Category: Columns

Known only to live on two rivers in Queensland, the lungfish has survived for millions of years but its existence is now threatened by the Traveston Crossing dam proposed for the Mary River. Posselt is appalled that his water engineering colleagues consider it more important to pump clean drinking water to Brisbane so people can wash their cars and water their lawns with it, than protecting the last breeding grounds of this living fossil.

Because of his background, people listen. This is someone who has spent their lives planning dams and pipelines; Steve talks the lingo of the professional town planner.

This interstate journey is not the first time the fifty something activist has taken up the paddle to draw attention to the plight of a river. In May 2007 he set off from Brisbane in his amphibious kayak and headed up the Brisbane River, over the Great Divide and down the Darling and Murray Rivers to South Australia. After paddling 2,200 kilometers and dragging the kayak for another thousand he became more convinced than ever that we have no idea what we are doing when it comes to water management and, worse still, have learned almost nothing from our mistakes.

We consider crayfish stupid because they never learn to avoid the craypot, no matter how often they’re caught. For all our mental superiority, we appear to be as stupid.

Last October, the people of Tyalgum protested in the streets of Murwillumbah about the proposed damming of the Oxley River. Jeering motorists that day echoed Max Boyd at the Mur’bah Civic Centre a fortnight earlier, “Put people on level 5 water restrictions and they’ll demand a dam. You just can’t get around the fact that people need water.”

The crayfish cannot resist the scent of the bait.

I asked Steve Posselt the same question I put to Max a year ago. Why can’t we reduce demand by capturing the water that falls on our rooves, and recycling the water we do use?

Max believes this is idealistic nonsense. Steve believes that it’s not only possible, it’s absolutely necessary. There’s simply not enough water flowing in the rivers to fill the dams that we have now, let alone any new ones that people are proposing. All over Australia, existing dams are at their lowest levels in decades. New dams cannot produce extra water.

Steve believes the problem is the attitude that we can take resources from one place, use what we need and throw the rest away. Unless we learn to live in harmony with nature we are doomed, he said.

When engineers sprout green philosophy and sitting politicians defect to the Greens there is a seismic shift afoot. Watch this space.

Steve’s website, kayak4earth.com, contains more details about his journeys and the lungfish of the Mary River.

You can hear Giovanni on Bay FM 99.9 this morning from 9 until 11.

Last week’s news that grandparents are good for children’s early development will come as no surprise to parents or, indeed, grandparents themselves. If babies bothered to read the newspaper, they’d chortle in agreement too.

The role of grandparents as childminders is hardly new. Extended families have been the norm in most societies across most of the planet for most of human history. It is the nuclear family iolated in the suburbs that is peculiarly modern.

Grandparents are coming back as families shrink. China’s one child policy has resulted in family setups known as the 4-2-1s. Four grandparents and two parents all focus on one child, often spoiling s/him rotten in the process.

In southern Europe, 85 per cent of people live within five kilometres of where they were born and machismo has been replaced by mamismo as increasing numbers of thirty-something males remain at home so mum can continue to cook and wash for them.

Australia’s ongoing obsession with the suburban dream, personal space and instant satisfaction mean we still consider it normal to exclude our parents from our lives, often condemning them to battery farming for their pension cheques.

Inclusion them in the extended family is not only good for babies but the elderly as well. As Beryl King of Coraki said in this journal last Thursday, “I’d be lonely without them all.”

The extended family is not just good for us, it is also good for future generations.

Building a house for every couple and supplying that house with its own laundry, garage, lawnmower, clothes dryer, refrigerator (you can complete your own list) steals resources from your grandchildren because we used them once and throw them away. We burn irreplaceable fossil fuel driving from house to house because staying home alone is too lonely. As it vanishes, literally, in a puff of carbon dioxide it causes extra problems that we can only speculate on.

The granny flat is almost a caricature of a community but is better than nothing, even though the housing crisis means they are overpriced and under maintained.

As we move into an era of severely limited economic growth, the generation that survived the depression can teach us all a thing or two even if we are toilet trained and can speak for ourselves. Bring on the grey power and lets remember to learn from the past.

Giovanni is the founder of the Ebono Institute and radio show The Generator

Kingscliff business owner Kelly Craig was quoted in these pages last week seeking the protection of closed circuit television cameras. In contrast to the burghers of Nimbin, most business owners on the Tweed Coast seem to feel the same way.

We hope that a watchful eye will keep things under control.

Be careful what you wish for. We are building a world where everything we do in public is visible to anyone in the world.

In the four decades since Andy Warhol said, “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” digital cameras, reality television and online social networks have rendered this almost true. The difference is that we are visible rather than famous.

There are now more images of us being captured than it is possible to watch. Central London has over one million closed circuit television cameras, 10,000 of them owned and operated by local councils. The presence of these cameras has almost no impact on the rate of solving crimes, partly because there is no way that anyone can afford to pay staff to watch the millions of images being captured. As a result, a flourishing industry in image-recognition-software has developed so that computers can detect unusual and suspicious activity.

We are creating a vast, digital nervous system that watches us for our own good.

This mimics the commercial network that traces every cent we spend and the communications network that pinpoints our location every time we use a mobile phone.

Visiting a precomputer India twenty years ago, I was amazed at the amount of paperwork required to book a hotel room or train ticket or to exchange foreign currency. As a commentator on computer systems at the time, I inevitably compared the Indian paper-based system to the automation that was delivering vast profits to modern corporations. In a practical sense, the major difference between the two systems is that the automated one employs less humans and is therefore cheaper.

What automation enables, though, is the ability to add layer upon layer to the system. For example, the systems have already been developed to replace printed barcodes with microchips that can be read from a distance. Using these ‘active’ product ids, every item of clothing you wear and everything in your pockets can be identified as you walk through the mall. Advertisers are salivating at the opportunity to sell you items based on what you already own.

As this “intelligent” nervous system develops, individual humans will be reduced to cells in a much larger organism, an organism designed to maximise profits, not empower or protect individuals. This is not wild speculation or alarmist semantics, it is the stated purpose of these inventions.

If you already feel trapped on a treadmill that funnels wealth and power into someone else’s hands, you are far from mistaken you have simply awakened. To revive another sixties phrase, “Do not adjust your set, reality is at fault.”

There are two ways to look at this.

You can, like the people of Nimbin, decide this is not the future for you. Or, you can rejoice in the brilliance of the brave new world that globalisation delivers and accept the loss of individuality as an inevitable consequence.

Just don’t delude yourself that you are in control.

Giovanni is the founder of the Ebono Institute. www.ebono.org

and then as it became true

Of course, one person’s party is another’s riot. The music that soothes my teenage daughters has the opposite effect on the paying guests of the Catholic retreat next door. The sound of lawn mowers on Friday afternoon may be music to someone’s ears, to mine it is the mad clatter of petrol addicts fighting nature with all the sanity of an acid-freak battling lizards in the bath.

Given the regular expressions of outrage in these pages when graffiti appears on prominent, blank walls, a good percentage of you obviously do not consider the application of the spray can, art. Personally, I think most graffiti is silly and some is wonderful but I am equally offended by bad and boring architecture.

Significantly, I am never as offended by visual pollution as I am by noise. You can look the other way, close your eyes or walk down a different street, but your ears are always open.

Given my distaste for the timbre of the two stroke engine, it will not surprise you, Dear Reader, that I do not like leaf blowers.

This is not just because of they interrupt the peace of my morning walk. They also remind me of an awful boss who once yelled at me once for using a broom rather than a petrol-powered leaf blower to clear leaves from a path.

I have long taken to heart the Buddhist adage that there is a certain stillness at the heart of order, and the gentle creation of order through the humble act of sweeping is a meditation in itself. I pride myself on the thorough and effective manner in which I wield the yard broom and the swish of bristles is the crisp sound of efficiency as well as the mechanical equivalent of a babbling brook.

By comparison, donning the earmuffs and eyeglasses to wave the noisy, smelly beast that blows is, for me, a pointless wrestle with the minions of Vulcan for little gain. These minor daemons are unsuited to the task of cleaning and letting them loose in the world to move leaves is like smashing through the window of the florist in your four wheel drive to buy a bunch of long stemmed roses.

Apparently, I am not the only weirdo to feel this way. The issue has become so fraught in California that 20 cities have banned them outright. Celebrity gardeners appear on television fighting for their right to peace and quiet, or the freedom to blow leaves as they see fit.

While I have restrained myself from crash-tackling the local video store owner at 6.30 in the morning, I do discourage our elected representatives from spending rate monies on energy intensive machines that can be replaced with a little, old-fashioned elbow grease.

Giovanni is on Bay FM, 99.9FM this morning between 9 and 11.

Local film-maker, Cathy Henkel, is polishing this work prior to its screening on ABC television in three weeks (October 14). Narrated by Hugh Jackman and well seasoned with heart breaking and heartwarming images of orangutans, the film weaves together the stories of three very different protaganists, all involved in ending the burning of Indonesia’s remaining tropical rainforest. The films weaves the stories of an Australian carbon trader, a danish Orangutan rehabilitator and an Indonesian palm oil farmer trying to earn enough money to educate his daughter into a nail biting drama that climaxes at the Bali conference last December.

Sunday night’s panel wove together eight points of view about climate change to conclude that humans need to evolve somewhat before a real solution can be found.

Djanbung Garden’s Robyn ‘Consume less’ Francis and Rainforest Rescue’s Robert ‘Localise’ Rosen delivered the practical message that we need to break the nexus of international capital and create resilient local communities. Macadamia Castle’s Tony ‘Orangutan’ Gilding and film-maker Felicity ‘Howard victim’ Blake addressed the practical mechanics of fighting the greed that rapes the rainforest.

For Gareth ‘Mutineer’ Smith, “turning over this ship and sinking it as soon as possible” is the only way to minimise the disaster. Just as passionate, but more considered, Mark ‘Buddah’ Jackson built on the premise that, by definition, an unsustainable lifestyle is the genocide of the unborn, to observe that spiritual evolution is required to address the root causes of climate change, notably conflict and greed.

A well informed audience leaped at the opportunity to discuss these core values and, topically, pinpointed the rampant greed of the world’s financial institutions as the institutional face of that problem, meanwhile echoing Jackson’s quest for spiritual evolution as the only long term solution.

As I wrote in these pages five weeks ago, my study of global poverty led me to a similar conclusion. Yes, I’ve been infected with Northern Rivers idealism and my quest now is to build the links back to the Real Failed World.