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

Chimp business

In this year of twin Darwin anniversaries, I find myself thinking of the great man (one of the few historical figures I would invite to a dinner party, but would he come, would he come?) even more often than in a normal year. I turn again to the Galapagos Islands, the place where, in a sense, all of the observations and ideas he had previously made on the voyage suddenly fell into place.

And I marvel again at the creationists and their stupidity which has such strong foundations in infinite ignorance. Here is a quote from a recent evolutionary thread - "I'm happy with the evolution of species within species, I'm convinced about mutation across kinds. Dog-Wolf I can cope with even if one is lupus and one canis since these words are our man-made nomenclature, Beetle-Man I find a bit too much of a leap." Leaving aside the originality of the "Beetle-Man" evolutionary link (I saw another that had Yeast-Human - whatever happened to good old primeval ooze?) this kind of sentiment erupts on every evolution post I have ever written or read. "It's all very well talking about antibiotic resistance in bacteria", someone will write, with that wonderful way they have of making a point made a million times before seem shiny and new (like Republicans and tax cuts), "but you show me where one species has ever become a different species". And they retire, having shown that Darwin fellow a thing or two about the real world.

We tend, I think, generous and empathetic to a fault, those of us on the reality-based side of the superstition curtain, to think that creationists have actually studied evolutionary theory, carefully considered it and then, having found what they believe to be one or two flaws, reluctantly and regretfully rejected it until such time as research resolves those questions. Just like the attitude of denialists to global warming.

But that sarcasm was unworthy of me, I know. Hard to resist though, when these people, whose brains scream maladaptation with every word they write, know, in fact, nothing of the evolutionary theories they are rejecting. When Darwin called his book "Origin of Species" he meant just that, an explanation of how new species came into being. His genius was to see, for the first time, that to answer this question you need to put together two apparently separate pieces of information. One everybody knew - species change over time. The second no one had previously spotted - if two populations of a species are separated geographically from each other both will continue to change over time and will eventually become so different that they will be unable to interbreed even if brought back together. This lack of reproductive potential between the two is how species are defined (they may still look very similar, and often do, a strange quirk for a "creator"), and it is important because once they can no longer breed with each other, the mutations that are accumulating in each, and the consequent natural selection processes, will continue quite independently. Each in turn can then give rise, in the right geographic circumstances, to two or more new species, and so ad infinitum.

The reason no one had spotted this obvious fact before is that on a large land mass subsequent movement of species, following their development, can obscure the fact that they were once separated (for example by the movements of glaciers, the rise and fall of sea level, the change of course of rivers, the rise of mountain ranges). What was needed was a world in microcosm, and that's what Darwin, the first naturalist to visit, found in the Galapagos group of islands. Here the development of species had occurred as populations became separated on islands too far apart for regular contact by small bird species (the famous finches). So here was a series of evolutionary events frozen in time (in a sense) and clearly visible. I have never, in the last 170 years, yet seen a creationist answer Darwin's very obvious question - why would a god go about creating a different species of finch on each island of a small group of islands? Incidentally the ability to see the process of speciation clearly in a group of islands was the reason why Alfred Wallace, working on islands in south east Asia, was also able to see how speciation worked, and went close to pipping Charles at the post.

So I suppose my question is how can creationists not be aware of this? How can they go on believing that "evolution" is merely the change within a species and not the origin of species? Do they really not know? Have they never had the wit to understand the simple proposition? Have they been deliberately misled by fundamentalist parents and teachers and preachers? Or are they refusing, dishonestly, to admit the obvious? They will grant change within a species, because changes in influenza (and other illnesses) alone make this hard to deny, but pretend that the question of separation of species has never been addressed (not just by Darwin and Wallace, but in the tens of thousands of cases of geographic speciation studied since by thousands of scientists). Because, and it is a very slippery slope indeed, once you admit that species originate in geographic separation, and then keep going their separate ways to become more or less different while maintaining clear evidence of their common origin, you have to come face to face with our Chimpanzee cousins. Once part of the same population as our ancestors but becoming separated by some chance geographic (perhaps climatic) event. And once you accept that relationship, that sense of a road not taken, can you really continue to say of the Chimpanzee "there but for the grace of god go I?" And can you really continue to talk nonsense about humans descending from beetles, or yeast, or primeval slime?



Many more attempts to reach across the curtain of superstition, bring the fundamentalists out into the light of reason, on The Watermelon Blog.

3 March 2009
Category Evolution
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When you wish

Well, here we are [drum roll] entry number 1000 on Watermelon. Never thought I'd reach 1000, but what with posts here, and pensees there, and political pontificating in between, I have staggered over the line.

Five years it has taken. Some 200 entries a year, settling down to 2 or 3 per week as old age has caught up with me in the last year or two.

So good value for all you watermelon lovers. If you are not yet a subscriber by RSS or email, why not give yourself an unbirthday present and climb aboard the love boat?

But whether you are an old faithful subscriber, or a regular visitor, or just someone who has arrived by accident seeking a watermelon recipe, you are all welcome. And please pass the word along to your friends and relatives and casual acquaintances met in the Casbah. It's a lot of work writing several deep and meaningful and occasionally wryly amusing essays each week, and the more people I reach the more I will feel loved and wanted.

Speaking of which - if you haven't stumbled upon "Stumble Upon" (http://www.stumbleupon.com/) give it a try. It is a serendipity tool for the web, finding sites (in chosen subjects) you would never find in a million years otherwise. Oh and you can recommend sites, and posts you like (hint, hint), which introduces many new visitors to the site and post in question. Just thought I'd mention it!

And so, post number 1000, and I thought I would do something a bit different (and longer than usual, but bear with me). Where I am, where we all are, is thanks to the teachers we stumbled upon serendipitously along the way, and who taught, inspired, educated, encouraged, enlightened us, and got us shooting for whichever star we had in mind.

So here is a tribute to four of mine, encountered in high school and never forgotten. Whatever I have achieved in the last 63 years and counting is due in no small measure to this lovely quartet:

The first to make an impression was probably Sheila Bruce. She may have been an English teacher for earlier classes or lower grades, but I have no memory of her having formally taught me. But her other great passion was drama, and she created, through her energy and enthusiasm, a totally unexpected tradition of excellence in drama at the school. She dressed in flowing dresses and skirts, and long scarves, all in pastel colours and floral designs. Her hair was I think blue rinsed, the shade varying from time to time. She looked like a gypsy perhaps or an artist in Bohemia, but whatever the image, it was totally different to anything I had encountered before. The women our family knew were very very conventional. She would invite students in her productions to her home and this too was a new experience. The house was light and airy with large windows, and the furnishings were as softly dressed as she was, with cushions on cane furniture, bright rugs on wooden floors and bright curtains hanging to the floor. It was nothing like the dark houses I was used to with their heavy furniture and drab colours. Mrs Bruce's house was both civilised and arty in some indefinable way, and she was opening my mind to such possibilities.

Her productions were deliberately professional, set up as a professional company might do it, and done to a standard at which they could be presented to audiences without allowances being made for us being only schoolchildren. She gathered around her students who shared her enthusiasm, and if you couldn't act (and I couldn't) there were always roles to learn in stage management, or lighting or scenery painting or costume design. I had a role in Midsummer Night's Dream - Snout playing the wall 'and such a wall as I would have you think that had in it a crannied hole or chink, through which the lovers, Pyramus and Thisbe, did whisper often, very secretly'. So I was a student pretending to be an actor, pretending to be a rustic, pretending to be an actor, pretending to be a wall - much like the rest of my life really. Other productions I remember included 'The Admirable Crichton', 'She Stoops to Conquer', and, most notably, 'Toad of Toad Hall'. This was the big one of 1960 and it was very well done. It starred Brian Hannon, who became a professional actor on leaving school, and he was a real star. My enthusiasm meant I couldn't be left out, but my inability to act made the choice of a role difficult. Finally Mrs Bruce settled on me being a mouse in the jury. Not a big role, in fact it only involved saying one word, 'Guilty' but I thought I could manage that (good training for blogging). Everyone else had quite realistic costumes, but my grandmother had some difficulty deciding what to do at little cost. Finally she got a sheet of white calico and turned it into a sort of a bag with a hood. I was the only white mouse, and the role of foreman who said 'Guilty' seemed natural for such an individual looking creature.

Stan Richards was the next to make an impression. He was my actual English teacher, thin and wiry with glasses and great energy, who seemed to bound everywhere. He had a passion for education and literature, and a belief in the value of both, and if you shared that with him he also had a belief in you. He was the first adult who treated me as an adult. He helped to develop my critical appreciation of literature, but most importantly he taught me to write, and taught me to have confidence in my ability to write. He would read anything I wrote, class work or the poetry and short stories I was increasingly writing on my own account. He would provide intelligent feedback, and often read things out to the class. It was the first time I think that I had been singled out and given a talent which others could recognise. It was my identity (David Horton is the one who is good at English) which was being developed, and I will never forget Stan for that.

Another memorable teacher was Beryl Critch, the biology teacher. Small with frizzy hair and a round face with glasses, she looked like an old-fashioned schoolmaam but was anything but. She did two things which were quite remarkable. First, she taught Biology as a serious scientific subject. It wasn't just a soft option that girls might do if they wanted to do some 'science', looking at flowers and birds perhaps, it was a real science to stand alongside physics and chemistry as real, rigorous subjects. So we studied it properly, and took it seriously because she took it seriously. Second (and in this she matched Richards and the chemistry teacher) she set out in fourth and fifth year to train us for university. But this phrase doesn't quite convey the magic of what was going on and its unusual nature. All three teachers said to us openly - most of this class will go on to university. At university you won't be spoon fed and be expected to regurgitate, you will be expected to study and learn for yourself, and be expected to make up your own minds and develop ideas. We will therefore teach you in university style so you will be ready for this. As a consequence the lessons and practical classes were conducted like university seminars and tutorials and lectures, not like normal school lessons at all. We thrived on this. The other advantage was that when I reached first year zoology at university I found I had already done the whole course with Miss Critch, and could concentrate on the physics and chemistry I might otherwise have failed.

The fourth of this quartet of remarkable teachers was Alan Strahan the chemistry teacher. He was plump with a round face, thick glasses which gave him an owlish appearance, and thinning fair hair. On the first day we had him he said to the class. 'Now, at any moment I may collapse on the floor and lie there unconscious and twitching. If this happens you must make sure I haven't swallowed my tongue, turn me so I am lying on my side, and get help. Don't worry I will be all right after a while.' We probably stared at him open mouthed. I can't remember what his medical condition was, though it may have been diabetes or even epilepsy. But this was another introduction to adulthood, both because he was being so open about his condition, rather than hiding serious things, even death, away, and because he was trusting us to save his life. From that moment we would do anything for him. I loved chemistry anyway, having mucked around at home for so long. I liked, I think, the idea that new things could be formed by combining other things, and that there was certainty to the process. I had learnt the periodic table off by heart very early, recognising that this was the key to chemistry, and this became another talent, I was the one who knew all the symbols. The chemistry lab was full of all the apparatus I would have loved to have at home, all of the complex paraphernalia that was so appealing. And there were long term experiments running in containers round the walls. One was crystal growing I think, chemicals gradually adding to a central core to produce a large visible object that reflected the invisible materials that had been in solution. Another was a huge glass tube. In the bottom had been poured a layer of blue copper sulphate solution. In the top had been poured, somehow, magically without disturbing the bottom layer, a clear liquid. Perhaps just water. There had originally been a clear dividing line between blue and clear, but very slowly, over a long time, you could see that the blue was diffusing into the upper layer. Given an infinite amount of time the oscillation of molecules would cause the two layers to completely mix and become indistinguishable from each other. Perhaps, 50 years later, that tube still stands in the chemistry lab, silently and slowly mixing itself.

So there they are, one for all, and all for one. I have tried to trace them in recent years, but sadly without success except in the case of Stan Richards, who had later had a significant career in curriculum development and such like. Found him on the web and found his phone number (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/11559/To_Sir_With_Love.html) and phoned him up to say thank you. The other three seem to be invisible, and I think they all deserve better than that. Don't you?

28 February 2009
Category Education
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A spoonful of sugar

I once went on a field trip with a group of students learning to do research work. We were camping out in the bush, and all of us took it in turns to cook, make a big pot of tea, make toast for breakfast, pick up supplies in town once a week and so on. One particular morning I came across to the "kitchen" area where a male student was setting up for breakfast. As I arrived I heard him say "Oh, I forgot to buy sugar in town, there's only a couple of spoonfuls left, lucky I was on breakfast today", and then watched as he tipped those last two spoonfuls into his own cup of tea and proceeded to drink. I was reminded of this the other day listening to the CEO of a big company who had just announced that hundreds of jobs were being slashed from the company and the operations taken overseas (to places, though she didn't say this, where there are very low wages, little regulation, no health and safety, no holiday benefits for staff, no environmental concerns, low taxes; heaven, in fact, for big business).

It also reminded me of the story of the discovery of the World War 1 battleship, sunk in battle, whose wreck was recently found. In the battle, many of the sailors had survived the sinking, though others had not, but the Captain, and a number of his officers, standing bravely on the bridge, had chosen to go down with the ship. I don't know what the Captain was thinking of course, but I am guessing that in choosing to die he was accepting ultimate responsibility for the loss of the ship and men. Was accepting that, no matter how hard he had tried, he had made mistakes, got things wrong, been in the wrong place at the wrong time, had organised the battle badly, had let his men down. And so he chose not to save himself but to help save as many sailors as he could and then down he went.

It's an old tradition of course, going down with the ship. Used to be something of a tradition with the head of a company too, but not any more. Oh the head of the company I am thinking of expressed great sorrow and regret. Well, a bit of regret. Said that they didn't want to do it, didn't like it, but it just had to be done. Reminded me too of the type of headmaster who, before thrashing a boy with a cane, would express the sentiment that it was going to "hurt me more than you". "Yeah, right" would be the unspoken reply. No, modern CEOs, instead of saving their men and going down with the ship do the reverse. The men are thrown overboard to lighten the load, the ship sails on, Captain on the bridge for a while, making sure that gold bullion has been safely sent to a secret bank account, and then are whisked away with a very large payout to the mansion on Sydney Harbour or the Gold Coast. It will indeed turn out, more often than not, that money will have been transferred from the company to other family members, or into property, just before the company goes down. The sailors, sorry workers, have no such option. Nor indeed any knowledge until the last possible moment that there is even a problem, let alone an iceberg in the way.

Which reminds me in turn of yet another story last week. Seems when the Titanic struck the iceberg a disproportionate number of British passengers went down with her. The reason? The British were too polite - formed queues, did what they were told, stood patiently in assembly points, waited their turn, didn't complain. Other nationalities rushed forward, jumped into lifeboats, pushed others aside, ignored instructions. It's like that in Australia when companies hit icebergs too. The workers keep on working to the last minute, packing orders, pushing trolleys across empty courtyards, running their machines, and then they file out of the gates for the last time in a quiet way, usually just tears being shed, loyal to the last, and getting nothing for their good behaviour. Being punished in fact for matters outside their control (poor investment decisions, bad takeovers, stockmarket risks, poor research and staff training, lack of analysis of markets and economic trends). Meanwhile management are getting everything they can get from the soon-to-be-wreck - are rewarded for the mistakes they made on matters they had control over. Are taking the last two spoonfuls of sugar.

Helps the medicine of bankruptcy and receivers go down I suppose. But just once it would be nice to see a Captain of Industry saving his men and sinking himself, instead of the reverse.

27 February 2009
Category Economics
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King Peter

Odd that the argument, that the royal succession precludes political conflict, that Royalists think is the best one for retaining the monarchy, is in fact the worst one (there are no good ones of course). The argument I think goes like this. The head of state of a country is the most important position, because it embodies, in a single person, the essence of the country and the continuity of that essence. Elections and political events come and go but the state remains, Australia is dead, long live Australia. And, that being so, it would cause instability if the position was open to election. Therefore it is a GOOD THING that we don't have to worry our silly little heads about all that, because the Queen and her heirs are head of state, keep it in the family, and that's that.

Imagine for a moment that the 99.9% of people who believe Australia should be a country independent of Britain have succeeded at last in all voting accordingly in a referendum. And then the Prime Minister of the day announces that it has been decided, in view of the controversy over the best way of electing a president, that from now on the president will be Rupert Murdoch, and after that the oldest Murdoch son in each generation. People will still be able to elect all of the other members of all the Australian parliaments, but there is one job that is always off-limits to everyone who isn't called Murdoch. An outcry? You think? Yet that is the sytem that was retained after the last referendum, if you substitute the name Windsor for Murdoch. There is a difference? What is it?

And ultimately the monarchy diminishes the democracy, because here is one position in our society, the most important position of all, and it is beyond the reach of every citizen of this country. If American children grow up with the pleasant myth that anyone, even from the humblest log hut, can aspire to be President; Australian children grow up with the unpleasant fact that no one can aspire to be head of the Australian state. A position is occupied, excluding all others, by someone who isn't part of the culture and society of Australia, and in being so occupied, excludes someone who could perform in the position by virtue of their talents and Australianess. Imagine William Deane, or Quentin Bryce, as the actual head of state, not merely the queen's representative in government house. There is a world of difference between holding a job, and acting in a job.

Which brings me, quite naturally, to Peter Garrett.

The phrase "Peter Garrett, Environment Minister" once seemed a tautology, so much a part, indeed a symbol, of the conservation movement was he, but has become, in the last year, an oxymoron. And increasingly it seems obvious that the ministerial handbook Mr Garrett was issued with when he took office was not, say, "How to be a minister", but "Catch-22". Everybody remembers the fundamental operation of Catch-22 - you can only be discharged from the army if you are insane. But you have to ask to be discharged. And if you ask to be discharge this proves you are sane, so you can't be discharged. But there was another minor example - you could see Major Major any time, but only when he was not in his room. If he was in his room you couldn't see him, but as soon as he was gone, then you were free to see him.

Increasingly Garrett seems to be acting on the basis that if an environmental issue is really serious, like say Global Warming, or the death of the Murray River, or even the Pulp Mill or the Macarthur River Mines, he can't take action because it is too serious, out of his hands. If an issue is really small he can take action, but there is no point in doing so because it is too small. There seem to be no middle size environmental issues for Peter to get his teeth into. Catch 22 - he can't take action on the environment unless he is asked to, but once he is asked to it becomes not an environmental issue but a political one, so he can't take action.

But in the meantime, like the Queen of England, he apparently occupies a position based on his conservation credentials, but with no wish to act on those credentials. This was a technique for appointing environment ministers, introduced by Hawke/Keating, refined by John Howard (where the minister essentially became not "for"the environment, but merely one who worked on matters relating to it), and now in full flow under Rudd.

Cabinet is generally seen as a battleground between sets of ministers. Between those whose portfolios spend money (education, health, social welfare) and those which earn money (Treasury, Finance). A minister for Health should be lobbying her colleagues, knocking on doors, having drinks with the PM, and then angrily and furiously arguing her case against those holding the purse strings in a tight grip.

And so the Environment minister, in a somewhat different, though overlapping, situation should be fighting tooth and nail against those in Cabinet who see themselves as the spokespersons for big business or mining company interests, a battle between those who would conserve and those who would exploit and destroy.

Peter Garrett seems rather to have become the type of Environment minister invented by the Howard government, one whose role is not to defend the environment but to facilitate its exploitation, fighting not against but alongside resource ministers (for example) to overcome public objections. So here too, while the chair labelled "Environment" is labelled as if it is occupied by one of the people representing conflicting interests around the table, in fact it is simply being occupied, like the Queen occupies the throne, preventing anyone else taking the position who might be willing to act on the big questions, to have his office door open when he was in.

I understand Prince Charles is something of a conservationist. Perhaps he would like to be environment minister? Might get some action from him. Then young William could take over later.

Something needs to happen soon before a conservative, not a conservationist, is once more in the Environment ministry.



Cross-posted at ABC Unleashed.
22 February 2009
Category Environment
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The worst of times

What can you think that hasn't been thought, say that hasn't been said? I keep waking in the night, some new horror from the fires seen and heard on the news running through my brain over and over (one night the death of an elderly couple found arm in arm; another the car driven into a dam; another a fire racing towards a lovely house on a hill; another a lady found dead in a car where she had fled with her precious china on the seat beside her; last night it was a description of dogs screaming inside a closed burning house). All, well, almost all, Australians have identified with the victims and survivors in Victoria. But I suspect that those of us in rural areas all round Australia identify even more strongly than do our city cousins. We can see, I think, fire running across our own farm, exploding into our own town. We can picture our friends and neighbours, wonder how we would bear their loss as the people of Kingslake and Marysville and all the rest have had to bear the loss of their friends. We look at our own dogs and cats and sheep and horses and wonder what we could do to save them. We think about losing the houses we built, the homes we furnished so lovingly, the gardens we struggled to grow in a drought, and we picture all that effort and achievement wiped away in an afternoon. Someone talked about the guilt feeling of survivors who had escaped when others had perished, and I think that feeling extends to some degree to all of us. There we were, going about our normal business while they fought for their lives; here we are with everything safe in our lives, there they are with nothing.

And then there are the heroes, for once not applied to footballers but to real heroes - the firefighters who battled so hard, the police and emergency services and paramedics who rushed into help, the neighbour who risked life for neighbour. Would I be so brave I wonder? But also villains - the arsonists of course, the people who failed to maintain power lines properly, the looters, the conmen collecting "charity" money. And people who have just behaved badly (I've got them on a list) - the commercial television reporters exploiting misery and intruding on grief and privacy and provoking lynch mob behaviour: the shock jock columnists who wanted conservationists strung up from lamp posts; the "fire managers" demanding ten times as much "prescribed burning"; the business leaders pretending that the fires had nothing to do with climate change.

People looking for answers as to why the fires occurred and how they can stop it happening in future? Well, the answers are complex, and the Royal Commission is going to have its work cut out sorting through the complexities and distinguishing submissions from ratbags with axes to grind (literally and metaphorically) and hobby horses to ride, from the genuine ones by concerned and knowledgeable people.

Some of my older readers will be familiar with the Vietnam War phrase - "We had to destroy the village in order to save it". A few people were suggesting a similar thing for Victoria long before the flames had died down. People were taking the opportunity to ride hobby horses - bulldoze all the trees alongside roads (in much of Victoria the only pieces of remnant vegetation of various kinds surviving); remove all trees on farms and for hundreds of metres around towns and individual houses; burn burn burn much more than we now do ("ecological burning" one man had the nerve to call it). All of those would irreversibly damage the environment of Victoria that people making such suggestions often profess to love.

On the other hand real solutions, involving compulsory fire proof building in fire prone areas; major restrictions on developments of housing estates and retirement villages in forested areas; stringent regulation on the maintenance of power lines; longer total fire bans; much greater support for rural fire brigades in equipment and fire suppression research; investigation of arson and developing methods for preventing it; and, the big one, the elephant in the room, joining with the rest of the world to get greenhouse gases reduced, to try to turn around the climate change that is creating the conditions for major fires.

I'm betting that the government follow the populist suggestions of the hobby horse brigade, and do nothing about the too hard basket of the real solutions.

It's a bet I'd love to lose.

21 February 2009
Category Fire
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The bulldogs bulldog

I try, from time to time, satisfying idle curiosity, to fathom the mind of the creationists, rather in the way that I might try to understand the thought processes of a tribe from deepest Amazon, or the art of a Pleistocene hunter.

And here is something that came to me, unbidden, as I watched a documentary on Darwin's voyage. You know how creationists always refer to "Darwinism", and ask the, to them, rhetorical question as to who would you rather believe, god or Darwin? I had thought this was just pure ignorance, a not unreasonable guess given their total failure to understand the simplest thing about the world they live in (it evolves). But now I wonder if the problem goes even deeper than this. I wonder, and it is like confessing a murder, whether they believe that had Darwin never lived, never voyaged on the Beagle, that the people of the world would have gone on, happily, accepting the truth of the biblical accounts of Genesis?

The Catholic Church, similarly perturbed by Galileo, forced him to recant his belief in the anti-biblical heliocentrism of this particular solar system. The Pope of the day and his cardinals seem to have thought that they need only silence this fool who, asked whether he would rather believe his own eyes or the bible, chose, temporarily, his eyes, that the Sun would keep happily circling the Earth as it had done for the preceding 6000 years or so.

Educationally challenged evangelicals seem similarly to believe that Darwinism was simply a quirk in the eye of the man who Lincoln must have been proud to share a birthday with, and that, if silenced, species would go back to being placed in position by divine intervention, as they had always been before 1859.

But in one sense Darwin was just (!) the right man in the right places at the right time. Had he not discovered the mechanisms by which species both changed over time and separated from each other then someone else would have done so. Either sooner (Alfred Wallace was so close that he pushed Darwin into publication), or a little later (could Huxley have failed to come up with the process if he was not needed as Darwin's bulldog, might he have needed his own bulldog?). It might have taken a bit more time to see the full sweep that Darwin's genius (not "just" anything) saw, but there were hundred of biologists playing around with ideas who would have recognised the truth within a few years of 1859. Great men speed up the recognition of great truths, but they don't create the truths. The world is there, in all its complexity and beauty, whether we accept it or not. A tree falls in the forest whether or not it is observed.

You want to keep believing in the Sun circling the Earth, or creationism, go right ahead, but your belief system, in this as in all else, exists in a parallel universe to the real one. And that would be true whether I had discovered it or not.



On The Watermelon Blog we try to keep evolving whether anyone notices or not.

15 February 2009
Category Evolution
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Greeks bearing gifts

I see some of the "elite sport" people were doing their final sums last week deciding how much to demand from the government. The calculation seemed to involve thinking of a number, doubling it, doubling it again, and then adding, oh, say, 50% for contingencies, and then you take away the number ... (oh, no, sorry, we don't do take-aways now). They seem to have borrowed the formula from the CEOs of giant corporations, who, even as their companies were going down the drain were receiving massive bonuses, and, especially in America, actually taking billions of dollars of taxpayer money, meant to bail them out, for the purpose.

Call me old fashioned (if you don't someone else will) but I seem to remember a time when there was no such thing as "elite sports" and "elite sportspeople", meaning people and organisations who got paid huge sums of money, just people who played for the love of the game, and who did so part time in between doing a job to support themselves. Football teams were based in their communities, cricket uniforms were not covered in advertising, athletes ran up and down sandhills to get fit, swimmers paid their own way to Olympics.

It's always been bad to pour money into these sports, running them as if they were businesses. When the chances of winning an Olympic medal can be easily calculated by the amount of money spent, something seems to have been lost, and much of the shine seems to have gone off the gold. And certainly the old concept that it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it is how you play the game is long gone from Australian sport.

The Romans, famously poured large sums of money into elite sports like chariot racing and gladiator fighting. I can imagine the head of the Gladiator Federation demanding ever more money from the Emperor otherwise the standard of the competition in the Colosseum would be lowered. Money that could have been better spent on infrastructure, the welfare of the ordinary people, and foreign aid, and therefore perhaps helped the Roman Empire survive for a lot longer.

But we don't learn from history, and here we are again with huge amounts of money being demanded for circuses. Money that is needed to cope with the effects of global warming, money needed for people who lose their jobs, money for schools and hospitals and other infrastructure. Money needed for the people who have been through such agony and loss in Victoria. And money needed to massively support bushfire brigades with equipment and logistical support and communications and research on more effective fire fighting.

Not a sport or a game, fire-fighting, but far more worthy of support than the sportspeople who can go back to doing it for the love of the game, and for a mens sana in corpore sano, as the Romans would have said. At least until we get through the next few decades and the challenges they will bring. And even after that, Mr Olympic official, don't call us, we'll call you. Seem to remember the ancient Greeks, unlike the Romans, were amateur sportsmen, competing for glory not gold. Let's return to the old Olympic ways.

I see the people of flood torn Ingham are donating much of the help they received to the fire victims. Perhaps the Olympic people could do the same for the Fire Brigades.

13 February 2009
Category Economics
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Hot tin roof

When I was a young fellow, many moons, and suns, ago, growing up in Perth, there was a rule at school that if the temperature exceeded 105 degrees fahrenheit (40 centigrade) we would be sent home. We thought, as cynical young people, that the figure had been carefully chosen to ensure that we would never be sent home. We would read forecasts carefully, check out the previous day's temperature in the morning newspaper, and, lo and behold, it never reached the magic number. We would sweat out our days at school, no air conditioning of course, not even a fan, the only relief provided by high windows, opened by reaching up a long stick with a hook on to turn a screw device. Hot, hot, hot, but we never got sent home in my time. Perth was a hot city, famous for it, and there were many days at home around 37, 38. 39, 40, where we ate ice blocks, went swimming, lay on the floor in a passage to try to get some air movement; and many days at school where we ran under sprinklers, squirted each other at the taps, or just flopped out in the shade of trees. But never hotter than 40, although we read, with horror, stories from Marble Bar, hottest town in Australia, where temperatures did reach 112, 113 (45 centigrade) but that seemed as far away and exotic as Timbuctoo.

And now? Temperatures everywhere in southern Australia (even Tasmania now) regularly hit 40 and more. Indeed 40 is barely remarked upon other than with some comment about going to the beach. And cities like Perth Melbourne and Adelaide have started experiencing temperatures well above 40, even, last week, 45.7 in Adelaide.

Look, I know my memory of childhood carefree days is heavily tinged by my rose-coloured glasses. There must have been the occasional hotter day, and indeed, the only context the news media provides for these recent heatwaves is the occasional reference to a hotter day in 1939 or 1909. But whether the actual temperature on a particular day is a record is really not the point. We are getting more and more of these very hot days, more and more sequences of unbearable temperatures. And as temperatures rise more and more people turn on more and more air conditioners (and nobody had those at all when I was a child) causing more and more of the CO2 gas to be pumped out that is racking our climatic conditions higher and higher. Another one of those feedback loops that make things rapidly worse - Arctic ice melting leads to more melting; less rainfall means more irrigation water taken from already drying rivers; hotter dryer forests lead to fires lead to forests more under stress leads to more fires; and so on. It's all going like a house on fire, climate change; you know, the more the fire burns, the hotter it gets and the more the fire burns until the house is "gutted" as the tabloids say.

This is the stuff scientists have been warning about for years. It wasn't just a matter of a degree or two warmer, "welcome on a cold Yass day" (as denialists would say), but a fundamental shift in our climate. But action from the politicians? Not so much. A different feedback loop there. The less Mr Rudd promises to do, then Mr Turnbull promises to do even less, and down and down we go, until we will have politicians promising to build more power stations to actually increase CO2 output (oh, wait, Mr Turnbull already promised that). Gotta break this feedback if we are going to break the other one - make politicians see they will be rewarded for taking action, not punished electorally. Let them know as soon as you can.

Put the heat on them in fact. Make those cats jump, just like ...

6 February 2009
Category Climate change
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The good that men do

I was watching a feel good story the other day in a feel good current affairs program on a feel good television channel (so, no clues there). It was about one of these wonderful people who spend their lives doing good deeds, looking after the poor, the homeless, the alcoholics, the runaway children, the victims of disaster. A jolly good fellow. Much was made of the fact that he was a catholic priest, and had "heard the call" in his mid teens and that was that - stuck with superstition and celibacy for life, poor fellow.

And much is always made, on the rare occasions when I say something slightly critical of religion and its noxious effect on human well-being, of the fact that there are people, from Mother Theresa on down, who are religious and who do good deeds. I am intended to feel guilty, though I don't, for ignoring these good people. And I am intended to feel stupid, ditto, for not having understood that religion is therefore not just a force for good in the world. but indeed the only force for good, that without religion the homeless and sick and abandoned would live lives that were nasty, brutish, and short.

But it is a very odd argument indeed, reminding me of the debate about whether smoking marijuana makes you mentally ill, or whether you smoke marijuana because you are mentally ill. And another question - do rich philanthropists only make donations for the tax benefits?Take my good priest. Is he good because he is a priest, or is he a priest because he was initially good? Are we arguing that he is doing good, in the religious context, because he gets some reward? Does he set out on his life's work, having done a cost-benefit analysis that confirms that 100 homeless children rescued equals 100 years in paradise? If he does, the values represented by him are not those I taught my children.

But I don't think he did do that (though I have no doubt that precisely that sort of analysis underpins much religious good work). Instead I think he would have been a good man whether he had finished up a Christian or Muslim, Jew or Hindu - or a non-believer. The goodness is incidental to the religion, not dependent on it. In fact this is another one of those tautologies (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/95768/Soul_brother.html) that bedevil religion - people who want to do good join religions because they think they do good. A cost benefit analysis though would show that the bad stuff done in religion's name far outweighs the good stuff, and whereas the good stuff would get done anyway, by good people, the bad stuff almost always results from the religious impulse, not in spite of it.

So next time you catch me being rude about religion, in spite of whatever resolutions I might make (the road to hell being notoriously paved with good intentions), don't bother telling me again that Mother Theresa and my priest were good because they were religious. Applaud goodness all you like, I'll join in with you, but don't use it as a religious alibi. That's just an indulgence.

I will keep trying to do good on The Watermelon Blog, though I expect it will be interred with my bones.

5 February 2009
Category Religion
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Watching grass grow

"Like watching paint dry" is another way of describing something as really boring. Fans of the different football codes use it to describe each other's game, all would agree in using it to describe cricket.

Saw a "news item' (I use the term loosely) the other day about a car race in England involving cars towing caravans around the track, the object being, to the excited cheers of the crowd, to smash the caravans during the race. Another item was the very sad case of a child killed while watching one of those events where monster trucks crush cars in an arena. A bit like the awful case some years back where the demolition of the old Canberra Hospital was made the subject of a public event, bringing crowds of people to the shores of the lake to watch explosives set off and the building turned to rubble, when something went horribly wrong, chunks of concrete and steel showered the crowd, and a young girl was killed.

Not just Canberra Hospital though, it seems that any building of sufficient size, demolished anywhere in the world, will appear on the nightly news bulletin. And not just monster trucks, but every motor sport event depends upon destruction. Watch the news coverage of motor bikes, or formula 1, or CART, or V8s, or drag racers, and you may or may not see the winner cross the line, but you will certainly see a compilation of the day's crashes. The more flames, and rolling wheels, and somersaults, and rolls, and disintegrating car bodies, and riders sliding, and spectators ducking, and fences impacted you can show the better. The point of the race is not the sport but the carnage and destruction. And from all round the world come images (at times accompanied by a chuckle from a newsreader) of train wrecks, plane crashes, boat collisions, cars crashing into buildings, motorway pile-ups, explosions, fires, building collapses.

I seem to be the only person in the world who finds this stuff distasteful. Indeed our whole society has changed from one in which things were patched up, repaired, reused, handed on, made-do-with, to one in which moving into a house involves gutting it and starting all over. And one in which city buildings a few years old are demolished to make way for new ones. A world where trees are cleared, sand dunes flattened, creeks filled in, parks turned into car parks, rivers re-directed; a world where every endeavour begins with a bulldozer and a wrecking crew. A world where pulp mills are fed with old growth forests, where long line fishing kills more than just tuna, where endangered species are a joke, and environmental protection legislation is no longer even a challenge to lobbyists. For developers who stand to make money the destruction is just part of doing business.

I can turn away from all the car crashes - in sport or real life. Refuse to take part in the media obsession with destruction and pain. But none of us can turn away from the slow motion train wreck that is a warming planet. Night after night come images of retreating glaciers, severe weather events, species under threat, farmlands turning to dust, forests dying, rivers drying. Every night is another example of the way that the energy and mining and manufacturing companies of the world are such fans of destruction that they seem happy to watch a whole planet being destroyed, along with a billion years of evolution and ten thousand years of civilisation, rather than reduce greenhouse gas production.

Don't know whether Warren Truss and Malcolm Turnbull are fans of motor sports. Hard to imagine them in the pits at Bathurst, but you never know I suppose. But they must both be fans of watching slow motion train wrecks because both, last week, were calling for a delay in any action on climate change (even the miserable excuse for pretend action that is the Rudd emissions trading scheme) until after the serious business of making rich people richer can resume. Then Malcolm came up with an idea roughly comparable to offsetting the petrol chewed up by racing cars at Bathurst by burying their waste engine oil.

Some time it would be good if people began to think that watching paint dry on a renovated building, watching things being repaired, watching things being conserved, watching the planet being saved, was as exciting as watching a collapsing baseball stadium, an exploding drag racer.

Many of us on the southern tablelands would be happy watching grass grow in the coming decades.

30 January 2009
Category Values
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Before Lincoln

I picture one of Obama's staff as a kind of ye olde town crier, with one of those ancient rolled up scrolls, a huge one, which is slowly unrolling across the floor as he reads out item after item from a list headed "Bad things done by the Bush administration that must be reversed, and good things not done by the Bush administration that must be done urgently", and after he reads out each item Barack Obama scribbles a note and hands it to another aide who rushes out of the Oval Office to take action.

Look I know it is a very big scroll, and there are so many urgent things on it that I bet Mr Obama already thinks he should legislate to double the number of hours in a day. And I bet he is getting constant buzzes on his Blackberry from people wanting their own pet item moved up to the top of the list. So I hesitate to make a special plea for mine, and anyway, for some unaccountable reason, I don't appear to be on the list of people who get issued with his Blackberry number.

But, just in case he is dropping in to check out my posts from time to time after hearing I had compared his gang to the gang from Wind in the Willows http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/117653/Toad_Hall_restored.html, here goes. I'd like him to sign an Executive Order forbidding the teaching of creationism (aka "Intelligent Design") in any American educational institutions. Look I know the people who have been teaching this ancient mythology are slow thinkers and have needed time to adjust. But the President could point out that this year marks the end of a changeover period of 150 years since the publication of Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, and 150 years is enough of a phase in time for even the slowest of thinkers among our fundamentalist brethren. He could also point out, as an admirer of Lincoln, that it has not been possible for an intelligent person to believe in creationism since a year and a half before Lincoln's inauguration. So enough is enough, time to move on.

Does it matter? Of course it matters. As a result of both shilly shallying, and active encouragement, from the conservatives, the number of Americans who don't understand evolution is growing in the 21st century. The fundamental basis of all the biological sciences is not accepted by large chunks of the population. Children are being taught that ancient middle eastern mythology has equal, if not greater weight, than the scientific studies of the last 150 years. Their understanding of the world around them, at a time of growing devastation of the biosphere, is hopelessly corrupted. No chance of encouraging conservation, or of fighting global warming, if large parts of the population think that god created the world in 6 days 6000 years ago.

And finally, I'm sure you are a man of your word, and when you said "We will restore science to its rightful place", you meant it. Hard to think of an action both symbolic and practical that would more clearly confirm your intention than of clearing out the ancient rubbish of creationism from American education. And would be another way of leading the world, since under Mr Bush's watch the insidious mental disease of creationism has been creeping into schools around the world.

Oh, and if you want some background reading Mr President, you will find plenty more on The Watermelon Blog http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/Evolution/ to justify this bold and enlightened and courageous move. But (spoiler alert) you will find I am occasionally rude about creationists. You could be more gentle if you want to keep reaching out to these people even more than you have done by having Rick Warren at your party.

Oh, almost forgot, good work so far Mr President, an A+ I reckon on your first week's assignments.Keep up the good work.

27 January 2009
Category Evolution
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Not in my barbecue area

Well, another Australia Day in a harsh hot dry January. If only Arthur Phillip had delayed his arrival until a more pleasant time - April 26 perhaps, or September 26. But January 26, what was he thinking? Not about the future, that's for sure. Perhaps, like "Christmas in July', we could have "Australia Day in June".

There was a silly advert in the lead up to the 26th, whipping up enthusiasm for patriotism on Australia Day with the mention of barbecues and beaches. Is that really all it's about?

Or is it partly about our role in remembrance of all of the people who have lived in our backyard - not just Don Bradman, but of all the peoples and achievements and events of the Australian years since 1788, and the 40,000 or so years that preceded them. Scientists and teachers, farmers and nurses, philosophers and poets, film makers and writers, architects and engineers, soldiers and explorers. Oh and the Aboriginal people who loved and served this land not just in the millenia before 1788, but in the 221 years since.

And is it partly to do with recognising our responsibility as guardians of a fair chunk of the world's surface and a not inconsiderable number of unique and irreplaceable plants and animals? I saw an item the other day about people fighting to protect a Victorian beach from the mindless proposal to build a desalination plant. It was in the backyard (or at least just over the fence) of one leading protester, and the reporter asked him, as they always do, aren't you just being a Nimby (not in my back yard) and he replied, in style, "Well, if we don't look after our own backyard, who else will?"

A good reply. Not long after the first Australia Day (three cheers for King George the Third - our beginnings are essentially the reverse of America!) the governor had to stop people chopping down trees in the colony's backyard because the only source of water, the Tank Stream, was being polluted and lost. It has been a theme of Australia ever since - chop down the trees, wreck your own water supply. So all Australians need to be Nimbys, protecting the continent which is our backyard.

And is it to do with seeing our role as citizens of the world? Australia Day shouldn't just be a matter of looking inwards and alternately putting on black or white armbands, depending on our ideological position. There are plenty of countries that do that on their National Day, aye, and all the year round in some cases. We need to look outward, be good neighbours to the world. Not be the country that is recognised just for helping America destroy Iraq, or the one that gets confused with Austria or New Zealand, but one that sets a good example in being a world citizen. Perhaps the one that aims to be the first to be carbon neutral would be an excellent start, would set an excellent example.

And we can be world citizens in other ways. I helped save some of America's wilderness when I signed a petition the other day, to try to reduce some of the Bush regime's last minute rush to destroy even more of America. None of my business, I suppose, not my backyard at all, but if I can help I should. Got thanked (along with thousands of others) by Robert Redford, whose backyard it really was. Just starstruck enough to appreciate that, even at my age.

So next year, come 26 January, perhaps we can think more about our own backyard, and what is in it in addition to barbecues and beaches (with or without desalination plants). And what responsibilities we have, as well as our right to barbecue. And about the backyard of the whole world, and how we can help others say "not in my backyard". It's our backyard too.

23 January 2009
Category Values
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Toad Hall restored

I was trying to think what it reminded me of, seeing Barack and Michelle, Joe and Jill, entering the White House after the inauguration. And then it came to me - "Wind in the Willows". You will recall that Toad Hall has been taken over by the bad stoats, weasels, and ferrets, a truly evil crew who wreck the joint. Then, as Wikipedia puts it "Badger, Rat, Mole and Toad enter Toad Hall via a secret entrance and drive away the intruders".

Mr Obama gave a speech full of so many good things, good things in every sentence, that it seems churlish to cavil, but I was struck by the phrase "We will not apologise for our way of life", which at first hearing had an awful resonance with Bush - "The American way of life is not negotiable".

A great deal of the world might well think that consuming such a disproportionate share of the resources and producing such a large volume of greenhouse gas might well require an apology and a promise of action. And indeed he offered a kind of apology in "nor can we consume the world's resources without regard to effect". So I think his "way of life", unlike Bush's, is more to do with values, and ideals, and democracy, and freedom of speech, and secular government, and the rights of women and minority groups, and the rule of law, and all the rest, but it still jarred, for a moment. As did "the knowledge that God calls on us", which is a theory or hypothesis, shared with many other nations throughout the world, and throughout history, not a truism to go unremarked.

But The Watermelon Blog appreciated the call out to "non-believers" which rather balanced the "God with us" sentiment, and especially appreciated "We will restore science to its rightful place". That's what you can do once you get rid of the stoats and weasels.

So at the Watermelon Blog we welcome Mr Obama as he leads America back to the Enlightenment world, in spite of my concern that here we have the first president whose age is almost the same as his presidential number. I remember when presidents were my grandfather's age, then when they were like father figures, then, all too soon they were people I might have gone to school with, and now, heaven help me, the first one only old enough to be my son. Either presidents are getting younger or I am getting older.

21 January 2009
Category Politics general
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Groundhog Days

When I unexpectedly found myself in hospital last year I was so impressed I later wrote to them - "Last Friday I was rushed into the Emergency reception of the Canberra Hospital with a sudden and worryingly potential life-threatening illness. My treatment by the Emergency staff, the EMU area, and then the Cardiac Care Unit, was first class. Everyone dealt with me quickly, professionally, calmly, and with as much care and warmth as if I had been brother or father, not a mere stranger rushed into their ward needing help. I appreciated my own care enormously, but watched with awe as everyone received this incredible service. In work that was constant and difficult, and far too much really for the level of staffing, nurses and doctors, registrars and support staff, all performed calmly and quickly and with an extraordinarily high level of skills. My family, and friends, and I are are all so grateful for our wonderful public hospital. The people of the ACT and surrounding areas are immensely lucky to have this wonderful group ready and willing to help in times of need and distress. I dips my lid to you all. Thank you Canberra Hospital."

I thought it was important to get it on the record somehow, given the constant refrain of stories from the media, another one just last week, about miscarriages and hospital infections and misdiagnosis, and sending people home who then die, and all the rest of the tv current affairs fodder. You know how the script plays out. Before you can say "cynical hypocritical opportunist" there is the opposition health spokesperson, arm around the mother/spouse/daughter/victim being a comfort. The tv media scum (sorry, scrum) crowd in, camera lenses probing closer and closer to the face of the victim, searching for the first quivering lip, the first sign of tears. The opposition spokesperson will demand action/compensation/heads rolling. The minister, trapped in their car by the media scum (oops), will promise an inquiry. The current affairs presenter, back in the studio, will look suitably mournful, wonder what the world is coming to, demand to know when the minister will act to fix our hospitals. And then the next night the script will be the same, but the issue will be public transport/schools/roads/old people's homes/child day care/environmental degradation, along with weeping victims of some kind, cynical opposition cuddlers, shifty ministers, and indignant presenters.

And the very next night, indeed perhaps on the same night, the attention span of presenters being so short, will come a story about outrageously high taxes and charges. The hard man finance spokesperson from the opposition will demand tax reduction for businesses/the rich/giant corporations/mining companies/oil companies/luxury car businesses/tourism. The hard man minister will say those tax cuts are in the pipeline and in addition there will be cuts to taxes on gambling/alcohol/cigarettes and he will get rid of speed cameras. The hard man presenter will nod wisely and suggest that until taxes for the rich are cut to zero they will be ruined and so will be the economy because there will be no trickling down.

It occurs to no one to say - but if you keep slashing taxes how are we, as a society, going to pay to fix the problems in hospitals/public transport/schools/roads/old people's homes/child day care/environment?

And the very next night, there will be yet another, hopefully, weeping victim of some failure in a desperately underfunded/understaffed/over stretched hospital emergency ward. And the same cynical opposition spokesperson playing at being sympathetic.

There are times when I feel I am Bill Murray in the film "Groundhog Day". Do you know it? If you don't, borrow it, and enjoy the story of a world doomed to endlessly repeat, unknowingly, the same experiences, while thinking that each new day is a new day. But hospital emergency staff should know that, out here in the real world away from tvcurrentaffairsland, people greatly appreciate them, are indeed in awe of them, and think that they should be given a lot more help and support, and a lot less cynical criticism. Wouldn't make good television though, and we can't let the scum (sorry, sorry) scrum, be unemployed.

Can we?

16 January 2009
Category Health
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The skeptic who came in from the cold

I have in the past, and will again in the future, launch deservedly vicious tirades against the stupid and ignorant, paid and unpaid, energy company denialist stooges in the International Anti Global Warming Conspiracy. But I realize that in addition to these braying idiots there are still a few genuine skeptics, people who really have tried to keep up to date with evidence as it floods in, and who remain puzzled by aspects of it, or believe that some findings are contradictory, or who think that the accuracy of some measurements might be questioned. Such approaches are in the best traditions of science, and lead to further advances in theories, further refinements of analysis or measurement.

Perhaps the most common element of the world view of such skeptics is the proposition that climate has changed in the past, and that therefore the current changes are neither special nor, generally, of concern. Such people might also believe that if the current warming is just the latest bump in the roller coaster ride of world climates over hundreds of millions of years, then we can do little if anything to prevent it, but should act to adapt to the new conditions. This genuine set of beliefs has been cynically used by the denialists, but just because it can be misused, doesn't mean that skeptics shouldn't look at the world through such a prism.

But because of the misuse, "the climate has changed before" gets lumped in with "global warming on Mars" or "urban heat effects" or "more ice in Antarctica" as just another part of the random word generator nonsense that makes climate change denialism the UFO affirmation of the 21st century. But I have gradually realized that this is wrong and self-defeating. By responding impatiently ("Yes, the climate has changed before. So?") to skeptics and denialists alike we keep pushing together these reluctant and odd bedfellows.

Trouble is, I think, we haven't done a good job of explaining what we mean when we say the climate is changing as a result of global warming as a result of increasing CO2 levels. We don't mean "the climate hasn't changed before and now it is". Nor do we mean "all of the changes in climate we see now are the result of global warming". Nor do we mean "the only thing that influences climate is changing CO2 level". But these seem to be the messages that the skeptics are hearing, and, rightly, disputing. And having, in their mind, disputed those perceived messages, they then think there must be something wrong with the science that has formulated them, and so they poke away questioning stuff that doesn't, in fact, need questioning.

So let's clear the air (so to speak, ho ho). "Climate changes" is, yes indeed, a tautology on this old and complex blue dot on the outskirts of a galaxy. Ever since the planet stabilized enough to have a molten core inside and land (moving continents) and air and water outside, together with a variable and elliptical orbit around a variable star, etcetera etcetera, the average temperature and moisture regimes it has experienced have seen great swings and roundabouts, and the species human beings (and the ancestors of human beings) share this garden of eden with have appeared and disappeared like so many candles in the wind.

There have been times when the climate was very much harsher than today, and (with or without the help of rocky visitors from outer space) great raft loads, enough to fill Noah's Ark many times over, of species have been lost forever. Continents have moved through the latitudes, ocean currents have changed direction, large bodies of water have oscillated in temperature, mountains have risen, forests have been cleared. And human beings, since we evolved from the primeval ooze, have shivered through centuries of blizzards; tried to deal with drought through changes in agriculture; have seen glaciers wipe out villages; have walked across dry land bridges between land masses and been cut off when seas rose again; have painted pictures of creatures they shared the land with, now long gone; have developed clever engineering solutions to move water, or hold back sand dunes, or reclaim land from the sea, or make houses livable when baby it's cold outside or when there is a tropical heatwave. So, no secrets there, the only certain thing about the climate of the Earth is its uncertainty. If you plot a graph of average temperature of the Earth it bounces around like a ball in an arcade game - up to the top, back down to the bottom, whoops, up it goes again, and down. A jagged line looking for all the world like the trace of vibrations from an earthquake. A climatic earthquake.

But wait, there's more.

We have known for a long time that carbon dioxide can act as an accessory after the fact of climate change. Can (working in tandem with water vapor and even, Sarah Palin help us, methane), rather in the way that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer, make times of high temperatures even higher. Nothing magic, not the work of Harry Potter or Al Gore, just fundamental physics and, for good measure, ice on the cake, the measurement of past carbon dioxide levels. Wouldn't matter greatly, just another of those curiosities of this magnificently complex real estate designed for a billion or so people, except for one very inconvenient fact. Part of the ebb and flow of animals like dinosaurs and the trees they ate while waiting to provide transport for biblical humans is that they finished up being reduced to their carbon components which were then captured and stored safely underground. All of those once vibrant ancient communities, lush in biodiversity, vibrant in evolutionary potential, reduced to wet or dry black stuff forming some of the layers in the great layer cake of earth's geological history. Safely buried until a particular species of wise ape discovered you could burn the damn stuff and do all kinds of neat things like providing heat and light and running Hummers. Oh, and adding carbon dioxide to the air - invisible, odorless, tasteless, disappearing into the sunset, gone and forgotten. And more. And more.

And as it rises so it begins, inexorably, to push up that bouncing ball of changing climate. That choppy sea (to mix metaphors well beyond the capacity of anyone to control by pouring oil on troubled waters) with its millions of years of ups and downs is gradually forming into a wave as the ups become uppier. A big wave, threatening to engulf humanity and dinosaur descendants alike. Not just climate change, which continues on largely oblivious to the way it is being supercharged, but the mother of all climate changes, ready to unleash shock and awe, a weapon of mass destruction, on climate scientists and denialists alike.

So if you are a skeptic, paddling around in the shallows, watching the little waves bounce up and down and saying, to your children, "see, the sea is always changing, always has, up and down", then watch out for the tsunami just in sight on the horizon, doesn't look much in the distance, but it is moving fast. And when it arrives you will hear the voice of Crocodile Dundee booming out "Call that climate change? THIS is climate change."

So if you have been a skeptic on the grounds that climate has always changed, nothing to see here, move right along folks, then it is time you came in from the cold. We weren't talking about climate change, we were talking about CLIMATE CHANGE. And we need you on this side of the barricades, welcome any time, free pass, no questions asked, but please make it quick. Things are going to get a lot worse before (if) they get better.



And the vicious tirades against the stupid and ignorant, paid and unpaid, energy company denialist stooges can still be found on the Watermelon Blog - no free pass for them.

12 January 2009
Category Climate change
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Ant misbehaving

You will probably laugh at me when you hear that I often bump into things because I walk around looking intently on the ground in front of me in order to avoid treading on and hurting spiders, or ants, or beetles, or snakes (the latter, I must confess, more for my benefit than for their's, although it can't be fun to have your tail trodden on by my large boots). So I try to tread lightly on the ground, just like Aborigines did in a more general sense (although I do try to tread lightly in general as well). I would also be laughed at if people knew I rescue moths and bees and grasshoppers from water troughs so I don't tell anyone about that.

I guess everyone who loves the bush, loves the natural world, behaves the same way. Just as we all automatically pick up our rubbish after a picnic and take it home, put out camp fires, try to leave things just as we found them. Are all outraged by people removing mossy rocks, stealing baby parrots from nests, chopping up hollow logs, digging up ground orchids. This is all like teaching your grandmother to suck eggs (though why she would want to I have never understood) - everyone knows the bush is fragile, under more threat than it has ever been, and the last thing any of us should be doing is adding to the threat.

So I was puzzled the other day to see that the latest advert for one of the new recreational four wheel drive vehicles (what the Americans call SUVs, and we seem to be adopting this) didn't promote their quietness, their lightness, their ability to slip in and out of a camping ground barely leaving a tyre print behind. It wasn't a cartoon of an SUV tip-toeing in on its four wheels, carefully avoiding ant trails and spider burrows and ground-nesting pipits, while recycling its own exhaust. It wasn't, in short, the kind of thing that would appeal to bush lovers who want to visit the bush and return without a sign of their passing.

No, just like all the other SUV adverts, for all the car companies, I have seen over the last ten years, it involved a big noisy heavy vehicle smashing its way through "pristine" wilderness. The images from all these adverts haunt me years later - close ups of wheels smashing through the rocks on the bed of a mountain stream, or skidding through a salt lake, or breaking down a sand dune, or flinging dirt up from a dirt track in a forest, or skidding across a white beach, or splintering logs, or running over mossy rocks. Loud music (could it be "Ride of the Valkyries" or am I thinking of another movie?) plays in the back ground as engines rev up to tackle the next environmental obstacle. All of the voiceover script is to do with conquering nature, beating it into submission, letting nothing stand in your way.

Why is it so? Well, I guess either the advertising agencies have it all back to front, and are aiming at totally the wrong audience, or these vehicles are not being bought by people who rescue moths from water troughs. I'm guessing the second option is correct, and if it is then we have a problem. Well, tens of thousands of problems.

Look I know that advertising has absolutely no effect on public behaviour, as advertisers keep telling us in relation to alcohol abuse, and childhood obesity, and teenage body image, and used to tell us about cigarettes. But just on the off chance that this is a case where it does, could someone please tell the advertisers that they should show SUVs not damaging the environment (hey, they can use my cartoon idea, free of charge), should show them treading softly, running silently, their owners walking to mountain streams instead of splashing through them.

Maybe they can help maintain some of those pristine environments a little longer. And maybe they will start selling some cars to moth rescuers.

10 January 2009
Category Environment
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Bring out your dead

I know you will correct me if I am wrong but wasn't it Churchill who said (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/60277/All_change_for_.html) "Democracy is better than all the other forms of government that have been tried, perhaps we should try it properly some day?"

Prior to 1215, England was a democracy of "one person, one vote". Literally, the one person being the king. After 1215 the number of persons voting was increased by the number of barons, a big increase in relative if not absolute terms. From that point on the number of voters would gradually increase, but at every suggested increase in the eligibility to have some say in the running of the country there was yet another trip to Runnymede to argue the case and sometimes succeed over the resistance of those who already had a say.

For hundreds of years after that first trip to the water meadow the qualification for voting remained the possession of wealth and property and a Y chromosome. All that really changed was that the cut off point for being wealthy enough and propertied enough to vote (and be voted for) was gradually lowered, so that the electorate went from being both rich and noble to just rich and then to just pretty well off (although of course none of those criteria mattered if you had two X chromosomes, except for the occasional queen who popped up when god had forgotten to provide a male descendant to be his next representative in the new Jerusalem).

It wasn't until the twentieth century that merely being human was seen as sufficient qualification for turning up at the ballot box and voting for other humans. Other countries have followed similar pathways, the biggest variations being the dates at which possessing a different skin colour, and lacking a Y chromosome, were no longer complete disqualifications.

So by late in the twentieth century, pretty much everyone in, say, Britain, America, and Australia, could potentially vote, although the field of people they could vote for was still largely restricted to those with large amounts of wealth, no more than one X chromosome, and large amounts of pinkish white skin. But given the disparity in wealth, chromosomes and skin (and the consequent difference in political and financial concerns) between the potential voters and the votees, it was in the interests of the latter to reduce the numbers of actual voters as much as possible. Or rather the aim was to undo the progress made in the 750 years after 1215 and head back as quickly as possible to the electorate as it existed at Runnymede.

Both America and Britain had a built in mechanism for reducing the numbers of voters. With no compulsion to turn up at the voting booths on election day, this instantly reduced (by half quite often) the numbers of voters by getting rid of the sick, or those who had to work that day (made even more effective in America by holding elections on Tuesdays), or the frail elderly, or those with small children, or those too far from a polling place, or single parents, or simply those who knew that whoever they voted for a politician would be elected. It is notable that conservatives in Australia have constantly tried to get rid of compulsory attendance at the polling place (this is not compulsory voting, as they often misleadingly say) in order to catch up to their political friends in the US. In America getting rid of other potential voters of the lower orders has become an art form. Voting rolls are run by whichever politician is in charge locally, so voters can be purged effortlessly on the basis of a name similar to someone with a criminal record (those really with a record, or in prison, being long gone), by getting rid of those recently evicted from their homes, by reducing voting opportunities in poor areas and so on. The efforts are now greatly helped by moving to electronic computerised voting on machines owned by Republican sympathisers.

Again, Australian conservatives are muttering about electronic voting (already a reality in Canberra), and have prevented those in prison from voting, and introduced a system of closing the rolls as soon as the election is announced in order to disenfranchise the young, or those often moving between rented accommodation and so on. Ideally, of course, the only voters you want are those voting for you, if you have no real interest in democracy, and merely an interest in power. And if the poor don't vote, and if those from minority groups don't vote, then the barons who do get elected need pay no attention to matters of health and education and social services, and equal opportunity in employment, and so on. All they need do is manage the economy in such a way that their fellow barons become even richer and live in bigger castles.

But if you are a true Democrat (and Churchill felt the full force of democracy when he lost an election after winning a war) then you want the biggest possible expression of opinion and preference by as big a proportion of your population as you can possibly get. The more people voting the more the election accurately reflects the will of the people and the more the elected representatives need to pay attention to that will.

So we need to reverse the efforts of conservatives (of both Left and Right) to reduce the electorate, and have a deliberate policy of increasing it. Resist any attempts to get rid of compulsory attendance, and indeed increase the fines for non-attendance without good reason. Even those who turn up and then deliberately refuse to vote or spoil a voting paper have expressed an opinion, and will encourage political parties to try to attract them to vote properly. Make sure that voting rolls are open until the last possible moment, and have even bigger campaigns to get people to update their enrollment details. Continue and improve the efforts to assist those in hospital and nursing homes and outback communities and travelling and doing shift work to vote.

And reverse the elimination of voters in prison. Who better to express an opinion on the society that put them there than prisoners and ex-prisoners? And what about the homeless? They would have difficulty appearing on an electoral roll, but social workers and church groups manage to reach them to feed and shelter them, so how about recording some votes from them? What about refugees who have reached the country - why should they not vote at the first election after their arrival? It would help us see ourselves as others see us. And the voting age? Why 18? Why not 16 or even 14? Teenagers may not have experienced much of life yet, but many of them are well informed, and, more importantly, they are at the education coal face and the battleground of the effects of social and economic polices on families.

Have we missed anyone? Well the unborn have begun to develop as a result of the experiences of their parents, and at birth will experience the full force of the hospital problems and potentially the shambles that is child care. Hard to register their vote directly I suppose, but why shouldn't pregnant women get two votes to represent the interests of themselves and their future children? And last, but not least, the recently dead have experiences in hospitals and nursing homes and have struggled under policies related to carers and pensions and transport and housing, and might also at least have a notional interest in what happens to their estate, and their descendants, in the future. Again, a bit hard to directly cast a vote from the other side, but a Will might include the assignment of a proxy to a relation for the election immediately after their decease. Let us turn around the political process to one which seeks not to decrease democracy but to increase it.

I wonder what King John would think?

8 January 2009
Category Politics general
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Hot/hotter/hottest

If you have been getting confused/concerned/puzzled/angered by the increasingly strident (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/66848/Whacko_Texas.html) climate change denialists, with their latest talking point about how the planet is actually cooling now/since 2007/this decade/last 10 years, then here http://tamino.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/stupid-is-as-stupid-does/#comment-26358 is the simplest set of graphs I have seen for a while showing what is going on with actual figures, 5 year averages, 10 year averages, and the cherry-picking data of the "cooling since 1998" crowd.

5 January 2009
Category Climate change
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Never promised you a rose garden

Already a week gone of 2009, where does the year go? Before you have time to get your Christmas decorations down and juggle the box full up into the roof once again it will be Valentine's Day, then Easter, and then all the other occasions on which you can spend money to help the flagging economy and keep the retailer's association happy. Well, happier. Happyish.

Is it time, I wonder, to move to another career this year, part of my endless quest to see what I want to do with my life? I just hope I can settle into a life as an astronaut before I turn 80 in case there are some kind of age limitations. Never really decided what I wanted to do with my life, just went along with the flow until some unpredictable opportunity emerged and then I lurched on to some new course. I knew people who planned out their lives in some detail, but I never seemed to get a chance to do that. Probably a good thing, I rationalise in retrospect, sort of like pruning roses back hard in the Peter Cundall style. You grow and flower in a job, but if you stay there too long the flowers dwindle down to nothing. Best to start again from ground level and burst into new growth all over again.

Once upon a time jobs were for life and a gold watch (coal mining was an exception - no gold watch because you usually didn't live long enough to collect it. In fact the drive to keep coal mining going at all costs seems bizarre. You would think that as soon as it was understood that it was a major cause of global warming everyone would have breathed a sigh of relief, literally, and said - "thank goodness we can finally stop getting this filthy stuff out of the ground and leave it where it is"). Not in recent times. And this year may see an even greater acceleration towards more and more casual, temporary, short term jobs. Contracts really. And I guess more and more short term businesses and corporations.

Look I know it's not as if young Yass River Valley people are rushing to listen to the sage on Gundaroo hill in the way that young Ancient Greeks beat a path to the Delphic oracle to see what they should do with their lives. But here goes anyway. Short and simple, just three words, and not obscure in the way the over-rated lady from Delphi could often be. Are you ready for it? GET AN EDUCATION.

And I don't mean get out of school as early as you legally can in order to take a labouring job that your mate told you about that pays "good money" and lets you buy the Holden V8 ute right now instead of waiting like forever. I mean stay on until Year 12. I mean do something more afterwards, whether at university or technical college. I mean keep educating yourself (if they come back for a second lot of advice I make it even shorter - READ BOOKS). I mean talk to people about ideas and events. I mean use the internet. I mean read newspapers. Don't let your mind stop developing, your knowledge base remain stagnant, at the point where, aged 16, you ran out of school and dumped your text books in the nearest bin.

Whether you are forced to change careers over and over because of greed and stupidity on Wall Street (which sends tremors felt even in Yass) or the inevitable changes that global warming will bring; or whether you rather like the idea of being pruned by Peter Cundall every few years and developing a new set of flowers, the only thing that will make it possible is the kind of education that keeps you both informed and flexible-minded.

Oh and before you go. What do you think I should try next? Gardening perhaps?

2 January 2009
Category Education
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As well as can be expected

I've always distinguished between Christmas (for family) and New Year (for friends), although as I get older and older the thought of seeing in the new year, at the impossibly late hour of midnight, loses many of the charms it once had when I wore a younger man's clothes. But I try, I try, and although New Year is a totally random concept in the real time of days and nights; seasons and changing climate; and family events including life and death; it retains its old spell on the human psyche. We think we have got rid of all the things that made, say, 2008, a bad year, and 2009, just like a new born baby, has endless potential for good, for refreshing the human spirit. But new born babies are not blank slates, and they carry all sorts of time bombs in their DNA, and in the background and ability of the parents they have been lucky, or unlucky, enough to be born to. And new years carry all the bad DNA of the old one. If we had any doubt, there is Israel once again bombing civilians in Palestine, in yet another war to end all wars in the Middle East - and what war ever did that? And there is CO2 still being pumped into the air at frighteningly accelerating rates. And there are terrorist attacks in Mumbai, and ever-growing hungry populations, and more and more species extinctions, and the killing in Iraq and Afghanistan looks set to go on for not just another year but another decade. Or more.

So plenty of bad DNA, and bad parents (all of us) for 2009 to try to overcome, but don't hold your breath. Hard to stand, wherever you will be standing, at a minute to midnight and look forward to a happy new year. A good year. Chance would be a fine thing. And at the end of 2009 we will find ourselves once again, as we do at the end of the year, answering as we might after being run over by a bus - "How ya doin?" "Oh, about as well as can be expected".

All we can do, I think, is try, you in your small corner, and I in mine, to do whatever will help, whenever we can, to make some aspect of 2009 better than it would otherwise have been. Only a little bit, I know, but every little bit does help. So there's a new year's resolution for me. How about you?

So to all my friends on the Watermelon Blog I hope 2009 goes about as well as can be expected for you. And if this post has depressed you as much in reading it as it did me in writing it, check out http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/107250/Black_cats.html for a slightly more optimistic view of the count down to 2009.
30 December 2008
Category Values
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Black cats

Well, it's that time of the year when we are meant to ponder the past and contemplate the future. It is also a time when, as we bury the old year, it's not seen, briefly, as the done thing to speak ill of politicians or climate change deniers. But it is a time, in spite of the fact that since the invention of written languages and formal calendars, there have been about 5000 New Years, celebrated by 133 million writers and poets (I made that number up), every writer worth his or her salt has to find something new to say about the passing of time that Shakespeare didn't say. Or Robbie Burns. Or Thomas Gray for that matter, so an elegy on a Yass churchyard isn't going to do it.

When I was young my grandmother, born in the north of England, insisted on the tradition of "First Footing". Like so many other traditions imported from Britain to Australia (fire works for Guy Fawkes Day, hot Christmas dinners, clearing trees) it had become partly forgotten, a bit lost in translation, and was not really appropriate. According to Wikipedia "Good luck is believed to be brought to the house by the First-Foot, and a female First-Foot is regarded with dread. In Lancashire a light-haired man is as unlucky as a woman, and it became a custom for a dark-haired male to be the one and only first-foot... In Yorkshire it must always be a male who enters the house first, but his fairness is no objection. The first-foot usually brings a gift of coal and salt. In the North they bring coal, a drink (usually Whisky) and should have some money in their pocket. The coal representing "warmth" for the year ahead and the salt representing "flavour". A drink is to offer the host, and money is to bring wealth and happiness to the house. Often bread is regarded as a good sign, indicating that the household won't go hungry in the year to come." And so on. Well in spite of Yorkshire connections my fair head wasn't allowed, and we had to use my uncle, when available, whose luxurious curly black hair (a sign, it was thought, of some distant Welsh ancestry) should have been lucky indeed. Later, when he wasn't, I did it, as the only other male in the family, but I had to carry a black cat to cancel out the blonde head. No whisky was carried (my grandmother was teetotal), coal was not needed in the middle of a Perth summer, and there would have been precious little money. Perhaps my uncle had salt, but if so it never seemed enough to ensure the good luck, and bread, but my grandmother ensured that we never went hungry anyway, no matter what else we lacked.

All seems like another world, another time, now, and of course it was. My children know nothing of such customs, and their children will know less. Instead we have developed our own customs in this odd southern land my grandmother had such mixed feelings about. We sit with friends on verandas, offering our guests a beer (or a chardonnay, that's the kind of people we are), the remains of barbecued food on a table, the gentle buzz of mosquitos and young children and sheep in the background; gum tree leaves moving slightly in a gentle breeze; the world's problems being solved even as we speak under the wide and coal black sky with sparkling diamond stars. A boobook owl is likely to call down in the valley and the kangaroos grazing on the drive will lazily move when the guests depart at 2am; a dog will bark somewhere in the hills; and there will be memories or premonitions of smoke in the air from bushfires.

And memories of permanently absent family, and friends, and yes, cats (and dogs). All of those earlier generations, those old long since times, good and bad, lucky and unlucky, all roll around once more on New Year's Eve, come out of nowhere and surprise you like a knock on the door from a dark stranger. Bringing who knows what for 2009.

I hope it brings you all warmth and flavour, and if not wealth then good food and much happiness. For auld lang syne my dears.

29 December 2008
Category Values
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Christmas Pud, coming ready or not

I hope you all have an excellent Xmas Day.
And a really good Boxing Day.
And a very good weekend while recovering.
And some pretty good days leading up to New Year's Eve.
And a terrific ...
But, well, we'll cross that bridge on the horse with no name over the river you can never enter twice in the same place when we come to it.

Thanks for coming with me on this blogging adventure during another eventful year. Can't imagine there are too many people who haven't spent time on the Watermelon Blog now, but if you have any benighted friends who that cap fits, then you could gently introduce them. Perhaps a useful reserve Xmas present for that unexpected guest who calls in just as you settle down to trying to fit the Christmas pud in and opening that unwise third bottle of wine.

Just enjoy.

Shalom.
24 December 2008
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Puff the magic dragon

Went Christmas shopping this morning. Well, Christmas looking really, because I didn't buy anything. Takes me a lot of looking and thinking, because I aim (not always successfully) to get each person the perfect present. A perfect Christmas is achieving that, and, well, getting some thoughtfully chosen ones myself. Last year my grandson insisted on buying me a plush toy model of a frill-necked dragon lizard. It was just what I wanted, he told his eyebrow-raising mother, and of course he was right, and it has sat beside my desk ever since. I used to get excellent, individual, carefully chosen toys when I was very young, and then suddenly there was a transition I have never fully understood, when all my Christmas presents seemed to come either in flat square packets (handkerchiefs) or flat rectangular ones (socks). Nowadays they usually come in rectangular cubes (books or DVDs) - what do you get an old man who has everything eh?

I worked in a big Department Store to earn some money one Christmas in the school holidays. I was put into the mail order section of the store, which was very important at Christmas time. All over WA there were isolated farms, and those near small country towns, without physical access to shops. They would have an account with a store like Foys that could supply all their needs from food to clothing and so on. At Christmas time they also needed presents and extra special food. It was a bit like children writing to the North Pole and wishing for train sets or dolls and I was one of Santa's helpers. I would head off with a shopping list and a box. Families in the far outback of WA were trusting me, an immature 14 year old, to choose a nice shirt and a tie to match for the husband, or a red dress size ten, shoes for a six year old perhaps, some nice books, a range of foods for the Christmas table, a new bicycle, and so on. I was filling their Christmas stockings, supplying their clothing needs, putting food on their table, helping their children play and read. It was a great responsibility and I took it as such, wishing that I could see faces when they opened up the parcels of carefully chosen goods I had packed for them.

I know people who complain about the commercialisation of Christmas. I don't mind shops having Christmas decorations and leaving Jingle Bells playing on a continuous loop, as long as they don't start in September. People seem more cheerful somehow, I guess because they are all seeking perfect, and often frivolous, presents, too, and have secret little smiles when they have discovered something just right.

But there is a commercial element I object to, and that is the spreading of the idea of choosing presents to just a generalised buy buy buy. We are threatened that if people don't spend more and more on everything every Christmas the country will be ruined. And one example of this kind of spread is the advertisements that assure me that I can do all my Christmas shopping, no need to choose, in a newsagent, or a pharmacy, or a hardware shop, or even a remainder market where I can get easy listening CDs for the whole family at a dollar each. Lots of flat square packets coming I guess.

But the nastiest advert of all is the one where the son gives his father a carefully chosen CD only to have the father put it into a home made machine which smashes the gift up and turns it into a shopping card for a chain of motor parts and accessory shops. "Thanks son", he says, "just what I wanted". I cringe when I see this because it sums up everything that can be made wrong about Christmas - perhaps I lack a sense of humour. It represents more of an attack on the very nature of Christmas than anything dreamed up by fundamentalist religious leaders when they talk about the "war on Christmas", referring to attempts to make the festival more inclusive and joyous for people of all religions or none.

May you all get a plush frill-necked lizard in your Christmas stockings.

22 December 2008
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Atlas Shrieked

Let me take you by the hand and lead you through an imaginary land. I am, I ask you to imagine, a fanatic believer in ultra-unregulated nature-red-in-tooth-and-claw-and-the-devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism. I am against any form of public ownership or activity - no public schools, hospitals, aged care, transport, communications - nothing for public good, all for private wealth. I am a religious fundamentalist, especially because I like the bit about man having dominion over nature, and I am against any form of environmental regulation of big business.

I have decided to set up the Murrumbidgee Science Institute. It has no buildings, no staff, just myself as President and CEO, and a web site. The prestigious (it will say so on the web site) Institute has a number of divisions, each charged with the task of asserting things I believe. One division will assert that Australian rivers have plenty of water, though when they dry up it is natural, and there should be much more irrigation; another will assert that there are more trees than ever before in Australia and farmers should be clearing them; another will promote the use of clean green nuclear power; another will press for the privatisation of all national parks, turning them into managed forests for timber and woodchips; another will press for the rejection of godless Darwinism and the teaching of creationism in schools; another will push the proposition that GM food is harmless, nay, beneficial; still another will assert that cigarettes are not addictive and smoking does not damage health (oh, no, sorry, that one was left over from my earlier Cigarette Institute agenda). And then the biggie. The A Division will assert that the planet isn't warming, or if it is the process is purely natural, and that there should be no attempt to curb greenhouse gases. I will of course be the spokesperson for all these divisions (and in fact the only member of each) since they will simply be asserting what I believe.

Each time an environmental issue arises I will phone the television networks and introduce myself as, say, the Head of the Rivers Division, Murrumbidgee Science Institute. The tv stations, desperate for balance, and faced with the unanimous opinion of all the freshwater scientists of Australia, will be delighted to hear a dissenting view. And so it goes.

After the first few appearances money will come flooding in, from farmer's associations, mining companies, business groups, foresters, providing the means for me to spread our messages even further. I will be able to monitor any media message which contradicts my beliefs, and instantly respond. No need to present actual research (there will be none), since I will describe the outcomes of scientific research as "opinion", and therefore my own opinions provide a perfect counterbalance. But I need something else, the ultimate killer application.

In September 1950 "Worlds in Collision" by Immanuel Velikovsky, one of the first of the blockbuster "popular science" books was published and reprinted a staggering 13 times over the next ten years selling many tens of thousands of copies, and author and title were household names in the 1950s. The book was nonsense. Velikovsky's theory was that the planets had moved around the solar system in a kind of celestial game of snooker, and the collisions between them, and the after effects, could explain all the history of climate and geology of the planet, and the evolution of organisms, and all human development. The collisions and their effects had continued not only through the last few hundred thousand years but into historical times. The book was based on an obsessive belief in the theory and a willingness to force every piece of information the author could find, every reference to the heavens in ancient texts, into the mould of his vision. The acceptance of the book by the general public was understandable - a claim to explain everything about the past all wrapped up in a simple theory is enormously appealing. Why though wasn't Velikovsky's book immediately discredited by the scientists of the day? Because a cosmologist reading it would say - "well, the cosmology is of course complete rubbish but the geology looks very interesting". A geologist would say, "well the geology is nonsense, but gee there are some interesting ideas about biology here", an historian would say, "well of course his reading of history is insane, but this stuff about planetary movement is really intriguing". And so on (http://www.blognow.com.au/mrpickwick/84979/Fire_and_Australian_Society.html).

Since I know how all this worked I can add another technique to my repertoire of Breakfast Show interviews and letters to the editor. Petitions. Here is a thing that will surprise you - there are lots and lots of "scientists" round the world. They range from people with PhDs from prestigious universities followed by a lifetime of publishing in major scientific journals and a laboratory or two named after them; down through the girl in the headache tablet advert who has a "science degree" and a white coat and is using them to see whether one tablet dissolves faster than another, by carefully placing the two tablets in, respectively, 2 glasses of water; and on down through people who have done first year remedial biology at a technical college, subsequently closed, in a very small rural town in Uzbekhistan. Anyway, hundreds of thousands of people, all of whom would be happy to say, with a little modest smile, "oh, I don't know if I would call myself a scientist, that would be up to others, but I certainly think of myself as one". And not many Albert Einsteins, or Charles Darwins, or James Hansens among them.

On the other hand, since these are, by and large, ordinary people, they represent the same range of wisdom and foolishness as the population at large. Among them will be religious fanatics, gun freaks, racists, political ultra-conservatives, foresters, talk back radio listeners, taxi drivers, and those who believe that capitalism will one day make them rich. So here is what I do. I set up an online petition - perhaps one asserting that evolution and "intelligent design" are equally valid theories, or one asserting that GM organisms are harmless, or one asserting that there is no such thing as wilderness and all forest should be managed, or one asserting that climate change is not happening but if it was it wouldn't be caused by humans. I know that real scientists who know anything about the particular topic will ignore me, but that people who don't will rush to sign up, to see their names on a list of "scientists". And, even among real scientists, just as with Velikovsky, chemists may think there is something to be said for intelligent design, physicists may see some logic in forest management, and geologists may think that recent climate change is insignificant. So among all the dross, there will be a few names of genuine scientists, signing up on an issue on which they have no expertise, and doing so because of some religious or philosophical or psychological imperative in their minds. Anyway, no problem racking up the numbers, and I will soon be able to make announcements - 20,000 scientists think schools should teach creationism, 25,000 scientists think national parks should be abandoned, 30,000 scientists think global warming is not caused by CO2, 40,000 scientists say GM organisms are good for you.

Not me saying those things you understand, but scientists, thousands of them. And I know that next time I go on breakfast tv armed with such a petition no one will question the make up of the list concerned (including the surprising number of "Mickey Mouses" who have scientific opinions), the quality and quantity of the "scientists" concerned. Even if I have to debate, say, James Hansen or the ghost of Charles Darwin, my list will trump them - 30,000 to 1 you see, take that James. And the success of such petitions in swaying public opinion through a scientifically-illiterate entertainment-obsessed popular media will impress politicians, making decisions on, say, whether a derisory 5% in emission cuts is enough or do they need to go to 10%. And, in turn, my ability to impress politicians and turn around some scientifically irrefutable, but giant-corporation-unpopular piece of public policy will lead to even more money pouring into my virtual coffers. A license to print money really.

And a license to impose my beliefs on a grateful nation, a grateful planet. Well, grateful eventually when they realise what I have done for them. Don't think anyone will be throwing shoes at me!

19 December 2008
Category Climate change
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Sundance kids

This http://www.nrdconline.org/campaign/stop_wilderness_giveaway/forward seems worthwhile to me and, hey, you get thanked by Robert Redford!
18 December 2008
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"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)

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