Dangerous climate change has arrived. Declaring a climate emergency is no longer just a question of taking steps to stop the escalation of catastrophes in the future, here in Australia we are now beginning to witness the impacts of the climate emergency right at our front doors.

The Climate Emergency Summit in Melbourne on 14-15 February 2020 was a powerful and almost overwhelming collective call to action from all corners of our society, and from both right and left sides of politics. I believe every single one of the two thousand people and one hundred speakers who were there would agree with me on this. It was impressive, inspirational, and important. There was a lot to take home and digest.

On the second day of the summit, two important national networks were formed to enhance climate leadership and work on creating policy certainty: Climate Emergency Australia – for councils in Australia, where there are now 95 councils that officially have declared a climate emergency, and the Safe Climate Declaration, which is a declaration you can support by going online and signing it.

The summit was live-streamed on YouTube, and these recordings are now made available in shorter segments, together with an additional set of audio recordings of the break-out sessions. There are so many of them – so many hours of listening and viewing, that again – its overwhelming in a positive sense.

What you’ll hear in The Sustainable Hour’s audio extract here are just a few of the highlights. Clover Moore’s, Peter Garrett’s, Adam Bandt’s opening speeches, and short excerpts from the hour-long panel discussions.

→ I recommend that you spend some time on viewing many more of the video recordings – they are all lined up on the summit’s YouTube channel

“The solution will come from lots and lots of small decisions. And a sustained effort.” ~ Shane Rattenbury, ACT minister for climate change and sustainability

Darebin Councillor Trent McCarthy’s speech about Climate Emergency Australia

Several of the speakers, including Adam Bandt and Peter Garrett, called for a ‘Climate War Cabinet’ in Parliament, and for a moratorium on fossil fuel projects. A price on carbon was also often called upon.

Wake up Oz. It’s the next 10 years that counts. #ClimateEmergency. ‘Antarctic heatwave melted 20 per cent of an island's snow cover in days https://t.co/EpXQq7p2aQ via @smh— Peter Garrett (@pgarrett) February 25, 2020

Dangerous climate change has arrived. Declaring a climate emergency is no longer just a question of taking steps to stop the escalation of catastrophes in the future, here in Australia we are now beginning to witness the impacts of the climate emergency right at our front doors.

The Climate Emergency Summit in Melbourne on 14-15 February 2020 was a powerful and almost overwhelming collective call to action from all corners of our society, and from both right and left sides of politics. I believe every single one of the two thousand people and one hundred speakers who were there would agree with me on this. It was impressive, inspirational, and important. There was a lot to take home and digest.

On the second day of the summit, two important national networks were formed to enhance climate leadership and work on creating policy certainty: Climate Emergency Australia – for councils in Australia, where there are now 95 councils that officially have declared a climate emergency, and the Safe Climate Declaration, which is a declaration you can support by going online and signing it.

The summit was live-streamed on YouTube, and these recordings are now made available in shorter segments, together with an additional set of audio recordings of the break-out sessions. There are so many of them – so many hours of listening and viewing, that again – its overwhelming in a positive sense.

What you’ll hear in The Sustainable Hour’s audio extract here are just a few of the highlights. Clover Moore’s, Peter Garrett’s, Adam Bandt’s opening speeches, and short excerpts from the hour-long panel discussions.

→ I recommend that you spend some time on viewing many more of the video recordings – they are all lined up on the summit’s YouTube channel

“The solution will come from lots and lots of small decisions. And a sustained effort.” ~ Shane Rattenbury, ACT minister for climate change and sustainability

Darebin Councillor Trent McCarthy’s speech about Climate Emergency Australia

Several of the speakers, including Adam Bandt and Peter Garrett, called for a ‘Climate War Cabinet’ in Parliament, and for a moratorium on fossil fuel projects. A price on carbon was also often called upon.

Wake up Oz. It’s the next 10 years that counts. #ClimateEmergency. ‘Antarctic heatwave melted 20 per cent of an island's snow cover in days https://t.co/EpXQq7p2aQ via @smh— Peter Garrett (@pgarrett) February 25, 2020

City of Greater Geelong Council is now on the official list of 1,400 local governments that have declared a climate emergency after a unanimous vote [at 1:21:00 min in the streaming video] in Geelong Council on 25 February 2020.

However, there were mixed feelings and claims of greenwashing among the climate action activists who had come to follow the debate. For instance, Brenda Hawke wrote on Facebook right after the desicion had been made that she thought it was a “Very strange council meeting. They did not vote to declare a climate emergency, but just acknowledged a recognition of the climate emergency. Playing with semantics. And get this… They are engaging Global Reporting Initiative to implement this sustainability framework. Huge mining and fossil fuel companies use the GRI standards, like ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, BHP, Rio Tinto and Adani!”

Colin and Mik, who both attended the meeting at city hall, spiritedly discuss just what it means for Geelong residents and ratepayers.

Our guest in the studio, Monica Winston from Transition Streets Geelong, comments on this, and also tells us about the big event her organisation runs on 8 March 2020 at Deakin Waterfront, the Sustainable Living Festival 2020. We’ll be talking with Mayor Stephanie Asher about this when she is guest in the program in about three weeks’ time.

Hear Monica speak very excitedly about the day her organising team has put together. There really is something for everyone in the day which is going to be MC’ed by veteran social justice comedian Rod Quantock.

Tony talks with Michael Chee about his project Portraits of Change exhibition and workshops – based on his PhD project on using photographs to tell stories of environmental projects. For the last three years Michael has been working with youth in China, Bangladesh and Australia, empowering them how to use photos to tell stories about what they are doing. The project concludes with an exhibition of his photos at Monash University’s Caulfield campus, Portraits of Change, which runs till Sunday 1 March 2020. Paul Sheldon from Transition Australia delivers his weekly ‘National Wrap’ events calendar. He tells of the many events on the climate emergency and sustainability calendar in Victoria and beyond.

At the National Climate Emergency Summit at Melbourne Town Hall on 14-15 February 2020, a group of school students had a workshop about how schools and students can declare a climate emergency. We listen to a speech by a very impressive 14-year-old climate activist and Year 10 student Zel Whiting from Adelaide. See the video recording of his speech below on this page.

City of Greater Geelong Council is now on the official list of 1,400 local governments that have declared a climate emergency after a unanimous vote [at 1:21:00 min in the streaming video] in Geelong Council on 25 February 2020.

However, there were mixed feelings and claims of greenwashing among the climate action activists who had come to follow the debate. For instance, Brenda Hawke wrote on Facebook right after the desicion had been made that she thought it was a “Very strange council meeting. They did not vote to declare a climate emergency, but just acknowledged a recognition of the climate emergency. Playing with semantics. And get this… They are engaging Global Reporting Initiative to implement this sustainability framework. Huge mining and fossil fuel companies use the GRI standards, like ExxonMobil, Royal Dutch Shell, BP, BHP, Rio Tinto and Adani!”

Colin and Mik, who both attended the meeting at city hall, spiritedly discuss just what it means for Geelong residents and ratepayers.

Our guest in the studio, Monica Winston from Transition Streets Geelong, comments on this, and also tells us about the big event her organisation runs on 8 March 2020 at Deakin Waterfront, the Sustainable Living Festival 2020. We’ll be talking with Mayor Stephanie Asher about this when she is guest in the program in about three weeks’ time.

Hear Monica speak very excitedly about the day her organising team has put together. There really is something for everyone in the day which is going to be MC’ed by veteran social justice comedian Rod Quantock.

Tony talks with Michael Chee about his project Portraits of Change exhibition and workshops – based on his PhD project on using photographs to tell stories of environmental projects. For the last three years Michael has been working with youth in China, Bangladesh and Australia, empowering them how to use photos to tell stories about what they are doing. The project concludes with an exhibition of his photos at Monash University’s Caulfield campus, Portraits of Change, which runs till Sunday 1 March 2020. Paul Sheldon from Transition Australia delivers his weekly ‘National Wrap’ events calendar. He tells of the many events on the climate emergency and sustainability calendar in Victoria and beyond.

At the National Climate Emergency Summit at Melbourne Town Hall on 14-15 February 2020, a group of school students had a workshop about how schools and students can declare a climate emergency. We listen to a speech by a very impressive 14-year-old climate activist and Year 10 student Zel Whiting from Adelaide. See the video recording of his speech below on this page.

Is it possible to recognise climate change as a global emergency and order a newly built bike lane demolished at one and the same council meeting? Well. Geelong Council managed to do just that on 25 February 2020. The late evening debate in the chamber split the 11 councillors in two specific groups, just like it did five months ago, when a motion to declare a climate emergency was discussed and then turned down – at that time influenced by a tiny but loud minority who had been contacting councillors in that powerful Block of Six, which de facto runs the city.

Geelong is now set to lose an important part of its new so-called ‘Green Spine’ in its central business district. Shortly after the first etape of the infrastructure project was completed in Malop Street, including two new safe bike lanes, six out of eleven councillors at City Hall decided to spend $2 million on demolishing one of the two bike lanes and turn it into car parking space and increasing the car traffic.

The bike path which Geelong Council has decided to remove

The decision-making process, which was labelled as ‘impulsive’ and misjudged by the councillors who objected to the decision, resembles exactly how it has been possible that the ambitious bike lane plans for Swanston Street and High Street ended up being watered down and in some road stretches were cancelled completely.

With this move, Geelong has once again consolidated its reputation as a city with lousy and dangerous infrastructure for cyclists and e-scooters. As you will hear if you listen to the audio excerpt below or see the live-streamed video from the meeting at Geelong City Hall, it didn’t happen without strong objections from five of Geelong Council’s eleven councillors.

In an attempt to politely reject Councillor Eddy Kontelj‘s notice of motion and its suggestion to remove one of the two newly established bikelanes in Malop Street, Geelong Concillor Jim Mason proposed an amendment to the motion, which would keep the best of Kontelj’s suggestions and ideas for improvements, but which removed the order to demolish one of the bikelanes.

Councillor Mason explained at the meeting:

“Increasing traffic flow and increasing parking spaces flies in the face of the orginal purpose [of the Green Spine in Geelong’s CBD]. The original purpose is to reduce the traffic flow and increase the walkability, cycle-access and liveability of the precinct. (…) Online shopping and changing community needs is causing a problem for traders. Increasing the traffic flow won’t fix this. Indeed, a different mindset is required. I am sorry that a noisy minority – and I am assured it is a noise minority – cannot adapt. There is a silent minority who support the Green Spine and have adjusted their mindset.”

“The Green Spine in Geelong’s city centre was recognised last year by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects and the Victorian State Government and was given various citations. One citation was that Malop Street’s Green Spine “is a shining example of how traditional retail streets can become inviting public spaces during the day and night. A horticultural connection to Johnston Park and Geelong Botanical Gardens is established through the use of indigenous and exotic species.” And this is going to be damaged by increasing the traffic flow and providing more parking spaces for traders who don’t feel very happy because they are not successful. Well,

Naturism. There’s a long article on Wikipedia about naturism. Because apparently ‘naturism’ is another word for ‘nudism’ – meaning “a cultural movement practising nudity”.

There’s a couple of other articles, though, that explain that naturism can also be referring to ‘worshipping of nature’, or religious practices that focus on nature.

The other day we received an email which suggested a new meaning to the word naturism.

Jim Sampson is a 73-year-old retired economist, and a business entrepreneur, who has also written two novels that dramatise the catastrophic consequences of climate breakdown. His fiction novel ’The apocalypse rising’ was published 11 years ago, in 2009. Before that, he published ‘The genesis enigma’ in 2006.

Recently, Jim completed writing a 56-page document, entitled ‘Naturism’, where he suggests “a framework for solutions to the climate crisis”.

He says, humanity needs to shift its thinking towards naturism because, as he writes, it is going to “take a change in human thinking to get a change in human behaviour”.

“Human luxury has to go. Mother Nature can’t afford it.”Jim Sampson

“We have lost track of our relationship with nature, and our relationship with each other,” he says. So he calls for a “single, unified and global voice” which will unmask the complex causes – the human behavioural causes – behind manmade climate change

In his email to us, Jim writes that he hopes that the term Naturism can serve “as an apt rallying call for urgent action and accord to rectify those human behavioural causes.”    

When I read that, I thought: We have to call Jim and have a chat about this – because, who is Jim Sampson, and where is he coming from with all of these ideas?

“What we really need is naturism. Because if we don’t adhere to what Mother Nature is saying to us, we’re gone. We’ll be gone like the dinasaurs. (…) Our problem today is that we are ‘carbon heads’. We have lost track of our relationship with nature, and our relationship with each other. Now, each of us are competitive to each other, and nature is an inconvenience. It is a reason to have an umbrella – and that’s all. We have got to change that.”Jim Sampson

→ Jim Sampson’s 56-page document ‘Naturism – a framework for a comprehensive solution to manmade climate change’

2009-article about Jim Sampson’s second novel. Click on image to enlarge

To believe or not to believe

What if we take Jim on his word? That naturism really is the way forward – and that currently, as Jim says, “we have lost track of our relationship with nature, and our relationship with each other…”

Charles Eisenstein has some advice for us,

“The evidence is clear. The world is standing at the edge of major ecological and humanitarian tipping points, and time has run out for half measures.” Introduction to the National Climate Emergency Summit, held in Melbourne on 14-15 February 2020.

We open The Sustainable Hour on 19 February with a report from the Climate Emergency Summit in Melbourne, where we hear former coal executive Ian Dunlop read a summit resolution and summit director Luke Taylor’s end remark to the attendees, followed by Colin Mockett’s global outlook.

Guests this week are Janine Duffy from Koala Clancy Foundation, Sarah Hathway from Climate Justice Alliance Geelong, who tells us what is going to happen in Geelong on the national Climate Crisis Day of Action on Saturday 22 February, and our 11-year-old youth reporter Ben Pocock. 

We play a clip with Russell Crowe, who spoke to millions on tv-watchers during the Fire Fight Australia show on Channel 7 and tv-stations around the world, and Paul Shelton from Transition Australia runs through the events calendar in his weekly ‘National Wrap’.

“We’ve got the hell of a movement to build, so let’s keep doing it.”~ Luke Taylor, director, National Climate Emergency Summit 2020

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Who’s gonna show up?

We start off this week with Ian Dunlop, an ex coal executive and long time advocate for real action on climate in our country, reading out the very significant resolution that he and Carmen Lawrence presented to the enthusiastic audience of 2,000 who attended Australia’s first ever Climate Emergency Summit last Friday and Saturday in Melbourne. This groundbreaking resolution based on real science is going to be made available for everyone to sign.

“The only way we can deal with [the bushfires], is to connect with each other.” In The Sustainable Hour no 300, we connect with Paul Shelton, Luke Taylor, Ben Pocock, Suzie Brown, and we play a new climate action song from Paul Kelly.

The Sustainable Hour no 299 with architect Alvyn Williams from SoftLoud Architects, Sonia Randhawa from the Coalition of Everyone, and Rick Coleman from Southern Cross Permaculture Institute.

The UN is preparing to declare 2021-2030 The Decade of Ecosystem Restoration. Adrian Drew is part of a group of farmers and land owners who think Australia should take a leading role in making that happen.

What to call the equivalent of a modern-thinking ‘urban farmer’ or permaculturalist, who works with growing food on a big piece of land on the countryside, but in a very different style than how the conventional farmers do it?

I suggest we introduce the expression the natural farmer.

My definition of a ‘natural farmer’ would be that it is a farmer who is focused on observing, understanding, following and making good use of the way nature works – the interaction between plants, microorganisms, animals, the landscape and the weather – rather than being directed by the way the agricultural and industrial economy works.

In The Renerative Hour today, I visit one of Australia’s natural farmers: Adrian Drew. He is part of a growing group of intelligent farmers and ‘landscape mechanics’ who share the vision that by 2030, Australia’s catchment and watershed systems can be drought-proofed and restored by using Peter Andrew‘s Natural Sequence Farming methods and the Australian Landscape Science Approach.

After working with this topic over 40 years, Peter Andrews has become a bit of a national icon. In books, articles, tv documentaries and numerous conference speeches and presentations he explains to the Australian farmers how a transformation of the way water flows through the landscape can help enable them to restore soil fertility by using all plants – understanding their function and part they play in landscape process at any point in time – so they can grow food without the use of fertilisers or pesticides, artificial irrigation or drainage.

Peter Andrews’ basic idea is to be working together with all plants and with the community to achieve maximum productivity and biodiversity in the shortest amount of time, storing water and fertility where it has greatest potential for use in the landscape, and working with the unlimited maximum of water flow in the landscape, while at the same time storing carbon in the soil as a result of plant production and growing more plants to reinstate water cycles and a more moderate, farming-friendly climate.

Adrian Drew: “The shift is coming”

“The shift is coming“As our summer get hotter and drier each year, it could be argued, as Adrian Drew does it well in this podcast, that this shift in the landscape is needed, moving from a drainage paradigm to a water storage paradigm in the farming sector and land management generally.

However, it will first of all require a major shift in mindset and mentality among Australia’s 200,000 farmers – and that is probably the most difficult obstacle to deal with and overcome, if this 10-year vision is going to be successfully implemented. 

“We are in luck, though,” says Drew: “The shift is coming. The evidence for that are the many committed landowners at various sites throughout Australia, who currently are participating in making this vision come true.”

Climate change is real#ClimateChange impacts at home,across Australia and around the worldEvidence for #Perthand for south-west Western Australiais extraordinarily clearreduced rainfallreduced streamflo...