The Day After Yesterday

I think it was Al Gore who I first heard talk about the oppressive Washington summer of 1988.  During this time James Hansen, the climate change scientist, was finalising his study demonstrating the link between burning fossil fuels and the greenhouse effect on climate change.

Hansen could choose the day to present his findings before the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, so he chose June 28, knowing it was likely to be a scorcher. It was 38 degrees Celsius in Washington that day and there are stories about how the windows in the room of the Congressional hearing were kept open, so that the policy makers were visibly heat affected and the implications of Hansen’s findings were given maximum dramatic effect.

I’m coming back to this page after a week. My point about the Hansen story was to illustrate how immediate physical sensations are always going to affect – perhaps erroneously – our sense of what’s real, particularly when it comes to something as ephemeral as the weather.

Anyway, down here in Australia, we have just had two weeks of frighteningly freakish weather. In my home town, it got ridiculously hot. I found my usual coping mechanisms didn’t work – usually I just figure out how to accept and enjoy the weather as it is. I try to move more slowly, I find a way to see the sweat trickling down my back as pleasurable, I take cold showers before bed.  I try to adapt and I try to teach the kids how to adapt.

But this time, I was frightened and as a result I didn’t cope too well. I was frightened by the conviction that this was not normal, that the next decade was going to get hotter and hotter and that no one – least of all me – had worked out how to manage this.  I haven’t even worked out how to effectively cope on a personal level, but it was also evident that if this particular hot spell had gone on for much longer all kinds of mechanisms and infrastructure would stop have working too. As it was, my workplace got daily notifications from the energy provider that the grid was at capacity and the city was in danger of ‘brown outs.’ In response, my work instigated rolling power cuts where rooms and buildings that weren’t being used were left without electricity. Those still in those buildings had to leave: it was too hot to work safely.

Other catastrophic events happened this January in the eastern states of Australia; there are still floods in Townsville and we lost a third of our fruit bat population. We also lost millions upon millions of fish.

Dead fish in the lower Darling River, killed by a lack of oxygen due to high temperatures and algae blooms.

 

 

One febrile, sleepless night in late January, I responded – albeit not directly – to The Orange One’s tweets about the polar vortex in the US:

 

Insomnia made me do it.  But I want to write about how that response led me briefly into a parallel reality, one where climate change really was a hoax, perpetuated by power-hungry, conspiratorial politicians, and fanned by the mass media.

In short, I made contact with Jessie Jay @coopitupanotch. I don’t know if Jessie is young or old, male or female (or other), black or white. If I was going to guess from their profile I would say they were white, heterosexual and probably working class – but all I really know is that they’re American, they support Donald Trump, and that they’re aligned with conservatives on things like abortion, immigration and climate change. They’re also a bit of a troll, but nonetheless our superficial exchange was fairly polite. Here’s some of it (I’m @jackolanternC ):

 

 

 

I decided to watch some of Lord Monckton’s videos. I didn’t watched Alex Jones, as recommended, and I only had a brief look at Marc Morano, also recommended and conclusively not as classy as Monckton. I lack the energy to respond in any sort of point-by-point manner to the arguments presented. But I will say this:

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about how an ordinary person’s belief in climate change depends on whose words they decide to trust. This troubles me – a lot – and not just in relation to climate change. I don’t want to believe that individual attitudes – to LGBTIQ people, or asylum seekers or indigenous rights, for instance – are just a matter of where we are born and what version of authority we choose believe. But a lot of views on identity seem inextricably trapped in sociological bubbles: people’s views are predetermined by where they are born, who they are born as, and how their personal circumstances unfold.

Climate change strikes me as the ultimate challenge to subjectivity, in that changes are objectively, empirically happening. A physical world exists, which is shaped by we humans but it’s not created by us. So the words of someone like Christopher Monckton – erudite despite his quirkiness – depress me. Monckton makes a kind of sense and I can deeply appreciate that someone like Jessie Jay, already inclined to be skeptical of climate change, would grab hold of the arguments that Monckton makes. It makes me realise that unfortunately discussions about climate change are still socially constructed discourses: that is, they are value systems, rather than something human beings are capable of looking at without a particular sociological lens filtering the view. There are still no universal truths.

I can agree with Jessie Jay about the importance of questioning authority and not blindly believing in a position just because most people are following it.  I can also agree that power distribution is desperately unequal right across the globe, both in democratic and totalitarian regimes.  I understand why Australia’s heat and the US’s polar vortex, freakish as they are, will never convince climate skeptics of incoming doom because it’s impossible for a lay person to extrapolate and provide proof that climate change is anthropogenic and that humans have indeed irrevocably altered the climate.

After conceding these things I get a bit stuck. I don’t see robust evidence that there’s a planetary Marxist conspiracy to take away the civic freedoms of citizens. I do see many challenges in organising on a large enough scale to halt environmental destruction, climatic or otherwise.

 

I’m out of time for writing today, so I’m going to end with sharing two ways that I navigate some of these conundrums. They’re only partially satisfactory, but here they are:

First, I try to work on my personal critical literacy whenever and however I can. I work in an academic environment, and so I do have a privileged vantage point.  However, in the last twenty years, like everyone, I’ve had to build on the maxim of “don’t believe everything you read.” When I’m teaching undergraduates critical and information literacy, we use the C.R.A.A.P. test.  Like any acronym, it’s a bit crude and reductive, but it helps. Asking if information is current, relevant, accurate, authoritative and purposeful is useful to any reader trying to determine what is true. I would add to this that it’s important to scrutinise agenda, whether we’re referring to institutions, publications or individuals. And it’s important to follow the money, whether looking at Monckton, Breitbart, The Guardian or Al Gore.

I still struggle to express the other way I try to wade through the mire of words that confirm and deny climate change. For me it’s about returning to the non-human, trying to reengage, becoming aware again of being part of nature.

Yesterday I witnessed cultural training by two Koori men who were gifted in coaxing a diverse group of workers to share their stories about the place that they lived.  One man talked about how the water in our bodies has been part of the water in all of parts of the globe, and that the water molecules we each contain have also been in the oceans, the rainclouds, the rivers and the streams. We know that all the matter that has ever been in this world remains, that it just gets reconfigured again and again. So, we don’t have to reconnect with nature, as human beings. We are nature. And we just need to remember that.

I walked in the bush this morning and thought about how the kangaroos and the rocks and the trees overhead don’t care about human politics. That’s not to say they’re not affected by politics; of course they are. I see everything around me changing: dams drying up, scrub and grasses dying, small animals disappearing and others taking their place. But it’s reciprocal, to an extent; the world also changes the human beings contained within it. So, there’s another way that I might – possibly – have some common ground with Jessie Jay.  Perhaps the politicians arguments about whether climate change is real or a hoax aren’t so relevant, in the end. We could ignore all of these arguments – maybe – if we had more control over the way we care for the land in which we live.  If we could all remember to care calmly and consciously for our natural environment, then maybe I’d worry less. The future might not look any brighter but the present certainly would.

 

 

Climate Change is About Everything

I don’t know how many people have been struggling with fragmented thoughts lately, but I have. I’m off overseas in a couple of days, and so far any attempts to summarise my year have been fruitless.  My head’s a mess. So, I’m just going to write in fragments. Perhaps this is counterintuitive, but I want to feel a bit more whole. So, firstly:

Climate Change Not Only Changes Everything: It’s About Everything 

I first remember a teacher explaining ‘the greenhouse effect’ when I was about 14 years old. I find it curious that this lesson sticks in my memory at all. It was about 1985, at the end of the Cold War, and we were taught that nuclear apocalypse was a real and present danger, far more alarming than any other possible catastrophe (movies like Threads and The Day After were made compulsory viewing at my high school). I found out later that my parents had seriously considered building a nuclear bunker in our back yard. Greenhouse gases seemed benign in comparison; in fact, if my memory serves me, my impression was that my arid homeland might become a lush rainforest, which was not an unattractive idea.

There were serious bushfires sometimes. One December afternoon, returning from the city with my parents, we could see billowing smoke over our suburb. As we drove closer, I realised it was the bushland to the west of us burning, but at night I dreamt of running and running from a fire that was always just behind me and always about to swamp everything.

In my late teens, I lived in Canada, and I joined a group at the college called SITE (Students Improving The Environment). I don’t really remember what we did – a lot of recycling, mainly – but I became aware of biodegradable and non-biodegradable waste. Canadians sorted their ‘trash’ long before we did. With the confidence of adolescence, and with the backdrop of perestroika, I was certain that my generation were the most self-aware to ever exist: more open and more politically galvanised.

So, I grew up with an awareness of impending global crises, but also a feeling of optimism that I suspect is common amongst colonials in the Antipodes: real life was always happening elsewhere. I also carried with me what now seems a particular sort of privilege: I felt certain that people were good and that everything would be alright in the end.

I also think I was fooled by my morbid, Catholic, literary attraction to apocalypse. At university, I studied both utopias and dystopias, fascinated by Wim Wenders and post-armageddon tunes by Morrissey.

For a while I lost sight of societal/environmental collapse as more than a concept, or an aesthetic. But in 2005, my Canadian English teacher sent me Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress , and this triggered an epiphany about the urgency of climate change: it was not Jared Diamond or Al Gore, as it was for so many others. Now I wonder why my understandings of various socio-eco crises came together after reading this particular little text: it’s a compilation of the 2004 Massey Lectures, and it’s about the collapse of former civilisations. But this was the book that finally sent me into permanent existential foreboding: I remember wandering the streets that Christmas time, thinking of my stepdaughter and my two small children, frustrated by the lack of a sense of crisis in the people around me. I had no idea how to live the rest of my life.

To paraphrase Tracy Chapman, talk of climate change sounded “like a whisper” in Australia, 2005. Environmental destruction was talked about, but only amongst some scientists and greenies. I don’t remember it having much traction in mainstream media.

Even today, I’m often struck by how hard it is for me to refer to climate change in professional situations, particularly as someone who is not a trained scientist. The very subject remains tainted with politics, though I can’t understand why it’s still often viewed as a partisan issue. Outside of Australian cities, as recently as last year, I witnessed tour-guides, geologists and farmers click their tongues in frustration whenever a trendy city person (like myself) brought it up.

There’s another thing  I struggle with, when I talk about climate change. I don’t know if I can articulate this well, but I’ll try.

The thing is: we spend so much time in Western societies, capitalist societies, consciously forming our individual identities. We do Myers-Briggs tests, to see what kind of personality we have. We make conscious decisions about our style of clothing and hair, music, living space, occupation and leisure habits (as well as the more subtly ingrained aspects of gesture, speech and taste – what Bourdieu would call habitus). We assert our sexuality, our gender identity, our alliance with some groups and our opposition to others.

Some of these aspects of self are chosen; many are pre-determined or innate. My attempts to comprehend what is innate and what is chosen is one of the subjects I keep returning to in this blog.

I don’t have a good way to say the rest of it: fighting environmental destruction is now the core responsibility and task of every human being on the planet. But I find the environmental activist aesthetic unattractive and it mucks with my personal identity. I know now that I will spend the rest of my time on this planet being conscious of how my own life reverberates with other lives, and with our shared biosphere.  But I’m no scientist. I don’t much like dirt.  Environmental activism sounds sort of . . . ugly and khaki-coloured. It smells like mould and mud.

I know I’m being petty and these are actually the best kind of people. I agree with their activism entirely.

I’m not good with sweaty earnest tree-huggers.  I like abstraction, poetry, beautiful art, impractical clothing, cityscapes, the exhilaration of air travel.

I’m trying to reconcile myself with environmental imperatives and my personal sensibilities. I suppose part of what I’m coming to terms with, like every living human being, is what is already lost.  I’m also trying to work out what can be saved. I remember reading Station Eleven: at the close of civilisation, people mourn simple things, like orange pekoe tea and warm baths.

Everything around me is so precious. I love our garden (what’s left of it); the bush; the stars at night; the handmade quilt on my bed. Our dogs, my husband, our crazy beautiful, mixed-up kids. I don’t want to let any of it go.

So . . .   Adani Must Be Stopped

 Adani is an ‘energy and infrastructure company’, a subsidiary of India’s Adani Group. Adani plans to build the Carmichael Coal Mine and Railway in the Gallilee Basin in Central Queensland (yes, close to the area last month that had ‘once in a century’ bushfires).

There’s more about this coal mine here, but suffice to say it’s projected to be Australia’s largest coal mine and one of the largest in the world. There are grave concerns about groundwater, the Great Barrier Reef, further desecration of indigenous sacred sites and, of course, the effects of carbon emissions. A Greenpeace report showed the output from Carmichael would exceed the yearly carbon dioxide emissions from fuel combustion in many countries.

Thirty overseas companies have refused to finance it, but the Australian government has pledged to subsidise two billion dollars to build it.

This is, inevitably, deeply political. Here’s our dickhead Prime Minister giving his infamous ‘coalphobia’ speech (when he was Treasurer):

Yeah. I do have an ‘ideological, pathological fear of coal’ if it continues to be dug up. Thanks for that, Scott Morrison.

Then there’s these pathologically tone-deaf words from Federal Energy Minister Matt Canavan:

NB: Adani is not ‘a little Aussie battler’: it’s an Indian multinational conglomerate.

 

In response, my children, like hundreds of thousands of others around the world have taken to the streets:

Canavan also had this to say, but he’s already demonstrated his complete disinterest in the future of kids and the climate around the world.

 

The Personal and the Political: The Big and the Small.

I tweeted last week that articles like this make me consider not tweeting about identity politics – including gender and transgender politics – ever again. How can individual concerns continue to be important in the face of global destruction? How can we care about our own lives and the life of everything on the planet at the same time?

I have a good friend at the annual UN Climate Change Conference at Katowice in Poland this week. She’s a climate scientist and has spent a lot of time in the small, rapidly drowning islands in the South Pacific: the Marshall Islands; Kiribas; Tuvalu. When my friend and I meet, we don’t discuss climate change much, really, but I once asked her how long she thought we had left to avert certain catastrophe. She replied, “Two years. Sorry.” That was a year and a half ago.

The world has already warmed by 1 degree celsius. It’s unlikely that we can prevent 1.5 degrees of warming, though many scientific and environmental bodies are still trying.

Personally, I still struggle with my sense of conceptual dissonance. I’ve lived on this planet for almost fifty years in a manner that now seems stupidly and fatally disconnected from the non-human world; now I, my family and everyone I know needs to figure out how to live in a fundamentally different way.

In the midst of all of this, I have a home to look after, young people to teach, two children still to raise. I have health issues and gender services to navigate. I still have individual aspirations: to learn the violin; to teach yoga; to publish a short story and to be a better cook. And while it sometimes makes me cringe to acknowledge it, I have a lot of personal healing to do, a lot of grief to accept and overcome. Sometimes, keeping myself balanced and functional is a full-time job, particularly when I spend so much time hunched over a computer screen, neglecting my physical health. These efforts makes me drink too much wine and then consult naturopaths about why I’m gaining weight and feeling so tired. But naturopaths and alcohol both cost a lot so then I deal with the residual guilt about my over-indulgent life.

They’re first world problems, but problems nonetheless.

I’ve written before about how the American educator and philosopher, Maxine Greene, made me aware of how we can misconstrue what is ‘big’ and what is ‘small’.  Green regarded ‘big’ things as being about the intricate and complicated lives of individual students. ‘Small’ denoted bureaucracies and institutions that could only conceptualise demographics, not people. Greene wrote:

“To see things or people big, one must resist viewing other human beings as mere objects or chess pieces and view them in their integrity and particularity instead.  One must see from the point of view of the participant.”

In terms of where I put my attention, I feel I’ve been incessantly zooming in and panning out most of my adult life.  Is the big life or the small most important? I feel giddy, distressed – and unfocused.

 

How do We All Stop Screaming At One Another?

This is a poem I return to frequently:

The Place Where We Are Right
by Yehuda Amichai

From the place where we are right
flowers will never grow
in the Spring.

The place where we are right
is hard and trampled
like a yard.

But doubts and loves
dig up the world
like a mole, a plough.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
where the ruined
house once stood.

 

I know that there’s little to be gained from adopting a hard line and then screaming at all who oppose it. One of my problems with activism is that a position needs to be adopted and maintained, often violently.  I despise ‘us’ and ‘them’ rhetoric – partly because it is never effective. I have never known anyone to shift their position or capitulate when they’re kicked to the corner.

In my climate conversation with my scientist friend she predicted that as global resources continue to be depleted, and to be inequitably distributed, there will be more terrible, unresolvable conflicts like Syria. As I write today, the yellow vests are rioting in Paris in response to Macron’s austerity measures. I fear – I know – my friend is right. Historically, the ability to not choose a side is a luxury. It’s also frequently amoral. Many people – including me and those closest to me – will have to fight. In some ways, we already are.

On social media too, virtual as it is, there’s a lot of yelling. Inevitably, I’m particularly aware of the angry divisions within transgender and feminist alliances and it fills me with dismay. I don’t see how anyone suffering gender oppression will be helped while this polarity runs so deep. I’ve equivocated lately about some feminist issues and I now feel regret, even though I know it was absolutely personally necessary to dwell with my uncertainty for a while.

I’m running out of time today to articulate everything exactly as I wish but finally, I wanted to write that I value kindness. It’s not a soft or a weak emotion: it’s so bloody hard to maintain. I want to be kind – and I want to be unafraid. As well as a bit less earnest, sometimes.

 

To conclude, for now:

I intend to focus inward a little more in the next year, to pay close attention to my friends, my family and my inner life.  It feels like the right time to reimagine what is big and what is small.

I know this seems like an odd choice, given everything I’ve articulated above. The planet and our lives upon it are tumbling out of control.  But I can do my best and most urgent work by guiding and enabling the young people closest to me, as we head into this unknown, burning, swirling future.

 

I’m probably going to be thinking about TERFs for a long, long time.

 

I have a lot to do today, so just a few thoughts:

I might give the impression that I’m unaware of issues like this and this. I’m not. In the time I’ve been following transgender issues, it seems that social media has gone from being preoccupied with bathrooms to being focused on the GRA (by the way, poorly played, The Guardian. Oh, and you too, Jesse Singal). Whilst these things have happened overseas, it’s not as if there haven’t been comparable wedge issues in Australian politics and society.

I feel like I want to expel a lot of my contradictory ideas and positions in this particular space, primarily for myself. So, I’m going to keep workshopping some aspects of my own make-up that don’t thrill me.  The first on my list is my battle with needing approval, and needing to be liked. I’m a classic oldest child, in this regard.

I also want to talk again (later) about how fearful I’ve been of trans-exclusive feminists, particularly online. I don’t know if others have been as frightened of figures like Gallus Mag or Cathy Brennan (although trans people would have a reason to be). I’ve even feared Miranda Yardley, who has personally been very courteous to me, though less so with others. I want to dissect the reasons – founded and unfounded – for my fear as I’m sick of it.

Finally, I’m going to drop the word TERF for now. It dehumanizes.

I need to talk about TERFs

 

 

Well, I still feel like I do. When I think about trans identity, my thoughts often veer back to this (loosely affiliated) group.  My writing often feels like it’s addressed to TERFs and I follow TERF articles, news reports and Twitter threads. I have an unresolved knot inside of me.

 

Here are some very personal views, unedited.

So, TERF stands for Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist. This stance has been around since the dawn of second wave feminism (so, since the 1960s and 1970s) but I agree that the exponential use of the acronym in the last few years altered the meaning, sometimes subtly, and sometimes like a sledgehammer.

I also sort of agree with the proposition that calling someone a TERF is invoking a slur that shuts down debate. Sort of. The closest equivalence that I can think of is calling someone a Nazi. An unapologetic white supremacist fascist doesn’t deserve the respect of a nuanced discussion about their views. They can just fuck off.  However, if someone is raising concerns, however ill-founded, only to be met with name-calling – well, that’s hardly helpful.

I became very tired of working through online shouting about TERFdom – from trans people, trans allies and feminists having problems/issues with current trans visibility. I’ve always detested polemics and often shouting seems to replace conversation on blogs and social media forums.

The 4^th Wave Now blog even in its early days was a little too shrill for me –  but in the last four years it has, at times, hardened into nothing more sophisticated than a hate group. It’s a pity. My dilemma is that I agree with some of the concerns that parents of trans kid have expressed within this group. I really do.

 

I’ll try and outline my personal issues here. They might be pretty boring, so bear with me, lovely audience of two.

I would have called myself a radical feminist during my twenties, like many earnest white Catholic girls before me. In practice, I was a pretty crap socialist and definitely a Bad Feminist, but the theories as well as the aesthetics and lifestyle were more than just attractive to me.  Radical feminism felt critical in forming my identity – an identity that was distinct from the way that I had been reared and the way that my church, family and education expected me to be.

One ‘problem’ I hit early on is that I wasn’t really sexually attracted to women. I often find women beautiful, and infinitely better company than my male counterparts, but I’m only slightly to the left of being completely heterosexual.

My total sexual encounters with women are comprised of two incidences involving drunken kissing. Both occasions were pleasantly intriguing but I’ve been sure for most of my life that I wanted to find a male life partner and I wanted to have children with him. I spent a lot of energy when I was supposed to be writing a PhD trying to reconcile my feminism with this desire.

To cut a lot of ruminating and angsting very short: I spent my thirties (re)discovering that the world was still aggressively slanted in favour of straight white men. Pregnancy, childbirth and childrearing are still overwhelmingly women’s work in Australia. They are overwhelmingly undervalued.

I’m well aware it’s female bodied people that get pregnant and give birth and breastfeed – but where do men fit into this picture? One of my major wake-up calls was that if I wanted to breastfeed (and I did) it was something my child and I did alone. It was my body that was needed – and this meant I was not available for education/socialising/work schedules/sleep/exercise for the breastfeeding duration. My partner and I couldn’t make it equitable. It wasn’t equitable. Biological determinism slammed right up against my ideology at that point, and from that point onwards.

In my forties, my ideas about feminism have – perhaps inevitably – become more intersectional. I got sick of nice white feminism: in Australia, the cultural feminism of Jane Caro, Annabel Crabbe and Virginia Haussegger was of limited attraction to me, despite having some important things to say about social and political inequity in Anglo Australian society. I think attempts to understand the position of Muslim sisters, Indigenous sisters, South East Asian sisters . . . have been partial, at best

I don’t claim to have done a good at either understanding or at standing in solidarity with women in developing nations. I do know that it’s crucial that privileged women work harder to do this. I’m no longer able to separate the problems of capitalist society, or looming environmental catastrophe, from the problems faced by women world-wide.

I have long wanted to embrace sisterhood. Strength in diversity. Solidarity in oppression. Celebrating universalities despite difference, feeling body-centred solidarity. We all bleed. We can all bear children. We share a disproportionate chance, worldwide, of being violated, raped and killed. We don’t want to be seen as objects, valued only for our sexual attractiveness, our ability to breed, or our willingness to maintain the dominance of men.

 

But trans existence blows that last paragraph wide open.