Some old posts
The Goodies
good television
good movies
good books
good poetry
more good books
good songs
good children
good boys
good people
good leaders
Try a lucky dip:
Strange
Bedfellows
John Howard
Kevin Rudd
Al Gore
George Bush
Malcolm Turnbull
Leon Trotsky
Thomas Huxley
Oliver Goldsmith
Kurt Vonnegut
Tony Blair
Samuel Pepys
Winston Churchill
Peter Costello
Joan of Arc
Fidel Castro
Sarah Williams
Peter Beattie
Ned Ludd
De-Anne Kelly
Barack Obama
Kylie Minogue
Tony Abbott
Alexander Downer
Barbaro
Sam Kekovich
Alan Bennett
Osama bin Laden
Rupert Murdoch
George Lakoff
Bjorn Lomborg
Adolf Hitler
Ayn Rand
George Orwell
Julia Butterfly Hill
Saddam Hussein
James Carville
Charles Darwin
Philip Cooney
Jacky Kelly
Irshad Manji
James Lovelock
Bob Hawke
Brendon Nelson
Barnaby Joyce
Robert Menzies
Robert Tressell
Slim Dusty
Noel Coward
Samuel Johnson
Walt Whitman
Edmund Hillary
Robert Byrd
Phillip Adams
Alisa Camplin
Arnold Schwarzeneger
Blogger's Cut
Best slices from the watermelon
Future to the back
Ox power
Whacko Texas
Ticked off
Inhaling the Sixties
God unwilling
Bakers Oven 5
Game over
All change for
Dog bites man
Whale tears
Flowers for bosses
Curtin spinning
Gotta love it
Dodgy intelligence
A glass darkly
Truth and consequences
Media-ocrity
Cant get me Im part of the society
Growing like woody weeds in the nanny state
|
When I was a young fellow a few decades ago (oh, all right, half a century plus) I greatly desired a model train. No money in a very poor family for such a thing, so I set about saving up. I had a jar to put money in, and on my bedroom wall I put a drawing (very originally I thought) of a thermometer marked in a scale with cents and dollars, the top figure being (if I remember correctly) $10. I did odd jobs - garden weeding, chopping wood, helping old ladies across the road, the usual things - and slowly filled up the jar, and filled in the thermometer (with a bright red pencil), cent by painful cent.
I tell that story partly for the pleasant memory it brings, but also, of course, as a lead in to another essay, another pensee. You see for that long ago ten year old boy, money was a simple thing - you did work, you got paid coins, you saved those coins until you had enough of them to buy something you wanted, and then you bought it. Money was a concrete link between work and goods, and it had a concrete, real value. And very concrete, in the sense that if you couldn't see the coins filling up the jar, the red line filling up the thermometer, it didn't exist.
I think at the time most children, and most adults, saw things the same way. My parents and grandparents had come through the Depression, and among other things October 1929 had taught the strong lesson not to put your trust in stock markets, borrowing, financial schemes, promises, debts, money in banks. All of my family believed in money you could see, in the jar, of working for a living, of buying only what you could afford, and so on.
But as time has gone by the lessons of the Depression have been long forgotten. And I have begun asking myself again and again, what is money? I held off, suspiciously, on credit cards for a long time. I suppose I got used to the idea that instead of a bank paying me to have use of my money I would have to pay them to use it. Got used to the idea that people could make money by selling and buying money (currencies of different countries). Got used to the idea of a futures (both products and the shares themselves) exchange, and reluctantly to the knowledge that the lessons of 1929 had been so far forgotten that once again people were borrowing large sums of money to bet on the stock exchange. I still don't really understand any of that, but the rest of the world seems to think this is all just common sense, the way to manage the modern economy, and any hint of regulating financial markets is met with scorn and powerful lobbying. But the final straw came this week when I listened to the head of a bank that had just announced yet another multi billion dollar profit explain why they were raising (ever so reluctantly you understand) bank fees yet again. It was because, he said, the "wholesale cost of money" was getting higher.
Now I don't know about you, but the thought of "retail" and "wholesale" money makes my head spin. It is the final step in the long line from my money jar to the modern financial world. This is money not as a concrete mechanism of exchange, but as just another commodity in itself. The private equity takeover process, the betting on future prices of shares, the purchase of houses with no ability to repay the loan, the currency machinations of financiers between countries, even credit cards with big limits, are all signs that the money markets (and that term itself is another sign) are living in a virtual world. It is as if my young self had gone to the toy shop carrying not the money jar but my picture of a thermometer and had the shopkeeper happily hand over the model train for it.
We have once again, as we did in early 1929, lost sight of the basis of money, and we need to re-establish it. My friend George Mobus, over at the very intelligent Question Everything Blog argues the case for linking money, the economy, to the supply of energy, and this is certainly a point to consider. But whether money is linked to energy, or goods, or work, it needs to be linked to something real. Dealings between people within a country, and between countries, need to be once again restored to real transactions based on a real economy, not virtual ones transmitted as streams of electrons between computers.
There are enough real problems to deal with over the next few years without having them compounded by another crash of world finances when the virtual bubble bursts. Real money is going to be needed to cut greenhouse gases, maintain agricultural production, stop biodiversity loss, help poor people at home and abroad, reduce the chances of war and terrorism. A photocopy of a dollar bill isn't going to do the trick.
You can, though, always bank on The Watermelon Blog
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
The prime minister announces an extra $100 million for carers of the disabled and elderly and the amount is immediately denounced as meaningless, with talk of $30 billion being needed. Commercial tv pontificates on how poorly Rudd has treated the carers. Women miscarry in hospital toilets, and there is an outcry from commercial tv, shock jocks, and the public, about how badly the hospitals are performing. A car crash or traffic jam brings demands for better roads. The loss of students from public schools brings demands for better funding arrangements. Massive funding is needed to save our river systems, our national parks, our world. Courts are slow and crowded. The homeless grow in numbers daily. Indigenous people need money spent to narrow all the gaps. Country people need money spent to narrow all their gaps. Technical education is floundering and the skills shortage grows. Hospitals are crowded with old people in the absence of beds in nursing homes. Universities lose smart students and smarter researchers as their funds dry up. Children are killed in domestic disputes and the chronic lack of money in the social services is revealed, again. Underfunding of customs and quarantine leads to outbreaks of horse flu and the entry of drugs and guns. Public transport grinds to a screaming crowded halt in city after city resulting in dramatic interviews with stranded commuters and pleas for expenditure on trains and buses. Many animal and plant species are in trouble and need refuges established, research carried out. Home owners need help to insulate their houses, change their appliances, add solar panels. Men, women and children die from diseases for which cures could be found; preventive health measures could save many more lives. The arts struggle in the face of the onslaught from American film and television studios and publishing houses. Farmers complain about poor telecommunications and other infrastructure, and are soon going to need considerable help to cope with the climate change that neglect of the environment has brought the world.
Commercial tv and tabloid newspapers present each of these stories in turn, and then instantly forget them, each new story bearing, it seems, no relation to anything that has come before. The stories are repeated, new faces the only change, to illustrate the iniquity of Labor governments across the nation.
And also endlessly repeated, often as the very next story in a news bulletin, is the constant demand, by big business and right wing think tanks, for tax cuts and reduction in government spending. Sorry, that should read "tax relief" the euphemism they have managed to get every media outlet to use. What they mean of course is extensive tax reduction for big business and the very rich, while the poor will be given relief from good hospitals, decent public schools, functional public transport.
Spot the problem.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
A recent post by Mayhill Fowler attracted a lot of attention in relation to the race for Democratic nomination in Pennsylvania. But I was struck by something else - "The ravages of mining and old-style manufacturing have been unable, after all, to break the bond Pennsylvanians have with the natural world. Driving through the western part of the state, I thought again and again what great deer hunting country it is, and how my dad, a hunter in his younger days, would love it."
You see I drive past a forest and I am struck by its richness and ecological variety. By the way that plants and animals fit together in complex relationships that keep the whole thing functioning. I will sense the great age of individual trees, and the much greater age of the forest itself - the thousands of years it took the ecosystem to reach its present structure, the millions of years for the evolution of each of its component parts. I would take pleasure in thinking of the birds and mammals and reptiles and beetles living their lives oblivious to human interests. I would be grateful for the contribution the forest makes to absorbing CO2 and producing oxygen, of protecting the soil and purifying water. And I would stop, and walk in a little way, not wanting to intrude, in order to let all my senses absorb the ambiance of this wonderful evolutionary product.
What I wouldn't think about is what an ideal setting it would be in which to take a high powered rifle and slaughter deer. Nor would it occur to me that a desire to spill blood on the ground was evidence of a "bond" "with the natural world". Just the opposite.
On the same day I read another story about how American farmers are dropping out of an environmental program that paid them to preserve grasslands by not cultivating. There is, with rising prices for wheat, soybeans and corn, a desire to cash in with big profits. A "broad coalition of baking, poultry, snack food, ethanol and livestock groups say bigger harvests are a more important priority than habitats for waterfowl and other wildlife. They want the government to ease restrictions on the preserved land, which would encourage many more farmers to think beyond conservation." The response to this has mainly come from hunting groups like "Ducks Unlimited", a spokesman, Jim Ringelman, noted with no sense of irony, it seemed, “There are overriding environmental issues here.” The environmental issue of course is to preserve the ducks and other elements of the prairie ecosystems from a return to damaging farming activities on the areas that have been preserved, not to prevent one kind of environmental damage in order to allow the environmental damage caused by slaughtering ducks.
It is all related to the old philosophical puzzle of whether, if a tree falls in the forest when there is no one to hear it, does it really fall? The people who think of hunting when they think of forests don't believe the tree really falls unless they are there (preferably there making it fall, in fact). They see no purpose for the natural world other than to serve human interests directly. In fact they believe that the natural world only exists at the whim of humans. With the slightest movement of a single finger on a trigger a life can be extinguished, with a signature on a piece of paper a forest can be bulldozed. In its purest form this belief extends into the bizarre world of the climate change denier (almost it seems, though not quite, an extinct species now). These people have been known to say, backs against the wall of irrefutable evidence of climate changing, habitats disappearing, species facing extinction, that none of that matters, only human survival counts. In their dreams, apparently, humans will one day wander in splendid isolation, on a parking-lot-bare surface of the Earth from which all extraneous other species have been removed. Or as the farmers said "bigger harvests are a more important priority than habitats for waterfowl and other wildlife".
Me? I think trees have been falling in forests since long before naked ape human beings evolved on the treeless prairies of Africa.
And, like John Keats, "if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel". Keats didn't own a gun, and nor do I.
And on the Watermelon Blog we don't hunt deer.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Much talk about the Australian Republic again after the Summit discussions. And all the usual responses. Most notably with the usual misleading comments from the monarchists (the Queen apparently isn't the Australian head of state after all - who knew, does the Queen? The last referendum was always intended to be the last time this was ever discussed since the Australian people overwhelmingly voted for a monarchy and that was that - is this your recollection of the real world? The people didn't want politicians picking the head of state - remind me again who singlehandedly picked Hollingsworth and Jeffrey - I'll give you a clue, first name starts with J, second with H) ). And from Alexander Downer, who came out with that original gem "if it ain't broke don't fix it", which would be more convincing (no, not really) coming from someone who wasn't part of a government who set about changing every aspect of Australian culture and economy even though, to my recollection, none of it was broken either).
But leaving aside that kind of foolishness, the kind of baby talk that is quite inappropriate when talking to a big grown up Australian democracy, the raising of the issue again set me thinking more broadly about it. The argument of course for an Australian head of state is that it is inappropriate for a grown up democracy (remember that we became a separate country, in effect, on 26 January 1788, all changes since then have been a matter of detail) to have a head of state shared with another grown up democracy. It downgrades our independence, our sense of nationhood. You know the argument, and I have been known to use it myself, on more than one occasion. But now I wonder. Given the serious nature of the problems the world now faces, particularly the slow motion disaster that is global warming, but also the increasing instability and violence and religious fundamentalism in world affairs (Iraq, Afghanistan, China, Zimbabwe, Sudan, to name a few), and the increasingly untrammeled and rampaging giant corporations, I wonder if we should be seeking not more difference between countries but less. Is this really the time, I ask myself, to be asserting a rugged individualism for Australia, have not the television media outlets not done enough damage already in their blatant fomenting of Australian nationalism (not patriotism, but nationalism)? Is this really, in the very perilously late year of 2008, the time to be asserting even greater separation from the rest of the world?
And so I wondered, what if we were to make a declaration that our democracy is so mature that we have decided to seek not greater independence, but greater integration with the world. Signing, at last, the Kyoto agreement was one step in this direction, but what if we decided that we were not going to create an Australian head of state in place of the Queen, but that we would nominate the Secretary-General of the United Nations to be the Australian President/Governor-General? We would be citizens of the world, who "called no man master and had no King" (just like the Aborigines, as that great man Fred Maynard pointed out). And I reckon, with that clear example, other countries would quickly follow our lead.
It has been said that no two countries with McDonalds have ever gone to war - a bit dated now, and reeking of American Empire. But in a similar spirit I suggest that not only is it unlikely that any two countries sharing the UN as a "head of state" would go to war, but it is also unlikely they would want to impose their carbon emissions on each other.
Worth a try? Nothing else seems to be working
Note for American visitors. The idea that a country would happily settle for having the Queen of England as its head of state probably seems bizarre. It is bizarre. Because Australia didn't have to fight for independence, had no need of a George Washington, had independence handed to her on a plate (in 1901), it never noticed that the independence was only 99% complete. When the public eventually did notice, in the 1990s, there was a vote on this, rigged by the 20% of people who have always been happy to call England home. The question of an elected head of state has recently re-emerged, when the 80% suddenly realised that, once again, they had been had. .
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
When the subprime crisis began in America and people began to lose their homes, I was stunned by the reactions to any suggestion that the government might come to their financial rescue in any way. Indeed might consider any kind of regulatory response to try to reduce the chances of such financial predator-prey interaction happening in future.
As best I could tell, the reaction from those who hadn't lost their homes towards those who had was a kind of an old testament judgment that they had it coming. Or perhaps the kind of glee that sees the performer you most dislike booted off American Idol in the most humiliating way. In the familiar expressions it seemed to be evidence that "a fool and his money are soon parted" and "there's a sucker born every minute".
I was amazed by the vicious comments on blogs that anyone who had lost home and money should be left to rot. It was quite clear that significant numbers of people thought that anyone who had succumbed to the massive advertising and peer pressure, by corporations using all psychological techniques refined in the 50 years since "The Hidden Persuaders" should get no sympathy at all. Not so much three strikes and you're in, but one strike and you're out.
Everything that happens to you in life is a matter of personal responsibility, it seems. No room for errors, failures of intellect, failures of education, family circumstances, personality quirks, or bad luck. No, if you have fallen victim to the shonky business practices of the subprime world you are to be left in the gutter.
Perhaps as an example to others? But how would that work? And how can it possibly benefit society to let families go to the wall, rot in the gutter? And how many families must be allowed to do this, as a sign that personal responsibility is the only value that matters? Are we prepared to let the subpoor increase in numbers until cities become unlivable, society suffers a complete breakdown, the economy heads towards another Great Depression? Does the expression cutting off your nose to spite your face ring a bell?
And why does the same attitude not attach to the CEOs of companies that go broke for whatever reason? When was the last time that a CEO jumped from a Wall Street window without a golden parachute? When was the last time one of these people, far more culpable, far more personally responsible than the average Joe Public, took personal responsibility and refused to take the golden handout?
Whenever someone like, oh well, me, writes about the baneful influence of religion in society, I will inevitably be attacked by someone claiming that atheists like me believe in evolution, nature red in tooth and claw, believe that humans who fall by the way side should be culled for the good of the race. The Nazis will be mentioned, eugenics, Social Darwinism perhaps, all in contrast to those societies like the American in which religion plays an increasingly dominant role. Where religion rules, it will be implied, human beings are valued as god's children, suffer the little children, no sparrow falling, lilies of the field and all that.
But the reaction to the subprime victims shows this for the hypocrisy it is. Here is an atheist calling for safety nets, public housing, social support, and there are non-atheists (if that is a word) demanding that there be no room on the life boat for the drowning. Religious people seeing the subprime crisis as a way of selecting out the subhumans (a bit like Katrina). Happy to see the least of these not valued but persecuted. Happy it seems to see the possession of money as a sign of adaptive fitness, and the lack of money as a sign that someone is the weakest link in the gene pool. Have I missed some religious revision? Has the new testament been rewritten to say that all poor people are going to hell, straight to hell, do not pass go, do not collect government handout? Can the poor not pass through the eye of a needle while the rich get their own heavenly mansion (in the ultimate gated community)?
Look, you all know that, while I might have moments of bitterness I don't cling to guns and god. But you guys, well, some of you guys, do. So what I want to know is - what would Jesus do about the victims of the subprime mortgage crisis? I mean, he was a sink or swim kind of guy, right?
Check out the rest of the Watermelon Blog for moments of bitterness interspersed with the sheer exhilaration of a life free of religious dogma.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Has only just occurred to me - dumb dumb dumb.
For years I have been known, on occasion, to rant and throw things at the television screen when some particularly bad example of the dumbing down of the medium is evident. And I have always assumed that the dumbing down was the result of television execs seeking ever bigger and bigger audiences and therefore dumbing down their content to the lowest common denominator. It is a classic example of why market forces serve the community so badly - instead of television stations outdoing each other to find better and better programs to reach a better and better audience, the reverse is true. Just like petrol companies.
But it's not true. I suddenly realised that it doesn't make sense as a tactic. Think about it this way. Intelligence in the community is in the form of the usual bell-shaped curve. A few very smart people at the top, more medium smart people, same number who are medium dumb, a few very dumb ones at the bottom, and the great mass of the population, half smart, somewhere in between. Now the media need to make choices about how they provide programs for this bell. Some channels might aim right in the middle, some might go just below the middle, some just above. So you would finish up with some channels with entirely popular programs, some with some intellectual programs, some with a few really dumb programs. All would maximise a particular part of the audience.
But the race to the bottom, a bottom which includes "The moment of truth" and which briefly, and symbolically, included "The power of ten", by all channels (yes, including the ABC) is in fact cutting out, leaving behind, more and more of the smarter people in society. Eventually, when you get all the way down (and arguably our commercial channels are already there), you have restricted your audience just to about 5% of the population.
So why is it so (as was asked on an intelligent program from long ago less dumb television times)?
Well, I think now that the commercial tv channels have long ago left any sense of public service behind, and have become purely profit-making machines, licenses to make a lot of money, the aim is to find the most gullible audience. The audience that will most readily believe what they are told by advertisers (and politicians, but that is another story) and rush out to buy accordingly. If you are shovelling out money to advertise the latest make-you-look-sixteen-again-face-cream, or the let's-pretend-it's-healthy-junk-food, or the car-that-will-improve-your-sex-life, then you want it to be seen by people who will believe everything you say and rush out to boost the sales of creams and fries and cars. Not much use pitching it to the other side of the curve, they will just laugh and say, "come on, pull the other one, this one's got bells on it".
Long been said that the tv programs are just there to fill in the otherwise silent spaces between the ads. Perhaps soon there will be no point in the programs at all!
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
I don't doubt that people who support prescribed burning sincerely believe it causes no damage to the environment in contrast to wildfires. I also don't doubt that they sincerely believe that modern regimes of prescribed burns match what they think Aborigines used to do. And they also sincerely believe that if Aborigines did it then it can't be harmful. Unfortunately all those beliefs are wrong.
Aborigines didn't frequently and regularly burn the bush, and the Australian environment of 1788 was not an artefact of "fire stick farming" - there is considerable mythology and wishful thinking in all the claims about Aboriginal use of fire to "manage" the environment. Every fire causes damage to the environment, and the more fires you have the more damage you cause. Really the only difference between a wildfire and a prescribed burn (one that behaves properly) is that the latter is perhaps less likely to kill mature trees and large wildlife such as kangaroos. All other elements of the ecosystems, including small birds, other vertebrates, invertebrates, fungi, bacteria, herbs and shrubs, are damaged as much by a deliberate fire as an accidental one. This is not a choice between damage and no damage, or even between much damage and little damage - every fire is damaging, and the effect is cumulative over time. Prescribed burning may cause a train wreck in slow motion, but it is still a train wreck.
If you sincerely believe that prescribed burning in strategic areas will prevent bush fires (and I think this is a matter of faith not proof) then use it in this way, carefully and judiciously, and to the minimum extent that you think it will protect life and property. But demanding that all the bush be burnt all the time is going to result in the more or less rapid destruction of forests and woodlands that I am sure you are sincere in valuing.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
The runner (a tv "personality" I think they said) who had the Olympic torch almost wrestled from her by a protester in London, said later, to her credit, words to the effect that it was good that she lived in a society where protest could happen. It was of course the "right" thing to say, the kind of thing that will form a feel-good sound grab on the news bulletins. But no one seemed to note the irony that the protester concerned had been wrestled to the ground, that the torch was surrounded by a flying squad of Chinese secret police and riot squad police, and that all the protesters were treated physically very harshly by police.
I don't really want to add much to all the words debating whether it is appropriate to use the torch relay for protest because the relay is a symbol of all the good things the Games are about. But it is worth noting that the torch relay was invented by the Germans for the 1936 Berlin Games, and you can guess the symbolism they attached to it. And amid discussions of boycotts (instantly rejected by Mr Rudd, who is rapidly adopting John Howard's approach to dealing with such issues) it is worth noting that the Berlin Games wasn't boycotted (would it have made a difference, who knows?) while the Moscow Games in 1980 were, to protest against the Russians sending troops to Afghanistan to deal with the rise of the fundamentalists on their border (hmm, sounds familiar, but I can't quite ...).
But I do want to talk about protest generally in the 21st century. The instant reaction to protesters on the relay was to wrestle them down and lock them up. There were almost instant discussions about shortening routes in Canberra and San Francisco, or even abandoning the relay altogether. There were discussions about keeping all protesters miles away from the relay route. It was all so familiar from earlier events like APEC and the visits of George Bush and Dick Cheney. No protest allowed anywhere near either event - in the case of Bush, no protester allowed within hearing distance, in the case of Cheney and Bush, roads and bridges completely closed off to the public. In the case of APEC the whole CBD closed down, with only comedians permitted access. And if somehow protesters still manage to get near the events they are protesting they will be met with tear gas, water cannons, tasers, police horses, baton charges, mobile prison cells. The media will present all of this as perfectly normal for a western democracy in the 21st century, and, quite without irony, show protest being prevented by similar tactics in, say, Zimbabwe, China, Russia, and use it as an illustration of how undemocratic those countries are!
The constant refrain from politicians (both Left and Right) and the media, is that all protests are violent protests, and that they must be put down with all necessary force. Ignoring, deliberately I think, the obvious conclusion from any unbiased viewing of the evening news bulletins, that almost all violence associated with such events is begun by police who have been instructed to break up demonstrations as quickly as possible with whatever force it takes.
Governments all round the world hate visible dissent because it shows that policies they are pursuing are not unanimously welcomed by their populations, and because it can have political ramifications for unpopular governments. In the past the dissent was mainly put down by dictatorships. Now, it seems, in all western countries as well, the right to express public disagreement with your government has been removed. And the media, who should be protecting that right, has been a major factor in seeing the end of it.
No protests in Beijing's Tianamen Square, and none, it seems, for Canberra's Petrie Plaza either.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Frank Luntz wrote a memo for the American Republican Party in the year of '02, preaching, among other things, that instead of using the term "global warming", Republicans substitute "climate change" because "while global warming has catastrophic communications attached to it, climate change sounds a more controllable and less emotional challenge".
Now at the time I couldn't quite see the logic of this - climate change sounds very uncontrollable to me. But this division between the two terms has continued to this day on blogs and other media outlets. While Mr Luntz's attempt to soothe the savage scientist may or may not have worked in semantic terms in quite the way he intended, it has certainly become an effective tactical move.
First the deniers argued that even if the planet was warming the climate wasn't changing. Scientists would be pushed into mindless discussions about the retreat of glaciers, the frequency of hurricanes, the meaning of droughts. This barrage was so effective that it made the media very reluctant to attribute any aspect of the weather to global warming (whereas in fact EVERY aspect of the world's weather is now affected by warmer temperatures). And the politicians would echo this - no of course we couldn't say that Katrina was caused by global warming. The public, reading this "debate" would be encouraged to believe nothing that their senses were telling them about a changing world environment was of any relevance to global warming.
But suddenly a switch. Seizing upon an abnormally high temperature in 1998, and a relatively (in context) low one in 2007, the result of the El Nino - La Nina cycles, the deniers again began pretending to believe that global temperature wasn't increasing. Now snowfalls here, and snow falls there, and very cold nights somewhere else, and an apparent lack of severe tropical storms, and a professed belief that we would all be better off living in Florida's climate anyway, became climatic indicators that there was no problem at all in the world that couldn't be solved by wishing it away.
This major shift in tactics has mirrored the smaller scale shifts that have been used in the media by the denialist claque. Evidence for warming? No, climate is the thing. Evidence for climate change? No, warming is the real test. It is all reminiscent of the old carney hustlers playing the shell game or the three card trick - you think you have the argument nailed down here? No, it's over there. No, not under that one, this one. Oh, you've lost your money? Too bad, next time you might win.
Or in the words of the song - "When you think it's all over, It's only begun". But in the words of the same song - "Now the preaching is over, And the lesson's begun".
No doubt the lessons are beginning, had begun well before the year of '01, as Mr Luntz must have known (and knows now, it seems), and soon all the cards will be the Queen of Spades.
My cards are on the table on The Watermelon Blog.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Kevin Rudd is clearly a prime minister acutely aware of his place in history to come (although this may be simply a tautology). Even this cynical, stony-hearted, "Extreme Green" is starting to warm to the man in spite of some continuing reservations.
So I have a suggestion which would both assure his place in history as not just the most important of all Australian prime ministers (not excepting my beloved John Curtin) but perhaps the most significant world leader who ever lived (a little flattery never goes astray).
James Hansen of NASA, now arguably one of the most significant scientists of all time, has just argued, on the basis of new analysis of palaeoclimates and of climate feedback mechanisms, that the EU target of 550 parts per million of atmospheric C02 - already the most ambitious in the world - should be cut not just to 450ppm (as he previously suggested) but to 350ppm if “humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed”. Since we’re already at 385 ppm and rising 2 ppm a year and with a lot of built in rise already on the way, 350 is a stunningly difficult target. Made even more difficult as world leaders (including Kevin Rudd, one source of my reservations) keep stalling by saying they can't move until other countries do, a recipe for no action at all.
So here is my suggestion. Kevin Rudd announces that Australia is going to take the lead in aiming for a level of emissions consistent with a world target of 350ppm. He puts the country on a kind of war footing, with an education program to ensure that everyone in the country knows the 350 figure and its importance, and immediately freezes the development of new coal-fired power stations and sets targets for each state to begin drastically slashing emissions from such sources. He will announce a massive program to support the renewable energy sources that Australians have been so good at inventing and so poor at using, while making it clear that he will have no truck with the snake oil salesmen peddling nuclear power, biofuels, and "clean coal". He will end the madness of land-clearing, and wood-chipping of old growth forests, put a stop to privatisation of electricity supplies, set new standards for energy efficiency in new homes and help ordinary householders to retrofit with insulation and energy saving devices, and establish a program to phase in fuel efficient cars. He will point out that such a program will be a preemptive strike in getting Australia ready for the failure of oil supplies world wide. And he will say we stand ready to work with other countries to help them achieve the same reductions in emissions, but whatever they do, we are going ahead right now.
His speech will be Churchillian in its cadences, and he could include "blood sweat and tears" if it seems necessary.
Mr Rudd has already ensured a footnote in history as a good prime minister with his signing of Kyoto, his apology to Aboriginal people, and his decision that the last Australian Governor-General will be a woman. This is his chance to be a great prime minister.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
A good article from Steven Schwartz (Canberra Times 11 April) on the need, which I totally support, for Rudd's education revolution to include Australian universities, to produce thinkers for an uncertain future.
But the other end of the education chain is also badly in need of a boost. If I was at the 2020 summit I would be calling for a nation-building approach to school education, something that would grab the imagination of the public, the teachers, the students. The British government recently announced a £45 billion pledge to rebuild every state school in that country by 2020. How about the same pledge from Rudd and Gillard? $100 billion over 12 years to rebuild every Australian public school would capture the imagination of all Australians.
Now the British government has subsequently watered down its proposals (which include substantial involvement of the private sector) to one where every student "would be taught in a fully refurbished or new classroom by 2020", which may well be a better way of putting it anyway. But either way, a breathtakingly ambitious plan to support public sector schools, suffering from the active neglect of the Howard government and the foolish neglect of state governments, would certainly get the education revolution under way. And it would boost the morale of the public sector, teachers, parents and students, put public schools on an equal structural footing with the private schools, and reverse the socially damaging drift to the private sector encouraged by Howard.
Julia Gillard is the Minister for Public Schools. That is her role. If there are private entrepeneurs who want to set up schools to make a lot of money then fine. She must demand that they meet standards (and not, for example, get away with teaching creationism) but that is the end of her involvement. It is only the start of her response though. She should be outraged that parents would choose to leave her public school system. She should be pouring money and resources into it, making sure maintenance was carried out and infrastructure was modern, and that she was attracting the best teachers. She shouldn't be happy until, as a result of her endeavours, students came flooding back into the system. In fact she shouldn't rest until all students were in the public school system, but I don't expect miracles, and I would be happy to award her a mark of 9 out of 10 for 90%.
Kennedy set an aim of getting man on the moon by the end of the Sixties. Rudd and Gillard could set an aim of getting every public school child into decent classrooms by the end of the Tens. Give public schools a certain future and they can produce many more university entrants for Schwartz's uncertain future.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
My lovely friend Pamela (of Frogblog fame) brought this item from Illinois to my attention.
"Rep. Monique Davis (D-Chicago) interrupted atheist activist Rob Sherman during his testimony Wednesday afternoon before the House State Government Administration Committee in Springfield and told him, "What you have to spew and spread is extremely dangerous . . . it's dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists!" "This is the Land of Lincoln where people believe in God," Davis said. "Get out of that seat . . . You have no right to be here! We believe in something. You believe in destroying! You believe in destroying what this state was built upon.""
Eric Zorn who wrote about this in the Chicago Tribune noted wryly "Apparently it's still open season on some views of God". He also noted that apart from on his blog "Davis' repellent, un-American outburst received no attention whatsoever"".
Now this is all fine, and I had the reaction that Eric had and that Pam knew I would have to the item (and to another one about Monsanto's activities, but that is another story), yet another example of the intolerance of the religious believer. But on second reading the thing that jumped out at me was the phrase "it's dangerous for our children to even know that your philosophy exists". It didn't take long before I knew why this seemed so familiar. It is the attitude of the Saudi Arabian authorities to Christian converts and missionaries - kill them, jail them. It is the attitude of the North Korean or Pol Pot governments to any dissent from the party line. It is the attitude of Catholic authorities towards any heresy. The attitude of Hitler towards communists. The attitude of Stalin towards private entrepeneurs. The attitude of the French revolutionary government towards any deviation. The attitude of Joe McCarthy on HUAC. The attitude of creationists to evolution (that dangerous idea).
And it is the current attitude of the US government towards Cuba and Venezuela and Nicaragua. In all cases the approach by political, economic and religious fundamentalists is not simply to claim that their way is the best. Not simply to think that people will choose their way because of its demonstrated superiority. Not simply to engage in a free market place of ideas. Not simply to debate, to allow free discussion which evolves towards either a consensus or a diversity. No, the opposing view must be prevented from existing, indeed it must never have existed, must be declared an un-idea, expunged from history books, photoshopped out of photos. Children prevented from learning that there are alternative religions, and indeed an alternative non-religion. The public must not be allowed to know that there are alternative economic philosophies to unregulated capitalism.
A strange view of democracy to be held by a Democrat.
But not a strange view to be held by someone so uncertain of the validity of her own beliefs that she does not want to know, does not want it to be known, that any other belief is even possible.
The Watermelon Blog explores all kinds of ideas and has no intention of testifying before the House State Government Administration Committee in Springfield.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
To hear old time farmers talk, small area farmers are as bad as rabbits or thistles, as dangerous as the Taliban, as pleasant as a cold sore, as much use as a bicycle to a goldfish. The very term for them, "hobby farmers", is said with a curled lip, followed by spitting on the ground. Everything that is wrong with rural areas today is apparently the fault of hobby farmers, as they take up more and more "good farming land" and ruin it.
Well, excuse me for disagreeing. In most cases the small farms are being developed around the fringes of towns on land degraded by 150 years of poor farming practices. Over-grazing, excess super-phosphate, tree clearing, pasture "improvement", chemical use, excess irrigation; has left hard packed, bare and eroded and often salty soils. Small farmers move on to this land and set about planting trees, removing weeds, developing pasture, and, usually, keeping only small numbers of animals. They value birds and other wildlife and do their best to encourage them to come back, especially by planting tree species native to the area. The presence of trees and shrubs and small dams helps to greatly increase biodiversity. In fact I would bet that the biodiversity of, say, 10 small farms on 200 acres would be tens, perhaps hundreds of times greater than any equivalent area on traditional farms. Especially on farms practicing permaculture or the newer "edible forest gardens" techniques.
But wait, there's more. In farming areas that for generations have seen only Wheat, Hereford cattle and Merino sheep, with, occasionally, to be adventurous, AngusxHereford, and MerinoxBorder Leicester cross-breeding. or a crop of oats, small area farmers have been responsible for trying out and developing a whole range of new enterprises in rural Australia. Not bound by what their fathers and grandfathers did, not restricted in their imagination by what they grew up seeing were the only proper animals for the landscape, they have been willing to try things. Olive trees, lavender, vegetables, nut trees, alpacas, vineyards, goats, exotic cattle and sheep breeds, ostriches, rare chickens. You name it, someone on a small farm is probably giving it a go. They will read books, use the internet, join breed associations, visit field days and shows, do rural extension or Tafe courses, talk to their neighbours, observe, make notes, sell their produce in farmer's markets.
Look, I know they are not all perfect. I hear horror stories like you do. But one rotten apple does not a summer make, or whatever that saying is. For every small farmer with 10 acres of broken down cars and three dogs that run loose at night I reckon you would find 99 who are working hard at making a go at something. And who are discovering new things that will thrive in their region. And who are doing it while trying to improve the environment we all have to live in.
With the world of Australian agriculture set for massive change as a result of global warming, it seems to me we need more new ideas, not less. The old ways are not going to work in ten or twenty years time. If you have a small area farmer as a neighbour stop and have a chat some time, find out what they are up to and how it is going. You won't find too many who think what they are doing is just a hobby. And if you are a small area farmer? Take a bow. Keep up the good work.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
"If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" said Isaac Newton, imitating Robert Burton and Bernard Chartres. Not true of course. Newton wasn't often wrong - except of course about the way the universe actually worked - but this time he was. It is often quoted though, as some kind of indication of the way science works.
But science doesn't work through the efforts of a series of giants, and Isaac has unwittingly played into the hands of those who neither understand science nor want it to play any part in the modern world except for developing large screen televisions. I'm reluctant to tackle Isaac, a giant himself in anyone's estimation, including his own, but having mildly contradicted Charles Darwin a while back I feel I'm on a roll.
So here goes - scientists, including Newton, don't stand on the shoulders of giants but on the shoulders of pygmies. Who on turn stood on other pygmies. Who in turn stood on other pygmies. And so ad infinitum. Or at least and so on back to Ancient Greece.
The point about scientific endeavor is that it almost always proceeds by small steps, each step having to be related to, rationalized with, the step that was taken just before. Oh, sure, there are occasional big breakthroughs, paradigm shifts, but they are rare, and even they have to take into account all that has preceded them and make sure that the jump is in accord with all the evidence and theory that is being cast aside.
Imagine it as a relay race, the baton being passed from one runner to the next, each examining it closely to make sure it is an actual baton before making minor changes to it and then passing it on in turn. A line of runners extending back through some two and a half thousand years. Occasionally a runner who is a better athlete than others, or who has sharper eyes, will realize that after all the changes the baton is no longer working properly, can't be held in the hand comfortably. and they will make major changes to its design and function before passing it on to the next runner as before.
This process, of having to not only satisfy yourself, but to be at the end of a chain of thousands of others who have also had to be satisfied, is what sets science apart. Yes the scientific method of testing hypotheses is somewhat more rigorous than the way our minds work in everyday life, but fundamentally science is different to, say, religion or politics, because no scientist operates in an a-historical vacuum. Unfortunately the media does, and it treats scientific progress as if it is a series of pronouncements coming out of the blue, just like the ranting of a televangelist or a candidate for president.
The average person in the street is confused by this treatment, and sees the scientist as just someone who has had a hunch or an opinion or has made a lucky guess. Joe Six Pack could do those things, might get a winning lottery ticket for example. The evangelical in the pew thinks that there is no reason to think that the average scientist is any more likely to be right than the average preacher. The school student thinks that the pieces of science they are being taught are no different to the items of undigested news they see on television. And politicians are quite happy to go along with the opinion of a single climate change denier, or a foolish creation scientist. There is no reason to take action on climate change - just the opinion of James Hansen. No reason not to teach intelligent design along side evolution in class - the opinion of Michael Behe is no worse than the opinion of Charles Darwin.
Next time you hear this kind of analysis picture the pygmies, a great chain of thousands of them, sitting on each other's shoulders. Then ask yourself who is seeing further.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
It is hard to understand how Don Aitkin (Canberra Times 3 April) could have taken 12 months to put together the extraordinary collection of ill-informed views that he has presented to readers of that newspaper. It is an outburst that would be typical of any shock jock, or oil company funded climate change denier. Impossible to know where to start with refuting it. Melting of sea ice doesn't cause sea level to rise? Good heavens, who would have thought? But the melting of glaciers, as well as the melting of ice in Greenland, Antarctica and other ice covered land does. And the melting of sea ice in the Arctic is a sign of a planet in trouble, and a recipe for feedback growth of heating, quite apart from ecological damage. Temperature rise in the past? Again, who knew? But the recent temperature rise is unprecedented in its speed and of even more concern because it is happening on a planet already under ecological stress, and with the small question of 6 billion human beings whose future is now grim. In addition, temperature rises in the past did cause extinctions. No temperature rise since 1998? Nonsense. The graph heads ever upwards, interrupted only by a particularly hot year in 1998. Sun activity? Only a small part of the warming. In fact temperatures should now be dropping in relation to solar activity. Not linked to CO2? How could anyone present that as a serious proposition? The physics is known, the correlation clearly observed. He is "prepared to accept" temperature rise "0.6 of a degree plus or minus 0.2 of a degree over the 20th century"? What does he mean? What temperature rise is he prepared to accept in the 21st century? Two degrees, three degrees, four degrees? Does he know the climatic and ecological implications of those rises? Try reading climatology and ecology for the next 12 months Professor Aitkin, then come and talk to us again.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Contrary to the opinion of Tony Bartlett (Canberra Times 3 April) there is absolutely no doubt that prescribed burning (ignore the euphemisms such as "managed fires" or "controlled burns") causes extensive environmental damage including loss of biodiversity. Nor any doubt that the more frequent the prescribed burns the greater the damage. The really worrying thing is that this is damage being done to ecosystems already under stress from weeds and feral animals, "ecotourism" (another euphemism), fragmentation as a result of development, cattle grazing, trail bikes, four wheel drives and so on. And an even greater worry, over riding all the rest, is that all Australian ecosystems are now under stress from global warming, stress that will continue to grow. At the moment we can do little about that, but we can try to reduce the additional stresses such as prescribed burns. Such burns may or may not (the question is an open one) be useful in protecting property, but even if you believe they are they must be used in a circumspect and restricted way, recognising that every burn is doing damage. Every burn.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
My young grandchildren have a very simple jigsaw puzzle. Shapes have been cut out of pictures of cars, each piece with a little knob. When you lift the shapes out of the holes they fit into you find underneath an identical picture of the car. Makes it easy for each child to match up the pictures, and put the jigsaw pieces back into exactly the right spot.
Have thought about this arrangement increasingly as this government has become bedded down. It was said "change the government, change the country". But it seems to me that all that has happened is that the little shapes of Liberal ministers like Costello and Turnbull and Abbott and Brough have been removed from their slots, and Swan and Garrett and Roxon and Macklin have been slotted in to the same pictures.
Day after day it seems come decisions from this new government that could easily have come from the old one. No action on any of the environment issues; the Productivity Commission called in over maternity leave; a razor gang slashing public programs; tax cuts sacred; Aboriginal kids sent to boarding schools; voluntary student unionism left in place. And on and on it goes, the new ministers rapidly becoming indistinguishable from the old ones, the pieces slotted into their predetermined places in the apparently fixed picture.
So who decided that a change in government would definitely not mean that the country changed? And has the same decision been made for America next year?
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
Remember the song "I was a big man yesterday, but boy you ought to see me now. Well I talked big yesterday, but boy you ought to see me now"?
Reminded of it when I see reports of the former ministers of the defeated Howard government Costello and Vaile and Downer and McGauran and Andrews and Ruddock all planning to pick up their bat and ball and go home.
But worse. Former Foreign Minister Downer won't shut up. Still talking big. You would think he (well, all of them) would be too embarrassed to speak out about his record, but no, he was at it again the other day criticising "the United States' strategy in the Iraq war, saying more troops should have been deployed in the early stages of the conflict. Mr Downer says getting rid of Saddam Hussein was the right thing to do but the Americans failed to back up their gains with sufficient troop numbers after the initial invasion." It's a bit like a member of a team of a failed team of bank robbers, saying that if only they had shot all the bank staff and blown up the building the robbery could have been a success.
Mr Downer has forgotten everything and learned nothing. Alex, we helped to invade (illegally invade, but that is a tautology) another country. We were there while everything in the country except the oil ministry was destroyed, either by bombing or looting. Watched as we helped foment a civil war. Watched as close to a million Iraqis have died, and 2 million more have fled the country. Watched as women's rights vanished, schools were destroyed, a health system made dysfunctional, Watched as electricity supplies and sewerage and water systems failed. Watched as the Arab world became more and more radicalised.
And Mr Downer, all for what? To destroy a country that had already been so much damaged by UN sanctions (while we watched) that it was no threat to anyone. No WMD (your friends lied Mr Downer, did you know?). No Al Quaeda. Could it all have been, do you think, Mr Downer, to get control of the oil? Do you know about the legislation, being pushed by the Americans, to privatise and sell to non-Iraqi companies, all the oil resources of the country? Do you think that is a coincidence?
Do you have nothing to say about all this Mr Downer except that we should have invaded more viciously?
Did I say he was a big man yesterday? No, he wasn't. A big man would have tried to help stop the invasion happening. That would have given him the right to speak about it after five miserable years for the people of Iraq.
Being a cheerleader for the invasion gives him no such right. Take your bat and ball, Alex, you have tarried too long in this parliament for what good you have done.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
In Russia they have a custom of diving into the river in the middle of winter, ice blocks floating, and then jumping out and rolling in the snow. In Sweden, the sauna experience involves sitting in a small hut shoulder to shoulder with naked sweaty men, pouring water on to red hot rocks, lashing yourself with pine branches, and then running outside to roll in the snow.
There are tribes who knock out teeth for initiation, others who carve delicate pieces from the body or tattoo other pieces. There are teenagers, not far from here, who pierce bits of metal through all kinds of body parts. There are men who will happily sit in a stuffy room smoking large cigars with other men.
None of it would do for me I'm afraid. Nor climbing mountains, diving in deep cave lakes, or jumping off cliffs with a rubber band tied to my ankles. Different strokes for different folks, right?
So I don't have any problem, either, with groups of people banding together in stuffy halls, singing dopy songs, being harangued by often apparently certifiably insane men about imaginary beings imaginary life after death and imaginary punishments, and paying big chunks of money for the privilege. Hell, if people pay money to go bungee jumping, who am I to say they shouldn't pay money to religious charlatans (a tautology of course)?
All fine by me then - atheists are inevitably easy going about the huge diversity of often whacky beliefs that go to make up human conversation on this dying planet of ours. But we do get pardonably a little testy about one thing, compulsion.
No one is trying to make me roll naked in the snow, or leap from a tall building, or shove sharp metal objects through my most delicate body parts. But the groups of people who gather in large buildings to be harangued by preachers are trying to make me do stuff. They are trying to change laws to affect the way everyone lives, reduce freedoms to see and hear things, damage science, determine foreign policy, make sure that elected officials will obey their wishes. Make sure, in fact that only true believers can be elected.
And, worst of all, they are trying to ensure that their children, everyone's children, will be brainwashed to become true believers in turn. The children of bungee jumpers may or may not decide to follow the lunatic example set by their parents. The children of evangelicals will have a hell of a time breaking away, and will almost inevitably find it psychologically impossible.
So there you have it. I'll happily walk to church with you, and wave goodbye cheerfully as you go inside the door. I'll wait for you to come out and we can resume our friendship. Hell, I will even go Christmas shopping (though secretly viewing it as a pagan midwinter festival with a very long history) and pretend to enjoy Christmas carols.
But please, don't start a political war in favor of your version of Christmas, or your version of the good life. That's when my famous tolerance of diversity comes to a grinding halt, and I man the secular barricades shoulder to shoulder with Richard and Sam and Daniel and even Christopher. The five musketeers, one for all and all for one.
If you enjoyed this post,
please tell your friends!
"Be light, stinging, insolent
and melancholy" (Tynan)
The following post is a talk I gave at a WA Conservation and Land Management conference "Fire In South-Western Australian Ecosystems: Impacts and Management" held in Perth in April 2002. It was later published (see reference at end) but is not widely available, and I thought people might find it useful to have it available on this blog together with my other writing on fire and the environment. My apologies for its length!
When I was a young fellow growing up in the suburbs of Perth a book was published, in September 1950, which was to be one of the first of the blockbuster "popular science" books. It was "Worlds in Collision" by Immanuel Velikovsky. It was reprinted a staggering 13 times over the next ten years selling many tens of thousands of copies, and author and title were household names in the 1950s.
The book was nonsense. Velikovsky's theory was that the planets had moved around the solar system in a kind of celestial game of snooker, and the collisions between them, and the after effects, could explain all the history of climate and geology of the planet, and the evolution of organisms, and all human development. The collisions and their effects had continued not only through the last few hundred thousand years but into historical times.
The book was based on an obsessive belief in the theory and a willingness to force every piece of information the author could find, every reference to the heavens in ancient texts, into the mould of his vision. If you know the truth, really know the truth about the past, all evidence must accord with that truth.
The acceptance of the book by the general public was understandable - a claim to explain everything about the past all wrapped up in a simple theory is enormously appealing. Why though wasn't Velikovsky's book immediately discredited by the scientists of the day? Because a cosmologist reading it would say - "well, the cosmology is of course complete rubbish but the geology looks very interesting". A geologist would say, "well the geology is nonsense, but gee there are some interesting ideas about biology here", an historian would say, "well of course his reading of history is insane, but this stuff about planetary movement is really intriguing". And so on.
Because the book combined material from many disciplines, no one was game to tackle it. Real scientists tend to feel a bit constrained about intruding into other disciplines, and they may give the book the benefit of the doubt, assuming the areas they don't have expertise in are ok. This lack of analysis by scientists didn't matter much for "Worlds in Collision". Like the 60s blockbuster "Chariots of the Gods" it was pretty harmless fun, with no implications for human activity in the real world.
In the last few decades a view of the Australian past has been popularised which, not just implicitly, but explicitly, has very serious outcomes in the real world. It is a view which combines interpretation of evidence from a number of different disciplines, it has been very popularly received by the general public and supported by the media and by political interests with particular agendas, and it has led to the justification of some behaviours and attitudes, and ever increasing demands for action of certain kinds.
The ideas about Aboriginal use of fire and the effects of such use preceded the evidence for them. In the last 30 years data from disciplines including archaeology, ethnography, biology, geomorphology, anthropology, palynology and history have been used by some people not to evaluate the validity of those ideas but to demonstrate their truth. The greater the popularity of the ideas, and the more they became a source of support for vested interests, the less critical has been the examination of the data. The media has played a major role, giving great publicity to the latest claims of proof, and no publicity to the voices of criticism.
Generally, combining data from a number of different fields and using them to investigate a single idea would be seen as a strength. In the firestick farming case it has proved a weakness - practitioners in each discipline have assumed that they can build on the work of the other disciplines and that any doubts that they might have are cancelled out because of the assumed strength of the combined evidence from all the disciplines.
There is also an assumption that if there are many separate pieces of evidence, even if some are wrong, some must be right. But the case is a house of cards, and as soon as you start, without preconceptions, picking away at the evidence in any of the disciplines, the whole lot comes tumbling down.
The idea that has been dubbed "fire stick farming" was from the start that most dangerous thing, the unfalsifiable hypothesis. This was made explicit by Rhys Jones who said that every change in the environment in the past was to be considered the result of human activity unless it could be demonstrated not to be.
So, high levels of charcoal in a swamp deposit? Fire stick farming. Low levels? Fire stick farming. Historic evidence of scorched tree trunks? Fire stick farming. No scorched trunks? Fire stick farming. Historic reports of many fires? Fire stick farming. Few reports of fires? Fire stick farming.
This monolithic interpretation of evidence extends to the model itself. The model demands that fire stick farming, in contrast to fires in recent times, was conducted in cool seasons when the conditions were such as to allow little gentle fires to run very slowly and quietly. Hence Aborigines would have burnt the bush in Spring or Autumn with moisture in the ground and vegetation, and little wind. In fact historic reports show the majority of fires burning in Summer. In Sylvia Hallam's work for example, of about 100 references to fire she records, 63 are in the months of December to March. Of the other 35 or so 13 are not references to bushfires, and in 14 it is unclear when the fire had actually been burning. In very few of those 35 is it clear that a fire had been caused by Aborigines. Attempts had to be made to discourage Aboriginal use of fire in the summer. Another report suggests fires being set on very windy days. The reason? Aborigines knew that on windy days the flames would be kept low!
Because we have here not a theory derived from the evidence, but evidence derived as a result of belief in a theory, there are a number of fundamental misunderstandings about the nature of that evidence. I don't have time to do more than pull away a few of the cards here.
• Fire has probably been fundamental to all human societies. The ideas of a hearth as a focal point for the family, of fire to keep wild animals or bad spirits away, fire to illuminate ceremonies or story telling, fire to cook food or keep warm, are all universal and of great antiquity. Consequently ideas about how humans learnt to make and harness fire is a common feature in mythology around the world. That these things are also true for Aboriginal societies provides no support for the fire stick farming hypothesis and is simply irrelevant.
• The general failure of observers in the past to distinguish in their reports between the smoke from campfires and the smoke from bushfires, is a major problem in ethnographic interpretation. Or, if it is a bushfire, to distinguish between a fire caused by lightning strike and one lit by humans. Or, if lit by humans, to distinguish between a fire set for the purpose of habitat modification and fires escaped from hunting trips and other such uses. The fact that in the early days of European exploration of Australia observations of campfires were used by Europeans as an indication of both human presence and human numbers means that frequent reports of fire mean very little in the context of fire use for other purposes.
• Similarly the early reports of occasional landscapes described as "park-like", so important in the fire-stick farming idea, have no bearing on it. Early European observers of Australia knew that Aborigines didn't practise agriculture. Here was the only continent on which no one practised agriculture. This being the case, the early observers knew that what they would be seeing as they explored was a wilderness of forests with thick undergrowth. There was no other alternative possible, if people didn't clear land it was wilderness. They were therefore surprised, and found it noteworthy, when they came across areas that had less undergrowth and apparently more widely spaced trees. Such reports were therefore accentuated (and the normal landscape ignored), and accentuated too because the colonists were farmers and were looking for areas to pasture sheep and grow crops. Observers had no way of knowing that variations in soils, topography and climate could cause significant variations in Australia without human intervention. Nor did they usually know whether a fire might have influenced the landscape some years before, nor, if it had, how that fire had started. It is far less excusable for writers 200 years later to also expect to see thick forest everywhere and to ignore all the descriptions of non-parklike conditions.
• A proposition designed to bolster this idea that Aborigines had turned the Australian landscape into a park is that some areas have "reverted" to thick wilderness when Aboriginal use of fire stopped. There is a lack of knowledge about European use of fire in the early nineteenth century, a failure to recognise that the effects of domestic and feral animals and plants and land clearance and fire suppression attempts also need to be disentangled, and 200 years of climatic |
money
tax relief
hunting
Republic
subprime
advertising
prescribed burning
torch relay
global warming
education
religion
small farms
evolution
democracy
Alexander Downer
religious beliefs