“Icebergs in the Harbour” by Mike Lamble, Oil

Written by Mike Lamble

Here I am sat almost half a days drive from Sydney roof down in my thirty odd year old MG, enjoying the peace and solitude of another spectacular day listening to the birds calling, cows mooing in the field next to me it looks and feels like paradise. Adam listened to the wrong voices and lost his paradise through greed and selfishness. In a moment I lost mine as the serenity was broken with the roar and whirl of helicopter blades as it dashed across the sky I thought how well this illustrates mankind’s greed and folly.

As I looked up I remembered a quote from German astronaut Ernst Messerschmid as he looked down upon the earth.
“When the Russian cosmonaut tells me that the atmosphere over Lake Baikal is as polluted as it is over Europe, and when the Americans astronaut tells me fifteen years ago he could take much clearer pictures of the industrial centres than today, then I am getting concerned.”

The shock is those words were spoken in 1988 twenty four years ago, global warming wasn’t even an issue then, one wonders how the same scene would look today as China and India continue to industrialise at a rapid and increasing rate, and yet only a few years ago the politician that represents the electorate I live in called global warming “a load of crap”.

My painting of Sydney Harbour with icebergs floating in it was my outraged response to such stupid short sighted and self serving comments.

Rain, Steam and Speed – The Great Western Railway by J. M. W. Turner

When Turner painted Rain Steam and speed in 1844 Britain’s rapidly industrialising railways were very much the new wonder of the age, from a largely rural society at the beginning of the 19th century to an industrial one at the end, Turner depicts the changes contrasting an idyllic rural landscape fading in the background with the train racing towards us showing the incoming age of invention and science.

Coming from the mill 1930 by L. S. Lowry

This was a romantics view. Turner loved to portray in his paintings of “progress” in British society at the time, never the consequences of such rapid industrialisation as poverty, disease, overcrowding, vast inequality, black soot covered dark Northern English cities.

That’s the short list, he never saw the implications of what he was portraying in this picture. To be fair how could he especially in the light of another 170 years of global industrialisation and yet our politicians talk about expanding the “global economy”, full employment, higher standard of living, while paying lip service to the ever increasing cry from scientists and visionaries we choose to ignore at our peril.

In an earth that has finite resources, at the rate we are going now we need another earth to satisfy our demands for “stuff”. Like Turner we are looking in the other direction in our greed selfishness and the pursuit of money. The train (Turners train) we are all riding is out of control with only disaster ahead.