Four Corners on Iview.
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Monday.
The weather is cool. A climb to our work site through new forest. The birds all calling, a lyre bird, whip birds, black cockatoos and numerous wrens and finches. All feasting following the rain.
I hope to record the dawn chorus tomorrow.
To the site of the last 2 years slash, layer and mulch lantana. Its a visual treat walking through the mulch. Pencil cedars, red kamala, red and white cedar plus. On the edges with forest rosewoods, bopple nut, wikea plus are emerging through the mulch.
Its great to observe and weed. Odd lantana re sprouting and the tobacco bush.
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Four Corners. ABC TV….. 8th OCT 8 30pm.
The Monsanto Papers
On Monday, Four Corners investigates the secret tactics used by global chemical giant Monsanto, to protect its billion-dollar business and its star product, the weed killer, Roundup.
When it was launched four decades ago, Roundup was hailed as a miracle product, a revolutionary herbicide that would transform farming and keep home gardeners happy too. And it came with the promise that it was safe.
Now a landmark US court case has made headlines worldwide, with a jury declaring Roundup was a substantial factor in causing a school ground keeper’s terminal cancer and that the company had failed to warn of the risk posed by the product.
My visual treat of the week.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/gallery/2018/oct/05/the-week-in-wildlife-in-pictures
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Save us the smugness over 2018’s heatwaves, environmentalists In this historically precarious moment, we need something more fundamental than climate strategies built on shame and castigation
There was a barely stifled schadenfreudian glee echoing across the liberal press through this burning hot summer. Environmentalists could scarcely disguise their we-told-you-so smirks as one suffocating heatwave after another rolled over the globe, wildfires savaged landscapes from Siberia to California and broken temperature records kept piling up.
But yearning for catastrophe is an ugly desire, and it is exactly the wrong way to think about global warming. Disasters always hit marginalised people first and worst, and as tempting as it might be to hope the calamities of 2018 bring new kinds of change, that desire only betrays how badly environmentalism needs to be overhauled.
It is a historically precarious moment for the environment. We constantly hear dire warnings from some UN body or scientific panel that we have this many years left and these thresholds before we hit the tipping points and the whole world unravels. Despite this piercing urgency, the languages at hand are so consistently inept that it often feels impossible to know what real change might be or how to talk about it.
The reflexive condescension of environmentalism that looks down on those working in industry is precisely what we do not need. Working people whose livelihoods and families depend on resource extraction have no time for catastrophism, and defaulting to that desire sets back climate justice movements immeasurably.
Ecology has to speak to class directly and confront inequality with believable claims that a different world is possible.
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