The symbolic value with very concrete consequences... The more we reflexively structure, cultivate and sediment our cultural identities, psychological subjectivity and civilisation around (and through) a limiting grammar and vocabulary of runaway greed, the more we find ourselves trapped in a spiral of accelerating entropy. Context: Thomas Keneally's 2020s vision: We must abandon the language…
Zen, Climate and Love: Disassembling a Fallacy of Difference
Zen is to utterly deconstruct, disassemble and reconceptualise Self and Mind. It is difficult medicine but the mischievous enigma at the core of all of our problems is our Self. Decentralised psychological subjectivity and cultural presence is one in which adversarial competition is dissolved as there is no foundational differentiation between persons, property or places.Utopias,…
Fractal Fire and Microcosm
We rarely perceive that each action, experience and event is always in some way a microcosm, deeply entangled with (and symptomatic of) a much broader and more complex world. In each notionally separate event, entity or artefact we might seek to discover a Global truth hidden, encrypted, but still standing there in plain sight.
Climate Change In Security: Insecurity
It may be a matter of social and psychological necessity that this kind of monumental existential threat - to which we have perhaps long been desensitised by repetition and the droning monotony of unnecessarily adversarial ideological and political competition - carry more impact, more information entropy and cultural gravity when they become a tangible, material,…
Afterburner: New Year’s Day and a Smoky Bushfire Hangover
This photo was taken from a car on New Year's Eve in Canberra. We woke up today to the world's worst air quality in Australia's capital, Canberra. I am still waiting for political leadership on the topic of Climate Change but expecting instead: more dismissive parochialism and institutionalised, ideological denialism and avoidance. Context: Canberra's air…
Wild Fire: New Year’s Eve in South-East Australia
Driving tonight, someone took this photo over my shoulder. We had been to the city and I decided to drive past the airport. As we crested a hill we were engulfed in smoke. This was smoke from fires over a hundred kilometers away. The South-East coast of New South Wales has been inundated with bushfires.…
One Planet: a Smoke Signal in this Warming World
Every day, in the afternoon or early evening, for around 4 weeks a blanket of smoke has drifted across my city. I reflected on this here recently but tonight I found myself inadvertently caught up in the smoke as I was walking. My eyes are stinging, I have a sickening burnt wood taste in the…
Climate Change: “Is this really how it all ends ?”
Every night now - for weeks - as afternoon gently slides into evening, a vast tide of murky opacity descends on my city. Not perhaps uncommon for winter in those parts of the world that feature just the right kind of terrain and climate to expect a great wave of mist as darkness falls. But…
Climate Inaction: Let the Bumbling Begin
Never mind that the sum-total of all available evidence is so profound that the only plausible chance anyone has of not believing that Climate Change is upon us is to either be so naive or so maliciously ignorant that it is impossible to admit this fact into their personal conceptual vocabulary and interpretive framework of…
The Shadows of Entropy
It is a truth almost universally known but rarely, if ever, acknowledged that the strengths and the values of our world are simultaneously its weakness and qualitative (as much as quantitative) poverty. Contemporary communications systems have, for instance, been truly wonderous - they have brought us all closer together through near-instaneous text, voice and video…
UN Climate Action Summit
I was watching a live broadcast of a speech from the UN Climate Action Summit this morning. It was a great speech - very well written, articulate, intelligent, well-timed and well-delivered. For the particular political personality involved, this is undoubtedly a tour de force and, perhaps, a career-pinnacle of statesmanship and Global leadership. There is,…
The Worst-Case Climate Scenario is Occurring
Don't be fooled into a false sense of security by the fact that a worst-case climate apocalypse is intimately terrifying on a scale exceeding any story that humanity ever told itself and is so far beyond our limited experience that we more readily characterise it as myth or fiction. At the scale of disaster we…
