Yes Brian,while we have a society and economic system in which Growth At Any Cost has the status of a sanctified religion then we are going to see all sorts of disastrous results,some of which you describe.

There needs to be more Australians taking a clear eyed and hard headed look at where we have been,what we are now and where we are likely to be if continue on this trajectory.

A good place to start is the population issue which is at the base of most problems.If we continue to pack more people into a finite and fragile Australia where are we going? I suggest - more degenerate people,more dysfunctional lifestyles,more degraded environment and much less chance of a sane and sustainable nation.

Is this is what the likes of Rudd want with their "vision" of a "Big Australia"? - more like a nightmare.

Yes!

One of the best books written on this topic, or how this situation came to be, was/is The American Replacement of Nature by William Irwin Thompson.

Indeed his work altogether is essential reading if one wants to understand where the world is at altogether, and how we got to here.

Of course the work of Thompson is too "far out" to be acceptable in either the academy or in the circles of people who write and talk about the situation of the world, and how we got to here.

Nope, I'll be the difficult one. Brian, just before you race off to collect your humanitarian award consider this: what do people want? Do they want shopping malls or do they want to commune with the bush? The answer is that mostly they want shopping malls. This is sad I agree but there it is. The bush is the place where they go in their four wheel drives. The fact that the tree went missing to build a mall car park is also sad but people wanted a mall and there are other trees out there.. Heartless? Perhaps. However, overwhelmingly people want a balance that includes malls and some preservation, but preservation away from their homes.
If you seek to confront us then ask yourself this difficult, confronting question. You mention three indigenous girls at the beginning of the article. What was the status of women in pre-contact indigenous society and what was their likely fate?

By saying "There are three indigenous girls walking and scrambling along the shores of Botany Bay. They are seeking something tasty to add the tribe’s dinner for that night." you paint a very rosy and peaceful picture of what life for the typical aborigine was like before whiteman came. However, in reality things weren't as serene as you make out. For example, in tribes around where I come from (Mt Isa, Queensland) the children were quite likely to be hunting down their cousins as a food source (ie: the Kalkadoons, like many aboriginal tribes, were cannibalistic). Even tribes that weren't cannibalistic were still very likey to be at constant war/conflict with their neighbouring tribes. A typical aborigine was lucky to die of old age-- many died premature painful deaths from fighting injuries, injuries caused by their lifestyle (such as snake bites), poor health due to bad diet, infections from cuts and broken bones and starvation.
So perhaps whiteman and his distance from "nature" isn't so bad after all?

lovely philosophical piece, brian - it brought tears to my eyes.

bill mckibben's 'the end of nature'' is another very good book - focussing on our species' duty of care, as custodians of what is left of nature on this planet, now that we have tamed the wilderness.

tony kevin

Hang on a while, I'll just rewind Brian's film, & have another look without the rose coloured glasses.

What we find now is 3 dirty, hungry, lice infested girls, desperately searching for food, any food. The men have been slack. They haven't burned the scrub for too lomg, & it's far too thick for hunting. No one has been able to find any larger game for a while, & the whole tribe's hungry.

Now the wet season makes the foraging harder, & it's hard to get a scrub fire going with everything wet. It's going to be a while with flat bellies.

Fast forward to Miranda years later. That bl00dy gum tree, that they tried to save has just dropped another huge branch. Dangerous damn thing, like most old ones, does it all the time. This time the tree surgeon has said it's too far gone. If we don't get rid of it, it will kill someone.

A different picture, probably a little closer to real life.

Wouldn't it be loverly, [that song again], if these dreamers just saw the facts, & called it as it really is, or was, as the case may be.

I don't like cities either, that's why I don't live in one. However, I have enough sense to know that they offer the easiest, most comfortable living for the majority of people.

If only they would stop painting idyllic pictures on a bush landscape, which would starve most of them to death, quite quickly, if it hadn't killed them in an accident, first.

Oh, & Brian, yes keeping busy is sure to be good for you, but try changing what you are doing old mate. What ever it is you are up to is not good for you. It's giving you hallucinations.