Nature is marvelous, sweet ears.
Creatures evolve to fill all niches, bacteria that live on the lips of underwater volcanoes, lichens that cling to alpine rock, diversity and resilience. Even here in the subterranean, sunless world where I find myself, how can it be so?, there are creatures adapted to circumstances. White cockroaches, blind mice, black slime worms with a wild white stripe.
I diverted myself for some months erecting a palace for the white cockroaches from discarded bits and pieces, which they loved and lived in, with their pungent smell, sharp and sweet like a primordial sweet and sour until the cleaner went through the place with a disinfectant, that also stank, and the entire population of my palace died, slowly on their back. Like the frogs in the Hacking River, running through the Royal National Park south of Sydney, poisoned by coal sludge released from the metropolitan coal mine.
The white palace was constructed from components salvaged from our collective waste. One of the secrets of my sanity, is the weekly rubbish run. In addition to our daily 15 minutes in the light well, we can escape the walls a while by sorting, carting and loading the rubbish onto trucks. Shades of the Last Empress, not the Korean TV show, Sweet Ears, the last monarch of the Ming dynasty, who, in her child hood, begged for the privilege of shoveling the shit out of the cess pool of a rich household to fertilise her poor family’s fields. True story: I am reliably told that hosts would weigh the turds of their dinner guests, so they could repay the nutrients they left behind. I have never established if the nutrients in the meal were deducted first.
I do that, I count costs. I am a thrifty soul, who believes in a resource tax, and on those weekly waste details, I am alarmed at the amount of waste we produce in this place. It is criminal. And that’s not a word we use lightly, down here. You Sweet Ears, on average, throw out half a kilo of single use plastic every day. I and my colleagues here, in the cage, involuntary produce five times that. The rubber gloves, the plastic knives, the blue safety suits. Safety, safety, we keep ourselves in cotton wool and the world is drowning in our discards.
The frogs of Royal National Park though are not just dying from the carelessly discarded toxins of individual citizens, they are being poisoned by a corporation, extracting ancient sunlight in the form of coal and who, accidentally or otherwise, have let a black sludge, laden with the phenols and other poisons that inhabit coal seams.
I once spent three idyllic days escaping the furnace of February in a Sydney Summer dog paddling and performing breast stroke in the Upper Hunter. A rocky bottom, the occasional sandy beach, weeping casuarinas providing dappled shade. It was delightful. I swam for hours, occasionally getting out to bathe in the 42 degree air to remind my blood that different temperatures reigned elsewhere.
The point, Sweet Ears? The relevance to our tale? My beard and the ends of my silver hair, turned bright orange. Immersed in the waters of the Upper Hunter for days, they had slowly absorbed iron or some other orange stain from the water. Were it iron, I’d be okay. Iron is not generally toxic to our body, unless you are a Celt and collect way too much of it in your blood. Google Hemochromatosis and weep. A good sword fight, session with a leech or visit to the blood bank generally fixes that, though.
My concern was were it something else. I mean we have dumped so much soot, microplastics and toxins into the ocean that it is killing the phytoplankton that produce have the worlds oxygen and such carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into food for the marine food chain. The death of these tiny plants has reduced the microlayer of lipids and surfactants that form a natural barrier between the water and the air, slow down the evaporation of the ocean and speed up the transfer of atmospheric carbon dioxide into the water. Bad stuff all round, and I don’t want it making my whiskers orange, if you get my drift.
But Sweet Ears, the dilemma is always the same. We can only do so much as individuals. I can demand a tin dish to lick my dinner from, or metal cutlery! But the system sees these domestic implements as weapons. I can walk rather than ride my mobility scooter to the mess room but that does nothing to reduce the poisons produced from the highly processed food slopped onto the plastic plates once I get there.
The Zeds, the broadcasting social enterprise that connects your Ears to my mouth, Sweet Ears, (though you might not want to linger longer on that visual image) used to regularly say, Educate, Agitate and Organise. We can, we should, we must. Lobby the powers that be.
Protecting the phytoplankton and the micro layer that are responsible for half the oxygen in the atmosphere and the carbon dioxide in the water is essential to our survival, but we cannot do it on our own.
The white palace was constructed from components salvaged from our collective waste. One of the secrets of my sanity, is the weekly rubbish run. In addition to our daily 15 minutes in the light well, we can escape the walls a while by sorting, carting and loading the rubbish onto trucks. Shades of the Last Empress, not the Korean TV show, Sweet Ears, the last monarch of the Ming dynasty, who, in her child hood, begged for the privilege of shoveling the shit out of the cess pool of a rich household to fertilise her poor family’s fields. True story: I am reliably told that hosts would weigh the turds of their dinner guests, so they could repay the nutrients they left behind. I have never established if the nutrients in the meal were deducted first.
I do that, I count costs. I am a thrifty soul, who believes in a resource tax, and on those weekly waste details, I am alarmed at the amount of waste we produce in this place. It is criminal. And that’s not a word we use lightly, down here. You Sweet Ears, on average, throw out half a kilo of single use plastic every day. I and my colleagues here, in the cage, involuntary produce five times that. The rubber gloves, the plastic knives, the blue safety suits. Safety, safety, we keep ourselves in cotton wool and the world is drowning in our discards.
The frogs of Royal National Park though are not just dying from the carelessly discarded toxins of individual citizens, they are being poisoned by a corporation, extracting ancient sunlight in the form of coal and who, accidentally or otherwise, have let a black sludge, laden with the phenols and other poisons that inhabit coal seams.
I once spent three idyllic days escaping the furnace of February in a Sydney Summer dog paddling and performing breast stroke in the Upper Hunter. A rocky bottom, the occasional sandy beach, weeping casuarinas providing dappled shade. It was delightful. I swam for hours, occasionally getting out to bathe in the 42 degree air to remind my blood that different temperatures reigned elsewhere.
The point, Sweet Ears? The relevance to our tale? My beard and the ends of my silver hair, turned bright orange. Immersed in the waters of the Upper Hunter for days, they had slowly absorbed iron or some other orange stain from the water. Were it iron, I’d be okay. Iron is not generally toxic to our body, unless you are a Celt and collect way too much of it in your blood. Google Hemochromatosis and weep. A good sword fight, session with a leech or visit to the blood bank generally fixes that, though.
My concern was were it something else. I mean we have dumped so much soot, microplastics and toxins into the ocean that it is killing the phytoplankton that produce have the worlds oxygen and such carbon dioxide out of the air and turn it into food for the marine food chain. The death of these tiny plants has reduced the microlayer of lipids and surfactants that form a natural barrier between the water and the air, slow down the evaporation of the ocean and speed up the transfer of atmospheric carbon dioxide into the water. Bad stuff all round, and I don’t want it making my whiskers orange, if you get my drift.
But Sweet Ears, the dilemma is always the same. We can only do so much as individuals. I can demand a tin dish to lick my dinner from, or metal cutlery! But the system sees these domestic implements as weapons. I can walk rather than ride my mobility scooter to the mess room but that does nothing to reduce the poisons produced from the highly processed food slopped onto the plastic plates once I get there. The Zeds, the broadcasting social enterprise that connects your Ears to my mouth, Sweet Ears, used to regularly say, educate, agitate and organise. We can, we should, we must. Lobby the powers that be. Protecting the phytoplankton and the micro layer that are responsible for half the oxygen in the atmosphere and the carbon dioxide in the water is essential to our survival, but we cannot do it on our own.
Of course, you can listen to the Podcast
