By Phil Jarratt
I’ve laid off Trump for a few months now, mostly out of respect for the couple of readers who supported him – and possibly still do, despite the mounting evidence of his narcissism bordering on insanity.
But after his scuttling of the Paris Accord and his increasing belligerence towards all forms of environmental commonsense, it’s time to sink the slipper in, just a bit, while also noting that Queensland Labor’s sycophantic embrace of Adani’s plan to extract the beating heart of western Queensland has equally frightening ramifications closer to home.
One of the things I most love about my subscription to the New Yorker Online is its Sunday reprints from the archives. Editor David Remnick digs deep to find quality journalism from the past that reflects the world we live in, and I’ve read no better example of this than last weekend’s re-publication of Rachel Carson’s magnificent and monumental “Silent Spring”.
Over three hefty instalments, that first appeared in June 1962 (when America was pre-occupied with the Kruschev menace and Jackie’s plans to tart up the White House) Carson forensically details in her classic and compelling style the dangers of the pesticide DDT. As Remnick notes, the articles jump-started the environmental movement and resulted in the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and many other layers of protection that Trump is now dismantling.
Here is just a taste of the power of Carson’s prose:
“The history of life on earth is a history of the interaction of living things and their surroundings. To an overwhelming extent, the physical form and the habits of the earth’s vegetation and its animal life have been moulded and directed by the environment. Over the whole span of earthly time, the opposite effect, in which life modifies its surroundings, has been relatively slight. It is only within the moment of time represented by the 20th century that one species – man – has acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world, and it is only within the past 25 years that this power has achieved such magnitude that it endangers the whole earth and its life. The most alarming of all man’s assaults upon the environment is the contamination of the air, earth, rivers, and seas with dangerous, and even lethal, materials. This pollution has rapidly become almost universal, and it is for the most part irrecoverable; the chain of evil it initiates, not only in the world that must support life but in living tissues, is for the most part irreversible …
“As Albert Schweitzer has said, ‘Man can hardly even recognise the devils of his own creation.’ It took hundreds of millions of years to produce the life that now inhabits the earth – eons of time, in which that developing and evolving and diversifying life reached a state of adjustment to its surroundings. To be sure, the environment, rigorously shaping and directing the life it supported, contained hostile elements. Certain rocks gave out dangerous radiation; even within the light of the sun, from which all life draws its energy, there were short-wave radiations with power to injure. But given time – time not in years but in millennia – life adjusted, and a balance was reached. Time was the essential ingredient. Now, in the modern world, there is no time.”
I hope The Donald found time between tweets to read and reflect. And pigs might fly.
Relics wreak havoc
As forewarned in these pages, Australia’s oldest competitive surfers washed up in Noosa last weekend for Noosa Malibu Club’s annual Wrecks and Relics Get-Together, and while there was no need to lock up your grandmas, the elder statesmen and women of our sport cut loose and demolished a reasonable right-hand bank down by the second groyne.
The club calls it a “get-together” because it’s meant to imply it’s all in fun, but in fact nothing could be further from the truth. Even this year’s slightly taste-questionable slogan, “stoke before stroke”, suggests a no-holds-barred battle for just a few more waves before time’s up. Make no mistake, the Wrecks are here to take a trophy home, even if it means a little collateral damage.
Just one example: a member of the group of elderly thugs known as the Wednesday Wanderers (who shall remain nameless but let’s call him Mick) received a world record four interference penalties (one of them on your columnist) in a single heat! His explanation – “I was out of rhythm.”
It all became the stuff of good storytelling over a few beers at The Reef on Sunday night, of course, and, God, Allah and Huey willing, we’ll all be back for more punishment next year. Well done, Noosa Mal Club. Another great Wrecks weekend.
A note from the other happy place
By the time you read this I’ll be reclining by the pool in my other happy place, a good book in hand, having surfed the left at the end of the street for an hour before enjoying a leisurely breakfast on the terrace at Nyoman’s while watching the local hotties tear up the rivermouth right.
I know, I know, it’s a dirty job but someone has to do it. And as soon as the sun gets near enough to overhead I’ll be slaving away over a hot laptop in my little tropical office, pausing between paragraphs to swim a lap or two. I’ve written three books and countless articles in this little bolt-hole, and I’ve come to regard it as a place of great productivity, even though it’s just a tiny desk in the corner of our bedroom.
And there’s no need to rug up in the mornings!
