Up there Cazaly

by Education, Media • Tags: , , , , ,

So, another football season has come and gone. Hooray. Oh I used to follow football, a bit, when I was younger, managed to get excited when “my” teams won, became briefly downhearted when they didn’t. Even went to a game or two of the WANFL (shows how old I am) in Perth as a teenager. But I began to lose interest when the codes became professional. When the WA and SA leagues were relegated to amateur hour and the AFL took over with artificial teams like the Eagles and Crows being created (back in the good old days, teams were actually based in a district, and were referred to accordingly, this creation of artificial teams with idiotic non-location based “names” was another turn-off). Similarly in Rugby League as the Broncos and Raiders emerged. I started to find I had little interest in who won these artificial contests and indeed could barely remember who had won the competitions the previous year.

But mainly I suppose the rise and rise of millionaire football players was the turn off. Always discussion during the season, and outside the season, about footballers behaving badly. Every week or two some footballer will not only get drunk out of his brain but emerge from a nightclub or pub at 5am to let the world, and the local police force, know that he is drunk out of his brain by committing various unacceptable acts. Sports commentators, presumably on the basis that it’s best not to throw the first stone never knowing whose glasshouse is in the way, generally don’t condemn the acts as such. Men are men after all, and a bit of violence is only to be expected – on and off the field. No the criticism is always along the lines that these people are “role models” for the young. Indeed I heard one commentator say in effect that the reason why footballers had bank accounts bigger than the budgets of some small countries was not because they played football but because they were being paid to be role models, so they weren’t earning their pay when they appeared, behaving badly, on CCTV cameras outside nightclubs.

Now it has never occurred to me to have a footballer as a role model, so I would join in the hysterical laughter from CEOs of football clubs (who pay millions, and juggle salary caps, for one reason, and one reason only – to win premierships) when that statement was made. But there is anyway a curiously restricted view of what a role model is. For sports commentators a role model is purely a negative thing – a footballer should avoid doing drugs, getting drunk in public, abusing women. Now I guess this is fine as far as it goes, but since there must be 21, 999,000 people, including me, who also don’t do those things, I am not sure exactly how a footballer not doing them either qualifies for role modelhood.

It is hard to imagine, conversely, any positive aspects of being a role model that a footballer can do. The only reason these guys are in the public eye is that they have an ability to catch and kick a football. In all other respects they are no different to the average guy in the pub on a Friday night, or walking down the street on a Monday morning. So why would you choose (unless you wanted to be a footballer) a footballer as a role model for, well, life I suppose? If I was advising young people as to who they could look to as role models for their future life I might advise them to consider nurses, teachers, police officers, scientists, soldiers, aged care workers, conservationists, farmers, emergency workers, public servants. If they used those people as role models I don’t think we would need to call on footballers to fill the, er, role.

Unless you wanted to be a footballer and earn far more money than any of those good people I have mentioned.

March of the soldier crabs

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by Environment, Media, politics • Tags: , , , , , ,

The other day a tv morning show did an interview with a wildlife photographer, agreeing that seeing his excellent photographs would encourage people to help save those species. The ABC is currently showing the latest David Attenborough blockbuster series called, simply, “Life”. For the last half century we have been seeing tv series (especially by Attenborough, but also others) in which there has been an escalation of improved filming techniques to the point where we can see, in close up HD full colour, an octopus lay an egg, a sting ray eat a crab, deep in the ocean. And yet, throughout that time, land clearing has gathered pace, over hunting and over fishing is rampant, the air is gaining CO2, and the extinction of interesting and photogenic species (as well as less photogenic ones) has gathered pace to the point where the only debates among scientists are about the proportion (quarter? half? three-quarters?) of species we are going to lose in the near future and over what period.

The logic of tv series about nature, as for zoos, is that the reason the environment is in trouble is that the general public don’t have an appreciation for what is out there. That environmentalists have erred in speaking about the environment in abstract terms, and that in order to encourage the public to support, perhaps even demand, conservation measures, we need to personalise the world “out there”, to show beauty, intelligence, structure, interaction, interesting behaviour, and evolution, among individual animals, in order to encourage people to think – “Oh my goodness, no, we don’t want THAT species to go extinct” – and, by accumulating such reactions both within individuals and whole societies, stimulate the public to act in ways that will encourage conservation.

Except, as we have seen, they don’t. So does David Attenborough have to work even harder, push the technology even further, to get more and more advanced images of more and more obscure creatures and rare behaviours? Will just one more astonishing television series (“The Universe and Everything”?) finally do the trick, tip the balance, turn the planet around?

No, it won’t. Firstly there is an almost total disconnect, in the public mind, between knowing, in one part of the brain, that there are interesting plants and animals “out there”, and using another part of the brain, when economic push comes to shove, to demand action to save them. A disconnect encouraged, perhaps created, by the media organisations who work in concert with, act to promote the interests of, the corporations and developers whose sole interest in the planet is to extract great personal wealth from it by exploiting it until the pips squeak. In any circumstance in which, say, a patch of woodland is being defended by a small number of Attenborough-inspired members of the general public, they will be branded as “radical greeny nimbys” who want to get in the way of progress and jobs for the downtrodden workers of the world. The branding will come from the ever reliable voices of shock jocks, the stukas of environmental blitzkrieg; from the billionaire company owners, their wealth apparently equating directly, in media eyes, with both wisdom and virtue; and from the politicians, their private phone numbers on the speed dial function of the billionaire’s phone, always aware, to the last dollar, of the donations by said billionaire to the party funds. Whatever film- or photo-worthy birds, mammals, insects, snails are in the woodland matters not, the bulldozers will go in, sooner or later. Probably sooner.

But, I hear you ask, what if there were more than a handful of people wearing beanies and sensible shoes? What if the wildlife documentaries were so influential that the whole population of Sydney, say, poured out to protect the last patch of coastal forest, carrying signs saying “Give us koalas or give us death”? Surely then the media would change its tune, the developers turn to brownfield sites, the billionaires go back to counting their money, the politicians get a new silent number? Well, possibly, but we will never get to do the experiment. The reason that we never get more than a small number is that, as it turns out, the wildlife documentary paradigm (just like the zoo paradigm) was wrong.

It is easy to forget, caught up in the magic million march of soldier crabs, that this is a virtual reality. That we are passive recipients, through tv screen, of beautiful images. We have not trudged over desert, or through forest, or dived to the ocean depths ourselves, but are simply absorbing the work of those who have. The researchers, and the film makers or photographers who rely on their work, have the direct personal interactions, experience empathy with individual animals, see the complexity of which they are a small part, understand intimately the threats to their existence and the consequences of their loss. We just see, dispassionately and impersonally, the images on screen. Whatever sense of empathy we might manage to garner from one film sequence, for one individual of a species, will in any case be quickly replaced by another sequence, by a brief passing concern for another species, and then another. In a very real sense the abundance of wildlife films is a negative – too many images, each substituting for the one before, too many beautiful plants and animals in too many places, too many ecosystems. It might, just might, be possible to generate major community support for one species, but wildlife documentaries require the public to assimilate the needs of thousands of species, turn that assimilation into a general call to action to save “the environment”, a call based on the ability of the average member of the public to understand that a mating squid is not a unique object for concern but a symbol of hundreds of other mollusc species, an example of what is happening in one ecosystem to many other species.

Indeed the incredible improvements in wildlife documentary film making over the past fifty years is itself a reason why the aim of such film making is not being achieved. Each film, to attract the money to make it, and the audience to watch it, has to be more spectacular than the one before. The evocative music as fish swim, birds fly; the astonishing close-ups of breeding or feeding activities; the ability to penetrate into every possible habitat no matter how remote or difficult; the slow- or stop-motion replays of actions; the dramatic narratives recounted breathlessly in seductive voice-overs; all take us further away from what we could experience in real life, all combine to make us mere passive spectators, more likely to replace last week’s on-screen concerns with this week’s and then what is coming “in next week’s episode”. A wildlife documentary is no different in entertainment value to the reality show, or crime drama. and no more likely to lead its audience to action.

Many of us have waited, in keen anticipation, for a wildlife-documentary-informed public to begin manning the barricades. Thousands of ordinary citizens at last joining the ecologists on the front line. Drawing a line in the sand dune, or rain forest, and saying “this far and no further – they shall not pass”. But a grass roots movement of thousands of ordinary people, marching like soldier crabs to war for the environment, isn’t going to happen – Attenborough is clearly not Kitchener. If we are going to stop the rot the action is going to have to come from on top not from below. Going to come from media organisations who recognise that making billions of dollars out of environmental destruction isn’t actually a qualification for commenting on conservation. Going to have to come from politicians who have given their silent number to ecologists not developers.

I can’t wait for the next episode of “Life” but I no longer think Attenborough central to saving the planet. Our political leaders are.

Cross-posted at ABC Unleashed.

The blinking cursor writes

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by Media • Tags: , ,

Stephanie Rice getting into trouble the other day over her insensitive tweet about rugby was a reminder, or a first clue, to everyone who posts stuff anywhere on the internet that what starts as a bright idea on your computer screen might not be a bright idea when it is potentially read by anyone in the world anywhere anytime in the present or future. Postings are not love letters in the sand, to be washed away by the next high tide, but engravings permanently engraved in sandstone. Or silicon of some kind anyway. The Stephanie Rice thing is particularly instructive for young people about to set sail in the job market, who will almost certainly find that a potential employer won’t just read the carefully handwritten notes by your schoolteacher or football coach, but will read any of the careless nothings you whispered to the internet at any time in the past. And those nothings, written at midnight, might not sound quite so clever, or so inconsequential, in the cold hard light of day next morning in a job interview.

On the other hand, things that exist only as a pattern of electrons on a hard disc are as impermanent as the fading colours in a rainbow as a shower of rain dissipates. Twenty years ago, in one of my other lives, I was asked to find out the results of a research project that had been carried out ten years earlier. No problems I thought, data and analysis had been done on a computer and stored electronically, and it would be a breeze to call it up on a screen, copy the relevant conclusions and send them on, whoosh, attached to an email to England. Uh uh. The work had been done on what was then the most advanced mainframe of its day at the university. And stored on the devices used to run the computer – those great big tapes that you see whirring away in old James Bond movies. The researchers had finished the work, carefully stored it on tape, put tape into library archive and went off feeling virtuous. Trouble is, even just ten years on, as a result of the intervening pc revolution, the tapes were unreadable. System software had changed, storage devices had changed, input devices had changed, analytical software had changed – the tapes were no longer readable by any available device. I have, actually, another story about the even earlier analysis I had done using punch cards. Remember them? They sit, forlornly, in my roof storage space now, neatly bundled up, but as useless as Mayan hieroglyphics.

I have recently, as well as doing my political rants, been putting family history material on the internet (http://davidhortonsblog.com/dream/). My Study, even more untidy than usual, is full of old birth and marriage certificates; copies of census returns from, say, 1841; old photographs of long dead relatives; faded newspaper articles, postcards, letters, and so on. They are all as solid and readable as they were 150 years or more ago – just as well they weren’t stored on punch cards or tape eh! On the other hand, my mob, my gang of ancestors, direct and indirect, are comprised of small farmers, coal miners, blacksmiths, carpenters, servants, factory workers, gardeners, potters, and such like, among the millions of anonymous people who lived and died, invisible to the history books, in Britain and Australia over the last 200 years. People who, while keeping the wheels of industry, and society, turning, and being, in their own right, interesting, smart, caring, hard-working, loving, always remain completely unknown. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, blowing in the wind and forgotten. So I can bring them back to life, and name them, give them identity, tell their stories for an audience all over the world, by using the internet, using the transient electrons to celebrate them in a way that the hard copy of their hard lives could never do. We need both in fact – not a reliance on fading technology (5 inch discs anyone?) to hold memories, but also not a fear of using the internet for good memories.

So the question isn’t really to be or not to be on the internet. The question is how are you going to be remembered. Stephanie Rice seems a pleasant enough person who can swim. I hope she gets remembered for that, and for what she does with the rest of her life, and not just for the inane comment now permanently engraved on the internet. And so does everyone else.

Up to you.

Tis the season

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by Climate Change • Tags: , ,

And now it is Spring again, already. I’d kind of like to go into hibernation now, until it is Autumn, wake up and discover I had survived another awful Summer on the southern tablelands. Can’t stand those cheery people in city television stations who happily announce that Summer is coming, nearly here, Hooray.

Not just me, think we would all be better off if we didn’t have seasons at all. If, by some fluke, our planet happened to have an axis exactly at right angles to its orbit then we would all know where we were – live in a warm place it stays warm, cold place likewise, no difference between northern and summer hemispheres – hot in Moscow, hot in Canberra; cold in Chicago, cold in Hobart.

The seasons are the reason that the giant energy companies have been able to get away, for twenty years, with pouring cold water on global warming; ensuring that no government anywhere would take serious actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; and that they could, therefore, continue to pour ever increasing amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere to generate ever larger profits as if there was no tomorrow. You see with alternating hot and cold seasons our memories don’t do well in making comparisons from one year to the next. Hard to remember what last Summer was like when you have been wearing the long johns all winter. Hard to recognise that a winter is milder than the one before when they are separated by a harsh Summer. If there were no seasons you could easily recognise, over a period of time that days were getting warmer on average, nights too, and that we were setting many more record high temperatures on the southern tablelands than record low temperatures. You would hardly need measurements to illustrate global warming, it would be so much a matter of commonsense that the conversations in country pubs wouldn’t be about whether it was real or not but how we should be reducing CO2 output.

And there is another reason why an accidental tilt of an axis has served the people of the planet poorly. Having one hemisphere cold while the other is warm and then switching to the opposite has made it easier for the deniers in both hemispheres to keep the pressure on year round. Heat causing bushfires around Moscow? Hah, pretty cold on Mount Wellington today, if this is global warming bring on more. Record sequence of high temperatures in Adelaide? Hah, that’s just weather, you should see the snow in Washington. And so on, over and over. Not having seasons would remove the opportunity for this illogical but media-popular line from those with a vested interest in delaying recognition that the planet is warming and that we had better act quickly.

But failing a Superman to lasso the North Pole and pull the planet upright, we will just have to rely on the sapience of Homo sapiens. Next time you hear someone say the globe isn’t warming because there is snow in London in Winter, take it with a grain of road salt. And try to keep in mind the comparison of season with season over the last, say, thirty years. If you can’t, and you probably can’t, then look at what the scientific instruments are telling us is happening. That’s what they, and the scientists who read them, are for.

We’ve all been mentally hibernating too long while the planet has been changing around us.

Tomorrow the World

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by Uncategorized •

Well, on a dark dark night – a new poll for Watermelon readers. Also note that methods (Twitter, StumbleUpon, Digg, etc) of publicising/sharing posts you like with the world out there are now at the base of each post. I currently have a lot more Twitter followers than blog subscribers, which seems, somehow, wrong. To work, Watermelon readers – tomorrow the world.

Haven’t added any new parts to “Dream” in the last week or so, but if you haven’t visited for longer than that, check out how the story is going.

Pound wise, penny foolish

by Economics, politics • Tags: , , , , ,

A billion dollars Tony Abbott offered to buy Andrew Wilkie’s vote. Oh sorry, that should read to “build a new Hobart hospital”. Julia Gillard only offered half a billion or so and therefore won what turned out to have been a lowest bid wins contest.

The same day, as that billion merged with all the other billions that had been miscounted by Tony Abbott’s responsible economic managers (deficits will always be counted lower under a Liberal opposition), I saw a little tv segment about a volunteer theatre group that worked with homeless people in Sydney to improve their self-esteem, give them purpose, give them new skills. The group was doing this worthwhile work on less than a shoestring – if I remember correctly they received no funding of any kind.

And the conjunction of these items, once again made me think that governments of all kinds and levels have lost the plot. This theatre project is just one of thousands of projects around the country, working with drug addicts, the disabled, street kids, old people alone, environment repair, children’s sport, mental illness, sick children, heritage work and so on. These projects are run by volunteers, fund raising relying on cake stalls, trying to find accommodation and transport, and mostly receiving very little in support from any government, at times none. Many of them are able to function only in one suburb or one town or with one group because of lack of funds to do more. Most of them could enormously expand the good they do with small, pitifully small, grants of a few thousand dollars, sometimes only a few hundred dollars.

Imagine how many could be helped with carefully targeted amounts, red tape free, from a fund of even a million dollars, let alone a billion dollars. Imagine how much community benefit there would be from an expansion of the kind of work that is being done in such small ways. It is time that governments started thinking small instead of big. That a lot of small expenditure, while it doesn’t get headlines, is a much better way to spend part of the federal budget than some of these big ticket items.

Fifty years ago, Parkinson (he of “Law” fame) described a typical committee meeting in which committee members happily agreed, in a matter of moments, with little discussion, to spend millions on a power station, because they knew nothing about power stations, while quibbling and arguing for hours about the expenditure of a hundred dollars for a bicycle shed, because they all knew about bicycles. We would be much better served if present day governments reversed those figures.

So, with the deal between the independents and Labor for an extra ten billion dollars for regional areas, why don’t you try all signalling some small, but important, projects and activities that could do with an injection of funds in this regional area. A thousand dollars here, a thousand dollars there, pretty soon you are talking real improvements in the bush. And the cities.

It ain’t broke

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by politics • Tags: , , , , ,

After every election, sure as bears leaving droppings in the woods, you will hear the cries from right wing think tanks for a change to our electoral system. This time the cries have been even more strident than usual – “Hung parliament – change the electoral system” “Informal votes – change the electoral system’. Ignore them, is the best advice; but ignoring my own advice, here is a guide to the silliness (apparently to conservatives you don’t change anything that ain’t broke except the Australian electoral system, arguably, and I would be happy to argue the case, the best in the world by a long long way).

The demands will be made for three changes. An end to what they call compulsory voting (failing to recognise the total failure of logic in using a rise in informal votes to call for no compulsory voting!); an end to preferential voting (supposedly to achieve “certain” results); a call for computerised voting machines.

Let me deal with the last one first. The day that Australia introduces voting machines built, programmed, and run by private companies is the day democracy dies in Australia. From then on don’t bother turning up to vote, it will be pointless.

And now the “compulsory turning up at a polling station on or before polling day and getting your name ticked off or sending in something by post” question. Really? Of all the questions about “freedom” you might ask (what to read, hear, watch, ingest, write, draw, see on internet, discuss on phone without listeners, speak, marry, die etc) the biggest imposition on us is ten minutes to consider our democracy every few years? Really? You don’t want to vote for anyone, feel free. Go for it, no one’s making it compulsory (sadly) for you to behave intelligently – scribble some obscenity on your paper or leave it blank, shove it in the box, stroll out whistling to yourself on a job well done.

And preferential voting? Well, nothing to do with the election result. The Australian people were split down the middle in their views as to whether they wanted a conservative Liberal government of a conservative Labor government. Couldn’t absolutely decide which was the lesser of the two evils. But also wanted to send a message to Labor, by voting Green more than ever before, that when people are given a choice between real conservatives and pretend conservatives they will choose the real ones, so Labor better move back to the left a bit (the preferences giving them a decided nudge). But in the meantime, whoever wants to form government has to deal with an assorted group of independents, and the Greens, has to modify policies and attitudes and approaches to governing. Pretty good result I’d say.

So, puzzled about why the calls for change? The conservatives think that not asking people to turn up for ten minutes at a polling booth an a Saturday every three years will result in the people who do turn up being generally more conservative. They also know that stopping people influencing party policy by gently nudging them through the preference system will quickly kill the smaller parties, and leave it up to a contest between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Now, where have I seen (including the use of voting machines) an outcome like that in real life?

Familiar with the American voting system are you?

It ain’t broke. Ignore them.