Green thought, in a green shade,

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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

Up a tree without a paddle

A few years ago in America one of those immensely brave young girls who care passionately about trees climbed down from the giant Redwood in which she had lived for two years. By living there, on a platform, Julia Butterfly Hill had saved that tree from logging. By the time she came down though, all that was left was a small patch of trees immediately around her tree and all the rest of the forest was felled. She came down from the tree in 1999, having succeeded in saving what was intended to be a symbolic example of a thousand year old tree, but which turned out to be pretty much the only tree that would be saved as logging proceeded all around her. The day after she descended even that level of triumph was lost when someone who hated trees and forests (and the young people who love them) took to the saved tree with a chainsaw. The thousands of Julia Hills around the world are doing wonderful things with great courage, but I think their efforts are counter-productive in forests (in contrast to Julia's work to save the Los Angeles community farm recently, where I think the tree-climbing tactics, with Darryl and Joan, are just right).

A natural forest represents a huge community of organisms ranging from the most microscopic to the largest tree. The incredibly complex interaction between all those thousands of organisms is what maintains the forest (and enables it to eventually recover after disasters like floods, storms and fires). The difference in viewpoints between those who see a forest as just a vista of standing logs waiting to be harvested, and those who see a complex ecosystem which must be preserved before it is too late, is at the heart of environmental debates about forest conservation.

If the forestry industry can't see the trees for the wood though, it is equally true apparently that conservationists can't see the forest for the trees.

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. They think, as a result, that saving individual trees is the important thing. In this belief they are playing into the hands of the loggers and woodchippers. This is not just because the tree hugging, actual and metaphorical, can be made to seem, and indeed is, ridiculous. The everyday view is that a tree is simply a column of wood, and the idea that you can communicate with it is basically as silly as communicating with a power pole or a fence post. The conservationists then are providing just two alternatives - trees as objects of worship and trees as raw material for saw mills or chipping machines. Faced with that choice it is easy for the forest industry to convince the public that there is really no contest. It certainly suits the forest industry for it to be able to help the media portray all opposition to what they are up to in forests as looney tunes dingbats. Indeed one suspects that if the opposition wasn't there in that form already it would suit forest interests to hire a bunch of young people to play the role. The more forest is destroyed, and the fewer trees are left, the more anguished and fervent the opposition becomes, the more the forest industry receives no serious examination.

Furthermore the identification of the individual tree as the object of concern for conservation introduces the concept that a tree is a tree is a tree. We will cut trees down but people are planting other trees, of one kind or another, somewhere else, so where is the net loss? Something with a trunk and some leaves, who cares? We leave a few specimens of the original species in a clump somewhere, or as a fringe hiding the thousands of hectares of pine trees like a fake town front in a Western movie.

Trees can be replaced too - ernest schoolchildren planting trees of all kinds in school yards and elsewhere believe I guess that they are compensating for the trees that have unfortunately to be cut down somewhere else to provide jobs. But they are not.

Also, the benign image presented of logging, that it is just delicately removing a few mature trees from the forest, leaving young ones to grow up in the sunlit openings created and replace them, in an endlessly sustainable cycle, although 180 degrees removed from the reality of clear felling, is partly established in the public's mind by the sight of someone chaining themselves to an individual tree specimen.

When the young, bizzarely dressed tree huggers say that the forests are being destroyed, all that forest industry spokespeople have to do, serious in their business suits, is to make the claim that trees are being replanted so what is the problem? Serious scientists are reluctant to be seen on the side of tree huggers, reluctant to refute outrageous claims like this and to point out the real issue in the forests which is the loss of total biodiversity on a now massive and accelerating scale.

The scientists are not helping in another way. Scientific advances in cloning plant tissue, and establishing seed banks of endangered species of plants are also misleading. A cloned plant or one grown from seed doesn't prevent the species going extinct, because the plant grown in the nursery or laboratory is naked. It has none of the organisms that are associated with it in an ecosystem, from microorganisms that live on and in it, to animals that rely on it for food or shelter. If the habitat in which it lives is lost to the bulldozer then you might as well throw away the packet of seeds. They give a false sense of security, and encourage the belief that the forest can be exploited for every last gram of cellulose, and then the scientists can miraculously reconstitute the biodiversity of the area by just adding water. They can't.

I don't want to be critical of the young people who are trying to fight physically to save the last of the forests. They are incredibly courageous. I wish I was half my age and had half their bravery to fight in the same way. But what I do think is that they are fighting the battle in the wrong way and in doing so are inadvertently helping the process they so passionately oppose.

The issue is not individual trees. Never was. A forest is far more than the trees which are simply the most obvious components. Every tree carries a community of organisms, the presence of every tree shelters other plants on the ground, the leaf litter falling to the ground nourishes the soil and shelters still other animals. Dead trees, standing or fallen, provide further shelter and food. The whole forest is a massively complex system. Forestry operations (including hazard reduction by fire or thinning) destroy that complexity. There have to be whole areas set aside to protect the biodiversity. Areas without exploitation.

We must insist on this. In the view of media, politicians and public that the issue is individual trees and these can be replaced, if necessary, lies the seeds of a looming environmental disaster. The scientists need to come out of the laboratories and start saying this loudly and clearly. They need to show just a fraction of the passion the young people show, and stop suggesting that science can come to the rescue after the event of extinction. The young people who are so passionate need to come into the universities and start learning ecology, so they can point out clearly and articulately the dangers of the present exploitation of forests and woodlands as whole ecosystems. Quickly, all of you, before it is too late.

Up a tree without a paddle
biodiversity

16 June 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)