From: gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au (Gil Hardwick)
Newsgroups: sci.environment
Subject: Australia, farming, and kangaroos
Distribution: world
Date: Tue, 15 Dec 92 06:03:47 GMT
Organization: STAFF STRATEGIES - Anthropologists & Training Agents


In article <1992Dec14.171039.79231@watson.ibm.com> andrewt@watson.ibm.com writes:

 > How parochial. You believe Gil Hardwick should ignore my refutations and
 > corrections of his claims about Australia if I do not hold Australian
 > citzenship!  As my postings were largely about biology, I assume you think
 > Australians should ignore any foreign statements about Australian biology
 > including, for example, the fundamental work done on the Kookaburra by Germans.

The argument is plainly about people telling other people what to do
from their foreign premises. The mindless universalist arrogance of
so-called scientists that they all know so much better than anyone else
in the world what *must be done*, instead of cooperating on particular
problem as they arise from time to time, is the mainstay of this matter
here at hand.

That the Germans you refer to may well have carried out fundamental
work on kookaburras as scientists in *cooperation* with the Australians
is very much to their credit, and certainly such a level of involvement
with the international community is to be welcomed. Indeed, we have an
internationally respected scientific base here of our own, with a large
number of scientists from a great many countries working here with us
on problems of mutual concern, as Australian scientists themselves go
overseas to work.

However, whether you personally are qualified to speak as a biologist
or not, your arguments were quite explicitly stated as philosophical
and your *premises* are as plainly those of a political activist. As
such you lose any credibility to your claim to have spoken here on
this issue as a biologist.

 > Of course, Gil Hardwick's belief that you can determine someone's
 > citzenship from their address is another error.

No such belief is either stated or implied. The issue here is again
plainly concerned with your lack of respect for the prerogatives of
sovereign nations, which from your stated ideological premises you
have openly sought to undermine. That you now choose to run off the
issue at such a pathetic tangent as this merely weakens your case
even further.

There was a real first class lunatic here in W.A. not long ago, who
actually sent his troups of concerned University students out into an
area at night while a kangaroo cull supervised and carried out by the
Department of Conservation and Land Management was in progress. His
warped reasoning was that since humans are similar shape to kangaroos
at night, the shooters would be reluctant to shoot at anything at all
for fear of hitting a human. The problem was that nobody remembered to
advise the CALM people that humans were there, and they were extremely
lucky that nobody was shot . . .

We are just getting fed up with that sort of crap, and nothing you
have presented here either persuades me that kangaroos should not be
subject to culling and/or harvesting by humans, as has been done for
many thousands of years anyway.

While I am at it, perhaps you might take a good hard look at the
policies now in place in such countries as Zimbabwe and other East
African states (I think it is called the Campfire Program, if someone
would like to check) which have knocked down all the fences around
the national parks and let the villagers back onto their land on the
condition that the well being of the local environment and its stocks
of wildlife underwrite the economic prosperity of the village.

Of course it works very well indeed, since the program merely serves
to reconstitute traditional management practices which had resulted
in such an abundance and diversity of wildlife long before the stupid
bloody Europeans arrived with their domestic stock and their colonial
administration responsive only the religious morality of Europe.

I bit of sanity at last.

--
Gil Hardwick                          Internet:  gil@tillage.DIALix.oz.au
Independent Consulting Ethnologist                  Fidonet:  3:690/660.6
PERTH, Western Australia                         Voice:  (+61 9) 399 2401
   * * Sustainable Community Development & Environmental Education * *
Newsgroups: sci.environment