Painting Fakes

I was too busy to get my head into writing a Christmas post this year, but this is almost it.  After all, there are 12 days in Christmas, right? This Christmas I've been thinking about something that's not strictly a Christmas story - Jesus' inauguration message in the Nazareth synagogue, as told in Luke 4. He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written: ‘The Spirit of the Lord is on me,     because he has anointed me     to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners     and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free,     to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favour.’ Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on him. He began by saying t

 In his book Collapse,  Jared Diamond uses mining as a metaphor to explain Australia's environmental predicament. Mining in a literal sense - i.e. the mining of coal, iron and so on - is a key to Australia's economy today, providing the largest share of its export earnings.  In a metaphorical sense, however, mining is also a key to Australia's environmental history and to its current predicament.  That's because the essence of mining is to exploit resources that do not renew themselves with time and hence to deplete those resources.... Australia has been and still is 'mining' its renewable resources as if they were mined minerals.  That is, they are being exploited at rates faster than their renewal rates, with the result that they are declining.  At present rates, Australia's forests and fisheries will disappear long before its coal and iron reserves, which is ironic in view of the fact that the former are renewable and the latter aren't. I thought of t

Just in time for COP26, our government released it's new-but-not-new climate policy, Australia’s Long-Term Emissions Reduction Plan: A whole-of-economy plan to achieve net zero emissions by 2050.  As The Juice Media so aptly put it (with language warning!), it's not so much a plan as a planphlet.  A few weeks later, in the dead zone of a Friday evening, they released a thing which they said was the modelling behind it. It's kind of like Schroedinger's cat, simultaneously promising to cut emissions to 'net zero' and to do no such thing.  People who know what they are talking about have analysed it - like here ,  here  and here .  I'm not sure they've quite captured how absurd it is.  So in the interests of progressing the theatre of the absurd, here are seven of the many absurd things about it.  1. 'Net Zero' = 'Not Zero'. Our Minister for Emissions Reduction, Angus Taylor, has said several times that 'it's net zero, not absolute

 I've just finished reading a wonderful little book by Melissa and Chris Bruntlett called Curbing Traffic: The Human Case for Fewer Cars in Our Lives.   The Bruntletts are Canadian cycling advocates who moved from their home in Vancouver to the Dutch town of Delft to pursue their cycling dreams.  They knew they were moving to the home of commuter cycling, having already written a book about the Dutch cycling revolution, but they were unprepared for just how great it would be. Delft itself is a small town but it's in the middle of the Randstad, the urbanised western part of the Netherlands that includes The Hague, Rotterdam and Amsterdam with a population of over eight million people.  These cities are pretty much the global leaders in active transport, with dense networks of protected cycleways and walkways and lots of areas which are 'no go' for cars.  Delft is at the forefront of this movement, with cars progressively barred from more and more of the town's street

When I first read Bruce Pascoe's Dark Emu  about three years ago I was, like many readers, mightily impressed.  Pascoe takes the myth of Aboriginal people as passive hunter-gatherers and turns it on its head.  He argues that Aboriginal people engaged in agriculture, aquaculture, building of durable permanent housing, food processing and storage and active management of pastures and the game animals that lived on them.  The picture he develops is of a highly intentional, sophisticated and sustainable food economy. Since then I have become aware that a lot of controversy swirls around Dark Emu.  This has grown in the three years since I first read it as the book itself has continued to gain popularity, spinning out into a dance performance by Bangarra and a version for children.   Some of the controversy seems to me to have less than noble motives.  For instance, some people have launched personal attacks on Pascoe, suggesting he has faked his own Aboriginal heritage (Pascoe has outl

Prompted by Extinction Rebellion and some of my friends who are involved in direct action protests on climate, war and other things I've been thinking a fair bit about civil disobedience.  This is what timid people like me do when faced with the option of being confrontational - we go away and think about it.  I'm planning to share various things with you over the next little while but here, by way of starters, are some reflections on Frederic Gros' little book Disobey: The Philosophy of Resistance. Frederic Gros is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris XII and the Institute of Political Studies, also in Paris.  This book is based on a series of lectures he delivered to his students, published in French in 2017 and in this English translation in 2020.  The subtitle is a little ambiguous - the cover says 'The Philosophy of Resistance', the title page 'A Guide to Ethical Resistance'.  I would go with the cover - this is a work of philosophy, not a

This week the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report .  It's a synthesis of the latest scientific understandings of climate change, put together and carefully vetted by a group of several hundred climate scientists.   The news is not good. The earth has already warmed by 1.09 degrees Celsius on average.  Australia has warmed by 1.4.   Scientists are more certain than ever that it's caused by humans (us, and particularly the wealthy oligarchs who are blocking action).   They are also much more certain than they were last report about the direct link between climate change and natural disasters.  Remember those bushfires, and the ones sweeping Europe right now, right after the floods that swept Europe?  There'll be more. Sea levels are rising.  It's hard to say by how much because it's hard to model how major ice sheets will melt.  But higher than now.  Some Pacific nations are at risk of disappearing.   This is not t