The Great Flood

                                                              

So reality has beaten me to my story. I have just completed writing a novel set in a great flood while Queensland is experiencing floods of ‘biblical proportions’

I watched the saga unfold through the media, as I am far away from home at present.

It was heartening to see the sense of humanity and comradeship disaster brings out in people.

It is though, for a brief moment, we get in touch with our primal roots and identify what is really important – a sense of community and our love and care for each other.

Less heartening was to observe how much coverage was given to the economic loss from the flood - the loses to the mining companies, the growth in GDP etc…

Just gibberish, rubbish, illusion designed to again disempower us, lest for a moment we attune to the power that rests in unity.

The other issue that stands out is a lack of responsibility taken by the authorities for this massive flood. The blame has been pointed squarely at nature, as though we had nothing to do with it.

From 1968 to 1987 Queensland was ruled by a right wing, fascist,  named 'Joh Bjelke-Petersen.' It was a time when even the white rulers of South Africa were jealous of the perfect apartheid exercised in Queensland. He was so admired for his white supremacist christen ideology, that he was even knighted by the queen of England.

A corner stone of this ideology is the premise that man is the supreme ruler of the earth. Thus He exercises total domain over her, exploits her and uses her as a resource to advance His agenda.

Of course what you do the great mama, you do to all mothers.

Anyway, back to the flood and its causes. During the years of Joh’s regime and before hand, Queensland has been clear felled systematically, in order to make way, for farms, beef grazing, mining etc.

No country in the world has experienced such earth carnage as Australia. In fact the environmental degradation we enacted in Australia in 200 years, took Europe a few thousand and western Asia almost ten thousand years.

We were in a hurry; we wanted to act fast, to rid the land of its native primal look - so to make it in the image of ‘mother England’.

We cleared the native people and we cleared the native flora and fauna.

Now, every kid knows that deforestation causes floods. Here are a few reasons…

•      Some rainwater stays on the leaves, and it may evaporate directly to the air (the more water used in the watershed, the less remains to run off).

•      Leaves reduce raindrop impact, and gentler rain causes less erosion.

•      Tree roots absorb water from the soil, making the soil drier and able to store more rainwater.

•      Tree roots hold the soil in place, reducing the movement of sediment that can shrink river channels downstream.

•      In short, the trees actually regulate the absorption and movement of water. With no trees left… the water is left to fend for itself and runs riot.

So once the clean up is over and we get back to our ‘normal’ lives, wouldn’t it be nice to start a massive reforestation drive in order to return the trees to the land.

I suspect the government would be talking nonsense again, money, economy etc.; building higher flood levies and waiting for nature to retaliate again.

Lets tell them it’s not what we want.

We want the trees back!

Another world is possible… lets plant more trees and stop cutting the few that remain.

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