Painting Fakes

I hesitated before reading Oliver Milman's The Insect Crisis: The Fall of the Tiny Empires that Run the World.   I knew it would be depressing.  I made myself read it anyway because it's important not to look away. I was right, it was a depressing read.  There are multiple strands of evidence that the past few decades have seen substantial, sometimes dramatic, falls in insect populations around the world.  Various longitudinal surveys in different places - primarily Europe and the USA - show declines in insect numbers that are generally in the range of 20-50% but in some places are as much as 90%.  Some formerly abundant species, like North America's Monarch Butterflies or some species of European and North American bumblebees, are now threatened, but even species that are far from being threatened, like our common domesticated honeybees, are facing increasing pressure.   A caveat is in order.  None of these are comprehensive region-wide studies, ...

I just read Bill McKibben's Oil and Honey , his memoir of the early days of 350.org, published in 2013.  Of course I already knew who McKibben is - he is the key founder of 350.org and a long-time writer and activist on climate change - and I'd read a few short articles he's written, but this is my first long-form encounter with him, almost a decade after the event.  I may be slow but I get there in the end. McKibben has been writing about climate change for decades.  In 1989 he published The End of Nature , one of the first books to explain climate change to a broad audience.  He kept writing in the years that followed, expecting that sooner or later the penny would drop and governments and corporations would act rationally and reduce their emissions.  Around 2006 he realised this wasn't going to happen without a fight and he teamed up with a few of his students at Middlebury College, Vermont to form 350.org and launch a rolling series of global actions. Oil an...

It rained.  And rained.  It rained more.  The river was rising.  There would be minor flooding.  It rained more.  Actually, it would be moderate.  More rain.  No, sorry, major. We moved stuff upstairs.  The lights went out.  We headed for higher ground, and there we stayed for five days.  We were lucky, we just had a couple of inches of water in the rooms we had emptied.  Our neighbours, a few metres down the hill, not so much.  The rain headed south, wreaking havoc wherever it went.   Amidst all this, along with the war in Ukraine and the ongoing global plague, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report saying how bad the impacts of climate change are, how much worse they will be, and how much we're not doing to adapt.  Tell us something we don't know.  If you listened to our politicians, you wouldn't know the report had been published.  From many of them, you wouldn't even k...

I've been busy so this article is a bit late, the Labor Party released its climate change policy back in December.  The election hasn't happened yet but it's already clear what Labor's strategy will be.  They will be just a little bit better than the Coalition.  This is not difficult, surely they can achieve it! In some areas it just involves being a little bit more competent at doing the same thing.  They would have ordered vaccines and RATS in time (we will never know).  They voted to pass the Government's Religious Discrimination Bill with a few amendments (proposed by independent members) to make it less crap enough for the Government to withdraw it.  On asylum seekers they promise to be better at trampling on people's human rights.   Meanwhile, on climate change they will be a little bit better at concealing the fact that they don't really give a s*** about climate change as long as fossil fuel companies keep those donations flowing.  Bu...

Did you know that over half the cells in your body are not actually human?  You and I contain masses of bacteria, fungi, viruses and archaea.  They live in every part of us - on our skin, in our hair, in our mouths, in our bloodstream, in our lungs, and most especially in our digestive tract.    Having just read Ed Yong's fascinating book, I Contain Multitudes , along with a few articles, I now have a much clearer idea of how much I don't know about this subject.  Of course, there are lots of people who know way more than me but I also have an idea of how little anyone  knows. For instance, how many non-human cells are there in our bodies?  One rather complicated article I read estimates the number is within the range of 3.8-10 13  - that is, somewhere between 38 and 100 trillion cells.  They estimate that the ratio of non-human to human cells in our bodies is somewhere around 1.3:1 in the 'average man', 2.2:1 in the 'average woman', and 2.3:...

One of the favourite political books from my young days was The Deep North  by Deane Wells.  It was published in 1979, the year I started university, and Wells was a Lecturer in Philosophy at my university.  His book analyses the political philosophy of Joh Bjelke-Petersen, who at that time was Queensland's Premier.  Joh was a figure who loomed large over our State, an authoritarian pro-business leader who outlawed political protests and set the police onto protestors.  During his reign the Police Special Branch spied on activists and union leaders and kept secret dossiers on them, trying to find ways to implicate them in crimes.   Wells' thesis was that Joh was a genuine, dinky di fascist.  He didn't mean this in the general sense that left-wing activists often use for right-wing authoritarians.  He meant that Joh followed the philosophy outlined by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, even though he had probably never read Hitler's writings .  ...