Today, Al Gore, saviour of the planet, is talking climate change at Auckland University. And with excellent timing, VUP has brought out a book that will enable you to get fully up to date with all the facts and figures from the huge conference that was held here in March.
Confronting Climate Change: Critical Issues for New Zealand, edited by Ralph Chapman, Jonathan Boston and Margot Schwass, is the book we all have to get to enable us finally look an inconvenient truth in the eye, and find out how we can actually do something about it.
Jeanette Fitzsimons, in the Herald on Sunday, said ‘For quite a long time, my brain has told me that we’re not going to act in time and that we’re past the tipping point. But my heart tells me you can’t live like that. You’ve actually got to live as though you can still make a difference and so that’s what we are working to do.’
Chilling huh. But she goes on to say, helpfully (who else is fed up to the back teeth, as my mother would say, with crapping yourself listening to all the doom stories, but not actually being told what to do?) that there’s a four-point plan that will make a difference if we can try and get involved in all or even a few of the following: ‘Use your car a whole lot less; halve your energy use, hold business to account for what they’re doing. And vote Green.’
Finally, just to cap this green posting, and at the risk of being maudlin, here are the words to a scary song our nine-year-old daughter has written and will sing at a local Xmas festival soon. Out of the mouths of the babes:
Birds flying through the air
Trees growing everywhere
Me standing on the ground
Me looking all around
It is plain as anything
It just makes me want to sing
It’s nature
It’s nature
The planet’s crying out for help
‘Cause soon the ice is gonna melt
There’ll be flooding everywhere
It seems as if you just don’t care
It is plain as anything
It just makes me want to sing
It’s nature
It’s nature
We’ve still got time to make it stop
So come on now, give it all you’ve got
We don’t have another place to live
And earth still has so much to give
It is plain as anything
It just makes me want to sing
It’s nature
It’s nature.
If you enjoyed this post, get free updates by email.
Comment by maggie ~ November 15, 2006 11:34 AM
Great song – it was inevitable that you and Chris would have talented off-spring!
Regarding global warming and Mr Gore. I went to his movie during the festival and found his “campaign” style a bit nauseating to be frank. Not that I’m not a convert to the ideas but felt the presidential-style approach and the personal-emotional stuff a bit hard to handle. It felt like he had missed out on the White House and so now he’d found a new cause to lead. Which is fine, because it is a good cause – but it seemed more about him than the cause. Is this just me? Mind you, I did hear Jeanette Fitzsimmons say she found his address hit the emotional buttons – and perhaps we need this, as the Greens have been pushing the moral buttons for years and not making much headway.
On that note. I went to a recent Book Council event (oh yes, again, I am a groupie at these events) on Antarctica – chaired by Veronica Meduna (it was so good to see the woman behind the amazing “voice”). We heard from two Scientists/Zoologists (with a tourist and conservation focus), and Gareth Farr, Laurence Fearnley, and Bernadette Hall. The artists, who had all spent quite a short time down on the ice, were without exception, thoroughly gob-smacked by their experience and it seemed they could have talked forever (had there been time). They all felt somehow “changed” by their experience (sounds a bit romantic, but sounded true).
At the end, Gareth Farr made a plea to the audience, if there were any “artists” out there who want to go down to the ice… believe it or not… they are short on applications! Anyone? I’m really keen, but not just yet… in a couple of years.
So come on… there must be someone out there… What an opportunity.
ISSN #1176-4465. LeafSalon is licensed under a 
