Category Archives: Environment

Like snowflake crystal

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

When I was, many years ago, a youngish archaeozoologist (or zooarchaeologist, the difference in name being a matter of taste), one of the skills I needed, and had, was a combination of pattern recognition and pattern memory. I would be faced with dozens, hundreds perhaps, of pieces of bone in various sizes, shapes, colours, textures. The challenge was to look at them one at a time and remember that you had seen, somewhere else on the table, perhaps in another bag or box, another piece that was similar, very similar, in colour, texture, and that had a broken end that matched this broken end. I could reach out for where I knew it was and, hey presto, join together two parts of a broken bone.

Then I could begin constructing narratives about how the bones had been broken, whether they were burnt, how far they had moved, what species were present (two halves of a jaw reassembled being easier to identify than the two separate halves), and so on. A narrative that helped make sense of the lives of the people who had once lived in that place.

I don’t do that work any more, haven’t for a long time. But now I work in social media and similar skills are once again in play. Firstly because of the way I work I suppose. Once I used to hastily jot down ideas while stopped at traffic lights on the car, jot them on any rubbish I could find like supermarket receipts, car park vouchers, paper bags, and then try to put fragments, bulging out of my pockets, together into a narrative when I got home.

One narrative I was trying to construct was my own family history/autobiography one (see under tab marked “Dream”) for publication on this blog. Lives are fragmentary, both as they are lived and more so in recollection. We take a childhood memory here, an object there, a photograph of a friend, and shape it together to form a coherent fragment of a life. Or at least a narrative of a fragment, because memoirs are nothing if not unreliable, to lesser and greater extents. But as an autobiographer you get to construct your own narrative, before your biographer comes along later and reconstructs it with his or her own narrative of your life.

These days fragments of ideas, internet links, quotes, photos, headings, half written posts, are jotted down on computer documents, and bulge out of computer folders cunningly labelled things like “Blog Ideas”. Every so often I go through them, remembering an idea from here, a link from there, a quote from someone, and suddenly realise that a narrative can be constructed.

And the material from which these fragments are derived is itself fragmented. Every day stories come pouring in from all over the world, important, frivolous, happy, sad, serious, trivial, fact, fiction. Long, short, stark, expanded, checked, unchecked, information, disinformation. All grist to the social media mill. Problem is though that it all comes through the filter of the mainstream media and is converted into their narratives before it reaches us. We’d like the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, and decide the narrative, having seen patterns, put two and two together, for ourselves.

So we need to deconstruct what we get. If I was looking at a table full of bones that someone else had stuck together, using their own criteria for best fit, and their own filter for narrative construction, I wouldn’t accept it. Instead I would dissolve the glue, separate the bones back to their original state, and start again from scratch. Much the same with the media narratives. We need to see what they are made from, and how and why they have been constructed. Then deconstruct them and make up our own minds.

The environment we all live in is often seen as fragments. Sometimes in a positive way “one might begin to write a book about a hedgerow when a boy and find it incomplete in old age” (from my lovely Ricard Jefferies). A realisation of the enormous complexity of the world we evolved in. Sometimes in a negative way, when politicians, developers, farmers, fishermen, think that destroying one fragment of woodland, driving one species to extinction, polluting one waterway, won’t matter because it is just a small thing.

But just as in our own lives, and in the social and political worlds, the environmental fragments are all inter-connected, and we need to reassemble those fragments to understand all of the narratives.

Have we got the skills?

Fiery particles

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by Cancer, Environment • Tags: , , , ,

So here I am again. Blogging, one-handed, in the oncology day treatment ward. For the last time. Ever.

No, mustn’t tempt the fates, waiting with their deadly scissors to punish both optimism and hubris. This is hopefully the last chemo treatment (astonishingly number 19) for quite a while after two years and 4 days since my first one, an age ago.

Side effects a bit rough last time, hope better this time.

This whole process is a bit like burning the forest to get rid of weeds and then seeing the good green shoots appearing again through the blackened landscape. Chemotherapy burns up all the white blood cells, including the bad lymphoma particles, and then the blood ecology comes back.

But just as the forest is damaged by each fire, and the more you burn, the less well the ecology recovers, so the more you “burn” the good cells in the body the more you damage them, and the less your body returns to normal. Moderation in both are needed.

There, managed to combine my fire research with my cancer treatment, not a bad metaphor eh?

So don’t forget to vote for me as Best Blog at http://www.writerscentre.com.au/bloggingcomp/peopleschoice.html – page 5 under THE Watermelon Blog.

The Write Stuff

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by Education, Environment, Media • Tags: , , , , ,

“…he lounged up and down the pavement, and gazed vacantly at the ground, the sky, the opposite houses, and the line of railings. Having finished his scrutiny, he proceeded slowly down the path, or rather down the fringe of grass that flanked the path, keeping his eyes riveted on the ground. Twice he stopped, and once I saw him smile, and heard him utter an exclamation of satisfaction. There were many marks of footsteps on the wet clayey soil; but since the police had been coming over it, I was unable to see how my companion could learn anything from it” … “… the murderer was a man. He was more than six feet high, was in the prime of life, had small feet for his height, wore coarse square-toed boots and smoked a Trichinopoly cigar. He came here with his victim in a four-wheeled cab, which was drawn by a horse with three old shoes and one new one on his off fore-leg …” Sherlock Holmes ‘A Study in Scarlet’.

When I was young I thought “Oh, if only I could write like Enid Blyton”. A little later it was “Oh if only I could write like WE Johns”. Then followed Charles Dickens, and a little later JD Salinger, and on and on through a life spent reading and writing. These days I will read some beautifully argued and written blog post or newspaper column and think, oh, if only I could write like that, perhaps I should copy their style, see what I can do.

But you can’t, really of course. Your writing style is born with you, grows with you, is the result of nature and nurture, is as individual as a fingerprint.

Or your track through a desert. It is often remarked (though I think much exaggerated and mythologised) that Australian Aborigines, Kalahari Bushmen, North American Indians, can identify not just which species of animal they are tracking but an individual, and the same when tracking humans. And what they were doing – here they paused to rest, here ate some food, there drank, at this point they were running, at that they were sleeping and so on. A track across a landscape becomes a history of an individual.

As does the track across your life of the things you write. We all leave behind not broken twigs, crushed leaves, footprints in soft mud; but letters, wills, academic research papers, letters to editor, books, post cards, theses, speeches, school essays, diaries, newspaper columns, poetry, book chapters, reviews, referee reports, and, more recently, emails, tweets, blogs. We don’t all leave all of those of course, but the combination of written works we do leave will also help to define our lives, define who we are, as much as the style and content of what is written.

Some disciplines impose strong frameworks not just on what is written but on how it is written. Law, Science, Medicine, Engineering, for example, impose style and content requirements that greatly reduce the individual footprint that can be produced in them. On the other hand writing history for example, or of course literature, is very much open to, indeed demands, that the writer develop their own style.

So you could, and people called biographers do, deduce a great deal about a person, their personality, ideas, creativity, influences, life story, from the written works they leave behind. A box, an attic, full of old papers doth a biography make. But for it to be a true, accurate, portrait of a lady, or gentleman, the record must be complete. There are many heartbreaking stories to the biographer or historian, of letters burnt after death on an author’s instructions (Dickens for example), of manuscripts lost in some way, of material discarded when a family moves house, and, these days, of crashed computers or damaged discs. The problem is not just that some detail is absent, some chunk of time not described, but that the missing material may well have totally altered our understanding of a life, a character, an achievement.

Material from which to cut the whole cloth of a life need not be actually physically lost, but can be merely lost sight of. A classic example in science is Gregor Mendel. He published the paper which showed how genetic inheritance worked in 1866. It was ignored for the next 34 years (and all his papers burnt after his death in 1884), during which time Darwin’s discovery of natural selection remained without a proper framework of genetic inheritance, until rediscovered in 1900. It was only after that time that modern genetics began to develop, and the genius of Mendel recognised. There have been many similar cases in all scientific disciplines I suspect.

This kind of failing is not just a thing of the past. Today the standard approach to “reviewing the literature” in an academic paper is to look only at the last few years, an event horizon at 5 years apparently prevents any further investigation. A literature review once was, should be, the following of a trail of evidence and argument back to its origins, in order to understand the life story of a theory or set of data. It only takes one or two literature reviews in which some papers are ignored for them to disappear into a black hole and never be referenced again (because future researchers will come to this point in their search and, not finding them, remain unaware of their existence).

Does it matter? Yes it does. If older works disappear from consideration then newer ones will keep reinventing the wheel, keep coming up with suggestions long ago dismissed for good reason (see my earlier post “The Burning Bush” for an example of this). Science is supposed to grow steadily as data and ideas accumulate, not keep slipping down to the bottom of the hill and start again the next day.

And for the individuals concerned (like poor old Mendel), ignoring work is as bad as having the maid burn a manuscript while lighting a fire, or work being done on a computer tape that can no longer be read by modern computers. Their life story, their achievements, their personal style as illustrated in the fingerprints of their writing, will be invisible to history, be incomplete. And we have no Sherlock Holmes now to decipher the biographical footprints scuffed out by policemen.

No one will ever know I smoked Trichinopoly cigars.

We need to talk about Kevin

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

The other day I saw the start of one of the Kevin McCloud lifestyle programs “Grand Designs” (a British series which follows people building unusual/interesting houses). I was struck by his opening scene. The camera ran a close-up on his face as he walked along. He said “What do you do in Britain if you want to build a house in the wilderness?” As he spoke the camera panned back to show that he was walking across a paddock, one of hundreds of acres of such paddocks as far as you could see, of pasture for sheep (which were, lambs at foot, dotted across the grass)! It would have been impossible to find a scene less “wildernessy”.

So pause for a moment, as I did, to absorb this incongruity. He isn’t a stupid man, Mr McCloud, so what on earth did he mean? Well, what he meant was that “wilderness” is anything that isn’t in a city. It’s like the ancient Greek sense of “Barbarians” meaning anyone who wasn’t Greek living in a Greek City State (a concept shared with most other cultures, everywhere from England, to China, to Aboriginal Australia, but I digress.

Let’s look at another, related, misused word, “pristine”. Once it meant what “wilderness” once meant – an environment unmodified by humans. Then it was turned on its head, by advertising agencies who decided it had a nice sound, to use, essentially, for a landscape with grass. As in a pristine golf course, a pristine housing development, a pristine farm (see the overlap with McCloud). But then it developed to pristine beaches (with added sand, breakwaters, carefully manicured by sand graders), pristine tropical islands (totally turned into tourist resorts) pristine snow resorts (trees and boulders removed from runs, ski lodges added, artificial snow created by machines), and so on. In this most recent sense it means something like “picturesque” “chocolate boxy” “place that photographs well” or, most simply “special offer, wouldn’t you love to have a holiday here?” Or, in a general sense, places that aren’t the city. Which brings us back neatly to Mr McCloud and his sheep paddock.

In the old days in Britain “wilderness” meant basically “places where we haven’t cut the trees down yet”. They were, consequently, dangerous, and might hide wolves, bears, brigands, ghosts, evil spirits and so on. A farm definitely wasn’t wilderness, but what lay beyond its fence line was.

The Romantics adopted this kind of definition, but turned it into a positive (following the original lead, in a different sense, of Rousseau). Wilderness was where we could get back in touch with nature, get away from the artificiality, indeed evils, of the city, where we were never meant to be, and get back to our roots. Now, instead of being feared, wild places of mountain or swamp or forest were celebrated in art and literature. People went hiking in them, climbed mountains, communed where the wild things were.

And then began creating “wilderness” on their estates – artificial waterfalls, clumps of trees, piles of rocks, fake ruins of temples, and so on. You could visit “wilderness” without the bother of travelling. And paintings, by Constable for example, treated as a single landscape the trees and rivers as well as the farm cottages or watermills or labourers in a field. At the same time the population was on the move as those same labourers tossed it in for more lucrative and perhaps easier work in factories and moved their families into town. The countryside was where they had escaped from, the primitive life, and they had no interest in it. If you needed a holiday from town then you travelled to a seaside resort which was a different kind of town, with a “pristine” beach, but with all the comforts of home. All views, and behaviour, which were exported to Australia with the first convicts and settlers.

So we come, gradually, to McCloud’s definition. Both symbolically, and actually, civilised life is in the city, and all that lies beyond is untamed, and rather threatening and uncomfortable, wilderness. Which people never really see, never want to see. Holidays still involve travel to artificial resorts (either in Australia, say the Gold Coast, or more often these days, in places like Thailand or Bali), the more “pristine” the better. They don’t involve contact with actual wilderness.

Does it matter? Of course it does. If wilderness is an undifferentiated “other” world out there beyond the outer suburbs, and a golf course or resort are “pristine”, then efforts at conservation will make no sense to you. Conversely nonsense like “farmers are the only true conservationists” or “miners restore the environment after mining” or “logging is good for forests” or “you got to choose between frogs and people” will seem to make perfect sense.

If you have no idea that what are trendily called “ecosystem services” these days – clean air, water, pest control, soil conservation – can only be provided by intact functioning ecosystems (wilderness), then you will see no problem in losing them. When populist politicians from Left or Right, or unionists, or big business, call for the felling of forests, the trawling of oceans, the complete use of river water for irrigation, the construction of huge open cut mines, the opening up of the North, shooting or grazing in forests, removal of marine reserves, the culling of bats or crocodiles, the public, in blissful ignorance, will applaud and vote accordingly.

Until the public understands that farmland is an environment little less degraded than cities and suburbs, and that actual functioning wilderness is consequently only in tiny, rapidly disappearing, areas, which are being woodchipped, mined, cleared, developed as I write these words, then there is no hope of trying to develop a public, and therefore political, conservation ethos.

Perhaps I could start with Kevin McCloud. Get him to make a program.

The Burning Bush

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by Climate Change, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , ,

As climate change effects in Australia (and elsewhere) begin to intensify, one of the most notable, and deadly, is the increase in frequency and intensity of bushfires.

It’s important to say that more subtle effects will have been underway for sometime. Local populations of species will have become extinct in some places, will have expanded into others. There will be, as a result, species ranges slowly moving south, moving up mountains, moving towards coasts. There will be acceleration of losses and shifts when disasters like droughts, floods, fires, strike particular habitats.

Some populations will achieve more speed than others – larger birds and marsupials for example, some invertebrates that can float in water or air, plants that have very effective seed dispersal, micro-organisms that can travel via water or dust clouds, and so on. But the great majority of organisms will struggle to move quickly enough, and many whole species are going to rapidly become extinct.

Important to note that we are not talking evolutionary adaptation here. That takes thousands of years, climate change is happening over decades. Consequently, even species that can readily move are soon going to find themselves trapped, unable to move further south over water perhaps, or running out of altitude on mountains. They don’t have time to adapt.

Which brings us to fire. Following the recent horrifying bushfire in southern Tasmania there were yet again complaints about the “lack of fuel reduction” nearby. Look, I get this, really I do. Fire is my greatest fear every Summer. I dread the sight of a column of smoke nearby. I imagine, all too graphically, what a fire would do to us.

But this “fuel reduction” thing is nonsense of course. Either someone would need to have predicted 6 months earlier exactly where the fire was going to strike and burnt accordingly. Or, every square inch of forest in Australia would have to be burnt constantly.

Indeed the latter is essentially the demand of “fire managers” and their populist politician friends. Their alibi, when challenged by conservationists, is supplied by a small string of writers. Bill Gammage has done an illustrated Flannery, Tim Flannery popularised Jones, Rhys Jones publicised Norman Tindale. All four writers promoted the view that the Australian environment was not only “adapted to fire” but actually needed it, and that consequently the Aborigines had regularly burnt the whole country and we should copy them.

For some reason media and therefore the public love this nonsense, and there is never any mention of the fact that this flimsy hypothesis has been challenged over and over again in last 50 years.

When the most recent of the four, Bill Gammage, began working on his much awarded book, he sent me a paper which formed the core of his book. I wrote to him (in 2003) as follows:

“Hi Bill
Thank you for sending a reprint, that was thoughtful of you. You argue your case like a lawyer. Trouble is lawyers are obliged to present all the evidence in favour of their client, not look at it in all possible ways. You seem not to have read my book yet. You would find it interesting I think.

The problems with your case, as I see it are in summary: 1. There is no question that Aborigines knew their own patch intimately. How could they not? I know my patch pretty intimately after a few years, and I am not relying on it for food. But knowing where kangaroos are likely to be, or when the yams are ripe, is not the same as causing the kangaroos to be there or the yams to ripen.
2. You must assume that natural features have natural causes until you can prove otherwise. To revert to the legal metaphor it should be a question of innocent until proven guilty, not guilty until proven innocent. Rhys Jones deliberately turned the burden of proof on its head for a very good reason – it is much harder to prove a negative than a positive. That is, apparently ‘anomalous’ patches occur for all sorts of natural reasons (of soil type, topography, rain, evaporation, biogeography, natural fire history etc). Eliminate all those and what remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth. But you do have to eliminate them first.
3. Vegetation doesn’t depend on fire so much as fire depends upon vegetation.
4. You can’t rely on nineteenth century theories about ecology and anthropology. You also can’t rely totally on apparent observations, and certainly not on the context of observations. Not only were observers prisoners of their prejudices (as are we all) but they were prisoners of the political agenda of the day and of the lack of knowledge of Australia’s people and biology.

Does it matter, other than as a fascinating debating point? Yes it does, because people of ill will use theories about the past to justify actions they want to carry out anyway. The attack on the environment of Australia is now so serious that letting people who want to put cattle in the high country, and burn every inch of Australia every year, and get rid of national parks and wilderness areas, support their demands with notions about what Aborigines did, is really very dangerous.
Best Regards
David”

So there you are, alibi destroyed. But does that matter, I hear you ask? Whatever Aborigines did, if the bush is “adapted to fire” shouldn’t we burn it?

Yesterday tv coverage of one of the recent nasty local fires ended with the obligatory comment about the bush recovering, a comment illustrated by the obligatory shot of some shoots emerging from the blackened trunk of a gum tree. But the ability to recover has nothing to do with being “adapted” or “needing to be burnt”. All species of plant can recover after disasters – if they couldn’t then long before now the planet would be as lifeless and empty as Mars. There can’t be a square metre of land that hasn’t at some stage been affected by the fast or slow disasters of fire, flood, glacier, tsunami, landslide, drought, tornado, volcanic eruption.

After the disaster some plants, not actually killed, begin regenerating. Others, surviving as seeds, begin germinating if not buried too deeply. Others, unable to survive the catastrophe themselves, will gradually return to the area via wind or birds or flowing water, or just by gradually expanding back onto the ground from surrounding areas. Different species have different abilities to do all these things, and, in addition, some can grow on bare or disturbed ground, some can not. So we have what is called a “succession” – some species arrive early (often the ones we call weed species, or those which have the capacity to become weeds), their growth modifies the environment and others begin to colonise, then finally, after the passage of a lesser or greater number of years, depending on the nature of the disaster and that of the original ecosystem, the plant community will look much as it did before it was destroyed. Although it is worth pointing out that it is very unlikely to be identical either in the totality of species present, or in their relative proportions.

Fine, good, comforting to know that however bad things look good old Mother Nature will recover. But note that I haven’t distinguished between any of the natural disasters in this regard, and that’s because there is nothing special about fire – plants are no more adapted to fire than they are to flood or tsunami. No one (I assume) in their right mind would call for the forests to be regularly flooded, or landslides triggered, nor welcome tsunamis or cyclones, just because later recovery is eventually possible? Also, and this is very important, no matter how fast and complete recovery might be after a single event, a repetition of the event in a short time would snuff out recovery and will certainly alter the composition of the new ecosystem. If you germinate all the seeds of a species, and then kill them all off before they can mature enough to set new seed, the species is gone. Again, it doesn’t matter what kind of a disaster, if it is repeated at short intervals (like, for example the recent massive floods in Queensland, just 2 years after the previous ones) the environment will be irreversibly damaged.

So we come full circle. If you want to strategically burn small areas to (possibly) help provide protection for particular places, then go right ahead. If you regularly burn all the bush any time in Australia you will change the ecosystems for the worse. If you do it when climate change is already impacting on the bush through fire, drought, flood, heat, then the damage you inflict will be infinitely greater. This is not a good thing.

PS – for other writing about fire on this blog click on the “Fire” and “History” tabs above.

Je regrette tout

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by Climate Change, Economics, Environment • Tags: , , , , , , ,

Whenever a young person comes to me and says “Listen, wise old man, what career should I think about? What occupations are going to be most needed in the next twenty years?” I am always happy to help.

“Young Person” I say “you have come to the right man. There are just three occupations you should consider:

1. Plastic Surgeon specialising in tattoo removal. There are going to be hundreds of thousands of Australians, millions perhaps, who are going to reach the age of, say, sixty, and say to themselves ‘What the hell was I thinking? What is all this rubbish on my arms and legs and back and neck? Who is this person whose name is on my arm in big letters? And are those Chinese characters? Really? A tiger, a motor bike, the Southern Cross? FFS’ And then they will be desperately searching for someone who can remove all this rubbish, which once seemed like a good idea (perhaps under influence of alcohol) when they were younger and smoother, from their now wrinkly skin.

2. Financial Guru specialising in the return of privatised companies to public ownership. Australia, like a number of other countries, tattooed its economy with once public utilities turned into glossy private companies. What seemed like a good idea (under the influence of neocon think tanks) in those carefree days of the 1980s and 1990s now is revealed as a terrible error of judgement. Smart people are going to be needed to undo the thatcherite damage, and return railways, water, telecommunications, airports, wharves, hospitals, schools, energy, to public ownership.

3. Landscape ecologist specialising in revegetation. Australia has tattooed its landscape (under the influence of agribusinesses, forestry companies, coastal developers) with the scars of bulldozers and fires and chain saws. What seemed like a good idea thirty years ago has left a barren landscape, erosion, loss of biodiversity and species, and contributed to the terrible consequences of climate change, and the public will soon be demanding that sand dunes, water courses, grasslands, ruined farmland be returned as far as now possible, to the habitats they once contained (not totally possible of course, land, like skin, loses its elasticity).”

So there you have it. Where once, devil-may-care about future consequences, singing along with Edith “Je ne regrette rien”, young people and politicians gaily jumped into decisions with little thought for how hard they would be to later reverse, soon all of us will be trying to undo them now the consequences are clear. And there will be plenty of jobs for young persons.

Bad Sports

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

The Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton” (Duke of Wellington)

After the recent horror in Newtown, Connecticut, all the usual suspects started trotting out their usual gun apologia, in America and here.

Even the good guys though, really don’t get it. Michael Bloomberg, for example “Nobody questions the Second Amendment right to bear arms”. But why not Michael, why not? Everything else in American society can be questioned but not rampant gun ownership? And here, Joe Hockey, also meaning well said he “couldn’t see why any member of the public, apart from farmers and sporting shooters, needed guns”. Quite right, but why should there be “sporting shooters” Joe (farmers are a different question, but I think also shouldn’t be an exception)?

People, like other animals, have always played games. The simpler kinds of athletics like running and jumping, and games involving some kind of ball or similar object, have been played in all human societies. As have frivolous ones like kite-flying, or spinning tops.

But there are other, more complex games, that develop to reflect, and reinforce, particular cultural or social factors in societies, and these come and go throughout history.

Some, many, are used (like the play of lion cubs or foxes) to train the youth of the society in martial pursuits. In Ancient Greece games like Javelin and Discus throwing, and wrestling; in Rome chariot racing, and gladiatorial contests; in Mediaeval England it was jousting and archery (Henry Eighth making this explicit in his law that the young had to practice archery); later, in many societies, it was guns used for target practice, horses doing dressage. Other games relate to people turning their working day occupation into a game or sport – for example wood-chopping, sailing and rowing, hunting, horse riding, motor racing.

Over the last few thousand years societies have grown out of some sports, left others behind as archaic, no longer relevant to warfare, have changed their ethical and moral attitudes to brutality toward other human beings, towards animals.

No longer do we see, nor expect to see, people leaping over bulls, chariot racing, gladiatorial mortal combat, jousting or bear-baiting. Then there are games that do continue, often underground, but that should have (for obvious reasons) gone totally by now – cock fighting, dog fighting, bullfights, hunting (all kinds), fishing and horse racing.

And then there are some new “sports” that should never have started but, having done so, should be stopped – wood chopping, motor racing, boxing, cage fighting, rodeos, and shooting.

Why? Well because sports don’t merely reflect the values and ethics of their time and place, they help to define them, reinforce them. In the Colosseum, watching thousands of rare animals slaughtered, or deciding on the life or death of a defeated gladiator by the whim of the crowd, were not merely reflections of a brutal attitude to life in Rome, but helped to maintain that attitude. No longer seeing defenceless bears torn to death by dogs on the streets of Elizabethan London must have helped to begin the movement towards a gentler society.

And so it is with our modern bad sports. One or two of them certainly seemed like a good idea at the time – other times, other mores – but that time is no longer with us. Take wood-chopping for example. Began as a way for the 7 foot tall, well-muscled, bronzed axemen of the bush, to see who was the fastest at chopping down 500 year-old-trees. Crowds cheered at agricultural shows, as these representatives of all that was magnificent about the Australia of the past chopped away to see who could cut through their log the fastest. Heroes, home-grown heroes. But these heroes had helped to destroy forests all over Australia, had removed magnificent old growth trees, had driven once abundant species like red cedar effectively to near extinction. In 2013, with forests everywhere lost or degraded, and with climate change coming at us like a timber lorry on a narrow road, the time for seeing wood chopping as a celebration of Australia should be long behind us.

Same with motor racing. One hundred years ago, there was a brave new world of fast cars, and brave drivers pushing boundaries, advancing technology. Hurtling around the track without a care in the world except the next chequered flag. The fastest drivers of our youth (such as Juan Fangio and Stirling Moss in my case) heroes in the sense that top footballers and cricketers and tennis players (ah, those were the days) were. But now? Kidding, right? How many cars in the world, a billion? Two billion? All burning petrol, spewing out CO2. We could do without high performance cars driving mindlessly round and round race tracks symbolically and actually wasting fuel for no good reason.

Similarly, with seven billion people on the planet, with wars and rumours of wars, terrorism, ethnic hatreds, violence on the streets of big cities, do we really want to keep glorifying the idea that two men (and even women these days) brutally bashing each other to the cheers and jeers of a crowd until one is so badly injured (even dead sometimes) they cannot go on, is a sport and an entertainment? And, on a planet where species are going extinct at a faster and faster rate, and where climate change and habitat loss are rapidly worsening, why the hell are we hunting and fishing the species that are left? And why are we still encouraging an ethos that animals are there for the mere purpose of entertainment, to be tortured and killed on a whim, in sports such as horse racing, rodeos, and bull fighting? It certainly reduces the level of empathy for the natural world so necessary to get us through the rest of this dangerous century, but, considering only self human interest, leads to less empathy for other humans.

Which brings me to shooting. Put all of the above together and tell me that in the world of 2013 we should be treating and glamourising guns as sporting equipment and not deadly weapons whose use should be reduced to a minimum. There is nothing sporting about shooting. We shouldn’t be treating as normal the idea of possessing and using guns which kill tens of thousands of people every year and millions of animals.

So we need some new games? How about some based on firefighting, tree planting, rescuing sea turtles and seabirds, collecting litter, replanting sand dunes, conservation farming, solar-powered vehicles, public health activities?

Good sports, eh?

Plus ca change, plus ca change

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by Climate Change, Environment • Tags: , , , , ,

* The more CO2 in the air the more coal, oil, gas we dig and drill.
*The more the oceans are ruined the more fish we catch.
*The more frequent and disastrous are marine oil spills the more rapid the development of offshore oil drilling.
*The more the forests are degraded the more clearing, logging, shooting, grazing we introduce.
*The more the Great Barrier Reef begins to collapse the more shipping we send through it.
*The more species head towards extinction, the more habitat destruction, hunting, poaching.
*The more concern about pests and weeds the more introductions of GMO.
*The less farmland available the more mining is approved in it.
*The more cancer rates rise the more carcinogenic chemicals we pump into our homes, air, food.
*As energy use strangles the planet more and more energy guzzling devices are invented and sold.
*The more the rivers dry up the more the irrigators take from them.
*The more fire damages the environment the more it is introduced into the environment.
*The more the world drowns in waste the more plastic crap is produced and wrapped in excessive packaging.
*The more obvious the dangers of nuclear power become the louder the cries for its greater use.
*The greater the need for environmental protection and regulation the faster the removal of existing protections.
*The clearer the coming planetary catastrophe the greater the refusal to accept the evidence for it.

It’s almost as if we were hell-bent on wrecking the joint.

Political Gene-ius

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by Education, Environment, Evolution, politics • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

I often think it’s comical
How Nature always does contrive 
That every boy and every gal,
That’s born into the world alive,
Is either a little Liberal,
Or else a little Conservative!
(WS Gilbert “Iolanthe”)

When I, aged 30, first met my Father we didn’t discuss cricket, and I have no idea whether he was a fan or not. But then I had no idea he was a Shakespeare fan until I learned he had somehow carried a volume of the Collected Works in his army kitbag all through the Middle East and New Guinea in World War 2, so perhaps he did love cricket.

My grandfather (yes, the one in the photo top right) certainly did play, and love, cricket, and was, apparently, a very handy fast bowler, even up to being in his Forties. I once proudly owned, and wore, his cricket cap from when he played in the County Durham competition, 100 years ago, but lost it in circumstances which remain painful.

He died not long after I turned seven. Before I was old enough to seriously appreciate cricket, and long before television, let alone direct tv broadcasts of Test Matches, came to Perth. Cricket could be followed, from England, on the radio in the early 1950s, and that was that. One of my many regrets about his early death was never being able to watch cricket with him. Both of us would have relished the experience.

But with no direct transmission from either father or grandfather, how did I get my love of cricket?

What used to be called the “lower vertebrates”, fish, amphibians, reptiles, generally speaking, fertilise eggs, lay them somewhere appropriate, and then piss off. Consequently the young, when born, are equipped to completely fend for themselves. All of their behaviour patterns are encoded in their DNA, and on hatching they simply seek shelter, food, and eventually mates in ways that were innate, not learned. [It's worth noting though that some species in all these groups have separately evolved live births, and others, after laying eggs, guard them until hatching, and then guard the young for a while. In such species it is possible the young do learn some behaviour associated with, say, feeding, from the male or female parent].

The “higher vertebrates”, birds and mammals, show considerable variation. All the birds (and three of the mammals) lay eggs of course. But there are some, the cuckoo species, that dump their eggs into the nests of other species to raise. There are some, all ground living types (emus, chickens, ducks etc), who have “precocial” young, with down cover, born ready to move off with their mother. Most others have young born naked and totally helpless, needing total care in nest from parents until their feathers develop and they can fly (and even then care continues). They therefore have a mixture of innate behaviours and learned (or at least modified) behaviours

Mammals also vary. Some, notably the herd/flock species, are up and moving within a few hours of birth and following the mother in the rest of the mob. Others are born completely helpless, and remain so for long periods, weeks, months, even years. The ones who develop quickly have less chance (and need) to learn from parents (though they will learn a great deal), those (notably the apes, including us, learn a great deal from the parents and have fewer purely innate components (though far more than we realise).

Well, in brief, we are into the nitty gritty of the “nature-nurture” debate – what part of a species, say Homo sapiens sapiens, behaviours are genetic, inherited, what part are learnt? Not simple, as the evolutionary history above shows. Certainly there are fundamental things – eating, drinking, danger, comfort, athleticism – that are strongly genetically based. Then there are superficial things – religion, taste in music and art, social unit structures, political beliefs, and, yes, sport preferences – that are strongly based on the context in which you are raised.

But, on the one hand the genetic ones are modified by upbringing (eg particular food preferences, response to dangers, how fit you are), and on the other, even some of the superficial socio-culturally-based ones have some genetic basis it has been found. Studies of twins raised separately for example show some tendency for them to be similar in their strength of religious belief (though the form strictly related to household raised in). Musical abilities are well-known to often “run in families”. And more recently (for example) studies show tendency towards respectively right and left-wing political beliefs have some genetic component (though again, the particular form this might take being related to up-bringing). Wonder if the otherwise inexplicable gun love in the US is part of this inheritance?

Interestingly, though not surprisingly perhaps, both the religious and political tendencies are related to serotonin production and the brain’s response, and since music also causes serotonin reactions, it may well be that is also related to the abilities of, say, the sons of JS Bach.

Anyway, all of that may help to explain (though of course there would be many other factors), why a religious believer might suddenly appear from an atheist household, or a fervent Young Republican from a Democratic one, or a genius musician from a non-musical family. May also explain why musical ability is rare, why the irrational belief in religion persists to damage societies, and why roughly half of the voters in most countries keep voting for conservative parties that will damage their interests.

Oh, and it might just explain why I am watching a cricket match on tv while I write this! There being more things in heaven an earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy, or made a fault in our stars.

Just fauxing

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by Climate Change, Environment, Media • Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Interesting article (“Martha Raddatz and the Faux Objectivity of Journalists“) by Glenn Greenwald following the Biden-Ryan VP Debate. “The highly questionable assumptions tacitly embedded in the questions Raddatz asked illustrate how this works, as does the questions she pointedly and predictably did not ask.” “That is what this faux journalistic neutrality, whether by design or otherwise, always achieves. It glorifies highly ideological claims that benefit a narrow elite class (the one that happens to own the largest media outlets which employ these journalists) by allowing that ideology to masquerade as journalistic fact.” Greenwald gives examples of the “Medicare going broke” and “Iran is the greatest national security threat to America” questions to illustrate his point.

I just saw a discussion on one of our tv networks about the effects of the “carbon tax” in Australia after “100 days” that is a slightly different example of the same thing. As these things go it wasn’t so bad. They had actually got an expert to talk about it instead of a politician or shock jock as they normally would. The questions were based on the “sky is falling in” scare campaign of the Liberals, and his answers were calm and measured. So what am I complaining about (never satisfied am I, even when they do the right thing, whinge whinge whinge?)?

Three things. The segment was advertised for an hour preceding with the words “Carbon Tax”, the term used throughout the segment except occasionally by the guest. Now “Carbon Tax” is the term the conservative politicians and shock jocks have been using for two years (alternating with “Great Big New Tax”) for two reasons. First to continue the lie that the Prime Minister had lied in saying she would not introduce a “Carbon Tax”, and second so they can scare the living bejeebus out of all the punters out there by pretending that they were going to be paying so much tax that the Apocalypse would be a walk in the park.

In fact the PM had gone on to say words to the effect “but I intend to put a price on carbon” and that’s exactly what she did. A carbon price isn’t a “carbon tax”. No one is paying extra tax. In fact because of the package of compensation measures almost everyone is better off. Instead of introducing a punitive tax to stop people using so much carbon-generated power, the government used the carrot of compensation so that if you began producing less CO2 you would do even better. To keep on using the term “carbon tax” is to keep selling the conservative meme.

Second, all of the questions, as I said above, were based on the dire warnings the conservatives have been running for two years – businesses ruined, towns wiped off map, pensioners dying in unheated rooms, lamb roasts costing $100 and so on. But still presenting them as questions on 14 October 2012 implies that they were indeed valid points to raise. Proved by the last 100 days to be wrong (although one of the hosts, whose politics are always worn on her sleeve, muttered that meat prices might have gone down but that was because of good seasons – still fighting the battle to the last), but who could have known that?

Well, you could have. You were told plenty of times. There was endless modelling to show the effects, but even without that a moment’s thought about the way the scheme was set up would have told you that all the conservative publicity stunts and deceptive parliamentary questions were as fake as the ones involving an antique shop and a pensioner’s electricity bill. That is “100 days” tells us nothing we couldn’t have known in advance if you hadn’t constantly legitimised the conservative campaign by merely reporting it as fact for the last two years.

And finally the Polar Bear in the room was never mentioned. The Arctic is melting at a frighteningly rapid rate, America has been frying, Barrier Reef in big trouble, and yet reducing greenhouse gases, the whole reason for putting a price on carbon was never mentioned. Nor has it been very often during the last couple of years in this context. So for the public the government has inexplicably introduced a “great big new tax”, apparently for no other reason than to ruin antique shops, wipe towns off map, and kill pensioners, because they are such nasty people. And still, today, the carbon price was discussed without this frightening context.

Australian journalism, like American journalism has a history in recent years of this kind of acceptance of what Lakoff calls conservative “framing”. Perhaps, to give them the benefit of the doubt, unknowingly, but I suspect often in full awareness of what they are doing.

Watch out for it.