[Vision2020] Superb Radio Australia Discussion Last Night "Darwin, Denialism and Climate Change"

[Ted Moffett]

Radio Australia just keeps the hits coming...

Maybe I am filtering or biased in some way, probably, but Radio Australia
impresses me much more than US PBS radio.

The discussion can be listened to at this website:
Darwin, denialism and climate change Tuesday 30 July 2013 10:20PM

http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/darwin-and-climage-change-denial/4852912

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I checked on the academic bio on the Australian National University website
for scholar Tom Griffiths, who is interviewed for this discussion:

https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/griffiths-tr
 Biography

Tom Griffiths is a Professor of History in the Research School of Social
Sciences at the Australian National University, Canberra, and Director of
the Centre for Environmental History at ANU. His research, writing and
teaching are in the fields of Australian social, cultural and environmental
history, the comparative environmental history of settler societies, the
writing of non-fiction, and the history of Antarctica. Tom's books and
essays have won prizes in history, science, literature, politics and
journalism. His most recent monograph, Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to
Antarctica (UNSW Press and Harvard University Press, 2007), won the
Queensland and NSW Premiers' awards for Non-Fiction and was the joint
winner of the Prime Minister's Prize for Australian History in 2008.
 --------------------------------------
Also, I searched for more published work by this scholar, and found the
following accessible and fascinating paper, 24 pages long  A short excerpt
from the end of the paper is pasted in.

Australia is an amazing place, with a very long history of human
habitation, much longer than North America, if I have my facts straight, as
this paper discusses.

It's reassuring to realize that even non-technological so called primitive
ancestors of modern humans survived large scale climate change.  Of course,
for us to survive it likely will disrupt our indulgent resource and energy
intensive extractive way of life, at least for the majority of people. The
rich and powerful, maybe they can live continue to live lives of kings and
queens...

"Let them eat cake!"

http://www.history.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/GRIFFITHS%20%E2%80%93%C2%A0A%20Humanist%20on%20Thin%20Ice.pdf

Published in
Griffith Review 29
(August 2010)

A Humanist on Thin Ice

Science and the humanities, people and climate change

Tom Griffiths

Short excerpt from pages 21-22:

The only way to make sense of our predicament is to look deeply into the
ice
we are losing. It is to go back to the last big ice age and beyond, to
times of
rapid and substantial temperature change. And when we are searching for
some vestige of human agency among all this icy determinism, we might turn
to an example in our own backyard. The history of the Aboriginal peoples of
Australia takes humans back, if not into the ice, then certainly into the
ice age,
into the depths of the last glacial maximum of twenty thousand years ago
and
beyond, into and through periods of temperature change of 5 ̊Celsius and
more, such as those we might also face. When Europeans and North
Americans look for cultural beginnings they are often prompted to tell you
that humans and their civilizations are products of the Holocene,and that
we
are all children of this recent spring of cultural creativity. By contrast,
an
Australian history of the world takes us back to humanity’s first deep-sea
voyagers of sixty thousand years ago, to the experience of people surviving
cold ice-age droughts in the central Australian deserts, and to the
sustaining
of human civilization in the face of massive climate change. This is a
story that
modern Australians have only just discovered, and now perhaps it offers a
parable for the world.
32
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Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett
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