December 2019

“...if you think (as I used to) the stuff you burn, from a cosy log fire to the fuel in an engine, isn’t doing you or your neighbours any harm, then you’re in for a shock.” Tim Medley, science journalist researching air pollution

Conservatives never shut up about terrorism and immigrants because people are too lazy, stupid and scared to learn anything about those topics. That wins conservatives elections. For example, the ‘terror’ attack in London in the last couple of days where 2 people were killed by a nutter with a knife. Know how many people have been killed by knives in London this year? 130. Only 2 by ‘terrorists’.

D.H. Lawrence believed forced mass education past a certain level was evil. The world of ideas he thought was a particular talent some people had, and many didn’t. Forcing everybody to take on higher levels of education would only make the majority of people resentful of learning itself, as they suffered through years of schooling that made them feel humiliated, or gave them ideas they had no idea how to handle. Gotta wonder if the big populist, anti-elite movements we’re seeing today might be proving him right.

Lest we Forget. Over 100 million people died in the 20th century fighting for freedoms. Everyday people were bombed daily, but got through it with stoicism. So...are we betraying those 100 million and more who died every time we vote for somebody who promises us ‘safety’ and ‘security’, while taking away freedoms those people died for? How did we become so cowardly that a handful of bullies with knives and bombs send us into such panic? As a society we’ve become pathetically fearful, which makes us puppets in the hands of bullies.

Everything is a copy or imitation of something else. Here’s a way to show it - find a picture of ‘nothing’. It can’t be done, Google might give you a black screen as an example, but that’s not nothing - it’s a black screen.

A rainbow doesn’t exist without a person looking at it. This is actually what Einstein meant by relativity, nothing in reality just exists, it exists relative-to some context. For example, is Elvis dead? In our timeline he is, in others he isn’t.

Good political cartoons are priceless. This one by Ben Jennings on the London Bridge terror attack this week says everything really about how modern conservatives use terrorism. Inside Tory HQ there would have been delight this happened in an election campaign.

It was a real surprise to me that fear is the reason many people either don’t post to social media, or post only about themselves. Then it clicked - people tend to use social media to create a social identity. That fear is often the fear of creating an unpopular identity. Paradoxically, many people post mostly about themselves because of this fear - they’re viewing social media as an ad about themselves.

In 1952 London had a 5-day smog emergency (picture). About 12,000 people died from the filthy air. Sydney is in the middle of a week of filthy air, the rest of us have been too. The damage that does to lungs and blood vessels in particular will kill and permanently damage thousands of us too. What’s worse, the really damaging tiny particles (the PM2.5) are too small to see - cars belch these out in huge amounts, so that a modern big city actually can have more air pollution than these old smogs, even on ‘clear’ days. Some believe the greatest cause of heart attacks and stroke isn’t diet, it’s air pollution. We’re obsessed with combustion, and it’s killing us.

One of Esther Perel’s flips that I like. Get the sex right, and the relationship will follow. We often put it the other way around. Good sex requires desire, desire requires seeing your partner as a distinct individual, seeing them as a distinct individual creates good relationships.

If your town had water restrictions, and one family completely ignored them and watered their garden 24 hours a day, would people forgive them if they said “we’re only using 1.3% of the town’s water”?

We are eternal, immortal beings. You could say ‘so why can’t I remember before I was born’? Memory is key I think, firstly can you remember being in the womb? Being 2 years old? 4, 5? Notice that the ‘younger’ you are, the less you remember. But you were just as alive then as now. Old people often get dementia. We see this as bad, but they’re possibly returning to a more eternal state of no-memory. Memory is the key, it’s not like a photo album, it’s time itself acting in certain ways.

I still think blood pressure became a medical thing because it's fairly easily measured. A case of measurement driving medicine, rather than medicine driving measurement.

Lord Haw Haw was a Brit who broadcast propaganda messages for the Nazis. One of the most despised people in British history. I think the loud climate denial voices in our public discussions are worse, climate change may destroy our civilisation. They’re traitors to all humankind. So from now on they’re all Lord Haw Haws for me.

See that red bar? That’s Jacinda Ardern’s party. Uh oh. Join a union.

Another reality filter to try. Dump all the Left and Right and other explanations for society, and look at society as a set of ideas that clash or harmonise. Like this girl in an exam, society sometimes can’t resolve its current ideas. So it seems broken. And we focus on the people speaking the ideas, and not the ideas, time and again. Ideas use us, they enslave us, and I don’t mean that as a metaphor. Until clashes of ideas are resolved, society is this girl writ large.

“Only some wild and undisciplined spirits will ruminate, now and then, in the whirl of the social sea in which they are plunged, over strange and absolutely hypothetical problems. Such people are the inventors of the future.” Gabriel Tarde

What we do 'physically' is entirely shaped by ideas. Exercise as a set of ideas has all sorts of damaging beliefs about the body, gravity and movement. Activity is great, ‘exercise’ as an idea has all sorts of serious problems. I developed a heart arrhythmia in my 20s (one reason I no longer drink), I’m pretty sure because I was exercising very heavily. You’ll see in the article that’s now seen as one danger of exercise.

Ever noticed that no matter what idea you mention, somebody will always disagree? Some people call that people being ‘divided’. What I don’t think is seen as much though is that this division binds people together. They may disagree, but they’re bound to the same idea. Actual division would be people not talking with each other at all. Divide means share as well as separate.

Brilliant thinking.

Universities are often seen as disconnected from real life and practical things. But I bet you can’t find a single ‘practical’ thing in life that didn’t originate in a university, or in the ideas of a brilliant thinker. Universities and ideas are the origin of all wealth and social change.

Fireys now say they can’t control the largest fires, which may burn for months. Until now the main public response to the fires has been the ‘Anzac effect’, worshipping people in the front line but ignoring actual causes. Now there is no front line, it’ll be interesting to see if attention shifts to the causes of the fires. Not confident, we still worship Anzacs today rather than learn the lessons of that war. Neither soldiers nor fireys want to be worshipped. They want to go home to their families.

Meanwhile in the UK, old people are voting for a ‘Great’ Britain that disappeared years ago, as their last parting gift to the next generation. Wrapped and put under the tree with a climate emergency, and debts that will take generations to repay.

With earphones you can hear that fireball arrive. This is the Pyrocene. Prayer might be all we have left.

ScoMo and BoJo are both implementing populist programs right now, following Trump. Populism isn’t Left or Right, it isn’t even politics. It’s society eating itself. The damage these people do, fuelled by the public’s hatred of politicians and institutions, dwarfs anything terrorists do. Do you think politicians and bureaucrats are the problem? Then you’re a populist, and you’re putting these people in power.

The whole world loves sport. They love a contest. But strangely, this doesn’t usually extend to ideas. A contest of ideas is a debate, an argument. When societies go through changing times, like right now, and there are lots of arguments, it makes people think something is wrong. Nothing is wrong, we’re ‘divided’ because society *isn’t* divided enough. Things aren’t shared. So we need to argue to get change. We should actually enjoy doing that, it’s sport.

Such a common way of seeing desire. As something to be resisted and controlled. But I think what gets missed is that the only way of controlling a desire is with another counter-desire. When we appear in control of our desires, it’s because we have desires balancing each other. Our ‘rational’ self is just another desire - a desire for order. Reality is a battle of desires, not just between humans either.

I think naturists prove that the suggestion of nudity, with revealing clothes, is much more desirable than actual nudity. Clothes invented nudity actually, as a thing. I think our inventions create our desires. Cleavage for example doesn’t exist without clothes.

David Rowe.

It’s easier to find the answer to any question, and fast, today than at any time in history. At the same time ‘facts’ have never been so ignored. Maybe this proves the maxim that we never desire what is easy for us to have. Facts need to play hard to get, to be desired. School should be hard, maybe that’s where the rot starts.

I wonder sometimes if the loudest voices on climate denial remember this fact. Having spent a few decades now actively and wilfully spreading misinformation, a time will come when they may be put on trial (literally) for crimes against humanity. Their little shallow political and debating wins today could see them jailed in the future. Here’s The International Court of Justice in The Hague, where such things do happen. The denialists will have no defence, they’re idiot enough to have done things like wave lumps of coal around in parliaments. Justice remembers, you run somebody over and get away with it today, you’ll still be jailed years from now if they catch up with you.

Always follow the money. ASIC is putting Directors of companies on notice if they fail to act on the risks of climate change. Directors can go to jail if they don’t act on guidelines like this. Nobody outside the shock jock bubble is even talking about whether it’s real any more. The emergency planning is underway. https://aicd.companydirectors.com.au/membership/the-boardroom-report/volume-17-issue-9/updated-asic-guidance-on-climate-change-disclosure

I re-post this every year. It's one of those facts people refuse to believe. Maybe bushfires can change their minds. Wood smoke of any kind is incredibly toxic, way worse than cigarettes for example. Harris is a bit of a dick usually but here he does say interesting things about facts and belief too. https://samharris.org/the-fireplace-delusion/

We don’t see ourselves every day as hypnotised in the things we do, but I think that’s because we don’t understand hypnosis well. Hypnosis is suggestion in its purest form. Suggestion is desires and beliefs. Society is literally made out of desires and beliefs. Beliefs are temporarily hardened desires. Even rationality and reason are just beliefs, desires. And it’s not other people hypnotising us, it’s the ideas or beliefs themselves.

I hear so many comments about how society is in a mess. What stands out is that people usually see the problem as disagreements between people. But all social problems are really clashes of ideas, and I think because we don’t want to look at the ideas, we focus on the people and situations that have adopted the ideas instead. And so the problems don’t get fixed. Ideas enslave us to do their bidding.

Couldn’t comment on the post you tagged me in Rell, it wouldn’t let me. At first look all the men are supporting their weight with their heads on the wall - they’re leaning head-first on the wall - and all the women aren’t, they’re supported by their legs. So the men cant stand up because their heads are supporting their weight. Men have longer feet relative to their stature than women, so the two steps back first instruction here forces men too far from the wall to be able to just rest their heads on it - their body weight ends up supported by their head as the body topples forward onto the wall.

Given that the stats clearly show that no school makes a difference to student learning, it’s not surprising that recognition at school is mostly about social status and who likes who the most. Doesn’t mean some genuinely talented kids don’t sometimes get awards, but it’d be much less likely if they’re not like the teacher or don’t have parents who actively promote them. Most schools wouldn’t recognise genuine intelligence in a line-up with inanimate objects. And I was a teacher, not just having a cheap shot.

People sometimes say if you pay for private school or private health, you should still get government support, for fairness. I love David Gillespie’s response to this idea.

Both winners and losers of elections talk about the 'will of the people'. There is no will of the people. There are millions of people each with their own view, that's all. You have to get closer to those individuals to understand politics. Demographics is (just one) way. Unsurprisingly, again the UK election result shows the old voted for the status quo, the young didn't. In an ageing society, the old win.

I wrote this yesterday Ben, about underlying currents as I see them, in politics. It's why i think all the categories we use to understand current conservative domination are no use to us, and they keep winning.

It’s not often I agree with the Daily Telegraph, but 100% on this one. Politicians won’t do it because they (probably rightly) think huge numbers of the ‘law and order’ public pay no attention to speed limits at all. So they fear a backlash. Bipartisan support might get it across the line.

Copernicus took the Earth from the centre of the universe and replaced it with the sun. Today we know the sun isn’t the centre either. But we didn’t give up the idea of the centre of existence - we moved that to inside our heads. But it isn’t there either; there is no centre. Not even ‘me’ is there.

"Our rivers and landscapes are suffering once again and it is not due to drought. It is caused by poor policies and poor management. And these are driven by POPULIST myths. The critical need is not to drought­-proof the inland, for that is impossible. It is to myth-proof Australians." (Aka - ffs, think, people.) https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/sep/25/we-are-talking-about-drought-proofing-again-they-are-simplistic-solutions-that-will-destroy-australia

Self-driving cars are already hugely safer than humans driving cars. It's interesting that we hold them up to a much higher standard than human-driven cars. Cars are much more than just modes of transport - they're the centre of a web of anti-social attitudes, ideas and behaviours that are only slowly unravelling. https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/21/technology/self-driving-car-safety/

The second a Tory has the election over, all the ‘governing for all of us’ disappears and we’re back to the standard script. Sell off public assets, sack public servants, tax cuts for the rich. ScoMo followed exactly the same script after his win, both want to bypass the checks and balances of the public service that protect society. Smash the institutions, populism continues on its destructive way...

Cities were so much more interesting before cars destroyed them. Most people alive today would never have experienced life in a city not governed by vehicles. (Thanks to Alex for the photo.)

Bialowieza forest in Poland is the last remnant ancient landscape in Europe. It’s an astonishing landscape. Herman Goering planned to turn it into a hunting playground for Nazi supermen. It survived so many centuries because it was once hunting grounds reserved for royalty. If you want to see how destructive populism is, a far-Right populist government in Poland recently sent the loggers into Bialowieza. They bulldozed hundreds of thousands of trees before the European courts forced them to stop. If you know any populists, whack them with a bit of 4 by 2, nothing else works.

Was wondering about this the other day, and it turns out it’s on the drawing board, and used for oil fires already. With the Gospers Mountain Fire possibly burning until February, desperate times may bring desperate measures.

I see schools are now doing rain dances, does stupidity have no limit? Australia’s problem isn’t lack of rain - ‘drought’ - it’s stupidity. Australia builds its towns and cities on its best agricultural land, flood plains, and then has to build dams to stop them flooding. This destroys the fertility of the land, and destroys the rivers that are dammed. It then tries to grow its food in the arid interior, and comes up with fantasies about piping water there. Straya, world champions in stupid. Just so long as property developers keep getting rich, our national priority.

Stupid is winning.

Stupid is winning. Part 2.

Humans as we know them have been around about 200,000 years. Dinosaurs occupied the planet for about 170 million years. Who says humans are the pinnacle of evolution? Um, only humans do.

Stupid is winning. Droughts and flooding rains. Strayans say that with pride, like they’re tough and isn’t this country a bitch? Actually they’re the same stupidity - we have ‘floods’ because we build on flood plains, where we should be growing our food. And we grow our food in semi-desert, and call it ‘drought’. Our dams and levees (you’ll find them in many if not most towns)) protecting our houses make the floods worse. It’s multiple layers of stupid.

This site is excellent for tracking fires. The RFS site shows you in very general ways where the fire is, this one shows you exactly where the fire itself is, and how intense it is in each place. Applause for Landgate and Edith Cowan University. https://myfirewatch.landgate.wa.gov.au/#

Funny, but also true. If you want real action from people, turn it into comparison. Look at the successful strategies from conservatives in our time - all of them ask us to look at what somebody else is getting, compared to us. Immigrants, the wealthy (aspiration), Europe (Brexit) etc.

As individuals, we know how much we hate when our own beliefs don’t align. That’s laying awake at night territory, trying to make sense of our lives. We like our lives to be governed by a small number of powerful, consistent beliefs. Society is exactly the same - it is us. Because our beliefs don’t align right now, populists try to unify them with anger mostly. They are the Emperor, literally. We won’t fix things unless we tackle the beliefs - the ideas. Thinking is our only way out. We hate thinking.

Victor has been in the news a lot lately. Sure indigenous burning was a lot more sophisticated than what we do, I’m all for this. But at the same time we need to question whether that burning is actually what turned Australia into a pile of kindling soaked in petrol. Those thousands of years using fire to shape the landscape turned it into a firescape. We should put water first in our thinking, not fire. That will also mean growing a lot more plants and a lot more different kinds of plants.

If you don’t think climate change is an emergency, how sure are you? Do you insure your car? Your house? Do you go to the doctor and dentist occasionally? It’s called risk management. Do you think the risk you might be wrong on climate change is worth insuring against? Got a spare planet for us if you’re wrong?

Climate change isn’t about whether you believe it’s real, or not. We’re not playing Monopoly. Climate change, like your fitness needing work, or you maybe getting skin cancer, or you being able to afford your mortgage, is a risk. We manage risks all the time. Whether you’re a ‘believer’ or a ‘denier’, you can both treat climate change as a risk, to be managed. Ffs, let’s grow up.

I love cars, which might surprise some people. What I don’t like is our one-dimensional thinking about them. So here’s a filter - could you survive without a car? Many of us actually live that question firsthand. As this survey shows, generally the answer is ‘no’, worldwide. Cars went from being a means to an end, to being an end themselves.

Ideas matter. Right now where I live air quality is well beyond ‘hazardous’ levels. And yet I’m still seeing people outside jogging and walking, for ‘exercise’. They want to be healthy 🤔

Australia’s favourite way to not address a serious problem? Let it get completely out of control, and then call the poor bastards who have to try to clean it up “heroes”. Like calling women juggling families and work heroes. Or nurses working in under-funded hospitals. Or teachers in neglected schools. Or firefighters who talk about emergencies and get told they ‘love being there’. They don’t want to be heroes, they want other people to stop being so bloody stupid.

Seeing a pattern here? https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/18/the-rights-accusations-of-antisemitism-against-sanders-are-cynical-and-dangerous?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Ideas matter. In the constant arguments about transport, why don’t we question why we need to ‘transport’ so much stuff in the first place, including ourselves? What would change if we flipped our thinking to make *not* having to transport things around the priority?

Nothing will bring a group of people together faster than curiosity. Onlookers prove it. Which tells me - the world only changes when it’s shown in a way that makes people curious.

I’ll be interested to see if those who crazily believe these bushfires were caused by a lack of hazard reduction burning, will seriously support communities going all through winter choking on smoke, after a summer choking on smoke. I bet it happens, stupid is winning.

Anybody who wades into complex public issues, especially at times of emergency, armed only with their pig-headed unresearched opinion, is a danger to society. I bet though in the aftermath of this catastrophe, we'll just have more populist bullshit, like "do more hazard reduction burns". Fantastic nuanced bit of research here, I particularly liked this bit about hazard reduction burning: "Experts emphasised that in extreme and catastrophic fire conditions, the surface fuel available for burning makes next to no difference to the level of a fire's intensity." https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-12-20/hazard-reduction-burns-bushfires/11817336

Thinking through the bushfires. Several historians have showed that what we now see as the 'bush' - mostly trees - used to be a mosaic of open and closed spaces. Compare this early Australian painting with the same spot in a photo, and you can see it. In fact all over the world thinking on landscape is showing the same thing; so often it's a mosaic driven by big herbivores, that since human intervention has become either desert (the bits we 'farm') or endless trees ('national parks'). These fires show I think that we need to fundamentally change how we THINK about landscape. We may need to clear a lot of trees in national parks to create these mosaics again, for example, to let our roos manage the grasslands again (why they end up on our front lawns, the trees have been allowed to take over far too much space). Unthinking responses will say 'we need more burning' - it's much more complicated than that. We need a mixed landscape again, where we share it with the other living things that help manage it. 'Greenies' see it as nature to be left alone, rednecks see it as a resource to do whatever they like with. They're both fundamentalists.

I'm in the middle of the bushfires with many others. The same patterns are recurring though - we post lots of powerful pictures, we thank the firefighters for their genuinely superhuman efforts, we get that nice sense of community that all disasters produce etc. We sentimentalise it, it becomes this big warm collective orgy of greeting card sentiment, of anger through to fear, awe, and arms around each other. And then - the fires will go out, and nothing will change. That's the danger. Unless we use these experiences to change how we actually think, they will keep happening, and they'll get even worse. Already this time firefighters are mostly powerless to do anything, because we didn't think hard enough all the previous times.

Maybe the fire crisis is nothing to do with fires, or with firefighting. These fires are the natural result of myths Australians tell themselves. I'm very interested that books like these are starting to unpick Australian understanding of landscape, particularly through its understanding of agriculture.

The Sovereign’s Sceptre, part of the UK Crown Jewels. Includes the Star of Africa, the largest colourless cut diamond in the world (over 530 carats). The Crown Jewels as a whole are estimated to be worth about $10 billion. One of the pinnacles of human luxury. I want to post more about luxury, it’s important I think.

More on luxury. The core human act is imitation. Comparing yourself against others and copying them. Imitation has a hierarchy, people aspire to be like the ‘best’. In societies that leads to classes, and there’s always a top-level, whether it’s royalty, or style-setters in consumer goods, or the best exponent of a particular skill etc. Luxury is imitation on steroids, the pinnacle of comparison. The Crown Jewels are not just beautiful, they represent the top of a pyramid of comparison and imitation stretching right down to the lowest members of society.

One thing that makes me nervous about emergencies is that it inflames a society already swimming in emotional treacle. It adds even more treacly unthinking emotion to the mix. Unthinking emotion creates problems, and the problems then trigger a tsunami of further unthinking emotion. Emotion - any type - is extremely dangerous if we wallow in it.

Surprises me sometimes that people don’t see the word ‘protest’ in ‘Protestant’. The Protestant churches are a protest movement that’s been going on for centuries. Have a look at what protest produces - directionless chaos. The Left of politics today could be seen as a protest movement against the Right. Same outcome. To protest is to adopt the framework of your opponent, without any of their unity of purpose.

You can tell a lot about Australia from space. Look at most of us, huddled on the coast, afraid of our own country. Like a lot of Australians, I’ve wondered about what reconciliation means, with aboriginal people. Maybe the bushfires is telling us. We have peoples who were living here thousands of years before the pyramids were built. It’s a wonder of the world. Maybe now they’re our only way to survive, because do we have any idea what to do about these fires? Or our water? Not one. They’re not perfect either, but they at least weren’t afraid of the country we live in. Maybe they can introduce us.

Every age has its aristocracy. I didn’t realise for a long time what the function of an aristocracy is, they just look like daft rich twits. But it turns out the true function is to make a country open to ideas from outside (because the aristocracy look to outside the country for inspiration), which can then be imitated by others copying the aristocracy, as a status game. Today’s aristocrats are often celebrities, we don’t always see the continuity with past social roles.

I'm ambivalent about holidays, have never liked the split between work and leisure; both are weird ideas. I prefer the idea of routine, to replace both of them. Habits. Habits save energy, and produce calm. One of the reasons I think travel as 'getting away from it all' is mostly a myth, most tourism transplants home routines (badly) somewhere else. People 'need a holiday' I think because our world of work lacks routine and is therefore exhausting and stressful.

Not my tree! But let’s embrace the essential message of Christmas. Materialism, the love of material things. The incarnation of God. Let’s rescue God from the spiritualists, get him out of the sky. Merry Christmas!

Ideas are everything. In the aftermath of the bushfires, the main question that may not get asked is - is the idea of ‘national park’ the main problem? Turning the landscape into a tourist attraction, or preserved specimen. At the moment we’re turning it into a story about fire, firefighters and climate change. That story just reflects debating positions between human groups, it leaves the landscape out.

National parks, part 2. The Australian landscape at the time of European settlement was overwhelmingly described as a ‘park’. But not in our modern meaning of ‘wilderness’, but in the meaning of the sorts of estates aristocrats had in England, or the parks in our towns and cities, with wide sweeping grass plains and pockets of forest here and there, with very little scrub and undergrowth (unlike today). It must have been stunningly beautiful, captured by early artists like Joseph Lycette here in 1820. It puzzled the early Europeans, who thought it must be the ‘natural’ state of the landscape. In fact it was entirely engineered, by aborigines. Within onIy a few decades these glorious parks had been reduced to either desert, or ‘wilderness’ (‘national’) parks of vast scrubby overgrowth, which burns like an atomic bomb.

Spending some of my Christmas break re-reading these amazing books. You’ll never look at Australia the same way again, if you read these. For tens of thousands of years, tens of millennia before the pyramids or anything the Chinese did, from tens of thousands of years before Christ until today, Australia was home to the most sophisticated civilisation on Earth. No other civilisation comes close, a few thousand years is considered remarkable, this civilisation went for close to 100,000 years. All the myths we grow up being told about aboriginal culture, my jaw drops every time I read these books. They turned this vast continent into a paradise, and managed to live in it that way for unimaginable periods of time. These books show the modern evidence for how we got the Aborigines completely wrong, in specific and gobsmacking detail. They weren’t hunter gatherers at all, they shaped an entire continent and its biogeography in ways we have no idea how to replicate today. It was the greatest act of genius, our modern technology is piddling by comparison.

A few people have said to me during the bushfires that the smoke is annoying, but it’s better than losing houses. Professor Ross Bradstock, who’s studied bushfires for 40 years: “we now know that bushfire smoke kills people”.

I think we misunderstood - what if ‘reconciliation’ needs to be with Australia itself? The landscape. Aborigines aren’t separate to the landscape - they created it. With towns and cities almost out of water, and uncontrollable wildfires, it’s never been more obvious that we don’t understand the country we live in. Extra firefighting gear and controlled burns won’t fix anything.

I want to talk about hunting, in a few posts. It crops up time and again in the best thinking about landscapes, around the world. What’s clear is that where meaningful hunting goes on, landscapes tend to be healthier. I think there’s a good reason for that - to have ‘game’ to hunt, the landscape must be in a condition to sustain the life of the game. The hunting of wild animals at the same time sustains the landscapes. There’s more to this story too, lots more...

Societies will always try to find a powerful unity of belief and desire. I think once you keep that in mind, most of what we see as ‘evil’ and ‘division’ looks very different.

One way to see the current bushfires is eucalypts intensifying their control over our landscape. The huge amount of scrubby undergrowth we’ve allowed to proliferate in our national parks, through our appalling attempt to spiritualise the landscape as ‘wilderness’, represents a real threat to eucalyptus. They’ve always promoted fire to clear away those competitors. As humans we struggle to see the agencies at work in the world, because we think ours is the only agency. Right now as always the fires are being thought about (not much thought actually) as a battle between humans - heroic firefighters, bad Greenies, idiot politicians etc. A tree from my holiday, showing a corkscrew-shaped branch. That tree actively responds to its conditions over time, with shifts in light and clearing patterns around it. It will burn you to a cinder if it thinks you’re in its way.

Don’t listen to all the spiritualist mumbo jumbo about what aboriginal peoples believe. I think it all boils down to 4 entirely practical principles: 1) treat everything as something you might eat or use 2) do everything to make the things in 1) as abundant as possible 3) do everything to make the things in 1) as convenient to you as possible, and 4) do everything to make the things in 1) as predictable to you as possible. If you mull over those, I think you’ll see that being entirely selfish, as 1-4 are, also encourages you to do everything you can to look after everything else, and make it more abundant and diverse. And it will take you in the exact opposite direction to most of our agriculture, and to veganism, our food fantasy that sits alongside our landscape fantasy of ‘wilderness’.

Ideas matter more than anything. I haven’t seen a ‘cause’ that isn’t just a sloppy generalisation. Like this one - the idea that peace is a choice, and that conflict is bad. Hashtag activism does this all the time, #metoo for example wallows in generalisations about gender. Banning plastic bags was the same (a complex problem wrapped up in a highly simplistic ‘cause’). I think we should always replace causes, with actual *causes*. Think through what is actually the cause of a particular problem. Not turn a too-general idea into a slogan.

Of course climate change intensified these bushfires. But there’s a deeper problem I think, as always it comes back to our ideas. Our idea of ‘the bush’ (and thus ‘bushfires’) is the direct cause of this disaster. This piece says with pride that it’s a sentimental term for Australians. Sentimentalism is almost always code for “we don’t have a clue how this thing works, but we feel strongly about it”. Almost the definition of most things Strayan.

Bought one of these before Christmas. In drought times or any time it’s genius, you get the water directly to the sub-surface. Saves a lot of water lost from evaporation. You don’t need to have Hoselink fittings to use it

When I was a kid, my grandmother said to me in front of a Blue Mountains scene a bit like this one, “it’s a mess, so untidy”. I chuckled at the time and thought she was being a typical European settler, not understanding the landscape. Here’s how George Evans the explorer, one of the first Europeans to see the Blue Mountains, described them in the early 19th century: “a fine appearance, the Trees being thin and the hills covered...with pasture to their tops.” One to reflect on in the bushfires.

An ancient pattern. Kangaroos LOVE golf courses. It seems obvious, there’s grass to be eaten there. But it’s much more than that, the pattern of long grassy strips (each hole of the course) bordered by trees and shrubs is one Aboriginal Australians invented to hunt kangaroos. The roos love that young, shooting grass (mowing produces that), and use the bordering trees for shelter. The Aboriginals would also plan the entire landscape so that these grassy strips would lead to dead-ends, so that when the roos were spooked they’d hop straight into hunters waiting in the trees. Aboriginals turned huge parts of Australia into that pattern, now mostly lost to either complete clearing of land for housing and farming, or re-claiming of the land by scrub and forest.

Farming was supposed to give greater predictability and abundance for humans. It hasn’t worked, because it focused on the farm level, rather than landscape level. We see the result now, farms destroyed by drought and sometimes flood, both things that can only be understood at a landscape level. What’s interesting to me is that the idea of designing whole landscapes removes the need to distinguish between human settlement (including farming), and the ‘environment’. There’s just landscape, actively and continuously shaped for our and animal’s and plant’s mutual benefit.

Happy birthday Laura! Can’t say it in Danish, alas ;)

The fence might be one of the greatest destroyers of the landscape. Dividing up the landscape into small territories stops it from functioning. Outer boundary fencing in critical areas is still important though. There is an alternative - create an environment rich in the food the animals you want to farm like, and they will come to you. Yes it makes ownership of the animals difficult to sort out, but if nobody owns them and they’re allowed to reproduce on their own, there’s plenty for everybody. It also dramatically reduces the work needed to look after animals - they mostly look after themselves. And they don’t over-graze, if they’re free to move around the landscape. Have a look at the Serengeti as an example. Plenty of animals, plenty of feed.

This is how you play the guitar. Shredders, watch and learn.

Everything about how 2019 ended, including people huddled on the shore for safety from fires, scared of their own country, converged for me upon Gammage's words about post-1788 Australia. Right now we're all mostly just visiting a land we still don't understand at all: "A majestic achievement ended. Only fragments remain. For the people of 1788 the loss was stupefying. For the newcomers it did not seem great. Until recently few noticed that they had lost anything at all. Knowledge of how to sustain Australia, of how to be Australian, vanished with barely a whisper of regret. We have a continent to learn. If we are to survive, let alone feel at home, we must begin to understand our country. If we succeed, one day we might become Australian."