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AUSTRALIA

Why coal is not good for humanity

  • 21 October 2014

The earth isn’t looking healthy. Most of us care about how we can engage with and keep safe the thing that our lives – and our children’s lives – depend on. It’s no longer an academic question, but one that stares deep into the human condition and how our communities relate to the material, nature and the ecological. 

Recently I’ve spent time in the company of incredible people. I live in Europe, and at various conferences and meetings I've recently found myself surrounded by friends from home. 

They were mainly Aboriginal Australians, and they reminded me of where I come from, and what’s important in life. Some were professors, others were social workers, artists and writers, but what they had in common was an intense engagement with their communities and the wider Australian public discourse: they cared.  

Australia has become one of the test cases for climate change, as seen in scary books like Jared Diamond’s Collapse. The French social scientist Bruno Latour remarked in February this year on the ‘uniquely Australian strategy of voluntary sleepwalking towards catastrophe’.  In the face of the Abbott Government’s ecologically suicidal policies and social science dismantling, Latour said that ‘not thinking of the future, when you’re Australian, [was] the most rational thing to do’. 

We now have our own political paradigm: the uniquely Australian model of wilful ignorance is agnotology, where 'ignorance is not merely the absence of knowledge, but an outcome of cultural and political struggle.' A substantial, if not the major part of this struggle is the wilful ignorance of indigenous jurisprudence and what it entails for the land that all Australians now inhabit, enjoy and profit from. 

I wish he wasn’t, but Latour is right. ‘Business as usual’ pervades the politics and comfort of the country more than ever before. The International Panel on Climate Change warns that profit without limitations cannot continue. This conflicts with the language of our prime minister who said last week that coal is good for humanity. 

But what he forgets is that humanity lives within the earth’s critical zone, a home that’s not looking so good for humanity.  Abbott deliberately forgets the obvious: that humanity is inextricably linked to its environment. He’s saying that it’s okay to extract, own and abuse the land so that white history can continue its progressive, destructive and eventually suicidal path. 

As the book from Bill Gammage, The Biggest Estate on Earth, illustrates, it doesn’t have
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