Richard Jones, our Political Potter finds that sometimes no matter how much you want to rescue something, resistance gets in the way – but persistance is always a virtue.
I spent much of yesterday trying to rescue beetles crawling around the floor where I was firing. It was a hopeless task. I turned them back on their feet but they were soon upside down. Again.
When I picked them up they seemed to want to burrow so I took a handful outside and put them amongst leaves under a tree and wished them luck. It was an alien environment for them in the kiln room, all concrete and metal. Much of our human environment is inimical to nature – but not all. Jo showed me photographs of two new towers at the old brewery site in Broadway Sydney covered in plants – two columns of green. Evidently native bees were harvesting nectar from the flowers – and this in what was once one of the grimiest parts of Sydney. It’s a case of accidental ‘rewilding’.
There’s a powerful new global movement to purposefully ‘rewild’ the planet as discussed in George Monbiot’s book FERAL – rewilding the land, sea and human life. (Monbiot describes himself as a ‘slightly unhinged adventurer’. He trained as a zoologist at Oxford University, was the BBC’s first investigative environmental reporter and has written and produced numerous articles, talks and books on environmentalism. goodreads.com
Needless to say rewilding is becoming extremely urgent. Neoliberalism, the dominant paradigm since the 1980s, is conducting a devastating war on nature and it appears that nothing can stand in the way of profits for the giant corporations and the 1% who control them. Right now the neoliberals are winning this war and if it continues in this manner by the end of this century this planet of ours will be virtually uninhabitable for humans and millions of other species.
Naomi Klein covers this in her book This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the climate. (thischangeseverything) As she says we need to reimagine our relationship to the Earth- and we are fast running out of time. Australia’s own Prime Minister is an arch proponent of neoliberalism and he essentially governs for the 1%, not the other 99%. We need to get his lot out as soon as we can in order to start beginning the repair job so desperately needed.
We all need to be part of this. If we fail, our grandchildren and their children will never forgive us.
