In a shocking announcement outside his San Francisco office, Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune,---who only succeeded Carl Pope to that position less than two years ago--- told surprised reporters that he was stepping down in favour of an android developed by technicians attached to an Artificial Intelligence laboratory financed by Texas billionaire T. Boone Pickens. The android will replace Brune and everyone else on the Sierra Club payroll.

This article makes it clear that energy consumption and its fall-out, pollution, have enormously increased over two or three generations, to a point where actions commonly recommended to minimise them, are laughably inadequate. It also highlights a tendency for one generation to be encouraged to blame another generation for overconsumption, rather than to blame the market system, which benefits from the social conflict.

Something very shonky is going on in Canberra with unjustified massacre of kangaroos. As the previous blog mentioned, no science to back it up.
Learn some more facts and take action! We can only stop this if lots of people take action!

You hear people like Rob Adams and Marcus Spiller saying there is nothing you can do about population growth in Victoria and Australia. Wrong. For a start the government should cancel the Live in Victoria website that invites people to come to Victoria and which explains how to get a visa. There is one in every state (Qld, NSW, the ACT, Tasmania, SA, WA, NT). They should all be pulled off the web. Pop Poll Results now available: 66% against further growth.

If one checks the policies of the Australian Greens Party ('The Greens') on its website - of their 44 policies, some 28 are NOT directly related to environmental conservation, but instead 'social justice'. So where is the so-called 'Greens' Party headed and if most of their policies are NOT concentrated on core green conservation - does this political party deserve to retain its morally mandate for driving the 'green agenda' and should it morally brand itself big G 'Green'?

Japanese whaling pirates raiding Australia's southern whale sanctuary every year poach all the whales they want, spin their exposed lie of scientific research to a complicit whaling commission bureaucracy that must exist only for the club sandwiches at meetings.

And what has Rudd-the-Dudd done to protect Australia's southern ocean and indeed its sovereignty from raiding Japanese poachers arriving from some 10,000km to the north? Squat, except publicly froth and bubble yet with no action like all his other core and non-core populist empty promises.

Now Peter Bethune is paying the price of Australia's bending over for Japanese whaling pirates to plunder and kidnap foreign nationals on the high seas as they please.

(Australian shelduck)
Australia was one of the first countries to sign the Ramsar Convention and designated the world's first Wetland of International importance. A report from the previous government says Australia has 65 wetlands of world significance listed under the Ramsar treaty, but water management requirements of only 11 sites are known in any detail. Roughly half of Australia's Ramsar wetlands are not adequately mapped, and information is so disorganised.
A member of the Ramsar task force says the lower lakes of the drought-hit Murray could be delisted along with the Coorong.

Farmers are illegally slaughtering thousands of threatened hairy-nosed wombats in South Australia. Brigitte Stevens from the Wombat Awareness Organisation says burrows of southern hairy-nosed wombats are being bulldozed or blown up on Yorke and Eyre Peninsulas and in the Murraylands.

(photo Wikipedia commons)
Thousands of litres of oil, gas and condensate has been leaking into the sea since August 21 from a wellhead near PTTEP Australasia's West Atlas oil rig, 250km from shore. A private environmental consultant's report commissioned by the WWF has found 15 species of whales and dolphins, 30 seabird species and five turtle species could be affected by the oil slick.

But Taiji, located 150 kilometres south of Osaka on the Pacific Ocean, has a town with a terrible secret. 23,000 dolphins and porpoises are killed annually in an inlet and sold to unsuspecting Japanese consumers as toxin-free Antarctic whales.

The NSW Government 'State Plan' to which all of NSW Government policy hinges, reflects a fettish for short term economic stimulation. To the incumbent Premier Rees, 'jobs, jobs, jobs' can only be good, irrespective of which unsustainable industry they are in, or how short term they may be. The State Plan is all about jobs at all costs. The triple bottom line has gone out the door. Rees' Plan ranks the environment a priority level 4 and deems native forests only valuable for exploitation and utility benefit to humans.

The Australian Press Council has just dismissed a complaint against Sydney Morning Herald columnist Miranda Devine about her opinion article back on 12-Feb-09 ‘Green ideas must take blame for deaths.’ Devine's provocative article dogmatically accused "the power of green ideology" for poor forest management practices and as the key reason for the exacerbated scale and ferocity of the Victorian bushfires in 2009. ['Complaint against Devine dismissed, SMH, 26-Jun-09, p.5] But although provocative, Devine's 'opinion' article pales in comparison to the social implications of headline media reporting of extreme bushfire risk immediately BEFORE the bushfires! See also "Victorian Bush-fires: ABC 7.30 Report ignores facts, creates scapegoats" and "Responding to incorrect fire information by joining the debate" and "Comments on recent fire-management in bush-fire areas" and "Greens, logging, forest fires and malaria" and "Deforestation drys continents - new theory explains how"

Defence has produced pseudo-science to justify a massive kangaroo slaughter at Majura in Canberra. It is clear that the government only protects human interests and is interested in "managing" wildlife such as kangaroos out of existence, and have their habitat replaced by housing and human structures!

If our governments have their way, kangaroos would be confined to sanctuaries and zoos. Maybe this is the only place our descendants will be able to see our “wildlife”.

VicForests' neo-colonial practice of logging old growth East Gippsland forests attempts to justify the native culling by claiming compliance with Australia's wood production Standard AS 4708-2007. But this standard is a Mein Kampf of ecological genocide for East Gippsland Forests.

Who's slaughtering Australia's old growth heritage faster - Queensland roadmakers or Victorian loggers?

World Forestry Day is another annual celebration of some cause that in this case captures 21st March each year. The concept sounds noble on the DSE site, but hang on a second! This is all about revenue FROM our native forests, not FOR native forests at all! So why not just rename this 'World Logging Day'?

ACT Commissioner for Sustainability and the Environment, Dr Maxine Cooper, is ACT's inaugural full-time Commissioner in the role, yet what relevant environmental qualifications and experience does the incumbent have, or indeed lack, to be officially condemning another local indigenous popluation of Australia's iconic marsupials, our kangaroos, to slaughter for pet food?

"At the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) the forest issue was among the most controversial, polarizing developing and developed countries. In Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, intense negotiations among governments at UNCED resulted in the Non-legally Binding Authoritative Statement of Principles for a Global Consensus on the Management, Conservation and Sustainable Development of all Types of Forests, also known as the “Forest Principles”, as well as Chapter 11 of Agenda 21: Combating Deforestation."

Radiocarbon-testing has confirmed that a giant rare old-growth eucalypt located in its natural forest habitat on East Gippsland's Brown Mountain has been chainsawed by VicForests, despite it being scientifically confirmed to be at least 500 years old.

On Thursday 26th March 2009, four people were charged in their efforts to save East Gippsland old growth forests from being chopped down. Is this Victorian Premier Brumby's hypocritical law of conservationists being prime facie guilty of conservation?

Not all creatures can share our Australia Day pride!

"To keep stable and just replace itself, a relatively young population like Australia’s would currently need something even lower than Western Europe’s rate of around 1.3 children per completed family. More like 0.93. And that’s without immigration!"

In the last whaling season, the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society with its one fast ship, the Steve Irwin prevented Japanese whalers from catching 50% of their quota. Captain Paul Watson has appealed to the GreenPeace Foundation for their cooperation in the 2008-2009 Antarctic summer whaling season in order to be able to save 80-100% of the planned Japanese whaling quota.

Sea Shepherd Conservation Society media release, 5 Jun 08

See also: Queensland to give green light to shark extermination of 1 Jun 08

What you can do: Donate to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Nearly all funds go to saving whales and other endangered marine species and little is spent on bureaucracy.

Whilst former President of the Australian Conservation Foundation Peter Garrett, now Federal Minister against the Environment looks the other way, primary school children petition the Victorian Government to stop the destruction by dredging of the pristine marine environment at Port Phillip Heads.

See also www.operationquarrantine.com, www.bluewedges.org, "Time to 'count cost' in Bay" (Mornington Peninsula Leader, 7 Apr 08) "Port Phillip Bay dredge protesters fight fines" (Herald Sun, 10 08)

It seems that even the almighty profit motive will bow to the spiritual, if it is pursued on a community scale by people rooted in that community.

On Friday September 7, 2007, the venerable Canadian environmental author Farley Mowat made a boldly generous but stunningly futile gesture. He donated 200 acres of his Cape Breton land to "Nova Scotia Nature Trust".

On top of the hazards of nuclear fission electricity generation, even more environmental threats are posed by mining of uranium, enrichment, reprocessing and disposal of nuclear wastes. A likely consequence of the expansion of uranium mining in Central Australia is that the Eastern seaboard stands to be exposed to clouds bearing poisonous radioactive uranium and other toxic metals blown from the mine tailings dumps (see David Bradbury's film "Blowin' in the wind" for a graphic illustration of this threat).

South East Queensland residents are using World Population Day, 11th July, to urge the Queensland Government to reverse the over-allocation of land and resources committed to development in the region.

"Today has been designated World Population Day by the UN, but you will not see any of the big environment and development groups mounting a campaign on population. Indeed, you will be lucky if they even mention the P-word."

Water crisis, housing crisis, transport infrastructure crisis, hospital crisis and continued destruction of open space and bushland are all the hallmarks that show growth is out of control in South East Queensland, say environmentalists.

HI All

There is another protest against the super quarry, (to be built at Mt Cotton) this
Wednesday 11th July at 9.30 am. We will be standing out the front of the Redlands Council,
on Bloomfield St, at Cleveland to remind the councillors that people matter, and we care about the loss of this valuable and wonderful part of Mt Cotton.
Please join us if you have a spare hour or so. We do not heckle, or disrupt, but we stand quietly and pass out informations leaflets and offer people the chance to sign petitions.

log onto candobetter to find out more.

Julia Buch.