GetUp are helping out Indigenous leaders with a petition to Premier Barnett, protesting his unconstitutional attempt to simply take privately owned land and give it to oil and gas companies. Please show your support for us here in the West by signing it and sending it on to people who you think would be interested.

They’ve put together a video which explains the issue:

The topic has also been featured on Lateline: Barnett overrides land negotiations.

If the owners of the land decide to sell it to the fossil fuel companies, that’s their business, even though I think it’d be a crying shame. But they shouldn’t be bullied into it, and they should be fairly compensated. In the past, Barnett has offered the ‘carrot’ of police and medical and school services - but these things are basic infrastructure that we should all be entitled to, not some special gift for people who do as they’re told.

Barnett has decided that since the negotiations aren’t going his way, he’ll just do what he wants anyway. Luckily, the process takes 18 months! So although the situation isn’t good, we’ve still got time to help out.

Photo credit: Protect the Kimberley Facebook group, part of the Like Nowhere Else campaign

I’ve had a rant here before about WA Premier Colin Barnett’s quarry vision. It won’t surprise anyone to find out that he’s still trying to sell off every inch of the state to multinational companies.

• WA Government partners with Monsanto - never mind that the evidence shows that GM crops provide more corporate control for very little benefit to farmers, we’re letting our state cereal breeding company be controlled by a multinational company with a long list of environmental and legal breaches.
• WA Government compulsorily acquiring Aboriginal land for a gas hub near Broome - because a Woodside gas hub is what every tourist city needs to attract more visitors! I’m sure that the endangered humpback whales just off the coast will enjoy the extra shipping traffic through their breeding grounds. What’s worse is that there are existing facilities in the Pilbara that could be used instead. Why does Barnett insist on this Kimberley land grab?
• We’ve already talked about the proposed oil drilling off the coast of tourist town Margaret River in a nearly-approved marine sanctuary. But that wasn’t enough - now the government is giving approval for a coal mine  just 15 km from the town centre. There are dozens of world-class wineries there, as well as those providing domestic wine, farmland and tourism jobs.
• And meanwhile, at Barrow Island, the Shell/Exxon/Chevron group found it too hard to stop killing endangered animals which live there, so they moved the small mammals to a different island (that’s got radioactive contamination). Although they haven’t figured out how to stop killing the endangered turtles yet.

Honestly, does Barnett not understand the value of tourism or farming? Did he have a horrible childhood experience in a vineyard or something? Was he menaced by a gang of numbats and potoroos?

Gilbert's potoroo: not very menacing

I’m so disgusted with this government. They pay no attention to the real issues facing us in WA, and can only focus on selling resources. They’re supposed to be managing our health and education and police force and emergency services - instead they’re acting like an auctioneer, selling everything that’s not nailed down to the highest bidder.

It’s turning WA into a plutocracy, and we’ve still got a couple of years before we get another election. It’s not like Barnett had any sort of mandate from the last one - the Liberals had to form a minority government with the support of the Nationals and an Independent, and we were all a bit surprised they managed it.

But that’s enough whining. Action is the antidote to despair. I’ve been writing letters to the relevant ministers; there are protests down south against the oil and coal; there are groups working on a fair go for the people up north. If you live in WA, or have visited and loved these regions, check these groups out and give them a hand - they could do with as much support as they can get.

• Like Nowhere Else is a campaign to help the Kimberley region.
• WA Forest Alliance is working to stop native forest logging in the South-West.
• Save Our Marine Life is making good progress towards getting marine sanctuaries around WA and SA.
• Conservation Council of WA and the Wilderness Society cover as many WA issues as they can with the people they’ve got.

If you know of any more active conservation groups in WA, please let me know in the comments.

Troy Buswell MLA (our chair-sniffing ex-treasurer) is at least opposing the coal in Margaret River, since that’s happening in his seat (ahaha) of Vasse. I’d trust him about as far as I could throw him, and I wonder why the oil drilling is ok with him. But it does show that politicians will take things seriously if there’s enough public outcry.

Extinction tattoos - a living record of endangered animals, a photo essay over at Worldchanging.

Sustainable September in WA - lots of events where you can learn about sustainable living, why not check out what’s on the calendar to find something near you?

Community Planting Day at Mordialloc Creek in Melbourne - organised by Living Links, a group trying to restore the ecosystem in Melbourne’s south-east.

Environment to be taught in schools - school students and teachers have joined forces to try and convince the Federal Government to add ‘the environment’ as a subject in the national curriculum.

Controversial coal plant in Borneo is sidelined - a huge win for environmentalists there! It would have been right on top of a marine park that protects a very biodiverse area.

Environment Victoria is working on reforming the Victorian Water Act - it needs to be updated so that the Minister has to do more than just ‘maintain’ system rather than ensure it’s healthy and useable in the long term. They’ve got a full report on the issue and could do with your support.

Review of IPCC calls for changes to its processes - a review of the UN group by a team of independent scientists from the InterAcademy Council says the IPCC needs a greater turnover of scientists, to ensure fresh perspectives on their work is found. The report gave the IPCC a general vote of confidence but proposed some changes to the setup to keep it on top of the important and frequently updating science of climate change.

Finally, a very cute video (narrated by John Cleese) about how it’s probably easier for us to stop climate change than it is for animals to adapt to it. From the Monterey Bay Aquarium…

He starts small, looking at how long it would take for a house to decompose into it’s parts. It’s much shorter than you might realise! Although if you think about how much time we spend cleaning and maintaining our homes, maybe we get an idea of how much effort it takes to keep them clean and standing.

He then looks at lots of other aspects of the impact we’ve had on this planet. Cities, nature reserves, petrochemicals, the ancient wonders of the world, weapons and art and the Voyager space probes. I was most amazed by the ancient underground cities in Turkey - they’re still there today even though they were begun in 700BC.

This book is fascinating, and while I was reading it my mood switched between inspiration over the amazing resilience of nature, and depression over how determined it seems we are to mess it up permanently. Wiseman finishes the book with some musings on human nature and the challenges we face if we want to still have a home in the future.

You might like to check out the website for the book: it’s got a couple of animations showing photos of locations mentioned in the book and the decay rate of houses.

Recommended?
Fans of science, nature and history documentaries will get a kick out of this book. It ties in nicely with facts you’ll have picked up from tv and the news. It can get a little dry at times, but usually the next section picks up again when Wiseman interviews an expert who lives in the area being considered. Well worth a trip to the library for this one.

Food Kozy wrapper from Kids Konserve

For my birthday, I was given some neat little reusable lunch wraps (thanks, Wendy!). I’ve been using them for the last few weeks and am pretty happy with them.

The ones I’ve got are from Kids Konserve, and I like them a lot. They’re flat plastic wrappers in an round-ish shape, with a velcro closure. The idea is to use them instead of cling-wrap for sandwiches and small snacks.

I usually have leftovers for lunch each day, because I’m not capable of organising even a sandwich before I’ve been awake for a while and had my coffee. But I’ve been using these to wrap up the homemade muffins and biscuits that I take as snacks. Previously I’d tried little Tupperware containers, but they let too much air in with the food.

The wraps work really well - I thought that maybe the uneven shape of the muffins would mean prevent the wrappers from making an airtight container. But the size of the wrapper means that it’s all sealed up well, no problems.

The other bonus is that they’re really easy to clean. Most days I just wipe them off, but when I’ve had something sticky in there I just wash them in with the other dishes. They’re BPA-free and recycleable as well, which is always nice.

Cling-wrap is one of those disposable things I’ve been bugged by for a long time. I’ve still got some, but I’m using a lot less these days. Eventually I hope to find other ways to replace it with other solutions - if you’ve got any good tips I’d love to hear them!

16 months community service with koalas as penalty for environmental advisor who gave bad koala advice to developers.

New Zealand glacier sheds 50m tonnes of ice - it’s gone from a u-shape to an l-shape.

Indonesia seeks $2.5billion payout for the north-west Montara oil spill - it destroyed fish stocks and seaweed farms relied on by local fishermen.

WA’s biggest privately-owned solar power project has opened - powering 20 homes in eco-friendly tourist destination in Shark Bay, backed up with diesel and wind power.

As I said yesterday, I think politicians don’t listen to us, and the media doesn’t do a good job of informing us. They seemed genuinely surprised by the election result. Now is the time to start telling them what went wrong, while they’re paying attention!

Problem: politicians not listening to us. We’ve given them a slap on the wrist, but we need to think like The Supernanny. It’s not enough to just say ‘unacceptable’ and send them to the naughty chair - we have to tell them what the correct behaviour is for future situations and reward them when they get it right.

A lot of greenies don’t like to get involved in politics, as if we think it’s too grubby. And it is certainly easier to ‘think global and act local’. We can grow our own vegies and switch our own lightbulbs and know exactly what result we’ll get on our own schedules.

Politics is messier and takes longer to change. But if we’re willing to boycott corporations and go on tree-planting days and stop buying overpackaged products, why can’t we make an effort to talk to our politicians as well?

They’re not mind-readers. We have to tell them what we want. We can do that by calling them or writing letters. We can also invite them to look at our community projects, and make sure we turn up to any public meetings they hold. They’re not good listeners, but I think we have to be the grown-ups in this situation and make the effort to break through. Find out who your federal MP is, and your Senators, and let them know what you think.

Problem: people not being aware of the issues. Most of the people who read this blog are very well informed. But a lot of Australians only get their political news from a 5 minute snippet on the telly, or from the mainstream newspapers mixed with stories about drink-driving sports stars or whatever. There’s a lot of bias there against greenies, and not much fact-checking either, so it’s not surprising people aren’t informed about environmental issues.

We’ve got less control there. But during the election campaign I saw something interesting. The media was focusing on ridiculous things like budgie-smugglers and free tomato sauce for meat pies. But there was a backlash from the bloggers and Twitterers, noting how abysmal this coverage was when serious issues were going unreported. And the journos who are on Twitter complained and made excuses, and then over the next few weeks they lifted their game a bit, asking policy questions and bringing up some contradictions between new statements and older ones. They still weren’t fact-checking numbers, but it was a start.

It shows that they do care what people think of them. I think that as with politicians, we have to start talking back to the media. We need to keep reminding them that we’re watching and assessing their performance, and that we’ll call them up or write in if we think they’re getting it wrong.

Talking to politicians and the media is quite possibly the least fun part of being a greenie. But it’s a necessary part, and if we don’t want to go through an equally ridiculous election again in a few years time, we need to get stuck into it.

While I was writing this, I got an email from the ACF - they seem to be thinking along the same lines as I am. They’ve asked people to call their local talkback radio or write to their local newspaper to say that lots of people want the new minority government (whoever they turn out to be) to take action on climate change. I wrote in to my paper, saying I wanted a carbon price from the new government. It’s not much, but it’s a start!

Do Aussies want what's on offer?

I love election days. No really, I do! I head off to the primary school down the road from us, dodge the leaflets, buy something from the sausage sizzle or cake stall, line up for a bit while I eat my snack, then put in my 2 cents on who should lead the country.

It’s the bare minimum we have to do for democracy, and I’m glad that it works so well in Australia. Other countries have machines or electronic systems that can be hacked, instead of a simple pencil and paper option counted by real people. Some don’t get to nominate a second choice if their first one doesn’t get in. They might have men with machine guns, instead of a school fundraiser. Some nations have to send tanks in to remove unpopular governments - we just send our PM off to chat with the Governor-General and sign some forms. I’ll take the sausage sizzle, thanks!

This year was a bit different for me though: I volunteered to be a booth captain for GetUp.

I spent 10 hours handing out the leaflets I normally try to dodge, getting rained on and sunburned at a polling station in the marginal seat of Swan. We didn’t give instructions on how to vote, or stupid slogans: we had an issues scorecard. GetUp took a survey of the issues people were interested in, then rated Labor, the Coalition and the Greens on each one.

Some people avoided us, or took our flyers just to be polite. But there were a lot of people who were very interested when I called out “Get a political scorecard, compare the parties on the issues”. We even had a few people seek us out on purpose and refuse anything else.

As the day dragged on we got to know the other volunteers who were there for their chosen party. We joked and mucked about in the quiet moments. They were all lovely people, but many of them said it was useless trying to talk to voters because “they’re all stupid and ignorant”. They thought we were wasting our time.

I don’t think voters are stupid and ignorant. Sometimes they’re uninformed - but how can you find out what’s really going on when the media won’t do their job properly? Sometimes they’ve stopped paying attention, because they feel like they’re being ignored and have no influence.

I hope our scorecard helped a few more people feel informed and engaged. At least we did people the courtesy of treating them with respect. And I think the election result proves my point…

Australia has spoken. We said “We don’t trust you buggers any further than we can throw you, and we can’t agree which one of you would be worse at leading the country”. We’ve got a hung parliament, with control in the hands of Greens and Independents. Nearly one-fifth of the votes went to non-major parties.

That’s not a stupid or an apathetic action: it’s a very reasonable response to being treated like a nuisance instead of a citizen. I’m not surprised most of Australia was feeling cranky!

And if we’d been paying attention, maybe we wouldn’t have been surprised by this result. Look at the state election results in WA, SA and Tasmania in the last few years. They all had a big swing to the Greens and a cliffhanger result.

Across Australia, people are tired of being taken for granted by our politicians. They’re tired of the unimaginative media spin. So we’ve given the career politicians a slap on the wrist, a reminder that corporations might have the money, but they don’t have the votes. We do, and we need to be listened to.

The only question left is… now what? How will we fix this situation so that it doesn’t happen all over again next time?

Tomorrow I’ll be writing about what I think should happen next. After that I’ll be quiet about politics for a while - I know I’m more interested in it than many of you, but even I have limits!

Giving it all away - Sarhn at Greener Me had her house flooded recently, and had to pack up her family and move out while the repairs happened. When she moved back in, she took it as an opportunity to get rid of her unneeded stuff, having an event mostly like a garage sale except that everything was free!

Fully Charged - Gavin pointed out this show on YouTube that was new to me: it’s all about electric cars, and is hosted by Robert Llewellyn (who I loved in Red Dwarf, and did the Scrap Heap Challenge too).

Mazuma Mobile - new to Australia, a company offering a set price for your old mobile phone. They resell them to developing nations, or recycle them if no-one wants to buy them. Anyone got any idea what their reputation is like in the UK?

5 foods it’s cheaper to grow - MSN Money has an article about which foods are cheaper to grow than buy. I like their choices, but I don’t agree with them that homegrown carrots taste the same as store-bought ones. Ours are way more flavourful, although I do think they’re not really good for beginner vegie growers.

How to conduct a mini-lifecycle-assessment - you know those lifecycle assessments that show the environmental impact of a product? Re-Nest has found a way to do a basic version yourself. It’s still a fair bit of work, but interesting to see the general idea of how it’d done.

Portugal Rocks Renewables: 45% Renewable Electricity by Year’s End - very encouraging, good work Portugal!

For now, take a look at this video on the science of climate change. I’ve been thinking I should email it to all the politicians from the major parties who seem to think that climate change is something that’ll happen in the far-off future after they’ve retired.

It’s a “just the facts, ma’am” presentation of how climate change works and the evidence we have that it’s happening now.