“Wilderness is mainly in the mind’s eye – to be a stranger in a strange land for a fraction of a second and create an other world where what is familiar and drab and safe is fleetingly unrecognisable yet beckons like a siren’s song. A place like home yet a place like no other.”
Posted by: Libby at May 27, 2008 10:06 PM
Photograph of Elford Reef, Great Barrier Reef, Australia. Provided by Walter Starck
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part 1 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/000797.html
part 2 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003015.html
part 3 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003044.html
part 4 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003104.html
part 5 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003112.html
part 6 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003120.html
part 7 http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003124.html
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I just want to dive off that boat into the pool of water.
The thing about being a “Stranger in a Strange Land” is that you can take a vast array of technological aids and gee whiz equipment with you. Heinlein, before he became old and sick and embittered, belonged to that strain of S-F of ‘can-do’; where human ingenuity came out on top against the worst that the universe/nature/aliens could throw at us; another such writer was Poul Anderson; I have just read one of his most recent efforts, “Starfarers”; the universe has closed down many of the loop-holes; no more FTL adventures; humanity crabs across the cosmos; although Casimir and ZPE provide an assist; and Anderson is very topical; on one planet our heros come to they observe; “Plate tectonics keeps earth alive. It frees the elements that life locks up in fossils, and releases others like potassium. It raises new rock to take up CO2 as carbonate, and takes the old rock down below before the CO2 is too depleted.” So much for anthropogenic caused movements in CO2 levels! Of course Craig O’Neill has described the same principle. Anyway, the new planet Poul’s adventurers are on doesn’t have subduction. Sounds like Earth and Venus. But with Poul now it is very tough so the universe as a playgound has died; Niven no longer writes and about the only exponent now of the superiority of human ingenuity is Peter Hamilton. Scientifically savy writers like Brin and Benford have very much relegated humanity to a mote in god’s eye position.
AGW is a manifestation of this trend, since the 70’s, of denigrating humanity and especially humanity’s technology; either we have the technological where-with-all to influence nature, in which case we do it destructively as in AGW; or, alternatively, we don’t and therefore can’t cause AGW because we are too inconsequential. It’s as though a miasma has descended on humanity and people are looking for succour, in nature and eleswhere. The idea that humanity can lift itself by its bootstraps seems to have become too hard an idea.
It becomes so hypnotising, Jennifer, that I’ve just had to dive overboard into 15,000 feet of ultramarine indigo and let my boat sail on without me with no one on board.
Mind you, I had a long line trailing…….
I felt I was “the first that ever burst into that silent sea”.
I spent a number of years cruising the barrier reef, & the pacific islands, & their reefs, in my yacht. I then spent a number of years running 1 to 5 night, outer barrier reef, tourist fishing trips. The reef never felt like wilderness. It always felt like home.
On the trip out there it could feel a bit bushy, at times, but if you want a real feeling of wilderness, get out in the middle of the Coral Sea in a small [40Ft] yacht, by your self, or with one other. When the wind gets up, & 25 foot seas want to join you, on the yacht, believe me, you’ve found wilderness.
I spent many days tramping through undisturbed rain forrest in New Guinea, the Solomons, & other places. If that was wilderness, & you can keep it.
I once drove a car from Lae to Madang. I wanted to see a vista of the Markam valley. Although the road was sometimes just a strip, cut into the side of the vally mountains, I never got to see the valley 1500Ft below, for the bl@@dy trees.
After 4 years of never being able to see for more than a couple of hundred yards, except in a town, I was getting desperate, for some space.
It was only when I was driving, down out of the mountains, onto the plains of Bathurst, that this need was satisfied.
Probably of those here, only Motty has planted more trees than me, they’re useful, but I don’t want them too thick. Give me the green green grass of home, thanks. You can keep the trees.
Where did this fallacy that it has to be overcrowded with trees to be wilderness come from?
Cohenite,imagination and capacity of humans is boundless and it must be controlled.
We haf ways of doing zis.
Hitler shot the Romanies on sight yet they were probably the true Aryans.
Hasbeen, you sound like an aboriginal. They couldn’t hack the ticks and leeches either.
After 60,000 years they are still not immune yet the true natives are.
But thick trees have their moments. I’ve got a lot of vigorous Sydney blue gums [E. saligna] and when I want a Jackson Pollock experience I wander down there. Can’t see the forest for the blue poles.
I agree, Hasbeen. this association of vegetation clutter with wilderness is very hard to fathom. But in political terms it is also a minority view.
There has been quite a bit of research in the US that involves what is called “perceptual mapping” to determine what people really value in a landscape as distinct from the ideology. And the overwhelming majority regard dense vegetation as a threat.
Their ideal landscape is akin to that reproduced on a good golf course. It has long vistas over grassland framed by trees, and with numerous water features. And in this image we can see the million year inheritance of the proto-human plains wanderers, observing their landscape from a rock outcrop.
They favoured a landscape with short grass because it indicated plentiful game. They favoured open space that gave good warning of the approach of predators or enemies, the location of game and a defence against fire. They favoured the shelter provided by trees, in part as ready refuge from predators, in part for shade, shelter, tools and fire wood. The water features meant short distances for their own water needs, the constant return of game and a diversified diet.
Venture into the more wealthy suburbs of our cities and you will observe the same landscape mix repeated as the ultimate human expression of security and refuge from the concrete jungle.
It is also no small irony that the inner city inhabitants of the concrete jungle are also the minority demographic cohort that also favour the closed confines of the vegetative jungle. To them, vegetation clutter is the refuge, and the absence of vista (from the outside) is their idea of privacy and protection.
“I felt I was “the first that ever burst into that silent sea”.”
But the sea is not silent. Granted, when you are over the continental shelf it can be quieter, but the sea is full of all sorts of sounds – marine mammals, fish, invertebrates, hydrothermal vent activity, wind and storm generated noise, and of course our noise. Hold your head under in Jennifer’s reef and it would be like a busy restaurant strip on a Saturday night.
Our waters off Sydney are starting to get the annual songs of humpbacks. I often wonder if some fish communities pull out their fishy ear muffs at this time of year.
OK. So how do you listen underwater? I snorkle and hear nothing.
You often have to dive down a little to hear well, and be patient. If you’re on the reef, fish that croak and grunt may be put off by your presence initially. Something you should be able to hear are snapping shrimp, which to an unassisted human ear in water sounds a little like crumpling paper. You can hear wrasse munching on the coral and sometimes little territorial fish make grunt-like sounds at you. It’s the same process as learning to see underwater and notice what is going on, and sadly both our eyes and ears are pretty useless in the water unless assisted. Hence the wonders of a hydrophone!
I seem to recall from our whaling discussion that the human ear can only hear sounds above 65 decibels under water whereas in air we can hear down to 1 decibel, the sound of a mosquito at few metres distance.
Which raises the interesting issue of how much of the real wilderness we are capable of detecting with our limited sensory arrays. We miss the infra-red spectrum as seen by snakes etc and certainly most of the estimated 50,000 smell vocabulary of Beagle’s and other dogs.
So it would seem that wilderness, like history, is little more than the confused accounts of witnesses.