Drought in the Bellinger Valley

The Bellinger Valley is experiencing the driest Spring in 43 years. abc

"Australia in the middle of its hottest-ever year...The next six months are going to be unusually hot, dry and risky." The Conversation 

Update:
North Coast enduring driest conditions in more than a century. Average rainfall was the lowest since 1901 in the region from Coffs Harbour in the south to Bundaberg in the north. abc 110814

The Armed Man - Thoughts on War

The Concert:
Karl Jenkins: The Armed Man (‘Mass for Peace’) The anti-war piece was performed by the North Coast Performing Arts Orchestra and Choir for the UN International Day of Peace. The event took place in the Bellingen Soldiers' Memorial hall.

Thoughts on War:
Intense warfare is the evolutionary driver of large complex populations. Primate and ant societies pursue war to defend their turf or invade others for resources. Settler culture and rapid reproduction leads to an overflow of the 'petri dish'. The early enthusiasm for endless growth and expansion brought about a way of life of  'Go forth, multiply, fill the Earth, subdue and vandalise the Garden'. The logic of expansionism led man to the "The brutal destruction of 'creation'." H. Blumenberg

The uncanny hubris
of 'creation's crowning glory' promising to achieve paradise on Earth now might have as an outcome the creation of hell on a once habitable planet. (Anthropocene, CO2)

'The pride of creation' usurped the place of the many Earth gods, which they later rationalised into monotheism before upstaging 'the only one'. Heads of hierarchical societies grounded their existence with recourse to God - the sovereign's ownership of the land.

Techné
Controlled fire use by early humans and tool manufacturing enabled a civilisation of ever-refined means of destruction. Warfare conducted throughout human history has refined the means of killing and formed society.
The perpetual peace of “citizens of the Earth” (Erdbürger) had no chance against the perpetual war of defending the home soil from the other, or the land grab 'over there'. The state of war of all against all' in a 'free market' and the invisible fist of the market place became the new state of nature.

Sovereignty declares a 'state of exception' (G.Agamben) with a tendency to generalize of the exceptional state. This is a powerful strategy for legalised lawlessness,  suspension of the juridical order. Undeclared wars rage and no one can any longer say "we didn't know".

Framing of War
War is "framed" in the media so as to prevent us from recognising the people who are to be killed as living fully "grievable" lives, like ours. "Collateral damage" is not part of the war game.

Spectacles of Blood
"Roman gladiatorial shows were not put on for the purposes of indulging violence, bloodlust and cruelty, even if they may seem that way today. Instead, they were put on for several important purposes including social control and education". Today's media frames the robot wars 'over there'. Decisions are outsourced to machines. The masses consume the spectacle at a safe distance on screens. The spectacle, a social relation between people that is mediated by images is a self-fulfilling control mechanism for society.
 
A society modelled on war.
The 'war model' of the modern city and of human catastrophic society is elaborated in Virilio's  'dromology'.  "The expansive project of modernity has reached its limit in the light speed colonization of terrestrial time and space by technology and media"

A permanent war economy merged with Disaster Capitalism (Naomi Klein) further accelerates and exacerbates the catastrophic nature of modernity. Disasters (economic, political, military or natural) are good for profits - they reboot the system.  "Creative destruction, interventions and economic reconstruction mobilise resources for some. Margins are the largest outside the system of civil society. All is frontier with the loot going to the 'highest bidder'. There is no longer a safe place - anywhere!

Discipline techniques
Disciplinary or managerial techniques are initiated and developed into a technology for the control of individuals. (Michel Foucault) "'Discipline' may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole set of instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets; it is a 'physics' or an 'anatomy' of power, a technology." Psycho-orthopedics and pharmaceuticals also aid in the pathology of normality.

Ordinary people engage in "the banality of evil." (Hannah Arendt). Genocides continue and we are running amok causing "the earth’s sixth mass extinction event, through such anthropogenic impacts as habitat loss and modification, the spread of invasive species and climate change" Is omnicide the goal? Modernity as a system of efficiency, beyond ethics, mobilises all in the war against nature.

The driverless and shipwrecked ship of fools cruises (kyvernó̱:  steers, navigates) into the anthropocene, with no goal other than cruising the ocean of 'business as usual': more growth on an infinite planet, holding tight to the rudder of pathological denial. 

Armed man is a tautology inhabiting the machinery of war.


Texts:
Agamben, Giorgio,  State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005, excerpt, Video, European Graduate School. 2003, starts at 2.29 min.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus:, 1980/ Nomadology: The War Machine (New York: Semiotext(e), 19
Subtopia, A field guide to military urbanism
Aeschylus, The Persians 

Images:
1.  Blake, William Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, 1819–1820  
2.  Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, Fire 1566
3.  Goya, Francisco, The Disasters of War  (Désastres de la Guerra), 1815–1820
4.  Bosch, Hieronymus, detail of Haywain Triptych, 1516

Creating an inhospitable ecosystem on Earth

We have maneuvered our hospitable planet into turbulent and chaotic property changes. In the anthropocene we have profoundly modified the Earth’s landscape. Human activities are creating an inhospitable ecosystem for human biomes and the biosphere at large.

The diy catastrophic climate breakdown is due to the addiction to burning fossil fuels. We are racing into a 4 degrees Celsius scenario, although it is known that fossil fuels need to stay unburned to meet climate target of 2°C. Some engage in pathological denial and are willfully blind to it resuming business-as-usual. For some it's enough to have a “change of government and climate change just disappears!”

There will be a legacy from the ones that “dig it up, ship it out and let it burn” - an out of control array of fire 'incidents', droughts, record intense heatwaves, floods, an 11-cyclone season, sea level rise and a dead, acid ocean.

Climate disruption will have severe implications for Australia's already challenged biodiversity conservation and protected areas. "Rates of extinction of species are likely to increase as the global average temperature rises by just 1.0 or 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and likely to accelerate sharply as temperature rises beyond 2 degrees Celsius."

Land degradation as usual continues with clearing, logging and slash and burn. The fossil-fuel-powered culture of sprawl, mining, plantations and pastoralism munches its way through all Australian biomes.

Fear of mega fire storms
There is a tendency to reclassify all bush/ native vegetation as fuel that needs incinerating with so that it cannot burn in the future. Backburning often leads to out-of-control blazes. Hazard reductions take place in nature refuges around cities and ever growing settlements in bushfire-prone areas. Arsonists and thoughtless cigarette tossers do their bit.

It is soothing to know ...

That Australia's 25,000 plant species have found a safe habitat in perpetuity in the freezer.

That Australian wildlife threatened by climate change will be relocated.

That "a refusal to implement the Kyoto Protocol or do something about CO2...calls for a new approach to deal with people displaced by climate change." Both overseas and local climate refugees.

That there is a "fires near me" app.

Images:
Public transport station

Updates:
The refusal to make the link between the fires and climate change will condemn more people to the inferno The Guardian
Heed the warnings on the new climate reality, The Guradian 

Waterfall Way - Lining the Pacific Highway with Crumbled Mountain

Speedy motorist society requires lining the roads with stuff. Mountains disappear and the Pacific Highway gets 'upgraded' with gravel. Bellingen Shire Council has just consented to expand a quarry at Dorrigo. Dorrigo is 731 metres above sea level. All mining trucks will wind their way down steep Waterfall Way. It is also New South Wales' best and Australia's third most beautiful tourist drive. And it is steep and narrow!  "Approval was for 100 trucks and adding an extra 200 trucks each week - many of them with dog trailers... Another concern is any potential instability of the mountain side due to heavy rains that may turn into a landslide under the weight of substantially increased larger truck movements. "

This would mean increased truck movements up and down Waterfall Way and through residential streets. Bellingen is structured like a drive-through town, with logging and smelly cattle trucks already roaring through the village. Car fumes and vehicle noise already prevent one from lingering or shopping.

Traffic is not just noisy and deadly but also has an impact on (residential) property values. "It is estimated that traffic involving trucks can decrease property value 150 times faster than strictly car traffic"

Sources:
Bellingen Council backflips 6-1 on controversial quarry bid

The development application includes increasing truck activity to 400-movements a week, to and from the quarry along Waterfall Way.

EPA stops gravel extraction from Corindi 

Updates:
200 extra laden truck movements through Bellingen. Meeting to discuss heavy traffic impact on Waterfall Way to the Pacific Highway. Bellingen Courier 101113

Waterfall Way Rd. Over the past five years there have been 81 accidents: resulting in one fatality and 133 injuries... It’s believed that approximately 20,000 tonnes per month will be carted down the mountain by 600 loaded trucks...This means that a total of 120 trips per day, or if curtailed to a five day week, 140 truck and dog vehicle movements per day. Bellingen Courier 062014 


400 Bellinger River turtles have been found dead or dying, see especially 2.6.2015 update on petrol contamination from vehicles to build more Roads to Ruin,

Retreat

A long weekend in a retreat (60-something kms from Bellingen). Multiple huts in a rural landscape.

On arrival multiple fossil fuel powered machinery made the landscape 'tidy'. The disturbing and excessive noise and dust pollution hogged the attention.

On opening the door to the premises, one was hit by an intense cloud of synthetic fragrances that was cooking on a power point. All textiles were drenched in these potentially hazardous synthetic chemicals. Curtains and furniture seemed to be dipped in fire foam and flame retardants. The bedsheets smelled perfumed. The kitchen cupboard had, as in most Aussie kitchens, the well-used spray can of pesticide handy. The water, without a filter, tasted foul and metallic.

The closeness of the  neighbouring huts tried to emulate a feeling of a tight-knit sub-urbia back home. Families wanting a "getting away from it all" feeling ended up in the confinement of 'family cabins'. "Loudness-as-an-inalienable-right “(Wallace, David Foster) of families one might add. Large unplanned families with the full package of pets and all the baggage. Parents intensely interacting with their wearables. Many mouths scream. The child that cannot use language cries and screams.

The dads of instant culture pour petrol, meths or other accelerants on the meat altar. The incinerated meat stands in the form of cows not far off. They are usually pre-cooked in the shelter-less Australian sun.

The toy pets bark and squeal from the abuse of being mistaken for a horse. Agitated the free range dog chases the only Australian native fauna in sight, a brush turkey. For short minutes distraction culture goes sensation seeking and then they sprawl and sprawl.

The use of the veranda is impossible and the hut smells toxic. The entire night the resident rooster claims his territory over the visiting Koel and the array of family dogs bark and yap and yap and yap.

Next idyllic morning the neighbouring fence is being drenched with toxins trailing in a large dust drift. The posts are meters away from the line of huts. Copious amounts of herbicide/pesticide is being doused, the diesel of the tractor fills the 'shelter' up with thick clouds of diesel fumes.

We retreat to a coastal eatery.  A deafening aural ambiance from families being fed. In the food preparation area a white, plastic auto mist box disperses pesticides totally unmanned round-the-clock! At short intervals poison is being released on to 'bugs', staff and customers. Enthusiasts of old car wrecks generously share the fumes of their old timers which fill the entire cafe.

People just seem to tolerate the ubiquity of pesticides and noise pollution

We disappeared through the sanitised, chemicalised agricultural acres which stretch for mile upon mile. Australian flora and fauna has been eradicated or only fragments are left as retreats.

Images: 
Cicada, domesticated silkmoth, Bombyx mori and a diversity of flies, Alfred Brehm,  Brehm's Life of Animals

Even ‘environmentally protective’ levels of pesticide devastate insect biodiversity. 
 Common insecticide used in homes associated with delayed mental development of young children

Update
Pyrethroid insecticides exposure increasing in homes and people, 07022014

A Society Tolerating Dog Attacks

And again a small child was mauled by a pet. A five-year-old girl was badly injured in a dog attack on the NSW mid north coast. The dog bit her face taking off part of her nose. The little girl is in a stable condition but traumatised for life. abc 1.10.13

A strange society privileging meat-eating carnivores over their own offspring... 

Declaring the dog "Man's best friend" and rejecting Australian fauna.

Update:
Wild dog pack ‘hunted’ down grandmother at Casuarina beach, NSW 24.03.2015

Related
Dangerous Animals of Australia
Australia has one of the highest rates of pet ownership in the world
Repurposed Zebras, Ostriches and Australian fauna into Dog Poo
Pet owners go barking mad over controls push
Rejecting the local environment: Australian fauna. Biodiversity decline in Australia.

Image
Graffito artist unknown,  On CO2 concrete jungle