"Despair is not an option" - Tim Winton

- by Robert McLean

“Despair is not an option,” Tim Winton said in reference to climate change.

The Australian author has aligned himself with the Australian Marine Conservation Authority and is now an advocate for Saving the Great Barrier Reef.

Tim Winton - "Despair
is not an option".

Talking about climate change and the threat it poses to the reef, Winton said, “We’ve heard a lot about warming oceans in the past couple of decades, and it’s always sounded so distant and technical.

“Even to me a 2-degree jump in sea temperature sounded harmless. But that was before I saw what it meant. That’s when it got personal, when it literally hit me where I live,” he wrote.   

Equally, despair is not an option when faced with the reality of Australia becoming even more deeply embedded in the military-industrial complex.

The Turnbull-led Australian government panders to populist ideas and values when announcing an expensive plan to build ships in South and Western Australia.

The $1 billion infrastructure upgrade in those states, more it is understood in South Australia than Western Australia, further weds us to the idea that this society can become richer and stronger by putting Australians to work by building  what are, despite rhetoric to the contrary, little more than killing machines.

And if they are not directly involved in the actually killing, then they are are vital part of the infrastructure that has the death of the other as its aim.

However, I do despair as the political justification to spend immense amount on military hardware after frightening the population with myths of threats from the other is deception on an incomprehensible scale and delusional, both on the part of the practitioners and those upon whom myth is being prosecuted.

Rather than wasting money on machinery that is confrontational in its very nature and both destructive to both the people and property, and, of course, the environment, we should be spending our cash, no investing our cash, creating an infrastructure that takes Australia closer to what will soon be a pressing need to exist in a low-energy and carbon free way.

War ships and the like are contrary to what will be needed if Australia is to have any chance of adapting to the rigours of climate change.

Despair is not an option when it comes to climate change

We've heard a lot about warming oceans in the past couple of decades, and it's always sounded so distant and technical. Even to me a 2-degree jump in sea temperature sounded harmless. But that was before I saw what it meant. That's when it got personal, when it literally hit me where I live. 

During the summer of 2010-11, Western Australia had an unprecedented marine heatwave. One morning not far from where I live, beach-walkers saw seabirds massed along the shoreline. Birds as far as the eye could see. When they got closer they saw the tide-line covered with dead and dying abalone – thousands of them. The sea had suddenly gotten too hot for these molluscs to endure. So they climbed out off the limestone reefs to escape, only to find themselves – out of the frying pan and into the fire – roasting to death on the sand.  A mass stranding of abalone – no one had ever seen the like before.

Read what Tim Winton has to say in today’s Melbourne Age - “Despair is not an option when it comes to climate change.”