Rae and John Sheridan have been regular givers to ACF for more than 50 years. They have also generously left a gift to ACF in their wills.
Rae’s been an ACF member since Easter 1967, inspired to join during a scoping bushwalk in the Snowy Mountains led by Geoff Mosley, ACF’s first director. At the time Rae was a first year out science teacher living in Canberra. I was a young doctor working in Sydney unaware of ACF, until joint membership was conferred upon me in 1968 when we married.
In 1970 we moved to Melbourne, Rae teaching at the National Museum of Victoria (as it was known then) doing a second degree and me embarking on a PhD and together starting a family. Being almost penniless we can vividly remember grasping the opportunity to feast at an ACF function held to honour Prince Phillip’s (ACF’s founding president) visit to Australia.
We have always been keen outdoors people with a love and respect for wilderness. ACF complemented and consolidated our love and respect with comprehensive, simply expressed, authoritative and timely environmental information. It has also inspired us with its many successful environmental campaigns. Little wonder ACF has the highest membership and is the most enduring and influential of Australia’s environmental organisations. It has served as a role model for many other successful regional and specialised environmental organisations.
Additionally with Rae and I, ACF has served as the foundation to our involvement in a spectrum of further groups that focus specifically on climate change mitigation. This has resulted in occasional friction with ‘authorities’ due to our belief that government and corporate policies and actions are misaligned with the policies and urgent actions needed to avoid the worst of ecological and societal damage.
Rae and I have become increasingly concerned about the climate since our first awareness of the problem back in the eighties. Initially we thought the threat would be promptly addressed but matters have only got worse.
We have three grown children and five grandchildren. We are greatly concerned for their futures and the futures of all young people wherever they are.
Governments, corporations, the press, and we citizens, must all accept responsibility and act with the urgency and resolution required. The world has never faced a threat of this magnitude and immediate action is imperative.
Of the above, governments must accept the greatest responsibility.
It is imperative that governments recognise and fulfil their obligations to safeguard the futures of current and future generations against emerging crises. With respect to climate change, to which Australia is a massive contributor, promoting new coal and gas developments is to remain complicit in a grievous intergenerational crime, a crime against humanity.
Politicians have an absolute responsibility to fully inform themselves of all mitigable, recognisable serious threats and to earnestly address such threats with the fullness of the powers entrusted to them.
Innumerable scientists have spoken, and the IPCC has made a final plea for climate sanity. There is no excuse whatsoever for continued fossil fuel developments.
Politicians will increasingly be held accountable for climate inaction and complicity with the fossil fuel industry. We must all do all we can to incentivise ethical governance!
