I have had an email from The Network's
dearest and most faithful friend,
Denis Wilson of The Nature of Robertson.
Links in the letter are by Miss Eagle.
Please go to Denis's post on this matter.
He has numerous links which interested Networkers
will be sure to follow up.
Please go to Denis's post on this matter.
He has numerous links which interested Networkers
will be sure to follow up.
Hi Miss Eagle
I first posted about Locust spraying madness after I came back from a bird-watching trip to West Wyalong - 450 Km each way, through wheat-growing country (mostly), and I realised I had hardly seen a small hawk all the way. That was several months ago.
Locust map from here. Click to enlarge.
I vividly recall driving through wheat country as a child and as a young adult, and it was normal to see a Kestrel or a Brown hawk on every second or third telegraph pole. On that trip I saw just two such birds.
Where have they gone?
You would be familiar with Silent Spring, no doubt.
Your John Brumby has now come out and declared war on Locusts
Why?
They supposedly pose a threat to the Melbourne Cup! "Locust plague threat to Melbourne Cup"
Anyway, there is a Victorian farmer who is being roundly vilified for his environmental campaign against COMPULSORY SPRAYING FOR LOCUSTS.
His brother wrote to my blog, sticking up for his brother Eris O'Brien (you've got the love the Irish!).
Anyway, his video is compelling.
Have a look at the list of chemicals registered for use on CEREAL CROPS - to make them poisonous enough to kill Locusts - but we eat the crops (and feed it to our mean animals) after the "withholding period".
How stupid are we?
I would appreciate some support on this, plus also for Eris O'Brien's website, [Save the Locust.com] and You Tube video.
Cheers
Spraying is SO mindbogglingly dumb.
ReplyDeleteAnyone who knows anything about natural selection knows that some of the locusts (the ones resistant to pesticides) will survive, and will simply breed up a new generation of pesticide-resistant locusts for the next season.
In the meanwhile, we humans, whose generations and systems are more fragile in many ways, inhale and consume the pesticides, and increase our cancers, illnesses, rates of autism etc. Oh, and we wipe out keystone species like bees at the same time.
Real dumb. Sometimes I think we humans *deserve* to be going extinct.
*cries*
Hi Brigid
ReplyDeleteThanks very much.
That Herald Sun article was unbelievably ignorant.
Nobody seems to understand the enormous dangers of dumping these highly toxic chemicals into the environment and the food chain - our own food chain.
Poor bloody Eris is being vilified still in the comments column.
"A Prophet is never honoured in his own country"
When there is a spike in cancer cases in rural Victoria in 10 years, I hope they remember this event, and the name John Brumby.
Thx for your comments Leanne. I am making a mental note to write to Eris and ask him to keep in touch with me on his experience with the locusts. I heard someone speaking recently and apparently they only swarm when there are a lot of them and they are packed in together. They are easily excited it appears. They have hairy legs and if they are not jam packed things are OK. When they are piled in together there is a tendency for hairy legs to rub up against each other - and that's it. We get excited locusts and they swarm and they're off!
ReplyDeleteWe humans are dumb. You would have thought by now that we would have realised that we live within an endogenous system - in short, what we put in to our habitat stays in our habitat. It all goes somewhere, ends up somewhere and - sooner or later - the stuff or its consequences bounce back to us.
Blessings and bliss
Brigid