Environment

Cyanide insanity

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In my book The Woman on the Mountain, I expressed my disbelief that the National Heritage listed wetlands of Lake Cowal — and all the waters downstream — had been put under great threat from Canadian giant Barrick Gold’s open-cut cyanide leach goldmining right next to it.

The Wiradjuri people and their supporters have been fighting this insanity, this obscenity, for the past 10 years. Now Barrick Gold wants to expand into the lake bed, doubling the size of the mine.

No mine has ever avoided leaking cyanide-laced water and waste into the ecosystem. Barrick’s gold mine at Lake Cowal will be no exception.

You’ll be appalled at what you learn from their Save Lake Cowal website which I am now including as a permanent link from mine.

They need ongoing support in this campaign about sovereignty, the battle against corporate greed and the ongoing fight to protect an ecologically significant and sacred land.

Watch a video about it here.

Coal port takeover

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Although I’d only been home for a few days, last Saturday I drove to Newcastle to help take over the harbour entrance to this major coal exporting port.

It’s the fourth year that the dynamic climate change action group, Rising Tide, have organised the event at Horseshoe Beach. This is a peaceful, family-oriented way to protest that the continuing export of our coal for the world to burn in power stations is fuelling global warming and thus climate chaos.

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That’s me in the red hat, centre left, camera in hand.

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This lone polar bear –  who sat there all day – said it all. The police boat kept a close eye on him: it’s the silent types you have to watch.

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Kayaks were supplied, but many people brought their own water transport, from surfboards, sailboats and rubber dinghies to inner tubes and floaties. Some had made rafts of limited navigation and dubious flotation abilities, but great ingenuity and sense of fun.

I didn’t do much paddling about, being a bit of a wuss waterwise, opting to help out in the kitchen tent instead.

This year, the port authorities didn’t wait for the people occupying the port for the day to have the chance to actually stop any coal ships leaving the port. They cancelled them anyway.

This made the protest a success before it started and also kept the tension and the numbers of police down from previous years.

See Rising Tide’s website for further details on the day and their ongoing great work. People power does work: you might like to get involved.

Kikuyu punishment

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kikuyu grass stops mower

A month away from the mountain is a long time. The bush itself requires no attention from me, but my domesticated area does, and the 350mm of rain in February has effected a great deal of green growth. Not all is welcome.

I continually apologise to the environment for my ignorant crime of introducing kikuyu grass here thirty years ago. As punishment, its runners are the scourge of my garden, but until lately the horses kept its main expanse munched very short, its patches the first thing they headed for whenever I let them into the house yard.

With the horses gone, that munching is much missed now after my month’s absence. Mowing is the only answer, and with these dewy autumn mornings that has to wait until the sun is hotter than I like for outdoor work.

Thick and tall kikuyu is a hard task for a mower and when wet it is an impossible one, a sudden choked capital green full stop.

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Fiery future fuelled by Rudd

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The death toll from the Victorian fire storm is now at about 170.  With the words of shocked survivors and images of whole villages obliterated, blown apart as if by bombs, cars and their occupants burnt as they drove to escape – we share vicariously in their nightmare experience. 

Like everyone else, I am preoccupied with what has happened, is still happening in other areas — and the threat will continue. Victoria is burning. Nowhere is safe until rain falls.

Having been through two major fires here, and chosen to stay, I can only begin to imagine what those people went through.  I know what intense radiant heat feels like, but even the experienced and well-prepared down there found this time it was beyond human endurance and had to abandon at the last minute.

The speed and ferocity of that fire was unprecedented. But not unexpected: the predicted effects of global warming had been of increased heat, extreme weather patterns, a drier south-east — hence more severe and frequent fires.

Welcome to the nightmare of climate change, which I prefer to call climate chaos. Look at Ingham.

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Code Red for climate emergency

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5% reduction won’t give her a future, Mr Rudd!!

Over 2000 people, wearing red, came to Canberra on February 3rd to link hands and red banners and tell Mr Rudd and Ms Wong that they have got it terribly wrong. 5% carbon emissions reduction will do nothing to halt our runaway global warming crisis. 

If our ‘leaders’ haven’t yet joined the dots, maybe they’ve noticed the prolonged heatwaves in Victoria and South Australia and the floods in Queensland, with 75% of the state a declared disaster area.

Excessive heat or excessive rain – infrastructure and services like transport and energy have collapsed, and people are suffering. 

Climate chaos is not good for the economy either, Mr Rudd.

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We went there on the opening day of Parliament to remind them this is a Climate Emergency, a red alert to act NOW. We were so many we encircled the block. 

But our message was eclipsed by Mr Rudd’s announcement of his billions of dollars to ‘save the economy’. What a shame he didn’t use those billions to take bold steps to save the planet at the same time.

All he gave was a drop or two for home insulation. Instead of splashing spending money for consumables about, he could have installed a solar hotwater system in every household — for free.

With one stroke he could have boosted green industries, created jobs, reduced energy consumption and removed the need for any new power stations while renewables kick in.

Well, they will only do that if the government gets serious about supporting them instead of coal power.

And there’s no sign they are contemplating that.

Individuals and community groups, young folk and old (like me, below, in the red hat) felt strongly enough to travel from all states to show their extreme concern in a peaceful way.

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Giving money for schools  is fine — but saving the planet that those well-educated kids will need to live on would be a hell of a lot finer.

When will they wake up to this all-too-real emergency and act?

Thanks to Graham Brown for the photographs.

Join me in Canberra

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Next Tuesday February 3rd, the first day of the sitting of Federal Parliament for 2009, I’m joining thousands of others (hopefully) in a large peaceful protest, forming a human chain that will encircle Parliament House. The aim is to place climate change at the top of the Federal Government’s agenda.

Find out more here.

If you can make it, join us there at 8am. Wear red and bring a strip of metre-wide red cloth if possible!

We Australians need to find a way to get the message to our leaders that we want urgent strong action on climate change: 5% is nowhere near enough. This will help.

Poly fungi?

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Driving home along the track I stopped to inspect this large whitish blob which hadn’t been there three days ago.

Was it a chunk of aged polstyrene, or yet another fungi that I’ve never seen before?

I didn’t touch it, but now realise I should have, for I can’t identify it in my fungi books. It doesn’t seem to fit anything exactly: maybe a sort of Calvatia?

Then the ridged lip made me wonder if it had fallen from a tree, but I hadn’t checked if it was attached to the ground, and it was undamaged.  Even so, I still can’t work out what it might be.

Next trip out I checked, and yes, it was just sitting unattached on the ground.

How amazing that it hadn’t smashed when it fell from the nearby big grey gum where I assumed it had grown.

Hurricane Hunter

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This was the sky on Saturday 22nd November, late afternoon, looking north up the Hunter Valley.

It followed an extremely windy day we’d experienced further south, but this looked more like we were heading for a hurricane – or it was heading for us!

With violent storms repeatedly hitting parts of southern Queensland the week before, a taste of the same was only to be expected.

The sky seemed to be sucking the clouds into a darkening funnel to the east yet the unusual band of crisply serrated white peaks just above the horizon remained undisturbed.

They made it appear as if, once over that final hill, we would drop off the edge of the highway into a snowy alpine landscape.

It was so spectacular I took a moving shot, through a very dirty windscreen, then felt guilty for not doing it more justice. By the time we were out of the dips and had found a place to pull over, a different skyscape presented. The Valley continued, the snowy mountains were just clouds after all.

As it moved westward, the huge formation still seemed to be connected to the earth, sucking at its surface. From news pictures of American storm centres, it was easy to imagine Kansas Dorothy flying up that grey funnel – from land Oz to sky Oz.

Given that we were on the way back from a rally against coal power’s fuelling of more climate chaos – it was also easy to assume we were seeing an example of it.

Hurry up, Mr Rudd!

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On Saturday 22nd November about 150 people walked in to the aging Eraring Power Station near Newcastle NSW.

Emitting over 20 million tons of C02 each year, it is one of the world’s most polluting, so an appropriate site from which to urge Kevin Rudd and Penny Wong to get serious about acting now to slow our runaway global warming.

And certainly not to give such an emitter a permit to keep doing so!

Police flanked and backed the walkers all the way.

Once we got there, they intensively guarded the final fence, while guard dogs paced behind it and police on horses and trail bikes patrolled the perimeters. We were allowed only three hours for a rally before all had to leave, escorted.

Perhaps they feared strong action, realising that people are getting desperate about the lack of genuine commitment by the Rudd government as time runs out.

The power station is huge when you’re up this close. It’s daunting, as are the unresponsive policemen between whom we edged to tie to the fence the banners we had carried, plus photos and drawings of things we love, and for whose futures we fear unless carbon emissions are stopped.

Here’s most of mine— less half a grandchild!

In December, the Rudd Government will announce Australia’s medium term emissions reductions targets, and they are widely expected to be weak and ineffective.

It looks unlikely that they will show enough courageous leadership to announce that 2010 will be Australia’s  ‘peak carbon’  year – after that and forever, our greenhouse pollution must come down.
 
But that is what we need, and what Saturday’s rally called for.

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Flat earth

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I know plains are flat country but I had no concept of just how flat they can be. Out on the Liverpool Plains of NSW, as you drive up the straight flat Newell Highway you pass straight flat ‘fields’ kilometres wide.

On one side you can see where they end, as the wheat fields run smack up against the Mt Kaputar National Park.

On the other side, the rows of sorghum or wheat or stubble of one of their many other food crops stretch to the horizon and beyond.

Anything vertical, trees or wheat silos, float in fake lakes, dissolve in a wavering mirage that defies a finite end to this flat, flat earth.

As you can imagine, irrigation and drainage levels are worked out precisely.

Longwall mining for coal takes out a huge chunk 3m high for a long distance underground; subsidence invariably follows.

Boring through layers breaches aquifers, can cause the mixing of pure water with saline or acidic.

If food production is important, and until we can eat coal, only a madman would think of mining under these incredibly flat Plains.

Yet the NSW government accepted $100 million from BHP for the rights to explore at Caroona on these very Plains.

They haven’t done it yet, because the farmers have been blockading their entry for over three months.

Check out their extraordinary stand on the Caroona Coal Action Group site

Farmers say ‘NO!’ to mining

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Gunnedah is the main town of the fertile, well-watered NSW Liverpool Plains, which grow much of our grain and seed crops, such as wheat, canola, sunflower and sorghum.

These flat lands are dependent on their underground aquifers and their even surface drainage. Longwall mining will wreck both.

It would be madness to mine there, so why should companies like BHP Billiton explore there?

BHP’s plans came to a halt when local farmer Tim Duddy simply wouldn’t let them onto his property at Caroona.

The court ordered him not to obstruct them, so all his neighbours did instead. They’ve been doing so for 6 weeks and they don’t intend to stop.

On Tuesday 16th September myself and 8 other coal-inflicted Hunter people went up to support the locals in a rally organised by the Caroona Coal Action Group.

They held it outside the Civic Centre where the Gunnedah Basin Coal Conference was being held.

As we were there from 8 am, most delegates must have gone in the back way, as we saw very few, although I later spotted some peeping through the glass front doors at the apparently scary protestors.

The rally was not your usual activist gathering; not a dreadlock in sight. Here we had conservatively covered books holding highly effective radical activism between their covers.

There were establishment farmers in their best moleskins and Akubras, their elegant wives equally adamant in their protest; there were worried rural families who’d thought they had a future here; there were babies and dogs and little old ladies bristling with No Mine stickers.

It was clearly a community sticking together, standing their ground against the Big Multi-national, saying ‘No’ with all the authority of People Power.

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Turn the Tide, Kevin—peak carbon by 2010

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Like the children of Rozelle Public School in Sydney, I’m backing this initiative: will you? Be part of creating a national visual petition to Kevin Rudd.

Gather around you whomever you know with a care for the future — whether from your family, play group, work mates, tennis club, or… ?

It doesn’t matter how few or how many. Ask for immediate and real action on climate change from our leaders.

Let Prime Minister Rudd hear the collective voices from our communities — loud and clear — with pictures.

Turn The Tide is aiming for over 1,000 images from communities all over Australia before the end of September.

Visit the Turn the Tide blogspot to see how others are doing it, and to find out how you can do your bit.

Let’s get everybody doing it!