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

For the purpose of eliciting truth

Chapter 17
‘for the purpose of eliciting truth’ (Luther, 1517, explaining the purpose of his 95 Wittenberg Theses)

‘Let us weigh the gain and loss in calling heads, that God exists. Let us estimate the two chances; if you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing. Do not hesitate then; gamble on his existence.’ (Pascal, Pensees )

‘I refute it thus’ (Samuel Johnson, kicking a stone, when asked how he would refute the proposition that the world was imaginary).

When Norman Tindale decided that Aborigines had extensively changed the Australian landscape by the use of fire, so extensively that there was no natural vegetation left, he caused a great shift in the belief systems of Australian archaeologists and those elsewhere. It was, at the time, a welcome corrective to the view of Aborigines as ‘parasitic’, a view that began with James Cook, and had continued in to the 1950s and even today. Terra nullius meant, in effect, not making use of the land, and here was a massive antidote to that description of Australia.

The general public makes a distinction between religion, based on faith and belief, and science, based on facts and experiments. While it is true that there are no facts and experiments in religion, it is emphatically not the case that there is no faith and belief in science.

A radical new theory, like that of Tindale’s, has the same impact in the scientific community as a new religion does in the religious community. Converts flock in, and what was once reformation becomes new orthodoxy. The converts see the whole world through the eyes of belief. Everything either becomes consistent or can be explained away. And eventually the new church closes in on itself, the doors are closed, and non-believers are treated with at best suspicion, at worst hate (and, in the world of religion, though not, yet, science, death to non-believers if the opportunity arises). It takes a challenge, nailed to the church door, to rattle the windows and shake up the doors, and get a new view of the world going.

The strong element of belief is dangerous in science as in religion because it prevents people seeing things. If you believe that people caused extinctions and that if they did the theory requires that it happened very fast and left little evidence, then the less evidence, the stronger the belief. If you believe that Aboriginal use of fire modified the environment and turned forest into parkland and woodland into grassland, then every explorer’s mention of trees more widely spaced than seemed natural to him becomes evidence for fire-stick farming. If you believe in fire-stick farming then any change in the pollen record becomes evidence for human arrival, at no matter what date.

So let us try to nail some theses to the door, though I think we can do it in less than Luther’s ninety-five:

• You can learn from the past, but anyone who professes certainty about the events of the past, their cause and meaning, including me, should be treated with as much scepticism as someone who professes to foretell the future.

• Aborigines haven’t been here forever. But at more than 50,000 years, they have lived on the same piece of land longer than any other human group on earth except the Chinese.

• Isolation, whether in Australia as a whole, or in Tasmania, doesn’t result in brain death. It does result in unique cultural and social attributes.

• Aborigines didn’t practice agriculture not because they were stupid, but because the linkages between religion, society, culture and the land were so strong that they could not be broken.

• Nothing, plant, animal, or human, is doomed to extinction by its genetic, taxonomic, social or cultural nature.

• The species of plants and animals, their abundance, their arrangement into ecological communities, and the form and distribution of those communities, as seen by William Dampier, Jan Carstenz, James Cook, Willem Vlamingh, Tom Cobley and all, would have been the same whether or not Australia was or was not also occupied by people.

• Aborigines did not cause the extinction of the megafauna (or the dinosaurs) and it is unlikely that they have caused the extinction of any element of the fauna and flora. The environment that present day Australians inherited when James Cook planted the flagpole, was the end result of millions of years of evolution and adaptation to a unique climate and land.

• Aboriginal use of fire changed nothing in the environment except in the sense of the short term outcomes which follow any fire.

• Aboriginal interaction with the environment was not aimed at exploiting it by changing it to a simpler form but at maintaining the biodiversity at the highest possible level.

• If you want to see what the Australian environment looked like in 1787 take a look in a wilderness area. It won’t be exactly the same, because the effects of 20 million people and their baggage are all pervasive, but it will be pretty close. All other parts of Australia are now very much depleted.

• If you want to practice control burning in order to protect houses or farms then do it in the same way as you would use a bulldozer to clear a fire break, but don’t pretend that you are doing anything but damage the environment.

• If you commercialise an environmental resource you do so to make money. Don’t pretend that it also benefits the environment.

• The economics of hunting and gathering help to conserve species, the profit motive does not.

• Aboriginal people weren’t conservationists in the western sense. But the effects of their beliefs were so strong as to protect the environment for a very long time. If this is true of Aboriginal people, effectively isolated from the rest of the world for years, it is a fundamental part of being human. Pursuing agriculture means you must suppress this human trait.

• The Australian environment in 1787 was not an artificial construct of human making which needs to be constantly interfered with. It was a natural construct of a long history and the things we are losing now will not be recovered.

• You can’t construct experiments in the past or the future. Certainty of belief is dangerous because you can’t readily undo mistakes, and much will be irreversible.

• Such losses and changes in fauna and flora as Australia experienced in the past were the result of massive swings in climate. This is going to happen again with Greenhouse, particularly if this exacerbates the El Nino events. If we don’t succeed in stopping this change, then we will again lose extensive elements of the environment. We will no more be able to prevent this effect than Aborigines were 25,000 years ago.

• The more diversity we lose, the less chance there will be for environmental recovery to ever occur.

• Maintaining trees was a vital part of Aboriginal maintenance of the environment. Australia now has only a tiny percentage of the number of trees present in 1788, a number which had been kept at the highest possible level through years of climatic change. It is not just the loss of forest areas that has been critical, but the loss of trees in the woodlands of the slopes and plains, once an enormously rich and diverse area biologically.

The extinction of the Australian megafauna, the result of a climatic event, was a very loud early wake up call. Now it is high noon, have we heard the call? That change to a hotter drier climate caused a large number of extinctions, even though there were no exacerbating effects of human modification of the environment, and it will happen again. Aboriginal maintenance of the environment, the retention of trees and biodiversity is a greenprint for the future. If the effects of Greenhouse arrive when the environment is not equipped, then the effects will be greatly multiplied. We need to be in shape to weather the storm, just as, we are told, the economy needs to be in shape to weather the Asian economic crisis. The coming environmental storm will affect every aspect of society economy and culture, unless, to use a Costello phrase, we can fireproof ourselves. We also need to do what we can to diminish the effects of Greenhouse — arguing for an increase in our own emissions is not a promising start.

There is a clear distinction between the Horton and Tindale (and Hallam, Jones and Flannery) views of the past, and a clear choice about their implications for the future management of the Australian environment. We need to gamble one way or the other. Whether I am right or wrong, action based on my view of the past provides a good chance of positive future outcomes for the Australian environment.

Will we learn the truth about the past, or will the future conquer us? Conquer the past and have a new future.

“‘Did Widmerpool increase his own speed?’ ‘Not at first they told me. Then he began complaining again that they weren’t running fast enough. He started to shout “I’m running, I’m running, I’ve got to keep it up.” ... Somebody heard Lord Widmerpool shout “I’m leading, I’m leading now”’” The last moments of Widmerpool, Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time.

For the purpose of eliciting truth
global warming

25 December 2005
Category History Conquerors
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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)