Green thought, in a green shade,

Green views

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

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:

"Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now."

"landscape that had been farmed for 2000 years or more but had retained some biodiversity and variety."

"So now there are calls for children in schools to be only taught that nuclear power is good for you."

"One of those human-animal hybrids reared its head again the other day and said "Moooo"."

"If you want people to be always under control then simply abolish the concept of "private", and it will get rid of those silly philosophical arguments between teenagers on the meaning of life and the concept of identity."

"if you had to choose one person who is most responsible for the failure of governments, particularly the American and Australian governments, to act over the last critical ten years, Rupert Murdoch is your man."

"Now, for the first time we have a literally Earth-changing event, the effects of CO2 increase on the climate of the whole planet."

"The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value."

"Lesser humans may look on aghast, as elections are fixed, opposition parties destroyed one way or another, lies told, courts and the boards of public bodies stacked with zealots, the media starved of information, laws broken, constitutions ignored, democracy trashed."

"In protests everywhere young people literally hug trees, believing, it seems, that there is some quality to a tree which allows a mystical connection with humans."

"Wow, I thought, Peter Costello has looked up from his "tax breaks for the rich spreadsheet" for a moment and smelled the carbon dioxide."

"the inability to do a Google search and instantly find an answer to a question you are pretending doesn't have an answer sure makes even a simple country boy put one flagellum with another flagellum to make three flagellae."

"these religious fundamentalists who spread the enormously damaging creationist propaganda, inflicting a kind of mental terrorism on schools, should also be on "no fly lists"."

"While most of us saw the dangers ahead for the only planet we can live on, representatives of the nuclear power industry, and their tame scientists, saw only a marketing opportunity."

"The ones who could express that love of country through creating art were lucky, but the others who came along to see it were part of that same community spirit."

"I wonder if John Howard has phoned any of his old high school teachers to say thank you for an Australian education?"

"The problem does not lie with the Iraqi people but with the fact that they have been invaded and occupied."

"before you can say "red sky at night, shepherd's delight", there will be the usual nonsensical calls for more and more dams to be built, or for rivers to be turned inland."

"I was again struck with the reality of how badly served are farmers by the leaders of the farmers' organisations."

"They are people who saw Orwells "1984" not as a warning but as a manual."

"Such approaches would certainly be much more productive, and much less damaging than a mistaken belief in the value and benign nature of "prescribed burning"."

"The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things."

"Will the minister be happy when only 15 percent of Australians accept that humans evolved on this planet, or does he have a still lower figure in mind?"

"well, someone is going to make money out of the destruction of the planet and it might as well be me."

"The combination of course let Pauline Hanson and her shadowy backers and wacky supporters off the leash and the rest is history."

"It would be hard to see any politician arguing against the need for big business to be more accountable to the community that supports it."

"Add into the mix the shockjocks on radio and television shamelessly promoting prejudice and whipping up emotions."

"brown snake bodies wrapped around them."

"Grasslands grow where they do because of combinations such as poor soils, flat lands, high temperatures and low rainfall, they are not areas where Aboriginal burning removed forests."

"It is also often claimed that Australian ecosystems are adapted to fire. This is a bit like saying that lawns are adapted to lawnmowers."

"The business community, with the governments help, is about to send us back to those horse and buggy days of employers ruling the world."

"All care will be taken, they promise, qualified pharmacists running them."

"How could you let them subsume the economy and international interests of Australia into the interests of the Republican Party of the USA"

"but where are my slippers"

"then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies."

"I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators."

"Ill fares the land, to hastening ills a prey"

"a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party."

"the evening star is coming."

"You might at least try to avoid the proposition that if there is a perceived conflict between business and "the environment" that there is no question but that the thing which goes is the environment."

"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."

" the only thing the market is good at, the only thing it is really for, is taking care of business, and it does that very well."

" let us not go rushing into this religious stuff until we see if there is anything science can't explain."

" Remember Iraq. Remember the flowers that weren't strewn on the streets for the invading armies."
" we have to work with the effects of the "progress" that has been made since Ned Ludd and his merry band were smashing the new fangled weaving machines. Go Ned, I want to say."

" Hard to tell how long the eruptions of the religion plague will last, and what damage they will do."

" Greenhouse temperature rise is a massive refutation of the proposition that the world should be run by businessmen for businessmen."

" We are pulling up the drawbridge against the peasants."

" People in areas prone to bushfires are usually advised to develop an escape plan or action plan which includes having, in easily transportable form, the core possessions you want to survive."

" most of our members were probably Methodists, it being as hard to imagine teetotal Catholics and Anglicans as it was to imagine a drunken Methodist."

" he is playing , like the grasshopper, in the warm sun of high resource prices and plenty of tourists, what happens when the prices collapse and winter comes and the tourists do not?"

" as after walking all that way I think I am capable of looking after myself."

" They can be brought out onto the streets to have some rather odd laws three thousand years old put into their courthouses."

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

Nationals Parks

Another extract from my new book manuscript 'On Fire'

I have heard a NSW National boasting that there would be much more management of national parks when they get back in to power. By management of course he meant grazing, burning, forestry, bulldozing, shooting, commercialising. The other parties are at it again too, Liberal and Labor parties, combining to get the Shooter's Party votes (sorry, that should read shooters) in to National Parks. The ACT Labor government talking about much more commercial activity in national parks, and presiding over a massive use of fire in recent times. The usual suspects in the National and Liberal parties demanding cattle grazing in the high country, and trying to get an inquiry that will back them.

With the increasing loss of the remaining small areas of forest available to the forest industry the battle has shifted to national parks. The public fear of the recent bushfires, the result of one of the most severe droughts yet seen in New South Wales, was cynically seized upon by farmer's groups, National Party, and Forest Industries, to start laying claims. The first steps were the extensive use of fire and tracks and 'thinning out'. NPWS staff are cowed or broken by the use of legal claims. Talkback radio trumpets the message that conservation groups are to blame for the fires.

And then you saw articles in the newspapers, and outrage on the airways, condemning the creation of National Parks. Part of the argument involved the spurious one that there is ‘no such thing as wilderness’ because Aborigines managed the forests. The falseness of this argument is easy to spot because it is proposed by people who have never ever conceded that anything else Aborigines did was of any value.

The second part of this deceptive narrative is also easy to spot when you apply some tests to it. The writer or speaker (who may or may not have overt links to the forestry industry, or may just share with them part of an overall neoconservative primitive mindset) will suggest that the government has been declaring National Parks without properly supporting them and they therefore become riddled with pests and weeds. To see what is going on here, apply three tests. First, is it actually true, or does it have a great deal in common with claims of weapons of mass destruction and terrorist links in Iraq? Second, if there is some truth to it, how much of that is the result of demands by the same or similar writers for more and more access to the parks by trail bikes, horse riders, hunters, four wheel drive clubs, fishermen, cattlemen, tourist resorts, neighbouring farms, prescribed burning, and the building of more fire trails? How often has the writer condemned any attempt to limit public access to wilderness?

But finally, and this is the real test, what is the author’s conclusion? These are always claims, made by conservative politicians or their cheer squads, that beg for the punchline ‘and therefore we call on the government to provide much better levels of funding for the National Parks and Wildlife Service’, in a rational world that is the only possible conclusion to such articles. In the fantasy world of the New Right though, claims that National Parks are underfunded lead naturally to the conclusion that they should be closed down! There are of course similar lines of argument, for similar reasons, about public hospitals and public schools. As a result of this dishonest campaign populist politicians promise to get rid of these dangerous parks. The forest industry will take over management of all such areas and since the park areas will be all artificial now anyway, there will be no reason not to 'manage' them for profit. There is a feeling in these times when neo-conservatism is once again triumphant, that National Parks and wilderness carry the whiff of socialism about them, one of the last activities in Australia that still does. National Parks are owned by everyone and no one, and are important as areas where the values of society not the marketplace triumph. Such philosophy is also to do with domination over nature and a feeling that humans are not just the most important organisms on the planet but the only organisms on the planet with rights. The demand to be rid of National Parks, and the demand that prescribed burning be carried out regularly, and cattle be allowed to graze are expressions of this approach. Dominating the environment with fire and whip is clearly the mark of true manhood.

A few more years will see the end of it all. The ability to make a profit out of destroying forests will disappear with the last remaining forests, just as the ability to make a profit out of fisheries will disappear with the last fish. The public, suddenly in the post-environmental age, will look around and wonder how it all happened. Then they will increasingly feel the effects of living in a world in which the environment can no longer sustain life.

If you sensed that burning the Brindabellas every year, and logging and cattle grazing in between, just might not be in the best interests of preserving biodiversity you were right. If you also sensed that there was something not quite right in using Aborigines as an alibi for this behaviour you were also right.

We need to set limits to human domination by learning how to say no, rather as you do to teenagers and toddlers, to National Party politicians and economic rationalists, and fishermen and mountain cattlemen, and tourist resorts. Whether they like it or not there have to be areas that are off-limits to people, there have to be not just National Parks for tourists (and perhaps, in the future, logging and cattle to go with the prescribed burning) but wilderness areas for no one and everyone. Areas which are not managed by and for people. Such areas have to be more extensive in proportion to tourism areas than they are now. The more extensive they are the more they will reduce the damaging footprint of every individual in Australia.

National Parks are not there for the short term political gain of National Party politicians or the enrichment of their mates during the four year election cycle. They are there to try to preserve species that took millions of years to evolve, and ecosystems that took tens of thousands of years to develop. Evolution and development that took place without 'management' by National Party mates.

Hands off. Leave the parks alone. They are national resources, not National's resources.

Nationals Parks
National Parks

31 August 2006
Category Environment
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"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)