Smoking and its socialised effects in Manly

Secondhand smoke exposure in Manly's public places, such as the beach, the streets, lanes and out-door eateries is causing direct physical injury to people wishing to share these public spaces. Lunch-time would be a prime time to enforce the law in these places. The no-smoke signs are a prefered smoking location.

After the big rain, the beach was thick with butts, causing the leaching of toxins into the environment. The paved environments are also carpeted with this toxic anti-product.

Mega litter and toxic run-off into beaches and waterways:

• 7 billion cigarette butts are littered by Australia's 3.7 million smokers every year.
• Cigarette butt litter still accounts for around 50% of all the litter in Australia

Cause of dangerous and costly fires:

• "..for every 1,000 smouldering butts that are discarded, 40 fires could result."
• 7% of Australia's bushfires are caused by discarded cigarettes - that's over 4,500 fires a year caused by cigarettes and smoking materials.

Facts via Planet Ark

Halloween – it's kinda spooky

Manly Council is attempting to facilitate 'community' top down. The chosen event this time is Halloween. “Make your Street Spookier” goes the postcard-blurb. We should engage in a “creepy” orgy of consuming and line the streets with debris (plastics): “fake cobwebs, bats" etc., streamers and sugar/coloured lollies and spend big on costumes. Strange ideas for a council that purports minimising waste and has a sustainability statement. The promise is that the road will be closed, but no mention is made where the many spectators will park and what the increased traffic hazard means for wildlife and adjoining streets capes.

Halloween has its origin in the agricultural rites of death and renewal for a new sustainable year. Part of the produce had to be sacrificed to the land spirits and shared within the community. Dark forces had to be soothed with gifts and bonfires held darkness and death at bay. This renewal festival has long been co-opted and commercialised to flog off (mainly plastic) merchandise. Australia has just recently hopped on to this bandwagon.
The are a lot of spooky skeletons in the Australian closet. The plastic bats, spiders, owls, crows, skeletons, the cats, werewolves, haunted houses and zombies might be contemporary props to ward off the the inevitable hot dry future created by mischief-making adults. The horror is ususally projected onto the living native spiders and bats etc - till the ritual spray or habitat destruction puts an end to the spook. The defense mechanism must lay the blame on a sacrificial being, to heal the denial, the anxious state of being. Halloween is a welcomed purging as well as an economic healer now.

Children are very anxious about the future. A world without water and food , but permanent engulfing “bonfires” does not fuel much optimism. Responsible elders not looking after our only common home make the decisions to heat it up unbearable for all, make the sea rise and melt the ice. Daily, many members of this common household have to go forever. The land, waterways and air are used as rubbish tips and all loose their health. Degraded land and toxic landscapes are part of the inheritance. This 'house of horrors' might well be less inhabitable than what their parents inherited and squandered. The disruptive nature of economic and ecological inter generational equity is creepy. Apart from these many “natural disasters” of a turbulent future, children go through horror scenarios of neglect and child abuse in Australia. Irresponsible use of cars, guns and dogs also sacrifices many young lives. Haunted human relationships propagate in a spooky Zombie culture. It is bewitched how young people are denied independence and maybe a future too.

Till then, put on the big magical denial party and celebrate...
Images: 1. Children at Manly Beach, 2 & 3 Street art Berlin

Fire, the Mythical Wand to create more Habitat for Humans

Global Warming on the Dry Continent
The destructive nature of wildfires will be amplified through global warming. In the Dry Continent, Australia 'the fire weather' is ubiquitous in the wildland-urban interface (WUI). At the moment fires rage in various National Parks, especially near human settlements such as Bundeena, The Basin and 'scrubland' near Newcastle. Two houses were burnt in in “fairly rugged bushland “.

Urbanisation of bushland areas
With the human sprawl over 'bush-land' and coasts, choosing to settle in 'getting away-from-it-all” leafy locations increases the costs and health hazards. The 'non-developed' green spaces such as National Parks and Reserves adjacent to urban areas have to be regularly burnt-off.
Many private landholders incinerate their land in the good old slash & burn method. Cheaply cleared land still fetches higher prices.

Incinerating protected forests & making a killing
The recent inferno in Greece destroyed 2 % of the land of which some where Europe's richest nature reserves. 67 people were killed. Many species of animals and plants are gone or have lost their refuge. Fire, as the magic wand to create more habitat for human populations, seems to have done its trailblazing for fresh real estate. The Peloponnese, untouched by mass tourism and '10 miles of virgin coastline' are now cleansed of 'protected forests' and ready to be monetarised.

Evolving Technology
Our hominid relatives, Homo erectus or Homo ergaster used fire 790,000 ago. Homo sapiens refined the tool further for the use of slash & burn 'agriculture', and for causing violence against each other and the Earth: Firebombing, Napalm, Firestorms etc.Pandora's Box
Some mythology has it, that fire was stolen by Prometheus from the gods and given, along with meat to the humans he had created. The outwitted god Zeus went into a rage and had him chained on a rock and his liver picked daily by an eagle. The punishment for humanity was to create the first woman, Pandora, bearing a box/jar out of which all evil for human-kind could come foreward.

Boxed into her Oikos, then and now s/he is obsessed by (re) possessions, that are in smaller boxes. 'Unboxing ceremonies' are highlights of possessed consumer culture now, running out of private warehouses/boxes to store all the boxes which they fetch with their box-like internal-combustion tanks from the boxed in mall. Fire might enlarge the territory for MORE McMansions/boxes. In the end they all exit in boxes back into the fire.

In the meantime Pandora's Box is wide open...

Links:
Fire, the Magic Wand to create more Habitat for Humans, Pt I
World Fire Atlas, ESA
Prometheus, Lord Byron

Update, 021007 The Cost of Sprawl

• Do check out the MSM images for 'sheds and houses' IN the bush (in bushfire-prone areas).
• The BIG DRY HEAT made in Australia is "inevitable". "Australia could be 5 degrees Celsius hotter and 40 to 80 per cent drier by 2070"
• Arson was involved when "..fires described as suspicious tore through 250 hectares and gutted a house on the state's North Coast."
• "...Bushfires destroyed a house and several sheds " on the North Coast, now they are working hard on the "asset protection zone".
• Interesting image here, Q.: How much bush has to be burnt down (contained) before a house is safe?

Image 1: Part of Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Berlin by Peter Eisenman

Fire - The magic wand to create more habitat for people

Various fires consumed Sydney's bush recently and created a smoggy dome. Primarily this form of land management “..is designed to help protect homes... from bushfire.” Especially the ones that moved to live IN the bush and then eliminated most Australian flora and fauna.

At the moment Greece is burning, large chunks of forests have burnt down and so far at least 50 people have been killed. Human beings deliberately set these fires in various places, as is also often the case in Australia. The well-to-do houses in the 'bush' have been saved. “Throughout the summer, Greece was full of rumors that many of the fires had been set by arsonists hired by developers looking to build on valuable land inconveniently covered by trees...Because there are no official maps indicating the boundaries of forests, though, once the trees have been reduced to ash, developers come in to claim land.” (Spiegel) The 'lungs' of that city have been eliminated, but there might be a housing boom...
Image: After incinerating various parts of Sydney bush the 'fog' was everywhere for days.

Update: 270807
- The 400 open tips started to smoulder with the high temperatures of global warming.
- The carelessness of smokers starts many fires the world over.
- Negligent private fires to incinerate garbage are also a cause of these fires.
- Real Estate speculation 'fuels the fire', houses are erected and all is sanctioned by council. Forests cannot vote. (The Standard at) Many of these practices are common here too.

A Greek journalist: "We had a beautiful country but we are increasingly losing it to fires, rubbish and the illegal buildings [built on land cleared by blazes]." (The Guardian)

Spraying flammable solvents over beach and bush

Twirling and splattering flammable solvents on the white beach sand and near Shelley Head bushland is a regular activity in Manly now. Today there were various people (a class?) at Shelley beach fuming out the entire headland with a stenching smell from their fuel ( metho, (formaldehyde) kerosene, naptha, petroleum etc). Sparks fly close to the dried out bush, the high winds this evening made it all fly well over the headland. But there they twirled, hurling these toxic chemical solvents and drenching with it the white sand of the beach. An amazing tolerance of the Kiosk. The car park above was also shrouded with this foul smell. So much for 'fresh air in Manly'.
But then it is part of the culture to chuck a bit of metho on the BBQ and the absence of any enforcement will probably soon ignite the bush and all the bunkers encroaching upon it.
Pyromaniac