Monday 18 March 2013

Crucial but too slow!

Last morning, at 1:00, I finished a crucial article on Epinions about Australia’s dreadful environmental record and policy, which I had planned to write a very long time ago - when Howard was still in power - but forgot too easily. This is a severe problem because time has shown how important it really is to alter Australia’s image abroad to something that actually reflects its ecology and culture.

The article, I will admit, is affected by being written in bursts rather than steadily and with proper concentration, and I am certainly open to guidelines to make it flow better. I need to learn to concentrate and to do my writing on a one-at-a-time basis - something I found much easier when I had other work like caring for my deceased father.

Still, I feel that the message of the article: that nothing can be achieved to reduce greenhouse emissions unless a very rigid zero-emissions target is enforced on Australia - and that efforts in Eurasia and the Americas to do so are useless and even wasteful if a zero-emissions goal for Australia is not achieved. Thus, protests directed against, for instance, Japanese whaling need to be redirected against Australia’s dreadful greenhouse emissions record, both from fossil fuels and land clearing. The latter is especially notable because of the high carbon storage from Australian flora with their dense, deep rooting systems that extract water even in dry seasons and years, so that there are many analogies between clearing this long-lived vegetation and extracting fossil fuels from Australia’s soils.

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