This essay tells us more about the author than about Bob Brown or what he believes and has said.

I wonder if Alan has ever sat down and had long extended conversations with Bob Brown.

Meanwhile Gaia lives. Human beings are completely entangled within and dependent upon the intricate web of mutually dependent relationships and patterns which operate as the vast SYSTEM called planet.And also upon cosmic systems too, such as solar flares and astrological conjunctions.

Yes the Earth is a SYSTEM which like all systems is "governed" by laws. Laws which always tend (even deliberately) to keep the system in balance.

The entire world is a living being. Planet Earth is a watery, breathing entity alive in the Mystery of Divine Communion. Like all forms and beings upon and within it, the Earth will also change and pass away.

So too for all the forms of life on Earth;the animals and plants, the rivers, oceans and mountains - all exist as Contemplatives by nature, and design. They are natural Contemplatives, without the heavy weight of the conceptual thinking-mind. Humans, in their most inherent simplicity, invested in true feeling, are also naturally disposed toward Divine Communion. But human tend to resist this intrinsic Spiritual impulse.

This is especially so for Westerners who now rule the Earth. And who are disposed by cultural presumption to gain power and control over one and every thing.

Instead of living as Spiritual Contemplatives, we dwell in our left-brained ABSTRACTING mind, and thus forget our True Nature. There are powerful cultural TABOOS against such Contemplation.

This forgetting of the Sacred is a destructive force that is disrupting this world, its intricate patterns of mutually dependent relationships, the lives of ALL beings here, including ourselves. This single lesson, fully learned, will awaken in us the necessary respect and remembrance of the Truth of ourselves, and of all seeming others (there is not a jot of separation to be found any "where").

The human world is the fear world. The non-human world is NOT the fear world.

Brown is just expressing the hope of imposing the ethics of corporate social responsibility where none currently exist. A greater tax on coal is fair and justified given the huge contribution that coal makes to atmospheric carbon emmissions leading to dangerous levels of global warming.

In the atmospheric history of Earth and Venus we see the two extremes. Very little CO2 in Earth's atmosphere 650 million years ago due to extreme carbon sequestration, producing Snowball Earth, glaciers and packed ice at the equator and everywhere else. That ice age was broken by volcanic eruptions of CO2.

In Venus, with the equivalent amount of planetary carbon, but no sequestrated carbon, only atmospheric CO2 creating extreme greenhouse effects with surface temperatures of 600 degrees C. The UN's efforts to curb CO2 emmissions is critical if future generations are not to face recurrent severe climate effects before mother nature's complex feed-back mechanisms pass a fateful tipping point.

In this context, taxing coal to pay for flood reconstruction and nation building around sustainable living is a smart thing to do. We need more leaders like Bob Brown.

Alan of course recently wrote an essay in the IPA Review in praise of Mad Men and how we supposedly all admire them.

Unfortunately it is precisely the out of balance essentially psychotic mad men who have created the current world-wide collective psychosis.

The only thing that these mad men are ever doing is dramatizing their unresolved childhood mommy-daddy oedipal patterns on to the world stage, and their many victims.

Mad men quite literally enjoy making a "killing". The more killings they make, the more "successful" they are.

While MikeyBear points out that the Gaia hypothesis - in its original form - is simply a scientific hypothesis, along comes HoHum to show us exactly how the half-witted mysticism of the Green movement has turned that hypothesis into the pseudo-religion of Gaiaism: 'Planet Earth is a watery, breathing entity alive in the Mystery of Divine Communion ... all the forms of life on Earth;the animals and plants, the rivers, oceans and mountains - all exist as Contemplatives by nature, and design.'

'Divine Communion'? 'Design'?

Dude, srsly.

Pelican ; you have been sucked in by the Anthropogenic Goons , the climate was never static , clearly it was never meant to be , something as big as climate is impossible to manipulate what Brown can do though is manipulate people , he draws on their basic instincts then massages their fears . If Brown and Flannery know as much as you think they do why didn't they warn Oz about the Qnsland disaster all those people could have been saved but they are just sprukers ; for heavens sake Pelican just go back six weeks they were preaching Climate Change to farmers at the MIA conference that the Darling was done and dusted , buggered , kaput , finished as a water course !
Get with the program man your a Pelican man you have landing water on every point of the Compass from every town in Australia !

OMG! Its a right wing denial convention:) Now watch as the true haters of mankind shows its ugly face.

The worlds a mess, and its not there fault...lol

Come on! Dont stop now.

BLUE