brad

Where'd that Brad go?

29.03.2004 Brad landed in Malaga Spain, not knowing where he was going. He combined with some German strangers and ended up in Granada finding a place to stay the night. A couple days later he was signed up for spanish lessons and had a room for a month with some crazy Czech and Finnish flat mates and a rabid landlady. 06.04.2004 he received the holy grail eMail from DFC adding him to the anize co-op, with promises of travel in Spain and dreams of South America.

29.03.2005 Brad now writes leftist monologues about saving the planet, crashes in his parents house and knows what will happen tomorrow… nothing much has changed in months.

So what happened to that old Brad? Where’d he go? The replacement’s going to bed now.

Millenium Ecosystem Assessment

So the first of 7 reports about assessing where we’re at enviromentally and sustainably was released yesterday and is now all over the media. (Yeah, I coulda blogged it on Wednesday) Head to the Millenium Ecosystem Assessment source to get the actual info. I haven’t had a chance to analyse it properly, but am already hearing Australian Government people deriding it in interviews, which probably means its spot on.

For those who prefer, there’s also the site designed for mass consumption of this report at Greenfacts.org

Taus Enviro thread

The thread continuing our sustainability and environment discussions on Taus’ blog is going off. For readers just on Brad and not all of anize, here’s the link

join the discussion

teddy quote

I’ve had this quote ready to go as an anize draft for a while, but my thoughts around it haven’t generated anything pithy for the blog. For some reason all my recent posts have gone up on Wednesdays, thats reason enough for this to join them now.

The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first and love of soft living and the get-rich-quick theory of life.
—Theodore Roosevelt

R.I.P. Paul Hester

Depression rears its ugly head again, taking away the talented joy maker Paul Hester of Crowded House fame (drums).

R.I.P. and consolations to those he left behind.

The Cat Empire

Got to mention last Friday’s outdoor concert in Freo by The Cat Empire. They rock! Get the crowd up dancing, you can feel why they went over to Cuba to record the new album. One of the singers (Felix) reminded me of Michelle an Italian playing music and ultimate in Portugal and bringing his guitar to Bar do Peixe campfires for years.

After everyone else had done solos (the horns were great), the bass guitarist had a go. The bass just went straight through me. Felt like my lungs were vibrating. Buzz.

Suzuki Says

So I went and heard the charismatic environmentalist David Suzuki. I never knew he was initially inspired by Silent Spring which forced him to confront issues and not pursue genetics. His presentation started out by making the case we need to treasure the earth like generations before used to and traditional peoples still do and not something to exploit. Like something that gave birth to us. Sounded quite like Gaia, although he never used the term.

Suzuki used the air we breathe to demonstrate a principle. In one generation we’ve gone from asthma being rare to being present in around 1 in 5 first-world kids. One breath contains ~3×10¹⁸ Argon molecules. Unlike other components of air, Argon is inert, so it just passes through us. He did some dodgy assumptions to indicate the chances are you’ve got an Argon molecule in you right now that I’ve breathed at some point. The gist was we’re breathing the same limited stuff and it goes around and comes back. So what we put in the air we put in ourselves. Rephrased: we are the air. Similarly with water. What we do to the air and water, we do to ourselves. The atmosphere is only 8-10km thick and the only place we can survive. If the Earth was a basketball, the atmosphere would be thinner than glad-wrap. And we still use it like a rubbish tip. I was expecting a quip about messy kids who let their mothers clean up after them, but it never came.

He says the 30% change in Carbon content of the atmosphere we’ve caused in the last century will take a millenia to filter through all the Earth’s systems (if left there). Since we don’t really understand them, the risk is there we’ve already done damage we can’t cope with. He says this Carbon content could be peanuts compared to what will happen if with even mild warming the methane trapped in the tundra gets released. (Methane is more of a greenhouse gas than Carbon Dioxide). Basically he’s saying we’ve already caused warming and other changes, and as they start, we’ve set nature into motions we don’t know how it will respond to. It may be damped, or it may grow exponentially. He really stressed that we are quite naive and don’t know very much, but as a society believe that science understands the science and risks and have to push forward.

I’m sure I’ve forgotten stuff, but he said he tried to change things top down by sending one of his books to all canadian politicians and didn’t get a response. So he did the challenge and petition I mentioned before and after lots of people signed on, politicians got interested. So bottom up leading to top down worked best for him. I wonder if any power brokers were in the audience. I fear not, the elections were won.

Question time wasn’t that revealing. Suzuki feels he’s just one individual and doesn’t kid himself that he will be able to change things. He doesn’t want his grandchildren to say “but you could have done more”. That wasn’t the optimistic outlook I thought I’d heard from him before. There’s a lot of frustrated, downtrodden environmentalists out there. His suggestion is to hang out together, get into nature and don’t let things get you down.

Out in Nature

Things have been happening, but I’m out of the routine of blogging them as they happen.

I managed one of those out in nature trips anizers like, down in the Stirling Range National Park. A group of 5 Ultimate players got away from it for a weekend (I tried banning all Ultimate discussions… why can’t we do that?), hiked up Bluff Knoll-> (the only place in WA that snows, max ~5cm) and then along the ridges. Up and down. Up and down. Sleep in Cave. Sunrise. More up and down. Lunch in a fantastic glen. At this point I thought we had an easy walk out. Wrong. Steep scarp, lost the path. Bash through the bush. Rick held on to a bit of dead wood that went snap and ended up with a stick protruding out of his shin. If I hadn’t left my camera in the car, the photos would already be up, but Rick and Dan took heaps of shots of the hike and as soon as I’ve got them, you’ll get to see the gore. Our Physio, Mama Jo couldn’t cut it down, so ended up pulling it out and bandaging it up. Luckily it wasn’t too bad, we got down ok and stayed at Jo’s grandparents near Albany hospital where everything was announced to be ok. Unbelievably he played ultimate 4 days later.

After a deep sleep (beds!), we went down to the most stunning beach at Nanarup before fish and chips at Middleton Beach in Albany. Detour back to Bluff Knoll cafe on the way back to pick up my wallet < cough>. Thanks to Inga and David Johnston of Hamburg for handing it in. Deb’s folks then put on a fantastic BBQ dinner… only after Dan temporarily mucked up his car’s electrics helping a damsel in distress (ok, old lady), so we caught up with them again walking along Albany highway. No boredom!

Despite lugging 9kg of water and ending up covered in ticks, its all smiles. The next night, David Suzuki said people should get out into nature more. Deb and I felt our aching muscles, itches and scratches, looked at each other and grinned, agreeing with him.

edit: Oops, I forgot to mention Moongoongoonderup. We saw the moon, drank two bottles of wine (not really goon) and also did lots of up. Moongoongoonderup: been there, done that.

Anize talk: Music

How about a music sharing thread? Worth a shot, I’ve got heaps of catching up to do.

I’ll start with some easily accessible Australiana you may not have heard of. Check out
Triple J Radio station - which you can listen to online or browse heaps of recommendations, reviews and info. Its listeners voted these hottest 100 songs for 2004
Missy Higgins and listen to her album
John Butler Trio, now a very popular independent, but a few years back was playing the streets in Freo.
Little Birdy. Another awesome Perth group.

And some requests of the anize crew and others, what should I check out? Volker - you’ve had time to filter all the stuff you found in South America. Where’s it at?