Kiribati - Putting a Face to Climate Change

This is a cross blog post of mine from Runway Australian Experimental Art on the theme of our latest issue Runway #24 ISLANDS

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The polemical topic of refugee rights has never been so prominent in common Australian discourses as it is today. It is a hot topic for discussion in Parliament, the media, and around the dinner table of many Australians. While there are many refugees fleeing from persecution, war and terror, there will soon be refugees who have simply lost their homes, fresh water and livelihood to the Climate Change we in Australia can ignore so easily. Our latest issue of Runway focussed on the theme “ISLANDS”, which reminded me of the work of Jon Lewis, Australian photographer, founder of Greenpeace Australia and a thoroughly inspiring tutor at the University of Technology, Sydney. Jon Lewis spent 6 months in 2009 travelling through the Republic of Kiribati, which consists of 33 atolls in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean and south of Hawaii. The entire nation has been under threat from drastic changes in weather patterns, fresh water salination and rising sea levels. Lewis produced a series of photographs entitled “Portraits from the Edge” Kiribati – Putting a Face to Climate Change.

Abaro Mud Kid-Tarawa.  © All rights reserved Jon Lewis 2009 Australia. Photo courtesy of the artist.

The impact of Climate Change on the people of Kiribati is far more significant today than just a few years ago, and in recent news a man named Ioane Teitiota has just lost his appeal for refugee status in New Zealand as the world’s first Climate Change refugee. Experts predict that the nation of Kiribati has only 30-40 years left before climate change renders it uninhabitable, and it seems Australia will most likely be facing a new influx of “asylum seekers” in coming years.

Yeomans Exhibition and Field Trip

I posted previously about working on a project for Ian Milliss and Lucas Ihlein called the Yeomans Project, which has just finished exhibiting at the Art Gallery of NSW. I went there on Monday and finally got some decent photos of the exhibition just before it closed. I also went on a field trip to one of Yeomans' original farms organised as part of the public programs. Here are some of my photos from both:

I'm also working on transcribing the talks by Kirsten Bradley, Joanna Mendelssohn, Stuart Hill and Wendy Yeomans from the public programs. These will eventually be up on the Yeomans Project blog.

Go Green over Jellies

Most little girls have a pair of jelly shoes at some point during their childhood years.

Image from Rambling Mummy

I still have an old brown pair that I wore while gallivanting all over Europe in 2009, but I never considered them the next must-have fashion item.

Late last year, a Jelly Shoe Store called M Dreams popped up in Pitt St mall, and suddenly, jelly shoes were no longer an 80's memory best forgotten. Even Fashion Hayley had something to say.

I got mine from Juju shoes online, and they arrived in the post today. I'm super excited to be strutting around in my high heeled glitter jellies tomorrow! They're really comfortable too.

Image: mine

And that's not the end of it. Jelly shoes are made from PVC, which is extremely durable (hence why my brown ones are going on 5 years!), isn't going to upset any animal activists, weather proof, and 100% recyclable. This means if they do break, or I get tired of them, they can be put in the recycle bin along with my empty milk bottles, which means zero waste.

In fact, the Brazilian company that make Melissa Shoes actually recycle their old unsold stocks and use the plastic for the new collection! It really brings a new scope to the idea of "wearing plastic bags on your feet". Recycled Coles plastic bags could end up being jelly shoes!

Jelly shoes comes in many style, and great colours. So get green with envy over jellies!

Silk - what you don't know probably won't upset you

On my various travels, in Europe and more recently, Vietnam, I've picked up a few beautiful silk scarves over the years. Yesterday by chance I happened to google how silk is made. Although I've been to a silk factory in Lyon, I never really understood the scientific process of how silkworms produce this luxurious fabric.

*Silk Worms, image sourced from Kidspot

I was... astonished, angry and saddened to learn that I can add silk to a long list of things like many household products, cosmetics, fur, cage eggs, etc that I no longer wish to buy. I was astonished because it's so commonplace to understand that something like fur comes from an "evil" place, but silk was always this beautiful, luxurious natural product that never harmed a fly. Pun intended - it actually harms the silk worms.  From several websites like this one, and this one, I learnt that most silk is produced from the cocoons of silk worms (which are apparently a lot like caterpillars). The caterpillars make their cocoon in order to transform into moths, and just before they eat their way out of the cocoons, they are boiled alive, before the cocoons are pried open and harvested as that beautiful, luxurious fabric we call silk.

So that's why I was astonished. I was angry because I'm sick of it. I don't want to live in a world I have to google every single product before I buy it to make sure it hasn't been involved in ripping someone off, treating something or someone or the earth badly, all for the glorious purpose of making someone else some money.

I'm no saint. I eat meat, I kill mosquitoes and cockroaches (or rather with the latter, I scream and run away until someone else does it). Nature has no shortage of cruelty. The frog eats the bug, the snake eats the frog, the bird eats the snake. Often in less than humane ways. I get it. But I don't torture cockroaches before I kill them. I realise caterpillars are caterpillars. People seem to classify smaller animals as "less than alive", as "unable to feel pain". Well, just because we don't like to think about it, doesn't mean they don't.

As (arguably), the most intelligent and powerful creatures on the planet, humans, who on a large scale, farm and kill animals for food, for fashion and even for sport, I believe we have a duty to the earth that has provided these species for us. Power doesn't come without responsibility, or at least it shouldn't. I realise that animal and environmental welfare is very much a first world problem - you do what you need to survive, and no starving society is going to be worried about the welfare of the monkeys they need to eat. What bothers me is the motivation behind everything - money.

Yes, the Great Barrier Reef is beautiful, but would anybody worry about it as much as we do if not for the billion dollar tourism industry it caters for? And even that isn't enough - I just donated to the WWF because turtles are washing up sick and dead on the shores for no reason anybody has yet worked out. Not only do we trick the fish onto our lines and suffocate them, we do it at a rate that will leave none of those fish for the future. It's not enough to use the fur off creatures' backs, we have to torture them to get it. We boil alive lobsters because it apparently makes them "fresher" to eat and we terrify them by chasing them around in "catch your own lobster" fork machines in pubs before we do. We turn a blind eye to the torture of animals like rabbits for industries like L'óreal that make billions of dollars a year and could very much afford to change their policies. But hey, if we make a profit from that mascara, what's the problem? It's not my rabbit being tortured.

And lastly, I was saddened. Sad that this beautiful scarf I was wearing that made me happy is no longer something I will enjoy wearing. No longer something I can say to someone "hey, check out my scarf - it's 100% silk and I got it in this cute store in Vietnam!"

*Cruelty free silk, image sourced from Fair Trade Products

No, to me a luxurious item is not luxurious when it's got blood all over it. The websites have told me to look for "cruelty free silk". Well I don't know about you, but I've never seen cruelty-free silk in my life. There's 20 brands of free-range eggs in supermarkets, but I imagine cruelty-free silk is harder to find than toothpaste that's not tested on animals.

I feel frustrated with this. Being human doesn't give us the power to own the world and all its species and do with them what we please just as long as it makes us some cash. Disrespecting a species you're farming to make money doesn't make your produce luxurious, it makes it dirty.

I'm on a tangent now, but I feel like humanity has misunderstood this concept of ownership. Working for money that humans created and paying for land they didn't doesn't really make it yours. Nature has been long before you were born, and will exist longer than you are alive. It is not owned by anyone. If anything, you are just borrowing it from future generations, and what is left of it for them is entirely up to you.

So here I am, trying to respect the silk worms that painfully died to make me this scarf. And frustrated with the world that allowed this to happen because everybody thought "hey, it's just a worm".

*Silk scarves for sale in Sapa, Vietnam