WOMEN'S CLIMATE LEADERSHIP
WHERE DOES IT TAKE US?
8TH MARCH 2021
Produced by Vivien Langford
GUESTS:
Victoria McKenzie-McHarg - Women's environmental Leadership WELA and Chair of the Climate Action Network Australia CANA
Lucy Manne - CEO of 350.org Australia
Janet Laurence - Artist and Curator of REQUIEM at the Festival of Sydney 2021
Kerrie Leishman - Painter on her exhibition "The New Beauty" featuring wind turbines at Waubra Vic
Music : Montaigne with the song that launched the School Strike for Climate in Sydney 2019- "Ready to Go!"
and "Mother earth" composed by Aunty Ruby Sims to launch the Beyond Zero Emissions "Million Jobs Plan" sent to us by Dominque Hes
The theme of international Women's day this year is Women in leadership.
Victoria McKenzie-McHarg launches the show. Her IWD hero is Julie Lyford who, with Groundswell Gloucester fended off a gas company in their valley and then won a court case to stop the Rocky Hill Coal mine going ahead. Julie is a graduate of the Women's environmental leadership course. Victoria says it's obvious that the present political, societal and corporate leadership is failing on climate action. a more collaborative, diverse and supportive form of leadership is needed. She speaks about Nicola Rivers who with young children could not see herself as a CEO but through mentoring came to the idea of sharing a CEO position which she now has as CoCEO of Environmental Justice Australia.
WELA is there to open doors for women. They have established a giving circle to fund women led projects and initiatives for our envoronment.
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To celebrate IWD we talk to two artists who lead us towards a change of heart around our connection to the land and landscape. They are Janet Laurence and Kerrie Leishman.
Janet Laurence curated REQUIEM, a week of art events in an old Reservoir near Paddington Town Hall. As we descend into the sunken cathedral she invites us to lament and reflect on the black summer bush fires. It is a place of reckoning and the audience response in Qand A was all about "what can we do?"
Art helps us to see what's invisible and Janet says blindness to nature breeds indifference. In front of her installation of waters made turbid by charcoal and dead matter left by the bushfires, many speakers such as Bruce Shillingsworth, urged us to think differently about mother earth and her lifeblood rivers. In an interview later Janet told me that the Art World did not easily accept her focus on climate change. But she does not want to plunge them into a defensive reaction and the sheer tenderness, the scale and the science behind her work is opening many minds.
Kerrie Leishman says that wind turbines create a new aesthetic. This challenges our usual idea of landscape. But like Janet Laurence she does not want to put us on the defensive. Her paintings are a subtle form of climate leadership taking us along as she comes to see the turbines as gentle giants. Her exhibition called "The New Beauty" was inspired by the wind farms at Waubra in Victoria.
blog - Kerrie Leishman Paintings and Illustration
Lucy Manne started the fossil Fuel Watch project during COVID. They report on such things as the media coverage of COVID recovery funds going towards gas projects rather than the jobs rich care economy. They also report on the national conversation around citizens' rights to protest. One example recently is when the mining lobby portrayed community groups as "vexatious" Graeme Samuels found that such legal challenges are the "foundation of our democracy". She recommended that we watch the Greenpeace film "Dirty Money" and join 350.org in their campaign to "Fund our Future not Gas".
She talks about the shift in energy resulting from the Biden Administration's climate policy in the USA.Will this help us turn a distant 2050 target to a manageable 2030 target for reducing carbon emissions to zero?
Her women's day hero is Milly Telford founder of SeedMob.
The campaign she wants us to support is the Torres Strait Islanders' landmark human rights complaint against the Australian Government. They say the government has not adequately reduced Greenhouse gas emissions or helped them adapt to changing climate conditions. Lucy herself is a shining example of women's leadership coming up from the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and now as CEO.
Climate Action Collective
