living in an oasis
Nov. 23rd, 2006 07:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_eI saw a large bearded lizard in front of the house this morning. He (I think it was a 'he' -- was doing the territorial head bobbing thing)... he was a bit more than a meter long from nose to tail-tip. It is hard to see that there would be enough room here for more than one beardy. This oasis is so small. It is just several acres surrounded on all sides by pastureland where cattle graze. It continually astonishes me how much life there is here.
It is hard to imagine how much there would have been before my white ancestors invaded and stole the land, obliterating most of the country in a swathe of destruction that continues today. It is even harder to imagine how much life would have been here before the earlier dark-skinned inhabitants invaded and destroyed the megafauna (4 meter tall kangaroos, wombats the size of volkswagons, marsupial lions...) and ruined the ground cover with annual burning, preventing soil buildup and encouraging fire-loving species like eucalypts.
Yesterday I was talking to Julie (my ex- from many years back). She spoke depressingly of England, where she now lives. There is no wildlife at all, just a handful of species. People proudly take her to what they call a forest, and she is horrified, because it is just a scrap of regrowth almost devoid of life. Oh sure, there are things living there, but the bulk of species were wiped out hundreds, thousands of years ago. There used to be bears, elk, and wolves in England. Nowadays the largest "wildlife" are some deer who remain only because they were cultivated as sport for people to murder for fun. The next biggest are badgers, and goes rapidly downhill from there.
This is what we will do -- are doing -- to Australia if we're not careful. In our relentless drive to build and pave over and "develop" everything we will destroy the most precious thing of all. We will end up with boring, filthy, McCity that looks exactly the same as every other city on the planet... where from cradle to grave you pay others for every breath you take and call that deprived slavery a "normal life".
Oh crap. I didn't want to start my day like this. Sorry.
It is hard to imagine how much there would have been before my white ancestors invaded and stole the land, obliterating most of the country in a swathe of destruction that continues today. It is even harder to imagine how much life would have been here before the earlier dark-skinned inhabitants invaded and destroyed the megafauna (4 meter tall kangaroos, wombats the size of volkswagons, marsupial lions...) and ruined the ground cover with annual burning, preventing soil buildup and encouraging fire-loving species like eucalypts.
Yesterday I was talking to Julie (my ex- from many years back). She spoke depressingly of England, where she now lives. There is no wildlife at all, just a handful of species. People proudly take her to what they call a forest, and she is horrified, because it is just a scrap of regrowth almost devoid of life. Oh sure, there are things living there, but the bulk of species were wiped out hundreds, thousands of years ago. There used to be bears, elk, and wolves in England. Nowadays the largest "wildlife" are some deer who remain only because they were cultivated as sport for people to murder for fun. The next biggest are badgers, and goes rapidly downhill from there.
This is what we will do -- are doing -- to Australia if we're not careful. In our relentless drive to build and pave over and "develop" everything we will destroy the most precious thing of all. We will end up with boring, filthy, McCity that looks exactly the same as every other city on the planet... where from cradle to grave you pay others for every breath you take and call that deprived slavery a "normal life".
Oh crap. I didn't want to start my day like this. Sorry.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
Re: Adolescence
Date: 2006-11-23 11:31 pm (UTC)- We need to stop destroying the ecosystems that support us. We need to get rid of religion, nationalism, racism, and all the other generators of xenophobia.
- We need to find a political system that actually works, and get rid of politicians that lie and rig elections.
- We need to disassemble the war machine.
- We need to abandon the clearly unworkable "greed is good" ethos.
And we need to do all this in the space of just a few decades before technological advances make us so powerful that a few people could end it for all of us. The curve of technological progress grows ever faster tending upward steeper and steeper. It is conservatively projected that the curve will go almost vertical sometime over the next 60 years. I feel it will be considerably before that. That point is sometimes called the "spike" or the "singularity". After that point, every day we will awake to a whole new set of potentials. We will have truly godlike powers.
We had better know how to act like adults before then.
Normally I'm an optimist. But I have to admit that the desire to mine uranium instead of using renewable power is depressing. Religion is in decline, but it will have to dwindle at a much greater rate to make the world safe. The military still have more than enough nuclear weapons to incinerate every many, woman, child, and goldfish on the planet... and they're still poised on hair-triggers waiting for an accident to set them off (they weren't decommissioned after the cold war ended). There is insane opposition to curbing global warming. The richest 10% are destroying even more of the world's limited resources while everybody else gets even less. People still ferociously fight against sharing even things that don't cost anything to share, like knowledge (though thankfully that is starting to change faster -- opensource, Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia...). Various corporate and government interests are trying to cripple our greatest hope yet, the internet.
[sigh] Sorry.