Creature of the Shade

reason to hope ...

... for post-human civilization:

Octopus opens valve, floods Santa Monica Aquarium

"It found something loose and just pulled on it," said Tara Treiber, the aquarium's education manager. "They are very smart creatures."  

aquarius

We may have just missed it.  From Wikipedia:

According to different astrologers' calculations, approximated dates for entering the Age of Aquarius range from 1447 AD (Terry MacKinnell) to 3621 (John Addey)^[1]. The opening lines of "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" from the 1967 musical Hair describe a specific alignment which will occur on Feb. 14 2009 ...

An unverifiable email that I received yesterday claims that the precise dawning of the Age of Aquarius occurred between 7:28 and 7:40 AM Greenwich Mean Time on the 14th.  (In North American Pacific Time this was 11:28-11:40 PM on the 13th; in Australian Eastern Daylight Time it was 6:28-6:40 PM on the 14th.)  This is almost exactly the moment when Phil and I finished hacking our way through a dense, trackless rainforest, emerged onto a serene if well-guarded suburban cul-de-sac, and set about removing our leeches.

I hope it was at least as transformative for you.

stay or go

Yesterday's firestorm north of Melbourne took me back to this Los Angeles Times article, published last August during the California fire season, that compares Australian and American attitudes toward wildfire.  Where rural Americans are urged to evacuate in the face of any advancing wildfire, rural Australians are encouraged to stay and fight, and are offered the training they need to do so. 

There's an important nugget of pure cultural difference here.  The deep American idea that "government is the problem" results in an eagerness to limit government and drive down its quality, yet Americans still retain an almost infantile sense of entitlement that government will be there for them in an emergency -- even when the task is as impossible as defending remote homes scattered all through a flammable countryside.

By contrast, Australian government treats citizens as adults and expects them to make adult decisions.  Rural Australians know that they're on their own, and that they'll have nobody to blame if they lose their home.  The policy is based on the observation that in large wildfires, much of the structure destruction is actually the result of spot fires lighted by falling embers -- fires that are easy to put out if you're there.  The government is also careful to de-romanticize the experience of protecting your house.  The LA Times piece contains a narrative about one family defending their house.  It conveys how harrowing and exhausting the job is, and that there are still no guarantees.

Yesterday's disaster may throw some of this up in the air.  The Times article contains this graph, showing how fire deaths have fallen since 1983's Ash Wednesday fires, which triggered the current policy of encouraging people to fight for their homes.

But the "'09" bar will be off the chart: more than 100 people died in the fires yesterday, which makes this the deadliest fire in Australian history.  Perhaps this is because the fire burned into towns where people are less prepared and equipped.  Kinglake and Marysville had many weekend homes, and since the fire struck on Saturday it caught many weekenders there.  Saturday's high in Melbourne was 46 C (115 F), so it's not surprising that the usually-cooler hill country where the fire raged was full of people from the city.

It appears, too, that these fires were just exceptionally fast-moving and severe, even by Australian standards, and caught even well-prepared people by surprise..  People may have done the right thing, stayed and fought for their homes, but simply lost the battle.  There are no guarantees.

top 100 botany blogs

I've just heard that I've been listed as one of the Online College Blog's Top 100 Botany Blogs, which is a trifle embarrassing as I haven't blogged about plants in the past couple of months. 

If you've come looking for botany, just click on the category "Confronting Vegetation" at right.  Otherwise you may find that my passion for botany doesn't exclude a passion for everything else. Welcome.