'It may be tempting to believe our 4WD has bumped over a wombat.' (from an article in a magazine). Tempting? Roadkill is driving some species towards extinction. Too few safe corridors for animals to find more food. Too many cars and trucks on many more roads through their habitats. How about a campaign to stop carelessness about road-kill?

Australians need help from the world's ecologists! Royal National Park, known to many tourists as the closes to Sydney, is the world's second-oldest National Park and Australia's first. It is under threat through adjacent overdevelopment by the growth-mad New South Wales government. Even Australia's primeminister doesn't want growth now and Sydney's expansion must be stopped. Royal National Park is of world class historic and ecological significance and it is incomprehensible and alarming that the NSW Government is allowing development to encroach.

Grandiose fantasies about filling up a continent to create a great and powerful nation are not exclusive to Australia. Demographic hubris is alive and well in Canada too, and even now, after the loss of 20% of our best farmland to development, with more than a thousand species at risk and an immigrant population that has, over the last two decades, generated four times as much GHG emissions as the Albert Tar Sands megaproject, there are people who believe in a Big Canada concept. Irving Studin of the University of Toronto is one of them.

What underlies the Australian establishment's antipathy to and ignorance of nature? The conflict between religion and science, and the roles played by 'colonial rationalists', the Catholic Church, and the State in the suppression of flourishing scientific debate and celebration of Australia's unique ecology. How controversy preceding the passage of the Victorian Education Act 1872 (which was intended to secularise education) derived from a rearguard defence against the growing influence of Darwin, to the lasting demotion of natural science and respect for environment and other creatures in mass media and government. This article was published in response to "Anglican Church Australia Overpopulated discussion paper - entire," and comments by Vivienne Ortega and John Marlowe

Population activists have been frequently accused of taking a simplistic approach to our environmental crisis. We are told that it is not just about human numbers, but how we choose to live. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. It is the environmental movement that is guilty of over-simplification. If they concede that population growth is a worthy concern, it is usually an afterthought, and typically framed as a global problem that afflicts distant continents. Their maniacal obsession with per capita consumption invites a countervailing stress on over-population.

"Save our Bush" Rally
Wednesday 24 February from 12-2pm
on Parliament House steps

(Ed. The subject of this article may seem hackneyed, but it is well worth reading.) The word "sustainable" or "sustainability" has been rendered meaningless and oxymoronic by its attachment to the most invasive development proposals and economic activity. But authentic sustainability does not lend itself to semantic pluralism. It can only mean the viablility of the whole, not its constituent parts. There is really only one kind of sustainability.

There is no need to send out a search party for the Growth Lobby. It lives in your neighbourhood and in your home town.

See also by Tim Murray: "What is a racist?" of 3 Jan 10, "The Green Badge of Courage" of 3 Jan 10 and "It is socially responsible to be socially irresponsible" of 4 Jan 10.

Queensland: Beautiful one day; bulldozed the next. Bligh government's gung-ho populate and develop policy is ill-informed and will destroy the golden goose, not to mention all the other creatures and plants. The development lobby is impossible to satisfy. Its demands are unreasonable and unsustainable.

A Galaxy poll suggests "60 per cent of Queenslanders want the Government to take steps to limit the state's southeast population growth explosion." (December 07, 2009). Although Anna Bligh's government actively advertises for overseas and interstate immigrants, the Premier is quoted saying , '"she was yet to see "any sensible or legal way" to cap the population.' Population sociologist, Sheila Newman, responds: "Premier Bligh could start by ceasing to advertise for more interstate and international immigrants. Her statements implying that population caps are not possible are ridiculous, misleading and irresponsible. All societies have numerous democratic ways of controlling population, unless they are politically prevented from doing so by undemocratic governments like Anna Bligh's."

What you can do: If you are a Queensland resident and Australian citizen, please sign the petition here.

When I was very young, 18, I remember taking a college course on agronomy, taught by an old professor with white hair. Many years later I realized the values he was trying to teach us... (Dairyman Dave)

What kind of incompetent government cannot even keep small creatures like bandicoots from extinction? Wildlife ecologist and forensic animal hair identification expert, Hans Brunner, says politicians and greedy planners have seriously watered down and misinterpreted the meaning of the word 'reserve'. Parks Victoria complain about the lack of money, but spend money on infrastructure for people leaving no money for the protection of plants and animals, or for weeding, predator control and fencing, which should be their first and only priority.

Did you know that Australians have until 15 June 2009 to complain about their declining human rights?
There are avenues for people concerned about the government's big population policy and its effect on human rights to safe clean water, a healthy wild biodiverse envelope, kind treatment of farm animals, functioning democracy not overwhelmed by commercial interests, the right to local self-government, to affordable housing etc to get demands on public record via the National Human Rights consultation.
It could be our last chance. UPDATE 7 Sep 2009: Note that a submission based on this article has been published as Submission # AGWW-7SM63S on the National Human Rights Consultation pages. Please support its content if you agree with it.

...work done confirms that the 1918 virus was an H1N1 virus and was closely related to swine and human H1N1 viruses..."

"The first case was seen in Mexico on April 13. The outbreak coincided with the President Barack Obama’s trip to Mexico City on April 16. Obama was received at Mexico’s anthropology museum in Mexico City by Felipe Solis, a distinguished archeologist who died the following day from symptoms similar to flu, Reforma newspaper reported. The newspaper didn’t confirm if Solis had swine flu or not.

The Mexican government is distributing breathing masks to curtail the disease’s spread. There is no vaccine against the new strain of swine flu, health authorities said."

http://www.royalcommission.vic.gov.au/
Preliminary directions hearing on 20 April 2009. Public hearings commence 11 May.
Call for submissions. General submissions close on 18 May 2009.

There is another drive for a big kill of kangaroos in Majura ACT (in rare-grassland fragments coveted by developers near the new airport). Conventional wisdom is that kangaroo numbers have increased in Australia since European settlement due to cessation of predation by Aborigines and dingoes, as well as increased availability of water. It seems probable, however, that at the time of settlement kangaroo numbers exceeded the present population at least threefold. Dr Giles Auty estimates their pre-1788 number at around 200 million.

It would be much harder to condemn the New Iberia Research Center (NIRC) in Louisiana if the institution had obviously made a great effort to compensate its experimental chimpanzees by giving them trees and a lovely environment between 'sessions'. But they have confined these forest creatures to an environment as friendly as a toilet block for life. A nine-month-long undercover investigation by The HSUS has exposed the mistreatment of nearly 300 chimpanzees and other primates. These chimps, living lives of deprivation and misery, are among the more than 1,000 chimps languishing in laboratories across the United States. Video available here. I describe the video contents in the article, if you need to fortify yourself first. It is a thoughtful video; I could cope. Please act, whatever you do.

new logging slash at Brown Mountain. This is what causes fatal bushfires and climate change - logging.
See also: "Greens, logging, forest fires and malaria" of 11 Feb 09 and "Brown Mountain Rape" of 26 Jan 09

Just got another email about who's supposedly to blame for the forest fires. Looks to me like the mainstream press is out to stir people up again and put them off voting for Greens or defending forests and wildlife. The latest email even accused 'Greens' of causing deaths from malaria by saying that DDT is bad. These 'anti-greens' never get it right, do they? Malaria is caused by clearing forests, which they are in favour of...

In 1995, when John Brumby was in opposition, he made a very stirring speech at a forest rally in Melbourne. "... that's what we'll do when we're in government - no more export woodchipping, an industry in the future based on plantations and the proper protection of our high conservation value forests." Unfortunately, it was not true.

Clearly we are at an early stage of globalisation. Only the seven plagues are globalised: mafias, commerce, robbery, exploitation, subordination of women, ransacking of natural resources and planetary poisoning… Here economics are based on the simplest of rules: work travels to wherever it costs less. (Lire la version française)

We only have one planet, Earth! Our economy is dictating government decisions, Our economy needs to be based on appropriate 21st century technology using available labour including that of its ageing population, rather than indefinite expansion using immigrants none of whom are expected to remain young indefinitely.

Nicolas Hulot: “France needs a Marshall Plan, at the level of France and Europe, to orientate massively our investments in our economies for this transition, and for mutual cooperation."