Climate action and changing seasons
School students are back in classrooms and city traffic is slowly starting to get busier. Where has summer gone?
With uni students coming back, it’s an exciting time in the city. I also absolutely love these weeks of all kinds of art happening all around Adelaide. The Fringe, Womadelaide and the Adelaide Festival of Arts has spurred this always-present, but recently more palpable, appreciation not only of culture but the planet that houses it.
Nature and the natural environment has always inspired creativity in me and the ocean would usually be the place I retreat to for grounding, strength, solitude, inspiration and peace. Here are some of the most relished lines from some of my favourite books which call on us to look after our home and the other species we share it with.
- Edward Abbey: Desert solitaire
"A man could be a lover and defender of the wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge even though we may never need to go there. I may never in my life get to Alaska, for example, but I am grateful that it’s there. We need the possibility of escape as surely as we need hope; without it, the life of cities would drive all men into crime or drugs or psychoanalysis."
- Rachel Carson: The sea around us
"It is a curious situation that the sea, from which life first arose should now be threatened by the activities of one form of that life. But the sea, though changed in a sinister way, will continue to exist; the threat is rather to life itself."
- Edward O. Wilson: Letters to a young scientist
"Finally, remember that you enter a career in science above all in the pursuit of truth. Your legacy will be the increase and wise use of new, verifiable knowledge, of information that can be tested and integrated into the remainder of science. Such knowledge can never be harmful by itself, but as history has so relentlessly demonstrated, the way it is twisted can be harmful, and is such knowledge is applied by ideologues, it can be deadly."
- Lynne Cox: Grayson
"Sometimes, he said, the important things take time, sometimes they don't just happen all at once, sometimes answers come out of time and struggle, and learning. sometimes you just have to try again in a different way."