Planet of the apes needs to get real

I have spent 20 years in the Green movement and I need to say it as it is: we won the argument but lost the debate. We showed that coal is killing the world and they greenwashed it “clean”. We got democracy on our side and they ignore it.

These are manic days for Planet Earth and everyone who lives on it. The ice sheets are cracking up and we’re not faring much better. We need to come together to change history, but global consciousness is pixellating into micro-worlds, atoms of meaning so hyper and nano they blast through your mind without touching the sides. Think Tony Blair. Short sentences. Integrity. Twitter.com.
Let’s take a breather from these manic times and think the thoughts that count, not prefabricated opinions. Let’s find a nice hole in the wall and talk funky green truths over a glass of organic chardonnay.

We must challenge the newsmakers, such as the Prime Minister and Saint Kevin, and with sentences of 10 words or more.

When Kevin Rudd was chief of staff to the Labor opposition leader Wayne Goss in Brisbane in the 1980s, he used to tell people he was the man with a new “paradigm”. Goss soon glided into power, surfing the wave of disgust at the dying remains of the corrupt National Party government.

Meanwhile Paradigm, as he was known in the press gallery, continued his long march, to where he is now rattling the gates of The Lodge. Fine then. Let’s go talk paradigms with our potential PM.

It was the Harvard University physicist Thomas Kuhn who coined the word “paradigm” in his influential 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Kuhn was trying to explain those huge shifts in science, like from the Catholic Church position that the sun goes around the Earth to the opposite, Copernican idea that the Earth orbits the sun.

One of the conflicts between the Earth-centred universe and the Copernican model was the doctrine of heavenly, or “super-lunary”, perfection. The church argued that while Earth was subject to human imperfection, up in heaven the trains all run on time. When astronomers observed the inconvenient truth that the moon is riddled with bumps, the geocentrists invented an invisible material that smoothed the bumps and made the “real” surface as perfect as God intended.

This is unprovable nonsense, like the idea that Generation IV nuclear reactors are guaranteed “fail-safe”, and thus the cure-all for global warming.

Sydney Morning Herald