Climate Culture: April 2024

In 'Climate Culture', Gerard Mazza shares what he's been reading, listening to, or watching that's had him thinking about the climate crisis.

Video tweeted by Revolution Permanente showing police clearing protest camp at Sorbonne University, April 29 2024

Before I sat down to write this column, I was scrolling through videos and images in my social media feeds of pro-Palestinian campus protests that have spread from the US to Europe and even Australia. How could I think to write about much else? The video from France's Sorbonne University shows armoured police tearing students from their tents and dragging them across the ground. Plenty of footage from the US has shown police treating protesters with violence. Students will endure brutal treatment from law enforcement and university administrators because even at its worst, the repression they face pales in comparison to what Israel has inflicted upon the people of Gaza. The determination of universities to silence their students shows they are not remote or removed from the injustices heaped upon Palestine. In the West, our institutions are complicit, and there are things they'd prefer to hide. Repression of protesters has backfired, as it so often does, and caused the students' tactics to spread rapidly. Tomorrow, an encampment is scheduled to begin at Curtin University in Perth.

Sign regarding product shortages at Woolworths South Fremantle, seen on 15 April 2024

Living for the past couple of years in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, 1,600 kilometres from the capital city, I grew used to not always being able to get everything I wanted from the supermarket. Being back in the city, I've found things are not so different here. In South Fremantle two weeks ago, I noticed a sign on the front window of the local Woolworths saying recent weather events had caused product shortages. The ABC reported this month that items in short supply in WA supermarkets included "flour, bread, almonds, diced tomatoes, deli and dairy goods and chilled items." The report went some way to contextualising the recent shortages when it quoted Western Roads Federation chief executive Cam Dumesny, who said freight disruptions were becoming more frequent and more intense. "Short, intense, geographically concentrated weather events are certainly exposing the vulnerability of our freight systems," he said. What the ABC neglected to mention was that the extreme weather causing this kind of disruption occurs more often because of the climate crisis - and that the longer we allow the climate crisis to exacerbate unchecked, the worse we can expect food shortages to get, even in wealthy parts of the world like Western Australia.

'Hitching a Ride with Cornel West: A Conversation on Israel, His Presidential Run and John Coltrane' by Garrett Gravley, Dallas Observer, March 4, 2024

Asked about the current generation of music makers and how well they have risen to the challenge of truth-telling, [West] offers, “This generation has certain impediments that are more intense than my day, because this generation is living in the most commodified culture in the history of the world. It’s all about money and spectacle, you see. It’s about titillation and stimulation, whereas my generation had commodification but it wasn’t as intense, so they could talk more about caring and nurturing.” (The caring and nurturing, West adds, is still present in current generations, but the excesses of unfettered capitalism have silenced it.)

I don't think Cornell West is being the old man yelling at cloud here. Sure, there's plenty of great political music being made today, in the mainstream and on the margins, but it doesn't feel like our popular culture at large is rising to the occasion of the various crises of our age.

The dynamics at play lead to situations like the one pointed to by Billie Eilish in a viral interview last month, where she called out the wastefulness of endless vinyl variants being sold by popular artists:

We live in this day and age where, for some reason, it’s very important to some artists to make all sorts of different vinyl and packaging … which ups the sales and ups the numbers and gets them more money […] I can’t even express to you how wasteful it is. It is right in front of our faces and people are just getting away with it left and right, and I find it really frustrating as somebody who really goes out of my way to be sustainable and do the best that I can and try to involve everybody in my team in being sustainable — and then it’s some of the biggest artists in the world making fucking 40 different vinyl packages that have a different unique thing just to get you to keep buying more. It’s so wasteful, and it’s irritating to me that we’re still at a point where you care that much about your numbers and you care that much about making money — and it’s all your favorite artists doing that shit.

Of course, people online were quick to point out the fact that Eilish herself had offered different variants of her own albums (as had been mentioned in the original interview). They missed the point. Billie Eilish the artist and Billie Eilish the business are two separate things. It's only natural they'd sometimes, or often, be in conflict with each other.

I love pop culture and pop music, and I also believe our culture is sick. I believe we're all morally obliged to do what we can to confront the crises of our age. Some songs I love seem like little more than shiny distractions, packaged up as products that end up paying for private jets. Sometimes, I feel at odds with myself, loving artists and music that seem to exist in a parallel world to the one in the process of ecological breakdown. These tensions are part of what drives me to write this column.

When I need nourishment, I can listen to John Coltrane, who Cornel West spoke about adoringly in his Dallas Observer interview. I can listen to recordings like the one of Coltrane performing his 'Peace On Earth' at Shinjuku Kosei Nansen Hall in Tokyo in 1966. It's all in there: pain, longing, love, relief, release.

Thanks for reading The Swell.

You might be interested in a new project I'm a part of - The Last Place on Earth - an independent media platform sharing the view from out west. We'll publish news, analysis, and podcasts straight from the fossil fuel heartland of Western Australia. Over the past week, The Last Place on Earth has reported from a picket line in Fremantle targeting an Israeli shipping company, and gone undercover at a conservative political conference associated with the shadowy right-wing Atlas Network. You can subscribe to The Last Place on Earth to receive all the latest.