Jul 28 2009
Second-hand Smoke
Second-hand Smoke
The valleys are so full of smoke that a haze nearly occludes the trees less than a hundred paces away. The loonies are burning the forests ‘to prevent them from burning’ - again – and thereby creating an inevitability fire-prone landscape; the types of plants that recover from this barbaric treatment will need eternal ‘preventative’ burning thereafter.
There’s so much smoke my eyes are watering, seared by the tannins and burning compounds of millennial trees and regrowth forests that are going up into the atmosphere in an annual conflagration. Thousands of rare and endangered animals are dying too - from fire, smoke, habitat loss and sudden exposure to imported feral predators.
The flora that die first and most thoroughly in fires are the most sensitive water-loving plants, followed by other rainforest types which, while able to recover, will disappear forever if they’re burned regularly – or even twice in a human generation. Instead of having a recovering rainforest ecosystem that replaces the sparser, less productive fire-prone plants in a natural succession of ever-increasing diversity, regular burning creates a regime whereby the rainforest is replaced by fire-loving harder growth and the ecosystem becomes thin and brittle. Food sources disappear and even the rivers dry up.
There are alternatives, but they require imagination, dedication and time. It takes time to grow a healthy forest, and no amount of money will speed the process appreciably. It takes many generations of stewardship by wise custodians to recreate the ecosystems our naïve parents and grandparents have so thoughtlessly destroyed. Simply leaving the environment alone to recover is a good start, but true recovery takes diligent long-term effort.
Let’s not even begin to think about carbon emissions.
Spring is early again in the subtropical zone; a ten-foot python as thick as my arm is coiled in the kitchen and no vermin are stupid enough to enter the shack. Winters are shorter every year, but the drying trend continues. Things are improving on a very local level since the orgone technology has proved its worth – but what are the chances of spreading the effect further?
Fourteen rare glossy black cockatoos flew over today, calling out to each other in the smoke – the rain’s on its way. Soon afterward a huge wedge-tailed eagle soared low over our heads, searching for straggling animals. Young goannas – lace monitors not yet longer than five feet – race around the buildings. All the animals are coming downhill seeking greener pastures as the slopes and mountains dry up – but this year the river is finally maintaining its level and not beginning to go down in the dry season; I’ve moved a hundred tons of boulders and smaller rocks by hand to raise the level of the creek by a metre over the last couple of years.
It’s easy to deepen the water table a little by pulling large rocks out of the riverbed and ferrying them to the bank on a bamboo raft – as long as they’re taken from the centre of the channel and I don’t expose the bedrock. Fat chance – half the hills have fallen into the nation’s rivers, filling them with crap since they were logged and further despoiled by cattle and sheep ranchers.
So far this week I’ve shoveled and barrowed about three tons of soil and laid about two tons of stone foundations for the new chimney. If you pace yourself and take regular breaks you don’t destroy your body and the work becomes an artform rather than a chore. It’s so weird to realise that people actually pay money to exercise indoors. A couple of weeks working part-time with things of wood and stone and swimming and hiking will do you more real good than an eternity of huffing and puffing in noxious air ‘conditioning’.
You might even have something to show for it other than an artificially pumped-up musculature – and there’s plenty of really satisfying work crying out to be done (by someone other than the ubiquitous legions of halfwit rednecks, most of whom can’t seem to help but make everything worse, even if they try to undo the damage their parents did). We need to heal the utter devastation we’ve wreaked on our forests, rivers and plains – and machines can’t do the job.
Meanwhile the bulldozers are moving in and tearing up more of the little that remains – trees are worth a lot these days and morons everywhere are cashing in ‘their’ superannuation, trashing the natural systems that keep us all alive for short-term illusory gain – on ‘their’ land. Greed is still flourishing, strangling the life out of everything real and worthwhile regardless of the rising levels of global consciousness.
Pyromaniacs still burn the forests every year in this highly developed democratic nation; what chance do other poorer and less well educated populations have of saving their natural environments if the Munchkins of Oz won’t protect their portion of the planet?
Please do something – other than vote for Tweedle Dum over Tweedle Dummer. Do it now.
Time appears to flow on…
- R.A.
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