Strange Quarks

The documentary 2040 (or visual diary as it has been referred to) does a good job of putting a positive outlook on the future by emphasising solutions, things that can be done to mitigate climate change, including but not limited to local solar electricity networks, kelp farms as a future protein source, and a move away from private car ownership toward more efficient transport systems.

I’m a father too, so I understand the film maker’s desire to put his young child (daughter in this case) at the centre of the story, imagining a better world for her early adult years and beyond.

But, as uplifting and inspiring as 2040 is, it doesn’t go nearly far enough in my view.

What bothers me about the film is how anthropocentric it is. In what follows, I give examples of how its vision falls short. I may be accused by some of being overly critical of what is an otherwise heart-felt, genuine labour of love, but so be it.

There is a section in which a farmer is interviewed and there is talk of farming practices to improve the health of the soil, which is great. But the true costs of animal agriculture in terms of emissions (comparable to the whole transport sector) and animal welfare are not really addressed.

Near the end of the film, there is a self-congratulatory comment about how much less meat people will eat by 2040. We are already seeing a trend towards eating less meat and towards other protein alternatives.

Primary-school aged children were interviewed throughout. Their insights sometimes bordered on the profound and were often more wise than the adult utterances. The kid who talked about planting a seed and getting meat was on the money, if the rise of the lab grown meat industry is anything to go by, as was the girl who liked bacon but wasn’t sure she should eat it because of its source. These are the sorts of comments that get an uncomfortable “isn’t that cute” laugh from the audience, the members of whom may more-or-less dismiss the seriousness of the points being made.

There is a rushed and insipid comment by the film maker about the existence of some nice meat alternatives as supplements (not potential replacements), but no meaningful concession to the need for a totally plant based diet, just that we should be heading toward eating more plants: a no brainer since that’s what the latest Australian Dietary Guidelines have been telling us for almost a decade anyway!

At one point the future daughter asks her off-screen father “what were you thinking” regarding our generation’s shipping of fish long distance, as opposed to “what were you thinking” by engaging in the act of industrial scale fishing at all, with its attendant destruction of the ocean environment, species population decimation and untold suffering.

The film ends with a jubilant young generation having a party, but it’s a little too soon for much celebration it would seem to me, when there is no sign that any serious attempt to tackle speciesism (arguably, a barometer of our maturity as a species) has been made, and we are in 2040 likely still too narcissistic to think much beyond the end of our collective noses.

In short, 2040 is evolutionary, not revolutionary, and to be fair, that’s consistent with the film maker’s focus on what we can do in future derived from what approaches exist today.

But I think we should want to do even better than what is proposed by 2040, if we are not only going to mitigate the worst of effects of climate change for Australia and the world in general, but also to be able to look our future selves in the mirror and consider homo sapiens worthy of a place as anything like competent stewards of this planet.

Recently, Karen and I were waiting for a tram in Bourke Street to take us to a vegan pizzeria in Melbourne I’d heard good things about.

Before the tram was able to come, hundreds of climate change protesters emerged. It was an unseasonably cold, wet day, as the picture suggests.

Now, as someone who in late 2019 attended a climate rally and a protest against oil and gas exploration in the Great Australian Bight, I’m broadly supportive of such public protests and marches.

However, there were a few problems with this one…

It seemed to Karen and I that the protesters were mostly preaching to the converted.

It took place in a street in which trams run. Trams. Not cars. Public transport.

Sure, not very efficient public transport given Victoria’s current reliance on coal for power (perhaps that was at least part of their point).

Why not march up a street where cars ran instead? They, at least, could have taken a different route. There was a police presence since this was a planned event, unlike another recent protest in Melbourne.

Yes, I know that disruption was probably part of the aim.

But the truth is that you don’t have to be completely disruptive to get attention like a two year old having a hissy fit.

Another problem was they appeared to circle around multiple times…

After the boredom set in, Karen and I got to wondering what a poll would show about just how seriously participants in the protest were about finding solutions to climate change.

Which of these people, we wondered, use vehicles (theirs or others) in a responsible way in order to minimise emissions?

Which of these people were vegan or at least made some significant attempt to reduce the consumption of animal products, given that the animal agriculture industry is responsible for a similar quantity of emissions as the whole of the transport sector.

Which of these people regularly waste food?

Which of them recycle? And so on…

Yet another problem was that at one point, the chants changed from being climate related to:

Always was, always will be, aboriginal Land

I encountered the same thing during the 2019 oil and gas exploration protest in Adelaide.

Now, no matter how sympathetic you are to the plight of aboriginal people in Australia (and there is good reason to be), how much you support the notion of land rights, or how positively you view the aboriginal people as good stewards of the Land, this is a problematic statement.

For one thing, it is astonishingly anthropocentric, the very thing that has gotten us into so much trouble with climate change.

For another, it’s a claim that can only have any validity for the last 60,000 years or thereabouts. Before that brief geological time span, the land “belonged” to other species.

Such a view may not be politically popular these days, especially with Australia/Invasion Day on January 26, but it has the distinct advantage of being true.

Of course, none of this excuses the terrible things done to the aboriginal people by our white settler ancestors and it is important to separate the massacres of two centuries ago from the broader historical place of homo sapiens, and the future of our species.

I’ve written more on this theme elsewhere. As I said there:

I’ve always found the Cosmic Calendar quite compelling. Popularised by Carl Sagan on Cosmos, the whole timescale of the universe is compressed into 12 months. Nothing remotely human begins until late morning on December 31. The original settlement of Australia by seafarers didn’t happen until 11:58pm and the last few thousand years of human history occupies the last 30 seconds of the day!

Getting back to the chant… It was out of place in the context of this protest.

If you’re going to have a protest about climate change, stick to the point!

Don’t dilute the message!

Also, ensure that you are really making an attempt to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

We eventually got to that vegan pizzeria, but it was far enough that we caught a cab.

Anyone who knows me, knows how much I hate catching a cab if I don’t have to!

So, thanks for that (not).