On Walden Pond

I'm listening to it as an audio book — and audio sets a nice reflective pace, and I have it on my iPhone as an ebook, which allows for a different style of reflection.

medicines from nature - Why bother?

I found this an elegant explanation about why we can find things in nature that are hard to discover in the laboratory:

Toxins that have already been designed in nature have the unusual combination of precise specificity and extreme potency – characteristics that make them particularly amenable to use as leads in drug design.

— Dr Brian Fry, Bio 21 Institute

I'd always wonder why you can't just sit in a lab and make drugs. Why it was worth discovering them in nature whether in the middle of the Amazon rain-forest or in the Antarctic ocean.

enviro quote IV

“I am following Nature without being able to grasp her.” – Claude Monet

DSE and EEG. The three wise monkeys: nonfeasance, misfeasance, and malfeasanc

As I'm understanding the DSE and VicForests defence against the EEG was the three monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, say no evil. Except in this case it was endangered species. If you don't see endangered species (or hear them and especially don't talk about them you don't have to protect them

I'm seeing this as a sign of the hardening of positions as the global debate on the environment warms; positions are delineated and deliberate nonfeasance, misfeasance, and malfeasance kicks in. No longer ad hoc but deliberate.

Environment quote III - another view from above


'For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light — our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.'

Ulf Merbold, German astronaut

Quotation II: A stark view from above

Astronaut John Grunsfeld is the veteran of five space missions between 1995 and 2009 and when he first flew over the Amazon in 1995 he saw networks of new roads fanning into the forest. By 2009 "there were huge open tracts, signs that some of the tributaries were drying out. Madagascar has basically been denuded of forest in 15 years.

Rivers I saw flowing to the sea are clogged up from erosion. At night the number of forests burning around the globe has gone up significantly. Our decisonmakers are ignoring it but it's so obvious from space. Everything is connected. Whether the Barrier Reef survives will depend on whether China keeps building coal-fired power plants."

Jeffrey Lee Lee

John Lee Lee is an absolute hero, donating land worth billions to Kakadu National Park. He should, no, must be declared Australian of the Year. Here is an indigenous Australian giving up more than any of us to protect his land. He's not a man who has had monetary wealth in his life, which makes his gift all the greater. He says, " It was a hard decision."

And he went on to say: "You are the only one in your clan group that is left and the pressure is on you.

"You've got a lot of responsibilities of that area, of that country, that's been passed on to you."

This is act defines the meaning of a "moral compass".

Presumably as it is Labor supported if the Liberals getting in, the land won't be joined to Kakadu and the French mining giant AREVA will go ahead and mine John Lee Lee's land.