COMBUST 2022 - Environment Collective Magazine

AKNOWLEDGEMENT OF COUNTRY

The University of Sydney Environment collective meets and organises on the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation. This edition of Combust was produced by writers, artists and editors living and working on stolen land, the sovereignty of so-called Australia never having been ceded. The environment that we aim to protect is sacred country, the destruction of which is an ongoing act of colonial violence. We pay our respects to Elders, past, present and emerging. We recognise the ongoing fight First Nations peoples face with regards to the survival of their land, communities and knowledge and stand in solidarity with them here as well as internationally.There is no environmental justice without Indigenous justice. We centre the voices, perspectives and knowledge of First Nations peoples in all our organising and activism. This land always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land.

EDITORIAL

Welcome to Combust 2022! This is an annual magazine written, edited, desgined and produced by members of the USYD Enviro Collective. Combust serves as a way for the collective to reach those who we can’t reach through our regular meetings and activism. We hope to inspire as well as collectively facilitate the education of the student body on the topic of radical environmentalism.

This year the zine features four main parts: an evidence base; political theory; disruption, power and praxis; and enviro arts and culture. ‘An evidence base’ provides some background on climate science, USYD’s relationship with fossil fuels, federal climate politics and COP26.

The political theory section hopes to encapsulate the radical, theoretical foundations of the Enviro Collective. In ‘Disruption, power and praxis,’ the writers focus on historical radicalism, student power and how to protest. Finally, the arts and culture section highlights some of our favourite climate-themed art and books.

Contributors: Neave Taylor, Fabian Robertson, Zara Zadro, Rory Larkins, Vivienne Guo, Tiger Perkins, Ariana Haghighi, Lia Perkins, Angus Dermody, Ishbel Dunsmore, Marina Dionysiou, Cole Scott-Curwood, James Sherriff, Alana Ramshaw, Andy Park, Aman Kapoor Editors: Indigo Crosweller, Vivienne Guo, Tiger Perkins, Ariana Haghighi, Angus Dermody, Ishbel Dunsmore, James Sherriff, Alana Ramshaw, Kritika Rathore, Talia Meli, Zara Zadro, Leyla Meharg With special thanks to Aurora Ward for her InDesign expertise, artistic vision and moral support, without which this zine would not have been published.

Editor-In-Chief: Tiger Perkins, cover art by Francesca Branagan i.

TABLE OF CONTENTS An Evidence Base A Short History of Climate Science Neave Taylor

Disruption, Power and Praxis 1

USYD’S 1.666b Fossilised Investments Fabian Robertson

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Federal Party Climate Politics Zara Zadro

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Reflections on COP26 Rory Larkins

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Political Theory Aboriginal Knowledge is Knowledge of the Land itself Vivienne Guo

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Capitalism, Climate and Crisis Tiger Perkins

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Green Colonialism: Climate Summits as Imperial Weapons Ariana Haghighi

13

Eco-Socialism: Class and the Environment Lia Perkins and Tiger Perkins

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Anti-Imperialism and the Climate Angus Dermody

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Civil and Uncivil Disobedience Ishbel Dunsmore

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The Green Bans Angus Dermody

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Student Power and the SGM Marina Dionysiou

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Case Study: Blue Mountains Conservation Society Cole Scott-Curwood

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Organise! Organise! Organise!

James Sherriff

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Collective Lessons Alana Ramshaw

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Enviro Arts and Culture The Nutmeg’s Curse: A Review Tiger Perkins

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Don’t Look Around: Climate Change as a Hyperobject Andy Park

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Enviro Top Picks Ishbel Dunsmore

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ii.

1988 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) formed

1987 Montreal Protocol ratified to limit emission of chemicals that damage the ozone layer

1972 First UN environment conference, in which climate change barely features

1957 It is shown that seawater will not absorb all the additional CO2 entering the atmosphere

1938 Atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperatures found to both be rising, with the former suggested to cause the latter

1900 Discovery that trace amounts of CO2 strongly absorb infrared radiation

1896 Emissions from burning coal hypothesised to lead to a warmer planet

1856-1861 Gases such as methane and CO2 found to absorb infrared radiation, creating the greenhouse effect

1824 Greenhouse Effect in the Earth’s Atmosphere Described

1760 Industrial Revolution

A SHORT HISTORY OF CLIMATE SCIENCE Neave Taylor timelines the history of Western climate science.

Our planet’s climate is complex and has implications for all life on Earth. Through analysis of empirical observation and modelling, the field of climate science allows us to project what our climate might look like in the future depending on what we change in the present. But for how long have we known that we are on track for catastrophic climate change, and that our emissions are fuelling it?

This understanding began with the foundational concept of the “greenhouse effect”, coined by French physicist Joseph Fourier in 1824. He discovered that energy from the Sun alone could not account for the warm temperature of the Earth’s surface, and suggested that the atmosphere may play a role in capturing heat. Eunice Foote in 1856 showed that some gases, such as CO2, absorb solar radiation more and thus could 1

warm the atmosphere. In 1861, John Tyndall further demonstrated that gases such as methane and CO2 could cause the greenhouse effect. In 1896, Svante Arrhenius posited that emissions from burning coal will lead to global warming and estimated that a doubling of CO2 would lead to ~4 °C of warming, a value of the same order of magnitude as contemporary climate models. However, given the lack of understanding of the complex interplay of climate systems at the time, Arrhenius believed this warming would be beneficial for future generations.

In 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar provided the first evidence that Earth’s surface was warming. His analysis revealed a 0.3°C increase in global temperatures since 1888 and hypothesised that it was largely due to increasing CO2 concentrations from fossil fuel

Many had also assumed that seawater would absorb all the CO2 entering the atmosphere, so increasing concentrations were not especially concerning.

In 1957 US oceanographer Roger Revelle and chemist Hans Suess showed this was not the case and expressed concern that “human beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future.” Up until this point it was also thought that Earth’s climate can only change relatively slowly (on the scale of thousands of years), however by the mid-1960s analysis of ice and sediment cores revealed that Earth’s climate has changed on human timescales in the past.

2016 CO2 concentration remains above 400 ppm year-round

2015 Paris Agreement adopted with the aim of limiting global warming to less than 2 °C

2014 IPCC Fifth Assessment Report released and notes that “continued emissions of greenhouse gases will cause further warming and long-lasting changes in all components of the climate system”

2007 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report declares that “warming of the climate system is unequivocal” and its impacts could be irreversible

2001 IPCC Third Assessment Report highlights strong evidence that anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases are the primary cause of warming in the second half of the 20th century

1997 Kyoto Protocol agreed

1995 IPCC produces its Second Assessment Report and concludes that there is “a discernible human influence” on the Earth’s climate

1990 IPCC produces its First Assessment Report

burning. However, Callendar also believed that a warming climate was positive as it would allow crops to be cultivated closer to the poles and prevent the formation of glaciers.

Climate Change (IPCC) was formed in 1988 to systematically review and release reports on the latest scientific knowledge of anthropogenic climate change. The certainty that the climate change we face without radical action is catastrophic has only increased with each report.

The link between CO2 emissions and increasing global temperatures has thus been clear for well over a century. We now also understand the consequences of this warming and the other disastrous effects of climate change.

Scientific consensus that contemporary climate change is humancaused exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature over the period 2012-2021.

We have had the knowledge to step towards a better future for a long time. It’s time to get moving.

Owing to increasing concern about climate change in both the scientific and wider community, the Intergovernmental Panel on 2

USYD’S $1.666b FOSSILISED INVESTMENTS Fabian Robertson reports on the ties between fossil fuels and our University.

The University of Sydney’s investment portfolio totalled $1.666 billion on 31 December 2020 and includes millions indirectly invested in fossil fuel companies such as BHP and Rio Tinto. Although the University has no direct investments in fossil fuel companies - a departure from 2018 in which the University had invested $22.4 million in fossil fuel companies like BHP, Woodside Petroleum and Santos - funds in the University’s portfolio use their investors’ contributions to invest in fossil fuel companies themselves.

The University, therefore, indirectly profits off the success of fossil fuel companies. Although private investment funds’ holdings are not typically publicly available, an investigation of various published documents has found that at least twelve funds in the University’s portfolio invest in or have strong ties to fossil fuel companies. The following information was acquired under the Information Access Application (GIPA) Act (NSW).

BHP and Rio Tinto The University invested $40.07 million in the Legg Mason Martin Currie Equity Income Fund. The fund’s June 2021 Factsheet reveals that 4.56% of the fund’s capital is invested in BHP. Therefore, at least $1.83 million of the University’s funds was indirectly invested in BHP (based on 31 December portfolio).

The University also invested $37.87 million in Plato Investment Management which ranked BHP/Rio Tinto as 1st and 7th respectively on the fund’s list of Top 10 Holdings in June 2021.

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BHP and Rio Tinto are the 1st and 2nd largest metals and mining corporations in the world. In the 2020 financial year, BHP and Rio Tinto emitted 15.8 and 26.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases respectively. According to the Climate Accountability Institute, BHP was the 19th highest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world from 1965 to 2017. BHP and Rio Tinto also have long histories of destroying the natural environment, with Rio Tinto most recently facing criticism for destroying 46,000 year-old sacred Aboriginal sites in the Juukan Gorge.

Santos The University invested $106.03 million in MCP’s Credit Trust fund. While there is no public information on this specific fund’s investments, MCP in an August 2019 report boasted of lending a total of $6.4 billion to various entities since 2013, including fossil fuel companies Santos, Caltex, Origin Energy Australia, Whitehaven Coal, Alinta Energy and Beach Energy.

Santos is Australia’s 2nd largest producer of oil and gas. They are currently at the forefront of a $3.6 billion Federal Government-funded gas exploration project in the North-Eastern NSW region of Narrabri on Gamilaraay land.

The project has faced criticism from Indigenous activists who have spoken to the USYD Enviro Collective previously about the impending destruction of sacred sites and poisoning of the natural environment in addition to the inevitable contribution to greenhouse gas emissions.

At least a further $176.4 million is linked to other fossil fuel companies, including Merredin Energy, Extraction Oil & Gas, Navitas Petroleum and Trident Energy.

the CC JCB Active Bond Fund which has not publicly disclosed its portfolio.

Amazon, Gambling, Banks and Military

USyd’s new Vice-Chancellor, Mark Scott, claimed ignorance of links to fossil fuels when questioned: “I understand the view that the university should be showing leadership in ethical investment and that many will have views on precisely what that means.”

In addition to the indirect investment in fossil fuel companies, USYD’s investment portfolio disappoints in many other ways. The University of Sydney continues to invest in Amazon, renowned for union busting, unpaid wages and abismal warehouse and working conditions. Military manufacturing, gambling companies and the banks (who loan capital to fossil fuel companies) also feature indirectly in their investment portfolio. $43.65 million was invested in VGI Global.

Their June 2021 report indicated that 14% of the fund’s capital is in Amazon and 4% is in French betting company Francaise de Jeux. $23.2 million was invested in Harbourvest funds. Harbourvest’s website advertises holdings in oilfield developer Crown Rock Minerals and military, law enforcement and rescue boat manufacturer Safeboats International.

Multiple funds also name Westpac, Commbank, NAB and ANZ in their Top 10 Holdings. These banks collectively loaned $7 billion to 33 new or expansionary fossil fuel projects from 2016 to 2019.

Mark Scott unaware of links

“It’s not an issue that I have studied and focused on at this point - I’m only 2 weeks in, but I’ll take on notice your observations and I’m sure they’re matters we’ll be able to discuss in the future,” he says.

The University released its Sustainable Investment Strategy in June 2021, promising to “increase investment in sustainable solutions and exclude fossil fuel companies with inadequate transition plans” with the ultimate aim of aligning its portfolio with the UN Sustainable Development Goals by 2030 and Net Zero by 2050. The strategy faced criticism for failing to commit to divestment from all fossil fuel companies - a commitment made by fellow Australian universities UNSW, QUT and La Trobe.

At the time of writing, the Sustainable Investment Strategy is yet to be published.

Meanwhile, over 40% of the University’s 2020 investment portfolio has released no substantive information on what companies they invest in, meaning it is impossible to know the extent of the University’s links to the fossil fuel industry. For example, $191.52 million or 11.5% of the University’s capital is invested in Art by Aurora Ward

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FEDERAL PARTY CLIMATE POLITICS Zara Zadro reports on the electoral climate policies of Australia’s major parties.

Last year, Prime Minister Scott Morrison reinstated the Australian government’s position of climate inertia on the global stage.

According to research released at the Glasgow COP26 summit in November, Australia has the highest greenhouse gas emissions per capita from coal power in the world, nearly doubling those of China. At the COP26 summit, Morrison refused to join 40 other nations, including the US, Canada and the UK, in pledging Australia’s commitment to net-zero emissions by the 2030s.

The Liberal government also poured $600m of tax-payer money into a new gas-fired power plant in NSW last year as part of its pandemic ‘gas-led recovery’. Now, NSW is set to consider applications for a surge in coal mine expansions across the state that, if approved, would generate 1.8 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions— more than three times Australia’s total emissions.

With a federal election looming, climate policy must be at the forefront of Australian voters’ minds now. According to the Australian Climate Council, emissions cuts must occur 21 times faster than what the federal government is currently managing to prevent dangerous and irreversible warming. Here is a breakdown of what the country’s big parties are promising.

The Liberal Party formally aims to reduce emissions by 26-28% compared to 2005 levels by 2030, stating it will focus on developing new technologies and not “wiping out industries”.

This goal is substantially lower than those of Australia’s strategic allies and trading 5

partners, including the US, UK, EU and Japan, whose targets range between a 46-68% reduction. The Liberals’ current 2030 emissions reduction target would actually take Australia to net zero by around 2100 rather than 2050, and fail to prevent catastrophic warming over 3 C (Australian Climate Council).

Additionally, nearly half of the Federal Government’s emissions reductions strategy relies on the Technology Investment Roadmap, which will invest taxpayer money in “low emissions technologies,” particularly carbon capture and storage (CCS). This reliance belies the fact that CCS facilities are globally scarce, and around 80 per cent fail to launch, or fail after they have launched. Of Australia’s four current CCS plants, only one is on a commercial scale— the Gorgon gas facility in Western Australia, which drastically failed to meet its carbon capture target in 2021. Major polluters also invest in CCS projects to greenwash consumers and sustain the fossil fuel industry; Gorgon is financially backed by Chevron, Exxon Mobil and Shell.

Thus, the framing of technological solutions like carbon capture as saviours for existential climate disaster ignores the need to reorient Australia’s economy toward net zero by 2050, and invest taxpayer money in widespread renewable energy sources that actually work.

The Australian Labor Party (ALP)’s climate policy promises to “create jobs, cut power bills, boost renewables and reduce emissions,” according to party leader Anthony Albanese in early December last year.

It has set a 2030 emissions reduction target of 43% below 2005 levels, a number which Melbourne consultancy hub RepuTex says will put Australia on track to meet net zero by 2050.

This target also aligns more closely with individual state and territory commitments.

Nonetheless, a number of major environmental activist groups including Greenpeace, the Climate Council, the Australian Conservation Foundation, and GetUp have said that Labor’s target is too weak.

Labor plans to rely on the Safeguard Mechanism for most of their emissions reduction strategy. This pre-existing scheme, introduced in 2016 by then- environment minister Greg Hunt, requires Australia’s largest greenhouse gas emitters to keep their net emissions below an emissions baseline.

Safeguard facilities must purchase Australian carbon credits to offset emissions over their baseline.

However, this scheme has continually failed in practice. The coalition has consistently allowed companies to increase their carbon pollution without penalty, including BHP, Anglo American and Tomago Aluminium.

Labor proposes to gradually lower that threshold for Australia’s top 200 emitters until the country reaches net zero emissions. It says this policy would see some 82% of electricity coming from renewable sources by 2030.

Labor also promises tax breaks for low emissions cars and the expansion of charging stations across the nation. Modelling suggests this price reduction will contribute to 89% of new car sales and 15% of all vehicles being electric vehicles in 2030.

The Greens aim to reduce carbon emissions by 80% by 2030 and reach net zero by 2040.

They promise an “equitable transition” to a sustainable net zero greenhouse gas economy, through a range of “market and regulatory,” measures including a price on carbon.

This includes 100% clean renewable electrical energy as soon as possible, through a higher renewable energy target (RET), public investment, feed-in tariffs and regulations.

They promise to introduce a ban on “donations to political parties or candidates from any person or corporation with a commercial interest in any aspect of the fossil fuel industry”.

This policy is significant, especially considering that fossil fuel companies donated over $1.3m to the ALP, Liberal and National parties in 2019- 2020, leading to lax environmental laws, approvals for disastrous projects, and tax-based subsidies.

Finally, the Greens promise a just transition for communities and workers affected by the closure of fossil fuel based mining and electricity generation industries. They also recognise the need to centralise the specific experiences, knowledge, priorities and needs of First Nations Peoples in their climate change response.

As a major world polluter, Australia has paramount responsibility to vote in a party that will prioritise climate action. This includes funding renewables, decarbonising the economy, supporting First Nations voices on climate, and facilitating a just transition for workers by providing clean energy jobs. While technology is a tool to aid carbon reduction, a complete restructuring of our economy will be necessary to achieve net zero emissions. We must vote in the party that best facilitates this future.

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REFLECTIONS ON COP26 Rory Larkins on why we need strikes and protests to solve climate change In November of 2021, leaders from around the world met in Glasgow for the 26th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26).

It was the first conference since the ‘Paris Agreement’ of COP21 which expected nations to make concrete commitments to prevent climate change. This was especially pressing since the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a new report only last year which indicated that the world had now reached ‘code red’ on climate change. It specifically named Australia as a country which must reduce emissions by 75% before 2030 to avoid climate catastrophe.

It was in this context that COP26 was expected to finally produce an international agreement that would actually bind nations across the world to substantially reduce their carbon emissions. However, the final agreement of COP26 was profoundly disappointing. A 1.5℃ limit to global warming was agreed on, as was a 45% reduction in carbon emissions.

However, these ‘commitments’ are completely non-binding, and there is no lever in place to force adherence. A recent assessment by Climate Action Tracker found that the policies countries are actually implementing are on track to produce a 2.7℃ warming by the end of the century. Not only is this a massive overstep of the 1.5℃ limit accepted in the agreement, but it would produce a global temperature increase which would be catastrophic. COP26 was also the first summit to produce an agreement which explicitly mentioned coal, but only in terms of ‘phasing down,’ with an emphasis on carbon capture and offset strategies, rather than actually 7

reducing carbon emissions.

The complete failure of COP26 to make headway in stopping global warming should not come as a shock. Governments around the world are far too concerned with maintaining the colossal profits fossil fuel industries reap.

Australia joined India, Russia and Saudi Arabia in demanding the removal of a pledge to substantially reduce government subsidies for fossil fuel companies. It is clear that governments like ours around the world prioritise fattening the pockets of their corporate mates over preventing an impending climate apocalypse. Just last year, the Australian government pledged $600 million of public money to construct a brand new gas power-station to replace a closing coal plant goes to show what these ‘commitments’ are really worth!

The inaction of governments against climate change is the nasty result of the capitalist world we live in, where the constant pressure of competition between businesses creates an infinite drive for accumulation. Those who are most able to break rules, lobby governments, and do shady deals are the ones who become billionaires. Those same billionaires can then use their massive economic power to exploit the world’s resources for themselves.

Governments play a crucial role in supporting businesses to do this. In exchange for a share in the profits, or for a revolving door from parliament to the boardroom, politicians protect and bolster the profits of these companies. Most importantly, they diffuse pressure from the public. COP26, in these

terms, was a massive success, with no binding commitment to policies that would hamper fossil fuel production, but with the superficial appearance that climate action is on the agenda.

The Liberals are entering this election year with an emissions reduction target of 26-28% by 2030, while Labor has offered 43%. While Labor’s target is a significant improvement, it is a far cry from the 75% called for by the IPCC. No surprises there, but we can do better.

Massive fossil fuel companies around the world may have a leash on our governments, but when it comes down to it, their wealth depends on the work of regular people. If we refuse and prevent this work from continuing, through strikes and industrial action, these companies will effectively have the rug pulled out from under them. The real weapon we can yield against the climate criminals is the power of the worker.

But to do so, we will first need to build a climate movement which centres and organises this power, and which offers a real alternative to the nonsense of ‘carbon offset’ and the ‘phasing-down’ of fossil fuels. In recent years, the climate movement has made significant headway in this direction, with a central demand for a ‘just transition’ leading the charge, which would strive to replace fossil fuels with 100% publicly owned renewables, and ensure that no worker currently employed in fossil fuels would lose their income or be left unemployable without sufficient re-skilling.

These workers are the ones who will be crucial to the fight against climate change, being able to refuse to construct or work on anything that emits carbon. A ‘just transition’ ensures that the climate movement includes them, and accommodates their needs.

But in order to be effective, the climate movement must be massive, and it must be militant. The first steps to building it are in the streets, with demonstrations which draw as many people as possible under the banner of climate action, and which provides a coherent strategy for real change. Already we are seeing the climate movement grow from the streets into the workplace. In 2019, Sydney dock-workers stopped work for the yearly ‘Climate Strike,’ alongside hundreds of thousands of demonstrators across Australia.

Last year, striking bin workers in the UK marched alongside 40,000 in Glasgow.

Recently, the Electrical Trades Unions (ETU) has stated that they will refuse to work on the Narrabri gas pipeline, which would tear through traditional indigenous land. Students can play a major part in bolstering this movement. The largest climate protests in Australia over the past few years have been the ‘School Strike 4 Climate,’ which students at Sydney University have led a 200 person contingent to just last year.

Hope for a sustainable and liveable future on Earth is not at COP26 or from our parliaments.

It is in the climate movement, on the streets and in our workplaces. By fighting collectively, with our power as workers, we can refuse to allow the wealthy minority from destroying the environment for the sake of their profits.

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ABORIGINAL KNOWLEDGE IS KNOWLEDGE OF THE LAND ITSELF Vivienne Guo explores Western vs Indigenous ‘Ways of Knowing’ The climate crisis is intrinsically linked to the processes of colonialism and capitalism that are embedded in our everyday lives. Since the invasion of sovereign Aboriginal land in 1788 and subsequent colonisation, the great loss of Indigenous knowledge has led to the suffering of Country. If we are serious about saving our planet and preserving the future, we must first learn to challenge colonialism ingrained in our ways of thinking and existing, because Indigenous knowledge is knowledge of the land itself.

As climate activists, it is firstly important to understand that colonialism and capitalism are explicitly opposed to the health of the environment and thriving of all people, and always have been.

In 2021, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released their Sixth Assessment Report, confirming once again what we already know: that human activities have contributed significantly to escalating climate change. To go further, it is also necessary to understand that climate change is not perpetuated equally, nor is it felt equally. Since 1988, just 100 companies have been responsible for 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions; all of these companies are fossil fuel producers. While the world burns, Western capitalism continues to turn a profit at the expense of our life-giving planet.

The pollution and anthropogenic climate change that is largely exacerbated by the Western world disrupts and fragments systems of kinship and reciprocity that have been cared for by First Nations people since 9

time immemorial. Even today, Indigenous people around the world protect around 80% of global biodiversity. Gladys and Jill Milroy, two Palyku academics from the Pilbara region of Western Australia, mourn the loss of oldgrowth forests – only around 10% of them remain – decimated by colonisation in their 2008 essay ‘Different Ways of Knowing: Trees Are Our Family Too’. Indeed, the transformation of sovereign Aboriginal land over the course of two centuries can be seen in everything from the invasive plants that pepper lawns and streets, to invasive animals that decimate native wildlife, to the raging bushfires that razed acres of old-growth forests to the ground in the summer of 2019.

I think about that summer a lot; orange skies, ash wafting through the thick air, and bushfires everywhere blazing through a build up of uncleared forest fuel that traditionally would have been managed through practices of cultural burning. As colonial mismanagement of land has led us down this treacherous death road, decoloniality is the answer as we strive for a sustainable future.

There is so much that we, those who care about climate justice, can learn from the holistic way that Indigenous spirituality understands the world. In many ways, Aboriginal spirituality and knowledge of Country diverges from Western knowledge, in particular the understanding of the environment as a pattern of symbiosis. Potent antidotes to Western modes of thinking that tend to ignore the duty and kinship that we have with Country and all other living beings,

are provided by Indigenous knowledges.

Approaches that derive from Aboriginal spirituality, such as pattern-thinking or bir-yun, a Yolngu word roughly translating to ‘brilliant’ or ‘shimmering,’ encourage a rich and deep understanding of the interconnectedness of the world, and the importance of caring for Country as it cares for us. The concept of bir’yun is one that I like to revisit often in ecofeminist scholar Deborah Bird Rose’s 2017 essay ‘Shimmer - When All You Love is Being Trashed’: “Bir’yun shows us that the world is not composed of gears and cogs but of multifaceted, multi-species relations and pulses. To act as if the world beyond humans is composed of ‘things’ for human use is a catastrophic assault on the diversity, complexity, abundance and beauty of life.” An understanding and respect for the multidimensional shimmer of life is in many ways absent from Western knowledge and capitalist governments which ultimately prioritise profit over all else.

Additionally, the Aboriginal notion of Country provides an illuminating alternative to the Western understanding of a landscape, which often fixates on extraction, production and profit, and is fundamental to discussions of land rights. Country is not a commodity, property or a product; Country highlights the personhood of the land and our duty to care for it. The rights of the land and our duty to care for Country are indispensable in moving towards a sustainable future for everyone, so, it follows that when we talk about fighting for land justice; we are talking about fighting for putting land back into the care of First Nations custodians.

Today, climate justice movements need to continue having conversations about decolonisation and anticapitalism, and move away from Western knowledge. As Gladys and Jill Milroy tell us, “Western knowledge is increasingly problematic because of its dominance over other people’s world knowledge and learning systems, its innate belief in its superiority over all other forms of ‘knowing’, and its claims to universality when it is only a ‘particular’ way of knowing.” In imagining a decolonial future, Milroy & Milroy propose a partnership between Western and Aboriginal knowledge systems but highlight that in such a partnership, “Aboriginal knowledge has to be privileged because it is the knowledge of the land itself.”

For settlers like me, learning about Aboriginal spirituality and culture is consistently disregarded by our education systems, which are designed to protect and hide the violence of Australia’s colonial past and present. It is only through embracing and prioritizing Aboriginal spirituality and knowledge that we might find a fraught, but possible, path towards detangling our world from coloniality. In doing so, we fight for a future that sees land not as a commodity for extraction and profit, but as Country, a living entity that gives us life and deserves our care and respect. Our futures must be decolonial.

Note: Much of the knowledge mentioned in this article I learned taking ENGL3705: Indigenous Ecopoetics which is coordinated and taught

by Dr Peter Minter.

Art by Aurora Ward

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CAPITALISM, CLIMATE AND CRISIS Tiger Perkins analyses the necessity of anti-capitalism in the climate movement.

It is not immediately clear upon joining the climate movement, or even just looking in from outside it, why anti-capitalism is a necessary part of the movement’s politics. Is it not true that liberals can care about the environment too? What about market mechanisms and giving businesses incentives to go green? I was in the same position when I came to University and joined the Environment Collective, having never really thought about capitalism or what it might mean to be anticapitalist. A couple of years of theory, practice and protest later, it is now clear to me that anticapitalism is integral to the survival of our planet and therefore must be one of the pillars of the climate movement.

Capitalism is an economic and political system in which a country’s trade and industry are primarily controlled by private owners for profit rather than by the state. Anti-capitalism is a key tenet of many different ideologies, each of which envisage its manifestation slightly differently. Broadly, however, to be anticapitalist is to believe that trade, industry and profits should not be controlled by an elite few private individuals, rather by the state or the general population of workers within the country. But why do the people have to have control of the economy, why is the government incapable of reducing emissions and saving the planet?

A big part of this is that fossil fuel consumption does not exist in a vacuum. Rather, it is tied up in a complex web of colonialism, profit, geopolitics and power.

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To even begin to unravel this web we have to go back to the Dutch East India Company of the 1500s, arguably one of the first conglomerates with capitalist tendencies. The Dutch pillaged what is now Indonesia, slaughtering and enslaving Indigenous inhabitants of the islands they visited for a monopoly over the spice trade. Everywhere around the world, slavery, incarceration and genocide were the tools of the earliest capitalists. Slavery, Indigenous deaths in custody and racism are not just byproducts of capitalism to be treated as separate issues, they are the very foundations upon which capitalism was built. If we are serious about centering First Nations justice, prioritising the land and people above profit and abolishing racism, we cannot continue to live under the system that has pillaged the earth for centuries on the back of racialised slave labour.

Another important obstacle to Western support for renewables is the petrodollar system, an agreement extracted by US President Nixon from Saudi Arabia in the 1970s. As a result, Saudi Arabia, as one of the largest suppliers of oil in the world, would require US Dollars to be used in all oil transactions. Author of The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Climate in Crisis, Amitav Ghosh notes that: “as a result, every country that buys oil must first buy dollars, and this cycle has become one of the foundations of the contemporary American economy.” He continues: “the geopolitical implications of the petroleum economy have… created specifically strategic (as opposed to economic) vested interests in the fossil-fuel maximisation of profit in every aspect of life,

“Simply put, fossil fuels are the foundation on which the Anglosphere’s strategic hegemony rests.”

- Amitav Ghosh What this means is that on top of the sunk costs that politically influential fossil fuel giants hold, and on top of all the profits still to be made in fossil fuel investments, it is also the case that the very balance of Western power is dependent on the continued use of fossil fuels, in particular oil. Why would Western governments and militaries oversee a transition away from that which guarantees their continued wealth and power?

While much of the economy and markets are deregulated under capitalism and the accompanying political ideology of neoliberalism, it is also true that governments and an elite ruling class are the invisible hand directing these machinations. Proponents of capitalism argue that as renewable energies become more economically viable, they will begin to dominate the markets; this view ignores politicians’ vested interests, political influence and short-sighted profit-chasing. In Australia, we have seen how cheap solar and wind have become and yet the government continues to subsidise billions of dollars of new fossil fuel investments, a phenomenon inexplicable by idealised and simplified understandings of markets.

Finally, it is important to understand the climate crisis as the inevitable extension of capitalism, rather than something gone wrong in the system. When the economy is based upon the

maximisation of profit in every aspect of life, the natural world is of course demoted to a simple resource, from which we must plunder as much as possible. When forests have no utility except for the financial value of the wood, palm oil and animals with which they are inhabited, it is a simple choice for private companies to chop them down. As long as the profit motive drives production, sacred Indigenous sites will be blown up by mining giants for the energy that lies beneath them, birthing trees will be chopped down for highway extensions and rivers and oceans will be recklessly polluted by chemical manufacturers and fossil fuel exporters. As long as our economic system continues to prioritise profit, the government will continue not only to sanction these actions but subsidise them as well.

Capitalism is a system built on slavery and genocide, a system tied to the Western hegemony that oppresses so many, a system that renders humans and the planet worthless except for the profit that can be extracted and one that is incapable of transitioning away from fossil fuels.

That is why capitalism must be dismantled, that is why anti-capitalism is such a necessary part of the climate movement and that is why the people, not corporations and the governments that sit in their pockets must lead us through this crisis.

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GREEN COLONIALISM Ariana Haghighi on climate summit agreements as imperial weapons There’s a seat at the table of an international climate summit reserved for the elephant in the room. Richer nations negotiate and attempt to better the others in their promises, often requiring little thought when allocating millions of dollars to realize them. Speaking their lingua franca of sacrificable budgets, richer countries fail to recognise their ongoing obligations to impoverished nations. Despite the culpability of the climate crisis falling largely and squarely on the shoulders of richer countries, global efforts to combat climate change often entrench poorer countries in deeper sociopolitical and fiscal instability.

The trend of sweeping concerns of poorer nations’ inability to fund climate action to the side is at its zenith as richer nations palpably feel the surmounting pressure on themselves.

Rather than assuming responsibility, richer nations hide behind a veneer of ‘global solidarity’ by making international calls to action. As every minute passes where richer nations continue to shirk their responsibility and do not mention the elephant, the climate crisis looms over poorer nations, its first and foremost victims. Kiribati could be underwater before our generation retires. The Philippines could suffer from an on-slaught of devastating natural disasters that will drain their inadequate resource supply. Climate hazards attacking Asian countries such as Myanmar could exacerbate intra- as well as international tensions and plunge oppressed populations such as the Rohingya into precarity.

Richer nations are endowed with the tools to mitigate these threats. Instead, they point their fingers at poor nations, for whom the initial rites 13

of development are just dawning. The West has forgotten its history- one of grim factories and hyperconsumerism that littered the avenue of development. Now relishing in the outcomes of hollowing rapid industrialisation, it is appealing for rich countries to encourage an international effort to ‘decarbonise’. Not only do rich countries encourage poorer nations to forgo policies imperative to their development, but they often leverage their obligations such as foreign aid, rendering poorer nations subservient. In this way, the climate efforts of richer nations are imperialistic.

Suppressing the development of poor countries under the guise of international climate action is one of many ways richer countries consolidate their power at the top of the hierarchy. In the World Systems Theory, Wallerstein illustrated the world economic hierarchy as three-pronged, composed of the core, periphery and semi-periphery. Though this model has its limitations, it rings true that it is in the interest of the richer countries forming the ‘core’ to relegate poorer countries to a periphery characterised by low-wage and highly labour intensive. Poorer countries are also left unable to escape from industries that bear the brunt of climate change and are the least fiscally rewarding, such as agriculture.

Last year, climate activism torchbearer Bill McKibben wrote a Guardian article urging the cancellation of a Ugandan oil pipeline’s construction. Although the use of fossil fuels is destructive and should be limited, this should be prioritised in the Western sphere before activists attack poorer nations. Australia’s progression with its construction of the Adani

coal mine is more severely reprehensible, considering we have the resources and monetary capacity to facilitate a just transition from fossil fuels to more ecological sources of electricity. Additionally, Australia and its fellow richer peers have contributed to the crisis in a way incomparable to the contributions of poorer nations. In 2020, Uganda was responsible for a paltry 0.01% of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, whereas Australia’s slice of the pie was 100x larger. For Western countries to then expect similar climate policies from impoverished countries as rich is nothing short of imperialistic. Forced by the hand of guilt and uncharitable monetary pressure, poorer nations are unable to prioritise their development and richer nations ensure their hegemony is never uprooted.

Despite espousing a narrative of global solidarity, few rich nations are able to commit to targets commensurate with their culpability.

We should definitely not encourage developing nations to repeat the grim history of the West’s rapid industrialisation. However, these nations are under more intelligent leadership than most Westerners assume, and South Africa’s deal at COP26 to decarbonise its more developed economy illuminates hope for a bright future for the African continent. However, it is unfair to treat every poor country equally, considering the varying factors that may ravage their economic and political landscape.

For some countries such as Uganda, decarbonisation is not an option currently.

Rich countries’ attempt to lobby institutions such as the World Bank and the UN to sanction African nations with nascent energy projects, which are obvious acts of imperialism and hypocrisy. As the second largest supplier of gas in the world, Norway recently increased its natural gas exports as it pleaded with the World Bank to stop financing poor nations’

natural gas projects in the same breath. Any attempt to turn poor nations in the direction towards renewable energy is motivated by the rich nation’s desire to preserve its monopoly in the fossil fuel market. The existence of a natural gas oligopoly composed of rich nations epitomises Lenin’s first feature of imperialism.

Efforts to halt funding for fossil fuel projects occur in the absence of adequate climate financing for poorer nations. 13 years ago, rich nations pledged to pool at least 100 billion USD in ‘climate aid’ to finance climate change adaptations and policies for poorer nations. A majority of countries have fallen short in their obligations, leaving developing countries in the lurch. While some rich countries such as France and Japan have appeared to pay their dues, this was often in the form of loans rather than grants, which provides an illusion of the financing’s security. Most of the money has also been channeled into projects that reduce carbon dioxide emissions, disregarding the pressing need for adaptation projects as poorer nations disproportionately manage natural disasters and environmental wreckage.

There is thus a clear avenue for richer countries to aid poorer nations in their road to a sustainable future. First, the idea must be rejected that every road is of the same length, and will be frequented equally by travellers.

Poorer nations will not decarbonise as rapidly, nor should they be expected to. Richer nations should focus on swiftly paving their roads with their mountains of cement before lampooning a neighbour’s slower progress. An aid to a neighbour should not be motivated by the rich country seeking to consolidate their own progress and industry. The sun is setting on paternalistic neocolonialism, and it throws shadows of a collaborative future on the sunbleached asphalt.

Art by Kritika Rathore

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ECO-SOCIALISM: CLASS & ENVIRONMENT Lia Perkins and Tiger Perkins evaluate the importance of a class-based approach to environmental politics.

Mechanisms of Change

Disproportionate Impacts

An understanding of class relations and therefore of workers as the foundation of our society is necessary for an understanding of the possible mechanisms for social change as well as the powers that stand in the way of that change.

The physical environment affects us all, but the distribution between the causes and effects of environmental mismanagement aren’t felt evenly. Just 100 companies contribute 71% of global greenhouse gas emissions. We must understand class in relation to both the assignment of responsibility for climate change, as well as its impacts.

The people who contribute the most to the climate crisis will not experience the worst of its deadly effects. Instead, marginalised peoples will be the first to experience these effects and will be the hardest hit. It is not difficult to imagine that, as rising sea levels sink the Pacific Islands and scorching heat burns Africa, the wealthy will continue to sit comfortably in their insulated homes in the West. Perhaps by then they will have colonised the solar-system and built homes for themselves on Mars.

“Ecology without class struggle is just gardening.”

- Chico Mendes The working class, broadly defined in contemporary society to include wage labourers such as teachers, nurses, hospitality and construction workers make up almost the entirety of society. However, the size of the working class is not its only strength, another source of their power is, as Matt Huber, author of Ecological Politics for the Working Class, notes, their “strategic location in the workplace.” This gives workers the ability to “withdraw their labour” through strikes and disruptive action. Bringing production, industry, supply chains, and any other aspects of capital accumulation to a grinding halt places our economic systems and the profits of capitalists in crisis, forcing them to make one of two choices - make concessions or allow disruption to continue escalating, possibly to the level of national revolution. As Huber points out: “The history of the nineteenth and twentieth century shows that the largest challenge to the rule of capital has come from organized working-class movements” grounded in what Adaner Usmani calls “disruptive capacity.”

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Criticism of the Climate Movement Greenwashing, a focus on individual plastic use, individual carbon footprints and other facets of ‘lifestyle environmentalism’ serve only to reinforce the idea that individuals are responsible for the climate crisis. It also places the moral burden on the working class to make expensive changes to their lives in order to live sustainably while accepting the austerity measures that tend to accompany anticonsumption rhetoric. That is not to say that people with the financial capacity should not attempt to live sustainably, but environmentalism must be accessible to all,

not just to the professional middle and upper classes. Our true power in affecting change comes from our collective ability to take disruptive action. As Richard White notes, however, this has not been the case as stickers reading: “Are you an Environmentalist or do you Work for a Living?” were popularised amongst the rural working class.

“Solving the ecological crisis requires a mass movement to take on hugely powerful industries. Yet environmentalism’s base in the professional-managerial class and focus on consumption has little chance of attracting working-class support” - Matt Huber While it is true that drastic lifestyle changes must accompany action on other fronts, they should not be employed on the basis of personal responsibility, and environmentalists shouldn’t focus solely on it. The first step must be the fight for “system change, not climate change” and lifestyle changes will follow as the inevitable result of the world’s changing priorities. It is unrealistic to imagine that singleuse plastic bag and straw bans will lead to the overthrow of the capitalist system necessary to save our planet, but it is far easier to imagine a post-capitalist world that is also plastic-free.

Strategies for Change System change, of both the capitalist economy and neoliberal political structures, is a necessary step, both for saving our planet and for achieving socially productive outcomes, but how do we go about this? We must channel the resentment towards politicians and capitalists responsible for current and future social conditions. It is imperative that this strategy is viable, not just theoretically, but in practice as well. The solution to this is to centre

the climate movement around the people who will be most impacted - the workers. We must also build our demands around the material gains of the working class. The Keystone and Dakota Access oil pipelines were supported by several unions on account of the highpaying jobs that they would offer. To counter issues like this, the climate movement must offer guarantees that workers putting their jobs on the line to strike and disrupt will have access to stable, high-paying union jobs on the other side. This is the basis for the politics of a ‘just transition’, where fossil fuel workers and Indigenous people on their land will have priority access to the quality jobs in the burgeoning replacement renewable sector. In Eco-Socialism or Bust, Thea Riofrancos, Robert Shaw and Will Speck outline the importance of the three D’s, “decarbonise, democratise, decommodify,” paying specific attention to the decommodification of those things, which should be human rights. Among others, access to - housing, energy, employment, food, water, leisure etc. They argue that disentangling these from the market as a means to improving general welfare and providing the working class with material gains is not just the climate movement’s ‘in’ but also our best option for fighting for a better world for everyone.

“A revived and supported working-class environmentalism could drive towards a rapid, fair and effective transition to global sustainability” - Karen Bell Note: much of the information and arguments in this article are informed by Matt Huber’s ‘Ecological Politics for the Working Class,’ which we would highly recommend as further reading.

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ANTI-IMPERIALISM AND THE CLIMATE Angus Dermody on the presence of anti-imperialism in the climate movement In recent years, the climate movement has been one of the most active and powerful social movements. We’ve seen massive climate strikes across the world, with students, workers, and Indigenous peoples coming together to demand a just transition to 100% publicly-owned renewable energy, among other equally important demands. It speaks to the nature of the climate movement that it can mobilise so many around such solid and radical demands. This raises an interesting question: given the scope of the movement, why hasn’t it taken up anti-imperialist politics?

Imperialism is the practice of states extending their power and control, generally by asserting this power over other states. This often involves heavy military force and has been responsible for brutal wars throughout history, including both World War One and Two. In Australia, this has largely taken the form of involvement in overseas wars, and our many interventions in the nearby Pacific - think Vietnam, East Timor, and more.

Despite being its own issue, imperialism is inextricably linked to the climate crisis. War and the military are inherently environmentally destructive, whether from the use of nuclear weaponry, or the massive carbon emissions required to sustain their imperialist operations.

Among the world’s biggest polluters is the US military - if it were a country it would rank 47th.

For a closer look at the fatalistic relationship between our climate and imperialism, we can look to Australian activity in the Pacific, specifically East Timor. Between 1975 and 1981, Australian military aid to Jakarta doubled 17

in an attempt to support the Indonesian occupation of East Timor. Aside from the strategic importance of East Timor, a driving factor in Australian support of the occupation came from the question of natural resources. It is no coincidence that this is one of the world’s most petroleum-rich areas. Australian capital naturally staked its claim over this area, with multinationals like Woodside and BP taking control of oil exploration in the Timor Gap. Australia’s crimes against East Timor have, of course, continued in order to secure these fossil fuels. We cannot secure a just transition away from fossil fuels without advocating against the imperialism that has driven it for so long.

It is not only logical to advocate against imperialism in the climate movement, it is deeply necessary – especially in our context as climate activists here in Australia. Right now, our government is pushing forward with the shameful AUKUS deal - a military pact with the UK and the US - which involves eight planned nuclear submarines for Australia. This represents a serious escalation in the push for war on China – something that we should take very seriously as activists. Rather than fund a desperately needed just transition to renewable energy, our government is funnelling billions into an imperialist war on China that would, in itself, wreak shocking environmental damage. This is a serious misstep in the midst of the climate crisis and we must respond accordingly.

In a general sense, we can fight imperialism in the same way we can fight the climate crisis.

As other articles in this magazine will have spelled out, workers’ power is the key. If the international working class were to stand in opposition to imperialism, refusing to aid war efforts, in our case build nuclear submarines, or even just go on strike, then we’d have a real chance at fighting the imperialist system.

We can’t truly achieve climate justice without demolishing this imperialist system; therefore, the climate movement must take antiimperialism seriously. The movement has incredible reach - what other movement in recent history in Australia has brought out so many people on strike from schools and workplaces? There is great potential in the climate movement to be advocating against imperialism, and it’s something that we need to start thinking about now more than ever.

Art by Tiger Perkins 18

CIVIL AND UNCIVIL DISOBEDIENCE Ishbel Dunsmore evaluates the form that protest and disobedience must take Activist Angela Davis wrote that it is “the duty of the individual to rebel against the system.”

But what form of rebellion – civil or uncivil – should this duty take? This is the essential question that must be addressed to open up the floor to more interesting discussions on how we – as a part of the climate movement – can engage effectively in legal disobedience.

To begin, principled disobedience is broadly characterised by a breach of certain laws that individuals would otherwise be generally and morally bound to obey in legitimate states due to normative principles of upholding law and order. In this context, disobedience is generally the product of disagreement of individuals when it comes to unjust policy or laws enforced by the state which are seen to unjustly target certain people or causes, such as marginalised groups or the environment.

The way in which individuals disobey these laws in the name of protest differs in two ways: protest through civility (CD) or through incivility (UCD). CD is characterised by fidelity to law by being public and non-violent, conscientious in the seriousness of its message, and communicative in its message to the public to help motivate change. CD is deliberate in its breach of law in the name of protest. Although similarly principled, respectful of basic interests in life and bodily integrity and aiming for non-domination, UCD is characterised instead by anonymity, occasional violence and deliberate offence as a means to an ends.

On Civil Disobedience - I won’t be attempting to prove whether CD is ‘justified’ (we can assume that it is), but rather how we can utilise 19

CD and, more interestingly, UCD from within the climate movement and beyond. CD has come to be known as a necessity of the climate movement. We have seen repeatedly that more traditional routes of change – lobbying for change, top-down efforts etc. – have been co-opted and neutralised to serve the governing body’s principle (political) needs.

Case in point: allowing mining companies to advise the current Australian government on ways to mitigate climate change.

Now, seeing the successes of mass mobilisation in, for example, the Green Bans of the 60s and 70s, and more recent acts of protest through SS4C, USyd Enviro (!), Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, there is evidence of the success of mass civil disobedience. But whether CD should always be used to characterise a conflict against an opposing majority, is a different question altogether. How can acts of civility wholly represent and highlight the struggles of marginalised people and/or causes if there is some preconceived, flimsy assumption of civic friendship towards people who have been de facto oppressed by virtue of being denied full and equal status? Aboriginal people are, by law, full and equal citizens in Australia, but there still remains intergenerational trauma, immense socioeconomic disparity, over policing and more that undermines any notion that all Australians are equal. We cannot have environmental justice without Indigenous justice, so to ignore the illusory nature of this civic friendship is to accept the majority’s refusal to hear the cries of the oppressed.

Furthermore, CD potentially undercuts the urgency and authentic commitment needed to address such issues through its inability to alert people to actual injustice, which calls for a more robust method of protest and indignation: UCD. An Argument for Uncivil Disobedience Where CD fails in making meaningful change, UCD seems to be a more plausible response in certain situations.

As discussed earlier by the civic friendship argument, there is empirical evidence to suggest CD cannot dutifully represent the plight of the severely oppressed. There is evidence to suggest UCD is a symptom of widespread division – rather than a cause as has sometimes been argued – that aims to highlight collective indignation at the issue at hand. For us, this could very well be an indignation at the global one-percent’s inaction on climate change. This is perhaps best demonstrated by the Hong Kong protests of 2019-20, where thousands of protesters clashed with police in response to the proposed government extradition bill which would allow criminal suspects to stand trial in mainland China.

Protesters engaged in a decentralised evasion of police, black bloc tactics, and other UCD tactics, which arguably contributed to its success – both in length, continued public support and international scale – when compared to a similar demonstration from 2014 which employed CD tactics, namely peaceful sit-ins. Instead of garnering traction through peaceful means, the 2014 Occupy Central demonstration in Hong Kong quickly lost its fervent support as the occupation engulfed the city and alienated inhabitants.

UCD advocate Candice Delmas argued that

the quick shut-down of the demonstration was aided by participants’ willingness to accept arrest and therefore defeat by an aggressive government that remains unwilling to negotiate, rather than push for change through continued indignation and evasion of police.

By unanimously rejecting such punitive measures by the Chinese government – both by resisting arrest and engaging in black bloc tactics which directly attacked powerful Chinese surveillance measures – UCD has highlighted extreme deficits in the state, the law and their institutions. Furthermore, UCD may improve democratic processes and strengthen their resolve to serve the people by inviting rethinking through rule breaking, rather than to “sow anarchy and invite violence” as Delmas puts it. Closer to home, we have seen similar success on an albeit smaller scale: in response to widespread education cuts, the success of USyd’s own Occupy F23 demonstration as a catalyst for further mobilisation is further proof of the need for continued UCD in 2022 and beyond.

Closing Remarks: The Future of the Climate Movement is Both Civil and Uncivil Going forward, and in the wake of the government’s flimsy commitment to net zero by 2050, public indignation is at an all time high. It is pretty clear that we need not be afraid of engaging in UCD when necessary.

There is an argument as to the risk of UCD undoing the good work of peaceful CD by confusing principled activism with unprincipled rage. But, given the imminent and exponentially increasing threat of climate change-induced catastrophe - global food shortages, rising sea levels and so on – there has really never been a better time to express such indignation through both principled civility and, out of necessity, uncivility.

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THE GREEN BANS Angus Dermody on what we must learn from the radical history of the NSWBLF One of the most inspiring moments in the history of climate activism is the story of the Green Bans, a series of union actions led by the NSW Builders Labourers Federation which saved many of Sydney’s green and heritage spaces from over-development in the 1970s.

The story is an inspiration for all those who wish to see a better world, and a powerful blueprint for climate action today.

The NSW Builders Labourers Federation: While the first Green Ban wasn’t until June of 1971, our story begins a bit before that. The 1960s and 1970s saw something of an economic boom, with large-scale redevelopment of the city. This meant more labourers than ever, constructing massive developments all over the city under terrible working conditions. The lack of job security and safety led workers (including many migrant workers) to organise in increasingly militant ways, stopping work on these construction sites, sometimes for multiple days at a time. A decisive factor in this story is that the development itself was largely overtaking working class communities and green spaces. As early as the mid-1960s, the rank and file and the leaders of the BLF were growing concerned by the ways in which increasingly profit-driven construction was threatening Sydney’s public housing and green spaces, which were central to many strong, working class communities. The success of their earlier struggle for better working conditions helped develop a willingness amongst BLF members to fight for these broader issues and start to address capitalist exploitation as a whole.

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The radical political agenda of the NSWBLF, combined with their industrial militancy is what led to the Green Bans. Kelly’s Bush was the site of the first ban, and as a result, it remains a large public green space in Hunters Hill. In a story all too familiar, A.V. Jennings purchased the land in 1967, and began plans to remove the bush on the site to develop it into private housing. These plans were protested by the community, particularly by a group of concerned citizens who in 1970, formed the “Battlers for Kelly’s Bush”. The strategy of the Battlers consisted of writing letters, a phone tree, and appealing to the media - tactics that appear still today in some forms of community organising. These tactics went on for months with no real impact on the plans, before, as a last resort, the Battlers went to the NSWBLF. Green Bans: The first step for the BLF was a public meeting to discuss the issue of Kelly’s Bush, attended by hundreds of locals. Given the large-scale support displayed at the meeting, they placed their very first green ban on Kelly’s Bush, banning all members from working on the project, and committing to use industrial action to stop the project entirely.

When Jennings tried to bring in scab labour, BLF members on a Jennings site in the CBD walked off the job to force a halt to the destruction of Kelly’s Bush. The workers told Jennings directly, “If you attempt to build on Kelly’s Bush, even if there is the loss of one tree, this half-completed building will remain so forever, as a monument to Kelly’s Bush.”

This successful first action, at the time known as a black ban, would lay the blueprint for the Green Bans that followed. After defending

public green space in Hunters Hill, the NSWBLF would go on to impose 54 more Green Bans in NSW before 1974, which are no doubt responsible for maintaining the character of Sydney as a city. The defence of working class housing was just as important as the environmental concerns, with areas of Sydney such as The Rocks being saved alongside the Royal Botanic Gardens, which was to be replaced by a carpark. In total, it is estimated that some $3 billion dollars of development was stopped.

One of the most important figures within this movement was Jack Mundey. Elected Secretary of the NSWBLF in 1968, Mundey would go on to lead the Green Bans, up until he was expelled from the Union in 1975 by conservative officials seeking to contain an increasingly bold and self-organised membership. The removal of Jack Mundey and other leading figures occurred amidst state and federal government repression, and retaliatory sackings from businesses seizing their advantage to crush the labour movement.

This situation led to the sudden decline of the Green Bans, although that is not to say that there have been no Green Bans since then.

Even last year, the CFMEU placed a Green Ban on Willow Grove, an historic villa in Parramatta that has now been destroyed for the new Powerhouse Museum. While unsuccessful, it was inspiring to see the idea come back to life, and watch the way that community groups and the union came together.

members employed, we will not just become robots directed by developer-builders who value the dollar at the expense of the environment.” The false dichotomy between jobs and climate action is one that needs to be overturned if we want to build a strong working class movement that can win a just transition.

How to win - in order to see material wins against the corporations and governments that are hellbent on environmental destruction, workers will have to collectively refuse to build fossil fuel developments. It is this collective power which could stop the Kurri Kurri gas plant, which is set to go ahead using $600 million of taxpayer money. The Green Bans are a strong example of how we could defeat the Kurri Kurri gas plant, and all new coal and gas developments.

Conclusions: despite the fairly specific and unique set of factors that gave rise to the green bans, this kind of radical action is possible today. We face much the same issues as the working class of the 70s, and climate action is needed now more than ever. If we build a working class movement that not only cares about the climate, but is willing to fight for it, then we can win - and we will!

Lessons: Workers can fight for the environment - the concern that workers will lose their jobs fighting for the environment that we still hear today is one that was levelled at the Green Bans at the time. Jack Mundey addressed this himself, saying: “Though we want all our 22

STUDENT POWER AND THE SGM Marina Dionysiou discusses democracy at Uni and Student General Meetings There would be few reading this who didn’t feel incredible pressure from the events of 2022, even as students. We were faced with continued attacks on our education here at uni, the sustained impacts of lockdown, and, of course, a worsening climate crisis. At times it can feel like there’s nothing you can do— but there’s always something you can do! As students we have incredible power to fight back against these compounding crises, as we proved in 2021 with not one, but two Student General Meetings (SGMs).

What is an SGM and why are they so important?

To put it simply, an SGM is an official gathering called through a petition, which brings together at least 200 students (representative of the student body) to vote on a motion. They represent one of our few official opportunities to bring together huge masses of students for democratic discourse, centred around building the political strength of the student body. The two SGMs called in 2021 were incredibly successful in drawing in broad masses of students to support the important campaigns we were already running.

In Semester 1 of last year, the Enviro Collective spent most of our time building for the climate strike on May 21. The campaign to build the strike itself was significant, being the first major climate strike since the pandemic began, at a time when climate action was (and still is) so desperately needed. After a year of online learning, it was a considerable effort to rebuild the climate movement on campus, and one of the most important parts of this was the SGM. 23

After gathering the required support for the SGM in under a week, collecting over 200 signatures from students committing to support it, the hard work of making the SGM reality began. The weeks leading up to the SGM saw members of Enviro leafleting, petitioning, and doing lecture announcements.

Our hard work paid off incredibly, as over 200 students turned up to the SGM on the afternoon of April 28. The students unanimously voted to support the campaign, go on strike, and called on the then-Vice Chancellor, Stephen Garton, to allow students to strike. All of this and more became a reality. The May 21 climate strike was a massive success despite dodgy weather and looming Covid, and the SGM itself well and truly put climate action back on the map for students at Usyd.

The Enviro SGM was only the third in Usyd history, fourteen years after the last one. It was also the first ever SGM centred around climate demands. Most incredible though is that a second SGM was held in Semester 2 of 2021 by the Education Action Group, as part of the Save Usyd Arts campaign. This SGM came off the back of years of brutal cuts to our education, and included demands to stop the Future FASS program (which would decimate the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences), as well as cuts to Dentistry and Business, and opposed the university’s imperialist tendencies. While the results of this SGM were less concrete, we can still be heartened by the willingness of the broader student body to participate in activist campaigns— even when they are online!

It’s important to place the SGMs in their activist contexts to understand student power more broadly. The SGMs, while significant events, were parts of larger campaigns, which they fueled and strengthened. The climate movement certainly didn’t begin with the SGM, nor did it end with it. The same goes for the education campaign. There would be no support for such meetings if students hadn’t been organising around these issues for years on campus. Similarly, these meetings would have little impact if they weren’t part of a campaign. The Enviro Collective has been building for climate strikes for years, and had done so without SGMs until last year. The SGM is not so much the pinnacle of student power, as it is an impressive expression of it. The SGM was also not just a meeting - it involved the collection of hundreds of signatures, hours of calls, a baffling amount of admin, and engaging the student body in climate action as a whole.

Aside from making it easier for students to come out on strike with us, the SGM allowed students to be a part of something bigger. A politically active campus is a healthy campus, and the SGM proves this beyond any doubt.

The campus was covered with chalk, posters, leaflets, and activists! This level of action entails a certain level of political development, as students who had never participated in activism before were gaining the political know-how, and confidence, to make lecture announcements in front of their classes, advocating for radical climate action!

Whether or not we have more SGMs, one thing that Usyd will never be without is student power. As we organise against the system we reclaim a degree of power over it. This has always been the case on our campus, and always will be as long as we have politically active students. Get involved with the climate campaign for a real taste of your power!

Photo of the Climate Strike Student General Meeting vote by Aman Kapoor 24

CASE STUDY: BLUE MOUNTAINS CONSERVATION SOCIETY Cole Scott-Curwood sits down with Society President Tara Cameron Known for its jagged cliffs and stunning waterfalls, the Blue Mountains stretches from the start of the mountain range foothills in Sydney’s west, up to idyllic gorges cut by the Colo River, and then south to the snow gums along the Boyd River.

The Blue Mountains Conservation Society aims to protect, conserve, and advocate for this sprawling area. It has existed in its current form since 1996, and its roots trace back to community organising as early as 1966. It comprises roughly nine hundred members working to conserve the Blue Mountains region, home to the Dharug, Gundungurra, and Wiradjuri peoples.

The Society helped to obtain World Heritage status for 1.03 million hectares of the Greater Blue Mountains Area in 2000. The campaign for this started in 1989 and its success means that the rugged scenery, biological diversity, and vast expanses of wilderness are now protected.

More recently, in November 2021, the 28-year campaign to protect the Gardens of Stone – a landscape on Wiradjuri country home to 40 threatened species, “distinct and significant” sandstone pagodas, and the endangered Giant Dragonfly and Purple Copper Butterfly – was successful. The proposed new state conservation area is particularly important to protect the upland swamps impacted by fires and underground coal mining.

Blue Mountains Conservation Society President, Tara Cameron, is elated by these 25

wins while acknowledging “there are still battles to be fought.” Much of this will occur through the Society’s Land Use Subcommittee – responsible for influencing land use planning, development approvals, and reporting potential environmental legislation breaches – which conducts a significant amount of advocacy. In the past year, this group has prepared 16 submissions on issues including Snowy 2.0 transmission to the protection of significant Aboriginal heritage in the Burragorang Valley.

Cameron acknowledges that this form of advocacy is technical while underscoring the value of contribution and service. She believes that “working with others in a voluntary capacity on things you believe in is incredibly energising.”

Specifically, Cameron recommends that citizens engage with local campaigns and look into joining environmental groups. Her own involvement started through bushwalking – initially with the Sydney University Bushwalkers – an activity she found to be nourishing and one that also inspired her to care for nature. She takes pride in the Society’s holistic contribution to the environmental movement that “caters for different styles of involvement.” The Society’s initiatives include a native plant nursery, bush care, plant study group, bushwalking, and educational and social events.

Experienced members of the Society coordinate bushwalks four days a week every week of varying duration and intensity. This brings conservationists together to enjoy the many walking tracks, get to know each other,

Photo from the Three Sisters Walk by Tiger Perkins and share knowledge of the flora, fauna, and minimal impact bushwalking. The Society organises a variety of events, including the environmentally focused annual Mick Dark Talk for the Future to showcase prominent thinkers; members’ workshops to direct what the Society should be doing to improve environmental outcomes; public fora on topical issues featuring expert perspectives and open discussion; and social events.

The Native Plant Nursery in Blackheath has been operating since 1989 to supply plants raised either from seed or cuttings collected within the Greater Blue Mountains area. This is supported by volunteers who grow the plants and sell them at markets giving local people a chance to buy native plants. The Plant Study Group learns together to deepen their knowledge of Blue Mountains flora. This includes the morphology of plants, habitat needs, fire response, and variability of species.

Their observations and discoveries have contributed to conservation efforts. For example, they conducted a flora survey of a hanging swamp on the Overcliff Walking Track in Wentworth Falls to support the protection of it with a boardwalk.

In recent years, the Society has conducted an impartial questionnaire of lead candidates for the Blue Mountains City Council election on

key environmental issues, taking on a more directly political role in the local area. Cameron describes this as “ensuring greater transparency and accountability.”

Considering the future of the Blue Mountains Conservation Society, Cameron highlighted the critical nature of community knowledge and engagement. She also notes that “nearly every protected area has come about as a result of some campaign, or advocacy, or discussion that was usually started by a community group.” The Society will continue with this mandate by opposing the “manifestly inadequate” plan to raise the Warragamba Dam, which would scar 4,700 hectares of national parks due to sedimentation and erosion; advocating to protect the threatened species, geological features, and/or Aboriginal heritage at West Glenbrook, Faulconbridge Mallee Ridge, and Kings Tableland; and opposing the progression of a zoo and hotel at Bodington Hill.

The Blue Mountains Conservation Society is an outstanding example of community-based organising and activism. Their rich history of working hard to produce tangible wins for local people, wildlife, and nature sets a strong foundation for the ongoing preservation of the Greater Blue Mountains.

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ORGANISE! ORGANISE! ORGANISE! James Sherriff on why the student climate movement needs a kick up the arse To confront the challenge of climate change head on, we must organise ourselves not only as students, but as workers, willing to use direct action to demand revolutionary change.

To get to this point we have a lot of work to do.

Yet every year, we see the same issues, the same protests, the same squabbles, while we seem to slip further away from a liveable future.

As students and climate activists, we must refocus our efforts and remind ourselves who our allies are, and where our power truly lies.

No friends in the boardrooms, no friends in parliament Climate change is an urgent and existential threat forced upon working people by the capitalist class. The vast scale of the issue leads many people to focus on government and corporation-led solutions to generate large-scale changes.

This is a strategy which disempowers working people, who lobbyists assume can do nothing for themselves except politely ask institutions and corporations to be better, while waiting always for the endless election cycle and a new set of decision-makers. We should know by now that we will not find allies in global summits or corporate boardrooms, nor will we find them in our parliaments and party rooms.

Even Labour and the Greens should be held at arm’s length. At best, progressive politicians are offered illusory and temporary power to tweak unfavourable policies. At worst, parliamentarians actively sap the life from 27

powerful social movements, and implement harmful reforms in the name of ‘electability’. If we are to build a fighting movement, we must ignore the false promise of electoral reform.

Student workers, working students – where does our power come from?

If we are serious about driving change from below, we must realise that only workers have the power to create the drastic change we need to resolve the climate crisis.

It is workers who make society run, and it is the very same people who can withdraw their labour and grind the economy to a halt. When workers are well-organised and willing to fight, we could demand the world.

But many students tend not to think of themselves as workers, despite often filling the most exploitative casual jobs during their studies. This is no mere stop-gap reality before eventually entering the ‘real world’ of professional work. As workers, and workers in training, it is up to us to realise our status, and the collective power it offers, and organise ourselves as such.

Worker power and climate action To turn the latent power of the working class into the real, fighting strength of organised labour, we must start with the realisation that organising in our workplace for better conditions has a direct impact on the strength of the climate movement, and all other surrounding social movements.

The scale of the climate crisis means it will take nothing less than mass strikes for us to secure an urgent transition to zero-emissions. It will not be achieved by electing a neoliberal Labor government, it will be achieved when workers everywhere place real industrial pressure on the economy to force change.

Mass strikes do not come from thin air, we have a lot of work to do. Australia has a rich history of hugely successful rank-and-file union action, from the push for Aboriginal land rights during the Wave Hill walk off, to the fight against corporate urban development with the BLF’s Green Bans of the 1970s. But the modern labour movement has been in decline for several decades.

Severe anti-union legislation has curtailed workers’ capacity to strike in Australia since the 1980s, when the Accords were signed between Hawke’s Labor government and the Australian Council of Trade Unions.

There is a long way to go before we can challenge this anti-union legislation and fight for the issues we believe are important, and our path is blocked by governments, bosses, and even our own union bureaucrats. But we have seen recent glimpses of potential, from the CFMEU’s Willow Grove ‘green ban’ last year (the first such action in decades), to the teachers’ strike in December, where ten thousand union members took to the streets in defiance of the Industrial Relations Commission, which ruled against their strike.

This kind of militant direct action can continue to develop, but workers must organise, building class-consciousness and solidarity.

This is how we win. Union activity organised from the bottom-up improves our capacity to tackle the climate crisis head-on. Organised

workers create active unions; active unions can build climate justice committees; these committees build links between workers across industries, and ensure material demands are won at work and incorporated into the broader climate movement. Taking direct action helps us win important demands, and each win inspires other workers to take action themselves. This is especially important for students in casualised industries to realise.

A world to save – a world to win Direct action trains us to demand more, and gives real power to the social movements students are so actively involved in. It also teaches us to imagine and participate in the building of a new world entirely, one built on solidarity and cooperation, not profit and exploitation.

Ultimately, if we do not forge a path to zero ourselves through direct action, then we will bear the brunt of mass ecological destruction.

But if we remember where our power lies, we can take hold of it to demand more than just piecemeal improvements and meagre reforms.

We can demand a better world, built on solidarity, equality, and respect for humanity and our environment. If we are willing to fight for it, we might just win it.

In the words of Spanish Buenaventura Durutti:

revolutionary

“It is we who built these palaces and cities...

We, the workers. We can build others to take their place… The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”

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COLLECTIVE LESSONS Alana Ramshaw on important things she has learned in the Enviro Collective My first week of university is one remembered through the dense haze and scorching heat that blanketed Sydney following the worst bushfire season in Australia’s recorded history. Like all of us, I was still optimistic, even dismissive, about the emergence of COVID-19 as it found its way into international headlines.

I thought the virus would surely disappear after a few weeks, never destined to impact my life in any meaningful way.

It was in my first week that I attended my first Enviro Collective meeting. The meeting was held at the base of the stairs behind New Law Lawns. I awkwardly made my way there around five minutes late, red bull in hand, and joined the circle. I sat through the meeting cross-legged and coated in a mildly uncomfortable layer of sweat due to both the light jog there from the other side of campus and the dry bushfire heat. Two years later, I find myself giving you advice I probably would not have listened to back then.

1. Listen, learn, and sometimes speak I arrived at my first Enviro meeting with an inflated sense of self-importance, an established idea of what the collective was, and an even more established idea of what I believed it should be. Having spent the prior year on the peripheries of the climate movement, I believed I knew everything there was to know about both climate activism and climate activists. The following years would prove me wrong on both counts.

Nobody joins the collective fully versed in the political, theoretical, and practical intricacies 29

of climate justice, and it’s important to not let any lack of experience or knowledge deter you. If you have a question, ask it!

Women, queer people, and people of colour are well acquainted with being discouraged from occupying time and space within their everyday lives. If you’re joining the Enviro Collective and benefit from whiteness and/or patriarchy, remain mindful and create space for those who don’t. If you’re joining the collective as a woman and/or person of colour, don’t be afraid to speak up when you have something to say.

2. Sometimes you will argue with people (read: the importance of pluralism) In spite of myself, I eventually allowed myself to listen to the people in the collective around me. I came to know them as hard working, passionate, and unafraid of a good time, and some of them even became my dearest friends. Every member brings something unique to the table, and we nourish each other as individuals and as a collective. I opened myself up to the ideas, views, and practices that I was presented with, and allowed them to shape me, rejecting some while embracing others. It was only after this occurred that I came to realise it wasn’t a bad thing.

If a movement’s strength is to be found in its homogeneity, in everyone agreeing on every matter and having the same skills and experiences, there would be no need for it to consist of more than one person. As with any other realm of life, you may encounter people who you disagree with on a political level, and

that is okay*.

3. It’s okay to give bad speeches (it’s better than not giving speeches) I gave my first ever protest speech in front of Hyde Park fountain, delivered through a tinny megaphone to the collective in September of my first year. Police officers kept an eye on me and my modest audience, so I made sure to include a few jabs at them. My speech was ineloquent and ungraceful, but delivered with as much zeal as I could muster through my nerves.

My first piece of writing in a campus publication was in last year’s edition of this very handbook.

I wrote my first draft in three frantic hours, hunched over my laptop in the Honi Soit office with last year’s enviro convenors, who were editing and laying up the edition (also frantic, also hunched over their laptops).

It is in such moments, and in taking such opportunities when they arise, that you build strong connections with the people around you. The Enviro Collective gives you opportunities to do a wide range of things, from writing or making art in a zine, to painting a banner, to facilitating a meeting. In putting your hand up to do things you haven’t done, even if you fumble your way through them, you gain skills, friendships, and sometimes even free beer†.

Good luck, and see you at your first meeting! *Some things are not okay, don’t be afraid to let a convenor know if anyone is being racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, and/or a liberal voter †Beer not guaranteed

Art by Tiger Perkins 30

THE NUTMEG’S CURSE: A REVIEW Tiger Perkins reads Amitav Ghosh’s latest book on the history of the nutmeg spice and what it has to do with the climate crisis and colonialism

“A must-read for anyone hoping to understand the powers that govern the world, the shortcomings of Western tradition, the importance of Indigenous knowledge and resistance and the history and future of our world...”

The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Climate in Crisis, a book by Calcutta-born Amitav Ghosh, is a refreshing contrast to the plethora of articles and pamphlets that tend to guide the political education of young university students. It is a blend of storytelling, historical analysis, anecdote and political commentary that centres around the history of the book’s protagonist - the nutmeg spice. Ghosh argues that much of the climate crisis of modern times is to do with a Western, mechanistic understanding of the earth that renders the natural world “inert.” Centering his argument around the nutmeg, is therefore an attempt to subvert such an understanding and show that spices, tea, sugar cane, opium, and fossil fuels too can be the “movers and shakers” of history.

The book begins with the story of the Dutch East India Company and their genocide of the indigenous inhabitants of the Banda Islands (Indonesia), in an effort to control the spice 31

trade. This, Ghosh argues, was the beginning of a centuries-long history of Western geopolitical dominance rooted in colonialism, eugenics, slave labour and greed, from which the world is yet to recover. Ghosh picks apart the letters, speeches and writings of many of those we laud with the creation of the modern world from Charles Darwin to Sir Francis Bacon to President Nixon to reveal the rotten foundations of Western culture that “continue to animate the workings of Empire to this day.”

Many chapters articulated what I felt about the world but could not find such perfect words for. Ghosh’s pages blew my mind with their novel insight, their expertise and their approach. Some of the most interesting chapters were those on ‘terraforming,’ vitalism, the geopolitics of oil and the violence of Western ecofascism.

He describes terraforming as the remaking of “immense stretches of terrain to suit the lifestyles of another continent,” which “inevitably entailed

the undermining and elimination of the ways of life of those who had inhabited their lands for many thousands of years.” This focus on the colonial practices of previous centuries is integral to any understanding of the climate crisis today, however he notes that it juxtaposes Western science’s emphasis on the future. A focus on computational modelling programs and the forecasting of future effects and the plans required to combat them abstracts the crisis from its historical reality. The discourse, then, becomes centred around the reduction of carbon emissions rather than the combatting of the colonial and economic systems that culminated in the climate crisis.

His arguments are thoughtful and nuanced and always with a view to expose those systems of power that rule the movements of governments and militaries around the world.

It is a must-read for anyone hoping to understand the powers that govern the world, the shortcomings of Western tradition, the importance of Indigenous knowledge and resistance and the history and future of our world, as well as for those who feel they already have these topics covered. Truly one of the most eye-opening and important books I’ve read in a long time.

He also problematises the ubiquitous understanding amongst left-wing groups, in which capitalism is seen as the root cause of evil in the world, suggesting instead that it is merely a symptom of the problem. Instead, he argues, the key to understanding the destruction of our climate lies in the hegemonic strategy and power relations of Western countries rooted in the colonialism of the midmillenium. He proves this through an exploration of “the hidden hand of American hegemony” - the petrodollar system.

Art by Tiger Perkins

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DON’T LOOK AROUND: CLIMATE CHANGE AS A HYPEROBJECT Andy Park analyses Timothy Morton’s theory of hyperobjectivity and Adam Mckay’s ‘Don’t Look Up’ There’s something deeply poetic about the end of the world. As unsettling and incomprehensible as it may be, it forces us to reconsider the value of life, meaning the apocalypse has been an ever-present cultural artefact. In the Book of Revelation, Judgement Day signals the end of all evil and a newly formed union between “God” and “Man”.

Though our conception of the apocalypse has generally lost its religious connotation, contemporary imaginations of the apocalypse are no less climactic. However, in recent times our relationship with the end of the world has irreversibly shifted.

Moments before the comet collides with Earth, Dr Randall Mindy, played by Leonardo Dicaprio, mourns, “We really did have everything, didn’t we?”. Released in December 2021, Adam Mckay’s Don’t Look Up has become something of a cultural phenomenon.

Almost purposefully on the nose, the starstudded disaster comedy lays bare the wilful ignorance of political institutions in responding to a world-ending comet — a blatantly clear metaphor for climate change inaction. Though the acting and writing borders on farce, so is the world that we live in. With climate change in full throttle, the sense of impending doom in science fiction is now a part of our reality. As much as there are valid criticisms of the film’s satire, credit is due to Mckay for attempting to capture the urgency of the climate crisis in art.

Some critics have pointed to how the film reduces the complexity of the crisis into the crude allegory of a comet. Ross Doutat for the 33

New York Times called it “lousy” citing an article in the Intelligencer which says that “whereas [climate change] threatens a diffuse, nonlinear, and gradual worsening of ecological conditions, [the comet] presents a clear-cut ticking-time-bomb scenario”. Whilst it is true that a comet is inadequate in encapsulating the nuances of the crisis, it is rash to criticise the film for conceptual reductiveness. It may be the case that the issue is not with the metaphor itself, but rather our ability to conceive of climate change.

For this inquiry, it is apt to consider the work of Timothy Morton. Now a rockstar in the world of philosophy, Morton’s concept of “hyperobjects” has descended from the ivory tower and entered ecological discourse as a popular neologism. Morton’s inquiry seeks to pin down the transcendental quality of climate change and provide a language for its ineffability. The difficulty is that though climate change is certainly real and has material impacts on the world, we cannot touch it, feel it or see it. This is the essence of the hyperobject.

For example, one manifestation of climate change can be felt in escalating weather events such as the Australian bushfires in 2019-20; but this isn’t ‘climate change’ itself, nor is the conglomeration of all such weather events. Morton calls this nonlocality — as hyperobjects are distributed across space and time they can only be experienced through instances and never in totality. The ‘hyperobject’ is a useful tool for conceptualising this epistemic difficulty; Morton’s philosophy

equips us with a framework through which to trace climate change.

It’s unsurprising that Adam Mckay’s production company is named “Hyperobject Industries”.

He explains, “The whole idea of the company was, Wow, the world is insane and shifting and teetering”. Mckay knew what he was doing. In what is an inadvertent response to the aforementioned criticisms, he explains that the comet metaphor is “a very simple truth that’s coming on a very predictable schedule”. In other words, the reduction of climate change into a single, identifiable object was a deliberate artistic choice to represent an otherwise unfathomable phenomena. Given our understanding of Morton’s philosophy, it’s clear that this wasn’t merely an artistic choice but an epistemic requirement necessitated by the immensity of the hyperobject. Morton says themself, Human art, in the face of this melting glass screen, is in no sense public relations. It has to actually be a science, part of science, part of cognitively mapping this thing. Art has to be part of the glass itself because everything inside the biosphere is touched by global warming.

In one of the best parts of the film, singing sensation Riley Bina (Ariana Grande) and DJ Chello (Kid Cudi) perform a duet to raise awareness about the impending collision in the anthem “Just Look Up”. Grande’s pristine vocals bring beauty to the dire circumstances for the fictional audiences packed in the stadium and those of us watching through our laptop screens — it’s undoubtedly heartstirring. And yet, by the end, everyone dies.

Art will always be important in any politics of change but in our media-saturated, instant-

gratification world, works like Don’t Look Up can feel like a Che Guevara T-shirt. We watch Don’t Look Up only for a season of Friends to follow. Where is the meaningful change? It’d be ignorant to cast this as a problem with our individual apathy, given it is clearly a result of deep structural problems — as the saying goes, there is no ethical consumption under capitalism. Hence, the real question we should be asking is what next? We’ve watched the movie, we’ve processed the art, where to now?

As a result of the wild incompetence and callousness of our government and global institutions, it’s easy to feel disempowered, especially as the climate crisis itself is incomprehensible. However, we mustn’t be disheartened and channel our disillusionment into radical action. At all points, the characters in Don’t Look Up turn to liberal institutions, the politicians and the media only to be crushed by the self-interest plaguing the ruling class.

Mckay himself explains, “The climate crisis, income inequality, homelessness, the lack of health care, the opioid epidemic, guns — all of that stuff is driven by dirty money freezing up our system…Would you say that systemic corruption qualifies as a hyperobject? I think it does.”

For those with a radical vision of how the world could be, hyperobjects encapsulate the way climate change, colonialism and capitalism are all enmeshed — the exploitation of natural resources is intrinsically linked to the profitincentives which drove the colonial project.

Though the end of the world is oft-characterised by despair, it can also be a time of renewal. In order for the climate crisis to be addressed, the world as we know it must end and existing systems of power must be burned to the ground. And from the ashes, we can build a world worth preserving.

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ENVIRO’S TOP PICKS Ishbel Dunsmore listens to, watches and reads all things climate-related.

Songs Monkey Gone to Heaven - From Pixies’ 1989 album Doolittle comes Monkey Gone to Heaven, a compelling and somewhat surrealist take on environmentalism in the context of man and his confused place in the universe.

Entangled with themes of Hebrew numerology to evoke the mythological and magical nature of the natural world, the contrasting doom and gloom that comes with enduring environmental issues – namely the hole forming in the ozone layer, oceanic degradation and general capitalistic negligence – are brought to the forefront through lead-singer Black Francis’ signature screams: “Now there’s a hole in the sky/And the ground’s not cold/And if the ground’s not cold, everything is gonna burn/ We’ll all take turns, I’ll get mine too…”.

Big Yellow Taxi - It goes without saying that Joni Mitchell’s smash 1970 hit Big Yellow Taxi has to be on this list as one of the greatest songs about the climate crisis to date. Its enduring relevance, having been covered and re-energised a number of times through history by the likes of Bob Dylan, Janet Jackson and Counting Crows, is plain to see in Mitchell’s transcendent message of anti-globalisation, 35

anti-industrialisation and anti-capitalism.

Perhaps most enduring is the simplicity of the line: “You don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone…”.

Ignorance - The Weather Station’s debut 2021 album Ignorance is an extraordinary album that seems to be inspired by impending ecological doom; its lyrics seldom address it explicitly but it still bears the emotional weight of addressing the burgeoning climate crisis. In Atlantic, frontwoman Tamara Lindeman finds herself gazing at the vast Atlantic Ocean, enraptured by its unending beauty as sea birds cry overhead. Ultimately, in between sips of red wine, she finds herself trying but failing to forget impending disaster. However this song may be interpreted, I think this album, and this song in particular, is an ode to the imperative nature of addressing impending ecological disaster, and that any attempt to divert attention away from direct action is futile.

Ignorance is an absolutely wonderful album that I highly recommend giving a listen. In its own quiet way, this album is a relevant and defiant call to action against ecological apathy.

Film Jack Mundey, His Life and Politics - Jack Mundey was a trade unionist and leader of the Builders Labourers Federation (BLF). A champion of the working class during the Sixties, Mundey was anti-racist, anti-war, pro women’s and gay liberation, and an all-round stellar civil disobedient. Beyond his staunch activism, Mundey was a pioneer of the Green Bans, which were the result of the BLF banning the employment of any builders’ labourers on development projects which were thought to be environmentally destructive or requiring the demolition of heritage buildings. Since most, if not all, of the builders labourers were unionists, the Green Bans had the power to stop any development from coming to fruition. Jack Mundey, His Life and Politics recounts the life and times of Mundey, and is an excellent biopic that the Enviro Collective screened last year in the months following his passing. If you can find a copy of it, it’s well worth watching!

Don’t Look Up - Although most of the letterboxd critics I’ve come across have slammed this film for being “corny, self-important, [and] out of touch” (ouch), Adam McKay’s 2021 film Don’t Look Up was, for me, a pretty accurate depiction of how the American elite – and more broadly, the global one percent – would respond to imminent threats of global catastrophe. In this case, how best to respond to the forthcoming destruction of the world by a comet. Although I agree the film reads like a debut feature film and for that reason lacks any sort of subtlety in its satire, McKay’s frustration at the state of our own world is very much audible. However unsubtle it is, his film still

seems cognisant of the level of irony it operates under, with an all-star cast of Hollywood’s finest critiquing the American public’s failure to recognise peril even when confronted with imminent death. Ultimately, it was a story of the power of the state in propagandising the masses into apathy, safeguarding the wellbeing of the rich even at the peril of the majority, and the imperative need for this same majority to mobilise against the systems which continue to fail both themselves and the environment. If nothing else, Don’t Look Up is an entertaining and all-too-real depiction of the failings of modern capitalism, especially in the context of imminent climate catastrophe.

Books This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate - Naomi Klein’s 2014 book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate is a succinct and to-the-point book which firmly establishes Klein as one of the most prominent American critics of neoliberal disaster capitalism. As noted by Eric Klinenberg, This Changes Everything has “become a touchstone of progressive climate activism. It’s the single strongest statement we have for why carbon-fuelled capitalism… with its imperative of relentless growth and exploitation, is fundamentally incompatible with ecological sensibility and climate justice.”

Her book succinctly ties systemic problems and structural violence to climate change, through which they proliferate. If you’re unsure where to start reading on environmentalism and anti-capitalism, this is the book to start.

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