Drip drip drip

Last fortnight I went to the Environment Victoria Community Environmental Recognition Awards ceremony. It was a terrific event, featuring the comical musical stylings of Tripod. Adam Bandt was there, along with numerous other movers and shakers in the environment sphere. There were a dozen or so awards given out to recognise the achievements of people working on various projects to protect the environment, from Ian Penrose, the River Keeper, to the 'Knitting Nannas of Toolangi' who are currently facing court for, well, subversive knitting. The thing that struck me is just now many people are getting busy doing so many things. There are groups working to save the Leadbeaters Possum and oppose coal seam gas mining and dozens of other projects ranging from very small local actions, to statewide movements like Quite Coal. There was a good panel discussion beforehand where people talked about the process of community organising - the highs, the lows, the frustrations and the triumphs. Kelly O'Shannassy, the EV CEO, made the point that the enviroment is suffering 'death by  thousand cuts' and what is needed is thousands of remedies - large and small. They all add up. Like water dripping on a stone, eventually the stone cannot remain unchanged.

We can't all sit around, wringing our hands, or fulminating on Facebook, or waiting for the government to 'fix it'. People need to become more active and more organised and begin to take matters into our own hands. There have been some great wins for people power in the past couple of years, locally and internationally. Sure there have been some failures too, but that's never an excuse to give up the struggle, or to lose hope or become apathetic in face of the many issues that need to be addressed urgently. The Greens are a political party of course, and we aim to make change at the government level, but support of community activism is also an important part of the mix. In the face of massive community actions, politicians of all stripes must begin to pay attention, and indeed they are. Adam Bandt made the point in a speech a while back that when locked in some windowless room somewhere making decisions it's enormously helpful if there are thousands of people outside demonstrating, signing petitions and writing letters to their MPs. Politicians are in the business of getting elected and then re-elected. To do this they need votes. To get votes, they need to give people what they want. The more people get out there, into the streets, into the newspapers, on the interwebs, into the public eye and make a noise and let them know what the public wants, the more politicians will begin to realise that the environment is no longer some kind of fringe issue only of concern to hippies and 'drop outs'. Politicians can count. It's one of their best things.

There are so many things you can do. So many groups you can join. So many actions you can take. Pick one thing, get your posse together and turn up! It is working. It might seem painfully slow, but as the point was made the other night, if you look back only 10 years, you can see how much things have changed in the public discourse. Think back only to 2006 when Al Gore made 'The Inconvenient Truth' and consider how much the issue of climate change is now centre stage in Australian and global politics compared to then, to name just one issue. Now, in the USA a gubernatorial election campaign has just been won by the Democrats, mainly on climate change, as well as marriage equality and women's rights. Ken Cuccinelli, a notorious climate 'skeptic' has just been sent packing by the voters. That's something of a landmark and one that should give progressive policians much encouragement and hopefully cause the GOP to have a bit of a rethink. So, take heart. What are you waiting for? There will never be a better time to become part of the solution.

You can blow out a candle, but you can't blow out a fire

I was chatting with someone during my travels last week and he asked me "Why do people want to get elected to local government anyway? Is there money in it?" How I laughed! Then I explained to him what councilors get paid. He was amazed. He asked why on earth would anyone put themselves through all that for a pittance? I told him I don't know about anyone else, but I know the Greens do it because we're trying to make the world a better place. He thought that was just pretty words, but I assured him it was not. I assured him we're all very serious about it indeed.

Hardly anyone knows anybody actively engaged in politics in real life, let alone really understands what they do, but many people feel perfectly comfortable ascribing all sorts of selfish and cynical motives to them. The vast majority of people are very jaded about politics and politicians, largely because of what they read in the newspapers and see on TV and the movies of course. This is hardly ever about the "boring but important stuff" that gets done on behalf of the people, let alone at local council level. Often it's just the highlights of various forms of bad behaviour because the media is in the entertainment business and this is what entertains people most it seems. Sure, just as in any walk of life, there are people who do the wrong thing. But it is not the norm by any means, certainly not in this country, to be lazy or corrupt, even in politics. There are many people who want to do the right thing, but they are often prevented from doing this by a small minority who hold power tightly within their little circles. It's this minority that must be challenged and overcome.

Our new Prime Minister promised to cut thousands of public service jobs in his election campaign, and the vast mass of ignorant people, who don't know what the public service does, cheered. He also plans to privatise as many schools as he can, sell public assets, open up national parks to 'investment', shut down various publicly funded institutions, stop public funding of research that he doesn't approve of, such as climate change research for instance. There are plans to give corporations open slather to 'develop' coal mines, roads, gas mines and the like wherever they want without government interference or 'green tape' as it's euphemistically called. This is all supposed to be in the name of building the 'prosperity' of the country, but everyone who knows anything understands that this is to line the pockets of the wealthy at the public's expense and has nothing to do with the public good or even the health of the economy.

People who don't read or study history don't understand what the world was like before we had democracy and the public service. You don't have to go back very far into history to see the sort of misery that most people lived in once upon a time. Charles Dickens describes the vast disparity between the rich and poor in books such as Oliver Twist. In those days if you were wealthy, you were fine. If you were poor, that was just too bad for you. There was no escape from poverty if you could not afford health care or education. There was no safety net. You either stole or starved if you lost your job. It took the great social revolutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century to overturn this model. It took the union movement to make sure that workers were not exploited or endangered by callous employers. Public libraries, public hospitals and public schools were set up using public money for the benefit of all. Many people died, or were jailed or beaten to achieve these things, but the conservatives would like to turn the clock back and reverse these kind of social goods if they could.

Thomas Jefferson said, 'the price of freedom is eternal vigilance' and he knew what he was talking about. For far too long the general public has been asleep, lulled by cheap consumer goods, television and various other forms of brainwashing. Many have not noticed how our lives have been taken over and how much power has been drifting into the hands of corporations and billionaires. But the people are waking up again, thanks in many ways to the way the internet allows us to connect with the like minded and get news out by going around the mainstream press. Things are changing fast. But we need more people to wake up and join the struggles that are now upon us and will only get worse. We need people to start making trouble, making a noise, getting out into the streets, getting active, joining political parties and environmental groups. We need a new mass movement similar to the movements of 100 years ago. It's going to be a long and bloody fight, but it's got to be done. The stakes have never been higher. We are litereally going to have to fight our governments to ensure our own survival.

The coming apocalypse

There's a box of Twinkies in that grocery store. Not just any box of Twinkies, the last box of Twinkies that anyone will enjoy in the whole universe. Believe it or not, Twinkies have an expiration date. Some day very soon, Life's little Twinkie gauge is gonna go... empty. -  Zombieland Screenplay by Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick

Lately I’ve been watching movies and reading books about utopias, dystopias and apocalypses in various forms. Sometimes it’s invaders from outer space, sometimes it’s a natural disaster, an evil mastermind or robots gone out of control. The trajectory is usually the same in these films, as one would expect from Hollywood. The hero (often some kind of scientist) tries to warn everyone of the danger. The powers that be ignore him (or less often, her). The hero’s friends and family think he might have gone a little bit loco. Before long though, the danger becomes imminent and people start to panic (cue car stunts, special effects, extras screaming and running for their lives). There is much discussion of what to do. Nobody ever listens to the scientist of course. The voices of the military industrial complex usually prevail. Financial, political and soldierly imperatives dominate for a time. However, as the story unfolds, naturally the good guys always win, true love finds a way and the world is saved once more through the heroic actions of a few ingenious individuals, often with the help of some miraculous technological breakthrough.

But this is real life, not a movie, even though some parallels with our current predicament are apparent. Although there are increasing numbers of individuals who are very alarmed and very active about the threats we face, as a species we have not fully emotionally or psychologically grasped the gravity of our situation. Just like in the movies, a growing number of brave and determined individuals have been crying out for some time trying to warn us that the earth is in danger, the problem is urgent, action is imperative. Again, not unlike the movies, we have largely ignored them. Financial, political and military voices tend to still speak the loudest. The scientists are being sidelined. The people are still largely a disempowered mass lacking leadership and purpose on the most imperative issues.

You can learn a lot from watching a zombie movie. A common theme is the quest of the survivors for food, water and zombie-proof shelter. All around are consumer goods of all kinds for the taking. Money blows down the street, but it’s all completely worthless now. The not-so-subtle point being that we have got everything backwards. The climate, the water, the earth and air that we breathe is beyond price. Although we absolutely cannot live without them, we treat them as though they were completely worthless. We use words like dirt, wasteland, swamp, weeds, vermin and pests to describe the parts of the natural world that we have not yet found a way to convert into cash. We use our rivers as drains, our oceans as rubbish tips and all the rest as a quarry.

But it is actually gold and diamonds that are worthless if you think about it. Despite a few useful applications in medicine, we could quite happily get along in a world where gold was simply left in the ground. Diamonds have a few uses in industrial processes, but nothing we couldn’t manage quite happily without. It is only their scarcity that causes us to lend these things some kind of abstract economic value. The fact that they are shiny I suppose originally led us to value them for aesthetic reasons, but everything else is just an abstraction.

The value of gold and diamonds is completely socially constructed. We can’t eat them. They don’t provide us with warmth or shelter and yet we destroy what has real value to us – clean earth, air and water – in order to extract these things. Then we jealously guard them against others and spend a lot of resources and even have started wars, keeping them in the hands of a select few individuals as well. 

If you look at it from the viewpoint of what is happening in the natural world, coal is a horror and oil is pure evil. Don’t even get me started on nuclear energy. At least we can use these things to create heat and light which is useful to our purposes I suppose. But we got along perfectly well for thousands of years without these things and we could get along perfectly well by replacing them with renewable energy sources, particularly if we managed to moderate our appetites and adjust our ideas of what makes a good life.   

Now is a critical point in our history where we must reconnect with our mother Earth and put her once more at the centre of things. If we are going to survive the coming catastrophes, it’s time to completely rethink our relationship with nature. We cannot continue to smash, kill and burn every part of the natural world that we come into contact with. We must start to care for, respect and repair the damage that we have already done to the biosphere. I am under no illusions how big this job will be or what a major paradigm shift this is going to be for homo sapiens. But if we don’t do it we will be making the biggest mistake we have ever made.

Gnomeaggeddon

I've been stressing about climate change again this week. I do that a lot, but it's got worse this week. My jubilant mood of last week has given way to somethig more sombre as I watch the mainstream media assuming that our new Prime Minister (brrrr!) is going to swiftly remove any pretense that we're even trying to tackle climate change and the ALP is showing ominous signs of getting the wobbles about stopping him in the Senate. He's going to 'axe the carbon tax' the reporters keep saying (even the ABC!) abandoning all pretense of journalistic correctness or even-handedness. The states with Liberal-National governments have already wound back most climate change action on the excuse that they weren't going to duplicate what Canberra was doing, waste of tax payers' money, etc. etc. Now, of course, Canberra doesn't want to do anything either except give the clean energy fund money back to the polluters. So what are we left with? Maybe the LNP will get a few trees planted, which I suspect is code for more pine plantations to replace the forests they intend to log? Maybe a few farmers will have a bit of a crack at 'carbon farming' which I deeply suspect is code for 'more timber plantations'. They want to ramp up coal and gas mining 'investment' and build '21st century roads' whatever that's supposed to mean.

It's difficult to stay optimistic when things appear to be getting nothing but worse. Rupert Murdoch's execrable publications have been out in force this week slamming the upcoming IPCC report before it's even been released, sowing the seeds of confusion in the minds of the masses. I've had people say to me - 'You must be glad. It seems like the climate change thing isn't as bad as we thought, eh?'. I have to patiently explain to them that they are being systematically lied to and it is indeed still just as bad as we thought, probably worse, but the report's not out yet. Abbott's own business advisor has been sufficiently emboldened by the recent events to write an opinion piece in the Financial Review, claiming that climate change is a myth and a fraud perpetrated by the Bureau of Meteorology. Barely anyone even commented on this outburst in the 'commentariat'. No doubt many people, even many now in high places, agree with him because they don't know any better, or do but don't care. If our respected newspapers publish these lies, and senior figures in society perpetuate them, what hope is there to convince people of the seriousness of our predicament?

I toss and turn and have bad dreams. I know I should be thinking more positively about it, but it's been difficult this week. I've been using up excess nervous energy hassling Rupert Murdoch on Twitter and picking fights with climate change deniers on Facebook. Always good for temporary relief of steam! I've also been trying to bend my mind toward solutions to the problem. Short of global popular uprisings, it's hard to imagine what's to be done to turn this thing around in time when many governments are either complacent or complicit. Not all of them of course. There are some shining examples.There are glimmers of hope of course. People are stirring, banding together, organising, mobilizing, doing stuff... I went to the Environmental Film Festival last week and saw 'Bidder 70' the story of Tim de Christopher and his courageous action against illegal mining lease auctions. I went to the demonstration in the city on Saturday by the brave people of Tecoma, who are fighting McDonalds. They might even win. I wouldn't put it past them, or their gnomes. I watched a documentary called ' Favela rising (Preview) ' which is about the people of Rio De Janeiro's slums rising up against the drug lords and winning, largely through organising music and dance groups amongst the youth, focussing on traditional Afro-Reggae music (strange but true). Even in the darkest times, little green shoots continue to struggle up where you least expect them. People are doing things, even if it doesn't merit coverage in our 'mainstream' media. Even if we are continually being bombarded and brainwashed with images of war and fear, consumerism, greed and stupidity, it's good to remind myself that in the real world there are good people everywhere and there is always hope that things will change for the better.

What gets measured gets done

I've been thinking about metrics this week. What sparked all this was the trusim that all voters really care about is 'the economy'. I was watching Planet America on ABC TV the other day. They were talking about the Obama inauguration speech. Obama talked about a bunch of things, including climate change and as usual it was a very inspirational speech, beautifully delivered. But when they did a 'vox pop' with people in the street, most of them said their main concern was 'the economy'. Now, why is this so? Sure, the US economy is in a terrible mess. Living standards for the '99%' are falling, unemployment is about 8%, the government seems too deadlocked to do anything about their monster deficit and naturally people find all this very worrying. But could it be the relentless media emphasis on money that causes this response? When a TV reporter shoves a microphone in front of someone they automatically say they're 'concerned about the economy', perhaps it's because they think that's the correct answer? I'll bet most people don't really spend all that much time thinking about 'the economy' if the truth were told.

There's a saying 'what gets measured gets done' and it's probably pretty true. Every day in the press there are repeated updates on 'finance' - share prices, interest rates, commodities, currency fluctuations and the like. Now this sort of thing is really only of limited interest to the vast majority of people, most of whom don't have shares and certainly don't scan them on a daily basis if they do. This info is of interest to share traders and bankers of course, but they have access to various sources of detailed information and are hardly likely to rely on nightly news bulletins for their data. But why on Earth is this sort of thing always given such prominence in nightly news bulletins when it's all Greek to most people anyway? I could go on about the emphasis on violence and sport too, and what that says about our 'culture', but that's a diatribe for another day.

It takes a lot of work to assemble all those financial figures and report them several times per day so the message the general public receives is that all this is terribly important need-to-know sutff. But just imagine if the same amount of time and effort was put into reporting far more important measures. Imagine if the nightly news bulletin always finished up with a summary of the state of the global environment - tonnes of greenhouse gases emitted, species gone exctinct/ off the endangered list, habitat hectares cleared/saved from the bulldozer, renewable energy projects given the green light / new coal mining leases granted on farm land ... How quickly do you think things would change? Do you think people would start to think the enviornment was terribly important if they did this? I certainly do. Imagine if politicians started banging on about this kind of thing ad nauseum as they currently do about 'the economy'. Imagine if journalists waited breathlessly for the announcements of the UN Enviroment Programme's monthly meetings the way they do the Reserve Bank's interest rate adjustments? Will it happen? Probably not any time soon, not while our 'culture' considers money, war and sport the things most worth reporting on.

Greed

I've been thinking about greed recently and how it seems to be a defining theme of our 'western' society. I stumbled across a TV show on hoarding 'Buried alive!' the other night. There are some people who are driven by the urge to acquire more and more 'stuff' at garage sales, second hand shops, or whatever it might be, but they just can't bear to throw anything away. They gradually acquire so much stuff they can barely get in and out of their houses. Morbid obesity has also got to the point where it is pandemic in many 'developed' countries, including Australia. Now, obviously these are psychological disorders and these people need help to be cured of them, but what about people who hoard money? What about the world's billionaires? What's with that? Rather than see these people as mentally ill for wanting to amass more than one person could possibly hope to spend in a lifetime, we are told by our 'media' to admire them. These people are considered heroes, idols, superstars. On reality shows, movies, magazine covers, lifestyle spreads, etc. these people are held up as an example to admire and emulate. Are we being brainwashed? Think about it. This behaviour is nothing to admire. This behaviour is completely dysfunctional. If I was going to be politically incorrect, I'd call it "nuts".

In other cultures, hoarding the vast bulk of resources produced by your society would be seen for what it is; a kind of madness. In many cultures such as the Innuit culture and Australian Aborigines, and various African cultures, not to share what you have with others is seen as nonsensical. It's OK to have personal possessions. It's OK to maybe have some personal possessions a bit 'nicer' than the next person - especially if you made it yourself. But to hoard 1000 or a million times more 'stuff' than you will actually ever need is really, really "bonkers". If you live 'hand to mouth' as a group there's nothing much to hoard anyway and if anyone did start hoarding, they would put the survival of the whole group at risk. Since those people are mostly your own relatives, and you have to live with them, there's not a lot of incentive. With the advent of the colonialism,t he industrial revolution and now 'globalization' a small number of world-class hoarders are now able to gather up OIympic sized quantiies of resources in industrial quanities and never need to see who's going without food or shelter because of what they're doing. They can strip forests, suck rivers dry, ruin whole continents, destroy entire coastlines whatever they want. No problem. Nobody to stop them or even disapprove. It's crazy. It's not sustainable. It's nonsensical and I said it, it's wrong!

Regular readers will know I like a good zombie apocalypse movie. For those who are not afficionados of the genre, there's a key theme running through many of them which is what happens to a small group of people forced to depend on each other for survival. What's the point of money anyway? You can't eat it. Zombies don't use it. What do you do if there are people in your little band who won't share their food and refuse to get along with others? Well, it's a pretty simple decision when you're surrounded by thousands of hungry zombies... Let's all hope there's a middle way between the current unbalanced situation we find ourselves in and some form of 'apocalypse-type' situation which is where we're going if we don't get our act together. Let's hope one day (soon) being ridiculously wealthy will be seen for what it is: ridiculous. Let's hope one day even sooner we work out what's really valuable (hint: it's not gold or diamonds). It's going to take a massive mental shift for a lot of people in the 'developed' world, but things are changing quicker than you might think. There's a lot we can learn from older cultures. Maybe it's about time we started paying attention?

Newspeak

Euphemisms are on my mind. They've been flying around like confetti for years now. They're on the news. They're in the ads, they're on talk back radio, magazines, papers ... and they're on everyone's lips, even (especially) on the lips of people who wouldn't know what a euphemism was if it bit them. When did this 1984-style 'newspeak' sneak up on us to the point we barely even notice it now? When did 'defence' replace 'militarism' in the lexicon? When did 'democracy' become code for 'consumerism'? Why are people referred to as 'resources' now? When did we start thinking that 'globalization' meant anything other than 'international slavery'? When did the English language become so debased? When perfectly good words were put into chains, hitched to bandwagons and taken so far away from their natural beginnings that we barely recognise them any more, that's when. Perhaps it was around about 1984 when it started getting really bad? That was back when a couple of shiny new euphemisms were invented: 'Reaganomics' which was a euphemism for 'unleashing the rampant greed of the oligarchs' and 'Thatcherism' which was code for 'crushing the union movement'. It's been coming for a while of course, this 'newspeak'. The Viet Nam war-mongers came up with the term 'collateral damage' which is a very handy euphemism for 'dead people, mostly women and children'. It sounded so much better on the news after all. They had others, many others. 'Friendly fire' for instance, was a euphemism for 'idiots running about with guns who have no idea what they're doing or why'. The list goes on (and on).

The advertising industry has been at it for decades of course and the PR industry has got its clutches well and truly on politics these days. 'Sustainability', (from the Latin, sustinere "hold up, support, endure," from sub "up from below" + tenere "to hold") has become a catch-all phrase for corporate greenwashers, who want to do everything but 'support from below'. What they want to do is suck the life blood out of the Earth in the world's largest ever Ponzi scheme ('growth'). From this PR 'newspeak' dictionary come the oxymorons 'sustainable growth' and 'sustainable development'. What is 'sustainable development'? Is that taking away the lands of indigenous people and giving them all a job in a mine, some cigarettes and an iPhone? Develop:"from French développer, from Old French desveloper "unwrap, unfurl, unveil; reveal the meaning of, explain"... When did 'develop' become a euphemism for 'ruin' as in 'develop the Kimberley'. Since when did to 'unfold' mean to ravage and destroy something perfectly beautiful, useful and fine the way it is, so a few people can buy themselves a yacht and a racehorse or two so they can show off to their equally misguided friends? Hmmmm?

Get your kicks....

I've been thinking a lot about what makes people happy this week. I often despair for our 'culture', obsessed as it seems to be by money, power, fame, sex, thrills and excess ... and that's just the nightly news. All of this is crazy carrying on is not conducive to happiness, despite what the advertisers would have you believe. It's very bad for the health of the individual and the planet as well. The other night, trying to enjoy a rare quiet night at home in front of the telly,  I was searching for some respite from the murder shows, sports scandals, Tony Abbott, fighting couples and explosions, I switched over to Channel 34 NITV - National Indigenous TV. It was like a breath of fresh air. There was a man teaching his grandson how to carve the old masks in Alaska. Here was a woman teaching her granddaughter how to salt fish for the winter. It was quiet, soulful and full of love. They were saying they didn't have a lot of money, their clothes were old and so on, but they were happy. They had their bit of land that they'd always had and the river was still clean and full of fish, the family were all living close by. They were gently spoken, smiling and obviously content with life ... I thought these people were way richer than Gina Rinehart myself.

But, we love thrills and excitement too. Too much peace and quiet can get a bit boring after all. Can you have thrills and excitement without wrecking the planet, starting a war, ruining your health or being very, very wealthy? Of course you can. I watched the movie Exit through the gift shop  the other day. If you haven't seen it I highly recommend it. It's all about the 'street art' scene in France, the UK and USA, especially Banksy and a few of the other leading lights. Everyone hates mindless tagging, but this movie shows the real artists who emerged out of all that anarchy and what happened next ... The movement is very anti-consumerism, anti-imperialism, anti-war, anti-authority... The artists pride themselves in making art out of nothing, getting paid nothing for it, just doing it to amaze, amuse or awaken. They put a lot of time and effort into their 'pieces', and take considerable physical risks as well sometimes, only to see their work scraped off the wall the next day, painted over, or crumble away in the weather. They don't believe art should be locked up indoors for the enjoyment of the rich and powerful, but it should be free for everyone. They're mostly dirt poor, but these crazy cats are full of life, reforming zeal, humour and creativity and are having the time of their lives. One of the young men described the way he'd chosen to spend his life (spreading the anti-consumerist word to the masses) as being the most joyful and fulfilling thing he could imagine doing, even though he had barely a penny to his name.

Excessive amounts of money are not necessary for a happy life and there are a lot of good ways to get your kicks that don't involve harming yourself or others. Sometimes less is more. 

Love conquers all

I've been thinking a lot about love this week. Not just the boy/girl meets girl/boy variety, but more broadly. So much of the bad behaviour in this world is driven by hate, greed and fear and so much of the good behaviour is driven by love. You need to exclude the 'love of money' of course. That goes under the heading of greed. The Greens have always stood for the four pillars, an overwhelmingly positive vision for how to bring about a more just society, healthy biosphere, equitable economy and peaceful world. Every Greens party in the world (and there are many) use the same four pillars as the basis of their policy making. The older parties continually bang on and on about money, power, fear, selfishness and separation. It's a very unpalatable vision of how the world should be in my view and I'm often astonished at how many people buy into it. But then I guess most people are brainwashed by the steady diet of 'news' we are fed, not to mention the constant barrage of marketing of envy, greed and fear that is so prevalent in our 'culture'. I've ranted about those things in the past, so won't repeat myself here. 

Despite the pretensions of the old parties to present a 'positive' face this campaign, so far it's what the young folk would call an 'epic fail'. This week they seem to be trying to demonstrate how very positive they are on 'women's issues' by bickering over minute differences between their 'paid parental leave' schemes and whether shareholders or billionaires are going to be made to foot the bill. One of the best things about being involved in the Greens is that you can be sure you're always on the side of love. The ALP made a big hoopla recently about how they would (finally) have a 'conscience vote' on marriage equality if they get in. Well, bully for them. We've been saying for years that love is love, no matter what gender you might be, and it's nobody's business who you marry as long as it makes you both happy. It's been part of Greens policy forever, not just a 'conscience' issue, but foundational to the notion that discrimination is wrong and love is good. It's well known which side the Greens stand on when it comes to treating refugees with compassion as opposed to an almost psychotic fear of 'invasion' reminscent of the old 'yellow peril' nonsense. If you suggest that the billions being spent on locking up the unfortunate on remote islands would be better directed at love than hate they call you mad. But it would actually be far more economical to help people to stay in their own countries safely and peacefully. How is that possible? Well, by boosting diplomatic efforts through the UN rather than enabling the bellicosity of the USA. Imagine if billions (trillions) were spent on stopping wars, encouraging micro-credit schemes, supporting the rule of law, educating women, stopping the trade in illegal arms, agricultural projects, banning landmines, renewable energy projects, reforestation, species protection and so much more. With these simple measures you could raise the standard of living of billions of people and put an end to much of the strife in the world. But that's crazy talk, right? We can't afford that, can we? Well, actually we could if we did this: http://robinhoodtax.org.uk/  and stopped doing this: http://www.globalissues.org/issue/73/arms-trade-a-major-cause-of-suffering

Sometimes I scratch my head with wonder at the old parties' relationship to our Mother Earth, our only home. They really seem to hate her. It doesn't make a heap of difference which mob is in. They both permit mining in national parks, despoilation of beauty spots, wiping out of species, endless 'development' and expansion of roads, mining, and the like. Both the old parties have plans to protect our 'economy' from impending doom by coming up with half-baked and largely useless policies to curb greenhouse gas emissions in any meaningful way, while giving multi-national corporations kick backs by the billions of public money, the better to assist them in killing our Earth more swiftly. The Greens are often accused of being radical or weird or loopy for suggesting that we're going the wrong way and the policies of the past couple of hundred years deserve a major rethink. Suggesting that maybe love is a better way to go than hate and greed puts you in the kooky club. But in the end it is not money, but love that truly rules the world. Appealling to the lowest aspects of human nature is nothing new, but me, I choose love. I choose the Greens. I choose to be on the right side and the winning side. Don't forget, while you're out campaining and volunteering, demonstrating and letter writing, to do it with passion. Do it with courage. Do it for love. Always remember, love conquers all