Just how difficult is it to be objective and effective in our work

My aim here is to show you just how challenging it is to understand ( say ecology , physics , chemistry ) and then work with nature.( engineering , agriculture etc)

 I am not saying I am an expert in all these areas , but i am deeply aware that while I had a  great career in environmental risk assessment and environmental engineering,  that opportunity no longer exists and all Australians need to know why ------ and do something to change things .

Unless the city stops telling custodians how to manage the earth , we will have no effective handles for people who work with nature to keep doing so . The battle to really listen  is not new

This wrong approach enslaves  precious people in the wars zones of the world.
A new view of how objectivity respect and democracy can work is needed  

The challenges for us ALL to objective about the earth and our neighbours needs in relation to our own have always stretched us and our forefathers . Being more  objective  ( the aim here ) will mean  we can be much more effective than they were;
A genuine hope and place of consensus to share with our children .

 

I am good at a couple of things,  I am going to just choose two

A  Easy engineering - Building with concrete and steel ( Most Engineers and builders are much better at this than I , so if you want to correct me here,  please do . the world only works when we get it right and it works efficiently for all - is my point valid ?


Think about  the relationship between steel and concrete. Mixtures have predicable sizes and relationships the world over ( steel at 3-5 mm thick 150mm squares and concrete ratio 5:3;1 set % for depth of placement etc etc

Ok but you still need someone to check  that the right steel and concrete is in the right place?




B    Ecosystems engineeering   
The quest for an objective view that we can work with

Ecosystems , by contrast , are sensitive to change and so vary block to block on the earth -- with any damage and failure ALSO dependent on the exact nature of the violence man imposes on the parties (eg time and times you disturb the soil; )
To make the engineering part  even more interesting, there is always a bit of "rubber" ( called resilience ) in there as well.

Whose checking who when it comes to all the wild accusations about whats not working in our engagements with the environment . Whose calming our overly cynical misanthopic guilt prone crowd  with the confidence of , not just facts, but with the confidence of experience with the facts ?

Who never gets beyond fear mongering .projection and muddying the waters 



OK  ---you accept that too many wannabes wanna be too smart with the environment

What are YOU going to do about it ?
Your options  

1. Sit in basic competency training class for a while.and learn whats deeply wrong with our education training and review system . the dumbing down of Australia predicted by the best scientists http://misplacedconcreteness.blogspot.com   What Aussie university is running classes on Ellul and Whitehead?  


2. Stop pontificating on complex subjects you  haven't properly studied

3. Recognize that polys have noone they can trust because their parties  have ALL been funding their own half baked "itching ears " versions of the bandaid brigade for decades http://cuttingedgecare.blogspot.com Take the huge mess of the Murray Darling - a plan that simply doesn't work .
Tries to please everyone , understands and pleases noone .
Which individual  in the photo or is the painting and framing wrong? 


4. Save time and trust some of us who study the environment and environmental engineering properly

Stop the chanting and ranting ' Give our kids the job you currently mess with from the front room

The blatant hypocrisy of the wannabes ( mostly non scientists )  about the " need for environmental care " still blinds  Australians to our profound and deep failure to leave the job of directing the tough neighbourhood jobs to objective scientists .Tokenism ,Projection ,Nimbyism and "laws for others " litter the landscape .

You may have built your dream house in the environment, but don't think you know the foundations ( the landscape ) ,  or can tell the food & water producers how to manage our delicate soils and climate . Lets be clever Australia by employing our children scientists in production questions on the land . We are not doing it now !

This Nimbyism of our age  is not new , Infact the new religious left are as guilty of it as anyone.
The Lefts( they have been driving environmental policy for decades )   blind sending of our rubbish to Asia is perfect illustration of their blindness .
The Master taught our parents better . own your own backyard ( Peterson) Talk and work with your neighbour, respecting that there are robbers beating him up and he has a hard job eco managing too .

We are only at our best in the West when our various functional arms and legs  work closely together and sit on careless conversations about what is happening over the hill .
ABCTV run back to same old cynics , worriers ,fur agents and possum sympathizers ;  recently with 4 corners program on dams (yes they can be OK -( ask all/ANY of the many  UNEMPLOYED young aussies with environmental engineering degrees ) .
For a whole decade,  the dummies have spent 19 billion on a wild goose chase down the Darling.

Chasing the wolf on the West Coast

Not only did the modern conservation management ministry miss the dumbest of ideas ( like building in the floodplain of the Barham Valley and making of water  near Warrigul )the  Daniel Andrews government don't even know that all the money they spend on landslides along the Great Ocean road last year is a expensive waste of time .


The Conservation arm of government has become the extending arm of panic and the absolutely stupid business of shoring up what will inevitably fall over .Union members again got jobs but the worthwhileness of the job is questioned by anyone who knows what they did where .
Instead of designing with nature the Andrews government have led the world in driving the country into the sea.
Straining out knats  (small earth flows )and swallowing camels ( the better planning in the area )
I wonder if Richard Riordan has asked how much the superficial works in the Wye River  cost and whether anything has really changed to reduce the risks of further degradation in the area.

The worlds greatest opportunity for peace goes AWL

This post is going to be incomplete for now.

It celebrates mine and others effective work in catchment management . It notes the complete incompetence of political parties to act in relation to the predisposing factors for WAR.

We note the loss of skill and respect for real world environmental managers
We note the now intransigent state of impotence led by PC academics , wannabes and theoreticians
 In the pre-millennial period in Australia ,where properly trained and mentored scientists maintained and improved the water quality and land use by working closely on sites capabilities and land manager relations .
The reason this post is so important and ambitious  is because this skill  has been lost to management class cultures over the last twenty years and won't come back easily. Professional care has been hijacked by theoretical and simple ideological  care.

Some of our staff have worked in Afghanistan and while catchment planning can work,  if its not allowed to, bombs will flow just as soils will continue to erode.  Water. soil quality and livelihood resilience stays than same as its done since biblical times- unstable

The point is the salinity and soil damage in the middle east  need not be the ongoing eroding capital loss of there and the Sudan and so on --
CM like it  has been here  can help restore rel resilience.
Without method resilience remains just an ambition 

 Here s one catchment in a SEMIARID  area where the water quality has been maintained and improved in the twenty years I worked it ----- slowly but STP=LTG
 Short term pain =Long term gain = achievable conservation 

The Good intentions create little but fiddle

Its been over 6 years since the last post here ( plenty elsewhere) What's changed in government's approach in that time ? (to environment) - nothing but more  fiddling and twiddeling ( at the behest of Green Labor)

1. More mere description
2. More PC research but no conclusions and nothing to upset the trip to the cul de sac
3. Longer lists of things to worry about  but no real understanding of biodiversity and how to encourage it.
4. More excuses 
5. More fearmongering 
6. More preventable disasters
7. More Emperors with no clothes  Julia must really notice the breeze 
8. Bigger excuses and bigger bureaus to manage and provide forms to fill out to prevent those disasters
9. An opposition aware of some of the bleedin,  but with no idea of how to do surgery on the bleeding economy in THIS regard . Making money is easy . Making the family work is another matter.
10. No idea what planning WITH the environment really means or staff who are trained and on the job to do it

Why environmental planning is in such a mess

This house will never be finished because it was stopped midstream; It's on a landslide . The Bracks government no longer stop such disasters , they wait for them to happen. Or they tell us they could happen Click here for Victoria . Click Thredbo for Australia . (The above update on 26th July)
How long before the biggest landslide risk area in Australia has a disaster? - no big ones that we could have stopped so far. Its all very well talking about potential problems (website), but Vic Government (as from 2006) no longer do anything effective to prevent them.

You heard it first on blogger.

The above does not relate directly to sites mentioned below .
Another story on a landslide site from last year.
Corangamite Shire
Came across someone trying to build a house on a landslide yesterday . The site was levelled, sighting pegs were in and PVC drainage pipes up. Reinforcing was stacked up on its side and the concrete was ready to pour. I though of another site we should have stopped the pour on last year . Would we do it this time ?
My young work experience assistant took some photos of the drain behind the house and closeups of the soil, but was typically not engaged too much about the dangers( or how to minimize them on site).
The risk of slope failure was so high that even major new site drainage works would be unlikely to make it safe for the lifetime of the building .

"Are you sure its dangerous?" was a question I sort of hoped for " What makes you think it will move ? Any question would have been a welcome change from the grunts and groans of sophisticated silence or soppy sentimental unsubstance that greets us a response from most of those who are now in charge of "the env agenda" "
The young Yr 10 student was, through no fault of her own, being brought up in a society which doesn't prepare them for dangers - at least the really serious scientifically and practically dangerous things like houses falling off hills( and permanently polluting waterways - both things we were also documenting that day )

Clearly, as the house project had got this far, noone had seen the danger coming. To give you an idea why , the slope on which this house was being built was none too steep.(18%) We grow up with preconcieved ideas of what makes something dangerous. Steepness is one of those things. Yet the risk is there to be seen --all around the owner - if only he would just look and or ask someone who knows .Then he would have known . the Shire would known ; The builder would have known .18 people wouldn’t have died at the hand of man at Thedbo .


When the children are in charge, its much harder to raise the idea of a new danger --the leaders think they know .Experience is the best teacher, but they not only not listening to them ; they are sacking them . Leaders think they now what real threats the country is facing but clearly they watch too much TV, drink too much coffee and don't get out enough amongst the rough and tuf .Dangers from rising sea levels , Shortages of water and coming shortages of hardwood pulp .The world is heating up – “its obvious isn't it” they say . Not to a scientist it isn't/ specially on a geological scale You name it they told you about it first . The children, in charge, that is

Save every drop. The Premier has put his name on the idea . Doesn't sound like he knows much . Save us from the dropkicks more like it .Don't they know water goes round in cycles like almost everything else. Sure our city cousins could be saving a lot more drops, but we don't all need to save every drop. By setting some unreal fence on some flat terrain where the living should be easy ( provided you don’t drive too fast ,keep your eyes open and use some common sense ; where is that these days? ) our leaders are have us all building fences and putting up signs where no fences or signs are required. Maybe the save your droppings campaigns overall effect will be more conservation - a good thing-- but look at the down side of making conservation simple - you risk credibility and careers. Such simpleton driven stupidity creates indifference amongst the young and cynicism amongst those trained to

4 corners ABCTV TODAY "Let the country people learn to survive the real world? "

The problem with the "eat you alive" worldview of the majority of myopic bookeepers is that we are not dealing HERE in the bush with recyclable steel, concrete and plastic .People working with the earth and applying the precautionary principle are being screwed by those who think collapse and high risk is a good feature of all industry. We desperately need a primary industry policy group that knows the difference betwen eco reality and eco garbage. One that doesn't feed off the "brilliance" of asset stripping and simple and even cancerous sales growth . .
Some of the world's most sustainable grain growing areas are in marginal country . True they have to be managed better ( and are - a great positive in the program) but using the ancient old seabed of the Murray Darling for a few more thousand years is not going to ruin it - it makes a lot of sense for much of it to stay as a foodbowl . Precision is the decision not recidivism.