great barrier grief

Written by Cathoel Jorss, published 11 years ago

I feel so ashamed and disgusted and frightened at what’s happening in my country. The inhuman way the world’s oldest civilization are treated. The lack of generosity towards people needing help who arrive on our shores. The decision to dump dredging waste from the expansion of a coal port within the National Park created to protect the world’s largest living organism, the Great Barrier Reef. The carte blanche offered to quick-buck miners who gouge what they can from our ancient resources – I’m including forest-strippers and tree-pulpers here as ‘miners’ – at the cost of sacred sites, irreplaceable rock art, and whole mountains which have withstood millenia but crumble before the dreary dollar. The cars stoked with air conditioning in which we transfer ourselves from one over-stuffed mansion to the next. Malls filled with landfill. Food which is hardly food, young people’s beauty marred by the treacherous marbling fat that comes from addiction to additives and inactivity, trans fats and sugar. We are so rare and beautiful and our earth, on whose surface we are still a minority, exquisite beyond words. There is more microbial life in a teaspoon of soil than there are humans who have ever lived, all counted together. My heart is sick and heavy and I don’t know how to drag us to the point where how we live remembers that.