, we are living in a time of increasing imaginative poverty, a time in which our ability to be imaginative seems to be under unprecedented pressure. We spend, on average, 65% of our waking hours in front of screens. Austerity has led to the closure of 478 libraries and has decimated community arts initiatives. Teaching hours for arts subjects fell 21% between 2010 and 2017, and entries for arts GCSEs fell by 35% in the same period.

One-third of adults, surveys show, feel as though they don’t use their imagination for work. We are living in a time that has been called the ‘Age of Anxiety’, and neuroscience shows how anxiety, fear and stress directly impact the parts of our brain vital to the imagination. As Aditya Chakrabortty puts it, “One of the great casualties of austerity is likely to be imagination, the sense that alternatives to this broken regime not only exist, but can be built by us”.

Read the story from Resilience by Rob Hopkins - “Why the Climate Emergency needs a National Imagination Act.”

Great Barrier Reef will be dead by 2100, says David Attenborough's Blue Planet II

London: Coral reefs – including Australia's Great Barrier Reef – will be dead by 2100 due to human "maltreatment of the oceans", David Attenborough's Blue Planet II has declared.

Sir David Attenborough - he says the Great Barrier Reef
will be dead by 2100 due to our maltreatment of the oceans.  

Attenborough's follow-up documentary series, which took four years to film and produce, finished airing in Britain on Sunday night (local time). It ended with his grim warning about the state of our oceans, which Attenborough said were "under threat now as never before.”

He said climate change, plastic pollution and over-fishing were all contributing to the demise of coral reefs.

Blue Planet II has been Britain's most-watched show of 2017, with 14 million tuning into the first episode of the wildlife series. Nine will air the seven-part series on free-to-air television in Australia in 2018.

Read Latika Bourke’s story in today’s Melbourne Age - “Great Barrier Reef will be dead by 2100, says David Attenborough's Blue Planet II.”

Population a 'huge area of concern for Sir David

David Attenborough - population
 is a "huge area of concern".

Sir David, who is soon to present a programme on human beings, said population control was a “huge area of concern”, adding the world was “heading for disaster unless we do something”.

He warned if humans do not act soon, the “natural world will do something”, as he argues famine in Ethiopia is about “too many people for too little piece of land”.

He suggested humans are "blinding ourselves" to the problem, claiming:, "We say, get the United Nations to send them bags of flour. That's barmy.”

In an interview with the Telegraph, ahead of new programme David Attenborough’s Rise of Animals, he admitted the issues had “huge sensitivities” but insisted it was important to “just keep on about it”.

Read the story on The Telegraph - “Sir David Attenborough: If we do not control population, the natural world will.”

Clive Hamilton at last
week's Melbourne forum.

(Just last week, the Australian author and public intellectual, Clive Hamilton, told a Melbourne forum that sheer population numbers was not the essential problem in relation to climate change.

Rather, the Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne, who is based at the Charles Sturt University in Canberra, said it was about how those people behaved and consumed.

His comments indicated that if people learned to live with, and accept, a more restrained way of life; a life in which they consumed less and used less energy, then the outright number of people on the planet was not necessarily a direct concern – Robert McLean.)

Climate science deniers have said nothing different for 'bloody years' -Robyn Williams

T

Robyn Williams - climate science
 deniers have said nothing
different for 'bloody years'.

o say that Robyn Williams is a bit of a legend of science broadcasting on the radio is a bit like saying David Attenborough is a dab hand at nature documentaries on the telly.

The “legend” epithet just feels a bit superfluous but is, in any case, annoyingly necessary to introduce a broadcaster to those not familiar.

Williams has presented more than 2000 episodes of The Science Show on ABC Radio National since it was first broadcast in August 1975.

Perhaps the only thing as synonymous with The Science Show as Williams is the microphone he uses – a curious but faithful lump of black plastic that he has used since first joining the ABC in 1972 (I got to talk down it myself once).

Read Graham Readfearn’s story on The Guardian - “Why Robyn Williams won't broadcast 'shameless' climate science deniers.”

Attenborough advocates for an Apollo-like blitz on renewable energy

A

David Attenborough.

n Apollo-style research programme to make renewable energy cheaper than fossil fuels has won the backing of Sir David Attenborough, who says this alone would be enough to halt climate change.

The renowned naturalist joins a group of eminent scientists, business executives and politicians backing a 10-year public research and development plan to cut the costs of clean energy and deliver affordable technologies to store and transport solar and wind power.

In a letter to the Guardian, the group argue that the approach, mirroring the intense Apollo programme that put men on the moon, “will not only pay for itself but provide economic benefits to the nations of the world”.

Read the story - “David Attenborough backs huge Apollo-style clean energy research plan”.