What does "urgent" mean?

Urgent should mean something that actually threatens your survival. However, in an industrial society in which people work for large institutions, we are constantly asked to treat things as "urgent" that have nothing to do with actual survival. "Get that report in by that deadline", "I need that form from you," "Get me those numbers so we can up our profits", etc.

These affect money, but not survival. Most of our stress in modern life is unnecessary, in a strict survival sense. It's hard to keep an eye on the big picture.

What is really urgent:
* Getting antivenom after being bitten by a snake
* Calling 911 when you have chest pain
* Protecting your child
* The climate crisis (See Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning by George Monbiot and Prescott Matthew)
* Protecting indigenous rights and knowledge, particularly knowledge of how not to grossly mismanage the planet as we have been doing.
Rights US      Rights Australia
Knowledge worldwide      Knowledge Australia
* Rainforest deforestation       Rainforest Action Network
* Protecting people who are vulnerable because of neurological disorders from being exploited       Information:  http://www.assesscompetency.com
* Getting out of Iraq, impeaching Bush (I don't really need to provide a link for this, do I?

Some more cool Aussie phrases, from snippets of Aussie conversation

What have you done so far today?
I've had a dingo's breakfast.*


Would you like some watermelon?
Yeah, that would go down a treat.


So, you left the States and you're an Aussie now? Drinkin' beer, watchin' the footy**...
I don't drink beer, and I've never been to a footy match.
What??!! We're deportin' you!


* a piss and a look around
** rugby

Wisdom implies ignorance

One of the things that constitutes knowledge is the understanding of ignorance. We humans know not only what we do know, but we know what we do not know.* Metaknowledge. Is this a cognitive ability that is limited to our species? I don’t know. This ability drives curiosity. We want to know what we don’t know, but to do that, we have to be able to represent what we don’t know, to represent the space that needs to be explored. That is, of course, the essence of science, to represent parts of what we do not know and to have a plan for probing into it. Perhaps what distinguishes a good scientist from a bad scientist, an ego-driven one from a non-ego-driven one, is humility, knowing the extent of what one does not understand, vs. arrogance at “look how much I know.”

What of intuitive knowledge, non-explicitly-represented knowledge, that whispers to us in dreams and visions? That which we know, but we do not know that we know. That which we can remember, or become conscious of. I think that this is a kind of knowledge that indigenous cultures are experts at. They make good use of dreams and symbols and visions, not worrying about whether something makes literal, explicit sense, but only whether it is useful. Their understanding of biology, ecology and pharmacology is wonderfully sophisticated even if it is not scientific.

There are different kinds of ignorance, personal ignorance, species ignorance, cultural ignorance. Is something unknown to you because you don’t personally know it? In that case, you might know who does know. Knowing who to ask is a valuable thing. It makes it do-able to learn something unknown. But if something is unknown to you because humans don’t know it yet, then it’s much harder to learn it. That’s where science comes in. We’re an amazing species in that we reached out into outer space. We landed on another world and looked back at our own, and came to understand our world and our place in the universe in a new way. It really was for all humankind that those steps were taken. Now we’re sending out pieces of technology to know things further out in the solar system. This knowledge from beyond the planet, these are things that humans haven’t known before.

Or have they? Native Americans say they always knew what it was like to stand on the moon and look back on the earth. Their medicine men and women had traveled to the moon, not with their physical bodies, but with their spirit bodies, and so they already knew that view of the earth, a sphere floating in black space. A skeptical scientist can dismiss this as nonsense, but maybe in that ancient, indigenous way of knowing, there is more than just biological knowledge, or ecological knowledge. Maybe there is cosmic knowledge.

And that brings us to cultural ignorance. There are things that our culture, modern American industrial culture, does not know. Instead of assuming nobody knows, assuming that if science doesn’t know it, then humans don’t know it, why not just ask other cultures? We don’t because when we ask them “how” they know, we don’t like the answer. “We know because the spirits tell us” or “We know because the plants tell us.” We assume we know what this means, and dismiss it as superstition. But suppose it’s just a way of talking about intuitive knowledge? Suppose we did not assume we understand what their “methods” are, but just asked about the knowledge itself. (While respecting their intellectual property rights of course.) It doesn’t mean we can’t go back and check it with science. That’s what Vine Deloria was saying, “Just ask the question. Ask the people who know.” Ancient, ancient cultures may know things that we do not. At least they might point science in some interesting directions.

Sociality and survival

Apropos of my last post, I’m reminded of a Canadian film, “The Snow Walker,” about a pilot lost in the Arctic in a downed plane, and how he depends on human connections to survive. Back in “civilization”, where they think he’s been lost forever, Estelle (the barmaid) says to Shep (Walter Shepard, the pilot’s boss) “When you get right down to it, all of us are just alone in this world, and that’s just the way it is.” Not so! That is a culturally bound idea she has, not at all an indigenous idea, and I bet it’s not too common in traditional agricultural cultures either.

The movie shows so clearly that this is not true: the final moment is a perfect image of humans’ non-aloneness. Charlie, the downed pilot, has walked hundreds of miles through the Arctic, with Kanaalaq, the Inuit woman who died of tuberculosis in the last few days of their journey. Without her, he never would have survived, and he tried to save her life, dragging her on a sledge the last days. After she dies, he walks the last miles alone. The final moment of the film shows him as a tiny figure approaching an Inuit camp. Most of the screen is taken up with the vast whiteness of the Arctic, what seem to us as featureless snowfields stretching forever, the sky white with blowing snow, and he, a lone and tiny figure swamped by it all, approaching other people. He stops, and they come to him, and then he walks towards them. A clump of tiny human figures in the vastness of the Arctic, coming together, greeting, touching. People. Community. Survival. Life. A small knot of humans in the vastness of that environment, their community and togetherness what enables them to live there.

We cannot live alone and expect to survive.


The Snow Walker, 2003, Walk Well/ Snow Walker Productions, Inc.
Based on the book, The Snow Walker, by Farley Mowat, Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1975; Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 2003.

The cure for loneliness

The November 2005 issue of Yoga Journal had an article that really pissed me off. (I believe that being angered by an issue of a magazine devoted to yoga officially qualifies me for the 2005 World Championship of Ironic Non-Enlightenment.) The article was entitled “A Real Cure for Loneliness: Sweet Solitude.” Great! I thought. Disconnection and alienation are such problems for modern industrial cultures, maybe they’ll have some wisdom to offer. I certainly have struggled with loneliness and a lack of social connection, as an immigrant to a new culture. So I was mightily disappointed when the article was focused entirely on the individual. Here was the author’s startling insight: time spent alone doesn’t have to be lonely. You can use it for spiritual practice, and as an opportunity to focus on the spiritual essentials that really matter. I expect more from a yoga magazine than platitudes that were obvious to me in high school. I expect a bit more depth of analysis.

It’s all well and good to focus on time spent in the "inner world", but such an analysis of loneliness misses the underlying cause, i.e., a society that is out of balance, in which people are disconnected from each other. Instead, the implicit message is that if loneliness is a problem for someone, he or she just isn’t being spiritual enough. It points to the individual him- or herself as the cause of the problem. Modern industrial cultures are structured to alienate people from each other. Our culture focuses on people as consumers rather than as relate-ers, shunting people towards activities like watching TV and playing video games that involve not interacting with other people. Given our society’s profound inability to foster meaningful lasting social connections, writing an article like this one is like saying that the problem with people on the Titanic was that they just didn’t have a spiritual enough attitude towards drowning in freezing water.

We are social primates. We need social contact, a sense of belonging, a sense of community and being valued by other people. Hunter-gatherer cultures and traditional agricultural cultures have this. (See entry of May 25, click here.) Maybe if we worked on enriching the social connections in our culture rather than everyone staying alone and gazing at their navels, a.k.a., inner worlds, we could heal the underlying cause of disconnection. Then we could focus on the inner world fruitfully. The wisdom traditions of the world recognize the need for community. Yogis, or Buddhist monks and nuns don’t try to do their practice in isolation, but within a spiritual community, or sangha. Even a monk in a cave depends on food and water brought by members of his sangha, and will return to that sangha to share the wisdom from his practice in the cave. It’s only Americans, thinking they can shop for spiritual wisdom piecemeal, who cling to the idea of practicing in isolation. Individualism is a part of American culture that gets grafted onto Eastern practices when they come to America, but that doesn’t mean it’s part of the Eastern tradition.

Plant rights vs. animal rights

In the 8 October isssue of New Scientist, Gary Francione argues for animal rights by saying that animals, like humans, should have the right not to be owned (essay here). As usually happens when I hear animal rights arguments, I find myself saying, "What have you got against plants?"

With this in mind, I took Francione's essay, changed the word "animal" to "plant" throughout, and made a couple of other cosmetic changes, just to see how it would read. I'm not holding my breath for a big "plant rights" movement to happen, but ecosystem rights might be a different matter.

Anyway, here's my essay on plant rights:

One right for all living things.

We treat plants how we used to treat human slaves. What possible justification is there for that, asks an evolutionary theorist?

Do plants have moral rights? What kind of legal status should we afford them? Some animal rights campaigners maintain that we should allow animals the same rights enjoyed by humans. That is, of course, absurd. There are many human rights that simply have no application to non-humans.

I would like to propose something a little different: that a sensible and coherent theory of rights for living things should focus on just one right for living things. That is the right not to be treated as the property of humans.

Let me explain why this makes sense, particularly for plants. At present, plants are commodities that we own in the same way that we own automobiles or furniture. Like these inanimate forms of property, plants have only the value that we choose to give them. Any moral or other interest a plant has (in avoiding being eaten, in controlling its reproduction) represents an economic cost that we can choose to ignore.

It is a fallacy to suppose that we can balance human interests, which are protected by claims of right in general and of a right to own property in particular, against the interests of plants which, as property, exist only as a means to the ends of humans. The plant in question is always a “crop” or a “houseplant” or a “decorative plant” or a “weed” or some other form of plant property that exists solely for our use or disposal.

There are parallels here with the institution of human slavery. While we tolerate varying degrees of human exploitation, we no longer regard it as legitimate to treat anyone, irrespective of their particular characteristics, as the property of others. In a world deeply divided on many moral issues, one of the few norms steadfastly endorsed by the international community is the prohibition of human slavery. We recognise all humans as having a basic right not to be treated as the property of others.

Is there a morally sound reason not to extend this single right – the right not to be treated as property – to plants? Or to ask the question another way, do we deem it acceptable to eat plants, harvest them, confine and display them in farms and gardens, use them in experiments or vegetable-growing contests, or otherwise treat them in ways in which we would never think it appropriate to treat any human or animal irrespective of how “humane” we were being?

The response that plants lack some special characteristic that is possessed solely by animals not only flies in the face of evolutionary theory, but is completely irrelevant to whether it is morally permissible to treat non-animals as just commodities – just as differences among animals would not serve to justify mistreatment. Is moral consideration of how we treat a living thing to depend only on whether that organism has neurons? This is an animal-centric view. Plants have a genetic interest in their own reproduction and survival. They take action to avoid being eaten. They sense predators and competitors in their environments, process information (though not with neurons), and respond in ways to avoid being eaten, by releasing chemicals into the air or elevating their own toxin levels. How would any of us like to be corralled in a field to be killed or to have our reproductive organs torn off every year? Also of no use is the response that it is acceptable for animals to exploit plants because it is “traditional” or “natural” to do so. This merely states a conclusion and does not constitute an argument.

The bottom line is that we cannot justify human domination of plants except by appeal to neuro-centric scientific faith or religious superstition focused on the supposed superiority of animals. Sentience is not a well-defined enough quality for science to be certain that it applies only to organisms with neurons. Our “conflicts” with plants’ interests are mostly of our own doing. We bring billions of plants into the world in order to kill them for reasons that are often trivial. Does our desire for sweets justify the breeding and slaughter of sugarcane plants? By bringing these plants into existence for reasons that we would never consider appropriate for humans, we have already decided that plants are outside the scope of our moral community altogether.

Accepting that plants have this one right does not entail letting rice, corn, soybeans and millet grow wild in the streets. We have brought these plants into existence and they depend on us for their survival. We should care for those currently in existence, but we should stop causing more to come into being to serve as our resources. We would thereby eliminate any conflicts we have with plants. We may still have conflicts with wild plants, and we would have to address hard questions about how to apply equal consideration to animals and plants in those circumstances. If plants or indeed, even ecosystems, could not be treated as property, these conflicts would change.

Recognising plant rights really means accepting that we have a duty not to treat non-animals as resources, or else it means recognizing that life feeds on life, and that as animals, we have to live. The interesting question is not whether the corn plant should be able to sue the farmer for cruel treatment, but why the corn plant is there in the first place.

I could try the same trick substituting "ecosystem" instead of "plant." Indeed, where in our economy are there any arguments about the rights of ecosystems? Where are the arguments about the rights of living systems who don't happen to have neurons? I don't know whether individual plants are intelligent. Certainly, they take in information about the world and respond to it. As a neuroscientist studying the intelligence that happens when a few billion units interact, I do think there's a reasonable argument to be made that any complex system of interacting units is intelligent. Ecosystems, meadows or forests, certainly process information and change and adapt to stimuli. But even if they don't, they still have a right to thrive. A moral system that would deem the ownership of any living thing illegitmate would completely undermine our current economy, and require a new model of economics. Of course, just such a view has been espoused by many indigenous peoples.

Intelligent Design? What about Intelligent Falling?

OK, this isn't really a post. It's just a link to somebody else's amusing idea: the Theory of Intelligent Falling will soon replace the godless theory of gravitation.
Click here to find out more.

Dumb-Ass Design Theory

I'm having a crisis of faith. First, creationists convinced me that the complexities of life could never be explained by mere “blind” Darwinian evolution. Consider the perfect aerodynamics of a bird’s wing, designed in just the right shape so that air flow over the front edge of the wing will create lift, allowing the bird to soar in the Intelligent Designer’s beautiful skies. The fibers in the bird’s feathers and the way they grow to overlap are designed for both warmth and aerodynamic efficiency, minimizing drag in flight and allowing warmth when the bird lands and folds its wings around its body. Such perfection! Such beauty! Surely no blind process could produce this, it had to have an Intelligent Designer. Only a divine intelligence could do such superb work. Anything else is just too improbable for me to believe.

And what a designer! Everywhere in the world, we can see evidence of the Designer’s divine wisdom. Ah, the majesty of a redwood forest, that natural cathedral, with the branches and needles designed to collect and condense fog, dripping it onto the spongy ground below to be absorbed by the trees’ shallow roots. And the exquisite beauty of a cherry blossom, trembling and beckoning in the spring breeze, the perfect bait for a bee’s visual and olfactory system. The flower tickling and dusting the bee’s body with pollen as it feeds, and moves on to another flower, cross-pollinating and creating more flowers: nature’s most holy threesome. And all of these creations are so lovely to our own human eyes. My faith in the Intelligent Designer was made deeper and sweeter with each observation. The Designer had made the world with ultimate intelligence expressed in each act of creation. I saw its marvelous design, and worshiped the Designer for these miracles.

How happy I was then! How carefree! Consider the eye, said the creationists, How the muscles surrounding the lens expand and contract to focus light through the lens from different distances. How could that have evolved by chance?

The wonders of eyes don’t stop there. Consider those strange and miraculous creatures, the fish who live in the ocean’s depths, where it is always night: their electrical senses and huge jaws, so perfectly designed for the conditions in those depths where no light reaches. They don’t have eyes, because they don’t need them. Wait, what? Many of them still have eyes? Scientists call them “vestigial” eyes, left over from a past ancestor who lived further up in the ocean where there was light. The fish just don’t use them. Why would the Intelligent Designer create vestigial eyes? It’s a waste of metabolic energy for those fish to grow them, and food is quite scarce in the ocean’s depths. What was the Designer thinking?

Well, perhaps the Designer put more effort into the human eye. We are, after all, the chosen beings of the Creator of the universe. Consider the retina, those light-sensitive cells on the back of the eye, those little miracles that register photons and then send signals back to the brain to be processed further. Such marvels of good design they are. Some can respond to a single photon; some can differentiate color. The light comes in at the front of the cell, and the signal leaves out the back… Wait, what was that you said? Retinal cells are on backwards? The nerve cells/axons that leave the light-sensitive cells actually project out from the front of the cell, and have to loop around to go back to the brain, blocking some light from the light-sensitive parts of the cell? I can’t believe that. Excuse me, Intelligent Designer, but this is the human eye we’re talking about. Did you do this? It’s a hugely inefficient design! What, were you busy doing something else that day? Giving the tiger its stripes or something? Why did you fall down on the job of designing our eyes? We were made in your image! Don’t we rate a little extra care with product design?

OK, how about another input system to the brain: human genitalia. So perfectly designed to create more people, and to give great pleasure while involved in the sacred act of procreation. The female clitoris, that tiny pink bud near the urethra that grows in a girl fetus’ development out of the same tissues that produce the penis in a male fetus. That blossom of female pleasure, so beautifully designed to make sex enjoyable to women so that they will want to procreate with their husbands. Wait, what’s that you say? The clitoris is shaped and placed in such a way that only a small percentage of women can get sexual satisfaction from intercourse? How can the Creator motivate women to procreate if intercourse is not the most fun sexual activity for them? I’m taking this one personally. Had the Intelligent Designer been hitting the communion wine when He designed this thing? What a kluge!

The troubling thing to my faith is that those damned Darwinians (and I do mean damned, literally) say that they can explain these kluge-y features through the gradual accumulation of small, incremental genetic changes, or as byproducts of some other adaptation. My faith is shaken. I need to believe in the wisdom, infallibility and omnipotence of the Intelligent Designer.^* It’s a major crisis, a crisis of faith.

If the Intelligent Designer were a major corporation, we would not tolerate this level of sloppiness in product design. We expect things to work better. We would be filing class action lawsuits, writing letters of complaint, and demanding to know who the design engineers were. With that in mind, I have started my own letter of complaint to the Intelligent Designer:

Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing to register a complaint about the following product you issued to me in 1963, my body. There appear to be some major design flaws and I would like you either to fix them or to compensate me accordingly. First of all, there’s the eye...

^* May we all be touched by his noodly appendage. Click here to find out more about the leading alternative to Intelligent Design, the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Beasties in the house

One of the great joys of living in sub-tropical Queensland (and I’m sure these things get only more delightful the further north one goes), is the ability to cohabit with all kinds of exotic critters. Huge fruitbats that swoop out of the tree next to you as you walk past, winging their way down the street ahead of you. They also eat fruit and then vomit up the seeds onto the ground below, or, as often happens, the car below. It turns out that fruit bat vomit is quite corrosive, so if you don’t want your paint job ruined, you have to wash it off quickly. Ah, for those halcyon days, living in the U.S., unaware of the dangers of fruit bat vomit that awaited me down under. We also have skinks, little brown lizards that scurry away as you walk past, and if they’re big enough, make you jump, in case it might be a snake. (Once, it was a python on the sidewalk and not a skink.) We have geckos, little lizards that crawl along the ceiling and make a loud chucking-chirping sound to announce their territory. They go away in the winter, but you know spring has arrived in the tropics when the geckos start calling. It’s not as lovely as lilacs blooming, but when there are barely seasons at all, you take what you can get for seasonal signs. Golden orb spiders are also not uncommon in my neighbourhood. They spin webs about two feet across, possibly meant to catch small children, and themselves are a few inches across. Nothing compared to the mighty Huntsman spider, which can grow as large as a man’s hand. Not my delicate, small, female hand. A man’s hand. And of course, no subtropical place would be complete without flying cockroaches. Giant, brown flying cockroaches, that can get up to two or more inches long.

I didn’t get off to a good start with Queensland’s cockroaches. I had seen them crawling around on the sidewalk at a safe distance, so I knew how large and disgusting they were. My first personal encounter with one was in the kitchen of some friends who had kindly invited me over to dinner. I felt something tickling my leg as I sat at the dinner table, and thought, oh, there must be a loose thread in my skirt, so I readjusted the skirt. A few seconds later, I felt more tickling and scratching, and I still thought it was some part of my clothing that was scratching me, so I reached down and shook out my skirt, and a HUGE cockroach landed on the floor and took flight. I jumped back and yelled, “It was in my skirt!” My hosts were typically Aussie, that is to say, unperturbed. “Welcome to Queensland,” was their attitude. Mine was a little different. “Omigod, I’ve moved to a place where two-inch long cockroaches can crawl up my skirt.” The horror, the horror.

The appearance of large cockroaches and spiders happens frequently in old houses, which is why I’m glad I live in a modern apartment with windows and screens that seal out the bugs completely. But, in the spring and summer, I cook outside on the barbie (yes, it really is called a “barbie” here) on my balcony, because it’s too bloody hot to cook indoors. And sometimes I leave the screen door open when I run back into the kitchen to get something. So that’s how I found a cockroach in the kitchen last week, lurking under my dish drainer, wiggling his brown antennae. (I don’t know that it wasn’t a her, but cockroaches have always seemed distinctively male to me.)

After screaming and leaping in the air, I had to decide what to do with it. Death sentence, or exile? I would like to say it was my deep compassion, instilled in me by Buddhist practice, that led me to spare his life, but in truth, it was just that he was about an inch long, and I couldn’t bear the thought of how much he would go crunch and squish under whatever object I chose to execute him with. And it’s not that hard to save a bug’s life. So I picked up a Tupperware box, and coaxed the little bugger out into the open, and then of course, he took flight. Causing more screaming and jumping. I cursed the fates that brought me to live in a place where a giant cockroach could fly around in my home. He landed on the kitchen wall, and crawled down to the counter, thankgod, where I was able to trap him under the box, and slide a piece of cardboard under it. He flew around in loops under the box, banging into the sides, as I escorted him outside. Ewwwww.

Like an idiot, when I went to my yoga class today, I left the door to the balcony standing wide open. Burglars and axe murderers are not too common in my neighbourhood, so luckily nothing was stolen, and there don’t seem to be any people with evil intent lurking in my back room or closets. But how do I know there wasn’t an intruder of the six-legged kind? Please, oh great spirit of cockroaches, remember that I was merciful to one of your children last week, and may none of your children enter my home or crawl under my clothing again!

Of course, I will also have to appease the great spirit of Huntsman spiders. I don’t really mind spiders at all, and I’ve always been happy to cohabit with small ones. I either let them be or take them outside (are you listening, great spirit of spiders?). But there are limits. I don’t want to wake up to find something crawling up my back that can have four legs on one side of my spine, and four legs on the other side, and whose weight I could actually feel. As I said, ewwww.

I know what my Aussie friends would say. “Don’t worry about the beasties, she’ll be right.”* What I want to say is, get me out of this continent!


* she’ll be right, she’ll be apples, no worries all mean everything will be fine, don’t worry about it

Off to the wildnerness to try to connect

In the spirit of connecting to Australia's landscape, I'm off to a camping festival in tropical North Queensland in a few days. I'm scared, because I have a proper respect for the dangers of camping in a rainforest. (Leeches! Yuck!) But I'm also looking forward to connecting to the land in Australia a little bit more by being in the landscape. So... no posts for a while, but I'm sure I'll have some very interesting reflections when I get back.

Learning Aussie English

They speak a different language down here. Really, mate. This is one thing about Oz that I’m really fond of. The language is very colourful.

Just as all the plants and animals in Australia are adapted to conserve energy, so is Aussie English. Never say multiple syllables when a shortened version of the word will do. Three or four syllables in a word is out of the question - who has time? Endings of "-ie" and "-o" are the route to energy conservation: I cook on the barbie, I live in Brissy. Here's a short glossary of Aussie English, both shortened and non-shortened words.

"Can I see your rego?" = Can I see the registration for your car? "Registration" is 4 whole syllables, an outrageous energy expense! They shorten it to "rego," pronounced redge-oh.

"Did you see that doco on the telly last night?" = I would ask you if you'd seen that documentary on television last night, but I can't be bothered to say all that.

"arvo" = afternoon. "Can I come see you this arvo?" Again, the syllables problem.

to chuck a wobbly: to have a temper fit, a tantrum. "I told her she couldn't have ice cream, and she chucked a wobbly."

to bung: to put.
The first time a colleague said to me "Just bung it in me box," I was a little taken aback. Good thing I knew we were talking about an envelope. Such moments of bewilderment are all too familiar to me.

cozzie, swimmers: a bathing costume, swimsuit. "Bung on your cozzie, we're going to the beach."

daggy: unfashionable, dowdy, uncool. "That’s a really daggy outfit." A "dag" is a little ball of brown stuff that hangs off the bits of wool at the back end of a sheep – not a very pleasant image, but most people don’t think about where the term comes from.

to earbash: to talk endlessly and boringly. An "earbashing" is a dull lecture. "I made the mistake of asking him how LED’s work, and he gave me an earbashing."

dunny: a lavatory. I think it used to mean outhouse, but it’s used more generally now. Our department head, Debbie, has commissioned the refurbishing of the bathrooms on our floor at work, so we've dubbed them "Debbie's dunnies."

to bang: to have sex.
to bang like a dunny door in a gale: to have sex often and with enthusiasm

stuff up, get stuffed: f**k up, get f***ed

"giving you the goss" = telling you my gossip.

"my week is chockers" = my schedule is chockerblock full this week

"getting rugged up" = bundling up in warm clothing to go outside

"Mind if I take a sticky beak?" = This might be said the first time someone comes to your home, and wants to take a look around. It comes from Cockney rhyming slang, peek rhymes with beak, taking a peek is nosy, like a bird sticking its beak into nooks and crannies, so "take a sticky beak". It will take me decades to figure out rhyming slang. A lot of the convicts sent to Australia were Cockney, so some Aussie English traces its roots back to Cockney English.

I'm in love with North America!

Geez, I'm homesick. I can't wait to go home in November.
A slight re-write of some Joan Osborne lyrics, from Early Recordings, the song "Fingerprints":

Why does it take so long for me to leave you
Once I’ve said goodbye
I wish it could be over quickly
Clean and painless and dry
But your place has left its taste with me
And your land has left its mark
My heart is full of whispers
And voices in the dark
Why does it take so long for me to leave you
Now that I'm not there
I didn't know I would feel this way
The loss because I care
But my spirit has a memory
And it holds you close within
The feel of your deep forests
The earth that is your skin
I feel your fingerprints
On my heart
I thought that I could leave you
I thought I was so smart
Now I feel your fingerprints
Nothing I can do
Ain’t it touching how I can’t get over you
I never knew, I never thought
That I would miss you so much
And it doesn't seem another land
Can wash away your touch
I feel your fingerprints
On my heart
I thought that I could leave you
I thought I was so smart
Now I feel your fingerprints
Nothing I can do
Ain’t it touching how I can’t get over you

The trouble with Eden

You can tell a lot about a culture by looking at its myths and stories. Despite the best efforts of the founding fathers, the U.S. is a Judeo-Christian culture. One of the central myths underlying American culture is the myth of Genesis and humanity’s fall from grace. The bare bones of the myth: there was an initial period where things were blessed and wonderful, and through some wrongdoing, people were exiled from that original blessed state. The solution to re-attaining that original blessed state, then, is clear: address the source of the wrongdoing, and paradise will come again.

That basic idea still pervades many discussions in American culture where you wouldn’t think that the participants in that discussion would believe in or be influenced by the Old Testament: feminism, neo-paganism, environmentalism. In feminism, there is a mythical idea that there was once a blessed period in the past in which women were revered and cultures were matriarchal, and that a wave of warlike patriarchal invasions destroyed this Edenic scene. (Best exemplied in The Chalice and the Blade, by Riane Eisler.) More likely is that there have always been a mix of very many different kinds of cultures, some matriarchal, some not. Yes, there are many statues of female figures from 40,000-20,000 years ago around Europe. Interpreting these as fertility figures and objects of reverence is a perfectly reasonable idea. It does not follow, however, that there was an idyllic period of matriarchy from which we have "fallen" because of the "original sin" of patriarchy. The route to paradise on this view? Eliminate patriarchy.

In neo-pagan circles, there is an idea that there was an original, blessed state when the people of Europe worshipped the Goddess, and revered nature. (Best exemplified in Starhawk’s writings.) Again, the pre-Christian people of Europe were most likely a mixed bag of cultures, worshipping both goddesses and gods, as well as local spirits of the land. It’s clear they were pagan, and more nature-centered than modern industrial culture. It’s not clear that this period of time was a blessed Edenic state, as the early peoples of Europe seem to have spent an awful lot of time making war on each other, at worst, and stealing each other’s livestock, at best. I wouldn’t choose to go back and live in such a time. The route to paradise on this view? Go back to worshipping the Goddess.

In environmentalism, the original blessed state is the life of hunter-gatherers, all living in peaceful harmony with the land around them, living by a conservation ethos. Agriculture is the "original sin" that caused The Fall, in this case. (Best exemplified in Paul Shepard’s Coming Home to the Pleistocene.) The route to paradise in this environmentalist idea? Go back to the ethos of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle. So does that mean giving up agriculture? The planet couldn’t support as many people as we currently have if we were all living as hunter-gatherers. So what is the practical route to paradise?

I guess this is why I have a problem with the Eden myth: it plays into the idea that if we can just correct some mistake our species made in the past, we will be able to have a utopia on Earth. I don’t believe in utopias – humans are too complex, too much of a mixture of light and dark, and too varied to ever have a utopia. Also, it is not universally true that hunter-gatherer cultures follow a conservation ethic. Anthropologist Wade Davis and historian Jared Diamond¹ have both made the point that many rainforest tribes find the idea of conservation alien, because they cannot imagine the bounty of the natural world being depleted. A conservation ethos is not part of their foraging lifestyle. Conservation seems to be part of the ethos only of hunter-gatherers living in places with more scarcity – places with harsh winters, like the Great Plains, or the Arctic North, or desert ecosystems with few resources, as in the deserts of Africa and Australia. The reason conservation is now looking like a good ethos is that humans have discovered that all of the planet’s resources are limited.

It is absolutely true that agricultural cultures have always driven out hunter-gatherer cultures, and usurped their lands, and that throughout history, this has made hunter-gatherers worse off. Hunter-gatherers have absolutely experienced a loss, a degradation of their circumstances from a previously better state². Every one of our ancestors experienced this changeover from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to an agricultural or modern industrial lifestyle at some point. This has made things much worse for humans all over the planet. I don’t deny that.

Still, I believe things can get better. Revering the feminine, getting rid of patriarchal systems and having a land-based conservation ethos may well be part of the solution, but they are not part of the solution because they can redeem our past sins. They are part of the solution because they are ideas that are good on their own merits. Just because I don’t believe in utopia doesn’t mean I don’t believe in reform. I just believe that the reforms will be something new, something complex, that our species is reaching towards, but hasn’t discovered yet. The problem with the Eden myth is not that things haven’t gotten worse. It’s that the myth points us towards simplistic solutions, and teaches us to be ashamed of our species, instead of looking for our best potential. We’ll only find a way out of our current mess if we look to our species’ best potential, and use it to correct for our species’ worst tendencies.


¹ Wade Davis, One River. New York: Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, 1996.
Jared Diamond, "New Guineans and Their Natural World,” in The Biophilia Hypothesis, Edited by Stephen R. Kellert & Edward O. Wilson. Washington DC: Island Press, 1993.
² Hugh Brody, 2000, The Other Side of Eden: Hunters, Farmers and the Shaping of the World, NY: North Point Press.

Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade. NY: Harper Collins, 1987, 1995.
Starhawk, The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess. NY: Harper Collins, 1979, 1989, 1999.
Paul Shepard, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Edited by Florence Shepard. Washington DC: Island Press, 1998.

Getting to know Australia

A telling piece of dialogue from the film, "The Man from Snowy River":

Jessica: One minute it’s like paradise, the next it’s trying to kill you.

Jim: …if it was easy to get to know it, it’d be no challenge. You’ve got to treat the mountains like a high-spirited horse, never take them for granted.

That is Australia! What better place to describe its character than in one of its great classic films. This is indeed a fierce continent. Everything that is indigenous – plants, animals and people – is incredibly tough, having accomplished the difficult task of making a living here. Geologically, Australia is one of the earth’s oldest continents. I don’t mean that it’s been here longer, I mean that there is no recent volcanic activity here. So Australia has had millions and millions more years of erosion without having new soil replaced, compared to other continents. Everything about Australia’s life forms are influenced by this fact.¹ The oldest river on the planet runs through the center of Australia. The deepest top-soil anywhere on the continent is only a foot thick. Australia’s soils are nutrient-poor; its oceans along the continental shelf are aquatic deserts, because so few nutrients wash down to its rivermouths. That’s why we have such crystal clear, blue, beautiful oceans, some of the most beautiful beaches in the world. It’s also why Australia’s rainforests, western plains, and coral reefs are so rich in biodiversity. It’s one of the paradoxes of ecology, that tough circumstances are one factor that can lead to biodiversity. I guess the harder it is to make a living in an ecosystem, the more different ways of making a living DNA will have to take on to be successful in replicating itself. The other pervasive selection pressure in Australia is long and severe drought cycles. Parts of Australia can go for years without ever seeing significant rain, and geology shows that it has been like this for a long time. In fact, Australia’s climate has been more stable over millions of years compared to other continents, because as the planet has cooled since the warm, lush days of the dinosaurs, when even Antarctica had no ice, Australia has been drifting northward, keeping its average temperatures relatively constant over the past 60-odd million years. This means that some very ancient forms of life have survived here.

Once DNA figures out a way of making a living in tough ecosystems like Australia’s, man, are those good designs! All the indigenous plants and animals are resource-efficient, able to thrive on fewer nutrients than their counterparts living cushy lives on other continents. Everything is designed to conserve energy. That’s why many of Australia’s animals are nocturnal – thermoregulation takes less energy at night here. That’s why the brains of marsupials have shrunk over the course of evolution here – brain tissue uses a lot of energy. That’s why Australian snakes are so extremely venomous – the quicker you can drop your prey, the less energy it takes to chase it down. Forests are incredible in Australia. It takes a lot of resources to grow a tree. Being a tree in Australia is an accomplishment. Being a tree in North America? They have it so easy. If Australian trees could talk to American trees, and if Australian trees were obnoxious and macho, they would say, "Man, you guys are wimps. You sit there in your nutrient-rich ecosystem, on all that deep top-soil, and you call that being a tree? You don’t even know what it takes to be a real tree. I’d like to see you try to grow in Australian soil." Trees here are powerful. If Australian snakes could talk to rattlesnakes and copperheads and water moccasins, they would say, "You call that venom? Ha! That’s just a light aperitif. We’ll show you venom. Step outside." To which the American snakes would reply, "Um, we don’t have legs."

OK, leaving aside the barroom brawl between Australian life forms toughened by adversity and North American life forms softened by easy living, this is what makes connecting to the land here a challenge. At first glance, I don’t find Australian forests as beautiful as North American or European forests. They’re not as lush, not as deep a green, they’re more dry and spare. But there is power and resilience there, and a different kind of beauty. Pale eucalyptus trunks lit up by the fierce Australian sun, etched against the blue sky like bleached bones, reaching up with their leaves, pulling up with their roots, drawing together sun and soil to keep the cycle of life going. That is power. Aborigines, the traditional owners of the land, have learned to live here over the past 60,000 years. An urbanite lost in the outback sees a harsh, unforgiving landscape with no food and no water, and will probably die in a few days. Outback Aboriginals see a landscape rich in food and medicine, and keep the knowledge of where to find water alive in song and story. That is power.

I respect Australia, and I am developing a fondness for the land. Will I ever love it, and feel connected to it, as I do to the land in North America? It’s a challenge.

¹ A lot of the information here is from Tim Flannery’s book, The Future Eaters, the first part of which details the role of nutrient-poor soil and drought on Australia’s natural history.