Web team convenor Peter Maddock recently described 'having an existential crisis' in response to the book and film 'Bright Green Lies' which question the renewables industrial complex. ​

Peter came across the film on Kindle just as he had finished reading Dead In The Water by Richard Beasley which he describes as 'A very angry book about our greatest environmental catastrophe. . . the death of the Murray-Darling Basin'.

'Hot Topics' are invariably highly complex 'wicked' if not 'super wicked' problems.  An excellent resource on wicked and super wicked problems, Chris Riedy's 'Climate Change is a Super Wicked Problem',  highlights the difficulty we have in making headway on dealing with climate change, and many environmental issues and the need for bipartisan approaches.   .

Another important article on complexity uses the analogy of a complex chess game to discuss the 'super wicked' policy problem of climate change. In  'We Need to “See the Whole Board” to Stop Climate Change', Project Drawdown's Executive Director Dr Jonathon Foley suggests that addressing climate change is like playing chess. "We need to use all the pieces, employ multiple strategies, and see the whole board. But, unlike chess, we have to play this game collaboratively to win."

Bev Lee
Web Team

I have been struggling recently with continuing my involvement with BSFG and I have advised our President Peter Holmes I wish to relinquish my position as Secretary.

In part this has come to a head during discussions between some members of our group about the film ‘Planet of the Humans’ which has been freely available online since the 50th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22. The film was strongly criticised by environmental groups and groups representing renewable energy.

The film did use outdated information to criticise the performance of solar and renewable energy in general which was a disservice to the films other message about our overpopulation and overconsumption of resources, often without much, if any consideration for the ecological space occupied and required by nonhuman species on the planet.

I have now come to the position of seeing large scale renewables as a continuation and potentially an exacerbation of the human domination of the planet and its resources. While we have been mining the solar energy in coal and oil for some centuries, the proposal that Australia now becomes a Renewable Energy Superpower will result in using our landscape to mine solar energy directly. At the large scale proposed I can only see such infrastructure as an encroachment on the ecological space required by the non-human species of our planet.

Although I am concerned about the impact of largescale renewables, I do think there may be an opportunity for local community energy which would most likely be rooftop solar. More generally I support the ‘Localisation Movement’ which hopes to reduce our emissions dramatically, for instance by reducing transport emissions, particularly food emissions.

Over the last few years I have been developing an Ecocentric world view which was probably reinforced by a number of books I have read and also from my reading of the freely available online publication ‘The Ecological Citizen’, confronting human supremacy in defence of the Earth: https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/​.

Some authors equate the Anthropocene, the human created epoch to Human Supremacy.

Looking for some information on the Ecocene I came across this Huffington Post article From Anthropocene To Ecocene by 2050? which became the title for my article.

The author Richard Steiner writes, ‘It is inevitable that the current Anthropocene era will evolve into an ecologically sustainable era - which can be called the ‘Ecocene’. The current trajectory of environmental and social decline cannot continue much longer. Indeed, the Anthropocene will be gone in the blink of geologic time. The real question is: What will be left of the biosphere at the dawn of the Ecocene, e.g. what species, including H. sapiens, will survive the Anthropocene evolutionary bottleneck?’.

Richard Steiner has a website from where you can freely download his book: OASIS EARTH: Planet in Peril: Our last best chance to save our world: https://www.oasis-earth.com/oasis-earth-planet-inperil .

The book begins with the Dedication, ‘In honour of the 50th Anniversary of Earth Day (April 2020) and the United Nations World Environment Day (June), Oasis Earth is dedicated to our extraordinary Home Planet-for nurturing and sustaining the evolution of life over billions of years; for being patient with H. sapiens while we learn to control our destructive impulses; and for the remarkable resilience that will restore Earth in the coming Ecocene, with or without us’.

Peter Maddock