<div dir="ltr"><div><div><div><div><div>Radio Australia just keeps the hits coming...<br><br></div>Maybe I am filtering or biased in some way, probably, but Radio Australia impresses me much more than US PBS radio.<br><br>
</div>The discussion can be listened to at this website:<br><h1>Darwin, denialism and climate change </h1>Tuesday 30 July 2013 10:20PM<br><br><a href="http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/darwin-and-climage-change-denial/4852912">http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/latenightlive/darwin-and-climage-change-denial/4852912</a><br>
<br>-----------------<br></div>I checked on the academic bio on the Australian National University website for scholar Tom Griffiths, who is interviewed for this discussion:<br><br><a href="https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/griffiths-tr">https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/griffiths-tr</a><br>
<div class="" id="biography">
<h2 class="">
<a name="biography"></a>
Biography
</h2>
<div class="">
<p>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. </p>
</div>
</div>--------------------------------------<br></div>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. <br>
<br>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. <br><br>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... <br>
<br>"Let them eat cake!"<br><br><a href="http://www.history.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/GRIFFITHS%20%E2%80%93%C2%A0A%20Humanist%20on%20Thin%20Ice.pdf">http://www.history.ubc.ca/sites/default/files/GRIFFITHS%20%E2%80%93%C2%A0A%20Humanist%20on%20Thin%20Ice.pdf</a><br>
<br><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif"><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:13.12px;font-family:sans-serif">Published in </div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:13.12px;font-family:sans-serif">Griffith Review 29<br>
</div>(August 2010)<br><br></div><div style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">A Humanist on Thin Ice<br><br>Science and the humanities, people and climate change<br><br></div><div style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">
Tom Griffiths<br></div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif"><br>Short excerpt from pages 21-22:<br><br>The only way to make sense of our predicament is to look deeply into the ice </div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">
we are losing. It is to go back to the last big ice age and beyond, to times of </div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">rapid and substantial temperature change. And when we are searching for </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">some vestige of human agency among all this icy determinism, we might turn </div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">to an example in our own backyard. The history of the Aboriginal peoples of </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">Australia takes humans back, if not into the ice, then certainly into the ice age, </div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">into the depths of the last glacial maximum of twenty thousand years ago and </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">beyond, into and through periods of temperature change of 5 ̊Celsius and </div><font size="4">more, such as those we might also face. When Europeans and North</font><br>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">Americans look for cultural beginnings they are often prompted to tell you </div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">that humans and their civilizations are products of the Holocene,and that we </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">are all children of this recent spring of cultural creativity. By contrast, an </div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">Australian history of the world takes us back to humanity’s first deep-sea </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">voyagers of sixty thousand years ago, to the experience of people surviving </div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">cold ice-age droughts in the central Australian deserts, and to the sustaining </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">of human civilization in the face of massive climate change. This is a story that </div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">modern Australians have only just discovered, and now perhaps it offers a </div>
<div dir="ltr" style="font-size:16px;font-family:sans-serif">parable for the world.</div><div dir="ltr" style="font-size:9.28px;font-family:sans-serif">32</div>------------------------------------------<br></div>Vision2020 Post: Ted Moffett<br>
</div>