Time for a stronger climate change response

This evening, I wrote to Senator Penny Wong, Australia's Minister on Climate Change, urging her to resist the amendments being put forward by the Liberal opposition to water down the Rudd government's proposed greenhouse gas emissions trading scheme (ETS), and instead to strengthen Australia's greenhouse gas reduction strategy.

The email was prompted by Who on Earth Cares, the Australian Conservation Foundation's public climate change campaign. Personally, I find the Rudd government's ETS a whimpy, futile attempt at cutting greenhouse gas emissions and slowing global warming. The ALP government's targets for cutting emissions are pitiful – and certainly not based on what scientists say is needed to prevent dangerous climate change. However, the Turnbull Liberal opposition's attempts to weaken (let's not use mealy-mouthed 'water down', shall we?) the government's scheme and demand greater subsidies for carbon polluters to be worse!

The Who on Earth Cares/ACF online campaigning tool allowed me to send an email to Penny Wong (automatically generated), urging her to strengthen Australia's greenshouse gas reduction, not weaken it. It says:

Dear Minister Wong,

This week the Liberal Party has made it clear that it proposes to weaken the Government’s emissions trading scheme.

I ask you, as someone that is very concerned about climate change, not to cave in to their proposed amendments and weaken Australia’s response to climate change.

I ask you not to give more handouts to the big polluters. Doing so would take the scheme backwards, and impact greatly on Australian taxpayers.

Instead, I ask you to strengthen and pass the emissions trading scheme, and take real action on climate change ahead of the crucial climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

Australia has so much to lose from a climate change catastrophe, yet so much to gain in a clean, low carbon economy.

We have abundant renewable energy resources, and huge potential to grow jobs and investment by grabbing a fair share of the global boom in clean technologies.

You have the ability to strengthen the emissions trading scheme by:

• Improving the target for reducing greenhouse pollution. 25% below 1990 levels by 2020 is the minimum credible starting point for Australia; and scientists say we should be making a 40% reduction

• Decrease handouts of free permits to Australia’s biggest polluters – now that the economy is back on track we should be winding back corporate welfare, not increasing it

• Ramping up investment in clean energy jobs and industries that will ensure Australia remains prosperous in the 21st century

• Using funds raised by the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme to help bring developing countries and their people out of poverty through clean economic development, and to cope with climate impacts that are already hurting them.

Australia has a history of leading by example and punching above its weight. I ask you to help continue this tradition.

I added some text below that, in the bit meant for us to 'personalise' our emails and, I guess, prove we are real people rather than the digital version of the rent-a-mob governments so maligned a decade and more ago. I'm sharing it here as an open letter to Penny Wong, Minister for Climate Change. Feel free to use it, or let it inspire your own emails or letters to the Minister. (Write to senator.wong@aph.gov.au)

To Penny Wong, Minister for Climate Change

On a further note, Minister Wong, I would like to strongly urge you to strengthen Australia's greenhouse gas reduction strategy with an insight from Victoria.

I am seriously concerned that in Australia we do all that we can do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent – not just slow down – dangerous climate change. If your government caves in to the demands of the Liberal Party and the carbon industry lobbyists, I strongly, strongly fear for the future of my children – my two boys, aged 9 and 3.

Last Saturday 17 October 2009, The Age reported that the huge aluminium smelters in Portland and Point Henry in south-western Victoria are costing Victorians more than $4.5 billion (by the time the contracts end in 2014 and 2016) in electricity subsidies for the smelters, and are likely to cost us more. Aluminium smelting is one of the most energy intensive – and greenhouse polluting – industries in the world, and it makes me angry that not only are we encouraging this industry, but we are actively subsidising it. Furthermore, these smelters are run on electricity generated from burning brown coal – one of the most carbon polluting forms of power generation there is!

If we instead subsidised and supported renewable energy such as solar power and wind turbines to anywhere the same amount, Australia would be in a much better position to tackle climate change!

Former Hamer and Kennett Liberal Victorian government minister Rob Maclellan, who was in the cabinet that decided to support and subsidise the smelters, was reported in that Age article as saying that decision was 'absolute madness' and a 'costly disaster' for our state. He clearly regrets those cabinet decisions! Please Minister, don't find yourself in a situation 10 years from now regretting any decisions you make to weaken Australia's greenhouse gas reduction strategy and throw greater subsidies at the carbon-polluting industries.

Victoria has already witnessed some of the most horrendous bushfires last summer, and I don't want my children living in a world where they have to fear every summer, rather than long for it and embrace the hope of its warmth and sunshine. This would be a horrendous future for us all. I want a carbon neutral future – and a brighter one – form my children. A future where my children will listen to Melbourne's weather report to figure out whether to take an umbrella or pack a jumper, or wear shorts and thongs – not whether to pack their belongings in a car and evacuate to a safe area to avoid a raging bushfire or a cyclonic storm.

Please – do the right thing. Strengthen Australia's greenhouse gas reduction strategy. Don't weaken it.

I welcome the opportunity to hear back from you about what you will do on this matter.

Regards,
Mark Lawrence

From a (little) more innocent summer some 4 years ago, Jacob (now turning 9) building a sandcastle at Squeaky Beach in Wilsons Promontory. I say a little more innocent, or idyllic, as we were still amidst a terrible draught then, and the heatwave that Australia Day weekend was awful! Photo by me.

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Hanging by a thread

We began this week with the news that the Wilkins Ice Shelf was at astonishing risk of breaking off the Antarctic continent. The European Space Agency has been tracking the progress of the disintegration of the land bridge that connects the Wilkins Ice Shelf to the rest of the continent. Its splintering increases the possibility of the ice shelf shattering into a thousands icebergs, blocks and shards of ice in the southern ocean.

It is more evidence that humans are heating the planet at faster rates than scientists had predicted, with increased risk that ocean levels with also rise faster than projected. When – not if – the plug of the Wilkins Ice Shelf finally breaks away, the continental ice it was holding back with crash into the ocean much faster, and flood more fresh water into the ocean – water that has been locked into the ice for probably centuries.

Ironically, the other iceberg of human ingenuity – the global financial crisis – is drawing from us a response that is directly inverse to the one required to deal with the increasingly urgent threat of global warming. Instead of curtailing our unrestrained, debt-fueled consumption of stuff and the resources required to make, cart around, sell and operate this stuff – especially fossil fuels – the most compelling thing our governments are asking us to do is spend – spend our way out of the economic crisis that, it strikes me, greed and over-spending got us into in the first place.

We are expected to trust our governments as they urge us to spend, spend, spend at a time when we need to tighten our belts and learn to sew on buttons, patch holes, and reuse, reduce and recycle to conserve fossil fuels and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. After all, who needs another of what Laura Carroll last Saturday so insightfully called in her essay 'Inconspicuous Consumption' in The Age's A2 supplement a piece of "billion-year-old carbon frozen in the humiliating form of a large, green Incredible Hulk doll".

I'm currently reading a collection of Kurt Vonnegut's non-fiction writings, A Man Without a Country, which includes various recent addresses and speeches on the war in Iraq and climate change. In a piece on fossil fuels and climate change, Vonnegut tells us:

We are all addicts to fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we're hooked on.

And all for the sake of keeping the gunky wheels and cogs of the economy rolling and chugging along. I sincerely do appreciate that Rudd's stimulus packages are to inject more consumption cash into the market to keep businesses going and keep peoples' jobs.

But when the ice of Antarctica is about to go crashing into the ocean at unprecedented rates, I really wonder if we are being so short-sighted and have lost sight of what's truly at stake – and consequently are not thinking deeply and creatively enough about what we need to do. If anything, we don't need to slow down or speed up the nasty treadmill of the neo-liberal economy. We need to get rid of it and build something else. And preferably something that works.

[Image is from the European Space Agency (ESA) website]

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After the air ignited

I have to say that I struggled for a long time with this post, as I found the horror of the past week's Victorian bushfires and deaths very troubling and emotionally painful, and wondered long and hard whether, and how, to put into words what I had learned of these events. I've decided to go ahead and post anyway. I hope it is read in the spirit of caring, concern and bearing witness with which I wrote it. The image is from flickr.

UPDATE : A happy ending after all
I have recently learned that C's house survived the fire in Kinglake after all! Please note he changes below. [Updated 4.10pm Tuesday 17 February 2009]

When I spoke to my friend C late on Sunday morning, he still didn't know if the house he'd been building for his family was still standing after the firestorm that swept through Kinglake last weekend.

He thought there was a "99% chance" it was gone, considering all the houses across the road from his – bar one – had burned down. However, he held on to a glimmer of hope that it survived. His neighbour and neighbour's son stayed to protect their house and saved it.

With the roadblocks and other restrictions on movement to the area, it was a while later when he found out that the house was gone. Thanfully, C, his partner and their three-year-old daughter were safe at home in Melbourne's north-western suburbs when the fires hit. He hadn't gone up to Kinglake to check on the nearly completed house as he'd not expected the fire danger to be so severe or immediate. In this case, it must be a blessing.

[Update: C has recently told me that he'd received incorrected information from a neighbour that the house was destroyed, and that he learned late last week that his house survived! He's been up to Kinglake to check it out and it's still standing.]

Unfortunately for the many, many dozens of Kinglake residents who lost their homes, and the 35 who lost their lives, the horrifyingly extreme nature of this bushfire was not anticipated – not the immensity of it, not the suddenness with which it changed direction toward Kinglake, not the speed nor ferocity with which it hit.

My heart was in my mouth when I woke on Sunday to read and hear the news of the fires hitting Kinglake (and the rest of Victoria), as I knew C was building there, and over the years I'd known people who had lived in that area. I was relieved to hear Chris and his family safe and well.

But I was also worried for another friend and her partner who live in St Andrews, another township near Kinglake and famous for its alternative weekend market. While I was quite unsettled and concerned that I couldn't get them on the phone either Sunday or Monday as the line was disconnected, by Tuesday when I'd heard about the high number of deaths in St Andrews – 22 at last count – I was panicking.

I called around a number of 3rd parties who knew these friends and finally heard from someone that they were safe. I finally spoke to my friend L on Tuesday afternoon (their telephone had been disconnected due to a stuff-up by the phone company, rather than the fires!) and learned that while they were safe and well, they had survived a close call. The stories of what she saw were unbelievably shocking – and she found it quite shocking, like nothing she'd seen before, and she'd previously experienced 3 other bushfires!

She told me how on Saturday they vigilantly watched the fires in the distance advancing on them, and were putting out burning embers on the roof and in the gutters that had rained from the sky all afternoon. She had watched the fire advance on a white weatherboard farmhouse on the top of a hill but leave it unscathed as it burned down the hill, and inexplicably leave it intact yet again when the wind change drove the fire back up the hill, and how that house now stands starkly white on a blackened hill.

She told me of how they watched as the very air ignited from the extreme heat and ferocity of the fire. How where as the top of one hill was ablaze, the air at the top of the neighbouring hill suddenly exploded in a ball of flames and set that hill ablaze. The fire was still some 3 kms away or so, sure to destroy their home, and they were prepared to leave when it go too close when the late change came through and started blowing the fire in another direction and their home was saved.

She learned the next day, as the rest of us did, what destruction and death that weather change wraught as it drome the firestorm front to the neighbouring townships and communities.

*********

Today we are being told that while the official death toll from the bushfires across Victoria stands at 181, already the worst natural disaster in Australia's history, we should expect the death tol to climb past 200 and nearer 300.

But Kinglake and St Andrews, while having amongst the highest death tolls in the state, are not the only communities affected. The township of Marysville has been scorched off the face of this earth, and the community is trying to come to terms with the devastation and loss of life there, while there have been terrible deaths and destruction in townships from Healesville in the Yarra Ranges to Churchill in Gippsland.

As you can see from MrTomTom's images of a family member's home destroyed by the fire in Yarra Glen, the devastation is frequently extreme and total.

I think this disaster and tragedy is going to stay with us for a long time, as we come to turns with the deaths, the environmental destruction, the loss of homes, jobs and businesses, the trauma experienced by the survivors and emergency workers, and the terrible injury to our collective psyche as we absorb this through the non-stop media coverage.

It is going to take a great effort and a lot of time to to make sense of this all. Though I have to say that David Tiley has made admirably insightful and eloquent efforts to do so. And Penni Russon's tale (her family and home in St Andrews are unscathed, thank goodness) gives great insight into the nerve-wracking business of waiting to see if the fires move toward them again. Penni and her partner have decided, quite understandably, they will leave their home again at the first signs of renewed danger.

I wish them, and all others on a danger footing, and dealing with the grief and trauma of this tragedy, my very best wishes. And to all my other readers too. Stay safe and well.

[Image sunrise.seven on flickr, under creative commons license. I think it's a screenshot from Channel 7's TV program Sunrise]

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Tearing open the heart

I'm having trouble coming to terms with the enormity of the tragedy of the drowning death of the father and his two sons in Tathra, New South Wales. They were burried today in Bega, NSW.

Each time I hear or read the news of the event, I feel terribly troubled – almost in pain – to the extent that I don't allow myself to dwell too long on it, and the excruciating pain that must stem from such a tragedy. Today I'm facing it, otherwise it may haunt me.

I'm a very visual person, and I tend to visualise situations and events, particularly imagining how they may have unfolded. It's what I do, and it somehow meshes with the 'worse-case scenario' type of thinking I'm prone to.

From the reports, I understand that the father drowned after he jumped off the wharf to rescue his two young sons (four and 18 months) who had fallen in the water. The two boys also drowned. From an early report, police were investigating whether the older boy was playing with the pram his baby brother was in the minutes prior to their falling in. The three had gone for a walk on the wharf at Tathra, a popular holiday spot in New South Wales.

Part of my tendency to visualise and imagine the worst is that I also can't help but wonder how this could happen to my two boys and I. It could so easily have happened to any one of us. Kids fool around, big brothers (and sisters) often want a turn pushing their younger sibling in the pram. You take your eyes off them for a second to ask the fisherman on the wharf if the fish are biting. You hear shout or a splash, you panic, the terror rises up. You jump in. I would have, even though I cannot swim very well.

No, I don't feel any better having written this. I've imagined it yet again, and it hurts. But I've also been reminded that constant vigilance is a price for the joys of raising children and being parents. And this is in no way a suggestion that the dad at Tathra had not been vigilant. Not at all. I know exactly how quickly, and terribly easily, it could all come crashing down. That imagination feeds my paranoia when the kids are mucking about in places or situations I don't feel safe in or about.

I know that my feeling troubled at these events pales in comparison to the trauma and deep grief the family, especially the mother of the boys, and the wider community in Bega and Tathra are feeling. And will feel for a long time. The grief of losing a child, let alone two, and your lover, can tear open your heart. Especially when your memory of your partner is coloured by what happened to your children.

I know many, many people live with grief each and every day, and I've had my share of grief from death in the family, so I know that time will heal.

Honestly, though, if I had not been able to find them in the water, I don't know if I could have come back up to surface to face the enormity of the pain of it.

Vale, Shane, Riley and Travis. May you rest in peace.

[Image of the wharf at Tathra, NSW, by sophiec]

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For peace remember Hiroshima Day

Today is Hiroshima Day. 63 years ago today, the crew of the United States bomber the Enola Gray dropped a bomb, Little Boy, onto the city of Hiroshima on the west of Japan's Honshu Island. The bomb blast directly killed an estimated 80,000 people. Injury and radiation poisoning killed another 90,000-140,000 by the end of the year.

I don't have figures for starvation and homelessness killing people, but wouldn't you say that these contributed a lot to the deaths by injury? After all, 69 per cent of the buildings destroyed, and another 6.6 per cent seriously damaged, and you can imagine what happened to the food stocks – either incinerated or irradiated. You can find out more on the bombing of Hiroshima, and of Nagasaki three days later, from Wikipedia.

Despite the debate over whether US President Harry Truman really had a 'choice' over whether to bomb Hiroshima or risk thousands of American (and Japanese) lives in an invasion of Japan to end the Pacific theatre of World War Two, Hiroshima remains an abiding reminder of the utter horror, and futility, of nuclear weapons and the way they have no way of discerning between civilian and military targets.

The true horror of Hiroshima – and Nagasaki – galvanised the world's peace movement and became the rallying point in the anti-nuclear weapons and anti-uranium industry movement and the peace movement. In many ways, it is as the survivors of Hiroshima want it. The Hiroshima Memorial remains a potent symbol of the devastation – and of remembrance – but perhaps not as much as the mushroom cloud.

If you are so inclined, and are in Melbourne, of course, there will be an anti-uranium, anti-nuclear and pro-peace rally in the city on Saturday the 9th at 1 pm at the State Library. There will also be a Peace Concert held by Melbourne-based Japanese peace activists at the Town Hall at 3 pm on Saturday, also marking Nagasaki Day.

But, instead of waiting for some 'official' Peace-come-anti-nuclear Rally or Peace festival on the weekend, I suggest that you can conduct your own Hiroshima Day activities. This can be a moment of silence to remember the first victims of the atomic bomb, or playing a peace song, or reading a poem, or lighting a candle or lantern, or folding origami paper cranes.

Folding origami paper cranes used to be a favourite and common peace activity to commemorate Hiroshima Day. It was something that thousands of school children in various parts of the world would do to mark the day and to call for peace. I'm uncertain how much it still gets done these days.

Here are some paper crane-folding instructions to follow, and here is an instructional video online (warning, I've been told the crane is a pretty tricky one to start origami with, so try this with someone who has done it before. I know I'll be doing just that tonight over the dinner table once the dishes are cleared.)

One of the other things I try to do each Hiroshima Day is to write a blog post on it as part of my rememberance, and as a renewal of my disavowal of all things nuclear.

These are easy activities, especially to do with kids in your family, or on your own on a busy mid-week. They are also easy enough to encourage other family members or housemates to do with you. The idea is to perform simple, accessible activities that bring to mind the victims of Hiroshima, of nuclear horror, and to resolve that nuclear weapons should never be used again and that all of us have a role in bringing peace.

[Image of Hiroshima memorial dome by bebouchard (cc)]

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Thought-quote for the day

Alex Steffen, in his recent WorldChanging post The Apocalypse Makes Us Dumb writes, "Disasters … are all about bad food and wet feet and sick babies and pointless pain."

There is much to reflect on in this very good post that questions the millennial assumptions of the 'end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it' thinking, particularly that related to global warming.

My other favourite idea/quote is "The Apocalypse will be an adventure." As he says, it won't. Well worth mulling over.

A good post to read in tandem with his post on who the heroes in a climate-changed world would be, which I've responded to in my Twitter updates (see 'Twitter updates' section in the column on the right).

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US aid plane lands in Burma

BBC Online reports that the first US plane carrying emergency aid has landed in Burma – nine days after Cyclone Nargis!

The plane was carrying over 12,000 kgs of supplies, including mosquito nets, blankets and water. According to the BBC, "The US spent days negotiating with Burma's military government to gain permission for the aircraft to land."

This is a significant development in this emergency, as in the early days the Burmese had refused to allow US planes to land, and all commentators were saying that any aid worker with a US passport wouldn't be allowed into the country.

The BBC also reports that three Medicins Sans Frontieres (MSF) planes are due to be allowed into Burma soon.

The biggest worry is that although the military is showing signs that it is softening its hardline stance against foreign aid intervention and help in the disaster, the pace of their cooperation with international relief agencies, the UN and leading western aid donor countries is too slow and this natural disaster is going to turn into a humanitarian disaster

Over 1 million people are still very much at risk from the aftermath of this cyclone, and the reports indicate that there are still many, many dead bodies unretrieved from the disaster areas.

It is still important to exert pressure on the Burmese military junta to allow the smooth flow of the international relief effort into cyclone ravaged Burma – especially via putting pressure on the junta's international supporters: China mainly, but also their Asean supporters and neighbours including Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia.

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Burma disaster roundup

I trawled through a number of websites to find sources of information and insight into what is happening in Burma post the Cyclone Nargis disaster, and I made an effort to find out what other blogs and Burmese voices, especially from the region, are saying.

Also bearing in mind that the crucial issue now is how quickly the international emergency disaster relief can get into Burma and to the areas most in need, and the military's reluctance to ease their entry, I've also found some information from the aid and relief agencies.

The Burma Campaign (UK) have called for concerted international effort to force the Burmese junta to accept international aid. They are lobbying the British government, for one, to take a strong approach. They say:

"The United Nations has the power to authorise aid shipments to Burma even though the regime has not given permission. Yesterday the French government tried to secure a discussion on this at the Security Council, but it is believed to have been blocked by China and Russia.

“Every day of delay is costing lives,” said Mark Farmaner, Director of Burma Campaign UK. “If the regime won’t give permission for aid, the international community must deliver it anyway. We can’t stand by and let thousands more die.”

However the level of concern, verging on panic, over the junta's refusal to allow the free flow of aid, most sane international aid and Burmese democracy groups are, however, stopping short of calling for an all-out 'humanitarian' invasion of Burma a-la Somalia, if only just. Reason will prevail in this matter, I hope.

The Democratic Voice of Burma has an amazing gallery of photos of the damage in Rangoon, from which the photo above has been lifted. The level of damage in Rangoon is pretty bad, but Tim Costello of World Vision has reported on ABC Online that the city is beginning to put itself back together, as its citizens pick up the pieces.

However, columnist and blogger Awzar Thi, writing in Rule of Lords, reports that 90 per cent of the large trees in Rangoon are gone – uprooted or split and cracked. Besides the damage this has done to power lines, buildings and roads, this does not bode well for the future urban ecology of this major city. Awzar Thi has extensive coverage of the cyclone's devastation.

I found Rule of Lords via web correspondent Mong Palatino, who is blogging on the disaster at Global Voices Online, the online aggregator of political and social blogging of the non-Western world. He has been tracking many more bloggers and websites reporting from either within Burma or from its neighbours. The region has many political bloggers, it seems. He has found a number of eyewitness reports as well, including this quite representative one:

In our house we were trapped when tress around the house fell over after 11 hours of strong winds at 200-240 knots. The mess is terrible everywhere, with all electricity down and no water for days.

With one million homeless and facing terrible conditions, hunger, thirst, exposure to the elements and risk of disease are the major challenges, and the aid efforts must reach them as soon as possible.

One of the most heartbreaking things I've learned is how the children and babies have been affected. According to a Save the Children media statement I found, 40 per cent of the dead are children. The young are at the highest risk of water borne diseases, and most feel the cold, thirst and hunger.

Save the Children's Burma director, who I mentioned in my previous post, is quoted in that statement saying:

“We know that some areas are still completely under salt water – some people have no drinking water or food. Unless assistance gets into those kinds of areas very soon, the death toll will keep rising. It is a race against time and now our priority has to be those who are left - we urgently need help to be able to reach the surviving children and families and deliver what we know they need.”

Medisans Sans Frontier's Australian division has set up a page on their website to provide updated information on what is happening in Burma and what they are doing as part of the efforts. Thankfully, MSF has had workers in Burma for many years now who could respond quickly to the disaster, but they are running out of human energy, resources and supplies, and are desperately waiting for the planes carrying relief supplies to be allowed into the country.

I trust MSF to do the right thing in terms of their aid efforts, their capacity to look after people, and how they use the money they raise through fundraising for their emergency efforts. They proved themselves many times over, including in responding to the Boxing Day Tsunami in the West Sumatra region.

You can find out more about what MSF are doing, inlcuding a video, here.

The Burmese people need the help and generosity of the international community. And out continued attention to ensure the military regime don't keep stifling the aid efforts. Leave me a comment if you know of other ways to help.

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Cyclone devastation and the aid crisis in Burma

It is growing increasingly apparent that the extent of the death toll and damage in Burma from Cyclone Nargis is getting much worse – horrendous, in fact. It is certainly far worse that the Burmese military dictatorship can either handle or is prepare to admit.

So far, Burma's official death toll has jumped from 15,000-odd to about 22,000, but aid agencies are predicting it may reach 100,000, and at least 40,000 people are thought to be missing. Hundreds of thousands are thought to be homeless as a result of the devastation. Exacerbating the problem is the military's refusal to allow international aid agencies to freely enter the politically and socially isolated country to both assess the crisis and get aid to those who have been hurt, made homeless or otherwise affected by the storm.

The unpleasant but terribly urgent job of retrieving dead bodies – especially from the extensive river system of the Irrawaddy delta – must be done quickly if they are to prevent a massive outbreak of cholera and typhoid and other water-borne diseases – one of the big risks now, besides starvation and thirst. Electricity failure has compromised fresh food storage and there isn't enough clean drinking water going around. I heard on the news last night than aid deliveries of rice had begun arriving yesterday, but I couldn't help but wonder how the hungry were going to cook the rice when there wasn't clean water and precious little in the way of dry fuel.

This is where the infrastructure expertise and equipment of international aid and disaster relief agencies – especially the Red Cross – come into play: besides medical equipment and food, they have the water purifiers, electricity generators, portable cooking stoves, canvas and plastic for tents and shelters and, as importantly, sanitation equipment (so the already contaminated water doesn't get worse). What is troubling is that the Burmese military is dragging its heels in letting them in.

I cannot understand such a callous regime with so little regard for the lives of its own people and is so hell-bent on defending its own pride and power – and insisting with continuing with its charade of a constitutional referendum.

What is heartening is news that the Burmese people are throwing their energies into the job of helping each other, especially in the clean-up. One report on the radio this morning spoke of Burmese Red Cross volunteers, themselves victims of the devastation, are putting on the Red Cross vests and going out to help. They need to be congratulated and supported. They need help.

I have found that BBC Online's coverage of the turmoil in Burma far more effective, extensive and thorough than ABC Online's – despite Burma's proximity to us, and the large number of Burmese refugees now settled here in Australia, the ABC hasn't managed to make such a major humanitarian disaster a priority for its online coverage (it is heavily reliant on audio and video pulled from the rest of the broadcaster's coverage, compared to the specially developed text content on the BBC's site). Pity.

If you want to keep track of the relief effort, the BBC Online is publishing the diary of Andrew Kirkwood, Save the Children's 'man in Burma'. They are also publishing eyewitness reports of the devastation (Warning, the reports are quite disturbing), and background analysis of the cyclone and whether the military are responding adequately to it.

In the aftermath of the Boxing Day Tsunami, as with a number of other recent disasters in the region, there were a large number of blogs and websites set up to track, report, and pool news of developments in the relief efforts, and to help channel people's desire to help. I'm going to look out for these in relation to Burma's tragedy and I would appreciate any tips or links for these in the comments. I will keep following this as closely as I can.

Meanwhile, flickrites MaiNaSukhumvit, luisrene and Azmil77 have photos of Cyclone Nargis's trail of destruction.

[The image above is of the peak of the storm in Yangon, witnessed by Azmil77.]

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After the storm

We were lucky. The almighty storm that ripped through Melbourne last Wednesday spared us the damage and inconvenience that so many have experienced in its wake. The gale-force winds ripped off roofs, tore limbs from trees, cut off electricity to thousands across the city – some for many days – and blew down brick walls and construction scaffolding. In the last two instances, two people were killed.

In the aftermath, an electricty company linesman was killed while trying to make repairs to the line down in the Mornington Peninsular. Now, some papers are attributing the death of an elderly woman in a house fire to the prolonged electricity outage caused by the storm – the house is thought to have caught fire from a candle used for lighting.

Compared to that, the troubles at our house were minimal. We lost electricity for most of the afternoon of the storm and had debris strewn around our backyard. I was at work while my partner had the kids at home. She returned from an early afternoon trip to the shop to find the picnic sun canopy we'd erected to shade the kids in the backyard was nearly blowing away, but she was able to disassemble it single-handedly!

Besides witnessing the eerie orange glow in the sky in the early afternoon, which turned out to be a massive dust storm, and watching tree branches tear across the street below my office window (1 floor up), and hearing ominous sounds from our building's roof, the worse I got while at work was getting dust in my eyes at lunch time and getting wet in the rain dashing for my tram home. I managed to squeeze myself on a very crowded tram. It must have been quite delayed through a very congested city – the sodden state of some passengers was a testament to their long wait for the tram.

In this context, it's strange to re-read my comment on about the escalating and increasingly dangerous changes of global warming in my previous post about weather forecasting.

I took the photo above of a mural that appeared on the back fence of a house backing on to a park in North Fitzroy. I'm sure it was a kids' project for the school holidays. When I first saw this mural from the tram heading home from work, I was struck by the cheery scene on that wet evening – a couple of days before the storm. There was also a real rainbow in the sky, and for just a moment the real and painted rainbows were visible together. I hope it cheers up those who have suffered damage in the storm, or damage and in inconvenience from the power outage.

And let's spare a thought for the men and women – many of them volunteers – who worked very hard to clean up the damage and help those injured or endangered by the storm, and the power company workers who are working long hours in dangerous conditions to get the power back on. I hope there are rainbows where you are to cheer you up.

You can find a lot of photos of the storm and its aftermath on flickr here.

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Bangladesh under flood

The horror that Cyclone Sidr created in Bangladesh is set to get worse, as the death toll is expected to pass 5,000. The Bangladeshi Red Crescent Society has already retrieved 3,000 bodies, and estimates that the toll could reach 10,000.

Villages have been flattened, survivors are traumatised, and the threat of water-borne diseases rises as both animal corpses and human bodies remain in flood waters. The problem of getting emergency relief and aid to the survivors continues, especially along the southern coast, where the category 4 cyclone hit. It has been described as 'catastrophic'.

But I'm sure you already know all that. Beyond this information from online news sources, however, I couldn't get much more. There was the usual about how the international community is pledging millions in aid and emergency relief, and how this is being called a 'calamity'. I wanted to know more about how the Bangladeshis are facing this tragedy, and what they are saying needs to be done.

So, I went in search of blogs and reports from Bangladeshis – either in Bangladesh or amongst the diaspora. Of course, the electricity supply in Dakha is unreliable, and pretty much out of action in the rest of Bangladesh, so this understandably makes new blog reports a little thin.

I did, however, find a blog that features posts by Bangladeshi women learning new skills – including blogging! – through the Nari Jibon Project. It also has some updates on the cyclone from the project's US supporter, Kathryn Ward. She hopes that the electricity will be back on within a week, but if it's not, she intends to get the women's stories of the cyclone over the phone from the US and post them on the blog. So, there should be more coming up there in the next week.

There's more news and posts via the blog aggregator, Global Voices, which promotes blogs from across the world, especially Asian, African, Latin American, Eastern European and Pacific voices. (This is a welcome change from the blogs I usually read. 'The world is talking', as they say, 'Are you listening?' )

Blogger Rezwan, originally from Bangladesh, has aggregated a bunch of news and posts on Cyclone Sidr for Global Voices, including information on how Bangladeshi bloggers followed the cyclone as it hit the coast. There are more updates at Rezwan's blog, The 3rd world view.

If you don't want to stand by helplessly, Rezwan has some good insights into the international aid needs for cyclone-hit Bangladesh.

Medicins Sans Frontieres Australia have not yet announced a specific appeal for Bangladesh, but if you're looking for a reputable emergency relief and aid agency that puts most of its donations into helping those in need, rather than in advertising or admin, then I'd suggest supporting their work.

The same goes for Oxfam Australia, who have launched a specific Bangladesh appeal, and are providing information on what they're doing there.

[Satellite image of Cyclone Sidr about to hit Bangladesh from here]

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A flood of pestilence

Jakarta's hospitals are struggling to deal with the hundreds of flood victims who have sought treatment in the aftermath of the worst flooding Jakarta and its surrounding areas have experienced in five years, according to ABC News Online.

Some 200,000 people have suffered from flood-related illnesses and there are fears that disease could spread with hundreds of people still displaced from their homes and thousands living in homes with no clean water or plumbing.

Ddealing with the outbreak of disease is one of the main problems in the aftermath of any disaster. Flood waters make things worse. A spokesperson for the National Coordinating Agency for Disaster Management says:

"There are 757 in-patients, most of them are suffering from diarrhoea, skin diseases, dengue, leptospirosis and severe respiratory problems."

The Indonesian Red Cross warns of that "danger rotting dead animals" pose for spreading disease after the floods.

The floods have killed 94 people so far.

Last night, my partner and I discussed some recent WorldChanging posts on climate change and 'climate foresight' – thinking about how we should anticipate and prepare for life under a changed climate that brings greater risk, disasters and problems to our habitats, not to mention possible threats of war, terrorism or other economic conflict. We speculated whether we should prepare our children to live in such a world. As we listed a range of possible scenarios of disaster, conflict, threats to health and more, we wondered whether having such a discussion in the first place was a) being paranoid, b) focusing on calamity rather than solutions, and c) betraying hope.

Eerily, this morning I came across another WorldChanging post by Chad Monfreda, whose list of calamities we will face resulting from climate change mirrored ours:

A planetary fever is about to deal a wallop of catastrophic floods, insect borne disease, deadly heat waves, and an all around worsening of the risks people face everyday across the world.

It can be considered quite heretical to talk about 'adaptability' rather than working on cutting emissions and reversing global warming, because we're urgently required to work on solutions rather than calamities. But, as Monfreda also wonders,

… if human vulnerability gives climate change saliency, aren’t direct adaptations to current risks a more efficient way to meet our goals than greenhouse gas mitigations that would have an indirect effect decades away?

In some contexts and extents, we are already doing this. In bush fire prone parts of Victoria, people are urged to develop their 'bush fire plans', i.e. plans that set out clearly what families will do in the event their homes are threated by bush fire – prepare defences, decide to stay or flee early, etc (as last minute decisions and evacuations, and panic being significant causes for fire-related injury and death).

Where I grew up, during the monsoon season, TV and radio announcements urged people to prepare to evacuate their homes in the event of flooding, and to ensure their important documents and identification papers were handy to grab with them to safety. Are these situations we will have to prepare our children to face in Australia? Families in northern Queensland are already facing this situation. Is this abandoning hope, or being realistic?

As Monfreda puts it, "it's time to start making our systems more resilient to the effects of climate change, even while we work to limit the magnitude of climate disruption," something other WorldChanging writers have argued for before. I'd say we need to make our selves and our children more resilient too.

[The amazing photos are by Yay!, which I found when WorldChanging published the top one. He has a flickr set on the Jakarta flood.]

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Katrina's damage continues

I've been way too busy to write for this blog, but I highly recommend Barista's look at Katrina a year on.

He has pulled together some eye-opening information on the damage caused, and how so many people have been displaced and still affected by it. He cites:

Fewer than 35% of New Orleans’ 462,000 residents had returned to the city as of March. Only half are expected to return by September 2008.

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Grief

Tragedy demands of us grief. But when it is tragedy that affects people so far away, and where we have become so immune to the images of war and natural disaster on our televisions, it is often difficult to summon the courage and the mindfulness to grieve for people who are killed so tragically.

Antipopper’s post on panic in this matter allows me to reflect on how we tend to imagine that only people like ‘ourselves’ panic, worry or grieve for loved-ones caught in war zones. His analysis is compelling: not only as a critique of Anglo-Australia’s narcissism – that white people only imagine themselves to have concern for their loved-ones – but also as an insight into how each of us tends to only imagine ‘people like me/us’. Antipopper speaks of:

“a narcissism that implicitly precluded the possibility that when horrible things happen outside of the Anglophone world, say in the Middle East, people there might also undergo a similar panic, and be frantically trying to reach relatives and friends”

I remind myself that people are panicking for their loved-ones’ safety wherever there is danger, whoever or whatever they are: be they Lebanese/Arab, or Javanese/Indonesian.

People are hunting for their loved-ones in tidal-wave-hit Java: they may be one of the nearly 400 dead, the nearly 200 missing, or one of the 54,000 displaced and homeless.

Yet, Australia’s media broadcasters can only allow us a small slice of this pain. They bulk out our breakfast news serves of this horror with reports of how ‘people like us’ experience this tragedy. Hence, radio interviews with Australian expatriates in the area are considered more articulate than those of Indonesian emergency relief workers. We don’t hear from the grieving parents who’ve found their child in the morgue. Our experience of this tragedy is mediated via white eyes, whose job is to make the pain ‘real’ for us.

The media can’t help but serve us a meal of how Australians have been caught up in war-torn Lebanon – thought I sense a disquiet about the fact that they are Arabs – mainly Australians of Lebanese descent – and in an Arab nation. What were they doing there? Why the Middle East? Why couldn’t they just holiday in Bali or Thailand like real Aussies do?

What hints at this is that their tragedy is played out in greater detail and panic, to convince us that they are real Australia’s whose panic and grief is real and deserving our sympathy.

Yet, I couldn’t help wonder: if they were white Australians holidaying in Thailand, Indonesia, Spain or Fiji when some tragedy or other violence struck, would the Howard government have mobilised evacuation plans much sooner?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that the Australian media doesn’t report on these tragedies (though whether they do so sufficiently is another thing). However, the sometimes horrifically graphic depictions of Iraqi mothers wailing in grief over their children killed in US bombings, or sectarian violence, or images of horrified Lebanese seeking their family members, etc. are so frequently played out on our television sets that we become impervious to their grief. (On the issue of images of innocence and horror, I recommend Barista's take on this.)

But I find myself asking: how did we come to learn that the quietly raging grief of American mothers whose sons were killed in Iraq, and the images of army boots spread on a field to symbolise the killed servicemen, are somehow closer to ‘us’ as part of the Anglo-world – are somehow more meaningful and powerful – than the visceral, heart rending grief of Arab women?

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Stock-up on floaties and learn to swim

If you didn't already know, scientists are saying the Antarctic ice shelf is melting at a rate faster than expected as the earth warms – in the next few centuries, ice sheets in western Antarctica will be most vulnerable, causing sea-levels to rise six to sevens meters!

Yes, this is caused by global warming. No arguments.

"The cause is the burning of fossil fuels, we need to find alternative energies, we need to lower our footprint," [New Zealand Antarctic Research Centre's Professor Peter Barrett] said.

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Correction: Monica's damage

It seems that reporting that (former) cyclone Monica spared Indigenous communities in the north (in yesterday's post) was rather premature...

This mornings's The Age reported that Monica caused some extensive damage in isolated Aboriginal communities in Arnhem Land, including in Maningrida and the smaller community where my friend had lived and taugh for over a year.

The Aboriginal people in these communities have so little in the first place, and have very poor, overcrowded housing and a lack of facilities. The storm damage will make a bad situation worse – unless more effort and resources are put into housing, resources, infrastructure and support for rural and remote Aboriginal communities like the ones involved.

I can't help but wonder if an outcry about the storm damage, an outpouring of support and relief, and the decrying of poor conditions – accompanying front page news reporting of the damage – would occur if it was predominantly white Darwin that had been hit as predicted, or as in the case of Larry's devastation of northern Queensland...

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"I looked out at the weather and it was terrible"

Causing extensive damage as it hit the Queensland coast at Innisfail (south of Cairns; see the red pointer on the map below), Cyclone Larry is now making its way inlad over the Atherton Tablelands.

The satelite image from the Bureau of Meteorology website is certainly frightening, but looking at a map of the area and hearing the news on radio this morning has raised more cause for alarm: that part of Queensland's coast has many small towns and hamlets, all of whom would have suffered extensive damage from the cyclone.

There is more news at ABC Online here. There are calls for public support for the cyclone victims. Even as it is still unclear which non-governmental aid agencies are helping, generosity is still demanded of us. Though this doesn't mean we shouldn't be vigilant of which aid agencies we can really trust to get the urgent short-term and long-term rebuilding aid out to the remote communities – especially the Indigenous ones!

I was reminded of the quote from the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ancient Sumerian myth which has an incredible flood story, that Tim Flannery uses to start his chapter on rising ocean levels in The Weather Makers:

The evening came, the rider of the storm sent down rain. I looked out at the weather and it was terrible… With the first light of dawn a black cloud came from the horizon;… the God of the storm turned daylight into darkness.

No, I'm certainly NOT suggesting that Cyclone Larry was directly caused by Global warming and thus greenhouse gasses. I just find the parallels compelling.

Remember to think of the people in trouble.

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