It’s fantastic that someone has finally had the courage and the tenacity to write a novel addressing the Mother of all elephants in the room: Human ecological overshoot – a combination of out-of-control human numbers and out-of-control consumption that are rapidly wiping out the biosphere and turning this small blue planet into a toxic dump. …
Losing Matilda
It still hasn’t sunk in. Matilda died this afternoon. Just like that. We were out hiking and nearly at the turn-around point two hours from the car, when there was a repeat of what happened on our Peaceful Bay walk two months ago – on the lead, and next thing she’s gone SPROING like a …
Foreword: Racing to Extinction
The writing has been on the wall for generations, and in each generation, voices were lifted in an attempt to direct the attention of the general public and those in power to the consequences of continuing to ignore the writing on the wall.
The Romantic poets saw and felt the horrors of early-stage Industrialisation and its dysfunctional social order because they had hearts and their eyes were not blinded by the contemplation of money and profit. They lifted up their voices in lament, as did some of their visual artist colleagues, like J. M. W. Turner, and poets coming after, including Walt Whitman and e. e. cummings.
Charles Dickens lifted up his voice at the cut-throat cruelty of his own society, which was at that point also busy colonising the rest of the world, exporting its cruelty abroad. His Magwitch speaks for all abused children, trampled citizens, and hunted men in history…
Beware of Repetition Compulsion
Excerpt from a letter written to a friend struggling with the kind of childhood background that sets people up for continued unhappiness via the curse of the repetition compulsion. Publishing it here because many could benefit from thinking about this pattern, for their own life or to help others recognise it. It’s worthwhile looking up …
Love in the Time of Homo colossus
This is a spin-off from an online music journal I kept for a few years, in which I mused about life and the universe while exploring the back catalogue of a band I had never liked until discovering belatedly that they had a serious, dark side. The main themes in this anecdotal piece are dating …
Nowhereland (Part 3)
A small reflection to start, on living in this universe. Albany to Perth via Lake Towerrinning, Darkan, Williams When you get out of the car to take pictures of rural countryside, there is another recurring theme – litter. Wherever Homo colossus goes, a trail of pollution is left behind. You’d think it would be a …
Nowhereland (Part 2)
A song to start with. Albany to Perth via Lake Towerrinning, Darkan, Williams At the end of the last instalment, we were visiting an inland lake ecosystem degraded by our culture’s activities both at the lake and in its catchment. We noted that the destruction we can clearly see from a biocentric perspective is mostly …
Nowhereland
I’m an Australian biologist, conservationist, educator, writer and “doomer” who would like to take decent people on a journey. If you’re a “doomer” you will already understand and none of what I’m going to say will especially surprise you. You will already have seen all this in your own part of the world and you …
Exploring the Back Catalogue: Wish, Toxic Families & Mass Communication Bards
The problem is that we’re not doing enough meaningful interaction — and that our social groups have become too large for our brains. We’re evolutionarily set up for small-tribe living, and we’re actually living in complex societies with millions of people in them now. It’s impossible to have working relationships with a million other people — your brain can handle interacting regularly with a “tribe” of maybe 100-200 people in a meaningful way, at a stretch. More than that, and it gets stressful. In cities, people tend to avoid each other; and one of our modern dilemmas is that we’re the loneliest we’ve ever been, even though surrounded by an ocean of other humans — too many humans.
And many of us aren’t connecting with each other as much as we were necessarily connecting when we were hunter-gatherers, or even agricultural villagers. In recent decades, with increasing job insecurity in the West and many people forced to up and move many times to pursue the next job, we’re getting socially dislocated many times over, and a good support network necessarily becomes harder to maintain.
People who are into sports or religion generally get little plug-in communities when they relocate; but if you’re not into those things, or you’re introverted, or have social anxieties, or your daytime job puts a hundred people into your face every day and you can’t face going to choir group or Scottish Highland dancing or the photography club or whatever else you might be interested in on a weeknight after that because all you want to do is be on your own and read a book, then you may end up having few social contacts that aren’t around your work…
When You Don’t Smile
Something I put on Guardian responses when Grace Tame not smiling at the PM got her public castigation by the usual suspects. I’ve added photos and captions for context. I just wanted to point out something regarding Grace Tame getting attacked by various people for not smiling at the PM, because I’ve not seen it …