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).