The 100 years from 1870 is described as the innovation century in which there more more inventions, starting coincidentally with the light bulb, than in the rest of mankind's history. For the most part their roll out into society was slow enough to dampen the impact of the invention, electricity wasn't connected fully in Australia until 1989. But for me there was one event that stood out and that occurred on on the 4th of October 1957 just before my birthday.

Most of us will remember the second pandemic year of 2021 more with regret or anger than fondness.  For the nature lovers among us, its closing days delivered a triple whammy, for they also proved to be the closing hours in the lives of three venerable conservation champions of international renown whom we had long revered.  By sheer coincidence, Thomas Lovejoy, E. O.

This medical research arises from the pandemic problem of fructose in our processed food, which is the major cause of Non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), which accompanies the terrible scale of modern obesity. This hepatitis-related obesity carries high risks of dementia, cirrhosis, and cancer. The effects are similar to those of alcoholism, but awareness of risks is even lower. This study identifies fructose as doing its damage by causing changes to the barrier function of the intestine, which is a new understanding of how the liver-disease starts. The study proposes the idea that a genetic intervention might, at some time in the future, prevent these changes to some degree, in people very seriously affected. It points to genetic interventions in mice made ill by high fructose-induced diets. The authors of the study note that it would, of course, be better not to ingest the fructose. We have also embedded a video about fructose from the U of California.

[Candobetter Ed: NAMES FOR FRUCTOSE: Fructose is a component of sugar (sucrose). The following ingredients all contain fructose: Brown sugar, corn sweetener, corn syrup, dextrose, fructose, glucose, high-fructose corn syrup, honey, lactose, malt syrup, maltose, molasses, raw sugar and sucrose.]

A team of international researchers including Monash University academics has discovered that, contrary to previous belief, fructose causes liver toxicity by changing the barrier function of the intestine.

The new study, published today (August 25th) in Nature Metabolism, shows that fructose affects the liver only after it causes intestinal barrier disruption, therefore treatments that prevent barrier disruption could protect the liver from fructose-induced diseases including non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD), fibrosis and cancer.

Fructose is a simple sugar which can be found in high quantities in soft drinks, sauces and fast foods. With the advent of modern biochemistry and metabolic analysis, in recent times scientists have discovered that fructose is up to three times more potent than glucose in increasing liver fat.

Excessive fructose consumption has been linked to the recent surge in Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) - one of the most common metabolic disorders - and its associated co-morbidities, which include liver failure, cirrhosis, and cancer.

Australian metabolic disease expert, Professor Mark Febbraio from Monash’s Institute of Pharmaceutical Sciences, was part of the international team of researchers led by Professor Michael Karin from The University of California San Diego, School of Medicine.

Professor Febbraio says:

“The findings from this study make it clear that fructose does its damage in the intestine and if intestinal barrier deterioration is prevented, the fructose does little harm to the liver.”

The intestine is an organ that makes up part of the gastrointestinal system (more commonly known as the gut). In recent years it’s become evident that excessive fructose metabolism in the gut reduces the production of proteins that maintain the gut barrier, which can lead to a chronic inflammation condition called endotoxemia, as documented in animal studies and paediatric NAFLD patients.

The international team of researchers found that by adding a cell signalling protein called ‘tumor necrosis factor’ (TNF) to hepatocytes stimulates the metabolism of fructose and increases the production of the enzymes that convert the molecule ‘acetyl CoA’ to fatty acids.

“A large increase in the expression of these enzymes was also detected in livers of fructose-fed mice,” says Professor Febbraio. “Conversely, genetic modification that reduced TNF production was found to protect mice from fructose-provoked NAFLD, which is a very exciting step forward for the treatment of diseases which can evolve from this all too common liver disorder.”

Although education and increased awareness are the best solutions to the problem of fructose-induce liver disease, for those individuals who progress to the severe form of NAFLD, known as non-alcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH), the findings described in this study offer some hope of a future therapy based on gut barrier restoration.

This study clearly demonstrates that maintaining gut barrier integrity is a therapeutic target to treat liver disease associated with high fructose consumption.

The researchers will now focus on screening drug candidates that target key proteins in the maintenance of gut barrier integrity.

The full study can be found at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42255-020-0261-2

The 100 years from 1870 is described as the innovation century in which there more more inventions, starting coincidentally with the light bulb, than in the rest of mankind's history. For the most part their roll-out into society was slow enough to dampen the impact of the invention. Electricity, for instance, wasn't connected fully in Australia until 1989. But for me, one event stood out, and that occurred on the 4th of October 1957, just before my birthday.

It was an event of enormous significance yet it is now almost completely forgotten. It changed the world – mostly for the better - in many ways, including preventing or lessening the chance of a nuclear war. It greatly enhanced the standing of science in government. It even made the moon landing possible.

At that time Australia was blessed with a prospective visit by a famous Rock star called Little Richard, (top song Good Golly Miss Molly,) but on that day he cancelled the tour and went into retirement in a monastery after he claimed to see a message from God in the sky.

In fact most Australians saw the same thing. The next night our family went out into the back yard of our house and, looking up into the sky, we saw a little aluminium sphere drift across the heavens. It was the world’s first satellite, launched into space by the Russians, and called Sputnik.

I can't remember anyone saying anything, but right then we realized that the cold war was not restricted to the northern hemisphere. Suddenly the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction, or MAD for short, was very close to home. The expression one flash and you’re ash had become reality.

For the United States this was a slap in the face - being beaten in science technology by a rival whose political philosophy they had scorned. Sputnik plunged Americans into a crisis of self-confidence, which included the idea that the country had grown lax with prosperity and had used science for frivolous purposes. This was so promoted by the media that people stopped buying luxury cars and Ford Edesel, an oversized vulgar yank-tank that aimed at the luxury market, went broke. One eminent scientist took advantage of the hysteria to proclaim: "Teach Science or Teach Russian."

It would have to be the slogan of the century, because by golly Ms Molly, it worked. Congress responded with the National Defence Education Act, which increased funding for education at all levels, including low-interest student loans to college students, with the focus on scientific and technical education. They enacted reforms in science and engineering so that their nation could regain technological advantages they had lost to the Soviets.

What was most fascinating, however, was that there were no dissenting voices. This was a universal movement: politicians saw they were on a winner and no one was crying caution. Science rules OK?

In the US, schools now placed new emphasis on the process of inquiry, independent thinking, and the challenging of long-held assumptions. Laboratory science was stressed, urging a hands-on learning approach. The emphasis moved from teaching facts to fundamental principles. Children could no longer be educated traditionally and Charles Darwin's theory of evolution, which had been successfully kept out of many US classrooms until late 1957, found a place in high school biology textbooks.

In Australia reactions to Sputnik were more pragmatic. The university system had been undergoing reform since 1956 and funding was increased by 300% in just two years to 1960. This was used to promote higher education and research across a broad range of disciplines, not solely to enable government-determined scientific goals. We did however become the third nation to launch a locally manufactured satellite in November 1967.

This was not a science renaissance but rather a re-imagining of science, which people saw as something that had been misdirected and mismanaged. The Science of the ICBM for nuclear weapons had become the pathfinder for space travel and carried the public along with it. Everyone wanted to be a rocket scientist, interest in astronomy boomed and, less than four years later, John Kennedy set out to land man on the moon.

But then something went wrong: science was sidelined, markets and money dominated government policy. So much so, that in 1990, Barry Jones AO, the science minister in the Hawke/Keating Labor government, announced that the crowning scientific achievement of his government was the return of Haley's comet. Yes, he was being sarcastic.
The Abbott government didn't even bother to have a science minister and cut funding for the CSIRO, the Climate Change Authority and many NGO's. Funding to the ABC, TAFE, and Universities, has also been cut, with the later becoming highly dependent on full-fee paying overseas students. The Climate Commission and the National Water Commission were abolished and, in terms of expenditure on research, Australia was ranked 18th out of 20 OECD countries in 2013, and this dropped a further 10% by 2015. Among those scientists made redundant was CSIRO’s Dr. San Thang, who was part of a team listed as a Noble prize contender for his work in chemistry. The technology this team invented has been adopted by 60 companies and royalties generated from the technology are forecast to reach $32.2 million by 2021.

This change in policy was more than just austerity-related cost-cutting, as there was also increased spending on fossil fuel projects, such as carbon sequestration.
It was targeted assassination of a rival philosophy and included drastic changes to our society and the way it functioned.

Manufacturing was almost obliterated, consumerism was revered, and population was purposefully increased through high immigration and a baby bonus.
Land clearing increased, along with animal extinctions and greenhouse emissions.

Unemployment tripled, housing became unaffordable, along with more homelessness and congestion, while mortgage debt exploded - all of which was hailed as economic progress.

Along the way Australia's corruption ranking[1] dropped from 7th place in 2012 to 13th place in 2015 and we became dependent on imports for things we used to manufacture and paid for them mainly with exports of coal and iron ore.

Why?

Economists like to think of themselves as scientists, but really they are not seekers of fundamental truths, but more like lawyers, ready to argue a case regardless of its merits. Thus, all our banks have economists who will argue for among other things, deregulation. The Mineral council has economists who will argue that coal is more valuable to the economy than agriculture, while the property council will have economists telling us that housing price growth is good despite the misery it creates.
We even had economists for the farming lobby telling us that tackling obesity by cutting back on sugar would be bad for the economy and, alarmingly, there are economists in the media who repeat without question whatever line is being proposed, whilst others in universities teach the same nonsense to the next generation.

Just like defense lawyers these economists will defend their clients’ interests without shame or remorse, because in carefully selected economic terms, they can be shown to be correct - or at least beneficial - in growing the GDP. The fact that these organizations can afford to pay their economists very well also helps. Conscience is soothed by a religious-like commitment to growth economics, which is able to replace human or environmental empathy with the certainty of market supremacy. They hide the reality of their philosophy by use of econogabble, a language full of terminology only understood by other economists and then vague enough to have alternative meanings.

Of course, not all economists swallow the idea of market supremacy and there are some very clever human beings like the Australia Institute’s chief economist, Richard Denniss, whose views are called unconventional. But unconventional economists don't get employed by banks or governments - after all who wants someone telling you what you are doing is absurd, immoral, dangerous or even uneconomic? Growth economics has, not surprisingly, resulted in increasing levels of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) in the atmosphere, the growth of plastic in the oceans, and is instrumental, if not the direct cause, of every problem that plagues our society.

Now you may think I am biased, and of course you are right, but I am not alone. Even economists don't like economists. The great economist John Kenneth Galbraith once said:

"The only function of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable."

Speaking of former US Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan, another economist quipped:

"He was the greatest, the Maestro. Only if you look at his record, he was wrong about almost everything he ever predicted."

And that is part of the problem: Being wrong is not a sin if you are an economist. If a scientist had somehow missed something as bad as the GFC he would be forever shunned and his failure relentless analysed, so that it could not happen again.

Gordon Brown, the then UK’s prime minister, made a speech in June 2007 that was surely one of the greatest political and economic misjudgments among postwar politicians. He described his era as one that history will record as a new golden age for the City of London, praising the city’s creativity and ingenuity, just weeks before it collapsed into the GFC.

The UK tax payer was left with a one-sided exposure of £1.3 trillion in loans, investments, cash injections, and guarantees to the banking system, of which over £100bn may be lost forever. But all was not lost for Gordon Brown. Just 15 months later he was honored in the US as ‘Statesman of the Year’ by US former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

After the GFC there was a great deal of criticism leveled at economists because for all their brilliant models and complex analyses, most economists completely failed to predict the disastrous outcome of the housing bubble. There were arguments as to whether the problem was an imperfect discipline or the result of human failures where biases on the part of many economists that made them blind to the truth. While there are always disagreements in the hard sciences, they're often less significant than some of the fundamentally different schools of thought within macroeconomics. You can have two equally respected economists perform two very well-thought out and rigorous analyses, but come to two different conclusions. That shouldn't be possible in a hard science. Facts plus analysis should lead to a conclusion that can be proven through observation.

The American Economic Association has proposed enhanced ethical standards for academic economists because, currently, they are not always required to explicitly state all sources of income and funding. This could cause bias to creep into their work, a process that was shown to have happened to financial advisers by the Australian Banking Royal Commission (4 December 2017 – 4 February 2019).

It could be argued that economic policy is more likely to contain bias due to outside influences than that of scientists, as there is often a lot of money at stake in either business or politics, depending on what the wisest economists in the land claim to be truth.

Logically then we should at least know who funds think tanks and Media columnists should disclose who they work for. We could go much further. Surely “ethical economics” is about using resources in a sustainable way.

Reducing carbon dioxide emissions, for instance, is certainly kinder to future generations than accepting the dictates of supply and demand.

Should we be importing products made by slave labor just because they are cheap? (Yes we do!)

Should we have traded with dictatorial regimes like Sadam Hussein's Iraq just because he bought our wheat?

Why do we support the arms trade, tobacco, alcohol, and gambling?

Well we do because, while third world countries get taken over by military coups, we were taken over by an economic coup d'état: a legal, constitutional seizure of power by a consortium of business groups who managed to pervert economics for their own benefit.

The way they achieved this can be understood by examining the words of David Suzuki, the world famous naturalist. He was three times voted the most trusted person in Canada. He summed up the economic strategy neatly, when he said:

“The economy — and the need to keep it strong and growing — has somehow become the most important aspect of modern life. Nothing else is allowed to rank higher. The economy is suffering; the economy is improving; the economy is stable or unstable — you’d think it was a patient on life support in an intensive-care unit from the way we anxiously await the next pronouncement on its health. But what we call the economy is nothing more than people producing, consuming and exchanging things and services.”
― David Suzuki, From Naked Ape to Superspecies: Humanity and the Global Eco-Crisis

It is apparent that this artificial obsession with a growth economy is a smoke screen that hides all other considerations, including human and environmental survival. I would argue that the wheels didn't fall off, they were stolen while we languished in complacency.

NOTES

[1] See the transparency Organisation at https://www.transparency.org/.

We republish an article from Global Research and an excerpt from the World Health Organisation on this politically, commercially, and thus medically, fraught topic. The World Health Organisation's ongoing research project page on Electromagnetic fields (EMF) is at https://www.who.int/peh-emf/project/EMF_Project/en/. Not mentioned in the Global Research article below is the World Health Organisation's report that "studies suggest that children exposed to EMF magnetic fields have an associated increased risk of leukaemia." The Global Research article below the WHO introduction is useful because it gives a number of strategies for minimising exposure to EMF, particularly where children are concerned. Furthermore, it gives access to opinion from different countries. We should remember that X-Rays were not banned for pregnant women until the mid-1980s, a long time after it was well-known that they were the major cause of childhood cancers. (See Margaret Heffernan, Wilful Blindness.) A much more intensive and pervasive level of electromagnetic fields involved in 5G and "smart cities" is being introduced to Australia and many countries as we write this. Smart cities carry their own dangers of total surveillance and automation that seem calculated to remove almost all possibility of democratic engagement, although that is not the subject of the reports cited below. (See Prof Justin O'Connor in "Smart Cities vs Creative Cities Symposium".)

World Health Organisation: "What is the International EMF Project? - Introduction

Background
Potential health effects of exposure to static and time varying electric and magnetic fields need scientific clarification. Electromagnetic fields of all frequencies represent one of the most common and fastest growing environmental influences, about which there is anxiety and speculation are spreading. EMF exposure now occurs to varying degrees to all populations of the world, and the levels will continue to increase with advancing technology. Thus, even a small health consequence from EMF exposure could have a major public health impact.

Concerns have been expressed that exposure to extremely low frequency (ELF) magnetic fields at power frequencies (50/60 Hz) could lead to an increased incidence of cancer in children and other adverse health effects. The evidence comes primarily from residential epidemiological studies. These studies suggest that children exposed to ELF magnetic fields have an associated increased risk of leukaemia.

Radio frequency (RF) fields are used to great benefits in many facets of everyday life, such as radio and TV transmission, telecommunications (eg mobile telephones), diagnosis and treatments of disease and in industry for heating and sealing materials. With the rapid introduction of mobile telecommunications devices, especially among the general public, there has been a focus on the problems associated with near field RF exposure to the head from the small radiating antenna of mobile phones. In addition, concerns persist that exposure to pulsed and amplitude modulated RF fields may cause specific health effects.

As societies develop, greater use of certain technologies leads to increasing exposure to static electric and magnetic fields. This is especially the case in industry, transport, power transmission, research and medicine. Possible health effects from static fields have never been properly assessed. Given the rapid expansion of medical devices and imminent introduction, potentially on a large scale, of magnetic levitation transport systems that use strong static magnetic fields, any health impacts need to be properly assessed.

As part of its charter to protect public health and in response to public concern over health effects of EMF exposure, the World Health Organization (WHO) established the International EMF Project in 1996 to assess the scientific evidence of possible health effects of EMF in the frequency range from 0 to 300 GHz. The EMF Project encourages focused research to fill important gaps in knowledge and to facilitate the development of internationally acceptable standards limiting EMF exposure."

Top 10 Facts About Cell Phones and Wi-Fi

Article first published in Global Research by Environmental Health Trust on July 18, 2019 at https://www.globalresearch.ca/top-10-facts-about-cell-phones-and-wi-fi/5683939.

1. All Cell Phones And Wireless Devices Emit Radiation.

Every wireless device is actually a two-way microwave radio that sends and receives a type of non-ionizing electromagnetic radiation called radio frequency radiation RF – EMF. This machine-made radiation is millions of times higher than the natural electromagnetic fields (EMFs) our grandparents were exposed to. Numerous peer reviewed published research studies shows that these made-made pulsed electromagnetic frequencies cause adverse biological effects and are very different than the natural electromagnetic fields that have existed in the environment for years. Research on humans has found an association between cell phone use and serious effects such as brain cancer, headaches, damage to the brain and immune system. Yale studies found that cellular radiation exposure during pregnancy led to increased hyperactivity and memory problems in offspring.

2. Our Brains And Bodies Are Penetrated By This Radiation.

When we hold a cell phone against our head to talk, the radiation from the phone moves into our brain. Likewise, when we use a wireless laptop, the radiation penetrates into our abdominal region, chest area and brain.According to the International Agency for the Research on Cancer:

“the average radio frequency radiation energy deposition for children exposed to mobile phone RF is two times higher in the brain and 10 times higher in the bone marrow of the skull, compared with mobile phone use by adults”.

(Read it on page 44 of the IARC Monograph on Radiofrequency Fields)

Multiple research studies report cell phone radiation penetrates more deeply into children’s brains (Fernandez-Rodriguez 2015 , Fernández 2015, Mohammed 2017) in comparison to adults.

Research also has found that radiation from tablets penetrates more deeply into children’s brains (Ferreira 2015.) A 2018 study that considered the radiation dose into the brain of teenagers found that teens who used cell phones up to their head had decreased memory performance on researchers tests.

3. Cell Phones And Wireless Devices Emit Radiation Constantly, Even When You Are Not Talking Or Using The Phone.

A powered on cell phone is always “checking in” and maintaining a connection to the nearest cell tower by sends intense bursts of radiation several times per second. Likewise, a wireless-enabled laptop, tablet or other device is always “checking in” with the nearby router or a network base. These “check ins” are radiation emissions—happening several times per second, and whether or not a connection is successfully established.Medical doctors have written many letters to schools calling for administrators to reduce exposures to this radiation in schools. Harvard doctors have published research linking electromagnetic fields to autism.

4. Every Wireless Device Has Fine Print Instructions Buried In Its User Manual That Specify A Distance Between The Device And User That Should Not Be Surpassed.

For example, most cell phone manuals state the phone should be held at specified distance (often around 5/8th of an inch) from the body. If you look in the user manual for your DECT cordless home phone, wireless laptop or printer, it will state that the device should be at least 20 cm (approximately 8 inches) away from the body to prevent “exceeding FCC radiation exposure limits”. These instructions are in the user manuals because cell phones and wireless devices are tested for user radiation exposures at those specific distances.

In other words, if you are using a laptop on your lap, you are exposing yourself to untested radiation emissions that could exceed the radiation levels our government regulations presently allow. When you use a device closer than the manufacturer’s distance instructions, you risk exposing yourself to radiation levels that our federal government understands can cause sterility, brain damage and tissue damage. Learn more about the fine print warnings on various devices here.

Read more: Brain Wave Warping Effect of Mobile Phones, Study Reveals

5. These Fine Print Instructions DO NOT Protect You From All Health Effects.

The instructions buried in your manual are not safe enough. Even if you follow these instructions, you risk your health. Note: radiation exposure at the specified distances is much higher than zero. Accumulating research now shows a myriad of health effects occur at levels far far below (literally tens of thousands times lower than) government regulation limits. Wireless devices were not adequately tested before they came on the market.
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6. Research Shows Low Levels Of This Radiation Impact The Brain And Reproductive System.

Wireless radiation has been shown to change brain function even at levels hundreds of thousands of times below federal guidelines. In 2011, Dr. Volkow’s NIH research showed that the brain increased glucose metabolism when exposed to cell phone radiation. Dr. Suleyman Kaplan has published multiple research studies showing damaged brain development in the offspring of prenatally exposed test subjects. Significant research shows that wireless exposures decrease and damage sperm and that prenatal exposure can alter testis and ovarian development. These are just a few examples from a large body of accumulated science which shows effects from cell phone and wireless radiation.
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7. Radiation Emitted By Cell Phones And Wireless Is Officially Linked To Cancer.

In 2011, the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer first classified cell phone and wireless radiation as a “class 2 B Possible Human Carcinogen” based on these research studies that showed long-term users of cell phones had higher rates of brain cancer on the side of the head where they held the phone.The United States National Toxicology Program completed a $30M study that found “clear evidence” of cancer in male rats exposed to long term low level radio-frequency radiation. Due to these findings, several scientists have published that the weight of current peer reviewed evidence supports the conclusion that radiofrequency radiation should be regarded as a human carcinogen.

8. As The Evidence Linking Wireless Radiation To Cancer Has Significantly Increased Since 2011, Now Scientists State That Cell Phone Wireless Radiation Is A Human Carcinogen.

In 2016, a major US government study found cell phone radiation caused increased cancers (brain and heart nerve) in rats exposed at low levels for two years. The results were stunning because the cancers the rats developed are the same type humans are developing after long term cell phone use.

Furthermore, since 2011, new research studies have been published linking wireless radiation to cancer. CERENAT (a case control national study in France) again showed a statistically significant association between glioma (brain cancer) and long-erm cell phone use. Another study out of Jacobs University (which replicated previous study results) showed that RF acted as a tumor promoter. The study details in its conclusion how, “Numbers of tumors of the lungs and livers in exposed animals were significantly higher than in sham-exposed controls. In addition, lymphomas were also found to be significantly elevated by exposure.”

In light of this published science, several World Health Organization experts are stating that the evidence has now substantially increased. Dr. Anthony B. Miller has testified on the increased evidence, and he and colleagues have written several published papers detailing their opinion and in 2018 he was lead author on a published literature review concluding that cell phone wireless radiation is a human carcinogen. Scientists from Israel researching cancr in radar operators also concluded that the evidence indicates radiofrequency can cause cancer (Peleg 2018.) Dr. Hardell and colleagues have long published papers concluding that that wireless “should be regarded as human carcinogen requiring urgent revision of current exposure guidelines.”

9. Solutions Exist: Hundreds Of Scientists Worldwide Recommend Taking Action To Reduce Exposures To Wireless Devices Because Of The Serious Health Effects From These Devices.

In 2015, a large group of scientists and medical doctors signed onto a formal Appeal to the United Nations and the World Health Organization, calling on them to take immediate action on this issue. This Appeal is now signed by over 250 experts and is published in the International Journal of Oncology.In 2014, a group of U.S. physicians, including the Chief of Obstetrics at Yale Medicine, presented scientific studies at the launch of the BabySafe Project, issuing specific recommendations to pregnant women on how to decrease wireless exposures in order to decrease risks to babies’ brain development. We do not have to give up our technology but we can make smarter choices about the way we use it. Every person can easily decrease exposure to this radiation by making simple changes every day.

10. Government Regulations Are Outdated And Antiquated.

In the United States, the last review for radio frequency limits was in 1996, and the reality is that these are limits are based on research from the 1980s. Many countries are using guidelines developed by the IEEE or ICNIRP—guidelines that have remained unchanged for decades. Those guidelines do not consider the more current science showing harm. Thankfully other countries – over twenty countries- are enacting protections to reduce public exposure to this radiation and have radiation limits far lower than the FCC and ICNIRP. Some have banned Wi-Fi in classsrooms, other have banned cell phones made for young children and others have cell tower limits 100x lower than ICNIRP.Regulations are antiquated because they have not kept pace with the manner in which consumers use devices—usage has changed considerably since 1996. For example, the regulations only consider one radiating device at a time and do not account for a residence, classroom, or workplace, healthcare, retail, recreational and other venues filled with multiple devices. The regulations do not consider that people carry their cell phones tightly in a front pocket of jeans or in a bra. They do not consider that laptops would be placed on laps by schoolchildren in the classroom. Regulations did not consider research that looked at long-term exposures to vulnerable groups such as children, pregnant women or to medically compromised individuals. Guidelines were set by only considering the impact to a full-grown man. Many scientists and major medical organizations have written about the inadequacy of these outdated guidelines.

Final Bonus Fact: No Safe Level Of This Radiation Has Been Identified.

Scientific studies have not been done to develop a “safe level” of exposure. The latest science clearly shows that biological effects could occur at non-thermal (non-heating) levels. Science also shows that children and the developing pregnancy are far more vulnerable to these damaging effects. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not do the research necessary to define a safe level that the public can be exposed to without harmful effects.

In a 2015 study (replicating prior scientific findings linking RF to cancer promotion), the researchers state, “Since many of the tumor-promoting effects in our study were seen at low to moderate exposure levels (0.04 and 0.4 W/kg SAR), thus well below exposure limits for the users of mobile phones, further studies are warranted to investigate the underlying mechanisms.” and “We hypothesize that these tumor-promoting effects may be caused by metabolic changes due to exposure. Our findings may help to understand the repeatedly reported increased incidences of brain tumors in heavy users of mobile phones.”

No medical organization has determined a “safe level” of this radiation for long-term exposure to children. In fact, medical organizations worldwide – including the American Academy of Pediatrics, the largest group of children’s doctors in the United States and the Athens Medical Association and Vienna Medical Association – are calling for eliminating and reducing radiofrequency cell phone wireless radiation exposures.

A group of birds that are not usually found in Australia attracted hundreds of birders to a relatively remote town on the north coast of NSW, resulting in a significant boost to the Australian economy.

A group of birds that are not usually found in Australia attracted hundreds of birders to a relatively remote town on the north coast of NSW, resulting in a significant boost to the Australian economy.

The new report by UNSW scientists – recently published in the Journal of Ecotourism –estimates that the birders who came to see the Aleutian Terns brought in more than $200,000 in revenue to the NSW economy over about four months.

Aleutian Terns breed in Alaska (USA) and east Siberia (Russia), and usually spend our summer in the North Pacific and parts of Indonesia. To experts’ surprise, they turned up at Old Bar, and on 11 December 2017, Aleutian Terns were photographed using a sandbar that many birders are familiar with for its impressive congregations of shorebirds.

“After word got out to the birding community on 11 December 2017, the who’s who of Australian birders travelled to see these birds until about the end of March 2018,” says study lead author and UNSW Science PhD student Corey Callaghan.

“It was a unique case because there wasn’t just one individual vagrant bird, there were more than a dozen.”

The study by the UNSW Sydney-led team is the first to quantify the economic impact of a vagrant bird – a species observed outside its normal geographic range – in Australia. It estimates the birders’ activity brought between $199,000 - $363,000 to the Australian economy.

The study comes after a similar study published last year, also led by Corey Callaghan, estimated that a single Black-backed Oriole in rural Pennsylvania resulted in more than $US220,000 revenue for that local economy.

“I think together, these studies are demonstrating the exceptional pull of vagrant birds to birders, while also showing the real economic potential of these events. They are contributing to local economies around the world all the time,” Mr Callaghan says.

One of the other authors of the study – Professor Richard Kingsford, Director of the UNSW Centre for Ecosystem Science – says the untapped potential of these visitors also has implications for much-needed increased conservation funding.

“We found that birders were generally conservation aware and would be willing to donate up to $30,000 to view rare birds. Often vagrants are in National Parks and protected areas, providing a potential fundraising opportunity,” he says.

Vagrant bird chasing is just one aspect of the bird watching hobby.

“The total economic benefits of birders, generally, is much higher,” Mr Callaghan says.

“Many birders don’t travel or ‘competitively’ seek out birds; they appreciate them in their local park or bush.”

For example, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service, up to $US40 billion dollars per year are spent on watching birds in the US.

“Ultimately, all birds depend on their habitats and so the benefits to the economy from birdwatching need to be factored in as real contributions, stacked up against development threats that destroy their habitats, such as land clearing,” Professor Kingsford says.

“The contribution of biodiversity to the economy is quite clear and needs to be factored in more in the future – at the moment, this is rarely done."

This is the first time, to our knowledge, that the ABC has departed from its growthist mantra, allowing its reporters to describe the problem and really let the public know how bad it is. "We need to focus on corruption, population to halt biodiversity loss." Researchers say targets for biodiversity loss ignore key drivers such as human population and corruption." Article by ABC Science, environment reporter Nick Kilvert. First published here: http://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2018-03-27/corruption-population-impact-biodiversity-loss/9586556

Both Dr Ritchie and Professor Bekessy cited the death of the last male northern white rhino earlier this month as a reminder that we need to be doing more to halt the loss of species worldwide.

Professor Bekessy said she believes people may not realise how much their day-to-day decisions can impact on species loss.

"Whether we choose to have beef or vegetable for dinner, or what sort of coffee we choose to have in the morning, all of these things lead to the survival or extinction of species," she said.

"Extinction is something that people understand. All the media attention around the last white rhino — it was heartbreaking because it was really personal.

"I think, [we need to make our goal] no more extinctions."

Expansive Economies and Limited Economies: Industrial capitalism is characterized by population growth, economic growth, expansion and intensification. [1] Although there was a short-lived case of industrial capitalism between about 1585 and 1622 in the Netherlands, [2] industrial capitalism as we know it today really originated in England, based on the apparently limitless fossil reserves of coal and the presence of many landless people who had to live by their labour. [3] These vast reservoirs of fuel gave rise to technologies that permitted mass production and facilitated the conquest and settlement of lands all over the globe. In the 20th century petroleum oil replaced coal as the fuel of industrial expansion, particularly where wheeled transport was concerned, although coal remained a mainstay for electricity production. [This article is an extract from Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013, which is part of a four-book series, of which the first two have so far been published.]
In contrast to Britain, America, Australia, Canada, with their larger landmasses, fuel reserves and well established trade links, small isolated islander societies had to learn to live within firmly fixed, immediate, territorial limits.

Any isolated island society which failed to do this must have perished quickly.

Two famous examples of reputed ‘failure’ to live within limits were Nauru and Easter Island (Rapanui). Nauru society had survived for many centuries, perhaps two or 3,000 years, but was quickly brought to its knees by capitalist ‘success’. Remarkable for its natural wealth and fertility, it did not survive the transformation of its phosphate and limestone coral-island base into a guano-mine for global-based agriculture, despite access to large but transient commercial wealth. [4]

From a well-watered densely vegetated, undulating Eden of native gardens, it was razed within about 62 years (between 1906 and it independence in 1968) by mining shovels to a flat, waterless desert, within a narrow fringe of marginal sandy coast. Rainfall ceased to gather on the island, but simply ran off the edges. The once self-sufficient nation now imports almost all food and water from Australia.

Nauru sought compensation in the 1990s through the ineffectual International Court of Justice but finally settled with Australia outside the court for a paltry $107 million.
Nauruans are now a spectacularly unhealthy and divided people, who have been obliged to rent out their devastated country as an international refugee camp to the colonial Australian government.

Although industrial economic exploitation for outside interests quite clearly destroyed Nauru, the wider industrialized world knows little of this. The press portrays the tragedy of Nauru as something the islanders brought on themselves.

Whereas the fate of Nauru is accessible to any who care to seek – although few do - the decline of prosperous Easter Island (Rapanui) has become shrouded in mystery and myth. It has become the subject of famous inconclusive investigations and explanations, including Thor Heyerdahl’s rafting experiment to test a theory that an earlier race of people built the famous giant statues on the island, and of Jared Diamond’s Collapse book among many others. Diamond popularized a theory with elements of biblical parable, not unlike Sodom and Gomorrah, but minus God.

Such theories leave the wider industrialized world with the idea that the Rapanuians were ironically the masters of their own destruction.

It seems, however, that Easter Island was, after all, like so many islands, including beautiful, rich Haiti, just another island victim of piracy and colonial forces in the European Trade Wars. The overwhelming evidence for this will be presented further on in Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations for Easter Island and in Book Three for Haiti.
Recognising the real causes of the destruction of Nauru, Easter Island, Haiti and similarly fated islands has far-reaching consequences.

For Jared Diamond, a North American, one reason to explore the failure to prosper of Easter Island and whole civilizations in the ‘developing world’ was to try to rationally dispel 20th century racist theories for persistent poverty and overpopulation among brown and black peoples. Another reason was because Diamond saw a parallel between the fate of Easter Island and the likely fate of capitalist growth economies, as doomed to collapse.

Diamond theorized that, like modern global citizens, the Easter Islanders failed to heed abundant signs that they were overpopulating and overexploiting their environment. For years this idea has been a popular subject of elaboration by ecologists like Tim Flannery in his book The Future Eaters [5] and bloggers and list-owners like Jay Hanson, who owned The Dieoff List [6] and pioneered EnergyResources among several famous resource depletion discussion lists. Just key Easter Island into an internet browser and you will find endless discussions about the mystery of the islanders eating themselves out of house and home as they continued to senselessly construct huge statues.

Ecological die-off writers’ theorise that the major difference between Easter Island and nations in the global economy is one of scale. The apparent inability of Easter Islanders to take stock in time contained a dramatic irony due to the tininess of their territory, which meant that the warning signs should have been inescapable to all but the willfully blind. In these days of sophisticated modern communications and widespread education, similarities can easily be drawn.

Why, ecologists ask, do modern humans also sit like proverbial experimental frogs in slowly heating water, and fail to jump out of the saucepan or turn off the gas? How is it that humans seem not to understand the incremental nature of systems failure, despite a myriad of gauges and dashboards, statistics and publications?

“Are we all doomed, like the Easter Islanders?” the cry goes out.

What if our fundamental assumptions are wrong and the Easter Islanders actually didn’t befoul and destroy their own nest after all? I will argue a need to abandon the parable that the Easter Islanders brought about their own doom because it probably is no more true than that the Nauruans brought about theirs. (More about this later.)

The untrumpeted and inarguable truth is that Easter Island, like many, many successful Pacific Island societies, managed to survive for thousands of years. The durability of Pacific Island settlements is born out by DNA records which show that the Lapita people and their societies have been around for between 40 and 60,000 years, notably in New Guinea.
Major exploration and European colonization of Pacific Islands occurred a century or two later than in many other areas, like South America and Africa. The transition in the Pacific from self-sufficiency and order to overshoot and disorganisation over the 19th and 20th centuries was therefore in many cases carefully and scientifically documented by anthropologists whose excellent work now lies in dusty tomes. Not all of it caught the limelight of controversy like Margaret Mead’s study of Samoa. [7]

If what emerges is that colonisation and capitalism destroyed these island cultures, does that mean that the same forces are now destroying the rest of the world as scientists like Jared Diamond and Tim Flannery seem to think?

Well, yes and no.

This book argues that there are two major systems in the industrial world. One of these systems is beyond the control of its citizens, but the other is not.

The work of Diamond, Flannery and others does not take significantly into account that the remorseless conditions of uncontrollable population growth and economic growth which are driving some major first world countries into overshoot do not really exist in the Western Continental European system.

Yes, Europe’s population is too big to maintain without fossil fuel despite nuclear supplements already in place and it is causing unsustainable environmental destruction beyond and within its own borders, but the Europeans know this and they are preparing to ‘downsize’ thorough natural attrition. In fact population growth in Europe slowed dramatically from the first oil shock in 1972-73.[8] The problem is that the populations of North America, Britain, Australia, Canada, etc – the Anglophone states – failed to slow their growth after the first oil shock, even though this was apparently desired by some of their leaders. [9]

Not only did they fail to slow down, they have actually increased their population growth rate on bases which have more than doubled since the 1970s, in the face of increasingly serious threats to democracy, international politics and environment.

Since the oil price-rises and global financial shocks at the beginning of the 21st century, the Anglophone states have hugely ramped up aggressive exploitation of their own, as well as other countries’ natural resources, with horrendous consequences to environment, democracy and international politics. (War with Iraq, Afghanistan, fracking for gas, blowing the tops off mountains for coal that had been considered uneconomic half a century prior, mining arctic national parks, etc.) These consequences have shocked and alarmed their own informed citizenry and the rest of the world. Yet the Anglophone states do not seem able to exert any more control over their fates than did the Easter Islanders, the Nauruans and the Haitians.

The problem of inertia in dealing with ‘overshoot’ in the Anglophone states is worsened by their institutional and commercial investment in continued population growth.
Europe’s Roman law system seems to contain a solution in its retention of some features of traditional local societies. Starting with France, the system has been adopted by nearly every country in Europe since the 19th century, making the Anglophone system a minority one.

The principle difference between the systems is that Anglophone state citizens have very little democratic power to organize to defend themselves against a Market and destructive corporate interests to which they and their governments have become captive. In continental Europe, however, citizens and the state have quite effective power against corporate interests, largely because the state still controls most of the land-use. In the Anglophone states, private and corporate ownership of land, resources and utilities rivals that of the state.

Industrialization looks increasingly like a short-lived phenomenon. Unlike the successful Pacific Islander societies, industrial society has no experience of economies or polities lasting thousands of years. Despite this, business as usual in industrial societies, depends on a widespread assumption that industrial capitalist society will go on forever. Moreover, it is believed that the future holds material utopias which will gradually fuse into some kind of total knowledge. A popular book by Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity, is an excellent example of this new religion. Central to Kurzweil’s thesis is an extrapolation of “Moore’s Law” where trends based on past rate and production of technological improvement go on exponentially forever. [10] This works fine as an isolated theory, but the author gives little consideration to practical problems. The major practical problem is the concomitant trends in material, social and environmental costs [11] that underlie those past trends and which extrapolation of those trends would also increase.

NOTES

[1] Burnham, Peter, 2003. Capitalism: The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Oxford University Press, p.64"Karl Polanyi concludes that capitalism did not emerge until the Poor Law Reform Act of 1834. Capital existed in many forms - commercial capital and money-dealing capital - long before industrialization. For this reason the period between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries is often referred to as the merchant capital phase of capitalism. Industrial capitalism, which Marx dates from the last third of the eighteenth century, finally establishes the domination of the capitalist mode of production. In contrast to liberals, writers in the Marxist tradition understand twentieth-century developments in terms of the movement from the laissez-faire phase of capitalism to the monopoly stage of capitalism. On the basis of Lenin's famous pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, the monopoly stage is said to exist when: the export of capital alongside the export of commodities becomes of prime importance; banking and industrial capital merge to form finance capital; production and distribution are centralized in huge trusts and cartels; international monopoly combines of capitalists divide up the world into spheres of interest; and national states seek to defend capitalist interests thus perpetuating the likelihood of war (see also imperialism).

[2] The Netherlands case is explored in detail in Book 2 of the Demography, Territory and Law2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, series in the chapters related to the Trade Wars from the 14th century to the 19th century.

[3] This phenomenon of dispossessed labourers in Britain is a core subject of the second volume of Demography, Territory and Law.

[4] Mary Nazzal, April 2005. An Environment Destroyed and International Law, p.3. http://www.lawanddevelopment.org/docs/nauru.pdf. "By 1906, the Pacific Islands Company reached an agreement which granted them mining rights in Nauru at which point the company was renamed the Pacific Phosphate Company. It is interesting to note that at this time the Nauruans could already foresee the demise of their island. A traditional song created in 1910 illustrates this point:
By chance they discovered the heart of my home
And gave it the name phosphate
If they were to ship all phosphate from my home
There will be no place for me to go
Should this be the plan of the British Commission
I shall never see my home on the hill.'"

"[...]The Jaluit-Gesselschaft mining rights were transferred to the Pacific Phosphate Company for a cash payment of £2000, £12,500 worth of shares in the Pacific Phosphate Company and a royalty payment for every ton exported. While the Nauruans were not part of any formal agreement, the Germans paid the native landowners a very modest amount per ton of rock removed from their land."

After Germany was defeated, Nauru became part of a new political agenda designed at the 1919 Versailles and Australia occupied and administered the island.

See also, TED (Trade Environment Database) Case Studies: Case Number: 412, Case Mnemonic: Nauru, Case Name: Phosphate Mining in Nauru, Case Author: Michael E. Pukrop, May, 1997. http://www1.american.edu/ted/NAURU.htm.

[5] The passage you are reading is from Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013. The second book in the series is, Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Capitalism in Britain, Countershock Press, 2014. The volume in the series that includes remarks on Haiti is still being edited. It will be published by Countershock Press as Sheila Newman ,Demography Territory Law2: Land-tenure and the Origins of Democracy in France, probably in 2018.

[6] Tim Flannery, 1994. The Future Eaters, 1994, Reed Books, Melbourne.

[7] This was a yahoo list about energy resources that was popular in the late 1990s and which was one of the first run by Jay Hanson in a series of yahoo lists with an international membership. There is an associated Dieoff website at http://www.dieoff.com. Jay Hanson has a facebook page at http://www.facebook.com/JayInHawaii [Since these old addresses don't have SSL certificates, I have not activated links to them.]

[8] Sykes, Brian, 2002. The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry, Corgi Press, UK.

[9] This slowing was a precautionary response to the prospect of oil depletion, which threatens the survival of the unprecedentedly large post-war populations. See Chapter 7 of Newman, S.M., 2002. The Growth Lobby and its Absence in Australia and France. Environmental Sociology Research thesis, Swinburne University, 2002. https://researchbank.swinburne.edu.au/file/a3115a39-c50a-4504-8d1f-4aca21be26fd/1/Sheila%20Newman%20Thesis.pdf, Chapters 6 and 7. [Note that the virtual location of this thesis at the universitiy changes from time to time, so if you cannot find it there, I suggest you use a search engine to find its new address or other copies that exist on the internet. ]

[10] Stephen D. Mumford, 1996. The Life and Death of NSSM 200: How the Destruction of Political Will Doomed a U.S. Population Policy, Centre for Research on Population and Security, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, pp.179-352. This study also contains an appendix recommending population growth reduction as a method of combatting fossil fuel depletion.. (Appendix 2.) NSSM 200 stood for National Security Study Memorandum. This was an interagency study of world population growth, US population growth, and the potential impacts on national security. In this work evidence was given to support an argument that population policy initiatives failed largely due to interference from a lobby group of Catholic bishops in the United States. See pp.179-352).

Aristide R. Zolberg, 1993. Are the Industrial Countries under siege. In G. Luciani, (Ed), Migration Policies in Europe and the United States. Kluwer Academic Publishers, Netherlands, pp.53-82, p. 61 : "In the 1970s, mounting objections by conservative segments of the citizenry to the presence of culturally and often somatically distinct minorities, as well as the oil crisis and ensuing economic crisis, prompted the governments of the industrial countries to undertake a drastic reevaluation of ongoing immigration, but the difficulty of reducing the flows to the desired level, as well as to restoring the status quo, precipitated renewed fear of 'invasion'. In the United States, in the 'stagflation' 1970s, estimates of illegal immigrants escalated to as high as twenty million, on the basis of which it was argued that the nation had 'lost control of its borders'. The major solution proposed was to impose sanctions on employers of unauthorized labour, but this failed of enactment because of resistance by organized business interests, so that in 1979 the Congress established a commission to overhaul the entire immigration system."

[11] Ray Kurzweil, 2005. The Singularity, Penguin Group, USA. Review by Robert D. Steele. www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend-Biology/product-reviews/0670033847/ref=pr_all_summary_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1.

[12] Energy costs in fuel and materials, plus the social costs of the politics of wealth distribution (piracy, slavery, environmental impoverishment, third world inequality, destruction of whole peoples through colonization, loss of biodiversity, rise in pollution, social engineering etcetera.)

This scientific submission on commercial kangaroo management was closely based on the literature from the industry, which proved to be a revelation in what it actually admitted about its manipulation of kangaroo population numbers. Basically, the very small number of scientists dominating the academic literature and the industry have stated (variously) that the industry artificially stimulates population growth rebound beyond normal numbers in targeted populations of kangaroos; that they then justify their industry and culls on the basis that the animals are too populous and a pest; that the Australian public would not allow the industry to continue if they did not swallow the line that kangaroos are a pest; that although the industry and population culls are justified in order to prevent damage to grasslands and erosion by overgrazing, this is in fact false, and the example is given of kangaroos even at 50 per square km making almost no impact on the land, whereas the sheep that the industry is purportedly saving the land for, devastate it. This is my second article on kangaroo science (see the other one here) and I did not go into it expecting to find such blatant snake oil passing for research among a very small cognoscenti, but here it is. I’m was surprised as you will be. Also, one final word, even if the industry is correct in saying that it artificially boosts kangaroo numbers in order to have enough kangaroos to ‘harvest’, as I say at the end, that does not apply to all populations and that does not mean that the strategy is not causing population crashes and demographic anomalies, for reasons that I raise in this article. If you think there are fewer kangaroos around, you may well be right and have a better idea than the industry itself. (This researched article by evolutionary sociologist Sheila Newman [1] was originally submitted to the South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022 ([email protected]) on behalf of the Australian Wildlife Protection Council on 7 October 2017.)

Contents

IS THE COMMERCIAL KANGAROO INDUSTRY ACTUALLY FARMING KANGAROOS AND AT HIGHER DENSITY THAN NATURAL?
POPULATION THEORY
Demographic brakes
Demographic accelerators
More demographic Brakes: Sexual Segregation/Gender pathways
What are the consequences of loss of sex-specific territory?
How far do kangaroos migrate? 9
ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE MITIGATION & ROO DENSITY: THEORY & EXPERIMENT
KANGAROO WELFARE PROPOSAL THAT WOULD ALSO REGULATE FERTILITY IN ACCORDANCE WITH CARRYING CAPACITY:
Proposal of wider definition of welfare
Refugia to be permanent and extended to harbour permanent stable populations
Public attitudes led by the industry and its scientists
Is contempt for kangaroos necessary for the commercial industry to continue business as usual?
REFERENCES

IS THE COMMERCIAL KANGAROO INDUSTRY ACTUALLY FARMING KANGAROOS AND AT HIGHER DENSITY THAN NATURAL?

The literature indicates an understanding among scientists researching in the industry, that these animals are artificially kept by hunting at greater numbers than they would be naturally, in order to both offset the impact of commercial hunting and to keep it going. The numbers are being manipulated upwards, and then the alleged spontaneous overcrowding [2] is being used to justify arguments for the need for a commercial industry and damage mitigation culling. [3] If the calculations of the program of artificial ‘management’ of kangaroo populations are correct in estimating kangaroo populations too numerous, then the management amounts to a form of farming, which is preventing kangaroos from exercising normal patterns of social organisation that would limit fertility opportunities.

“Caughley (1976, 1977) outlined the principles of wildlife harvesting. To harvest a sustained yield from a population at steady density, it must first be manipulated in some way to promote its rate of increase (e.g. reduce it below its ecological carrying capacity or supplement its resources). The second of the four theoretical principles he identified was that: “Harvesting theory rests upon populations being regulated by some combination of density-dependent reproduction and mortality. This has been described well for a number of large mammals (Fowler 1987). Harvest mortality is seen as being compensated to some extent by lowered natural mortality rates and increased fecundity rates.” (Caughley (1976, 1977) cited by Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg, (1999), “Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia.” [4]

“Even as a pest, however, kangaroos are still a resource, and they can only be that while they remain numerous, a necessity which puts an economic value on their conservation.” (Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg, (1999), “Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia,”pp.38-39. ) [5]

The notion that commercial hunting is causing increases in kangaroo populations has also been articulated in an objective evaluation:

The percentage change in the population (Appendix figure b) was plotted against the percentage of the population harvested. This was a gross test of whether the harvest was regulating growth in the population. In fact, if anything, there tended to be a positive relationship between harvest rate and rate of increase, which could be interpreted to indicate that culling at recent/present levels enhances the growth rate of the population.

This result does not necessarily mean that harvesting has a causal effect on population increase. However, harvesting does mimic some of the conditions produced by natural perturbations, such as die-off of males in drought, from which the kangaroo population is adapted to recover quickly by enhancing its rate of increase. (Penny Olsen and Mike Braysher) [6]

If real kangaroo numbers are being manipulated upwards by commercial management practices, then the commercial hunting industry will not welcome my observations about how kangaroo populations may spontaneously reduce their fertility, in the absence of shooting. These observations are more likely to serve the kangaroo conservation, animal welfare, and tourism concerns.

According to predator-prey theory, predators adapt to prey numbers. Would the kangaroo harvesting industry consider this adaptation, rather than continuing to farm? Like so many industries, it seems to want more growth, so more kangaroos and more territory: The South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022 indicates plans to increase the commercial kangaroo meat catchment area by formally extending it [7] and by getting more farmers to work for it by shooting kangaroos on their property, through a DEWNR regional staff program. [8]

POPULATION THEORY

The population model and assumptions in the South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022 seem to have a number of theoretical flaws and biases, some of which at least have been pointed out in recent research.

There seems to be an underlying assumption in the population model used (exclusively predator/prey biomass dependent) [9] that all the kangaroo species under consideration breed to the maximum (W.D. Hamilton (1964)) unless prevented from doing so by natural catastrophe, big predators and human culls for commercial or other reasons. Whilst Hamilton’s rules for inclusive fitness and Dawkins’ theory on selfish genes are very important, they should not cause a failure to investigate countervailing forces to genes seeking maximum reproduction.
Gordon Grigg (1998) has even asserted that, since the creation of the dingo proof fence, the South Australian kangaroo population would have grown 40% bigger, were it not for human culling. [10] Pople, Grigg (2000) [11] later decided that dingos ‘regulated’ kangaroos, rather than ‘limited’ them. However the exclusive model of a predator/prey biomass dependent kangaroo population did not permit the consideration of other factors regulating kangaroo populations.
The South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022 has also asserted that European land-use would have increased the amount of water available to kangaroos, and therefore the number of kangaroos. This has been questioned on grounds that feral animals do, but kangaroos don’t, rely on artificially created water sources. [12] European land-use may really have destroyed as many or more water sources for kangaroos as it has theoretically created. In South Australia sheep-grazing and rabbits have desertified parts of the state. [13] Desertification and competition for habitat with sheep and cattle and human activity has decreased the habitat available for kangaroos.
Demographic brakes
Outside the predator/prey model, countervailing forces to reproductive urges exist in the subtleties of endogamy (breeding within a local population) and exogamy (incest avoidance) [14] which also limit fertility opportunities, including, in some species, sexual maturation. [15] For instance, in order to attempt to breed, young male kangaroos need to leave their natal group because there is only room for one dominant male breeder and he monopolises all the females unless another mature male successfully challenges him. The dispersing young male may not find a group within his range of migration that has available females or he may fail to successfully compete for them.
Aspects of cooperative breeding may be present in kangaroos and delay sexual maturation in both males and females. This could explain some variations in breeding ages in different populations and environmental circumstances. [16] These should limit fertility opportunities in a natural ecology, i.e. one not impacted by the commercial management considerations noted above or by other major disorganising human impact, such as new roads, fences, and suburbs.

My theory is that undisturbed local populations respond to environmental cues like rainfall and soil richness by a variation in genetic algorithms for fertility. Sexual maturation and pairing is limited by the availability of territory. In humans these algorithms translate into kinship and marriage rules that vary in degree according to rainfall and other environmental cues. [17] In humans, the regulating effects of endogamy are part of mainstream French demographic theory [18] but have little profile in the Anglosphere. Extreme examples of this exist in humans – for instance royal dynasties - and other species – for instance naked mole-rats - and have the effect of consolidating territory and restricting enlargement of the community sharing that territory. [19]

Demographic accelerators

But we have abundant examples demonstrating that, because of hunting and culling, more fertility opportunities are being created for younger, smaller animals

“Commercial harvesting may affect the demography (e.g. size, growth, distribution and birth and death rates) of harvested kangaroo populations by selecting the larger kangaroos, which tend to be the older males (Allendorf et al. 2008). Commercially harvested populations may have a lower average age compared to that of unharvested populations. The average size of kangaroos in harvested populations may be lower, and populations contain a higher proportion of young animals than unharvested populations, but these differences are lessened during drought when older animals are lost from unharvested populations (Pople 1996).The sex bias (i.e. the percentage of harvested kangaroos that are male) has increased from 60-70% male to 92-97% male for red and western grey kangaroos (DEWNR 2017). The increase in sex-bias is due, in part, to some meat processing plants only accepting male carcasses. The sex bias of the euro harvest has historically been higher due to the small size of female euros, but the sex-bias has also increased from 75-95% male to 99% male (DEWNR 2017).” (South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022) [20]

Massive bias for shooting large males leaves remaining, smaller males, without the suppression of sexual maturation (possibly) or sexual behaviour (definitely) that those large competitive mature males would have caused. The remaining smaller males do not need to disperse from their natal group to breed. The natal groups may be so fragmented that most adult relatives have disappeared and the remaining young does and bucks may lack the normal incest avoidance due to disturbance of Westermarck relationships. [21] It is also possible that the presence of mature related males and females may delay sexual maturity or behaviour in female kangaroos, so that loss of big males and females would then also favour early breeding in young does.
Penny Olsen and Mike Braysher have also noted this effect:

“However, harvesting does mimic some of the conditions produced by natural perturbations, such as die-off of males in drought, from which the kangaroo population is adapted to recover quickly by enhancing its rate of increase.” (Penny Olsen and Mike Braysher) [22]

And the industry knows that hunting affects populations upwards:

“To harvest a sustained yield from a population at steady density, it must first be manipulated in some way to promote its rate of increase (e.g. reduce it below its ecological carrying capacity or supplement its resources).” (Caughley (1976, 1977) cited by Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg (1999) [23]

If there were really a desire to achieve smaller kangaroo populations naturally, then a number of things could be tried. Assuming that the disorganisation caused by hunting and culling is responsible for managing the population numbers upwards, we might create reliably safe areas and corridors local to various kangaroo clans in the harvesting area so that they could adapt to protect dependent young and females, encouraging the Westermarck effect, normalisation of patterns of incest avoidance and dispersal, weight, rate of maturity, sexual competition and fertility response to environment. If this succeeded it would reduce both the perceived need and the opportunity for the commercial industry as well as damaging the kangaroo’s reputation for overpopulation. These refugia could also provide a safe and permanent environment away from the massive human population expansion and landscape transformation which also uproots, scatters and kills kangaroos.

More demographic Brakes: Sexual Segregation/Gender pathways

Some other variations in population organisation can affect fertility opportunities. Examples include separate gender pathways, with 'sexual segregation' where male and female populations live apart.

“Sexual segregation is a phenomenon seen in many species, with segregation occurring along behavioural or ecological dimensions. Sexual segregation in western grey and red kangaroos in semi - arid Victoria has been the subject of intensive investigations since the last review.

[…] MacFarlane and Coulson (2005) investigated the effects of mating activity, group […] composition, spatial distribution and habitat selection on sexual segregation in western grey and red kangaroos. The synchrony and timing of mating activity was seen to influence the magnitude and timing of social segregation in these species, with mixed sex groups predominating during the breeding season. …

… Spatial segregation and habitat segregation were also seen. Although the magnitude of these types of segregation were weaker, they were both still significantly influenced by synchrony and timing of breeding.

Coulson et al. (2006) discussed sexual segregation at three levels (habitat, social and dietary) and confirmed that both size and sex influence segregation.

MacFarlane and Coulson (2009) showed that the need for males to maintain contact with other males (perhaps to develop important fighting skills, evaluate rivals and establish a dominance hierarchy) might also promote sexual segregation.

Similarly Nave (2002) reported evidence of sexual segregation in eastern grey kangaroos in Victoria.” (Review of Scientific Literature Relevant to the Commercial Harvest Management of Kangaroos http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/resources/nature/110641Kangaroolitreview.pdf)

What are the consequences of loss of sex-specific territory?

Years ago, Glen Marshall, who was a teacher and missionary in PNG between 1960 and 1974 [24] told me that fertility shot up when churches convinced men and women to cohabit, where previously they had separate land and houses. I was later able to study this concept in detail and wrote a book about how Pacific Islander land-tenure and inheritance traditions kept populations within the limits of small islands. [25]
What effect could reduction of habitat, forced cohabitation, forcibly changed migration routes and wiped out populations have on male/female kangaroo territory and consequently on fertility opportunities?
How do we know that the female bias (recorded by Fletcher, 2006) at Tinbinburra, for instance, is not due to that area being female territory?
How far do kangaroos migrate?
Another aspect of population theory is migration.
The South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022 estimates red kangaroo ranges based on Croft 1991 and Pople et al 2006.[26] Should these range estimates take into account recent MT DNA studies, such as Zenger et al DNA study 2003. [27] Zenga et al look at Eastern kangaroo populations, but I note that South Australia uses the NSW model anyway. [28] Clegg et al, emphasise

“Significant genetic differentiation of mtDNA, implies demographic differentiation of the female portion of the population and demographically separated parts of the population should be managed as separate units. [29]

Underestimation of real geographical range risks skewing the estimation of population numbers by confusing seasonal or reactive population movement with permanent populations: Pople et al (2007) [30] acknowledged that temporal and spatial kangaroo population movement had been ignored in the models and it does not seem to be taken into consideration in the South Australian Management Plan yet. Pople et al did not, however, consider the discrete dynamics within local populations and their interactions with other populations within the overall area. They were looking at a commercial hunting model seeking to predict when and where populations would be grouped together and easier to harvest economically.
Effectively the counting method and population model in the South Australian Management plan seems to assume an undifferentiated ‘metapopulation’ and to ignore the local populations that actually make up that metapopulation and which have their own local characteristics of endogamy, exogamy, dispersal and philopatrie within that metapopulation.

“A metapopulation is a population of populations (Hanski & Gilpin 1991). Wright (1940) laid the groundwork for a genetic theory of metapopulations, while Andrewartha & Birch (1954, Ch.14) did the same for metapopulation dynamics: 'A natural population occupying any considerable area will be made up of a number of local populations or colonies. In different localities the trend may be going in different directions at the same time.' They emphasized the influence of dispersal on the number of patches occupied at any given time.” (Caughley, 1994). [31]

ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE MITIGATION & ROO DENSITY: THEORY & EXPERIMENT

Goal: […] to provide an alternative management option for reducing the damage to land condition caused by overabundant kangaroos. (The South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022, p.4. ) [32]

The South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022 seems to rely, as mentioned above, on a predator/prey, biomass dependent population theory, and to cite a small group of scientists who have apparently confirmed this theory time and again, describing how kangaroos wear down grasslands and then starve to death. One scientist not cited is ACT Ecologist Donald Fletcher, whose extensive field research failed to confirm the theory. The ACT Kangaroo Management model relies on the same literature as the South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan, and the model is one of high fertility sedentary populations that rarely migrate, grazing grasslands down to the subsoil. But, in his 2006 thesis, p. 237, Senior ACT Kangaroo management ecologist, Donald Fletcher, tested this model and found, to his surprise, that,

"The study did not provide evidence that high densities of kangaroos reduce groundcover to the levels where erosion can accelerate.

Unmanaged kangaroo populations did not necessarily result in low levels of ground cover. Groundcover had a positive but not significant relationship to kangaroo density, with the highest cover at the wettest site where kangaroo density was highest. Weather has an important influence on groundcover."

"The results from the study as a whole indicate that unmanaged kangaroo populations did not necessarily result in unacceptably low levels of ground cover." (Don Fletcher.) [33]

Grigg is also recorded virtually dismissing the environmental reason for culling kangaroos.

“Grigg strongly queries whether the cull is needed for its stated purpose - to protect sheep grazing land from the ravages caused by large numbers of kangaroos. If anything, according to the observations made by the team, sheep damage the land more than the kangaroos. For example, in an area east of Lake Frome, where kangaroo densities are as high as 50 per square kilometre and sheep numbers are comparatively low, the land is not degraded. It is in other places where sheep numbers are high and kangaroo numbers are low.” (Lowe, 1998.) [34]

KANGAROO WELFARE PROPOSAL THAT WOULD ALSO REGULATE FERTILITY IN ACCORDANCE WITH CARRYING CAPACITY:

Kangaroo welfare has been limited in the South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022 to two extremes: avoiding extinction [35] and how kangaroos may be killed. [36]

Proposal of wider definition of welfare

I would like to propose a much wider definition of welfare to include the well-being and preservation of the structure of the families and clans of this social animal, with a full age and sex cohort. This would restore and preserve their natural social behaviour and fertility regulation, with the associated incest avoidance, mating competition, and reduction of mating opportunity among smaller, younger males and females. It would probably also mean that age of sexual maturation (possibly physiological as well as behavioural) would be delayed. Infant survival would probably improve if kangaroos had the opportunity to experience and learn nurturing skills from experienced older kangaroos, instead of joeys being raised by very young kangaroos in fragmented populations.
Accordingly, since the kangaroo meat industry greatly favours the killing of the largest male kangaroos, the impact of this industry needs to be limited, and/or its selection preferences need to change.

Refugia to be permanent and extended to harbour permanent stable populations

Refugia have been mentioned in the South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022, as part of mitigating commercial harvest impacts. It seems, however, that no permanent safe places for kangaroo clans and mobs have been designated outside national parks. [37] Even the national parks are subject to population culls. I would propose that permanent and extensive refugia connected by safe corridors be designated for the welfare of kangaroos and with the purpose of allowing their populations to regain and retain their natural structure.

If commercial hunting were to persist, it would be with a much lower target ‘harvest’ and only take place in areas outside substantial refugia. Although Grigg has suggested that kangaroos don’t compete with sheep and don’t damage pasture, farmers might perceive a benefit from smaller kangaroo populations than those that have to date been cultivated by the commercial kangaroo hunting industry. Tourism would presumably benefit from the experience people enjoy in seeing healthy, confident, stable kangaroo clans and mobs undisturbed in their natural habitats.

Public attitudes led by the industry and its scientists

Public attitudes led by the industry and its scientists. Kangaroos have been given an undeservedly bad name by the commercial kangaroo industry and many of the scientific papers, as ‘pests’ in plague proportions. Yet my citations from the literature, beginning with (Caughley (1976, 1977) cited by Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg (1999), in “Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia,” show that the industry knowingly artificially stimulates those numbers by hunting. Kangaroo science writers freely use the term ‘pests’ to describe kangaroos. For instance Pople and Grigg (1999) provide a good example of what seems the cynical use of this term, [38] when we know that Grigg was unconvinced that culls are needed for their stated purpose – to protect sheep grazing land from the ravages [purportedly] caused by large numbers of kangaroos – when he says that sheep do far more damage and kangaroos little if any. [39]

Is contempt for kangaroos necessary for the commercial industry to continue business as usual?

“The main reason an industry is approved is almost certainly because of the extent to which kangaroos are regarded as a pest.” [40] (Pople and Grigg 1999)

Indeed, Australians have tended to absorb this cynical attitude as it has been handed down by the authorities and promoted by the press. Politicians implement it. The ‘pest’ epithet has excused reducing the notion of ‘welfare’ for kangaroos to whether the species might become extinct or the manner of a kangaroo’s final moments, ignoring the quality of most of its life. It has probably stimulated public contempt for kangaroos which has resulted in growing reports of mutilations and tortures, and the tendency to grant cull permits to farmers without inspecting the reasons. The public need to be properly educated to understand that kangaroos don’t normally overpopulate their ranges and also don’t damage their habitat. They also need to be given permission to enjoy and respect these attractive and social animals, which form an integral part of Australia’s extraordinary evolution and natural endowment.

ENDNOTES
[2] “Harvesting will invariably involve some injuries and protracted deaths. However, this must be weighed up against compensatory mortality, reduction in other forms of killing when an animal changes status from a pest to a resource, the quality of life for individuals in dense, unharvested populations during droughts and alternative land uses if harvesting is not allowed.” Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg,“Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia,” Department of Zoology, The University of Queensland, for Environment Australia, August 1999, p.2).
[3] “Australia's problem with abundant kangaroo species: Australia has about 50 species of marsupial mammals of the Super-family Macropodoidea. Most of them have declined in the 210 or so years since Europeans settled here, some to extinction. Some, however, have thrived to the extent that they are now among the most abundant large mammals anywhere. The abundant species, particularly the three largest species of kangaroo, are so numerous in many rural areas that they are regarded as pests, in competition with sheep and cattle for pasture which, in a dry country like Australia, is always in short supply.
The abundance of kangaroos, with their high conservation status, and the recognition that they are regarded as a serious pest by graziers gives Australian conservation agencies a problem. Not surprisingly, all Australian macropods are protected by law, as is almost all Australian wildlife. The solution to this conflict has been to issue limited permits which allow kangaroos and some of the most numerous wallabies to be shot as pests. However, most of the control is effected through permitting a regulated commercial harvest of kangaroos and wallabies for meat and for leather.
Any commercial harvest or pest destruction of wildlife is likely to be controversial, especially if the subjects are as appealing and as well known as Australia's kangaroos. That kangaroos are the most readily identified symbol of Australia, and that they are harvested by shooting, only exacerbates the concern, and it is not uncommon for there to be organised public campaigns against their commercial use. […]
[…] The individual aims of the Management Programs differ a little between the different States but, in general, all identify the need to balance land-use requirements against the necessity to ensure continuation of self perpetuating kangaroo populations of all species.” Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg,“Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia,” Department of Zoology, The University of Queensland, for Environment Australia, August 1999, p.2).

[4] Caughley (1976, 1977) cited by Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg, “Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia,” Department of Zoology, The University of Queensland, for Environment Australia, August 1999, p.5

[5] Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg , Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia, Department of Zoology, The University of Queensland, for Environment Australia, August 1999, pp.38-39.

[6] Penny Olsen and Mike Braysher, Situation Analysis Report: Current state of scientific knowledge on kangaroos in the environment, including ecological and economic impact and effect of culling, for the Kangaroo Management Advisory Committee, November 2000, p. 192.
[7] “However, within the life of this plan, new Commercial Harvest Sub-Regions may be opened, on the basis of population surveys, in areas of South Australia where commercial harvesting of kangaroos is not currently occurring. The Commonwealth Government will be advised of the quotas annually through the Quota Report before implementation.” South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022, p.10
[8] “Action 8: Educate DEWNR regional staff and land managers on best practice for combining the use of commercial and non-commercial techniques for kangaroo management.
Performance indicators:
8.1 Develop decision-making tools to assist regional staff in providing advice to land managers on commercial vs.non-commercial kangaroo management.
8.2 Any landholder seeking a destruction permit for more than a specified number of kangaroos (determined seasonally) within a CHMR is asked to consider using the commercial harvest option in the first instance. In such circumstances, Permits to Destroy Wildlife (Kangaroos) are only offered after the commercial harvest option has been declined.
8.3 Investigate the introduction of formal training requirements (like those undertaken by Kangaroo Field Processors) for landholders requesting a non-commercial Permit to Destroy Wildlife (Kangaroos).
8.4 Investigate alternative ways to integrate commercial and non-commercial kangaroo management options to mitigate damage to land condition.” (South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022, p.8.)
[9] As well as being a biomass model, this also talks of how hunting stimulates population growth, which contradicts what Grigg says in the note below re cull reducing population numbers. Simplification of population dynamics in pasture biomass model: “Briefly, changes in kangaroo numbers are modelled as a function of pasture biomass which, in turn, is determined by recent rainfall, past pasture biomass and the density of kangaroos (and livestock) consuming the pasture. Harvesting obviously reduces kangaroo numbers, but the reduced density results in higher pasture biomass and therefore higher rates of increase of kangaroos. This improvement in environmental conditions for a population, which without harvesting has no long-term trend, is a basic requirement for the sustainability of a harvest. The population can be simulated 10,000 times over a 20 year period. Each run is different as, every three months, rainfall is drawn from a probability distribution using the average and standard deviation for rainfall in western NSW and thus reflects the uncertain food supply in this arid environment. Population size is also estimated with uncertainty by aerial surveys, and so this too was drawn from a probability distribution using the average and standard deviation associated with aerial surveys (Pople 2008). The population was harvested at an annual rate of 15 percent or less if it was below a particular threshold.” (Source: Appendix 3, pp31-32, South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022.)
[10] “Without the annual cull, kangaroo numbers would jump by 30 to 40 per cent, he says. The dingo once kept kangaroo numbers in check. Now fences keep the dingoes out of pastoral areas. ‘We’ve become the predator instead,’ Grigg says. […]” “Grigg’s team estimates that in the 20 years from 1978-1998, the number of red kangaroos in the pastoral zone has risen from about 1 million to 1.6 million, while the number of western greys has remained steady around the 400 000 mark.” (Ian Lowe, “South Australia’s great kangaroo count,” ‘Forum’, New Scientist, 12 September 1998. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15921516-600-south-australias-great-kangaroo-count/).
[11] A. R. Pople, G. C. Grigg, S. C. Cairns, L. A. Beard and P. Alexander, “Trends in the numbers of red kangaroos and emus on either side of the South Australian dingo fence: evidence for predator regulation?” Wildlife Research 27(3) 269 – 276, 2000, http://www.publish.csiro.au/wr/WR99030
[12] Letnic, Mike ; Laffan, Shawn ; Greenville, Aaron ; Russell, Benjamin ; Mitchell, Bruce ; Fleming, Peter, “Artificial watering points are focal points for activity by an invasive herbivore but not native herbivores in conservation reserves in arid Australia,” Biodiversity and Conservation, 2015, Vol.24(1), pp.1-16.
[13] Gordon Grigg, “Kangaroo harvesting and the conservation of the sheep rangelands,” Keynote address, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales conference on Kangaroos, May 14, 1988.
[14] “[Inbreeding is] a lesser problem in natural populations because mating between close relatives is uncommon and individuals often actively avoid mating with close relatives (Ralls, Harvey & Lyles 1986). Caughley, Directions in Conservation, Journal of animal ecology, 1994 Vol: 63 Issue: 2 Page: 215 -244, 1994, pp220-221. Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law: The rules of animal and human populations, Countershock Press, 2013., Chapter 4, cites:
Marie Charpentier, Patricia Peignot, Martine Hossaert-McKey, Olivier Gimenez, Joanna M. Setchell, and E. Jean Wickings., 2005. “Constraints on control: factors influencing reproductive success in male mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx).” Behavioral Ecology 16:614–623 ’Several studies have shown that maternal relatives avoid mating with one another (rhesus macaques: Smith, 1995; red colobus, Procolobus badius temminckii: Starin, 2001; Japanese macaques: Takahata et al., 2002; and see for review: Moore, 1993; van Noordwijk and van Schaik, 2004), but less is known concerning patterns of inbreeding avoidance between paternal relatives (but see Alberts, 1999). In this study, we showed that the probability of paternity by a dominant male decreased when he was related to the dam at R = .5 (the highest possible relatedness coefficient in our study). Smith (1995) showed in rhesus macaques that the intensity of inbreeding avoidance was directly correlated with the closeness of kinship, as in the mandrills studied here.’
Some other references on incest avoidance in multiple species from the same chapter:
Hoier, S., 2003. “Father absence and the age of menarch, A test of four evolutionary models,” Human Nature, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 209–233, Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York.
Cockburn A, Osmond HL, Mulder RA, Green DJ, Douvle MC, 2003. Divorce, dispersal and incest avoidance in the cooperatively breeding superb fairy-wren Malurus cyaneus. J Anim Ecol 185 72:189–202;
Griffin AS, Pemberton JM, Brotherton PNM, McIlrath G, Gaynor D, Kansky R, O'Riain J, Clutton-Brock TH, 2003. A genetic analysis of breeding success in the cooperative meerkat (Suricata suricatta). Behav Ecol 14:472–480;
Mateo JM, 2003. Kin recognition in ground squirrels and other rodents. J Mammal 84:1163–1181;
Pusey A, Wolf M, 1996. Inbreeding avoidance in animals. Trends Ecol Evol 11:201–206;
Stow AJ, Sunnucks P, 2004. Inbreeding avoidance in Cunningham's skinks (Egernia cunninghami) in natural and fragmented habitat. Mol Ecol 13:443–447;
Yu XD, Sun RY, Fang JM, 2004. Effect of kinship on social behaviors in Brandt's voles (Microtus brandti). J Ethol 22:17–22.
[15] See introduction and most chapters in Nancy G. Solomon and Jeffrey A. French, Cooperative Breeding in mammals, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
See “Chapter 4: Towards a new social theory on population density and geometric patterning” in Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013, (http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/6537280, https://www.amazon.com.au/Demography-Territory-Law-animal-populations-ebook/dp/B00ALE8YSA, http://www.lulu.com/au/en/shop/sheila-newman/demography-territory-law-rules-of-animal-human-populations/paperback/product-21735874.html) and Sheila Newman, The Urge to Disperse, Candobetter Press, 2012. (https://www.amazon.com/Urge-Disperse-Sheila-Newman/dp/1446784134).
[16] “Kangaroos at risk,” gives examples of variations in breeding age in different populations. http://www.kangaroosatrisk.net/2-biology--population-ecology.html
[17] “Chapter 4: Towards a new social theory on population density and geometric patterning” in Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013, (http://catalogue.nla.gov.au/Record/6537280, https://www.amazon.com.au/Demography-Territory-Law-animal-populations-ebook/dp/B00ALE8YSA, http://www.lulu.com/au/en/shop/sheila-newman/demography-territory-law-rules-of-animal-human-populations/paperback/product-21735874.html) and Sheila Newman, The Urge to Disperse, Candobetter Press, 2012. (https://www.amazon.com/Urge-Disperse-Sheila-Newman/dp/1446784134).
[18] For instance, references to Jaques Dupaquier and to Massimo Livi-Bacci in Henri Leridon, "Théories de la fécondité : des démographes sous l’influence ?" Population, 2015/2 (Vol. 70) Éditeur : Institut national d'études démographiques (INED), France.

[19] An extreme human example of incestuous kinship rules is that of the Egyptian pharaohs, although the reader might recognise that all ruling classes tend to be of small numbers and to marry closely within their rank. See, on various kinship rules, including the pharaohs, Sheila Newman, "Overpopulation: Endogamy,Exogamy and fertility opportunity theory," http://candobetter.net/node/3197.
The naked mole-rat is an extreme example in another species, where the female head of the community (the queen) chooses one of her sons as her ‘husband’ and the rest of her children remain sexually immature helpers. These communities (which may contain more than 80 members) are also extremely xenophobic towards other communities of naked mole-rats. Furthermore, they are extremely inbred but very hardy. See Christopher G. Faulkes and David H. Abbott, “The Physiology of a reproductive dictatorship: Regulation of male and female reproduction by a single breeding female in colonies of naked mole-rats,” in Nancy G. Solomon and Jeffrey A. French, (eds.) Cooperative Breeding in Mammals, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
[20] South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022, p.25

[21] The Westermarck Effect: Towards the end of the 19th century, Finnish sociologist, Edvard Westermarck, whilst conducting research into endogamy and exogamy, discovered a phenomenon which came to be called the Westermarck effect. He was able to show that incest avoidance applied to people raised together, whether or not they were genetically related. The Westermarck Effect could also be an explanation for apparent incest avoidance in many species. Since animals (and many humans) cannot be sure of their actual DNA relationship to siblings and other clan members, it might be more accurate to attribute their incest avoidance to an avoidance of members of their species who they were brought up closely with. I discuss this in Sheila Newman, Chapter 4 of Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013.
[22]Penny Olsen and Mike Braysher, Situation Analysis Report: Current state of scientific knowledge on kangaroos in the environment, including ecological and economic impact and effect of culling, for the Kangaroo Management Advisory Committee, November 2000, p. 192.
[23] (Caughley (1976, 1977) cited by Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg, “Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia,” Department of Zoology, The University of Queensland, for Environment Australia, August 1999, p.5).
[24] Sheila Newman, “Suppression of matriarchal societies and population stability in Papua New Guinea 1960-1974,” Interview with Glen Marshall, /node/4382. Although this may seem an anecdotal sort of interview, separate men’s and women’s land in Micronesia, even today, and elsewhere, is a well-established fact in anthropology.
[25] Sheila Newman, Demography Territory Law: The Rules of Animal and Human Populations, Countershock Press, 2013. This also explores the Easter Island population crash narrative.
[26]“Red kangaroos have sedentary populations that move within home ranges of variable size (typical weekly home range size may be up to 560 hectares or 5.6km 2 (Croft 1991). Red kangaroos range more widely in response to drought and can move a long way to access the better feed. Movements of up to 30km to obtain fresh pasture growth in response to rainfall have been recorded (Croft 1991). Occasional long-distance movements (i.e. >100km) of mature individuals of both sexes have been recorded (Bailey & Best 1992). Long-distance movements of red kangaroos to access better feed have also been found in the long-term aerial monitoring dataset for South Australia (Pople et al. 2006).” South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022, p.21.

[27] Zenger et al DNA study 2003: (Heredity (2003) 91, 153–162. doi:10.1038/sj.hdy.6800293, K R Zenger, M D B Eldridge and D W Cooper, "Intraspecific variation, sex-biased dispersal and phylogeography of the eastern grey kangaroo (Macropus giganteus)." http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v91/n2/full/6800293a.html
[28] “South Australia has adopted the harvest thresholds method used in New South Wales and described in the New South Wales Commercial Kangaroo Harvest Management Plan 2017-2022. The following explanation on harvest threshold setting by SR McLeod and AR Pople (2011), is taken from the NSW Commercial Kangaroo Harvest Management Plan.” (Appendix 3: Setting and applying harvest Thresholds, South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022, p.28.)
[29] Clegg et al, Molecular population genetics of the red kangaroo (Macropus rufus):mtDNA variation, Molecular Ecology>, 7, 679-686, (1998), p.685.

[30]“Whether the goal is conservation, sustainable use or pest control, wildlife management ideally requires regularly updated information on a population's size and distribution. Most frequently, population size is estimated from sample counts throughout a study area, but the pattern of distribution is either ignored or considered subjectively. Typically, management actions such as setting appropriate seasonal harvest limits or culling are triggered by estimates of the total population without sufficient regard to its spatial and temporal distribution. This means that management actions may be focused inappropriately, leading to wastage of money and outcomes that may be seriously suboptimal. Management actions would benefit from readily available and up-to-date information about the distribution of wildlife populations within a region, as well as the total population size. To do this, point-based sampling data need to be translated to density surfaces. Density surfaces modelled using geostatistics or habitat models have been produced from ground and airborne surveys of marine (e.g. Augustin et al. 1998; Rivoirard et al. 2000) and terrestrial (e.g. Campbell & Borner 1995; Rempel & Kushneriuk 2003) wildlife populations. However, few, if any, studies have modelled wildlife density over a large spatial and temporal extent, thereby providing local estimates of population size to inform more focused management actions.” (Pople, Phinn, Menke, Grigg, Possingham, McAlpine, “Spatial patterns of kangaroo density across the South Australian pastoral zone over 26 years: aggregation during drought and suggestions of long distance movement,” Journal of Applied Ecology 2007 44, 1068–1079)
[31] Caughley, Directions in Conservation Biology, Journal of Animal Ecology, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Apr., 1994), pp. 215-244, p. 221)

[32] Context of quote: “Widespread changes to the environment since European settlement have changed the abundance of many native species. Many species have declined in number, and some are now threatened. Other species have been able to adapt to the changes and can exploit the opportunities provided by altered habitats. These species – including kangaroos – are now present in larger numbers, or more widespread distributions, than before.
Kangaroos can be in conflict with various land uses and the objectives for which land is being managed. When this conflict occurs, kangaroos can cause detrimental impacts that may be environmental, economic, or social in nature. This plan adopts the ethic that the mitigation of environmental, economic, and social impacts of kangaroos should be allowed, provided it takes place in a manner that is humane and does not pose a risk to the long-term conservation of kangaroos.
The NPW Act provides for the destruction of kangaroos for the purposes of mitigating or preventing damage. This process is managed outside of the commercial harvest through the permit to destroy wildlife system and DEWNR’s non-commercial destruction policy, which guide staff in the issuing of non-commercial destruction permits. A landholder can apply for a permit to destroy a specified number of kangaroos when kangaroos are causing, or are likely to cause, detrimental impacts. Kangaroos culled under a Permit to Destroy Wildlife (Kangaroos) must be killed following the Non-Commercial Code.”
[33] Don Fletcher, Population Dynamics of Eastern Grey Kangaroos in Temperate Grasslands, Institute of Applied Ecology, University of Canberra, 2006 (PhD thesis), p.231.

[34] Ian Lowe, “South Australia’s great kangaroo count,” ‘Forum’, New Scientist, 12 September 1998. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15921516-600-south-australias-great-kangaroo-count/
[35] “Extinction is highly unlikely for this simulated population unless there is some combination of low numbers, catastrophic weather and unsustainable harvesting (i.e. much greater than 15 percent). A more useful measure of threshold performance is the probability of the population dropping to a relatively low density. This can be calculated as the proportion of the 10,000 simulation runs where the population falls below particular densities. Thresholds can be expressed in terms of standard deviations (SDs) below long-term average density for a kangaroo management zone. That way, the aim of the threshold harvest strategy is to keep the harvested population above historically low density.” (Appendix 3: Setting and applying harvest Thresholds, South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022, p.31.)
[36] 4.1 in South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022.

[37] It is not clear to me what the 'refugia' available to kangaroos are in South Australia, from this draft management plan. Are they established places where not shooting takes place, within the commercial shooting areas, or are they inferred as areas that, more or less randomly, so unpredictably, escape shooting in any month or year? Or are they simply areas that are hard for shooters to reach? From the draft review: "Commercial harvest is patchy within management regions and properties, leaving areas of unharvested refuge habitat." (p.25); "The extent of harvesting is patchy, and refugia (e.g. areas that are not harvested) or areas that are lightly harvested occur across the harvested area." Are there any reliably safe areas local to various clans in the harvesting area to which they might habituate so that they could adapt to protect dependent young etc?
[38] Here is the context: “In the management of kangaroos, their multiple status as pest, resource and national symbol are all tightly interwoven. The main reason an industry is approved is almost certainly because of the extent to which kangaroos are regarded as a pest; and their commercialisation has provided a self-funding pest control agent. Had kangaroos had no commercial value, pest control would have been a direct and continuing cost to graziers. On the other hand, their status as national symbol, with a very high conservation value, has guaranteed sufficient public interest for government conservation agencies to implement extensive monitoring and regulatory procedures which ensure that annual harvests are conservative.
The present situation is a compromise which has been responsive primarily to the opposing demands for much greater pest control on one hand and complete protection on the other.
Even as a pest, however, kangaroos are still a resource, and they can only be that while they remain numerous, a necessity which puts an economic value on their conservation.” Source: Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg, “Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia,” Department of Zoology, The University of Queensland, for Environment Australia, August 1999, pp.38-39.
[39] “Grigg strongly queries whether the cull is needed for its stated purpose—to protect sheep grazing land from the ravages caused by large numbers of kangaroos. If anything, according to the observations made by the team, sheep damage the land more than the kangaroos. For example, in an area east of Lake Frome, where kangaroo densities are as high as 50 per square kilometre and sheep numbers are comparatively low, the land is not degraded. It is in other places where sheep numbers are high and kangaroo numbers are low.” Ian Lowe, “South Australia’s great kangaroo count,” ‘Forum’, New Scientist, 12 September 1998. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg15921516-600-south-australias-great-kangaroo-count/
[40] Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg, “Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia,” Department of Zoology, The University of Queensland, for Environment Australia, August 1999, pp.38-39.

REFERENCES

Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg,“Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia,” Department of Zoology, The University of Queensland, for Environment Australia, August 1999
Penny Olsen and Mike Braysher, Situation Analysis Report: Current state of scientific knowledge on kangaroos in the environment, including ecological and economic impact and effect of culling, for the Kangaroo Management Advisory Committee, November 2000
South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022
Appendix 3: Setting and applying harvest Thresholds, South Australian Commercial Kangaroo Management Plan 2018-2022
Ian Lowe, “South Australia’s great kangaroo count,” ‘Forum’, New Scientist, 12 September 1998.
A.R. Pople, G. C. Grigg, S. C. Cairns, L. A. Beard and P. Alexander, “Trends in the numbers of red kangaroos and emus on either side of the South Australian dingo fence: evidence for predator regulation?” Wildlife Research 27(3) 269 – 276, 2000
Letnic, Mike ; Laffan, Shawn ; Greenville, Aaron ; Russell, Benjamin ; Mitchell, Bruce ; Fleming, Peter, “Artificial watering points are focal points for activity by an invasive herbivore but not native herbivores in conservation reserves in arid Australia,” Biodiversity and Conservation, 2015, Vol.24(1), pp.1-16.
Gordon Grigg, “Kangaroo harvesting and the conservation of the sheep rangelands,” Keynote address, Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales conference on Kangaroos, May 14, 1988.
Caughley, Directions in Conservation, Journal of animal ecology, 1994 Vol: 63 Issue: 2 Page: 215 -244, 1994
Sheila Newman, Demography, Territory, Law: The rules of animal and human populations, Countershock Press, 2013.
Marie Charpentier, Patricia Peignot, Martine Hossaert-McKey, Olivier Gimenez, Joanna M. Setchell, and E. Jean Wickings., 2005. “Constraints on control: factors influencing reproductive success in male mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx).” Behavioral Ecology 16:614
Hoier, S., 2003. “Father absence and the age of menarch, A test of four evolutionary models,” Human Nature, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 209–233, Walter de Gruyter, Inc., New York.
Cockburn A, Osmond HL, Mulder RA, Green DJ, Douvle MC, 2003. Divorce, dispersal and incest avoidance in the cooperatively breeding superb fairy-wren Malurus cyaneus. J Anim Ecol 185 72:189–202
Griffin AS, Pemberton JM, Brotherton PNM, McIlrath G, Gaynor D, Kansky R, O'Riain J, Clutton-Brock TH, 2003. A genetic analysis of breeding success in the cooperative meerkat (Suricata suricatta). Behav Ecol 14:472–480
Mateo JM, 2003. Kin recognition in ground squirrels and other rodents. J Mammal 84:1163–1181
Pusey A, Wolf M, 1996. Inbreeding avoidance in animals. Trends Ecol Evol 11:201–206
Stow AJ, Sunnucks P, 2004. Inbreeding avoidance in Cunningham's skinks (Egernia cunninghami) in natural and fragmented habitat. Mol Ecol 13:443–447
Yu XD, Sun RY, Fang JM, 2004. Effect of kinship on social behaviors in Brandt's voles (Microtus brandti). J Ethol 22:17–22.
Nancy G. Solomon and Jeffrey A. French, Cooperative Breeding in mammals, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Sheila Newman, The Urge to Disperse, Candobetter Press, 2012.
“Kangaroos at risk,” http://www.kangaroosatrisk.net/2-biology--population-ecology.html
Henri Leridon, "Théories de la fécondité : des démographes sous l’influence ?" Population, 2015/2 (Vol. 70) Éditeur : Institut national d'études démographiques (INED), France.

Sheila Newman, "Overpopulation: Endogamy, Exogamy and fertility opportunity theory," http://candobetter.net/node/3197.
Christopher G. Faulkes and David H. Abbott, “The Physiology of a reproductive dictatorship: Regulation of male and female reproduction by a single breeding female in colonies of naked mole-rats,” in Nancy G. Solomon and Jeffrey A. French, (eds.) Cooperative Breeding in Mammals, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Sheila Newman, “Suppression of matriarchal societies and population stability in Papua New Guinea 1960-1974,” Interview with Glen Marshall,” /node/4382.
Caughley (1976, 1977) cited by Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg, “Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia,” Department of Zoology, The University of Queensland, for Environment Australia, August 1999, p.5).
Caughley, “Directions in Conservation Biology,” Journal of Animal Ecology, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Apr., 1994), pp. 215-244.
Tony Pople and Gordon Grigg, “Commercial harvesting of Kangaroos in Australia”, Department of Zoology, The University of Queensland, for Environment Australia, August 1999
Zenger et al, DNA study 2003: Heredity (2003) 91, 153–162. doi:10.1038/sj.hdy.6800293, K R Zenger, M D B Eldridge and D W Cooper, "Intraspecific variation, sex-biased dispersal and phylogeography of the eastern grey kangaroo (Macropus giganteus)." http://www.nature.com/hdy/journal/v91/n2/full/6800293a.html
Pople, Phinn, Menke, Grigg, Possingham, McAlpine, “Spatial patterns of kangaroo density across the South Australian pastoral zone over 26 years: aggregation during drought and suggestions of long distance movement,” Journal of Applied Ecology 2007, 44, 1068–1079.
Don Fletcher, Population Dynamics of Eastern Grey Kangaroos in Temperate Grasslands, Institute of Applied Ecology University of Canberra, 2006 (PhD thesis).
Ian Lowe, “South Australia’s great kangaroo count,” ‘Forum’, New Scientist, 12 September 1998.

Can you have a memory if you don’t have a brain? The question has been answered with the discovery that brainless slime moulds use excreted chemicals as a memory system. The finding by University of Sydney researchers is strong support for the theory that the first step toward the evolution of memory was the use of feedback from chemicals.

“We have shown for the first time that a single-celled organism with no brain uses an external spatial memory to navigate through a complex environment,” said Christopher Reid from the University’s School of Biological Sciences.

The research, led by Reid, with colleagues from the School and a colleague from Toulouse University, is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal on 9 October.

“Our discovery is evidence of how the memory of multi-cellular organisms may have evolved – by using external chemical trails in the environment before the development of internal memory systems,” said Reid.

“Results from insect studies, for example ants leaving pheromone trails, have already challenged the assumption that navigation requires learning or a sophisticated spatial awareness. We’ve now gone one better and shown that even an organism without a nervous system can navigate a complex environment, with the help of externalized memory.”

The research method was inspired by robots designed to respond only to feedback from their immediate environment to navigate obstacles and avoid becoming trapped. This ‘reactive navigation’ method allows robots to navigate without a programmed map or the ability to build one and slime moulds use the same process.

The researchers used a classic test of independent navigational ability, commonly used in robotics, requiring the slime mould to navigate its way out of a U-shaped barrier.

As the slime mould (Physarum polycephalum) moves it leaves behind a thick mat of non-living, translucent, extracellular slime.

When it is foraging the slime mould avoids areas that it has already ‘slimed’ suggesting it can sense extracellular slime upon contact and will recognise and avoid areas it has already explored.

“This shows it is using a form of external spatial memory to more efficiently explore its environment,” said Reid.

“We then upped the ante for the slime moulds by challenging them with the U-shaped trap problem to test their navigational ability in a more complex situation than foraging. We found that, as we had predicted, its success was greatly dependent on being able to apply its external spatial memory to navigate its way out of the trap.”

In simple environments the use of externalized spatial memory is not necessary for effective navigation but in more complex situations it significantly enhances the organism’s chance of success, just as it does for robots using reactive navigation.

You can download a pdf with a full article about the experiments here.
A video is also available, showing the slime finding its way around the obstacle, on the website at Sydney University.

National Academy of Science member and Distinguished biologist and Professor in Geoscience endorses David Ray Griffin's work exposing the truth of 9/11

By Lynn Margulis

This article was first published as "Two hit, three down, the biggest lie," [pdf file] in the Rock Creek Free Press.

Two Hit, Three Down - The Biggest Lie

National Academy of Science member and Distinguished Professor endorses
David Ray Griffin’s work exposing the truth of 9/11

By Lynn Margulis

I comment here on the nanotechnology aspect of Jerry Mazza’s masterful review (Rock Creek Free Press, January 2010, page 6) of David Ray Griffin’s extraordinary 2009 book, The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False.

By the time we (Dorion Sagan – my eldest son and Sciencewriters partner – and I) met David Griffin in 2003 in his native habitat at the Center for Process Studies (which is on the campus of the Claremont School of Theology in southern California), he had written over two dozen books, none of which I had ever read or even heard of. We immensely enjoyed a three-day scientific-philosophical meeting on the Darwinian-evolutionary view of life that had been organized by Griffin’s sage mentor, the sweet-tempered but razor sharp, Jimmy Carter-sounding, octogenarian professor emeritus and director, John B. Cobb, Jr. The results of this fascinating meeting have since been published (Cobb, ed. 2008).

At that meeting, Griffin’s talk was sober, academic, competent, scholarly – and entirely new to me: Christian theology in a much broader philosophical context than any to which I had ever been exposed. The science-friendly philosophical outlook Griffin espoused apparently was developed by Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), the English mathematician-philosopher who became a Harvard professor, or by Cobb. Why would I have known anything about this theological-philosophical work? My own expertise after all is in protoctist and organellar genetics. With close colleagues I reconstruct the origin and evolution of nucleated cells in the Proterozoic Eon. Where I understood DRG’s talk at all, he made clear to me his honesty. Truth, especially scientifically/empirically established truth, seemed intrinsic to his Christianity. As a typical agnostic scientist overtly critical of organized, and even disorganized, religion, I was surprised by the scientific commitment to approaching empirical truth in a religious context rather than the usual authority-pleasing consensus.

Griffin went on to elaborate that, although as a Whiteheadian he embraces the methods and results of science, he is critical of the entire international scientific enterprise as generally practiced today. Not only do scientists extrapolate their intrinsically specialized empirical knowledge into intellectual territory where it does not belong, but they don’t heed Whitehead’s recognition that, after all, scientists –like all people – have an emotional life and an inner spirit. The acclaimed “objectivity of science,” on close scholarly inspection (by, say, Cobb, Griffin and other Whiteheadians), often translates into tribalism, jingoism, naiveté, denial of obvious truths, uncritical service to The State, and other forms of profoundly dangerous ignorance. Scientists, as do all groups of people, share unstated philosophical assumptions. For example, they not only have faith in the consistency and “knowability” of the real world, but they often assume that the concrete particulars of the world are adequately described by the abstractions that have proved useful for limited purposes in their own disciplines – an assumption that Whitehead called the “fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”

On the return trip east from this meeting, I read, non-stop, DRG’s seminal book on 9/11, The New Pearl Harbor. Since then I have watched the “aging theologian” (his self-description as quipped in the excellent video-graphed lecture “9/11 and Nationalist Faith” (or was it 9/11: Let’s Get Empirical? Both are highly recommended) metamorphose from a compelling, careful scholar to a brave and extraordinary orator (but still careful scholar). Griffin has become a superb politician with a single agenda item: We must re-open public inquiry into the events of September 11, 2001, especially the collapse of the World Trade Center.

I had personal reasons to be interested in this issue: I had watched a member of our Geosciences Department (University of Massachusetts-Amherst) realize that morning that his beloved brother was on the doomed Boston-to-LA “hijacked plane.” Two of my sons and both of their mates were on Manhattan Island on 9/11. My grandson, Tonio Sagan, the Problemaddicts hiphop lyricist and leader, was released from his Springfield probationary status to me that evening. Like everyone else close to the action, my global consciousness was instantly and permanently altered on that date. But I happily remained an academic evolutionist. So, I ask here, what happened to the “aging theologian” to cause such a radical shift in his personal and professional life: from ivory tower scholar expert in theology and philosophy to detective, orator, and political activist?

I will not try to answer this question, but will simply state: Griffin has become a scientist, in my view, and even more a science educator. He has undertaken the search for the solution to a relatively trivial scientific problem and has found it in the literature and through discussions with experts. Along with solving the scientific problem, however, he has burdened his life with a colossal science-education problem.

In spite of his authorship of eight excellent books on the subject, he is not winning the education skirmish. This is not surprising, because science education battles – I can tell you this from chronic painful experience – are far more intrinsically difficult to win than those of mere science. I illustrate this point with regard to the destruction of the World Trade Center.

The scientific problem:

Why did three World Trade Center buildings (#1,#2 and #7) collapse on 9/11, after two (and only two) of them were hit by “hijacked airplanes”?

The scientific answer:

Because all three buildings were destroyed by carefully planned, orchestrated and executed controlled demolition. Ignited by incendiaries (such as thermate) and high explosives (including nanothermite), the steel columns were selectively melted in a brilliantly-timed controlled demolition. Two 110-story buildings (towers 1&2), plus one 47-floor building (WTC 7), were induced to collapse at gravitationally accelerated rates in an operation planned and carried out by insiders. The apparent hijacking of airliners and the crashing of them into the Twin Towers were intrinsic parts of the operation, which together provided a basis for claiming that the buildings were brought down by Muslim terrorists. The buildings’ steel columns, which would have provided irrefutable physical evidence of the use of explosives, were quickly removed from the scene of the crime.

Impeccable logic and addiction to reading inspire this truth-seeker. With his practiced scientific mind (he has organized professional philosophy-of-science conferences and published several books on this theme) coupled with investigation of evidence from not only us scientists but from witnesses, documentary film-makers, scholars, architects and engineers et al., he concludes that the virtuall free-fall collapse of the three (not two) World Trade Center buildings in 2001 was a premeditated, exquisitely executed operation. He recognized this “tragic publicity stunt” (my claim) was likely intended to provide the “new Pearl Harbor” desired by radical neoconservatives, some of whom had become members of the Bush administration (see Ch. 6 of Griffin’s 2006 book, Christian Faith and the Truth behind 9/11).

The far-more-difficult science-education problem:

The persistent problem is how to wake up public awareness, especially in the global scientifically literate public, of the overwhelming evidence that the three buildings collapsed by controlled demolition. (Much has been published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, see Ch. 4 of The Mysterious Collapse). We, on the basis of hard evidence, must conclude that the petroleum fires related to the aircraft crashes were irrelevant (except perhaps as a cover story).We citizens of Earth within and beyond the boundaries of the United States who demand detailed evidence for extraordinary claims agree with Griffin: the rapid destruction of New York skyscrapers on September 11, 2001 was planned and executed by people inside the US government.

Griffin’s eight books about 9/11 (listed below) are his call to his kind of truly patriotic action. They show in appropriate detail, accurately documented, that the official government conspiracy theory can not be correct journalistically, scientifically, and morally. Muslim airline hijackers, in short, never triggered the collapse of high-rise steel-framed buildings at gravitational acceleration into neat removable pieces. They didn’t remove the remaining steel girders before they could be studied as evidence for a huge crime. They were not described in telephone calls by passengers and crew members from the four airliners –all the evidence for al Qaeda hijackers on the planes dissipates under close inspection (for example, even the FBI now admits that the reported cell phone calls from 25,000 to 40,000 feet never happened).

And to me the most compelling and obviously incorrect accusation is that Muslim hijackers caused the pulverization of cement high-rise office buildings into tons of dust that contain crystalline thermate and other minute metallic particles not found in the usual charred remains of fire rubble. Minute iron-aluminum-molybdenum rich spheres, steel perforated with swiss-cheese type holes and large quantities of unreacted nanothermite are not components of petroleum office fires. Besides the fact that building fire temperatures, even if fed by jet-fuel, could not have risen beyond 1,800°F, and hence they would be nowhere close to the of 2,800°F needed to melt iron (or for molybdenum that melts at 4,753°F). The facile appeal to the presence of gypsum (calcium sulfate) in the office wall-board fails to explain why sulfur was found in the intergranular structure of pieces of steel. (There was no detection of calcium!) The New York Times, in a rare example of honest reporting about the WTC collapses, called this “the deepest mystery uncovered in the investigation”).

Nor could “Muslim terrorists” have accessed and then planted in these buildings huge quantities of nanothermite. This recently developed high explosive was developed mainly in secrecy by professional scientists and engineers who enjoy government grant support for “nanotechnology” by the military. Significant quantities of red-gray crystals of nanothermite have been found in several independently collected samples of WTC dust studied by a team headed by physicist Steven Jones, formerly of Brigham Young University. Niels Harrit, a University of Copenhagen professor of chemistry who specializes in nanochemistry, is the first author of a peer-reviewed paper reporting this team’s results.

The two mutually exclusive “9/11-conspiracy theories”, the patently and nefariously absurd tale our government imposes on us and the true, criminal story yet to be entirely brought to light, deserve the attention of all literate people. Remember: Only two airplanes struck, but three buildings collapsed at free-fall velocities on that same day. Begin with Mazza’s review and Griffin’s book that detail the nanothermite scientific studies. Examine the government’s reluctant late admission that WTC 7 came down in absolute free fall for over two seconds to realize this is a scientific impossibility unless all the steel columns were partitioned into neat, removable pieces by explosives. Find out what happened to two men, Hess and Jennings, trapped inside WT7 in its abortive explosion before noon. Truth here, as David Ray Griffin tries to tell it, is (at least to me) stranger and far more dramatic than even the best fiction.

Suggested sources of evidence and explanation:
John B. Cobb, Jr. 2008 Back to Darwin: A richer account of evolution, Erdmann Publishers
Michael Ruppert 2009 Collapse: Peak oil, global politics, depletion of world resources and the end of “civilization” Chelsea Green Publishing Co. White River Junction VT
Lecutre by D.R. Griffin and M. Ruppert on DVDs.
DRG:
1. The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11 (2004)
2. The 9/11 Commission Report: Omissions and Distortions (2005)
3. Christian Faith and the Truth Behind 9/11: A Call to Reflection and Action (2006)
4. 9/11 and the American Empire: Intellectuals Speak Out (2006, co-edited with Peter Dale Scott)
5. Debunking 9/11 Debunking: An Answer to Popular Mechanics and Other Defenders of the Official Conspiracy Theory (2007)
6. 9/11 Contradictions: An Open Letter to Congress and the Press (2008)
7. The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-Up, and the Exposé (2008).
8. The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 Is Unscientific and False (2009)

SOURCE AND NOTES:

This article was "Two hit, three down, the biggest lie," [pdf file] first published in February 2010 issue of the Rock Creek Free Press.

What underlies the Australian establishment's antipathy to and ignorance of nature? The conflict between religion and science, and the roles played by 'colonial rationalists', the Catholic Church, and the State in the suppression of flourishing scientific debate and celebration of Australia's unique ecology. How controversy preceding the passage of the Victorian Education Act 1872 (which was intended to secularise education) derived from a rearguard defence against the growing influence of Darwin, to the lasting demotion of natural science and respect for environment and other creatures in mass media and government. This article was published in response to "Anglican Church Australia Overpopulated discussion paper - entire," and comments by Vivienne Ortega and John Marlowe

This article was originally written as background research for an as yet unpublished theory on the politics of natural science and environmentalism in Australia. I dusted it off in response to the comments above. Hope people will find it interesting.

Paradise revealed

Colin Finney in Paradise Revealed, Natural History in Nineteenth-Century Australia [1], writes that science gained ground in school curriculums during the 1890s. He attributes this trend to the role in its encouragement played by a group of liberal and influential schoolmasters associated with the council of the University of Melbourne. He names the Reverend Dr John Bromby, ex-headmaster of Melbourne Grammar School, and Dr Charles Pearson, royal commissioner, former lecturer in history at the University, and headmaster of the Presbyterian Ladies College, as important in this group. The group’s efforts were supported by friendly University professors who did duty as matriculation examiners. Not surprisingly, he notes that the teacher group was “often more sympathetic to science than were University professors such as Frederick McCoy…”

A Pageant of conflict between religion and science

A G Austin, author of Australian Education, 1788-1900,[2] describes the conflict between religion and science, and the roles played by 'colonial rationalists', the Catholic Church, and the State. He attributes much of the controversy preceding the passage of the Victorian Education Act 1872 (which was intended to secularise education) to a rearguard defence against the growing influence of Lyell, Darwin, Huxley and Spencer. He writes of a 'spate of lectures and sermons on the topic' delivered by such as Professor Frederick McCoy. Dr John Bromby (mentioned above, for the other side) delivered a competing lecture at the same venue:

"This procession of learned divines and professors across the stage of the Princess Theatre in the winter of 1869 seems somewhat ludicrous until we realize that these men were not engaged in any academic reconstruction of the English debate, but were doing serious battle against a potent force at work in their own midst, for rationalism had been an active and vocal movement in Victoria for a number of years."[3]

"In ever-hardening opposition to the rise of secularism stood the Roman Catholic Church which, almost alone, made up that group of denominationalists who were prepared to reject the secularists' claims as a matter of principle… Irish English and Spanish as they were, the bishops had had to adapt their European outlook to the concerns of the impoverished minority group which made up their flock."

Establishment of Catholic School system

But money and power were also at stake. The cost of renouncing State aid was too great for most religions and they did not seriously pursue the notion of establishing separate religious schools. But the Catholic Church stood its ground and set about establishing its own school system.

"This restatement of Catholic ideals, dogma and discipline could not help but collide, head-on with the whole liberal ethos of the late nineteenth century. Worse, this collision of ideologies would inevitably expose and inflame the sectarian bitterness and bigotry which has always formed an ugly scar across the Australian mind…"[4]

"It had always been there … but in the closing stages of this struggle between Church and State it assumed a dimension which these three writers have not fully appreciated. It produced the form in which the secular Actis finally passed into law - designed, not to drive religion out of the State schools, but to prevent the Roman Catholic Church from continuing its assault upon the liberal, secular State with the aid of the State's own resources."[5]

The question that arises in my mind is whether this historic situation has prevailed and the Catholic education system has continued to reject Darwinism at all but a superficial level. It certainly seems to be the case that the Catholic Church, at least in Australia and America, plays a special role in discouraging effective population policies to restrain growth by encouraging high migration, discouraging contraception and maintaining a weak and superficial line on ecology and the environment. [6] If my observation is true, then here is a further explanation of the extreme sensitivity and poor viability of debating and designing effective population policy in Australia and other countries with similar histories.

Secularists vs Sectarians in 19th Century Australia

In his fascinating history, A. G. Austin, Australian Education 1788-1900, Church, State and Public Education in Colonial Australia,[7], writes that, in the 19th Century, apart from Edward Cohen's contribution, the secularist agenda to remove religion from education came from a small 'heterogenous' group. Cohen was a leading member of the Victorian Jewish community and a member of the Victorian Legislative Assembly, who said:

"This being a new and free country, let us leave behind us all the superstitious nonsense of the old world. Let us meet here on common ground. Let us send all our children to the same schools, irrespective of creed or country; and let them there be brought up in that creed of kindliness and friendliness which will make them forget that their other creeds divide them."

Austin asserts that historical study of the development in English thought through Lyell, Darwin, Huxley and Spencer, that focuses on New South Wales to the exclusion of Victoria, would fail to note the much earlier and vigorous manifestation of Darwinian secular thought in that State.

Victoria's rationalist movement, the press and popular debate

"Controversy was very lively in Victoria in the 1860s; to postpone its arrival until the 1870s is to miss the point of many of the arguments which preceded the passage of the Victorian [secular] Education Act of 1872." [8]

In support of this he cites the "spate of lectures and sermons which were delivered on this topic towards the end of the 1860s." Once again the name of Professor Frederick McCoy is raised, with reference to his lengthy condemnations of Huxley and Darwin's theories. Apparently McCoy and the pro-Darwinist Reverend Dr J E Bromby both appeared before a large audience at the Princess Theatre, Melbourne on 28 June 1869. Two weeks later Bromby's bishop, Bishop Perry appeared at the same venue to retrieve the church's reputation. He delivered a two hour lecture on the theme that "the Bible has nothing to fear from Science."[9]

Austin makes the point that "the procession of learned divines and professors across the stage of the Princess Theatre in the winter of 1869" was not just part of a debating festival. These men were seriously engaged in defending their positions as the rationalist movement steadily gained ground.

Austin cites E.W. Cole, owner of the "famous" Bourke Street Book Arcade," as renowned for "daily suffering Persecution for his heretical writings, which the boldest Melbourne papers are afraid to advertise."[10] Cole’s publications Religions of the World, (1866); The Real Place in History of Jesus and Paul (1867) and Essay on the Deluge (1869) were all published in Melbourne. A.G. Austin also mentions Henry Keylock Rusden, "renegade son of the vicar of East Maitland and radical brother of George William Rusden", who was a pro-Christian but non-sectarian agent of the National [Education] Board for the whole of eastern Australia.[11]

In 1871 Henry Keylock Rusden said this to Bishop Perry during a public encounter:

"...education is most valuable in so far as it is moral ... Morality is based - not upon religion - but upon men's social nature and necessities ... That very religious fervour which formerly prompted our ancestors to incremate each other for being conscientious - to subordinate real and natural to imaginary and supernatural duty - is precisely that which now interposes the principal obstacle to the establishment here of an effective (or secular) system of education ... The suppression of the broad distinction between moral and religious needs and objects is so general, that I grieve to say that I know no school in Melbourne much superior to the streets for acquiring moral training. [12]

Austin thinks Victoria was most influenced by the rationalist movement of all the colonies in Australia. Major Victorian newspapers, including The Age and the Argus, supported the rationalists' position on secularisation of education, if not their arguments. At the national level the Sydney Morning Herald, the Queensland Guardian, the Brisbane Courier, the South Australian Register, and the West Australian all eventually came to the same point of view.

George Higinbothom, editor of the Argus, lawyer, Member of Parliament, Minister of the Crown, Royal Commissioner and Chief Justice)[13] stood somewhere between the rationalists and the more conservative non-sectarianists. The latter believed that education should be Christian, but not sectarian. As chairman of the Royal Commission into the Common Schools Act, he delivered a report denouncing a system that left more than half the colony's children completely unschooled. He introduced a bill for compulsory elementary school education. In the belief that religion was an essential part of education, the bill also sought to allow clergy to give non-sectarian religious instruction in schools at allotted periods.

The Age and the Argus both urged Higinbotham to go the whole hog and support the "absolutely secular" position.

Giving his reasons as due to the "ecclesiastical rivalry and dissension and ... the unpatriotic policy pursued by the leading Christian sects" he gave his support to a completely sectarian system.

The famous politician, Henry Parkes, who spent five terms as Premier of Victoria, and was a major legislator on educational issues, came out in defence of non-sectarian religious instruction, apparently in the spirit of ecumenicism. [14]

The Roman Catholic Church was by far the most discountenanced by the secular education movement. It was the only one to stand its ground. In the face of the threat of withdrawal of government grants for school salaries from denominational schools, all the other religions demurred to the secularist non-sectarian option.[15]

Austin describes the Roman Catholic hierarchy as "Irish, English and Spanish ... the bishops had had to adapt their European outlook to the concerns of the impoverished minority group which made up their flock." This meant that they had become increasingly reliant on government handouts.

"By the [eighteen] sixties and seventies the ultimate result of this process [of concentrating power in the new secular school boards] was becoming clear: the Roman Catholic schools were gradually being squeezed out of the government system..."

[16]

Pope Pius IX, papal infallibility, and Darwin

The Catholic stance was bolstered by the publication of Pope Pius IX's encyclical Quanta Cura, which included the famous Syllabus of Errors. Darwinism historian, David L Hull, "Darwinism and Historiography" in The Comparative Reception of Darwinism[17], describes Pius IX as having put his stamp on one of the most scurrilous anti-Darwinian attacks to appear in the French language. Paul Collins in God's Earth, Religion as if Matter Really Mattered, p.32 attributes moves toward papal centralism and the declaration of papal primacy and infallibility in 1870 as in part reactions to Darwin's Origin of Species. He writes that in the Syllabus Pius IX stated his intention not to "reconcile himself with progress, liberalism and with modern civilization."[18] Austin writes that this restatement of Catholic ideals, dogma and discipline could not help but collide, head-on, with the whole liberal ethos of the late nineteenth century.[19]

In Australia as in Europe, this new statement of Papal infallibility and inflexible opposition to liberalism was experienced as a political threat by non-Catholics (and doubtless by Catholics as well.) In response to the Vatican decisions of 1870, Gladstone wrote:

"For the first time in my life I shall be obliged to talk about popery; for it would be a scandal to call the religion they are manufacturing at Rome by the same name as that of Pascal ... The truth is that ultramontanism is an anti-social power, and never has it more un-disguisedly assumed that character than in the Syllabus... The proclamation of Infallibility I must own I look upon as the most portentous (taking them singly), of all events in the history of the Christian church." (A.G. Austin, citing John Morely, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone.) [20]

Interestingly, the Australian environmentalist Catholic priest, Paul Collins, author of God's Earth, Religion as if Matter really mattered, later wrote a book called Papal Power challenging these very foundations of modern papal authority. (He then quit the priesthood before he was pushed.)

Catholic and Protestant jockeying for political power

A G Austin writes of such a sense of danger to liberalism as being all the stronger in Australia because they felt that "the enemy was so much more numerous".

"Never less than one-fifth of the population, and by 1870 close to one-third, the Catholics in Australia had always represented to the Protestant mind a very real political danger. Victoria's Registrar-General was not exaggerating when he told an audience at St. Patrick's College that he had 'seen it stated in broad print ... that Catholics are striving with all their might to obtain more than their due share of influence in the Legislature, and interest in the patronage of the Government." (A.G. Austin citing W.H. Archer, Noctes Catholicae)[21]

Sixteen years later a Ministry under Irish patriot Gavan Duffy had lost government over a scandal where the Premier was charged as having abused privilege by preferring to appoint Irish Catholics for official appointments.

That same year, 1872, some voices, including that of the Protestant Rev. F.B. Bryce of Orange, suggested some sort of funding compromise in order to avoid totally alienating Catholics and giving rise to a dual system. But it was Parkes, the once persistent defender of non-sectarian religious instruction in schools, who finally drafted and sponsored the Bill to abolish all financial aid to denominational schools in 1879. All other States followed suit in time.[22]

The Victorian State elections in 1872 degenerated into a sectarian struggle between Catholics and non-Catholics. The Argus came out in defence of the government. In Sydney the scenario was repeated in the 1880s. In Western Australia, where Sir John Forrest had a very good relationship with the influential Bishop Gibney, the abolishing of State aid to denominational schools did not occur until 1895. The protestant majority in that State had become increasingly vocal about its desire for this to happen and the elections of 1894 focused on the issue. [23]

A.G. Austin comments on the number of

"gold-seekers [who] came swarming into the colony [of Western Australia] from the depression-ridden colonies in the east. Overnight Western Australia was confronted with the eastern influences from which it had been so effectively insulated ..." "With every increase in eastern migration [Forrest's Catholic pacifying] policies became less acceptable, and his opposition more formidable."[24],

And so the Australia-wide independent Catholic education system was established on a basis of historic bitterness and alienation from the rest of the Australian community and within a strongly anti-Darwinian culture. Providing a lower cost private education, it continues to service a growing part of the Australian community, many of whom are not Catholics. It seems likely that these beginnings may have created barriers for the Australian Catholic Church to formulate a system for understanding Australia's ecological uniqueness. The Church's stance on birth control is well known to be prejudiced against artificial methods of contraception and abortion, although its policy on population control could be said, at least at an interpersonal level, to be Malthusian. However the Catholic Church, in Australia and elsewhere, has become an ardent advocate of open borders and high migration. Naturally Catholic migrants and refugees are more likely to receive assistance to migrate from the Church than others. The demographic impact of this on political processes affecting population policies has to be considered.

On the question of the Church's treatment of ecological imperatives Collins, writing as a priest:

"This [Cartesian-Newtonian] mechanistic view of nature has achieved a great deal for science and it still predominates in contemporary scientific thinking. But the mechanistic approach sees nature as a vast, inanimate storehouse of useable 'resources' that are there to be exploited for the short-term advantage of humankind. It is this attitude that has brought us to the tragic and disastrous environmental impasse that we face today. ... Up until the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the revival of the philosophy of Aquinas was mandated for the training of priests by the Vatican, it was largely the philosophy of Descartes that was taught to student priests in European seminaries. Theology easily embraced the Cartesian notion of the mind in the machine because for so long the Christian tradition had been subverted by Neo-Platonic dualism. Descartes was simply the tag end of Platonism.

"In the Christian communities, such issues [as ecology] are usually swept aside by seemingly more anthropocentric issues, such as social justice and the liberation and development of the third world. ... Muscle-flexing by churches from developing countries led to a highlighting of the centrality of human liberation that largely pushed ecological theology into the background.... I mention the fate of ecology at the WCC Assembly because it is typical of the way the churches deal with this topic. It is good as window dressing, but it is not really taken seriously. ..."[25]

Perhaps in fact the problem for the Catholic Church and for much of the non-Catholic population as well, lies in the lack of a Darwinian or equivalent concept of or aesthetic appreciation for our biosphere. How widespread is the Cartesian view of a mechanistic universe of soul-less animal servants and incidental flora and fauna peripheral to the human system in contributing to educated as well as unsophisticated [by which I don't mean hunter-gatherer] peoples' world views?

NOTES

[1] Colin Finney, Paradise Revealed, Natural History in Nineteenth-Century Australia, Museum of Victoria, Melbourne, 1993, p 123
[2] A G Austin, Australian Education, 1788-1900, Church, State and Public Education in colonial Australia, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd, Melbourne, 1961, pp 181-204
[3] A G Austin, Australian Education, 1788-1900, Church, State and Public Education in colonial Australia, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd, Melbourne, 1961, p 183
[4] A G Austin, Australian Education, 1788-1900, Church, State and Public Education in colonial Australia, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd, Melbourne, 1961, p 196
[5] A G Austin, Australian Education, 1788-1900, Church, State and Public Education in colonial Australia, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd, Melbourne, 1961, p 197
[6] Paul Collins, God's Earth, Religion as if matter really mattered, Dove, Harper Collins, 1995, pp140-141, "In the Christian communities such issues are usually swept aside by seemingly more pressing anthropocentric issues, such as social justice and the liberation and development of the third world. … Muscle flexing by churches from developing countries led to a highlighting of the centrality of human liberation that largely pushed ecological theology into the background. .. [Ecology] is good as window dressing, but it is not really taken seriously. The seemingly incurable anthropocentrism of the churches means that the call to protect nature is soon swamped by the pressing reality of human needs. Human development quickly takes over from ecological conservation."
[7] A. G. Austin, Australian Education 1788-1900, Church, State and Public Education in Colonial Australia, Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, Ltd, 1961) p. 181.

[8] Ibid

[9] A.G. Austin, Op. Cit., p. 182 citing C. Perry, Science and the Bible, Melbourne 1869, p.3.

[10] A.G. Austin Op. Cit., p 183, note 38, (citing B.S. Nayler), Cole's, The Battle of Science, Melbourne, 1869, p.12.

[11] A.G. Austin, Op. Cit., p.49 and p.183.

[12] A.G. Austin, Op. Cit., p.184, note 41, citing 'Hoker' (H.K. Rusden), The Bishop of Melbourne's Theory of Education, Melbourne 1871, pp.4, 6.

[13] A.G. Austin, Ibid. p.184)

[14] A.G. Austin, Op. Cit., pp. 189-190)

[15] A.G. Austin, Op. Cit., p. 190 and p.197.

[16] A.G. Austin p. 194, note 72, citing T.P. Fogarty, The Principles, Origins and Development of Catholic Education in Australia, unpublished PHD Thesis, Univ. Melbourne, 1956, p.45.

[17] David L Hull, "Darwinism and Historiography" in Thomas F. Glick, (Ed.), The Comparative Reception of Darwinism, University of Chicago Press, 1988, p.392

[18] Collins, God’s Earth, Op.Cit. p.32, citing Colman T Barry (ed.), Readings in Church History, Vol III, Paramus, N.J.: Newman Press, p.74.)

[19] A.G. Austin, Op. Cit., p.196

[20] A.G. Austin, Op. Cit., p.198, citing John Morely, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, Vol II, pp.508, 510-12.

[21] A.G. Austin Op. Cit., p. 198, note 82, citing W.H. Archer, Noctes Catholicae, p.2.

[22] A.G. Austin Op. Cit., p 203-204.

[23] A.G. Austin Op. Cit., pp 206-216

[24] A.G. Austin Op. Cit., pp 214 -217.

[25] Paul Collins, God’s Earth Religion as if matter really mattered, Dove, Harper Collins, 1995, page number not available here.

English version: "French comic J-M Bigard and Mattieu Kassovitz challenge Official 9/11 story on French Television".

Le 23 octobre 2009 Guillaume Durand, présentateur de l’émission, L’Objet du scandale (France2) reçoit le comédien, Jean-Marie Bigard et le metteur en scène, Kassovitz, soi-disant pour leur permettre de s’exprimer sur leurs doutes de l’explication officielle des événements du 11 septembre 2001 (« 9/11) à New York et en Washington, ou deux tours sont tombées suite à des collisions non-accidentelles de deux avions, et une troisième tour est tombée pour une raison inconnue et la façade du Pentagone serait pénétrée par un avion.

A l'origine l’objet du scandale faisait le pub pour une interview avec Bigard et Kassovitz, plus Éric Laurent – auteur français spécialiste du « 9/11 », habile aux interviews - et Niels Harrit, scientifique danois, professeur de chimie a l’université de Copenhague, qui a écrit un papier affirmant que les décombres de la troisième tour contenaient de la thermite, et qui a paru sur les infos danoises.

Puis, pour des raisons mystérieuses, qui ont étés peu élucidées par Durand à la fin de cette émission, Laurent et Harrit ont été décommandés.

Commentaire sur le débat

Je trouve que Bigard et Kassovitz ont eu la parole coupée par les interruptions de, ou anéantie par, le bruit que faisaient Bonnaud, Gattegno et Durand. Plusieurs fois on leur priait (à Bigard et Kassovitz) ‘juste de’ laisser poser une question ou un argument, mais quand ils essayaient de répondre, on leur faisait taire de nouveau, comme si c'avait été eux qui venaient de parler, en les adressant comme des enfants déraisonnables, tel : « Jean-Marie, oh, Jean-Marie, s’il vous plait ». C’était ignoble.

Vers la fin du programme Guillaume Durand a demandé que Bigard lui laisse la parole, en promettant de laisser répondre Bigard après qu’il eût dit ce qu’il avait à dire. Mais Durand a ensuite terminé l'émission sans donner la parole honnêtement à Bigard.

Bigard et Kassovitz ont été provoques par Frédéric Bonnaud et Hervé Gattegno qui ne me semblaient pas répondre aux quelques mots qu'on nous laissait entendre dire Bigard et Kossovitz, mais qui répondaient plutôt aux commentaires dans des extraits de filmes que l'on faisait passer.

Pourquoi inviter Bigard et Kassovitz si on allait commenter surtout sur des extraits des filmes ?

Cette émission aurait été beaucoup plus valable si Jean-Marie Bigard et Mattieu Kassovitz auraient pu dire pourquoi ils pensaient qu'une nouvelle enquête plus profonde sur 9/11 est nécessaire. On a essaye de les ridiculiser sans leur laisser se défendre. Cela paraissait très lâche !

Frédéric Bonnaud et Hervé Gattegno ne semblaient pas connaitre le sujet parce qu'ils ne faisaient que lancer des accusations en essayaient de faire tant de bruit et tant d'interruptions que l'on n'entendait presque rien de Kassovitz et de Bigard quand ils tentaient de répondre. Ils avaient l’air de vouloir couvrir ce que les autres avaient à dire.

Par exemple, quand Bigard ou Kassovitz demandèrent pourquoi, de toutes les caméscopes vidéos à filmer autour de la Pentagone, on ne semble pas avoir gardé un film utile simple de l’attaque, Bonnaud et Gattegno ont hurlé que seulement des idiots avaient besoin des photos ! Mais la question était de savoir pourquoi ils n'ont pas rendu tous les films pris par leurs caméscopes vidéo ce jour-là disponible pour le public ?

Aussi, l’explication que fournissait Bonnaud ou Gattegno pour le non-affichage de la personne de Bin Laden comme ‘cherché’ pour les crimes de 9/11 pourrait être vrai selon la loi nord-américaine (je ne sais pas) mais n’explique toutefois pas pourquoi alors l’on aurait poursuivi Bin Laden en faisant la guerre en Afghanistan et Iraq, si l’on n’était pas sure qu’il soit le responsable. [1]

Bonnaud et Gattegno ne réussirent pas, quand même, à faire taire Bigard et Kassovitz sur ce fait : Pourquoi n’a-t-on pas fait venir Harrit, le scientifique qui a écrit l’article que tous les ‘Truthers’ citent sur la thermite ? Il est vrai que si le co-auteur – Steven E. Jones - du papier sur la thermite a écrit des articles défendant l’idée que Jésus a paru en Amérique, que c’est déconcertant.[2] Néanmoins, ce n’est pas une façon de répondre a l’argument scientifique. Un homme peut croire aux fées, mais s’il avance une théorie scientifique il faut analyser et critiquer sa théorie sur la science qu’elle se pose dessus, et non pas essayer de la réfuter en changeant le sujet aux fées.

Apres tout, les scientifiques mormons, tout autant que les scientifiques islamiques et les scientifiques chrétiennes arrivent à construire des ponts, des bâtiments, des bombes et des avions tout aussi bien que les scientifiques non-croyants. Les Etats-Unis sont bourrés d’adeptes des religions des plus farfelus mais bourrés aussi de grandes œuvres technologiques.

En conclusion, moi je trouve que l’objet du scandale doit à Jean-Marie Bigard et à Kassovitz une nouvelle session avec les invités originellement prévus – Harrit et Laurent. Cette-fois-ci peut-être faudrait-il utiliser un chronomètre sur l’écran pour contrôler un peu l’allocation des paroles.

Si les medias françaises n’arrivent pas se conduire de façon équitables envers J-M Bigard et Kassovitz ils ne font que donner de la force aux théories de conspiration officielles.

Finalement, merci à France2 toutefois d’avoir essayé. On voit que c’est difficile pour les medias officielles de questionner les explications officielles. C’est pour cela que les medias non-officielles existent.

[1] «Le Bureau d’investigation fédérale dit que l’évidence liant Al-Qaeda et bin Laden aux attentats de septembre 11 est claire et irrécusable. Le gouvernement du Royaume Unie forma la même conclusion sur la culpabilité d’Al Qaeda et Osama bin Laden dans les attentats de septembre 11, 200q. Bin Laden nia au début qu’il y était implique. Le 16 septembre 2001, bin Laden lut une déclaration qui fut émise par Al Jazeera, une chaine satellite du Qatar, niant sa responsabilité.

Dans une vidéo trouve par les forces des E.U. en novembre 2001 a Jalalabad, bin Laden peut être vu en train de discuter l’attentat avec Khaled al-harbi dans une manière qui a indiqué la prescience. L’enregistrement fut émis sur plusieurs chaines d’infos le 13 décembre 2001. La fiabilité de cette traduction a été contestée. Arabiste Dr Abdel El M. Husseini en dit, « Cette traduction est très problématique. Les parties sur lesquelles on pose la culpabilité de bin Laden ne sont pas identiques à l’arabe.
Dans le video de 2004 d’Osama bin Laden, bin Laden laissa tomber ses démentis sans retraire ses precedentes declarations. Il disait qu’il avait lui-même dirige les dix-neuf pirates de l'air. Dans l’enregistrement de 18 minutes, transmit par Al-Jazeera, quatre jours avant l’election présidentielle nord-américaine, bin Laden accusa le President des Etats-Unis, George Bush, de négligence sur le piratage des avions de septembre 11. »

Ma traduction de:

“The Federal Bureau of Investigation has stated that evidence linking Al-Qaeda and bin Laden to the attacks of September 11 is clear and irrefutable. The Government of the United Kingdom reached the same conclusion regarding Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's culpability for the September 11, 2001, attacks. Bin Laden initially denied involvement in the September 11, 2001 attacks. On 16 September 2001, bin Laden read a statement later broadcast by Qatar's Al Jazeera satellite channel denying responsibility for the attack.

In a videotape recovered by US forces in November 2001 in Jalalabad, bin Laden was seen discussing the attack with Khaled al-Harbi in a way that indicates foreknowledge. The tape was broadcast on various news networks on 13 December 2001. The merits of this translation have been disputed. Arabist Dr. Abdel El M. Husseini stated: "This translation is very problematic. At the most important places where it is held to prove the guilt of bin Laden, it is not identical with the Arabic."

In the 2004 Osama bin Laden video, bin Laden abandoned his denials without retracting past statements. In it he stated he had personally directed the nineteen hijackers.[80][90] In the 18-minute tape, played on Al-Jazeera, four days before the American presidential election, bin Laden accused U.S. President George W. Bush of negligence on the hijacking of the planes on September 11.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden

[2] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_E._Jones On dit qu’il a interprété des pistes archéologiques des Mayenne préhistoriques comme témoignant que Jésus Christ aurait visité en Amérique.

English version: "French comic J-M Bigard and Mattieu Kassovitz challenge Official 9/11 story on French Television".

(Photo by Sheila)

This article is a reflection on the nature and efficacy of wildlife research in Australia.

I raise 3 issues:

Can research benefit wildlife? Can research contribute to its survival? Can research engender respect for the intrinsic value of wildlife?

The Nature and efficacy of wildlife reseach in Australia

I’ve asked these questions because, despite over 200 years research into every aspect of the lives of our native animals, the many thousands of papers produced and the many millions of dollars spent, fauna populations continue to decline, the number of endangered and extinct species continues to rise and the attitude of the general public towards indigenous animals slides further into the abyss.

The current state of wildlife is desperate. It’s obvious that Australia is waging a war on wildlife. It’s a dirty war. It’s fueled by research and it will ultimately result in the destruction of all native animals.

You would think that our native fauna would be a precious and vital element of our country’s identity and that these animals would be nurtured and protected, not only for their value to the tourism industry or their role in the maintenance of biodiversity and the fragile ecosystem but for their sheer beauty and the elegance of the way they strive to survive in this harsh and dangerous land.

Two prevailing views

Photo provided by Nikki Sutterby, Co-Ordinator, Australian Society for Kangaroos

Unfortunately this is not the case. Very broadly speaking there are two prevailing views of the environment in Australia and I believe that wildlife research reflects and perpetuates these opposing points of view.

The majority view is that humans always have priority, with the right to live wherever, take whatever and do whatever they want.

Depending on who you are, wildlife is a resource to be exploited, a pest to be exterminated, or a curiosity to be dissected. For hunters and hoons, wildlife is fun to kill and for environmentalists it is sustainable food.

These beliefs are perpetrated by bureaucratic, short sighted, exploitative institutions and individuals who are always looking to maximize revenue, trade and profit. The research of selected experts is used to justify lethal management decisions and to excuse horrific cruelty to animals often by incompetent contract killers.

Taxes pay for this

Members of the CSIRO, National Parks, State and Federal Government agencies, councils, universities and agricultural colleges make up this group. Their work is often supported by the RSPCA and always paid for by the tax payer.

At the laboratory level these institutions also appear to be conspiring to eradicate wildlife by any means. They contract and conduct research into all means of destroying wildlife and habitat - poisons, fencing, traps, snares, starvation and introduced predators just to name a few. This research not only uses native animals in lab and field experiments but has contributed to the suffering and death of millions of native animals in the wild, as has the wide variety of cruel and often lethal tracking devices that have been developed and applied by these institutions for their dubious data collections.

Just last week it was revealed that in NSW, native stripe-faced dunnarts, a species classified as vulnerable, died in an experiment to see how their immune function would be affected by pesticides.

Research favourable to animal welfare

West Aust Black Cockatoos in rehab. Photo from Black Cockatoo Conservation Team

While it is true that there is research favourable to animals; research that proves for instance that kangaroos do not threaten the wheat and wool industries and that they are beneficial to the maintenance of natural vegetation, ethics committees and government departments usually choose to ignore these findings in favour of a quick result and often to cover–up incompetence in other areas of environmental protection or worse, to hide plans for building development.

Wildlife is not and has never been a priority in Australia. Based on the research and recommendations of certain experts, state governments and councils continue to sanction the slaughter of populations of flying foxes, koalas, possums, wallabies and kangaroos. Non-violent solutions, long-term planning and pro-active methods are rejected as thousands of ‘inconvenient’ animals die in holocaust-style mass-murder.

But then, when a species comes to the edge of extinction or contracts a mysterious disease, suddenly there appears to be great concern, with heaps of money flying around, lots of experiments in labs and zoos and plenty of carefully manipulated media attention, often to avert a situation which, with attention to research that had warned of environmental threats, could have been avoided.

Views of the Environment

The minority view of the environment is held by a group of Australians who believe that humans must co-exist with the natural environment for our mutual benefit. People with this view are compassionate, moral people, some of whom rescue and care for injured and dying animals, some carry out vital research of their own. They endure threats and scorn but mainly their work is ignored.

This minority group is long-sighted, non-violent, inclusive and creative. These people always look for the third alternative, they promote moral decision-making based on the interests of all players and they offer solutions that are not based on vested interest.

For example;
Last year when the Department of Defense decided to massacre hundreds of kangaroos trapped at the Belconnen Army Base, no amount of non-lethal, alternative solutions offered by researchers from this minority group could persuade the government to show an atom of compassion for these gentle family-oriented animals - and the world saw the most horrendous, unforgettable slaughter. When populations of animals are trapped in areas without corridors, when there is no proactive planning and when ‘management’ is code for ‘killing’, it’s so easy to justify their elimination.

In SA the kangaroo industry killing quotas are reviewed every 3 years after aerial and ground surveys. Although this is euphemistically called research for sustainable management, kangaroos are not benefitting from this. On top of the commercial kill, they also continue to perish as farmers take more land every year and kill more kangaroos. Independent research shows that genetic diversity is diminishing as a direct result of this slaughter but while the government profits from this industry, this issue will not be addressed.

On a smaller scale, there are the activities of the SA Museum, a centre for biodiversity research in that state. Researchers map declines and extinctions. They claim to contribute to the informed management of wildlife. This is defined as the way to provide for human needs without destroying other species. They are keen to point out that no unnecessary pain or suffering occurs in their research procedures but earlier this year a report revealed that, among other deficiencies in research methodologies, trapped tortoises had drowned during a data collection procedure. The solution to this ‘mistake’ was to invent a snorkel device to stop tortoises drowning.

These are just a few of the myriad ways that research harms wildlife in Australia.

Can research benefit wildlife?

Dr Maxine Piggott

Dr Maxine Piggott received the Voiceless Eureka prize last year for her development of non-invasive DNA analysis to research animal behaviour, genetic variation and population structure in Australian native fauna. Traditional methods of data collection involve trapping and handling animals to get blood and tissue samples. This can cause animals stress, injury or death and there is a risk of females abandoning their young in the process. Currently DNA analysis of hair and faeces samples is mainly used for conservation work and is particularly applicable to the study of rare and endangered species. It is an extremely important example of what research can achieve when animal welfare is made a priority.

Can research contribute to the survival of wildlife?

Recently Dr Mike Letnic, of the University of Sydney carried out observational research into the environmental role of the dingo. He has shown that as Australia's top predator, the dingo, plays an important role in maintaining the balance of nature and that reintroducing or maintaining existing dingo populations could reduce the predatory impacts of foxes on small and medium sized mammals, increasing biodiversity across over 2 million square kilometres of Australia..
Different regions separated by the dingo fence in farmlands of New South Wales and Victoria were compared. In regions where dingoes roamed free, there were far fewer kangaroos and red foxes and small native animals thrived. On the other hand, in lands protected from dingoes, researchers noticed far fewer native animals were present.
Dingoes suffer so much because of human pressure and ignorance – it’s amazing to find a researcher presenting in their favour, with data that hopefully cannot be ignored or distorted. And that’s what so great about this kind of research – it focuses on native animals in the context of their environment while highlighting the detrimental human impact of traditional attitudes and providing a non-lethal proposal that puts humans and wildlife on the same side. Is there a possibility that the Minister for the Environment will recognize the importance of this work and act on it before dingoes all disappear into history?

Can research engender respect for the intrinsic value of wildlife?

As you may well know, Northeast of Melbourne in the Whittlesea council, there is an area where a mob of kangaroos have become trapped on its home range by council –approved building developments. Residents are confronted daily by the sight of dead or dying kangaroos that have been hit by cars or mauled by dogs and local police have increasingly been called to euthanize injured kangaroos who have tried to escape to safety or better food availability.
The council and government have allowed development to enclose the kangaroos’ territory and are now just waiting for them all to die as this last tract of land left for the animals is going to be developed as a cinema.

Where is the research on which government based the decision to abandon these kangaroos? Where is the long-term environmental plan that showed respect and concern for the welfare of the original residents of this area? What message about the value of life and the wisdom of government is being conveyed to the local population?

Wildlife research becomes corrupt when it operates outside the ideals of preserving species and habitat; when it fails to protect individual animals and provide an environment where they prosper. Government used such research to justify the killing of the 7000 kangaroos slaughtered at Majura in the ACT over the last month.
Such actions contribute to the public perception of the disposability, even invisibility of wildlife and this manifests in the contempt consistently shown towards wildlife by sections of the public. But, appalling and shameful as any murder of wildlife is, I believe that the long-term consequence of this callous official attitude will be irreparable damage to the national psyche; the destruction of the natural spirit along with the extinction of all native animals.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I don’t want to live in an Australia without native animals. It’s unbearable that they should continue to suffer because of pseudo-science and society’s addiction to economic growth. But there is great pro-wildlife research out there and many active people lobbying for change. We urgently need a coordinated national approach which makes wildlife protection and preservation a priority to all Australians. Meanwhile we can all get behind the campaign to boycott tourism to the ACT until they stop this obscene rampage against kangaroos.

By chance I noticed an article in the Guardian newspaper on Thursday and managed to attend an interesting conference at Manchester Town Hall this weekend 4-5 July. It was chaired by Lord Bingham, formerly Britain's top judge, and part sponsored by the Guardian, who will be running a feedback on the conference in a special supplement next Monday 13 July.

Advocates for 20 proposals to mitigate climate change were invited to speak. They covered scientific and engineering solutions to economic and social solutions. A couple of interesting solutions came from Australia. One of the delegates, Kirk Sorenson, has an interesting site on thorium reactors.

There was no pre-agenda and I went along expecting to lobby for why population was not included as a key solution. Climate and Energy Secretary, Ed Milliband, would be speaking at the Saturday session.

Population Sustainability Network

In the event, I found on the day that a talk on renewing commitments to reproductive health policies was included for the final Sunday afternoon session. This was given by Louise Carver of the Population Sustainability Network. It turned out to be fairly low key and was cautious on really highlighting the issues, but at least it was there. One interesting point was that she said family planning funding was at an all time low and had dropped by 30% in real terms since the mid-1990s.

Milliband waffling, out of touch on population problems in developed countries

I did question Milliband at the Saturday Q&A on how politicians and the media were neglecting and ignoring population as a key driver on Climate change and other key issues. Predictably he waffled, saying that he heard this issue raised quite often in relation to climate change, but really we were doing all that can be done and the key was to make reproductive health care easily available and improve the education of girls in developing countries in particular.

I replied that both politicians and many green groups were in denial on population as a key issue. The UK Government had no policy on population and we would not solve the critical problems ahead without going further and incentivising a move to smaller families through the tax system, instead of raising perverse incentives to increase our numbers as is happening in several developed countries like Germany and Australia.

He responded by saying that Australia was a big country well able to absorb a bigger population. Due to question time pressures, I did not have the chance to point out that in fact Australia was a very fragile country ecologically, much of it desert and unable to withstand further big population pressures, but his reply demonstrated how out of touch influential and supposedly well-briefed people can be on ecological and population pressures.

Even so, there were some very interesting presentations.

The aim of the Report is to narrow the best solutions (in the opinion of the panel) down to ten from the original twenty. These will be covered in more detail in the Guardian next Monday, but all will be mentioned.

Thorium and fission

As a nuclear skeptic, I found the presentation on the Thorium alternative to Uranium energy fission by Kirk Sorensen, an aerospace and nuclear engineer from Alabama USA, quite compelling. I spoke to him later and he is basically an advocate for developing the Thorium fission process as a far more effective energy performer than the uranium fission path. He said Thorium was ignored because the US Government wanted to make weapons grade material via Uranium and consequently went down the nuclear/uranium development path. His blogsite, he says, has all the details: www.energyfromthorium.com or www.thoriumenergy.blogspot.com

Improving grass to capture more Carbon gases

Another presentation of interest was by Tony Lovell on soil carbon and redefining grazing habits in arid areas to improve grass quality and consequently carbon capture. A further interesting presentation was by UK scientist, Mike Mason, who looked at an Australian company domestic ceramic fuel cell appliance called BlueGen. This seemed to promise a lot.

Cloud-seeding

A Professor Salter has also been trying to get £25m funding for 6 years to complete development for around 50 cloud seeding ships to reflect more solar energy back into space. Again, this was compelling in its simplicity. To find out more go to www.see.ed.ac.uk/-shs then browse to climate change.

Leggett on Solar

Jeremy Leggett of SolarCentury photovoltaic company made a good presentation on increasing solar power cells, claiming that 116% of UK power needs could potentially be provided by solar power, if north and south facing roofs of all UK properties were adapted to use solar voltaic cells. He also mentioned a WWF UK report coming out in late 2009 "Pathways to a one planet economy".

Economics

Andrew Simms of the (UK) New Economics Foundation gave a very assured presentation on Do Good Lives have to cost the Earth? It seems they are all following the UK Sustainable Development Commission's groundbreaking Prosperity Without Growth report published April 30, 2009. I hope to get in touch with him on several related issues.

Lifeboats and overpopulation

Andrew gave a good analogy on the thinking of many modern growth economists, quoting a now deceased economist Mesham. "A man falls from a 100 floor building. As he heads down the 99 floors they say look he's still fine. Then he suddenly smashes into the ground. Too late! Another one was on lifeboats - from another delegate. "We need to plug the hole in the lifeboat and bale it out." The hole in this case being population. Most green groups are busy concentrating on bailing it out!

Brian McGavin

Book Review

A. Peter Klimley, The Secret life of Sharks, Simon & Schuster, New York, 2003.

“There was a massive procession of whales and fish passing by us and moving in the direction of Seamount Espiritu Santo. The first in this animal parade were twenty or so pilot whales. Then came a crescent-shaped formation of dolphin-fish. Then followed a large school of tuna. Were we privileged to be witnessing the slow migration of this whole assemblage toward its next destination, Espiritu Santo? Could this massive assemblage of whales and fishes be using the magnetic lineation on the seafloor below to guide its procession?” Peter Klimley, The Secret Life of Sharks, p.125.

Ichthyologist (fish scientist) Peter Klimley has an ethologist’s eye for communities in the sea. His book describes his own research into shark behaviour, particularly into schooling habits, communication, and navigation methods of particular species. The navigation methods are mind-spinningly different from our own. Klimley concentrates on the navigation skills of schools of hammerhead sharks in the Gulf of Mexico (more below). This focus also leads him to observe ecological communities on the move along the same lines, in the extraordinary procession of whales and fish described above, moving between geological saliences where plant species and therefore fish, aggregate.

Repairing the damage from Benchley's Jaws

When I was about 9 years old, my favorite book - long lost - was by Jeannie Lewis, My life as an ichthyologist. This was a rollicking tale of a woman's adventurous career amid the brightly coloured waters of the South Seas. It was illustrated with perky drawings of kinky little animals, like trigger-fish. It also described strange legends of frogs and stones falling from the sky into thatched huts, and revealed some secret women's business.

I wanted to be an ichthyologist because of it, but unfortunately I read Peter Benchley's Jaws Doubleday & Company, NY, 1974, which almost ruined my enjoyment of swimming in the sea. I now see it as a book about developers taking over a town and corrupting its government, but the scene where a huge serrated man-trap silently surges up beneath the slightly drunk swimmer, has imprinted my mind indelibly.

To cope with this after-image of human swimmers as shark cocktails, I have tried to learn more about sharks.

Seeing fish as individuals

What made me buy Peter Klimley's scientifically rich Secret Life of Sharks, as I riffled through its pages in a Brisbane store that markets remaindered books, was noticing how the author made a personal connection with one of the sharks he studied. He had taken Huey, a foot-long baby grey nurse, from the 'Shark Channel' in the Miami Seaquarium, because he felt sorry for him, knowing his certain fate was to be eaten by other sharks in the Channel. The author also has a strong aesthetic sense of nature.

"One day, I couldn't restrain myself from scooping one up in a dip net to keep in an aquarium above my desk at the marine laboratory. The baby shark that I held in my hands was very attractive. It was brown with alternating dark and light bands, each of which merged into the other with a gradual shift in the hue of its color. Speckling his body were small green iridescent spots. Both the bands and spots would gradually disappear as he grew up. Protruding from the forward edge of his nostrils were long barbels. These gave the foot-long nurse shark, whom I named Huey, a comical touch.

Klimley takes the reader on amazing journeys

Klimley is able to take the reader to some amazing places and share with us some unique experiences, such as feeling as if we are also looking up at the sun-silhouetted bodies of sharks above us in the gulf of Mexico. Another strength of this book lies in the author’s skill in relating clearly, but in an interesting and useful way, the details of his experimental work measuring, testing and describing the behaviour of the creatures he swims amongst. We are introduced to a variety of scientific fields and their application in real life. We also get a good picture of the behaviour of the teams of human observers and neighboring fishermen, of the techniques, skills and the risks required to do unusual tasks in unusual environments.

Routine feats of endurance

Feats of endurance were routinely required in much of this marine field-work. These are interesting for the scope they reveal in human performance, especially that of young men, for instance doing repeated free dives to around 100 feet below in order to tag hammerheads. On one occasion, in another situation, the author notices a colleague becoming disoriented and clumsy from fatigue, whilst swimming against a current in choppy waters, and he comments on how unconscious competition between himself and the other swimmer probably contributed to this.

Shark attacks described in accumulated detail

Klimley describes a shark attack on a collegue in the same way he describes shark attacks on seals and other prey. The account is humbling because it is totally unjudgemental, unanthropocentric. (The diver survived.) This doesn’t mean that the author has no feelings for his colleages, for he reveals a strong and appropriate concern in many situations. The difference is that this account falls into a range of accounts from scientific observation of many many feeding behaviours over a period of time off the coast of a remote island where Great White sharks made their living. We are also grateful to learn what turns sharks on and what doesn’t, and the posture they display when they feel challenged.

Klimley outlines his hypotheses and then instructively describes the problems he encounters looking for ways to test these. Any student would benefit from these descriptions. The author shows versatility and breadth in his scientific knowledge, particularly of earth physics.

Stunning findings on undersea animal navigation

Perhaps the most stunning research he describes are his findings on the use of magnetic lineation on the sea-floor to navigate. In this he demonstrates a huge new dimension to life. He shows that some sharks and other sea-creatures have senses which we humans, and most terrestrial animals simply don't suspect exist. He verifies this sensory world through painstakingly devised techniques to measure, repeat, record and locate patterns of behaviour in individuals in hammerhead schools near the Espiritu Santu Seamount in the south western coast of Mexico. He repeats his measurements at night.

"[Salmon] were certainly skilled navigators, but the scalloped hammerheads might be even better: they made nightly migrations far out into the featureless ocean and were able to find the seamount every morning. (…) There was simply no light to guide the shark … Yet she was swimming away from the seamount in a perfectly straight line."

Klimley describes the different forms of magnetization: "The total magnetic field measured at the earth’s surface is the sum of two magnetic sources, the earth’s inner core and its outer crust. Circulation of electrically conductive molten metals in the earth’s core creates the [very strong dipolar magnetic fields of the (…) north and south poles. (…)"

The author explains that magnetic minerals (oxides of iron and titanium) produce smaller dipolar magnetic patterns on the earth, including undersea. Because of the volcanic origin of underwater mountains you often get such dipolar patterns in different locations on the same sea-mount because the north-south poles reversed their polarity between one eruption and the next. This means that the magnetic particles in those eruptions remain aligned according to the prevailing polarity of the north-south poles at the time of eruption.

30 years of diving with sharks tells us another story about ourselves.

People should not be surprised to hear that, as this story of one man's study of sharks is told, over a period of about 30 years, between the early 1970s and the beginning of the 21st century, the numbers of sharks decline markedly.

Sharks are threatened by human predation because it takes them a long time to mature reproductively and they are often taken by fishing well before they reproduce.

Handy tips to avoid the sharp end of sharks

There are many handy tips for those of us concerned to avoid being on a shark's menu.

Here are some humorous ones I have synthesised from Klimley's more sober observations:

Keep your fat to muscle ratio low: To generalize over shark-species, they seem to prefer prey with high fat-content, and will frequently spit humans out because their fat-content compares poorly with preferred prey, such as seals.

Perfect your killer-whale vocalisations: Several shark species have been shown to react with extreme fear to the sound of an orca’s vocalizations.

Wear black and white swimsuits: In some of his early interactions with sharks, Dr Klimley adapted his wetsuit and wore a fin to make himself look like a killer whale (orca) and some species of sharks in certain circumstances made themselves scarce when they saw him. Perhaps this idea might inspire some swimsuit and wet-suit fashion designers.

A. Peter Klimley is an associate professor at the University of Davis, California https://wfcb.ucdavis.edu/www/faculty/Pete
[24reads-to-edit smn]

The last thing that Battalion Chief Oreo Palmer expected as he surveyed the dwindling flames on the 78th floor of the World Trade Center South Tower at 9:54am on 11 September 2001 was, seven minutes from then, for the South Tower to come crashing down on him and to collapse almost completely into dust at a rate barely slower than free fall. Many scientists and engineers, who have since disputed the official US Government explanation of the World Trade Center collapses, would have agreed with Palmer's judgement on the day, however the ABC's Science Show, presented by Robyn Williams seems reluctant to let its listeners know of their views.

See also: articles: "Fire Department Tape Reveals No Awareness of Imminent Doom" In New York Times of 9 November 2002, "NY firefighters reached South Tower crash zone" in the Guardian of 5 Aug 2002
sites: Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, www.911oz.com, wearechange.org.au, 911research.wtc7.net, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, Patriots Question 9/11, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, 911truth.org, 911blogger.com

Veteran firefighters at impact scene expected South Tower to remain standing

At 9:54AM on 11 September 2001, seven minutes before he perished in the first of the two Twin Tower collapses, Battalion Chief Oreo Palmer radioed his unit, Ladder Company 15, this message, from the 78th floor, close to where United Airlines Flight 175 had slammed into the World Trade Center South Tower, only 51 minutes earlier :

"Ladder 15, we've got two isolated pockets of fire. We should be able to knock it down with two lines."

The Port Authority of New York refused to release the recording for over a year after the attack until forced to do so by the New York Times.

When Oreo Palmer's widow heard the recording of her doomed husband, she said:

"I didn't hear fear, I didn't hear panic. When the tape is made public to the world, people will hear that they all went about their jobs without fear, and selflessly."

Palmer and Fire Marshal Ronald Bucca had caught the elevator to the 44th floor_#main-fn1">1 and had then climbed 34 floors to the 78th, the floor immediately below where flight 175 had hit. Palmer had found wounded needing evacuation and fires he had judged could be doused with water pumped from two fire trucks.

Palmer and Bucca had every expectation that the South Tower would remain fully standing as they proceeded to extinguish the flames and attend to or evacuate the wounded.

The last thing that Palmer, Bucca and many other veteran firefighters, then making their ways up to 78th floor, expected to happen only 7 minutes from then was for the whole of the South Tower to collapse in an explosive spectacle that has imprinted memories round the world.

The point to take in here is that, seven minutes before that final collapse, the temperature on the 78th floor was not sufficient to cause professional fire-fighters to panic, let alone present a threat to their lives or the steel structure of the building.

Whilst each of the two towers had suffered, respectively, the unprecedented impact of a jet-fueled passenger aircraft, both had withstood the impact with most supporting pylons in their cores undamaged and few entirely severed. The buildings had been designed in the 1960's to withstand a head-on impact from a Boeing 707, comparable in size to the Boeing 767's which had struck the towers. Even if the structure had been fatally weakened, the collapses should have occurred at the time of the impact and not 58 minutes later, in the case of the South Tower, when the strength of the oxygen-starved fires had greatly diminished.

Oreo Palmer's assessment of the situation he faced on the 78th floor, and, indeed, the fact that he was even able to be there, stands in flat contradiction to what 'structural engineer' Chris Wise told the BBC on 13 December 2001:

"It was the fire that killed the buildings. There's nothing on earth that could survive those temperatures with that amount of fuel burning. The columns would have melted, the floors would have melted and eventually they would have collapsed one on top of each other."

Many well-credentialed and credible scientists and engineers, stand by the judgment on that day of Oreo Palmer and the other 342 members of the Fire Department of New York (FDNY) who unexpectedly perished there. These scientists and engineers disputed Chris Wise's pronouncement about the inevitability of the unprecedented engineering failure which occurred on that day. These include:

• Steven Jones, Physics Professor, Brigham Young University (BYU)
• Kevin Ryan, former Department Head at UL (Underwriter Laboratories) company which certified the steel which went into the World Trade Center buildings at construction, and inspected it after the WTC collapses in 2001;
• Alexander K. Dewdney, Professor Emeritus of the University of Western Ontario
• 552 members of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth

They argue, firstly, as Palmer intuitively knew, that there should have been abundant strength left in the structural steel of the towers to keep both standing. They maintain that, even if the structure of the towers had somehow failed, it would have been impossible for these buildings to have collapsed at a rate barely slower than free fall straight down, through the path of most resistance. Rather, they would have expected the collapses to have been more irregular, and the buildings to have toppled in one direction or another. They don't believe it possible that the impacts and fires could have caused the structural steel to have been almost completely dismembered and for nearly all the concrete in the buildings to have been pulverised to dust simply as a result of the planes' impact and the fires afterwards.

"No office-building has collapsed just because of fire."

In fact, they argue that no office-building has collapsed just because of fire. If that seems hard to believe, have a look here for examples of similar skyscraper-fires. (Please let us know of any contradictory examples).

They argue that the only explanation which fits all the recorded evidence and all observations made, was that all three towers were brought down by controlled demolitions. They have called for new investigations into the collapses which would not rule out in advance the controlled demolition hypothesis and which would take full account of all the available evidence.

As the controlled demolition explanation must necessarily implicate many senior figures within the US Government, fierce controversy has raged over these questions for more than seven years.

Science Show uncritically broadcasts controversial 'collapse' explanation

Australians rightly esteem and enjoy Robin William's popular and educational Science Show, but this listener was disappointed and irritated by what seemed one-sided treatment of this issue.

On the Science Show of 20 September 2008, Dr Sergei Dudarev of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority was presented to the listeners of the Science Show as having the final word on the controversy.

Dr Dudarev's argument relies on the idea that the towers would have reached a temperature of around 600 degrees centigrade. Even though this temperature is well below the 1,500 degrees centigrade melting-temperature of steel, Dudarev thinks it likely that, at 600 degrees centigrade, changes to the steel's magnetic properties - similar to those exploited by blacksmiths when forging metals - would have caused a fatal weakening in its strength. That weakening would have started the collapse.

Even if we were to accept that theory, it remains inconceivable that Oreo Palmer would have been able to stand on the 78th floor as he did, only seven minutes before the collapse, if the steel above and below him really were at temperatures reaching 500 degrees Centigrade. Dr Dudarev's theory also fails to explain how the temperatures could have subsequently risen so dramatically, in such a short time, when the ferocity of the fires was diminishing.

If, in spite of that failure of his argument, we were to accept that the fires around the impact scene could somehow have initiated the collapse, Dudarev's theory could only possibly explain the commencement of the collapse and not its subsequent astonishingly rapid progression and its totality.

In regard to Dudarev's hypothesis of structural steel being weakened, in a letter dated 9 November 2008, Judy Shelton of Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth, pointed out that tests conducted by the the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) showed that steel in the towers was unlikely to have reached temperatures anywhere near 600 degrees as a result of the fires_#main-fn2">2 (see #LetterFromJudyShelton">Appendix 1 below).

Robyn Williams final question to Dr Sergei Dudarev was:

"Does this scotch some of those many conspiracy theories (I'm sure you're familiar with them) and explain actually what happened?"

Sergei Dudarev answered:

"The answer to the terrible tragedy is had the thermal insulating panels been glued better to the steel structures, nothing would have happened, or at least the buildings could have been evacuated before they collapsed. It is a predictable outcome of very strong fire in a building where a conventional steel proved to be unsuitable for the purpose, so partially the answer might be in the use of different steel that remains mechanically stable at high temperatures, or partially in the design of better protected structures using thermal insulation materials."

Science Show and 'right of reply' request

Although Dudarev had not directly answered the question, Robyn Williams pursued it no further, so the impression that many Science Show listeners would have gained was that all controversy had ended.

Knowing this not to be the case, I contacted the Science Show on Sunday 2 November. I wrote:

I note that Sergei Dudarev's theory which ostensibly explains how the Twin Towers collapsed at www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2008/2369411.htm is hotly disputed by many credible scientists, engineers and architects, including whistleblower Kevin Ryan who was sacked from Underwriters Laboratories for publicly questioning the way his company was investigating the collapses.

Is the Science Show intending to let its listeners know why they [meaning the abovementioned scientists and engineers et al] believe Sergei Dudarev to be wrong?

Would the Science Show be intending to cover the science of the WTC collapses and other aspects of the 9/11 attacks some time and allow all sides of the raging controversy to be aired?

Robyn Williams gave the following general response to my question in his response of Wednesday 5 November:

"Dudarev was at a conference organised by the BA and vetted accordingly. His paper was put to in depth questioning by science journalists for one hour before I took over.

"When new evidence appears, vetted by the usual processes, we shall report it. It is a recurring topic."

A rather circular correspondence followed, which I have appended below this article. I argued that either Sergei Dudarev was wrong or that his explanation for the collapses was at the leading edge of science and opposed to current knowledge of physics and structural engineering. In either case, I believed that listeners were entitled to be made aware of all sides of the controversy. I only got general replies which gave me the impression that the Science Show must think that peer review among the scientists for 9/11 Truth is perhaps inferior to peer review among scientists from the ITER Project, to which Sergei Dudarev belongs, and which he managed to publicise in his comments about 9/11.

Perhaps if the 9/11 Truth science project were backed to the tune of 10 billion Euros, like the ITER Project, the BBC and Australia's ABC would take it more seriously. After reading particle physicist, Michael Dittmar's damning analysis of the ITER project, "Fusion Illusions," in Sheila Newman (ed) The Final Energy Crisis, 2nd Edition, Pluto UK, 2008, however, I think the Science show should be more cautious about Dr Dudarev's ITER-association, let alone his theory on 9/11 building-collapse.

Unfortunately, the Science Show is far from alone in keeping the Australian public ignorant about the of 9/11 controversy, despite its enormous political consequences. That is a subject for another article, except to say that rest of the ABC, together with the corporate newsmedia and even, surprisingly, the 'alternative' media and the supposed far left of politics have acted almost in uniformity to suppress open discussion on this seminal issue of the twenty first century.

As a consequence, Australians remain amongst the most ignorant in the world about this issue.

See also: "Fire Department Tape Reveals No Awareness of Imminent Doom" In New York Times of 9 November 2002, "NY firefighters reached South Tower crash zone" in the Guardian of 5 Aug 2002
sites: Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, www.911oz.com, wearechange.org.au, 911research.wtc7.net, Firefighters for 9/11 Truth, Patriots Question 9/11, Pilots for 9/11 Truth, 911truth.org, 911blogger.com

Footnotes

#main-fn1" id="main-fn1">1. #main-fn1-txt">↑I thought I had read somewhere of Ronald Bucca having ascended all 78 floors on foot, but it is difficult enough for me to imagine anyone ascending 34 floors on foot, let alone 78 in 51 minutes at most.

#main-fn2" id="main-fn2">2. #main-fn2-txt">↑ Judy Shelton's e-mail does not directly address Dr Dudarev's argument about the likelihood of magnetic properties of steel changing to fatally weaken steel at 500 degrees - 600 degrees Centigrade, but #10;<h3><a href=" id="LetterFromJudyShelton">Appendix 1: Letter of 9 Nov 08 from Judy Shelton refuting Sergei Dudarev's explanation_#main-fn2">2

Many learned scientists have been drawn to the challenge of trying to explain the anomalies of the World Trade Center collapses, and some have offered imaginative, creative, and ingenious theories. Dr. Dudarev's information on the magnetic and quantum mechanical properties of steel is very interesting, but it's not very illuminating because there is no evidence that the World Trade Center steel suffered the 600 degree Centigrade temperatures Dr. Dudarev's theory relies on. NIST has not one piece of core steel showing heating above 250 degrees C.

NIST has said that the jet fuel burned off in ten minutes, and that office fires burn at most twenty minutes in a given area before the fuel is consumed. Firemen radioed from the south tower at the impact zone, reporting that they saw a couple of isolated pockets of fire. Photos of the burning towers show black smoke, indicative of oxygen-starved fires.

It is well to consider all hypotheses, but Dr. Dudarev's theory is not consistent with the evidence.

#LetterToScienceShow-9nov08" id="LetterToScienceShow-9nov08">Appendix 2: Letter to the Science Show of 9 Nov 08

Dear Robyn Williams,

Firstly, thanks for your reply.

On Wed, 5 Nov 2008, you wrote:
>  Dear James Sinnamon,
>
> Dudarev was at a conference organised by the BA and vetted accordingly.
> His paper was put to in depth questioning by science journalists for one
> hour before I took over.

Is there any record of this questioning - perhaps an MP3 recording or a transcript?

It seems to me that more likely that Dudarev is plain wrong, but if he is not wrong, then he is
at the leading edge of a change in scientific knowledge with profound implications for
structural engineering.

In either case, what he said should be subject to closer scientific scrutiny than what I was
able to read on the Science Show at
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2008/2369411.htm If you believe that the one
hour questioning by science journalists amounted to proper scientific scrutiny, then perhaps
that should be shared with your audience.

However, I think it would be easier and fairer to just allow someone who completely rejects
Dudarev's hypothesis, in line with current engineering knowledge and physics, to be given a
right of reply, so that, at least your audience can know that Dudarev's views are far from
uncontroversial. 

> When new evidence appears, vetted by the usual processes, we shall
> report it. It is a recurring topic.

There is a good deal of 'old' evidence of which I am aware, which, as far as I know, has not
been given air time on the Science Show.  Examples include scientific peer-reviewed articles
on http://journalof911studies.com/ and a good deal of material on the site of Architects and
Engineers for 9/11 Truth at http://ae911truth.org

I myself did not even seriously entertain the idea that the US government itself was
implicated in September 11 attacks until little over a year ago.  Now, having studied a great
deal of evidence and having given what I believe to be a fair hearing  to both sides of the
argument, I can't come up with any other explanation which would account for the strange
phenomena, unusual behaviour, suppression of documents and astonishing coincidences
associated with the September 11 attacks.

If the 9/11 Truth movement are right, then the implications for US and world democracy are
profound.

Whatever the Australian public should at least be made aware of the controversy and made
aware that many well-credentialed and highly credible people reject the Official US
Government explanation of the 9/11 attacks and want a proper investigation unlike the joke
that was the 9/11 Commission so that they can make up their own minds.

Some who question the official explanation are listed at 
http://www.911truthgroups.org/911Truth101/Step2ProminentSupporters/tabid/633/Default.aspx

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

#LetterFromScienceShow-12nov08" id="LetterFromScienceShow-12nov08">Appendix 3: Letter from the Science Show of 12 Nov 08

Dear James Sinnamon,

Could you exchange points of view with him? I was simply covering an event.

No, the PC was not recorded but several press reports ensued.

RW

#LetterToScienceShow-30nov08" id="LetterToScienceShow-30nov08">Appendix 4: Letter to the Science Show of 30 Nov 08

Dear Robyn Williams,

Thanks for your further reply and my apologies on my part for my slow response.

On Wed, 12 Nov 2008, you wrote:
>  Dear James Sinnamon,
>
> Could you exchange points of view with him? I was simply covering an
> event.


I am afraid that this doesn't address the concerns I raised in my previous e-mails.

I requested that you allow other scientists, who reject Sergei Dudarev's explanation of the
collapses of the Twin Towers in accord with current knowledge of engineering and physics,
be given the opportunity to do so on the Science Show.

I would appreciate it if you would indicate to me whether or not you would be prepared to
agree to this.

If your listeners are not given the opportunity to hear from those who reject Sergei
Dudarev's explanation, then it seems to me that they will have been misled into believing
that his views are not controversial and that the collapses of the Twin Towers have been fully
explained.

It is noteworthy that even though the implications of Sergei Dudarev's theory would have to
be groundbreaking, if true, that nothing more has been heard of it since September, as far as
I can tell.

So this further confirms my suspicion that Sergei Dudarev is plain wrong.

I will include a response to Sergei Dudarev in an e-mail I received from Judy Shelton of
 Achitects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth on 9 November :

"Many learned scientists have been drawn to the challenge of trying to explain the anomalies
of the World Trade Center collapses, and some have offered imaginative, creative, and
ingenious theories. Dr. Dudarev's information on the magnetic and quantum mechanical
properties of steel is very interesting, but it's not very illuminating because there is no
evidence that the World Trade Center steel suffered the 600 degree Centigrade temperatures
Dr. Dudarev cites (at least, not as a result of office fires; higher temperatures did occur, but
office fires don't burn at 600 degrees Centigrade).  NIST has not one piece of core steel
showing heating above 250 degrees C.

"NIST has said that the jet fuel burned off in ten minutes, and that office fires burn at most
twenty minutes in a given area before the fuel is consumed.  Firemen radioed from the south
tower at the impact zone, reporting that they saw a couple of isolated pockets of fire.  Photos
of the burning towers show black smoke, indicative of oxygen-starved fires.
http://i53.photobucket.com/albums/g78/idiotbastard/wtcburnssmall.jpg

"It is well to consider all hypotheses, but Dr. Dudarev's theory is not consistent with the
evidence."

I am sure that if you were to contact Judy Shelton through  http://www.ae911truth.org/contactus.php
she would be more than willing to find a suitably qualified and knowledgeable scientist who
would be willing to respond on your program to Sergei Dudarev.

Thank you,

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

#LetterFromScienceShow-1dec08" id="LetterFromScienceShow-1dec08">Appendix 5: Letter from the Science Show of 1 Dec 08

I'm afraid I have to make 32 programs in the next two weeks. We shall no doubt 
return to this topic.

#LetterToScienceShow-4dec08" id="LetterToScienceShow-4dec08">Appendix 6: Letter to the Science Show of 4 Dec 08

Dear Robyn Williams,

Further to my previous e-mail included below.

I would appreciate at least a response, one way or another, to my request that a scientist
who disputes Dr Sergei Dudarev's highly unorthodox views about engineering and physics,
be, as soon as is practical, given air time on the Science Show to rebut those views.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon

#LetterFromScienceShow-8dec08" id="LetterFromScienceShow-8dec08">Appendix 6: Letter from Lynne Malcolm of 8 Dec 08

Dear James,

I am writing in response to your most recent email (4th December) to Robyn Williams,
presenter of Radio National's Science Unit program, "The Science Show ".

Please note that Robyn Williams has stated that the program will return to the matter in due
course, as we see fit.

Thank you for your interest.

Regards,

Lynne Malcolm

Executive Producer

Science Unit

ABC Radio National

#LetterToScienceShow-12dec08" id="LetterToScienceShow-12dec08">Appendix 7: Letter to Lynne Malcolm and Robyn Williams of 12 Dec 08

Dear Lynne Malcolm,

Firstly, thank you for having contacted me.

I will take your reply as meaning that my request, that the audience of the Science Show be
given an opportunity to hear views opposed to Dr Sergei Dudarev's novel and controversial
explanation of the collapses of the World Trade Center twin towers on 11 September 2001 at 
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2008/2369411.htm, has been refused.

In my view, that is poor journalistic and scientific practice for reasons that should already be
implicit from my previous correspondences.


I will now be pursuing my complaint through other channels.

Yours sincerely,

James Sinnamon.

Reducing consumption key to a sustainable future

Based on then ground-breaking modelling, the forecasts of global ecological and economic collapse by mid-century contained in the controversial 1972 book; The Limits to Growth, are still `on-track' according to new CSIRO research, published on 11 November 2008.

The Limits to Growth modelled scenarios for the future global economy and environment and recommended far reaching changes to the way we live to avoid disaster.

In a paper published in the current edition of the international journal; Global Environmental Change, CSIRO physicist Dr Graham Turner compares forecasts from the book with global data from the past 30 years.

"The real-world data basically supports The Limits to Growth model," he says. "It shows that for the first 30 years of the model, the world has been tracking along the unsustainable trajectory of the book's business-as-usual scenario."

"The original modelling predicts that if we continue down that track and do not substantially reduce our consumption and increase technological progress, the global economy will collapse by the middle of this century.

"We've had the rare opportunity to evaluate the output of a global model against observed and independent data," says Dr Turner."The contemporary issues of peak oil, climate change, and food and water security, resonate strongly with the overshoot and collapse displayed in the business-as-usual scenario of The Limits to Growth."

This is the first time anyone has comprehensively tested the predictions of the first, and still one of the most comprehensive, global models linking the world economy to the environment.

"We've had the rare opportunity to evaluate the output of a global model against observed and independent data," says Dr Turner.

To date, the recommendations of The Limits to Growth, which included fundamental changes of policy and behaviour for sustainability, have not been implemented.

The The Limits to Growth documented the results of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) study carried out by Meadows et al, who were commissioned by The Club of Rome to analyse the 'world problematique' using a computer model developed at MIT called World3.

TheThe Limits to Growth became the best selling environmental book in history, selling more than 30 million copies in 30 languages.

"In the years since 1972, The Limits to Growth has provoked much criticism but our research indicates that the main claims against the modelling are false," Dr Turner says.

CSIRO is investigating how Australia can address the challenges of economic, environmental and social sustainability facing communities across Australia.

Source: http://www.csiro.au/news/The-Limits-To-Growth.html Reference: 08/179