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

How can you reduce the effects of bushfires?

(a) Increased 'prescribed burning' will cause great and irreversible ecological damage

(b) Whether it would be effective in reducing bushfire risk is at best debatable, and there are many circumstances in which the risk could be increased.

(c) The basic dilemma is this - if 'prescribed burning' is to be effective then it would have to be done very very frequently, but the more frequently you do it the more damage you cause.

With those conclusions I am frequently asked to say what my answer is. In a sense this is the wrong question. Much of the debate on bushfires in Australia is based on the false premise that if a fire happens it is someone's fault and all risk can be removed by the correct behaviour (based of course on common sense). I don't believe this, anymore than I think you can remove the risk of floods in Bangladesh, volcanoes in Indonesia, droughts in Africa or blizzards in Alaska. However I think there are a number of approaches which could be usefully taken which might improve things.

1. There should be studies to try to understand and reduce arson attacks. Heavier penalties might help (it could be argued that the crime of arson should rank as the most serious crime in Australia), but ultimately we need to change public attitudes to fire and let people understand the damage caused by fire. Changing media approaches, and undertaking education programs might help.

2. Similarly there need to be studies of the causes of accidental fires with the aim of greatly reducing those. Both education programs and changes in design of equipment and work practices might reduce the number of fires caused by cigarette butts, camp fires, trains, electricity wires, tractors, electric fencing, welding, chain saws and so on. In Australia in the summer it should be assumed that all areas are under total fire bans except on rare occasions, instead of the present reverse procedure where total fire bans are in place only rarely.

3. Many others have made this point but Australia needs to be much more careful about where it allows houses and tourist facilities to be built in forested areas, and, when they are built, to be much more careful about the design and building materials of such structures. Building wooden houses on stilts on the edge of a gorge for example and then demanding that all the trees be cut down to prevent fire seems to me a very strange approach. The present scattering of valuable property all over the forested areas is resulting in a great demand for fire fighting resources which can't be met, and means that fire fighters are constantly forced into property protection mode (and their lives put at risk) instead of trying to put fires out.

4. Considerable resources must be put into the equipment needs of firefighters. In many ways we are still fighting fires in the same way as we did 100 years ago. A research and development effort comparable to just a part of the effort that is put into defence equipment development could see substantial improvement in our ability to both control fires and keep fire fighters safe. In particular there needs to be investigation of how best to hit lightning fires that start in rugged country before they build up force. If Australia were to develop new equipment it would be much in demand in other parts of the world.

5. Finally the committee could exert pressure on the government to sign the Kyoto protocol, and to try to influence the Americans to also do so. It should be evident by now that whatever the possible costs to Australia of implementing the protocols, agricultural losses caused by extreme climatic events, and the gradual heating up and drying out of the continent will be much greater. Fire events are also likely to greatly increase with more frequent droughts, high temperatures and strong winds. In relation to fire, the direct financial losses are huge and the indirect environmental losses are going to be much greater over time.

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'. Destroying something in order to save it is never a useful approach.

How can you reduce the effects of bushfires?
fire

1 January 2006
Category Fire
1 comments

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Prescribed burning

{ 10:40 PM, 3 November 2009 } { Posted by Anonymous }
your spiel about reducing incidence of accidental fires makes sense... untill you consider the storms that drop lightning but little (if any) rain. kinda blows the whole if we stop people lighting fires then there'll be no fires and everything will be fine. possibly the solution is to have an awful lot of water stored and create a little bubble of water mist around your house when the big one comes through. [David says - Thanks for dropping by. I wasn't suggesting that if we stopped people lighting fires there would be no fires. Lightning has caused fire for millions of years. All I was saying is that you would reduce the number of fires.]

Edited by mrpickwick on 3 November 2009 at 2:34 PM

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