Brainiacs
One of the things I really love about where I work has nothing at all to do with my job (like that’s a shock). When I pop outside for a ciggy (shut up) there’s very often a small collection of crows wandering around the raised garden bed. I adore watching them, they’re utterly enchanting.
I like birds anyway. From the tiny little wrens with such skinny legs you wonder how they work to massive eagles and hawks, I just think birds are awesome. I love their social structures and habits – for example, the white winged chough (which against all logic is pronounced “chuff”) lives in large family groups and because bigger families mean more babies, they kidnap the young birds from other family groups in order to grow their own. Nifty huh?
But back to the crows. They live entire life cycles around the building. A couple of months ago it was all babies screaming for more food. Now they seem to be out on their own for the most part. They don’t tend to worry about me, they’ve seen me out there so much I’m part of the landscape to them now I suppose (and I’ve been known to smuggle them some meat when we have left overs from functions). What really gets me about crows is that they are incredibly bright.
I’ve often seen them hiding bits of food for later on. They dig careful holes and make sure that the holes are properly covered with mulch and things. I’ve seen them walk away, check from a distance and come back to make things just so. I’ve seen them dig with sticks, gather more nesting material in their beak without dropping the bundle they’d already collected… lots of smart things these birds do.
Today however, took the cake. We’ve a couple of those big volcanic type rocks outside the staff door – the kind that’s riddled with interesting holes. Moss tends to grow in these holes when enough dust and dirt accumulates in them. Today I stood enthralled watching a big shiny crow as he (or she) very carefully lifted the moss out of the holes, slipped in a little bit of the food he’d found and then place the moss back into the same hole, sometimes patting it down to keep it in place. I figure while I was watching he hid about 7 or 8 little morsels for later, in the most amazingly secret hiding place I’ve ever seen them use. Brilliant.
A changing world.
A heavy snowfall tends to make people say “Bah, global warming my arse!” while unseasonable warm in the winter makes people say “Yay! Global warming makes warms!”. Which is why I prefer the term Climate Change, because it has no implication of warmth.
Nature is a balancing act. The death of one kind of plant can result in a lack of food for a certain animal, or a loss of nesting location for a bird. Those birds or animals die out, and perhaps the trees the birds pollinate begin to die out. One of the major factors in the survival of any plant or animal is climate. Everything has evolved to be exactly where it is, if that makes sense. Animals are designed to live in the conditions they live in, and while some kinds of animals are highly adaptable, others are far more delicate and a simple raise in temperature of even 1° can result in them being wiped out.
Yet while the icecaps melt and weather patterns change, creating floods, droughts and god knows what else, humans are remarkable in their ability to ignore the fact that we, as a species, are at fault.
Far from the delicate balancing act of mother nature, humans are happy to tramp any old place, adapting to conditions as needed and developing ways to make life more comfortable. In the developed world, that tends to be technology and central heating, big cars and disposable everything. There seems to be a mass idea that living in a sustainable, low carbon way involves keeping your own cows, living in a yurt and never washing your armpits.
Bullshit! There’s a million things every single person in the developed world can do to improve their carbon footprint, to create less of a negative impact on the planet and perhaps slow the damage we’re doing to the environment. Here’s some:
- Instead of keeping your house hot hot hot all winter, turn the heat up enough to keep the chill out. Still cold? Try a jumper. It stuns me that people seem to think they should be able to walk around in a t-shirt all year round. A blanket, sweater or robe will warm you just as well as pumping up your heating.
- Buy local produce as much as possible. For a lot of people, this is not an easy option, but if you look around you may find a lot of your diet can be obtained from farms etc that are quite close to you. Less transport = less carbon emissions transporting things to you.
- Cut back on the disposables. Instead of a 10 pack of throw away razors, get a good quality one with replaceable blades. It’ll cost more in the beginning, but eventually you will save money. Spend a little extra on a refillable pen, use tea towels instead of paper towels. Buying quality reusable items costs less long term, and you’ll probably find they perform better too.
- Sell, donate or recycle your old technology. Got a 5 year old computer that no one wants? I’ll bet you’ll find someone through your community house or school that would love that machine. Sure it won’t run the latest games, but for wordprocessing and internet, it’s fine. Call around, or search the net to see if there’s a programme running in your area. If all else fails, send it for recycling. There’s never any call for technology to end up in landfill.
- The Bottled Water Thing. In Australia, tapwater is high quality and drinkable. Plastic bottles of water are a huge impact, with the energy needed to make the bottles, transport them etc. Pick up a sports bottle for cheap and fill it from the tap. In places with less than delicious water, try and invest in a filter.
- Walk it, ride it, share it. Walk more! It’s good for you, by the way. Grab a second hand bike and ride it places. I’m not saying you should walk to work (I know I couldn’t, it’s too far) but if you’re popping down to the corner store, do you NEED to drive? Probably not.
- Buy less shit. Okay so you’re awake at 2am and there’s an advertisement on for a toothpaste squeezer which seems like a grouse idea (esp at 2am). So you buy it. Now, do you NEED a toothpaste squeezer? Probably not. So now you have another plastic thing in your house, made from oils in a big old factory, shipped to your country, driven to your postoffice… it’s a waste of energy and time. I’m the last of the great impulse buyers, but I try to think three times about pointless crapola.
- Reuse. You know the best cleaning cloths? Old cotton underwear. I kid you not. Lint free, soft. They’re awesome on windows. So next time you find a hole in your underdaks, toss them in the wash then toss them in the cleaning rag pile. Same goes for t-shirts, awesome cleaning power in a shirt. Carpet underlay is a great weedmat on the garden. Before you toss stuff out, think about using it for something different. Okay you can’t wear your “Frankie Says Relax” shirt in public anymore, but you can most certainly dust with it.
In short, reducing your impact is not hard, and it’s not something anyone expects you to be 100% dedicated to. You don’t have to live in a tent with 17 dreadlocked people in order to show some kind of compassion for the planet. You can enjoy the same life style you have now, but an awareness of how things end up in your house, how they’re processed, developed, produced and delivered will help you make a choice about what you do or do not buy or take part in. I’m not expecting anyone to change their lives as a result of this post, but I’d appreciate it if you’d give it some thought.
6 Months
It’s been 6 months to the day since that hellish day in February. And it was as close to hell as I care to be. I’ve written a very little about it, and debated writing about it tonight. Glancing at the few photos I sent to Flickr, the coldness in my spine said “Don’t even think about this anymore”.
But I have to.
On Black Saturday, my family stood in the paddock that faces the Kinglake Ranges and watched them burn with such speed there were no words. This wasn’t a fire, and it shouldn’t ever – EVER – be termed a Bushfire. It was a Fire Storm. It took no time at all to devour the Ranges. It ran ahead of itself in the crowns of trees. The soil, the goddamned DIRT burned.
We lost people. Everyone lost someone. Everyone here knows someone who was burned out. By the most incredible luck – and I mean incredible – the wind changed and my home wasn’t at risk. Others had the same luck, others had the exact opposite.
So now they talk of clearfelling the bush, and removing all the trees and the plants and turning it to grassland or parkland or developing it and my heart breaks. It shatters into a million pieces. People who lived through this, people who ran from the fires, who lost children and parents and friends to the storm, they have gone back to rebuild in the same place, because that’s where they love to be, because the bushland is their life and their passion.
The firestorm really did change everything, and very very few people understand something I saw with my own eyes – there wasn’t any way to be prepared for this storm. There was NOTHING anyone could do to save their houses, or in some cases, their lives. It didn’t behave like the bushfires of the past thousand years. It was new, it was something we’ve never seen before.
This is a bit stream of consciousness, I apologise. There’s a lot of raw emotion, and while the people of the fires are not so much in the news anymore, they are still living every single day with this nightmare. But they went back. Sure some didn’t. Some moved elsewhere and I don’t blame them a jot, but those that did – they understand that this is the Bush. This is what happens, and even with fuel reduction and backburning and god knows what else would have stopped this particular storm.
Those that we lost will be always missed. I don’t ever want to belittle or discount the horrors of the day. But I cannot stand the thought of bush destruction. I’m weird like that.
A Meme already?
Yeah I know, I have the suck. But it interested me. The meme, or challenge or whatever I spotted on an unrelated blog today was to pull up your photos folder, find the 6th folder in the list, then post the 6th photo in the folder. So here you are:
It might look like a random shot of the garden, but if you peer into that you’ll see the back end of a bird (hint, it’s yellow and brown). This is one of a few dozen shots I took trying to capture a great shot of this bird that was nesting in the staghorn. I didn’t get one SINGLE clear shot of her, but I’ve since figured out how to shoot continuous mode, so that helps!