Climate Change

Climate Change

is……..

David Arnault became a member of Al Gore’s team of activists in 2016 and has been providing training and presentations to school groups, local government and communities since that time. However, he has been working with the issues surrounding the changing climate for 30 years: writing about it and speaking publicly in Canada and Australia. In 2018 he is working with communities as a starting point to help them define a long term vision for their towns and villages. This 50 year vision is a simple thing to do, but it must be a first step before plans are put in place and funding for projects is secured: awareness and vision are crucial. David has been producing between 25 and 40 newsletters a year. A sample of this is provided below. If you wish to be included on the mailing list, contact the author at david@davidarnault.com. Please include a few words about who you are and how you are contributing to addressing the changing climate.

transition/adaption

Volume 5, Issue 17, August 27, 2017

rejoice

I dream of a world where the truth is what shapes people’s politics, rather than politics shaping what people think is true. Neil deGrasse Tyson The changing climate shines the light on polarised mankind itself, on the devils among us and on the angels. It confronts mankind in ways that cause us to cower or to deny, or to hate, or to race headlong into chaos. Or to embrace falsehoods with more ardour than we embrace our loved ones. Or to rejoice. There are lies which we believe sustain us but they are simply lies. Gas is not the clean fuel, the free market is controlled by wealth and itchy fingers, too many people are boat people fleeing the truth of humanity, corporations are the people smugglers, and too many politicians are agents for vested interests. Law is not the basis of civilisation, for law all too often is a construct of distorted entitlement, or vile ambition. Henry David Thoreau went to jail because he refused to pay his poll tax, because the money was used to fund the Mexican-American war, a war which was really just a land grab, and an attempt to extend the slave economy westward toward the distant Pacific. Vile ambition and distorted entitlement lead mankind into the warren of dark and airless hollows such as we find now with government countenancing drilling for oil in the Great Australian Bight, or fracking for gas under our prime agricultural land or unquestioningly following Trump and the US military machine into a senseless war. When will we learn? Returning recently from northern NSW by train, I saw coal train after coal train heading to the ports The parade of carriages seemed never to end. At this time, before he was found to be an Italian citizen, the Australian minister for digging it up and shipping it overseas, claimed that it was expedient to fund the railway that would allow the Adani mine the trigger that will lead to the annual extraction of 300 million tonnes of coal. However, by the twisted logic of world bureaucracy, the emissions would not accrue to this country, so, Australia might conceivably meet its agreement at the Paris accord. The media – much of it – seemed to say, this makes good economic sense. The Earth has just the one atmosphere. We’re terribly good at compartmentalising. at shifting benefits to one sector and assigning costs to another, and thereby cloaking the truth behind opaque layers. But like far too many in the house in Canberra, the Italian minister is a slave to ideology, to radical and extreme capitalism to the pursuit of power, to shallow thinking that skims the surface of the business pages, and the poor fellow should spend more time reading the work of scientists than listening to the blather of psychopaths. Leonard Cohen wrote a song called Democracy, a strident, martial prosecution of the human race, and a lot of people thought it disrespectful. But it wasn’t composed out of disrespect He had this to say of his song: I think the irony of America is transcendent in the song. It’s not an ironic song. It’s a song of deep intimacy and affirmation of the experiment of democracy in this country. That this is really where the experiment is unfolding. This is really where the races confront one another, where the classes, where the genders, where even the sexual orientations confront one another. This is the real laboratory of democracy. So I wanted to have that feeling in the song, too. It’s not an easy journey to go from the time when a civil war decides differing points of view, to where reason and common sense – not populism – sways decisions. Perhaps this is where we are, at a time of transition, when the solutions are at hand, when our communities one by one, can have a real voice in their future, in how we adapt to the changing climate, in how we transition from the corporate-controlled planet to one of respect for rich and poor, for the disabled, for other creatures, and for the vital organs of our planet: soil, forests, oceans and atmosphere. And if so, let us rejoice, and feel smug for a moment. Okay, time’s up, let us save this planet. We have the tools now, and we have the majority, so we need to make sure this happens. Don’t do it for yourselves, as has been the case for centuries, do it for the future generations. yours in love and determination david arnault