November 2009

In Sydney, between drought and dust storms, the effects of climate change are becoming more visible than ever.

In this Voices for Change video Amanda McKenzie from the Australian Youth Climate Coalition explains how these changes are affecting life in a city increasingly vulnerable to storm surges and rising sea-levels.

As I write this, I'm sitting in the plenary room of the ICCAT meeting, whilst Charles Clover's film 'The End of The Line' is being screened. This in itself is a great coup.

In a memorable scene from the film, whilst attending a previous ICCAT meeting, Clover himself chastised the bureaucrats in that meeting for setting irresponsibly high quotas that ignored scientific advice. In his words they were '…negotiating with biology. And you just can't do that, and expect to see the biology survive'.

Joni at the Pacific Coliseum - photo courtesy of Alan Katowitz

"They paved paradise, put up a parking lot" sang music icon Joni Mitchell presciently in one of her earliest hits, 1970's Big Yellow Taxi. And right from the start she showed a willingness to put her money where her mouth was in support of her environmental concerns.

So much so that later that year, when Canadian peace activist Irving Stowe announced plans for a benefit concert to raise funds to send a ship to oppose US nuclear testing in Alsaka, she was one of the first to sign up. On October 16, together with fellow rising star James Taylor and the legendary protest singer Phil Ochs, she put in an astonishing performance for an audience of 10,000 at Vancouver's Pacific Coliseum, raising over $16,000 - enough to send a boat and crew to the Amchitka nuclear testing site.

There are a lot of chickens around Porto de Galinhas, in Brazil , where ICCAT, the body responsible for mismanaging bluefin tuna, and other fish species, is meeting this week.