Scott Ludlam
Black Inc. Rrp $.34.99
When reviewing another book earlier this year I wrote that I had always been a great fan of the Winston Churchill quote: ‘short words are best’, Scott Ludlam seems not seem to agree with Churchill.
When reading a new book, I usually adopt the 40-to-50 page rule and I must confess that if I had not been asked to write this review I might well have put this book aside at that point. However, I am glad that I persisted, although getting through its 341 pages requires a fair effort. It is not an easy read and sometimes it is unclear what point the author is trying to make. There were some passages that I found to be almost incomprehensible.
Scott Ludlam was senator in the Australian Parliament from 2008 to 2017 and during that time was the deputy leader of the Australian Greens. The book tells us that he has worked as a filmmaker, artist, and graphic designer and that he has led a life of activism.
The front cover of the book displays a quote by Raj Patel which says that the book is “at once a comic chronicle of the climate apocalypse, a heartbreaking work of paleohistory and a fugitive tourist diary, strange, uncategorisable and magnificent.”
I would certainly agree that the book is strange and uncategorisable, although I wouldn’t myself have used the adjectives comic or magnificent.
Ludlam begins by reminding us of the climate aggravated fires which ripped through many parts of east coast Australia, and in particular the small town of Cobargo in 2020. He then recalls Professor Ross Garnaut’s accurate prediction in 2008 that we would be observing longer and more intense fire seasons by 2020. Ludlam then sets the scene for much of the rest of his thesis by suggesting that: “A bloc of transnational resource sector investors control the ministerial wing of parliament and hold majorities in both chambers”.
Early in the book Ludlam refers to the story about the creator of the game of chess who is offered a reward by his queen and responds by proposing that the queen put one coin on the first square of the chess board and two on the second, doubling the number of coins up to the sixty-fourth. The queen thinks this is a good deal until being told that she will owe him 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 coins. The author uses this story throughout the book to illustrate where the world will end up with the doubling of economic growth mentality which infects most political and economic leaders and systems. By books end you realise that it is this growth at all costs mentality which is leading to environmental, social, and economic disaster.
What I found frustrating about the book, apart from some of the big words that I had to look up, was the way that it jumps quickly from one topic to another. Sometimes it is like a slide show where, just as you are getting interested in one picture, it disappears and is replaced by another completely unrelated shot. Ludlam does not subscribe to the view that a good story should have a beginning, a middle and an end. Patel’s comment mentions paleohistory and the book will move from subjects such as international debt, iron ore prices, manipulative advertising, the changing nature of work, onto the early stages of evolution on earth, and then onto some direct protest action that Ludlam was involved in, and then back to the unfairness of our economic systems.
I do get that Ludlam is trying to use the way that early life behaved and developed to illustrate the present human condition, but I personally did not find it helpful. Others might disagree.
Ludlam’s book takes us to various parts of the world such as Lebanon, Mongolia, Bangladesh, Japan, Kenya, India and Brazil to illustrate economic, environmental and other issues, but here again I found that just as I was getting interested in what was happening, we were off onto another place or topic.
The book covers a whole range of major issues such as neo liberalism, economic unfairness, state capture, global warming, climate change denial, political donations, false history telling and particularly how fossil fuel corporations have, with the connivance of governments, rigged the system to their own benefit despite being aware of the terrible destructiveness of their product.
One issue that I found particularly timely was that of dissent. Ludlam quotes former prime minister John Gorton as saying: “This government will tolerate dissent only while it remains ineffective.” He then discusses how governments which have been captured by the fossil fuel industry are doing their bidding by legislating draconian anti-protest laws. This has happened in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and now Tasmania. All these laws are intended to render environmental protests totally ineffective.
The book does conclude on a more positive note by:
“Imagining for a second a city that runs on sunlight, sipping just as much water as it returns to the landscape, growing a fair fraction of its own food, woven seamlessly into a mosaic of wetlands and native bushland…It is a place that no longer calculates Gross Domestic Product; it tracks genuine progress indicators for social justice, health, energy and water productivity.”
It is a complex book which many readers will find frustrating. However, on balance I recommend that it be tackled, and that the reader persist to the end. Amongst the complexity and frustrations, the reader is likely to discover many gems. As Bill McKibben comments on the book’s cover, Ludlam really does “take on these existential questions of real power.”
John Watts
Retired Barrister, Gloucester resident, and author of ‘Nine Lives for Our Planet’ and ‘The Town That Said NO to AGL. How Gloucester Was Saved from Coal Seam Gas’. John is also the president of the Gloucester Environment Group.