High Time - Life on the top of the bottom
High Time
Life on the top of the bottom
“Don’t you get lonely living way out there all by yourself?” Peace asks as he sharpens the curving scythe blade with a smooth dark whetstone.
“It beats the alternative,” I reply. “Besides, hardly anyone else can handle living with themselves in that neck of the woods. And I’m not really alone,” I admit, nodding at Wonder Boy, who’s examining Peace’s latest attempt at producing a hand-made replacement shaft for his gardening implement. “The kids are out there with me almost every weekend.”
“I suppose that would make a big difference…”
“And someone has to look after all the plants and animals in paradise; it’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it.”
“You’re well placed for it. I remember hiking out that way in the middle of the Killiecrankie blockade; it’s a pretty wild place, fairly remote. But you reckon a logger has moved in next door?”
“He’s doing a decent job with a little portable mill; not too destructive, and he’s pretty careful with habitat. Besides, it has to be possible to take regrowth hardwoods out of the recovering rainforest without destroying everything; in fact, if we want the rainforest to recover we’ll have remove the fire-prone trees and replace them with the original species, which are far more sensitive.”
“You need those eucalypts for a primary canopy,” agrees Rob as he sips some tea. A small raptor hovers over his shoulder, wings fluttering in the overheated summery air above the garlic patch. “That’s about all that comes up and survives in full sun, along with wattles and casuarinas…”
“And if we don’t remove the gums from the recovering rainforest that’s coming up under that primary canopy, the place will revert to a pyrophytic regime…”
“ ‘Fire loving’ ” Rob explains.
“…Particularly bad with global heating – and everything will burn until it’s all eventually rocky desert scrubland.” I indicate Peace’s recent plantings, where clusters of shrubs and wee saplings hug the brown-soil banks of a trickling little stream that was once overshadowed by millennial rainforest giants. “You’re lucky to be able to get rainforest to grow in the blazing sun here at the bottom of the valley, but up on the hills it’s different.”
“Drier, you mean?”
“Unless you’re right in the base of the clouds – and nowhere around here is that high, except Killiecrankie. We have to make use of the eucalypt canopy…”
“As the only possible primary canopy,” interjects Rob, “to shade the rainforest as it comes up…”
“…but then we have to thin out the gums so the rainforest species can begin to predominate again,” I conclude.
“That’s what I keep telling the groups I plant trees with,” Rob agrees. “I tell them, ‘We’re engaged in an eight hundred year project to recreate an old growth forest’.”
“And that’s all it will take,” I concur, glancing at Wonder Boy, “or maybe a thousand. Of course, we won’t tell them it’ll take more like ten thousand years to recreate the forest that was here before it was all trashed and burned by the cedar getters and farmers – that could seem discouraging. And if we replant the crucial target species we can speed the whole process up.”
Peace hefts his scythe, checking its balance. “Which species do you mean?”
“For starters, the seeds that were only ever transported by humans.”
“Like Bunya nuts?” Peace suggests.
“Aye,” I concur, “and quandongs, for instance, or burrapines; all the big nuts and seeds that we humans require, any that are otherwise only carried by gravity.”
“Not by wind or birds or animals you mean,” Wonder Boy clarifies.
“That’s right. And catalytic species,” I add, “like nitrogen fixers and bird attractors.”
“What’s a rainforest nitrogen fixer?” Peace considers. “Like a wattle, you mean?”
“Or one of those.” I point toward a nearby hill on the communal land, where the large amenities block is shaded by stands of trees. “Black beans, coral trees, even ice cream beans…”
“Ice cream beans? Are they native?”
“They are, a little further up north.”
Perhaps you, too, are fed up to the gills with living in a civilisation whose simple catchcry is “MORE!”, where teeming billions are encouraged to live unexamined lives in mediocre cultures devoted to yesterday’s heroes and tonight’s microwaved dinner, mesmerised by radiation-spewing plastic prepackaged entertrainment. Perhaps not. Perhaps you view all this rootless basking in luxuriously consumptive waste as enjoying paradise on Earth. Perhaps you think we ought to enjoy it while it’s here – and why not?
We could live lifestyles of identically interesting, rewarding and artistically baroque levels without trashing the planet and sawing off the branch of the tree of life we all depend on. But while every action we take reduces our span on Earth (due to the interlocked facts that we’re using resources at an unsustainable rate and poisoning ourselves and the ecosystem into the bargain) it’s unwise to feed the ravening beast of planetary death with our energies. It’s stupid to keep frittering away the only real chance to live long, happy and healthy lives we’ve had for the last few millennia!
Everything a modern city-dweller eats, drinks, breathes and touches is tainted and toxic. It’s remarkable how resilient humans really are, managing to live until seventy or eighty despite the fact they’ve been thoroughly poisoned and substantially debilitated for decades.
It’s possible for every person on planet Earth to live lifestyles as rich – and far more rewarding than – the wealthier people in the USA, if we only clean up our act. The only reasons the Earth can’t sustain our crazily expansive global civilization are that we waste so much, and our energy czars are addicted to making money from toxic fossil fuels (including, of course, Uranium) that we blithely hurl into our air and water.
There’s more than enough to go around, and more ways to extract clean energy from the myriad energy sources that surround us than are dreamt of by textbook writers (see the free energy links at New Illuminati, for instance). All that’s really required to save the world is a change of viewpoint, and a change of heart. Would you like to tell your grandchildren you contributed to the destruction of their ecosystem by working at a mindlessly destructive job and filling your time and space with toxic crap, or explain how we managed to turn it all around, and grasp victory from the jaws of defeat by becoming smarter, more ingenious and compassionate?
What do you want to tell yourself on your last day on Earth? It’s high time to rethink all our lives, and get on with the things we’ve been putting off for so long. Live a little, or more than a little, in the wide green world outside your window – and let your kids run free. You don’t have to be lean to be green, but hey, friends, fat kills.
Turn on. Tune in. Opt out. Friends are waiting beyond the walls.
- R.A.
Images - author’s
For further enlightenment see –
The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
(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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From The Rainforest Home of the Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com
