Do you think these thoughts are different from or additions to Marlo Morgan's Mutant Message Down Under?

Hi Lawrence. The book you refer to has been widely condemned as a hoax. I do not make fake claims. As well, my comments about indigenous Australia seek to be grounded in respect for and knowledge of their cultures, even though as I have stated here I see reconciliation as involving mutual critique and dialogue rather than a simple uncritical effort to change white values.

Robyn Davidson, the author of Tracks, actually did what she said, as celebrated by the National Geographic photofeature linked in my last post. The review of Morgan's book by Cath Ellis provides some useful starting points to explore the genre of imagined indigenous channelling, citing the similarity to The Celestine Prophecy. Castaneda's work fits this to some extent, but so do the Gospels. As with the Jesus story, which is a Greek appropriation of Hebrew peasant life, there is still quite a bit of ethical good in this genre despite its apparent fraudulent methods. It all fits in the mythical tradition that if you claim something is true it will get a lot more public traction than if you admit you made it up.

The relation between indigenous and mainstream cultures is a highly complex and challenging problem. In Central Australia, indigenous people largely managed to escape the British Genocide, although they were subject to systematic and deliberate cultural destruction of language, social structure, land ownership and tradition, and forced relocation into concentration camps. Despite this turmoil there remains a vibrant indigenous living tradition which is increasingly honoured and celebrated by visitors from around the world. However, the trauma of the white invasion of Australia continues to inflict immense suffering, and the adaptation of black Australian society to the alienated individualised world of modernity remains partial and difficult, with massive problems of poverty, violence, substance abuse, unemployment, indolence, illiteracy, bad health, racial prejudice and short life spans.

The hoax idea that you allude to may be in reference to my mention of Carlos Castaneda. In Tales of Power, Don Juan says that the Spanish Invasion of Mexico was a great opportunity for the sorcerers, whose activities were totally invisible to the blundering soldiers and magistrates of the colonial administration. While I respect the critiques of Castaneda's shamanistic parabolic style, I also think there is a philosophical authenticity in his writing, a tradition which is entirely foreign to Europe and which gives the feel of emerging from a highly evolved indigenous tradition. Like the Gospels, my approach to such stories is to read them critically, recognising that their intent is to convey moral lessons through a concealed packaging, designed to be accessible to the reader while respectful towards their content.

DWill wrote:I can sometimes see the purpose of holding a location as sacred, meaning it will remain untrammeled. We have the problem in our popular natural areas of loving them to death, and certainly to read about the filth left by humans on Mt. Everest is nauseating. In a sense, our cities can serve as better models of conservation than can the natural areas we flock to. In the hardened environment of cities, our impact can be better absorbed and contained. I say this with regret as someone who has always loved to roam and explore in the woods and mountains. There is a growing literature on how the presence of humans affects wildlife adversely, even when that presence is benign from our point of view.

Thanks for these good pieces of travel writing.

Protection of natural heritage is just part of the meaning of the sacred. There is also the sense that sacred places are locations of special presence of spiritual energy where people can nurture a connection to divinity. Christian cathedrals conceptualise this transcendental imagination as the presence of God in the holy site, while the indigenous myth of the Tjukurpa has resonance with the shamanistic mystical tradition of the animation of natural objects and places by a sort of telluric chthonic spiritual connection.

http://www.environment.gov.au/resource/ ... ional-park explains that "Tjukurpa is the foundation of Anangu life and society. Tjukurpa refers to the creation period when ancestral beings, Tjukaritja, created the world as we know it, and from this the religion, law and moral systems."

2 September 2015

Just back from a busy week in Cebu, central Philippines. Cebu was the colonial capital after the Spanish first invaded 500 years ago, with Magellan killed there in battle in 1521.

Here is a picture of my breakfast one morning at the Waterfront Hotel, including seaweed, mushroom, mangosteen, rambutan, sushi, cheese, fish and radioactive ginger.

I am just now discovering the delights of using a phone as a movie camera. We had a welcome dinner hosted by the Philippines Government, and they got a range of local dancers, whose styles tend to mix indigenous traditions with the range of foreign cultures which have reigned there, and I filmed a lot of them. It was great to see the energy and enthusiasm and uniqueness of the dancing.

Then of course came the karaoke, and I managed to sing Annie’s Song, From a Distance, Man of Constant Sorrow, Dream Dream Dream and You Can’t Do That (among others).

Driving to the airport we got delayed by flooding and had to drive on the wrong side of the road which was fun, and I took a video of the traffic which is mildly surreal.

I got heavily into the gym, doing a hundred pushups, situps and squats with weights several days.

Also, something about visiting Uluru affected me, since I have stopped drinking alcohol.

The APEC Press Release on the work I was involved with is at http://www.apec.org/Press/News-Releases ... 1_MTF.aspx

10 October 2015

After seven days in Boston, here to attend the Crowds and Climate Conference at MIT where I was a Judge’s Choice Winner in the Climate CoLab Energy-Water Nexus Competition, I will try to catch up on this journal.

It was quite a big time for me in September to have both my mother die and get the opportunity to present here in Boston. So I want to reflect on both of these, in this post just putting down some notes about my mother, Marie Tulip, 1935-2015. ‘Mum’ is the Anglo-Australian spelling that I prefer, in case any Americans are listening in here.

My sister Libby told us on Wednesday 16 September that mum had stopped eating and the doctors thought she was pre-terminal and probably had several weeks to live. I caught the bus to Sydney on the Friday to go see mum on the weekend. On the Saturday morning September 19 I was sitting with my old friend David recording a draft of my three minute youtube presentation required for MIT, when the phone recording got interrupted by an incoming call. I finished the recording (although as I later found the call had automatically ended the recording function) and listened to the voice mail which was my brother Bill telling me that mum had died that morning at 9.20. So I went straight over to the nursing home to meet Bill and Libby. It was a shock to see mum dead in her bed. It turned out that her friend Erin was with her that morning, and mum was sleeping peacefully, and soon after Erin left her side she died. Mum had about ten years of steady decline into dementia, and had lost her quality of life, unable to talk or to feed, change or toilet herself, although she could still understand what people said and recognise people. She was ready to go, and her death was a release. She has given her brain to science for medical research.

Mum’s wish for her funeral was that it not be religious and that I should play guitar and my daughter Diana should sing. Diana had visited mum the day before she died, and had sung to her Urlicht by Mahler, and possibly the last response mum had made to anyone was that a tear fell down her cheek when Diana finished singing.

At the funeral we performed Bushes and Briars, combining the Vaughan Williams guitar arrangement which is my old favourite with the first two verses of the folk song, and also Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz. We also led the congregation in singing Auld Lang Syne.

One of the speeches which I found most moving was from mum’s old friend Dorothy MacRae-McMahon, one of Australia’s most prominent feminist Christian ministers of religion. Dorothy explained that mum had been a voice of conscience and spiritual direction for her, which I think shows that my mother was quite an important cultural figure, despite her self-effacing style. I had a lovely chat with Glenys Livingstone, author of a feminist theology book PaGaian Cosmology, who regarded my mother as a matriarch of the goddess movement in Australia. Mum wrote a book on the status of women in the Uniting Church in Australia, and ended up leaving Christianity when she formed the view that the feminist Jesus of the Gospels had been co-opted as a primary instrument and bastion of patriarchal bigotry through the social power and ideology of the church.

My mother influenced me very deeply in my views of the world, for example in trying to see a larger horizon for history than is provided by the usual western framework of Greece as the cradle of civilisation, and in seeing the Judeo-Christian tradition of the fall from grace into corruption as a metaphor for the rise of monotheist patriarchal culture. These are confronting and unusual perspectives which are not widely discussed, but which open up ways of thinking about gender equality and societal change. To me some things may seem obvious because I learned them from my mother, while to others they seem very unusual ideas. So it is a challenge to me to integrate what my mother taught me with a range of other ideas from modern rational philosophy in a way that makes sense and is accessible to a broad audience.

Sorry, for your loss. A mother is a very special relationship.

Just a thought, but not a point of contention. No need for a response. I know you aid a lot about her beliefs of God. I would extend you a free pdf reed of my upcoming book "Come on MAN, Speak English to ME about GOD." It is 97% done. You seem very intellectual and would like your input. It is not a trap. Let me know what you think.

Brother bob

I wrote some other comments while I was in Boston. Here they are.

Now is a good time to reflect on the Climate Colab Conference. Firstly, here is the feedback I provided to the MIT survey.

The overall process and concept of CoLab is excellent. The planning and delivery were excellent. Crowdsourcing of new ideas by internet is an extremely valuable innovation strategy, as a way to unearth ideas and people who face barriers to communication regarding new ideas. This is certainly the case for me. Despite a rather good public position working in Australia's Foreign Ministry on energy and resources, I find that my own ideas lack traction, primarily because I disagree with the dominant paradigm regarding carbon tax and emission reduction as the best way to stabilise the global climate, and instead see direct focus on new technology as an area that is somehow neglected. So I think CoLab is helping to address a pathology in the policy process, opening a platform for fundamental debate on the theory of change and program logic regarding the climate crisis. What I think is a shame is that established scientists seem to think they are too high and mighty to condescend to engage in open dialogue with people like me who have differing perspectives. Sure, there are some ideas at CoLab that are unrealistic, and people need to exercise caution in assessing proposals, but there is a good winnowing process through the CoLab judging system. I think where it falls down is the capacity to get traction with the established policy debate. There are massive hidden politics in climate policy. For example, my ideas align to the Bjorn Lomborg view, which is treated as anathema by the political left. The challenge here is to enable a courteous and open dialogue about the real blockages preventing action on climate. I predict the Paris Conference will fail, and that will force a more open discussion and debate.

I really appreciated the opportunity to present my concept. That is the first time I have spoken about it in public since I get zero traction in Australia. Having the recording on the internet is a superb resource, even though my presentation is rather stilted and my video reflects my amateur capacity and the fact I have received no help from anyone. Having an Engineering Professor say in public that my ideas are compelling was a great validation. I was disappointed at the lack of interest in following up.

MIT is a superb frontier pioneering convenor with underutilised power to achieve global change.

We can tell our grandchildren we are part of a community that is turning the world from a path of catastrophe to a path of stable abundance.

The psychological challenges of enabling serious discussion on climate remain immense, and need fundamental philosophical work to uncover barriers and solve big problems.

While my expectations were met, my hopes were not, since I did not find enough people interested to take time to speak with me. I hope that we can follow up and I welcome MIT initiatives in this regard. However that lack of immediate traction did not surprise me since my ideas can be difficult and confronting. However I hope I will be able to give CoLab a lot of credit in a few years when my ideas are commercialised on large scale. I thought Sun Saluter was a very worthy winner, given its focus, relevance, practicality and advanced status.


I arrived in Boston late on Saturday 4 October. All my travel arrangements have been smooth and simple, with the only small glitch being that I misread the location of one event and so arrived late at it. And also, with jetlag, several speakers managed to put me to sleep. I used AirBnB to get a room and it worked superbly, with perfect location, great value, good room and nice people. You can look up Comfy Futon in Cambridge if you are ever visiting Boston. On Sunday 5th, I went for a stroll up the Charles River to Harvard Yard. I stopped for a coffee in the morning, and got chatting to an engineer about my tidal pump invention, and was glad that he found it interesting. I went to the church service at Harvard with the Brahmins at 11. American high culture is very impressive to me, and the singing and preaching were memorable. The sermon was from the Dean of the Harvard Divinity School, on the text James 3:18 ‘the fruit of righteousness is sown in peace.’ His focus was on growing up in Belfast where the troubles created such social division, and how the theme of restorative justice in James and the Beatitudes presents a transformative ethical framework. There is much to learn from the experience of worship in such a context, and those who take a superficial condemnatory oppositional stance of superiority to all religion are really missing out on something important in life.

On Monday I went to MIT, and spent the morning with the CoLab Winners workshop on entrepreneurial skills and the afternoon at MIT’s Solve Conference, with the theme of ‘make,fuel, care, grow’. Jeffrey Sachs, principal adviser to the UN on sustainable development, was the keynote speaker at Solve. While I agreed with most of Sachs’ comments, I find that I travel to the beat of a different drum regarding response to climate change. My view, in agreement with Lomborg, is that the agenda of decarbonisation of the economy and divestment from fossil fuels is a recipe for failure to address the big problems of global warming. I am fairly out on my lonesome on this one, but to me the empirical data look to be entirely on my side. I very much look at the topic through the lens of my ideas about algae biofuel as a decisive innovation with potential to remove more carbon from the air and sea than we add. This framework makes me think the agenda of emission reduction, with its failure to focus on how industry can profitably mine carbon as a central resource for the new economy, reflects a religious attitude of sacrifice rather than a rational policy analysis.

If it is not too provocative, this debate about emission reduction is a main reason I liked Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand so much. Her ethical opposition to sacrifice as a moral framework presents a powerful message about how we can achieve progress towards universal abundance rather than manage decline into scarcity, and her main character the inventor John Galt is an inspiring role model for me. Rand is a lighting rod for political debate, seen as representing the selfish grasping individual competitive attitude which leaves so many people behind in poverty and is causing the destruction of the earth without heed for consequences. I just don’t see it that way. I think it is entirely possible to reframe the conversation to see that the competitive ingenuity which Rand champions as the framework of moral incentive actually offers the only path to an overall bigger economy that can provide more opportunity for everyone. I think Rand is too hard on the role of government as a regulator, since there are public goods which can be advanced through a level playing field governed by law, and a better conservative capitalist framework to understand the role of the state is provided by Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty. Anyway, the really confusing thing about this talk of Ayn Rand is that there is a general assumption in public debate that serious efforts to stabilise the global climate have to be led by the left of politics, because industrial capitalism as the main supporter of the political right is the main source of the climate problem. To me this pervasive political view is utterly misguided and wrong, a fallacious recipe for ending up with bigger governments, a hotter planet and a series of highly dangerous risks including extinction and conflict and poverty. Only the ingenuity that is driven by profit can offer hope to scale up innovative solutions.

The big day for me was Tuesday. I put on my suit and tie and nice shoes, and arrived at MIT before 8am. Today I would find out what level of interest there was in my tidal pump. As expected we started off with lectures about how carbon tax is the only way to fix the climate. To me this is farcical, like pushing on a string and expecting the other end to move. Or maybe like the Poles in 1939 telling the Germans that they would prevent invasion by reforming their tax code. I see climate change as a massive immediate existential crisis, requiring urgent mobilisation of world resources to work out the most efficient and effective ways to remove the excess carbon we have added to the air and sea.

Emission reduction is only about slowing how fast we add more fuel to the fire, not about putting the fire out. Another metaphor is that the world is like a bathtub that is about to overflow. We can either pull the plug, analogous to removing carbon from the air and sea, or we can turn down the tap to a trickle to delay the overflow point by a relatively short time, analogous to reducing our emission rate. The question whether these analogies make any sense turns on the feasibility of new technology such as the Tidal Pump to remove CO2 from the system.

You talk about sacrifice as something either bad or unlikely to be widespread because of human nature. I agree that we're not well equipped to sacrifice opportunities to increase our happiness--it's virtually the American religion--but the key is to arrive at an understanding of what constitutes sufficiency. Then, maybe we can place less burden on the earth, with the weight of our individual desires for materials having lessened. Our wealth consists more in public goods than in private. I can't bring myself to believe that unfettered individualism will produce anything but a bad outcome for the planet, and ramping up our rate of resource-use is the way to get there. One bad effect of climate change dominating the environment discussion is that many assume that if we solve carbon we're home free, and that just isn't true. We can still overcrowd and over-exploit the planet to near-oblivion with a clean source of energy, not that that is likely for many decades if ever.

DWill wrote:You talk about sacrifice as something either bad

No – my point is not that sacrifice is intrinsically bad, which is Ayn Rand’s view, but rather that it does not achieve the results that people imagine for it. In traditional religion, the sacrifice of animals was imagined as a path to atonement. Christianity then said the single perfect sacrifice by God of Jesus on the cross was the source of salvation, as explained in some detail in Hebrews. Earl Doherty provides a good analysis of the concept of sacrifice in the Epistle to the Hebrews at http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp09.htm

Both these magical ideas, animal sacrifice and the cross as sacrifice, are not accepted by modern secular reason, but the emotional satisfaction of sacrifice remains a potent driver of ethical imagination. So people imagine that in order to save the climate, we must sacrifice our wealth. I simply don’t agree that this opinion is based on firm evidence.

DWill wrote:or unlikely to be widespread because of human nature.

In traditional religion, the priesthood saw sacrifice as a way of fostering the virtues of generosity, abstinence, community, patience, discipline, planning, etc. However, in Judaism this became formalised and corrupted as a sort of doctrine of salvation by works, that by giving up a prize bull as a gift to the temple you accrue moral credit. The prophet Amos prefigured the Christian critique with his powerful statement in Chapter 5 that he despises sacrifices, because they are a way of deflecting attention from the real core divine moral value of justice, which he says comes from the one who made the Pleiades and Orion, not from our vain selfish imagination.

Instinctive values are not generally sacrificial, although there is a genetic basis for sacrifice seen in altruism and group selection. Religion is a way to create a community ethic where the individual benefit is sacrificed to the wider good. But this idea has been transformed into a magical theory of the blood ransom of Christ as atoning sacrifice, and also devolved into the simplistic secular ethic of 'live more simply so all may simply live'. All of these ideas contain some merit, but should be contestable in terms of their consequences and logic.

DWill wrote:I agree that we're not well equipped to sacrifice opportunities to increase our happiness--it's virtually the American religion--but the key is to arrive at an understanding of what constitutes sufficiency.

Much as I too admire Thoreau, I see his ethic of sufficiency as fundamentally misguided, and not as key to anything except some useful dialogue. What really is the key is research and development to deploy new industrial technology that can sustain universal abundance and biodiversity at global scale. That is a very different path and vision from the idea that reducing consumption is a primary good.

While the current pattern of consumption is definitely putting humanity on a path to extinction this century and so needs to change, the transformation should be to different methods of consumption, not just less of the same.

DWill wrote:Then, maybe we can place less burden on the earth, with the weight of our individual desires for materials having lessened. Our wealth consists more in public goods than in private. I can't bring myself to believe that unfettered individualism will produce anything but a bad outcome for the planet, and ramping up our rate of resource-use is the way to get there.

Trying to deconstruct the logic here, I believe the fallacy sits in the connection drawn between reduced burden and individualism. Yes, there has to be a reduced human burden on the earth, since business-as-usual has a linear trajectory towards a boiling ocean. However, the elision to the critique of “unfettered individualism” deserves examination.

Personal freedom is not the same thing as corporate power, and yet I get a sense that the “unfettered” part of this comment is directed towards the undue corporate influence on government policies. While this American myth of the pursuit of happiness draws its romantic origins from the pioneering spirit of liberty and frontier expansion, there is a large dose of myth-making going on in this space.

What I like about Ayn Rand’s myth of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged is that I identify with his sense that a corporate socialist state mentality of what Orwell called groupthink places fetters around the ability to develop a culture of innovation. Creating freedom for innovators means examining social mores and taboos. I don’t agree that the metaphysical work done by the critique of “unfettered individualism” is particularly coherent or constructive in establishing a best path forward towards a reduced ecological burden. We should have unfettered freedom to create, but we also need better fetters on our freedom to destroy.

DWill wrote:One bad effect of climate change dominating the environment discussion is that many assume that if we solve carbon we're home free, and that just isn't true. We can still overcrowd and over-exploit the planet to near-oblivion with a clean source of energy, not that that is likely for many decades if ever.

The carbon problem is just the canary in the coal mine regarding the evil thinking of the world. The problems of climate and environment and sustainable consumption link to some deep metaphysical problems such as the old ideas of the fall from a state of grace into a state of corruption. It is essential to place the technological solutions around carbon into a much broader philosophical conversation about human identity and existence.

Robert Tulip wrote: No – my point is not that sacrifice is intrinsically bad, which is Ayn Rand’s view, but rather that it does not achieve the results that people imagine for it. In traditional religion, the sacrifice of animals was imagined as a path to atonement. Christianity then said the single perfect sacrifice by God of Jesus on the cross was the source of salvation, as explained in some detail in Hebrews. Earl Doherty provides a good analysis of the concept of sacrifice in the Epistle to the Hebrews at http://jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/supp09.htm

I think the only thing in common that your use of 'sacrifice' has with mine is that in neither case are we really talking about anyone having to give up something necessary for well-being. With animal sacrifice, somebody got to eat the offered flesh, and there were other assumed benefits that made this a sensible transaction for the sacrificer. The Christian theological use of the idea has nothing to do with what I'm talking about. My point is that people may perceive sacrifice in holding back from getting everything they might want, but a lot of that is superfluity anyway, not needed for a happy life lived by humane principles.

I also believe that we need to greatly increase world wealth. This means enabling most people to escape degrading poverty, and it is a massive undertaking that in itself will strain world resources. If we project some kind of cornucopia fantasy in which everyone (the burgeoning population of the earth) will be affluent individual consumers in the manner of much of the "First World," we're into delusion territory. Investing faith into unrealized and perhaps unrealizable transformative technologies is an irresponsible course. Even were they to materialize, the weight of our specie's success will probably still unbalance the ecosystem.

Much as I too admire Thoreau, I see his ethic of sufficiency as fundamentally misguided, and not as key to anything except some useful dialogue. What really is the key is research and development to deploy new industrial technology that can sustain universal abundance and biodiversity at global scale. That is a very different path and vision from the idea that reducing consumption is a primary good.

This is simply wrong Robert, this coupling of 'universal abundance and biodiversity.' How would more abundance, heretofore a cause of species extinction, foster biodiversity? It's a serious case of having cake and eating it. You ignore or denigrate social change that right now can be effective, as difficult and incremental as it is, and as needing of technology to assist it as it admittedly is. A guy named Darshan Karwat has an article in the Washington Post on his 2-year experiment in reducing consumption. The second year, his total yield of both trash and recyclables came to six pounds. Like Thoreau, he presents this as an experiment, and one that he knows not everyone can conduct. But it serves to illustrate how much can fairly easily be done with no real sacrifice. In fact, he found his life enriched by the different patterns he needed to adopt.

Sometimes I failed, and a few skeptics wrote me off as a tree-hugger. But I think such remarks are an easy way to deflect tough questions about how to live more gently on Earth. To reduce our environmental footprint, we need to know how to make full use of the investments we have already made in material objects. We need to know how to take the most advantage of our ever-increasing body of scientific, technological and social knowledge to create an economy based on reduced consumption. We need to talk more about how collective change is possible by experimentation in our individual lives.

While the current pattern of consumption is definitely putting humanity on a path to extinction this century and so needs to change, the transformation should be to different methods of consumption, not just less of the same.

We can't wait for whatever you may be talking about to happen.

Trying to deconstruct the logic here, I believe the fallacy sits in the connection drawn between reduced burden and individualism. Yes, there has to be a reduced human burden on the earth, since business-as-usual has a linear trajectory towards a boiling ocean. However, the elision to the critique of “unfettered individualism” deserves examination.

Personal freedom is not the same thing as corporate power, and yet I get a sense that the “unfettered” part of this comment is directed towards the undue corporate influence on government policies. While this American myth of the pursuit of happiness draws its romantic origins from the pioneering spirit of liberty and frontier expansion, there is a large dose of myth-making going on in this space.

What I like about Ayn Rand’s myth of John Galt in Atlas Shrugged is that I identify with his sense that a corporate socialist state mentality of what Orwell called groupthink places fetters around the ability to develop a culture of innovation. Creating freedom for innovators means examining social mores and taboos. I don’t agree that the metaphysical work done by the critique of “unfettered individualism” is particularly coherent or constructive in establishing a best path forward towards a reduced ecological burden. We should have unfettered freedom to create, but we also need better fetters on our freedom to destroy.

I have trouble deconstructing this logic, too! Is state socialism really stifling innovation wherever it exists, for example in Northern Europe? That bears examining. Opposed to that, will freedom from controls, this Randian individualism or selfishness, create anything but individual wealth, however it can be produced? That motive is exactly why oil execs want there to be no hydrocarbons left behind in the ground.