• loving vision to heal + habitat = more habitat and more biodiversity
• killing to heal + habitat = less habitat, less biodiversity

The Agricultural Chemical and Machinery Industries‘ direction within mainstream society has endowed future populations of  our world with:

• fast food production,
• decreased biosphere activity
• fast development
• increased production yield in mainstream Horticultural, Agricultural and Amenity cropping systems.
• Everywhere you drive, along the side of the roads you can see this legacy of the Agricultural Chemical in the form of  dead grass and micro habitat sprayed with herbicides.
• Everywhere you shop, you can purchase food products as a legacy of this fast fix Agricultural Chemical legacy.
• Every time you meet council and landlord requirements to “pest proof” your new building or leased property, you sponsor this legacy of Agricultural Chemicals.
• Everytime you you chose the comfort of  poisoning a rat, spraying a fly, safeguarding your home from those “terribly annoying and threatening spiders and ants”, you further this legacy of Agricultural chemicals into the world and the food chains.
• Every time you need to travel many kilometre to retrieve food and accomodate lifestyle, the machinery industry helps you, via roads, non regionalised industry, and non sustainable developments.

Now, I do not mean to make you feel uncomfortable about this. Or do I…….

• Agricultural Chemicals and Large Machinery  are a wonderful and terrifying gift from Science and, in turn God. These pesticides and machines, if I may so loosely term them, have saved lives, and helped feed millions.

And this, dear environmentally concerned reader, is the quandary. The annoying dichotomy of existence today.

The Quandary

*Chemicals + machinery+microhabitat and habitat = Bare soil / limited habitat

How does one practice and live valid, sustainable lifestyles (especially those that we, and our peers have become so accustomed to), and yet keep our environments comfortable, safe and abundant?

“Chemical free” I hear the advertisement chirp cheerily on the radio. “Without harmful chemicals”, “biosafe” .  .  .       I see the presenter announcer –  in pristine white gleaming kitchen, as she wipes those dangerous germs from the kitchen bench, her baby’s hands, and her swing lid garbage bin.

Well, we are all chemical. It is highly chemical. We are a biochemical complexity on a biochemically complex earth.

*The trick is: chemicals , particularly man made ones, are on the rise, permeating our food chains, air, water and soils.   Our world has become so full of these new, and often combined chemicals, that. . . …… that it is hard to know what was natural, in the beginning, and what is “natural” now.

Our minds have become so full of this knowledge, about these chemicals, that we have reached new plateaus of tolerance and comfortability about them all (well, at least many of them).

Yet, listen to this reasoning:

• We may be all chemical.
• We may strive to define what is a “good chemical” and a “bad chemical”.
• Essentially, in between all those biochemical components that make up the living earth………. in between all the organic, and inorganic chemicals of our living planet, there exists SPACE.

And there is alot of it!                 In fact, mainly, we ARE composed of SPACE. There is quite alot going on, in that space….. another story………. I digress.

Tolerance Plateaus and Stress

So the tolerance plateaus that  much of society have reached, with regard to man made chemical creation?

• Food chain chemical adjustment.
• Brain wave chemical adjustment.

The combined effects from media and industry onslaught of killing the bug, monculturing the lawn, product fixation, running to a deadline, playing with the beast?,

Generally, over-driving natural systems to the same extent we drive our neurotic selves., Causing a number of  abreactions.  Combined effects of combined effects carry with them unpredictable outcomes.

Chemical Monoculture Mindsets

*Bare soil    =      limited habitats,limited biodiversity

*Chemicals + machinery+microhabitat and habitat = Bare soil / limited habitat

These mindests have been built up of a number of generations now – courtesy of

• marketing,
• advertising (some of it, you even invite into your home via tv, radio, via playing it while YOU go about YOUR day). Why look!!! I even have google ads on bluecray…well, i tried them for a while…
  
• Product & Company endorsement via guidelines laid down in government and agency activities
• Schooling “norms”
• Peer Higher Education interfacing with Corporate/ Business.

Now all of this makes me think of R J Lifton’s writings,  how my experiences in life show me that many people adopt this strategy of “killing” in the name of healing, as explained by R J Lifton.

Nature is also under stress. And like us, has coping mechanisms.

However, consequences from all of these stresses  - the ongoing complexity of them…… makes the little things rather important.

Little things, like not killing, but growing habitats.

In our dazed neurotic state (complex as it is),  we forget what we were doing. We forget our simple, caring lives.

Instead, we find ourselves caught in an ever informed, mindblowing realisation that it really IS going way too fast!! All of us, so many people in the planet lost into their moment, and times are changing, again!

Vision and Love

I would like to bring this article back to the beginning now.  Back to that directional  idea. That idea of killing something with chemicals, spraying the country, waterways and estuaries with chemicals.

• Machinery and chemicals cause small localised losses of biodiversity
• These losses can accumulate rather rapidly owing to other localised pressures that are also within that particular ecosystem or even habitat.
• I have noticed that many small and sometimes larger property management tree plantings  are cleared extensively by mowing or herbicide. A strange birth path for an environmental project. Killing the land to heal it. It isn’t even a gentle killing!!
• Various different growth stages, over time, of different plant communities = Variously different habitats and related biodiverse flora and fauna communities

This is a symptom. This is looking it right in the eye, at the ground level. TAKE A LOOK!!!

*Over cultivation  + Mowing + herbicide use  =    limited habitats  +  limited biodiversity

*Bare soil    =      limited habitats,limited biodiversity

• Australian landscapes have a fundamental dynamic biodiversity that has functioned for tens of thousands, even millions of years.
• Different biodiversity dynamics appear regularly. The trick is in keeping the biodiversity going, so that balances can occur more readily.
• Nature is amazing, and it can re-invent iself quite remarkably. A bare mown patch of ground can, perhaps, turn itself into a forest. It certainly can, if it is in the middle of a wet rainforest, surrounded by biodiversity. If it is along the Darling River, it may take many, many years or even decades and centuries to “reinvent” itself into a dynamic yet stable over time,  biodiverse habitat.

Various different growth stages, over time, of different plant communities = Variously different habitats and related biodiverse flora and fauna communities

• Habitat regeneration, without chemicals and large machinery is caring for our country, flora and fauna.
• Habitat regeneration need not be  about killing habitat. Although natural processes do respond to death in a rebirth way.
• Habitat repair, after destruction via machinery and chemicals,  having gone past critical level, responds with less and less resilience.
• Habitat regeneration is about understanding and loving habitats. Loving nature, and bothering to spend some time there, to care, before you race in and kill habitats and micro-habitats.
• A loving approach to Habitat regeneration makes more sense.
• A loving approach to Habitat regeneration takes more time. The birth energy of such a regeneration project is alot more well adjusted to fit into natural rythms already working on the revegetating sight.

Meanwhile, back to the Abreactions, the biochemical and psychological stresses that we are handing ourselves over to.

• When someone is acting from a primed stress response, any further stresses can cause chronic illness.
• When an animal is acting from a stress situation,  especially if stress patterns are already deeply based in the animal’s responses, with further stresses occurring, that animal may become further stressed, depending on it’s coping mechanisms.
• Changes that occur too rapidly, will often then cause more stress.
• The same can be said for a micro habitat.  The most basic micro habitat for much survival, here on earth, is the humus level. This humus level is a fantastic earthly biological wonder.  Beyond this are the smaller creatures of earth, the bacteria, the insects, the spiders, the fungi, the lichens, the small molluscs, reptiles, mammals etc, plants, vegetation communities.
• As our personal environment changes about us, be it social, homelife, daily or work related, our earth’s environment is also moving  fast, about us. (especially in rapid development areas).
• Social Environmental Stress is also rapidly changing.
• Habitat destruction comes in many forms.
• Habitat destruction stresses us and earths precious creatures and life forms  in more ways than you can imagine.
• Habitat destruction has far reaching consequences on, and via the more basic earth elements, such as fire, wind, rain, heat, cold, weather etc.

Killing to heal is an auto response that doesn’t always serve us. Loving to heal is a whole much better. Get it?

killing to heal + habitat = less habitat, less biodiversity

loving vision to heal + habitat = more habitat and more biodiversity

Environmental Ethics at the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Peter Vintila at Postkyoto Centre : See some of Peter Vintila’s work here:- ABC Unleashed: “Climate War” 6th November 2009; Post Kyoto Journal . His works show the dichotomies of human acquired learning responses and social adaptive tendencies when, the whole of our beautiful blue planet is at risk from our collective social activities. The tendency to “fight, flight and freeze” – the trauma adaptive qualities of centuries of “threat from outside” are now being acted out en masse by society. These learned adaptive processes, whilst possibly serving us collectively in humanity’s “youth”, are now outdated, and a new, brave form of courage is required. That of a VISION encompassing loving, sharing, forgiveness, acceptance – growing and nurturing “the good” in place of fighting and destroying “the bad“.

This can be said, in general,  for wars, developments, community revegetation programs, roadside management, planning instruments, daily lifestyles of individuals and much much more.

“A Balance of Faeries” 1989 – A true story

• Weed Identification – IBRA – SE Qld
• Weed Identification – IBRA – NSW North Coast

My own mind has been home to  radical thoughts since the beginning of my conscious life. For years I thought that it was only ME who saw the world differently. Now how innocent is THAT!

Researching for the bluecray.org  website has led me to  discover some inspiring and reassuring people, websites and journals. These discoveries have encouraged me to stand my ground, state my position from creative insight and seemingly go at odds to  mainstream collective thinking and perception.

I found that  there are people, websites, and journals offering independent activism initiatives that fill a mainstream void.  A void  that so readily occurs when the mainstream momentum engulfs creative radical perimeter thinking,  swallowing, chewing it then regurgitating it as popular thought, minus the deeper meaning and context.

Now I am not saying that this eating up of radical thought by the mainstream is wrong. And I am not saying that this process doesn’t  serving humanity or that it is toxic to humanity’s mass conciousness journey – or is it?

All I am trying to say is that  peripheral radical and unique creative elements  of human society are very essential to the overall wellbeing of the direction of humanity.

• The Change Agency has one such website . While mainstream community environmental workers have undoubtedly helped the environmental “cause”, agencies such as the Change Agency dare to be that little bit different.
• Radical Psychology - A Journal of Psychology, Politics, and Radicalism by the Radical Psychology Network is one such Journal Website. Questioning themselves in the mainstream flow of Psychological knowledge, they appear to be stretching the creative edge of Psychological reasoning and daring to bring their insights to public awareness.
• R J Lifton – is one such individual. He has given value to the Artist and visionary, in the scheme of humanity facing mass destruction.
• Daniel Goleman : Ecological Intelligence, Emotional Intelligence, Social Intelligence and Truth and Consequence

At ground level, I have seen this feasting on the radical edge, by popular mainstream movement, time and time again, within the environmental movement.

Examples are:

• Organics mainstream:  served to us by popular word, offered as a buffet by supermarket giants and television presentations. To the side still lies true organics, offering a peaceful coexistence with nature that is in stark contrast to the mainstream rush at devouring the earth’s resources.
• Landcare and other mainstream revegetation programs : that feed on weed infested sites, clearing and spraying their way to a new glorious habitat “presentation”, whilst often destroying delicately balanced micro habitats in the process. A diet of weeds can, in fact, be very healthy for a site that is being regenerated.
• Mainstream Climate Change and Natural Resource Management  initiatives and products:  absentmindedly allowing us to buy and spend our way out of future environmental consequences whilst the real issues of “living like kings and gods”,  inequality for human rights and markets for weapons and lifestyles of mass destruction lay dormant in our irrational minds as we take our daily diet of mainstream news for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
• Sustainability : a word so overused now, that it is a frequent term used by the very markets and processes that erode the earth’s environmental sustainability to describe their own financial longevity and practices.

So next time you race out to by the newest “green” product to sponsor a cause, “kill” off that grass with roundup to plant a new forest and decide to buy organic herbs packaged ever so nicely in their plastic container rather than pick your own home grown parsley – have a thought for your own radical psychology – then go to the edge, and THINK AGAIN.

• The Rainforest Information Centre – “Earth Spirit Action” - Deep Ecology
• Alison Tuck : Woman and Child First  - Psychology Links and Articles
• Bluecray philosophy links