Social Acceleration in Bellingen/ Gleniffer Suburbia

After logging machinery has denuded the forest and ploughed up Gleniffer Rd. more fossil fuel monstrosities are widening the road again. This degraded landscape of Bellingen/ Geniffer now attracts high-speed burnouts with boomboxes.

This 'production of space' opened up the space for burning some tyres throughout the night. Far away from civilisation and enforcement the drivers are racing though the denuded koala habitat and residential areas.

It is futile to deliberate whether the suicides of young men are unintentional or intentional. The mobility infrastructure design demands automobility and speed. The active transport desert repels pedestrians and slow (e)mobility. The traffic jam spurs rage and violence.

Society demands the acceleration of the pace of life. Commercial combustion racing events encourage all petrolheads in petrotopia.

Driving always entails a latent ‘suicide risk' in this given system. The ‘integral accident’ is inherently woven into this mode of transport and technological acceleration. It is the 'collateral damage’ tolerated by all.

Mainstream media bombards us with ‘news’ of ‘accidents’. The overexposure to the daily slaughter on the roads leads to its normalisation. Only spectacles and superlatives can demand any attention now.

Daily reporting of a house that has 'collided' with a speeding car. A group of people without armouring that 'collided' with a flying car. Just another hit-and-run. Just another normal hit-and-run. A few walking school kids ploughed off the footpath while mounting the kerb. No road is ever wide enough or has enough bollards to protect living beings from these machine operators on autopilot mode.

The concepts of the all-terrain vehicle (ATV) and the 'Sports Utility Vehicle’ (SUV) destroyed all mental guardrails for the motorist. Roads became 'so yesterday'. The 4x4 combustion machine was liberated to conquer the rugged terrain (car ads) of all non road spaces. A mindscape of ‘without any limits’ was born.

This allocation of space/time means that humans and other animals now have to dodge these ubiquitous flying bullets. Living beings are literally out of a habitat, considering how many cars end up on top of their homes.

Cars doing burnouts at night are just a matter of degree to the ‘normal’ daytime traffic of a commercialised and heavily industrialised sub-urban Bellingen/Gleniffer area now.

Links:

Suicide or accident? The hidden complexities of intentional road crashes in Australia
https://theconversation.com/suicide-or-accident-the-hidden-complexities-of-intentional-road-crashes-in-australia-248673

The Original Accident, Paul Virilio, 2007
https://www.wiley.com/en-us/The+Original+Accident-p-9780745636146

"Australians far less aware of biodiversity loss than climate crisis, research finds"

“Research found that fewer than half (43%) were aware Australia had one of the highest rates of mammal extinction in the world and just more than half (54%) knew most of Australia’s forests had been lost since colonisation.”

"Samuel’s 2020 review of national laws found Australia’s environment was in unsustainable decline and successive Australian governments had failed to protect the country’s unique species and habitats."

“Half of Australia’s economy relied on natural systems...The loss of biodiversity would have serious consequences for clean air, food and water, human health, Indigenous culture and national identity." The Guardian

Biodiversity Council report

Healthy Riverbanks Booklet: The Turtle, The Cattle and The Indian Myna

After the mass kill event in 2015 of the critically endangered Bellinger River Snapping Turtle, various authorities have now resorted to making information and activities available to property owners and other stakeholders in the catchment area.

The Bellinger River System Landholder Booklet (pdf) is also available in the dead tree version.

It seems that the introduced Indian Myna (pdf) is symbiotic with the cattle business and roads as they spread along with the precooked ungulates standing mostly without shade in severe heatwave conditions.

Meanwhile the drought continues...

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