Tell me this… why do we cut down our use of paper clips in the office all year and turn off the lights when we aren’t in a room? Why do we bother carpooling and why do we recycle? Because in December every year our media rush out to promote the houses that do exactly the opposite by stringing untold party lights across their roofs and gardens in some hope of becoming 5-minute famous.

The media should be doing the opposite. But how many newspapers are running the story about the arsehole wasting resources to become that local 5-minute neighbourhood hero? Next to none, if any.

What lesson about the urgency of global warming does that Christmas light display send to our children other than “BURN MORE COAL”? We wonder why human induced global warming isn’t taken seriously across society… take one look at those Christmas light displays on your local news channel.

I look at the newspapers pushing these “fabulous displays of Christmas spirit” as somehow socially irresponsible. It’s about selling papers. But at some point we need to turn our consumption and consumerism around into some coherent society that can operate on the idea of enough, equity and moderation. And we are going to need mainstream media to help facilitate that change of attitude on a broad social scale.

So just consider two small things this Christmas… will one more present from China make your child love you any more or less in the long-term? And, will burning another truckload of coal in a Queensland suburb really be harmless entertainment in the long-term?

If you can’t see the link between consuming more energy and the science of human induced global warming then nothing will change your mind about Christmas lights or rampant consumerism. That extra Chinese toy took resources, water, fossil fuels and trees in production. At a certain point Christmas stops being about goodwill and peace to all and metamorphises into “fuck the rest of the world because I’ve got money.”

Remember this… with privilege comes responsibility. Try this Christmas lesson::: teach your children to be good people, to work hard and to make a difference.

Signed

The Environmental (Green) Grinch
Pooping Parties across the Developed World
BecauseICan, Australia

In the last century 90 per cent of the World’s fish have disappeared and the hand lays squarely at the feet of human beings for how this travesty of the Commons has happened. Charles Clover’s book titled The End of the Line: How Overfishing is Changing the World and What We Eat is the result of several decades investigating and experiencing the various fishing grounds that feed us. He looks at where we fish, the historic evolution of our fisheries and how and why we’ve suffered specific fisheries collapses. It’s a scary world when you are more ethically fish conscientious buying a McDonald’s fish meal than a fancy restaurant meal.

As a young man I was drawn to commercial fishing in Bass Straight (long-tooth scallop dredging that quickly collapsed the industry) and several months working on a prawn trawler out of Townsville. It was obvious that a world without quota and devoid of some sort of communal responsibility had no long-term future. And if fisheries within the 200 mile limit were treated that way then what hope was there for the oceans that have since been blitzkrieged with industrial high-technology driven fisheries? The by-catch from trawling for prawns off the Great Barrier Reef meant that a good ton of fish in the net equaled a bucket of prawns, a few Moreton Bay bugs and the rest went back over the side dead.

So I really did find The End of the Line a compelling book that can only be recommended to humans who should be very worried about how we are going to consider feeding 9+ billion people by 2050 without fish. And it’s right now that we need to be discriminating on our plate to ensure that resource continues to exist… as for wild fish farming of carnivore species there have been more problems created than questions answered, so don’t hang your hat on that being a solution.

While reading this book a tweet ran down my Twitter stream from a usability professional in the Unites States – he wrote “I need more Sturgeons in my life”. He’s tweeted that before. So I replied with a link to Wikipedia for information about sturgeon… just so he’s aware that sturgeon are highly endangered. Unfortunately restaurants seem to be quite willing to provide their patrons with the almost forbidden fruit of endangered species. However, we would be appalled to read that Bengal tiger steaks and urangatan cutlets were served to the rich.

The End of the Line is an accompanying book to the documentary of the same name. It does look at the problem but more importantly it looks at the relatively simple solutions. Some major fisheries have collapsed and rebounded… but only through a long hard process with the involvement of all stakeholders (not just commercial & recreational fishermen). Perhaps one of the biggest challenges is to rope in the global fish plunder of the European Union. However, it’s fixable if we continue this turnaround rather than pretending it will go away. If we don’t chase that solution then the only thing to go away certainly will be the fish.

A refreshing part of Charles Clover’s book is also the positivity he has that it doesn’t need to be this way. We can still have our fish and eat them, too. If we do it the right way. If we stop strip-mining the oceans for economic short-term benefits over the interests of the fish and the people’s Commons. After all, the fish and the oceans do not belong to the fishermen… they belong to the people.

I remember watching the late Richard Carleton on 60 Minutes reveal in 2003 how live sheep were crammed in unbearable heat to suffer a horror voyage to the Middle East. Thousands died at sea and were pushed overboard. Survivors were dehydrated and starved on the voyage standing in their own dung and urine. When they arrived the slaughter was in a traditional style that our Western perspective found abhorrant. Australians stood up and voiced outrage the very next day… and some of those issues were addressed by government (final paragraph on Page 2). Unfortunately, some of those issues have remained to haunt us even today with live animal exports to Indonesia. Note the corporate players in live exports are almost unaltered from a decade ago.

The 4 Corners episode about live animal exports to Indonesia (A Bloody Business) aired on Monday 30 May, 2011. In my humble opinion, 4 Corners has produced one of the great pieces of Australian Journalism to be aired this year. This is what Journalism should be about and what it potentially has to offer society – the revelation of a hidden truth that somebody wants to remain untold and, in the telling of that story, produces an affective response within society that leads to action and some level of social change.That, my friends, is Journalism with the big J. That’s where great editorial skill comes to the fore… it’s where journalistic institutions become necessary to protect the story being told from the big business and government ministers who definitely do not want the story told. So, in my view, whether you want to concede this point or not – the Indonesian slaughterhouse story was exceptionally good investigative Journalism.

There is a GetUp! petition available online addressed to Prime Minister Julia Gillard and Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig: “We call on you to immediately halt the live exports of Australian cattle to Indonesia and move towards an end to the live exports of Australian animals within 3 years.” I hope you consider adding your voice to the call to stop live animal exports from our country. The bottom line is our meat should be butchered in Australia by professionals in as humane an environment as possible. We should only sell into markets that accept our meat as it is supplied.

However, I see that there’s a world full of cross conversation happening around this issue as well. Again in my humble opinion, this is all pepper on the toilet roll when it comes to it’s core. Are our animals ‘Australian’ is as loaded a question as ‘do you believe in cruelty of overseas animals’. First – yes and no. Yes we have an ethical and moral (and I know the difference between those two terms) responsibility to the livestock we raise and sell for export; in that sense they are Australian. No, I don’t think they’re going to be swearing steers in as Australian citizens. It comes down to whether you see farm animals as living feeling creatures or as dumb commodities. Second – no. Animal cruelty is shocking and I obviously miss the inference that opposing the live export of Australian animals in any way equates to a yes on that question.

And yes there are a lot of issues in the Australian livestock industry – the contribution to employment and the Australian economy, the impact on global warming, the KG value per acre of our best farmland, the damage caused by hard-hooved beasts, water consumption per KG of meat, the environmental footprint of failing to produce food near it’s place of final consumption… the list goes on. You can argue backwards about all of these side issues, you can throw down your fork this afternoon and become a vegan, but that won’t change the issue. This conversation IS about the conditions of export of live animals reared on Australian properties that are being unnecessarily mistreated between sale and slaughter. We have a choice, as a nation, as to what stance we take about that process.

Briefly, I also want you to consider my perspective as somebody with an MBA degree. Don’t fool yourself in any way shape or form… live animal export is an industry all about increasing Australia’s GDP (Gross Domestic Product) by letting a few fatcat big companies make a lot of cash through moving animals from here to there. It’s not about raising cattle to feed our nation. It’s not about humane treatment or animal husbandry. There is no RSPCA to stop cruelty in this process. The fundamental driver is cash for cows (or sheep or pigs). People breed more cows to feed that market and as long as the rich are getting richer and GDP is rising everybody in that system chugs along with a big fat greedy smile. Don’t get me started on the stupidity of throwing in subsidisation.

So in my view the 4 corners expose of the treatment of Australian live animals exported to Indonesia is about a brutal business model based on a cross-cultural demand we should refuse to fill. There is a market for white slaves but we don’t sell our orphans to fill the need… likewise, we should protect our livestock. And we shouldn’t care if the United States or Bolivia fill that market need in our absence… it’s a market we do not want to be involved in.

But mostly I want you to think about why this story was such good Journalism and what it takes to create Journalism of that calibre. Investigative Journalism does not occur out of a dingy bedroom without editorial or resources. It is hard fought and defended because somebody powerful and influential does not want you to be told that story.

Fracking: Drill down 8000 feet all over the countryside and pump vast quantities of fresh water mixed with over 500 chemicals to fracture the underlying rock and release gas deposits. No, I mean VAST quantities of fresh water (in a world suffering rising water shortages) and I mean a soup of 500 chemicals (including a large number of serious carcinogens and other killers). Half that soup rises to the surface and the other half becomes a part of your countries long-term geological water supply.

The second insidious part of that business model is that contaminated victims have to prove the harm was caused by the fracking AND they have to fight it in court AND the corporation, if found at fault, simply pays out the last man standing. And where are the environmental regulators on all of this? They’re gagged by governments who pass special laws that allow these large energy companies immunity to our existing environmental safeguards. Where does it ever make sense to give multinational corporations immunity to pollute without being monitored?

A rational person would think the President of the United States of America would watch this documentary and hit a red fucking button and the world would stop on it’s what-the-fuck axis. But no… apparently Power comes in an idiot suit and Presidents are less powerful than corporate lobby groups. And now this insidious cluster-fuck of environmental ass-pumping has arrived in Australia. To the echo of ‘almost silence’. The only sad faces bleeting on our doorstep are the farmers who stand to lose their businesses to the corporate onslaught.

I don’t want to get into a synopsis here… if you watch Gasland you’ll see how water faucets can be ignited, how animals and land are contaminated and how devastating these greedy industrialists are being with the world’s future. It’s all about short-term cash. It’s also about chasing the fallacy that everything in the world is an economic problem – the High Lord Economics is as flawed as the sacrifice of virgins to a Sun God we now know to be an insentient ball of gas on the horizon.

So this makes me mad. This is exactly why I went through the MBA program – to understand globalisation, corporations and the true enemy of life on this planet. And at some point we’re all going to have to stand up and say ‘Stop the fuck here, bastards.’ If they aren’t fracking our water into poison or chugging the rainforests for cheap hardwoods then they’re scooping the oceans with their lucky dip mentality.

But the really crap part about all of these HUGE issues is that the corporations (a) have people willing to work for them to achieve these goals, and (b) know that by dividing and conquering and using the law against us then they win by the default of centralised power. How does the average community fight against hundreds of millions of dollars to sweet talk and cajole our politicians? Power corrupts.

And with Australia being swept up in this insanity where are the Australian Greens? We have voted these bastards in with numbers they’ve never seen before in national politics and for the life of me I can’t see any more than a small mention of gas fracking hitting their agendas. OK let me ask Australia this: ‘If the Murray Darling Basin were contaminated, what are our fallbacks?’

At a time when a douchebag like Donald ‘Squirrel Top’ Trump is trying to make his way into the United States Presidency why can’t we collectively see that chasing the bottom and buying into the religion of the High Lord Economics is a bizarrely insane strategy. For fuck sake, what’s the point of gas fracking to push up employment numbers and improve GDP (Gross Domestic Product) in the short-term if we’re going to be shot-duck third-world economies in as little as ten-to-fifteen years.

People think I’m joking when I compare the High Lord Economics with a Peruvian Sun God. Watch Gasland… watch the virgin get sacrificed and think about those parallels. Every civilisation falls and one of the underlying reasons is their inherent belief it can’t happen. Without fresh water and healthy land we even risk joining the mass extinction.

Architects called it Number 10, locals affectionately called it the Milk Crate and Michael Aird called it “a bad example of brutalist architecture” – but who owns Tasmania’s best example of a 1960s modernist office building?

Dirk Bolt and later David Hartley Wilson, a pioneer of architectural environmentalism, designed 10 Murray Street in 1963. It was a modernist office building that displayed a brutalist influence.

The term brutalism meant the building capitalised on an aesthetic of raw concrete.

Professor of Sociology, Adrian Franklin, said in his opening speech at the ‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ exhibition on May 4th that he does not accept politicians should be allowed to make decisions about our cityscapes.

“They are short term people… cityscapes contain our memories, our souls, our joined pasts, they are the shape that we wake up to in the morning and they’re what we consider when we become homesick overseas.”

‘Please Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’ was a fund raising event organised by the Save 10 Murray Campaign to raise awareness and protest at the impending demolition of the often misunderstood 10 Murray Street.

Dr Franklin said any move to sell or demolish 10 Murray Street will “rob them [our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren] of something that is rightfully not ours to dispose of”.

“We cannot allow them [the Government] to bracket in and bracket out whatever buildings they feel like because that’s our history, that’s our culture… We wouldn’t allow them to do that with our history as it’s recorded and as it’s taught to children in school,” Dr Franklin said.

“[10 Murray Street] was chosen by people who should be in a position to decide what is a significant building”.

The people who should decide are the experts in architecture, historians “and perhaps sociologists like myself”, he said.

On May 6th Hobart architect and chair of the Australian Institute of Architects’ 20th Century Buildings Committee, Paul Johnston, said on ABC Radio that 10 Murray was “identified as one of 60 buildings nominated to the Register of the National Estate in a survey of 20th Century buildings that was done by the Institute of Architects and the University of Tasmania in 1996”.

“As a consequence… it has been included in the Sullivan’s Cove Waterfront Authority’s heritage listing as a place of cultural significance.”

Mr Johnston said the buildings of the late 20th Century, those of the modernist movement, are the most susceptible for demolition because they are the least understood and least protected.

“You have to understand that heritage and the idea of heritage… changes over time,” he said.

“Typically what we need to find is a level of generational change that allows buildings to be placed in a social context and then they become rediscovered by newer generations because they can relate the buildings to their circumstances.”

The decision to demolish 10 Murray Street is subject to an appeal by the Save 10 Murray Campaign before the independent Resource Management and Planning Appeals Tribunal in June, with a verdict expected in July.

As long as Australia is contributing to the displacement of people in the world we cannot ignore our responsibility to house and protect the displaced from those conflicts (and other conflicts caused by globalisation and our voracious consumerism).

What makes me so mad is that our Federal Government (and each new government that gains power) incessantly rant on in Parliament about this issue as thought 3000 refugees will sink our economy or water down the master race. Let’s face it guys – Italy had around 30,000. And when the tide starts to come in we’ll be seeing a million or more knock on our back door for their right to life. How can we deny them that right?

All sides of the Australian political system have bought into the idea that refugees in boats are criminals. They certainly are not criminals – they are REFUGEES and displaced people. Our politicians frame this as border protection to stop queue jumpers and asylum seekers and bicker over the ability of one or the other party to keep these refugees, many of them women and children, in our purpose built maximum security prisons.

Hint: when boat numbers increase it does not mean our immigration policies have been wrong – it means our foreign policies have been wrong.

Here is a novel idea… but one I have heard bandied around the actual population before today. How about just letting the refugees into Australia with automatic temporary visas until it can be ascertained that they are bona-fide displaced people.

That means no prison. You are only a queue jumper (where is the queue anyway?) if you are just another immigrant flying under the radar. You ARE NOT a queue jumper if you have been bombed and shot and raped and crawled thousands of miles over five countries to get your family to safety.

Currently we treat everybody by default as a criminal. That is abhorrent behaviour from a civilised people towards victims of abuse.

So let’s start by just telling our politicians we don’t want to be totalitarian pricks anymore – we don’t have limited space on our lifeboat. Either that or they stop bombing the rest of the world in a bullshit war against terrorism (that incites more to become terrorists and insurgents against our invasion).

Fellow Australians, hypothetically, if we were invaded by our neighbour Indonesia at some point in the future then how would we expect to be treated if we made it on a battered old fishing boat to New Zealand? Would we expect to be treated as criminals by default? Locked in maximum security prison for years at a time? Would we expect the Gestapo response, or the humanitarian response?

It’s not until we accept our responsibility to the rest of the world as a humanitarian symbiotic relationship that we can even begin to think globally about other solutions to problems like global warming, species extinction, water shortage and poverty.

It’s time Australian politicians understood some issues are bigger than tit-for-tat in question time. Do we want to be totalitarian protectionist Australia, or humanitarian best-practice Australia leading the world in helping other people survive.

Written from the perspective of a British consumer, Fred Pearce endeavours to find out what’s behind some of our most unthought-out-loud questions. As a respected science journalist Pearce’s task in Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of my Stuff is to hold us to account for our actions. From Britain to Africa to Siberia and Australia he follows the trail of his own stuff through the hands of manufacturers and sometimes unclear supply chains to find out the conditions and the footprint incumbent in our transactions. What is the deal with the devil we make every time we dig into our perpetual bargain basement?

Who lives and who dies in the globalisation of our economies – where are we empowering and disempowering societies beyond our proximate view?

In some sense this book told me a lot about what I already knew at the base of my soul – my consumerism is a disease. However, Pearce has put together a book which looks at food, clothing, our everyday stuff and then the minerals we make them out of… and finally the glimmers of a solution. This is not solely a book about bagging out globalisation. If anything, its about informing other consumers about the difference between inclusive globalisation where we bring the rest of the world with us and exclusive globalisation where we use the third world as a slave market to perpetuate our lifestyles unsustainably.

While reading the food and clothing chapters I found myself almost paragraph after paragraph saying WOW out aloud and sharing the facts with my friends and family. I honestly had no idea that African bean farmers were supplying British supermarkets so efficiently by mobile phone… some of this was simply amazing work. I don’t want to share the actual stories in this review because I’d like you to read it – if you’re a public library then get hold of several second hand copies for loan.

As an MBA student I did find it interesting that not only don’t people in general feel comfortable knowing where stuff comes from, universities are no different. We’ve got the osterich policy in place, if we don’t see or hear then we’re not complicit. How do we stop the race to the bottom for the cheapest most exploitative products – simple: as consumers we need to start being prepared to pay what things are worth. Consumers need to demand quality, not rubbish. It starts with us.

And resources… once again the statistics were boggling. Resources are running out at an imminent rate. I was surprised how low some important metals are becoming in the planet’s crust to the point where there is serious consideration given to mining street dust.

But most of all I think this particular book is important because it changed several things about the way I operate as a consumer. I’m trying not to demand rubbish for cheaper prices and I’m prepared to pay more for good produce. I’m drinking only FairTrade coffee (although I’m prepared to pay more than what they’re currently charging). I’ve got a greater appreciation for how much rock gets mined and how much water is consumed to provide me with a tshirt or a gold ring. Everything comes from somewhere… and sometimes its surprising exactly where that is.

I’d put this on the must read list with a caveat. Don’t buy this book just looking for the good or the bad answer to your own bias. There are good and bad things going on in the world of your stuff. But do buy it if you’re interested in your own footprint on this planet. It will definately make you think again about the value of your stuff.

And I can tell you from experimentation that even PhD lecturers in MBA business programs DON’T WANT TO KNOW what that gadget, food item, garment or christmas present cost in resources. Which is odd because in a world with rapidly (scarily) depleting resources you’d think business schools would be particularly interested in teaching MBAs about effective resource management. Not simply strategic management in the grander sense but actual factual education about what we have to compete for and how we plan to compete for and use those resources into the next generations.

My personal view is that the great managers and leaders of 10 years from now will be those who understand and can manage depleting resources – not finance background MBAs. Not exploitative wasteful managers racing to the bottom for the cheapest, mass produced commodity. Why? Simply, our world’s resources won’t stack up to provide us with the exponential growth we’re all hooked into believing will happen.

How much of mineral X still exists? Where is it located? Hey, we don’t even want to face the fact that the tide is coming in because the day our government accepts that a rise is inevitable – a ban on buying or selling foreshore land property – then we’ll have global financial collapse. Our economic systems don’t stomach bad news.

Here’s a rule of thumb for you: All things are made from something and wind up somewhere.

A second rule of thumb: People who don’t believe in slavery and murder sure as hell don’t mind paying for it vicariously.

Its the meeting of those two rules of thumb that makes our lives unsustainable. First, consumers want ever cheaper products. Second, consumers want them in such a way as not to feel bad about the people forced to work below a living wage, those killed and raped and maimed in our industrial wars… Ultimately people wind up getting irate at the messenger who tells them that somebody is dying OUT THERE SOMEWHERE.

Yes I’m a hypocrite. Yes I’m a know-it-all. But am I actually wrong? Because when you’re inside a broken system it just doesn’t seem broken so everything just cruises along… but now you know… what do you do?

Third rule of thumb: ITS NOT US.

I guess its alright then. What do you think?

If you watch the video you can clearly see the captain of the Shonan Maru deliberately swerved at the boat that appeared to be a sitting duck. Not only that… after they ran the much smaller boat over they hit it again with the water canon! Thus further endangering life. That tells me that its only sheer luck that nobody died in the incident.

Can I see how this happened in the seasonally intensifying battle to eat or save the 935 minke whales and 50 fin whales of this year’s Japanese harvest? Yes, to a certain extent it was inevitable. But it was also a crime.

So my question is where do the Australian Federal Police get the kahoonas from the cupboard to go and arrest the captain of the Shonan Maru? I’m serious. Last year we had the incident with the AFP jumping all over the Sea Shepherd for apparently (as the Japanese accused) intentionally running into them somewhere out in the ocean. That’s a no-no, by the way. Ships are meant to at all cost avoid crashing into other ships – the sea is a dangerous place.

As a concerned Australian citizen who has seen the video of the Shonan Maru intentionally causing that collision with the Ady Gil – where is the AFP? Why aren’t they already out there arresting that captain and impounding the vessel for committing a crime in Australian waters? Why isn’t the Royal Australian Navy out there arresting these people?

Oh I forgot. Australia doesn’t want to diplomatically offend Japan. Same old story… we’re the bend-over-the-table bitch in that prison relationship.

So I have to say this much… I’ve contacted a number of influencial people and organisations asking them to somehow acknowledge the issue but it looks like Zeldman doesn’t care, Boing Boing doesn’t care – and they’re right, the American-EU-Australian-Asian consumers don’t care about the 45,000 dead every month in the Congo to fund our obsession with cheap technology consumerism. We simply turn our backs en-masse, much like the good German’s did during World War 2, and let the other people pay with their lives for our peaceful night’s sleep.

But its endemic to where we’ve come with our two Gods – consumerism and economics. Things, after all, must be consumed so that more factories can be made to produce more things for the consumer… our world needs Congolese coltan to make tantulum to then produce tantulum capacitors (and other things) which in turn gives us cheaper and better mobile phones and stereos and computers. Those less fortunate 6 million dead over the last 12 years, a half of them children under 5 years of age, become dead bodies directly through our shiny new IT accessory purchases. We, the consumers, drive the demand for the products that lead to the killing in the Congo. Its a simple war of economics and business rationalisation.

But as that purchase makes you feel all warm and cosy in your bed at night spare a thought to the 10 year old boy soldier who was forced into that hole in the ground to bring your precious coltan to the surface. Spare a thought to the slavery and murder and attrocities being committed at that very moment in your name – the western IT consumer. What can you do?

• upgrade your tech only when the old tech fails to work
• write to Sony, Siemens, Nokia and other tech companies demanding a Congo-free supply chain
• pass the word around and around until people take responsibility for their everyday actions

The Congo War has killed more people than any other conflict since World War 2. Blood is on our hands. Every SMS drips life onto the concrete and grass at our feet. Every SMS makes us complicit in the rapes and mutilations. The question, how complicit as an individual are we willing to become? Maybe we don’t want to hear this right now, maybe Zeldman and Boing Boing and the others are perfectly correct. After all, why should the 60 million people in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) deserve personal security and freedom?

Let’s stop the Congo War being our dirty little secret. Its time to break the silence.

[The image below is from Marcus Bleasdale's Rape of a Nation]