Weed trees are an interesting
concept.
Have any of you ever hiked or camped in a
mono-cultural woods? It is a very strange place.
Especially if the companies have used any sort of herbicide or
insecticide. Sort of like a library filled with the same
book.
I would recommend a book "Americans & Their
Forest, a Historical Geography" by Oxford scholar Michael Williams, (Cambridge U
Press 1989) for a good overview of the
issues.
It seems that, like the Arts, there was more going
on in serious conservation questioning in the mid to late 19th century than
there has since. On the face of it, such a statement seems
farfetched but the above book documents the statement in the same way that the
economists Frank and Cook documented the existence of 1,300 opera houses in Iowa
in 1900. Who would have believed such a thought?
Today we have the idea of agriculture and forestry as a "mechanical"
systems, rather than biological, or at least that seems a kind of current
goal. It is attractive since machines are basically cheaper
and less bother than their organic version so if you can reduce diversity and
engineer things like square tomatoes that pack easier while not
tasting too much worse then that is laudable. This is the way they
destroyed the wild rice crop.
In my culture, forestry and agriculture are
biological systems that interact with all of the rest of the systems on the
planet. That is where Harry misses the point on the oceans as
well. Something that I believe is not likely to be admitted in
English. It is not whether the oceans are dying but whether the
changes being wreaked will continue life as we know it. That
includes us. It is not whether the conservative approach is
correct but whether the more liberal approach to global warming, the oceans,
farm policy, and forests can nibble away at the systemic connections that
maintain life as we know it. It is obvious that there were
survivors of the great Asteroid but life as known by the larger animals did not
survive. It seems to me that figuring out the systems, how they
interact and what is necessary to maintain our lives is one version of avoiding
an "asteroid like" calamity in the not so distant future. Sort
of like learning to drive the car before you begin to tinker with it on a
freeway. If we begin to think in such a fashion we also might
have the foresight to turn all of those telescopes to the hunt for the next real
"great asteroid" and how we might avoid the massive die off that happened with
the dinosaurs. Today we see as intellectually bereft as they in
figuring out a way out of such a situation. While at it
we also might begin work on the super volcanoes spread around the world in the
massive calderas like Yellowstone and in New Mexico's Sangre De Cristo
mountains. Volcanoes that are so huge that an explosion by one
could create that same winter that could come from a Nuclear exchange or a giant
asteroid. Is it too much to ask that we not fritter away our
lives in orthodoxies while we are being "stalked" by such
catastrophes. (Good heavens folks, didn't any of you
grow up on superman? Remember Krypton? Sorry
I just got carried away. Always wondered how that related to
the earlier Bagman version.)
For me it is more a matter of whether I want to
live in a world that is alive with organic relationships or in a world where
things are built around the concepts of mass production and a general
aesthetic that I find ugly and unappealing. Sort of like that
art that you folks didn't like earlier in December. Art is
supposed to mirror truthfully the world. In that sense I think
the Artist did his job. The elevation of the banal and the
depression of the Ideal.
Yes Harry, I agree that all life has a "right" to
exist but that does not mean that all life is equally valuable to the system of
the environment as a whole, especially when there is so much of the same
thing. In the 1930s it was the mono-culture on the plains that
brought the great fires. I would be interested in what the forests
are like around Sydney. I know that the fires in
California spring from a refusal to exert control over the scrubbushes that
contain a highly flammable chemical. It is just not cost effective to
solve, so a few houses are sacrificed each year to the God of
Fire. It doesn't take a socialist government to choose cost
effectiveness. Private companies do that just as
well. I'm truly sorry for Keith's son's house. I will
remember him in our ceremonials. Indian people have always
used fire and plant diversity to keep fire away from such
dwellings. I wonder why there are not such programs in effect,
especially for times just like this? Is this another situation
like avoiding looking for the Asteroid or trying to figure out whether
Yellowstone will explode next year or the next 100,000
years. Especially since it is rising rather dramatically at
the moment. Oh well, we can worry about that when it
happens.
Does this not sound like modern police work, health
care, education, etc? It's not cost effective to
avoid bad social situations that contribute to social decay, or drug resistant
TB, or smaller classrooms with well paid highly trained teachers,
etc. Might the problem be a little deeper than a traditional
government or growing transnational
corporations?
It seems to me in my post sixtieth birthday
that if there is a deity responsible for the whole of reality that he/she/it
would probably squash us like a runaway termite that cares little for the effect
that we are having on the rest of life as we continue to explore our unlimited
desires at the cost of just about every other life form in our
universe.
Regards in 2002
My student sang wonderfully tonight.
She added to the pleasure of the friends, relatives and other members of the
audience and even got an offer for an audition in a major Broadway
show. I suspect that deity would have been pleased as
well. Beauty and Ideals were sustained at great cost in
ancient Egypt but what is left seems almost to have been created by people from
another planet rather than the current crop. How did
the descendants of the Greats lose their dreams? I
suspect it happened slowly as the people lost connection with the river and its
gifts. Today that cursed dam has even spread the
shistomiasis so far that 40% of the entire population now has
it. How much better to have built large statues than a water
machine that spread death and disease all over the world in the bowels of ship
from the land of the Pharaohs.
REH
----- Original Message -----
From: Brian McAndrews <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Harry Pollard <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: futurework-scribe.uwaterloo.ca <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Wednesday, January 02, 2002 5:42
PM
Subject: Re: economics, sense of values, perception
of truth
> >Note Brian's response, where he introduced the idea of "weed trees".
>
>
> Sorry Harry, you've got the wrong guy. Being a teacher I asked you to do a
> critical review of Waring's book.
>
> Brian
>
