Painting Fakes

I was sad to read Clive Hamilton giving short shift to the role of traditional religions (including Christianity) in dealing with the Anthropocene.  After all, I mix with quite a few Christians who are passionate and active on environmental issues. Still, I have to sadly admit that Clive has a point.  Christian climate activists are decidedly in the minority.  Aid agencies like TEAR  and lobby groups like Common Grace  and ARRCC have picked up the issue, but many Christians are disengaged and it is not something that has been talked about regularly in any of the churches I have been part of.  When it does come up there will be the predictable skeptics and deniers, but many Christians will respond that while it's true and important, it's much more important for Christians to 'preach the gospel', by which they generally mean 'make converts'. I find this frustrating but also familiar.  It is exactly the same response I have heard over many year...

A few years ago I read Affluenza: When Too Much is Never Enough  by Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss.  The authors examine the ubiquity of over-consumption in Western societies, what drives it, why we keep doing it even though it doesn't make us happy, and some ideas for countering it. I remember agreeing with it, but largely from the standpoint that I had heard it before.  Back in 1975, the English theologian and later bishop John V Taylor wrote a little book called Enough is Enough  which urged Christians to resist the temptation to over-consume.  I still remember his advice to families watching TV - when the ads come on, cover your ears and shout 'Who are you kidding?'. I haven't really been paying attention to Hamilton since then, but recently I saw a reference to his book Defiant Earth: The Fate of Humans in the Anthropocene  in an article I was reading and decided to check it out.  I'm both glad and sad that I did.  Glad because it i...

Australia has many myths about its history, and particularly about our history of invasion and dispossession of Aboriginal people.  Among them are the myth that Australia was terra nullius , an empty land, prior to the arrival of the British; the idea that Aboriginal people were hunter-gatherers who roamed randomly around the country; and the idea that the Europeans named the various parts of the country , as if they did not already have names. Each of these myths has been comprehensively busted, but many Australians remain unaware of this fact.  Other myths also remain alive. Rosalind Kidd is a Queensland historian whose main work has been on the administration of Aboriginal affairs in Queensland.  At the start of the 1990s she was given access, through the intervention of Aboriginal academic and activist Marcia Langton, to the files of Queensland's Aboriginal Affairs Department going back to the foundation of the colony.  Aside from her doctoral thesis, the ma...