Opinion: As climate changes, we need the arts more than ever

In the 1997 film “Titanic,” Wallace Hartley, the violinist and leader of the band on the ill-fated ship, turns to his bandmates as the water rises around him and says: “Gentlemen, it has been a privilege playing with you tonight.” Is the only contribution musicians and other artists can make at this moment in history to bravely go down with the ship, lifting the spirits of fellow passengers? On its own terms that’s an honourable contribution, but surely we can do more.

We now need arts more than ever.

It’s often said that a novel, a painting, a song or a motion picture changed the world. What that really means is, it changed how a lot of people thought or felt about the world.

Anthropologists and historians rightly argue that society’s major transformations have emerged not from the arts, but from our relationship to our environment — for example, our shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture, or from using firewood as our main energy source to using fossil fuels.

Read Richard Heinberg’s Ensia piece - “Opinion: As climate changes, we need the arts more than ever.”

I weep as I write for we are slipping beneath the waves



Like the Titanic, Australia
 is slipping beneath the waves.

I weep as I write.

The facts are known, the outcome of those facts is already evident and this week our Federal Government is acting to remove the last of the regulations that might, I reiterate “might” have helped Australia play its part in mitigating the worst of climate change.

With a denialist Prime Minister in charge of the orchestra, I think I can hear the soulful strains of “Nearer My God to Thee” as like the Titanic, Australia slips beneath the waves.

Although it was the waves that claimed the Titanic in 1912 and drowned more than 1500 people, it could be those same waves that “reach out” and rescue the people of southern Australia.

In a story headed: “Southern Australia faces water crisis by end of century due to climate change” it is suggested that some southern cities, Perth in particular, may have no option to employ desalination plants to provide potable water.

Beneath the Wisteria supporter, the University of Melbourne’s Professor David Karoly, a Professor of Meteorology and an ARC Federation Fellow in the School of Earth Sciences, has said the ramifications for Perth are stark.

 

- Robert McLean