Weeknotes 7

21 April 2019

1. On Monday we squeezed in a final morning of climbing in the Blue Mountains (see weeknotes 6) and then started driving back to Melbourne, arriving Tuesday afternoon.

   I was quite taken away by the amount of natural beauty there. I kind of expected it to feel like extended Sydney suburbia—I hadn’t realised there was so much pristine national park around the place. The towns all sit on a plateau at about 1000m, and there are plenty of sweeping views of tree-filled valleys to be had.

   We spent our first week staying with some friends who we had only met once, way back in 2014, on the other side of the world in Chulilla, Spain! The climbing community is great like that.

   On rest days (from climbing) we did some beautiful walks—one through the Grand Canyon track (lovely, but a bit busy) and another down into the Blue Gum Forest (splendid isolation).

   I’m a bit sad to be back in the city to be honest.

2. On Friday, I wrote a book review of Climate: A New Story, which I read for the second time during my holiday. I wasn’t sure what to make of it the first time around so I approached things a bit more academically this time, making notes as I went through. The review was part of that process really.

3. I loved this ‘Message From the Future’ video from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and was especially pleased to see it talk about ecosystem restoration and indigenous wisdom (two big themes in the aforementioned book).

4. Staying with this theme, I looked up a short, inspiring film which the book mentioned called Life in Syntropy about the Syntropic Farms approach to agriculture which fosters biodiversity.

5. I’ve been watching the news about Extiction Rebellion with interest. We listened to an interesting interview with them on the drive. Say what you want about their tactics, I’m just glad to see so many people clearly engaged with the issue. I also like that the name frames it in terms of life (or loss of life), rather than ‘climate’.