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The Samuel Alexander Lecture 2015 Earth can survive without us; could we survive anywhere else?

(L-R): Cameron Ensor and Eloise Bagnara, Glen Waverley Captains, Germaine Greer, Helen Drennen, Aimee Bowles and Nick Williamson, St Kilda Road Captains

Play word association with the name Germaine Greer Greer takes issue with Hawking’s belief in our future resting and ideas like noted feminist or The Female Eunuch might on space colonisation and is happily scathing about this silly immediately spring to mind. However, if you were lucky enough thing going on about settling Mars. She doesn’t see it as viable, to attend her sold out Samuel Alexander Lecture at St Kilda painting a colourful picture of attempts at survival on Mars and Road’s Adamson Hall in April, you may well volunteer such stressing its certain failure. She observes that we don’t need to words as endosymbiosis, enviro-poisons and slime moulds… go out to reach the universe, we’re part of it here on Earth. She and you’d be justified, for while Greer’s engaging lecture Earth argues that our planet has existed around a 1000 times longer can survive without us; could we survive anywhere else? that humans have: Earth did without us for billions of years – certainly had a feminist thread, the focus was very much on the could we survive anywhere else? ecology of our planet, and in particular the micro-organisms we rely upon for our survival. Here Greer displays a strong knowledge of biological processes, and she conveys our dependence on the natural Greer is not a woman to stand intellectually still, and this was world via the dynamic activities of the microbes that exist all never more evident with her assertion that the fate of humankind around us and within us. She opposes the use of the everyday (or earthlings, as she puts it) is tied to this planet, not with any products (enviro-poisons) marketed to us for our homes and space adventure as suggested by Stephen Hawking. Hawking’s gardens which kill bacteria and germs construed as harmful. argument is that Earth has only about 1,000 habitable years left, According to Greer, many of these micro-organisms are often and so the human race must colonise space if it is to survive. necessary to our lives and health. She critiques the female But let’s go back a bit to start… obsession with cleanliness (women are in a jam – they have got to be clean!), urging that less energy be devoted to eliminating Nowadays, Greer’s feminism is very much grounded in germs, which help our auto-immune systems to develop, and eco-feminism, and typically, she is engaging with this on both some of which protect against asthma. Thus in ignorance a personal and a philosophical level. She has acquired a tract and zeal, despite best intentions, women too are agents of of land in South East Queensland which she is replanting into destroying nature. rainforest, and in doing so she feels she is “replanting herself”. On the philosophical level, she sees a fundamental antagonism Audience questions put to Greer following her lecture between masculine power structures and the planet, and sees concerned our capacity for change (we’re clever we humans, women as more connected to the earth than men, in large part we’re resourceful and we can learn), capitalism as a destroyer of due to woman’s tradition role as “gatherers” in our early hunter- nature (action by groups and individuals can guard against the gatherer system of survival. She argues that female attitudes excesses of capitalism) and the ethics of eating animals (yes, and values can save our planet, if allowed to be expressed it’s OK to eat an animal – as long as you eat all of it…preying on and enacted. animals for sport is just wrong).

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