The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside
"We can do better" (Kennedy)
Richest fluency
"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body." Walt Whitman
During the recent visit of Mark Latham to the Tasmanian forest a union official of the forestry workers was interviewed and said that the issue was simple, it was 'Spirituality versus jobs'. No question in his mind that the answer was 'jobs'.
Now this simple comment so beautifully highlights the public misconception about conservation of the environment that it deserves comment (although even if you thought it was true, imagine the case of a building worker's union observing that there was a shortage of land for building in the cities and that it was essential that churches be bulldozed and graveyards ripped up to make room for apartment blocks and shopping centres, and commenting that the issue was 'spirituality versus jobs').
There may well be people who have a spiritual dimension to their feelings about forests, just as there are people who have a spiritual dimension to feelings about V8 cars or Collingwood football, but the small number of such people are completely irrelevant to the reasons for the environmental movement. The union official seems to think that 'the environment' is over there somewhere. That piece of remaining forest is the environment and we can choose whether to clearfell it or not. But we would only choose to keep it, he thinks, because some people see that bit as like a church. No jobs or money in churches of course.
But the environment isn't that bit of forest, it is the world we live in, all of us, including union officials. In order for us to live in it the planet has to be capable of supporting life (unlike Mars or Venus). The only reason it can support life is that all of the living things that make up the environment - trees, bacteria, birds, fungus, grasses, ferns, frogs, insects, spiders, kangaroos, worms and so on - keep the soil and the air in a stable condition by circulating water and oxygen and nutrients.
So much damage has already been done to the environment, all over the world, not just in Australia, that it is in danger of losing its ability to support life, including human life. The global warming, and the rise in salinity, are just two of the symptoms that things are breaking down. It is as if someone took a sledge hammer to a V8 car and kept smashing off bits, each time saying 'look, it is still working. I can keep smashing a bit longer'. When environmentalists say it is time to stop clearing the last bits of Australian forests they are not saying it for spiritual reasons but for reasons of survival - for all of us, whether we are in a union or not. If the answer to jobs in Tasmania is to keep clearing forests then someone is asking a fatally wrong question.
"You are a person of some interest,one comes to you and takes strange gain away." (Pound)
"I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but the continual drinking of knowledge. I find there is no worthy pursuit but the idea of doing some good for the world." (Keats)
"nothing startles me beyond the moment. The setting sun will always set me to rights - or if a sparrow come before my window I take part in its existence and pick about the gravel." (Keats)