Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Good Causes

Menstrual Sanitation – An Environmental Issue

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“LIKE many other Western countries, my home country of Australia is reluctant to support development in all its forms,” writes Caroline Marohasy in an article just published by New Internationalist. In the article, entitled “Menstrual sanitation is not just a ‘lady issue'”, Caroline explains that…

“WE liberally support causes like AIDS or infant mortality prevention, but equally important issues like female hygiene and sanitation attract minimal attention.Screen Shot 2013-07-26 at 7.40.30 PM

Yet investment in projects that directly support women and girls is essential to reducing poverty. In 2012, the UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon said that ‘the greatest return comes from investing in girls and women. When they are educated, they drive development in their families, communities and nations.’

A single year of primary education correlates with at least a 10-per-cent increase in a woman’s wages later in life, with the returns on a year of secondary education estimated to be double that. Moreover, educating girls remains the single best policy for reducing fertility.

– See more at: http://newint.org/blog/2013/07/25/menstrual-sanitation-development-education/?1946526611352061#sthash.CBlt7MAF.dpuf

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The article was written by my daughter Caroline who has just spent 5 weeks in Kenya.

The photograph was taken by kyhm54 and is reproduced here under a Creative Commons Licence.

Facebook, And

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I’ve a Facebook account and I’ve started posting information there that is not about the natural environment, but that I think is important.  A reader of this blog, Neville, sent me a link to a podcast of Alan Jones on 2GB talking this morning about Julia Gillard and her involvement with the AWU.   Alan Jones can go on a bit, but this morning he was unusually specific and focused.

You can hear the podcast at the 2GB website or via my Facebook page.  Following is a simple screenshot of the post at Facebook.  To link directly to my Facebook page look for the photograph of me on the RHS column of this blog home page and click on for the link.  Cheers,

Act Locally to Axe the Tax

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Dear Supporters,

In the next few days we will be launching a poster campaign to coincide with the introduction of the Carbon TAX.

The campaign will consist of distributing this poster http://www.galileomovement.com.au/images/poster_campaign_800c.jpg to shops and business in your local area and asking them to display it prominently in their windows or notice boards.

We have chosen this method of communication as we think it will reach more people than will a letter box drop and needs less effort.

We need your help in two ways:

Firstly, you can request us to send you by mail between 1-5 posters for you to take to your local shops. (More if you are really confident)

Additionally, you are welcome to download and print your own copies and ask businesses to hang them in their front windows.

And secondly, we are looking for 100 supporters to donate $5.00 each to help cover the costs of printing and postage. (All money donated will go towards this campaign only).

Link to our Donations Page http://www.galileomovement.com.au/donations.php

A special big thank you to Steve Hunter who has allowed us to use his illustration.

If you have any questions, or want to show your support or order posters, please email us at Galileomovement@gmail.com

Thank you for your support!
The Galileo Movement

After Gina Rhinehart Buys Fairfax

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‘The hilarious implication – and secret terror of every Melbourne hipster – is that Rinehart will turn Fairfax into some kind of 24-hour Mining Channel, with endless re-runs of Red Dog and Wake in Fright, interspersed with ads for blue singlets. You won’t be able to so much as pick up a copy of the Age without finding your hands stained red with dust, as you search in vain for a single article that isn’t about the Hancock family, while averting your eyes from the topless pictures of Andrew Bolt on page 3. 

I don’t know about you, but given the uniformly mindless dross scraped up, warmed over, rehashed and then served as ideological bubble-and-squeak on the ABC (even drizzled with its jus of self-righteousness and dark-green sea foam), I long for alternatives. In fact, I long for the much-anticipated sale of the ABC under the most enthusiastic sort of Liberal government, and dismantled by an equally enthusiastic Mark Latham. During the Renaissance, it was the independently filthy rich – the oligarchs, bankers and popes – who sponsored the finest artists of the age. Let a new Renaissance bloom at the touch of button 2 on the remote: I hope Rinehart buys the entire Fairfax group, and then casts hungry eyes on the ABC itself…

Read more here: http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/qed/2012/06/one-woman-army

From ‘One-woman Army’ by Philippa Martyr
Published at Quadrant Online on June 20, 2012

Away with Rio+20: The Voice of the Peasant

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‘GOVERNMENTS from all over the world will meet in Río de Janeiro, Brasil from June 20-22 2012, to supposedly commemorate 20 years since the “Earth Summit”, the United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development, that established for the first time a global agenda for “sustainable development”. During this summit, in 1992, three international conventions were adopted: the Convention on Biological Diversity, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, and the Convention to Fight Desertification. Each of these promised to initiate a series of actions destined to protect the planet and all of the life on it, and to allow all human beings to enjoy a life of dignity.

At that time , many social organizations congratulated and supported these new conventions with hope. Twenty years later, we see the real causes of environmental, economic, and social deterioration continuing without being attacked. Worse still, we are profoundly alarmed that the next meeting in June will serve to deepen neoliberal policies and processes of capitalist expansion, concentration, and exclusion that today have enveloped us in an environmental, economic, and social crisis of grave proportions. Beneath the deceptive and badly intentioned term “green economy”, new forms of environmental contamination and destruction are now rolled out along with new waves of privatization, monopolization, and expulsion from our lands and territories.

La Via Campesina will mobilize for this event, representing the voice of the peasant in the global debate and defending a different path to development that is based on the well being of all, that guarantees food for all, that protects and guarantees that the commons and natural resources are put to use to provide a good life for everyone and not to meet the needs for accumulation of a few.
[Read more…] about Away with Rio+20: The Voice of the Peasant

Away with Rio+20 and Ineptocracy

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INEPTOCRACY is a system of government where the least capable of leading are elected by the least capable of producing, and where the members of society least likely to sustain themselves or succeed, are rewarded with goods and services paid for by the confiscated wealth of a diminishing number of producers. That’s according to the web-based Urban Dictionary of slang and seems to be an increasingly apt description of how Australia is governed.

The latest fiasco is the proposed closely down of an already diminished Australian fishing industry through the creation of the world’s largest marine park.

But what on earth is the purpose of having the world’s large marine park if we continue to condone the slaughter of a species of marine mammal already on the verge of extinction? There are only about 14,000 dugongs left in Great Barrier Reef waters and about 1,000 are slaughtered each year.

Dugongs are closely related to elephants, don’t calf until they are nearly twenty years old and suckle their young for up to two years. They are slaughtered by aborigines and Torres Strait islanders as part of an indigenous hunting right, never mind that the slaughter is unsustainable and inhumane.

If the Australian government really cared about the Great Barrier Reef and its dugongs, it would immediately ban the slaughter of dugongs by aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.

Then there is the Murray River fiasco. The buy back of vast quantities of water by the Australian government from our most efficient food producers to send to an artificial freshwater reservoir that has crippled the Murray River’s estuary and all ostensibly to save the environment.

Before the sea dykes that dammed the estuary, each autumn when the southwesterly winds picked up, the Southern Ocean would push into Lake Alexandrina. So the lake was sometimes fresh and some brackish and during prolonged drought it was full of seawater. A mainstay of local fishery was mulloway, a large fish with a golden sheen, but there are no mulloway anymore.

Before the sea dykes were built across the five channels that converge on the Murray’s sea mouth, mulloway would hangout in the underwater canyons beyond the Murray’s mouth. As though reluctant to come in, then on a big tide and a full moon large schools would race through the inlet between the sand dunes. The year the sea dykes were sealed, the mulloway came in and then were trapped, on each ebbing tide, churning in the channels below the sea dykes. There is an old photograph of the Goolwa wharf groaning under 160 tonnes of dead mulloway.

If the Australian government really cared about fish it would restore the 75,000 hectares of terminal coastal lagoon at the bottom of the Murray Darling by removing the sea dykes.

But it doesn’t really care about dugongs or mulloway.

In our ineptocracy, real and pressing environmental issues are ignored while governments legislate against productive and sustainable industries.

Over the next few days the mainstream media are going to tell us stories about the Rio+20 conference, a place in South America where Australia’s richest environmental groups and government bureaucrats are gathering with other such groups and governments from around the world. They are gathering ostensibly to solve the environmental problems of the world by promoting a new economic order through a new political document for our future.

A majority of those attending will likely represent the least capable of leading meaningful change and the least capable of contributing in a practical way to a productive society, and their very attendance will be a consequence of the taxing of a diminishing number of productive and sustainable industries.

And not one of the many delegates from Australia has ever shown the slightest interest in any of our real environmental issues including the restoration of the Murray River’s estuary or saving our dugongs.

 

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I took the picture of Green Island shown above from the window of one of those small Dash 8 aeroplanes on my way to Cairns last week. From Cairns I ventured north to the Daintree and went looking for cassowaries with Neil Hewett.

… only my second YouTube movie. Thanks to all who donated to Mr Koala’s fundraising appeal, we purchased the video camera with some of the monies raised.

My very first YouTube movie is here…