Snags - Ancient Perspectives and Blind Modern Groping
Snags
Ancient Perspectives and Blind Modern Groping
When I reached to grasp the nurseryman’s handshake he withdrew shattered remnants of healed-over flesh from the pocket of his baggy shorts. He introduced himself and grasped my proffered hand with the stumps of two fingers and the nubbin of an amputated thumb.
The biannual little plant fair in the local village was dusted with windborne scrapings from the far deserts, and the desiccated salt-crusted bed of distant Lake Eyre was soughing down on all and sundry like finely sieved flour. The surrounding landscape of rolling hills was rendered into a stylistic smudge of hillcrests rising from a greyish miasma that blocked out the daylight in a partial eclipse. The Sun had burned with an uncommonly sharp bite for the previous few weeks, but now the world was cloaked in grey and the solar bite was replaced with that of the chill ill wind.
A supertyphoon was massing over Southeast Asia and Half Past Human’s roving webbots had retrieved data suggesting dire cataclysms around the September Equinox. This led the website’s authors – who employ sophisticated algorithms that retrieve clues to the zeitgeist of the collective consciousness, on the premise that if individual humans are (at least) subconsciously psychic, then the collective babble of humanity as expressed on the worldwide web must be orders of magnitude more so – to make a prediction that has since borne spectacular fruit.
The site had previously made some notably accurate prophecies regarding the 2008 financial meltdown, among quite a few others. Their prognostications regarding recent seismic events – beginning almost three months ago, which is about the self-proclaimed limit of accurate forecasting for Half Past Human – indicated dangerous volcanic (or seismic) activity around the Pacific rim around the end of September, when the equinox falls.
This prediction is a remarkable near miss at the very worst, and in the light of the unprecedented – in both frequency and magnitude – run of recent earthquakes and resultant tsunamis this result should be considered accurate for all intents and purposes. It must be adjudged as evidence for the efficacy of HPH’s method, and perhaps for a fundamental concomitant truth; that humankind has the capacity to see beyond the veil of time.
Day after day the Earth rebelled in a chain of lethal rumbles, ranging from Indonesia to New Guinea, Tonga, Samoa and the isle of Santa Cruz - zones situated around the so-called Ring of Fire that girdles the planet like a twisting magmatic serpent. Tsunamis rose from the chaotic seas and populations dashed from crumbling buildings and made for higher ground, with the memory of the great killer Southeast Asian tsunami still fresh in the minds of many.
One may be forgiven for thinking that these events only seem remarkable because we have an accurate grasp of seismic events in the 21st Century. It’s a little-considered fact that since just before the dawn of the 20th Century we’ve been able to detect all quakes occurring anywhere on the globe with a magnitude of six or greater. There were a handful of such quakes in the first decade of the last century, and only a few more in the next decade. Quakes with a magnitude of seven or eight on the Richter scale were virtually unknown until recent decades, and have now become very familiar to millions of victims around the world. The frequency and magnitude of earthquakes has increased in a steeply rising curve across the globe over the course of the last hundred years.
This is only to be expected. The planet is warming in more ways than one and the crust is beginning to show the strain. Extraterrestrial and anthropogenic sources of heating are shifting vast masses of displaced ice and water around the world. The oceans weigh more than most people image and the planetary crust is thinned into shallow-bottomed basins by their mass, sunken between the thicker encrustations of continents.
Additional water flowing into the seas from the poles and melting glaciers displaces so much weight that the fractious fault lines of the planet are suffering from even more stress and strain than from all drilling and mining, past underground nuclear tests, current geothermal experiments, and innumerable other sundry damages caused by purblind burrowing humankind, in the unexamined treadmill quest for meaningless monetary progress.
It’s obvious that the old feudal paradigm will no longer suffice to meet the needs of the planet, or the requirements of the upgraded specimens of humanity many aspire to be and become. The best time to change our ways utterly, to find new methods of thriving on a healthy planet, is also the best time to plant fruit and nut trees – twenty years ago. But today is still a viable second best, while next year will be far too late.
Loggerheads
The nurseryman shook my right hand with the stump of his. Such injuries are common among mill workers in the local timber and beef cattle towns, here on the east coast of Oz. Many digits or limbs have been severed or crushed in the quest to wrest money from the hard, hard wood of the eucalypt forests cloaking the rugged foothills of the Great Dividing Range.
Almost all such crippling injuries were delivered in devastating accidents with spinning blades, fast-moving belts or machinery, or sudden smashes by crushing loads of heavy wood. Very few of these once common stigmata are the result of insurance jobs – in which a finger could be swapped for a few thousand measly bucks – but such happenings are hardly unknown in impoverished, ignorant and desperate settings.
The nurseryman – who gave me a lopsided smile from beneath a typical mill worker’s cap – was selling Bangalow Palms he’d grown from seed on his hobby farm-sized lot just outside town. The youngest boy was with me, and both of us were looking pretty wild and woolly in the harsh dusty windstorm that knocked his potted palms flat with its blustery gusts. Even whilst Wonder Boy was picking pots up for him, the grizzled sunburned soul started a tirade against ‘those damn greenies’.
Greenies were ‘stopping men from making an honest wage’, ‘stopping them from cutting down useless old growth trees – just rotten wood, not worth a damn,’ and ‘stopping them letting some sunlight in for the saplings’; they were ‘all dupes of a city conspiracy, sucked in by people who reckoned carbon dioxide caused global warming’, and ‘there are plenty of trees, and the only endangered species is the farmer, because of the stupid rules they’re expected to follow’ (not that many do in the vast and convoluted landscapes of the Great Southland – inadequate environmental regulations are rarely enforced and the land is only overseen by its so-called ‘owners’); yet his rave unravelled onward and on with nary a word of dissent from me. After a number of similar fusillades, this human stereotype completed his rave with a dig at ‘those stupid greenies who stop you pulling logs and snags out of the river – from tidying things up and making them safe and neat.’
I was tempted to mention that the government had been paying good money for such logs and snags for years now, and was trucking them across hundreds of kilometres of (now) treeless desert and dry blowaway grass to the once mighty Murray River, where they were putting the tree trunks back into the near-lifeless water – to replace those pulled out and burned by misguided speedboat-owning, oil-spewing bank-trashers and destructive neatness freaks. After pulling billions of trees from the verges of the mightiest river system on the continent, there are literally none left along incredibly long stretches of this infamously trashed national waterway - no protection of washaway soil, no stabilisation of crumbling banks, no shade to prevent evaporation, and no common sense, environmental awareness or scientific intelligence.
But what would be the point of arguing with him? He was too old and debilitated to do any more damage to rivers or forests, too crusty to change his ways, and far too belligerent to seriously consider making the attempt; not with my wide-eyed ten year-old in tow at the gossipy local village plant fair. I went and spoke to the other stallholders, almost all of whom proved to be card-carrying greenies, all selling wide ranges of various species of local and exotic trees and other plants, while the soil of the continent blew overhead and made algae bloom in the far Pacific, while Mother Earth prepared to toss and tumble, turn and grumble not far below.
The next day I ran into man-mountain Brian, erstwhile head man in the local Aboriginal Land Council. He beamed down at me over his whitening beard as we stood by the new surveillance camera set onto the
token clock tower in the midst of Main Street and discussed local and broader events. After a while and out of the blue he proceeded onto the topic of snags in the river. “You know they’re pulling out all the logs again,” the elder said, “and half of the jiddi logs, too.” ‘Jiddi’ is the cobera worm, a favourite delicacy among the few local tribes that have access to this locally distributed seasonal rarity; I’ll probably not discuss it further in this public forum – not unless the elders say otherwise.
“No cover for the fish, and you know what’s worse if you pull them all out?” he asked with a rhetorical air. “The rivers silt up. If you leave those logs on the bends in particular, they sweep out all the gravel and silt in the floods. The bends stay deep and cool. If you don’t, the rivers silt up and dry out, like they have all around.”
I agreed, casting my mind’s eye back home, where a massive trunk sleeps at the perpetually deep bend in the crooked creek, providing a channel for currents that churn out the detritus of a century of land clearing and aggrocultural abuse – all on behalf of a crumbling pyramid of inedible cash in the distant anthill termite cities, whose non-conspiring willing workers flush the world away down toxic pipes and burn swathes through the world forest with each languid flick of a switch.
The daily casual damage to rivers, soils and the landscape in general is unbelievable to anyone with an ounce of common sense and a dram of eyesight, let alone foresight. I could rant and rave for hours about leaving the banks alone and keeping the cattle away from the broad filter strips we need to grow and maintain along all our streams and rivers – but what would be the point? These controls are already well-established in the laws of most advanced countries; laws so poorly enforced by lazy time-serving officials that the once pristine water in most waterways is toxic to humans and animals.
Unless you procure your drinking water from an unpolluted sky (ho ho) or a pure groundwater source (ha ha), the stuff in your taps is laced with stultifying aluminium and chlorine, and don’t even start me on tranquillising sodium fluoride rat poison – just find out for yourself (you might read the recent EU judgement on the matter)! Pure water is a thing of the past in most places, and the modern industrial version they pump into your house is being rapidly privatised in a world where increasing scarcity means temporarily greater profits.
But not around here. We ‘greenies’ kept the forests around the upper catchments of this valley intact as we could, by standing up to the mighty bulldozers, implacable cops and standover merchants behind the curtain, who move their ignorant contractors and enforcers like pawns on a cutaway chessboard. We kept them from the rivers and the hills and from the ridges all around. Many of the rainbow warriors and earth defenders (derided as ‘dirty hippies’, ‘filthy ferals’, ‘stupid peasants’, ‘impressionable aborigines’ and ‘city greenies’) still do, every day - probably somewhere not far from where you’re sitting and reading at this very moment.
Out here in hippified swathes of countryside (that you probably haven’t seen or even heard of) we’re slowly witnessing the fruits of our labours turn greener and fresher, while the rest of the world turns a fecund planetary paradise into a toxic industrial wasteland under the tombstone catch-cries of ‘progress’ and ‘industriousness’. Most people won’t know the value of water until their own privatised well runs dry, and the taps finally deliver only grave dust from the desiccated heart of their vampirised Mother Earth.
Now witness the slow-motion apocalypse occurring before every punter’s dazed and overworked eyes – devastating changes are all happening in a geological eyeblink while we wander along, failing to notice the signs of impending demise, making a date with density.
The world is changing; it’s not just events which always occurred beyond our purview suddenly becoming apparent due to advances in modern communications. No. ’Fraid not. The writing’s on the wall, friend. Everybody knows.
There’s still time to discover your place in the real living world, away from the entrancing pneumatic throb of money and status. Find clean water. Plant a forest (but don’t build a house on the beach or under a volcano). Discover the true inner self you haven’t had time for. Become a snag in the mainstream – a sensitive new age guy, gent or girl, an eddy that slows the onrushing flow to the falls. Save the world. Save yourself. Love someone. Life is awaiting. Turn on. Tune in. Opt out together, today not tomorrow…
Start by clicking this screen that stands between you and the REAL world off – or not. The choice is up to you; red pill or blue?
- R.A.
Images - author’s
See the Ringwood Agreements
For further enlightenment see –
The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
( These sites are about to be closed along with ALL the free Geocities sites -
RingWood )
(These sites have been locked by Today.com and this author no longer has access to his own blogs - Enlightenment Today
Imagine Nation – Artwork & Images )
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