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The Watermelon Blog Green on the outside, social justice inside

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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

The whole heaven

I increasingly think my writing is somewhat futile. The threat from climate change is now a certainty, and writing blogs, or books, seems a bit like scribbling away in the bowels of the Titanic, hoping, in a year or two, to complete a magnum opus which the Captain will read, and, eventually, be convinced to think about reducing speed. But I would like to be up on the bridge helping to wrestle the wheel from the Captain's hands, and advising the passengers where the baling tins are, while refusing to allow the band to play 'nearer my god to thee'.

But it is increasingly obvious that I am not going to be - the captains, around the world, are still ordering more coal to be shovelled into the boilers, demanding more and more speed even as the Arctic meltdown produces ever more icebergs. So what is the point of writing at all, meeting self-imposed deadlines each week, scanning the world's media for news, forming ideas that look at the news in, well, new ways, turning accepted wisdom on its head and seeing what falls out of its pockets? Am I just a blockhead, as Samuel Johnson, were he still alive, would say?

If even the lovely Sheryl can't effectively communicate with Karl then what hope do I have of influencing anyone? I increasingly feel as if I have called out 'Fire' in a crowded cinema and run to the door, only to look back and find that all of the rest of the audience is still sitting down, munching on popcorn and watching 'Ocean's 17'.

So I can feel myself turning inwards, writing to try to make sense of what is going on, trying, day by day, to understand what is happening to us and why it is being allowed to happen. I am perhaps like Samuel Pepys recording the great fire of London, or an observer at any of the great destructive events of history - the sack of Rome, the San Francisco earthquake, the burial of Pompeii, the flooding of Atlantis, the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the fall of Carthage, the destruction of New Orleans. Events of such a magnitude that observers can't comprehend the scale of the disaster, can only look on and record what their senses tell them is happening but their brain does not believe. As Sam Pepys said - seeing 'how horridly the sky looks, all on a fire in the night, was enough to put us out of our wits; and indeed it was extremely dreadful, for it looks just as if it was at us, and the whole heaven on fire'.

Well it looks to me as if the whole heaven of the world is on fire now, and all I can really do is keep my wits about me, as best I can, and record the events as they unfold, the world as it unravels. Hope you will stay with me, looking over my shoulder, as I sit at my keyboard. By the way if you would like to take a look back down the road I've been traveling for some three years now, the rag bag I carry on my journey, with all of my writing in it, is here in the archives, all the 730 blogs. All kinds of good, bad, and glad rags in there.

The whole heaven
global warming

4 May 2007
Category Climate change
6 comments

Link

{ Post a Comment }

Please Stop Whining!

{ 7:45 AM, 4 May 2007 } { Posted by Anonymous }
Dear Mr. Horton,

I have noticed that you have no comments so I thought I would help you out.

In my opinion, you think rather a lot of yourself. No, that's not accurate: you think so much of yourself that you are trying to build yourself up into some kind of fabled intellectual-rebel-truth-seeker.

Just pretend you were reading this particular quotation coming from somebody else:
I am perhaps like Samuel Pepys recording the great fire of London, or an observer at any of the great destructive events of history - the sack of Rome, the San Francisco earthquake, the burial of Pompeii You'd think the same thing of them, wouldn't you?

In my opinion, however, you are someone who has read enough about global warming to imagine that you know precisely what's going on, and you have the hubris to think you know what the future holds. Since you like putting things metaphorically, I would say you are like the kid in the backseat telling Dad he took a wrong turn and is going to drive you all into a volcano. To be clear, I am implying that global warming isn't going to destroy the earth -- it's going to change it as it's always been changing and will change again someday.

So really, stop complaining about how nobody wants to listen to what you're saying. It's not the fault of the people not reading you, it is your fault! Al Gore had gotten hundreds of millions of people to listen to him.

In short, stop 'fetish-ising' the archetype of the unheard, unappreciated intellectual laboring selflessly away in isolation. I'm not trying to be mean, I'm just saying that's not you. And so what? Cheer up old man life's really not that bad!

[David says - Ah, Mr Anonymous, you have missed the point. I wasn't flattering myself with a comparison to Mr Pepys, just the reverse. I was just making the point that I am finding it increasingly impossible to envisage the scale of disaster that is coming, just as Samuel Pepys could barely comprehend what he was seeing. But I will continue to try.]

Edited by mrpickwick on 3/5/2007 at 6:11 PM

A word to Anonymous

{ 9:46 AM, 4 May 2007 } { Posted by snowy }
Perhaps if you had the courage to post your thoughts under your real login we could engage in some meaningful debate. While I don't agree with David in the means to combat global warming, I do share his concern at the apathy of people such as yourself. Apart from a few patronising comments, you have offered nothing positive to the debate. I guess I'd hide behind an anonymous login if that's the best I could do too.

Edited by snowy on 3/5/2007 at 7:36 PM

On Anonymity

{ 10:33 AM, 4 May 2007 } { Posted by Robert }
I'm sorry, I don't have a login for this particular site but my name is Robert, Mr. 'snowy'.

I didn't offer anything to the debate, you point out, but of course that same criticism must apply to the author of the piece to which I'm responding. Complaining that nobody listens to you is immature and unproductive.

If you want some productive input, here it is.

1. Climate models are based on the fact that we use the same technology (e.g., the same sort of carbon-producing manufacturers and cars) for the next one-hundred years. Looking backwards, we see the folly of imagining things won't change in 100 years. Thus, we should take into account the assumption that technology will become cleaner and more efficient on an exponential basis--just as it has been doing.

2. Move beyond carbon credits. The amount of world that can be planted in trees is finite; Al Gore alone has bought tens of thousands of acres of "trees" to offset the carbon he makes. This is a silly way to go: we can't use tree plantations to forgive our environmental "sins."

3. Bring faith back into the debate. The author of this blog is decidedly anti-God, but I think faith in God is the strongest incentive for protecting His creation. Otherwise, who cares if we makes species go extinct or sea levels rise? If most people prefer rampant biodiversity and present climate, then we'll preserve it, but otherwise, let's destroy the earth--there are no ultimate consequences to humans other than death--and we're all going to die anways, so who cares?

[David says - Hmmm, Imaginary friend versus only livable planet within 20 light years; Only livable planet within 20 light years versus imaginary friend. It really is a tough choice. How to decide, how to decide ...]

Edited by mrpickwick on 3/5/2007 at 8:51 PM

Well then, Robert

{ 10:51 AM, 4 May 2007 } { Posted by snowy }
Perhaps it's time you did get a login for this site.

You still haven't said anything that you can substantiate, and your third point gives the lie as to where you're really coming from.

Take heart

{ 3:17 PM, 4 May 2007 } { Posted by Anonymous }
Hi David. This is so poignant and beautifully written. It made me sad; I know we all have these days where the eternal hope spring seems to be nearly depleted, just like all the other natural resources we've abused and taken for granted... I gave another blogger I read a pep talk the other day because he wrote a similar post, saying maybe he'd be better off writing a home and garden blog (http://antwerp.wordpress.com/2007/05/01/the-ultimate-u-turn-in-blogging/). We need you, we need each other, don't give up the fight!

Take heart...and/or take some time off blogging

{ 9:35 AM, 5 May 2007 } { Posted by Anonymous }
e.g. to answer emails from your friends!

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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)