City Forest Notes

• CHAPTER ONE H.E.R.


• THE FIRST CAUSE IS THE COMPLETELY INEXPLICABLE FAILURE OF MANKIND TO DESIGN HIS LANDSCAPE--HIS TRUE LIVING PLACE.


• THE SECOND CAUSE IS THE BASTARDISATION OF AGRICULTURE


• [man designed his first shelter, then houses, castles, etc. These dominated the landscape and were never designed from an environmental perspective]


• The principal difficulty in eliminating pollution may be the mental attitudes of people. The older members of the population have been brainwashed and conditioned all their lives to believe in doctrines which in today's crowded world are false and anti-landscape. There has been no preparation in their education or in their lives for understanding the problems of today which have seemingly rushed at them so quickly!


• They do not fully understand why their own kids are so different from themselves as youths. They have not yet appreciated that the revolt of kids against the establishment. represents the dawning of sanity and common sense in a society otherwise hell-bent on its own destruction.


• Youth had no part in causing it, yet they are suffering the most from its health-destroying and life-shortening effects.


• Thanks to the attitudes of the establishment over the past few years, youth has been robbed of any reason to be proud of its country. But still the real hope lies today in the questioning disbelief of young people and in their contempt for authority, whether traditional, financial, scientific or government, which does not make sense.


• They know the things that are wrong; they are searching for truth and real freedom, and many are devoting themselves to changing society for the better


• start the Human Environment Revolution now wherever they are; get with it and stay with it, no matter what!


• They have the numbers and the strengths to do it. They have what no other age group ever possessed; a capacity to organise their thoughts and their actions to proceed almost spontaneously both as individuals and as a multitude.


• the evils and the avarice of finance, science and big business, can never be reconciled in a common sense solution to the problems of the sick landscape or the inhumanity of society.


• The chemical sciences which have been debauched by business to make billions from polluting the Planet will continue to out-shout the healthy but financially crippled biological and social sciences. Business will fight strenuously and as ruthlessly as ever against changes which threaten their influence and their profits, while at the same time, they will advertise with the power of their money, that they will save the world.


• The strangers, the confused and the lost in this world are not the young people, but their parents. Youth should not dismiss them but should guide and teach their elders.


• mankind has merely imposed his smothering clutter on Nature's living environment. He failed to design the special purpose landscapes for himself.


• Even the English countryside has no logical basis of design


• CHAPTER TWO The Proposition


• pollution started with water. Rectifying the water position is the starting point for designing the elimination of pollution. The City Forest refers to a specific area of the remedy. As a first step, it is proposed that the filtered effluent from sewerage treatment works and other used waters of town and city, be delivered via pump and pipeline to selected areas of land and not to the rivers and the seas as it is today


• The City Forest and a Strip Forest for every farm, would be an integral part of the new landscape design


• even now big business interests are planning the "development" of land where the destruction of all trees over vast areas, together with other orthodox agricultural practices, will inevitably lead to further wide landscape destruction


• fertility can be lost by faulty management in a few decades. But it will be shown that the process can be reversed and the impoverished soil be made more fertile and deeper than it ever was, and in a few years.


• There are two classes of landscapes. Class one is the Wide Enfolding Landscapes of Nature. Class two is the Special Purpose Landscapes of Man.


• CHAPTER THREE The Landscape Design of Nature (1) THE GEOGRAPHY OF LANDSCAPE


• There is a landscape design of Nature. It is made up of three water lines and three land shapes. It includes also three land forms and one special pattern


• [1st water line = water contour line 2nd water line = water drainage line (stream/rivers) 3rd water line = water divide line (regions where water flows over land)]


• The grand strategy of Nature was the creation and the deployment of life to protect the land from the agression of water


• [1st land line = main ridge, water divide line, look at the skyline, surrounds almost all catchments, these ridges follow the same idea as rivers in their branching,]


• [2nd land line = primary ridge]


• [3rd land line = depression of lakes/ponds]


• The crest line of a ridge and the water-divide line are synonymous. The centre of a road and the ridge of a roof are water-divide lines; water flows in opposite directions from both.


• [Main ridge above primary valleys and primary ridges]


• named the point of slope-change in the primary valley, the Keypoint. A contour line around and across the valley from side to side though this point is the Keyline of the valley. ONLY A PRIMARY VALLEY HAS A KEYLINE.


• low place is a saddle in the main ridge and it often shows where a primary valley has intruded deeply and reached the crest line of a main ridge.


• This is the landscape design of Nature. It is repeated endlessly to cover the land surface of the Earth. But what is the purpose of this design?


• The purpose of Nature's landscape design must surely be the protection of the land from the attack of the waters.


• THE HARMONY OF PURE DESIGN IN THE LANDSCAPES OF NATURE IS THE RESULT OF LAND'S LONG BATTLE AGAINST WATER'S CONSTANT COMMAND--"COME BACK TO THE SEA."


• CHAPTER FOUR The Landscape Design of Nature (2) THE GEOMETRY OF SHAPES AND FORMS


• natural path of water flowing over the surface is always at right angles to the contours


• This natural path of water is the steepest and fastest route, but it is never a straight line; it always forms a flat S curve from ridge to valley.


• When the man-made landscapes of farm and city were imposed on those of nature, the balance of the association of land and water was changed. The flow of water off the land was speeded-up, instead of being slowed down.


• CHAPTER FIVE The Fragment Between


• [the area that is between water-land divide, high/low tide, flood plains, places that can be water OR land depending on the situation]


• [should not develop this land, but we do]


• Yet in all the special purpose landscapes of man, the movement of the water off the land has been speeded up instead of being controlled and slowed down. Water moves faster off the farms than it did from the former natural landscapes, while the farms carry more animals that provide waste products which are washed to the streams and pollute them. Rainfall run-off water rushes from the roofed and paved areas of the city and waste water is lost quickly without reuse.


• CHAPTER SIX Design for Environment


• objective of landscape design ... (1) to control and to use for the benefit of the landscape the water which, in the natural landscapes and in the present landscapes of man, flows over the surface of the land to the water courses, and (2) to improve the pattern of behaviour of water which falls as rain on the ridge shapes of the land, for the benefit of the landscape.


• The first new water line is a diversion channel to control the run-off water from rainfall; the second new water line is an irrigation channel to water the land.


• THE KEYLINE SCALE OF PERMANENCE 1. Climate 2. Land shape. 3. Water. 4. Roads. 5. Trees. 6. Buildings. 7. Subdivision. 8. Soil.


• The first three of the eight factors of the scale of permanence--climate, land shape and water--are THE INSEPARABLE TRINITY OF LANDSCAPE DESIGN.


• There is a good chance also that the homestead--the sixth factor of the scale--is well positioned since this is often decided by the womenfolk. [hehe]


• Impoverished soil can be made fertile again and soil which was originally low fertility, can be made deep and fertile--both in a short space of time.


• it is concerned to see that all the wastes of the farm from plants and from the urine and the dung of animals is absorbed again into the soil where it rightfully belongs. It is concerned to see that water which leaves the farm does so by first being absorbed into the soil to improve it


• CHAPTER SEVEN Design A New City


• The basis of design for any landscape is the control and use of the water which has greatest significance for the efficiency and aggrandisement of the landscape.


• water is to move by gravity flow.


• "the inseparable trinity of landscape design;" they are climate, land shape and water


• The basis of design for the new city is the same as for the farmscape, it is designed from the Keylines or the primary valleys which have greatest landscape significance.


• roofed and sealed areas of a city, rainfall run-off is very high. It is necessary to design for 100 per cent run-off from the biggest storm rains.


• [Water lines should follow natural keylines, but be at grades to facilitate flows required. They can be piped underground on contour. Roads above these will accentuate the shape of the land. Houses placed as seated in the amphatheater of the keyline.]


• The new city, like all landscapes, is designed from the main ridges downwards, and not as in the past, upwards from the shore lines and the river lines.


• second zone would lie between the lines of control and lines for use of the rain run-off water.


• City Forest areas located in the third zone--the zone on the farmscape which contains the blocks of irrigation land. [sewage treatment at edge here]


• The design thus far is skeletal and on the surface is illustrated by the interconnected system of roads, run-off water holding areas at the Keylines of the selected primary valleys and the layout for the City Forests. Each of these separated areas are subdivided by appropriate further water lines, roads and streets. The rain run-off from every road and street and from the roofed and paved areas, and the waste water of the sewer lines from homes and buildings, are guided to their special underground mains to flow by gravity to their proper places. Such designs in detail within the design of the cityscape are the province of the municipal councils, the planners and the architects.


• CHAPTER EIGHT Review The New City


• logical and forward planned sequence of developments


• locating of underground mains at uniform depths below the surface is efficient and economical, particularly by comparison with present city practices where the placement and servicing of these mains turn many cities into vast underground mining operations where excavations are often very deep and pumping stations innumerable.


• The first zone of the main ridges with its principal roads along the crest lines is the place for many of the centres of administration and management, the sites for the cultural and commercial centres.


• The fourth zone along and above the shoreline and the drainage lines of the streams, principal sport and playgrounds, of the larger parks and gardens as well as sewerage treatments and City Forests


• This is a CLEAN city, where waste water treatment works have trees in mass surrounds. The water which moves to the rivers and harbours from the soil of the City Forests will probably be better than the water stored today in the great supply dams on the rivers.


• Because there may be certain trees in the world which would concentrate one or other of the harmful substances now in the environment; every kind of tree should be grown


• The City Forest is designed to be a working, perpetual forest for the profitable production of fertile soil and valuable timber


• CHAPTER NINE To Clean A City


• The response of the establishment is predictable with certainty. It will do what it always does; create highly inefficient bureaucratic structures whose immediate interest will be their own elevation to power and permanence. They will have the one efficient department of Public Relations to convince the people of their necessity and efficiency. [will focus on most photo opportunities and not tackle the heart of the issues]


• The pollution problems of city and country cannot be separated, they are merely different aspects on the one great threatening catastrophe.


• growth could be stopped and a new city designed nearby, but divorced from the function of the present city, except for the joining of the two by roads, public transport and communications.


• CHAPTER TEN Soil Sense


• The foundation trio of a healthy environment is clean air, good water and fertile soils.


• [rocks to soil over millions of years, but now life turns subsoil into topsoil]


• The living process is very rapid. It merely has to convert the sub-soil into fertile soil.


• Earthworm = reliable soil informant


• The soil is a complete universe. It has varying inhabitants which occupy specific atmospheres.


• best and cheapest food of all for soil making on the grand scale is the dead roots of good pasture.


• we broke the soil material to three inches deep with a chisel plow--the modern equivalent of the ancient stick-plow. Into this we sowed a mixture of clovers (with the appropriate innoculants) and grasses with one hundred-weight of a 50-50 lime-superphosphate mixture to each acre. The pasture that resulted was cultivated likewise with a chisel plow in the autumn of each of the next three years only. (The particular attributes of the chisel plow are that it does not turn the soil under and secondly, it is a tough go-anywhere affair. It has two-inch wide chisel-like tynes attached to heavier spring-loaded steel shanks mounted on a steel frame. Its proper use on pasture land aerates the soil.


• chisels were allowed to penetrate deeper into the earth in these three consecutive years, reaching a depth of six or seven inches in the final working. We were thus letting a great deal more air into the soil and making better use of the rainfall by taking more of it into the soil. During these three years, stock were managed in a way which encouraged the production of excessive quantities of pasture roots.


• The super-phosphates--a chemical fertiliser--was used to artificially stimulate the grasses and clovers to grow the initial crop of roots. It was not used again or for any other purpose.


• by the time pasture plants have grown to near flowering stage, their roots will have penetrated as deeply into the soil as they will go. Supposing at this stage the grass is mown down or eaten off by stock . deeper roots then die and become in various ways the food for the whole universe of life in the soil.


• The system of the constant nibble, where stock remain on pasture for long periods, is the system of the constant shock. It will progressively reduce the depth of the aerated and alive soil to two inches or even less.


• farmer can thus ensure, by moving his stock on and off his pastures at appropriate times, that bigger and better crops of roots are produced from deeper root systems.


• In this manner shallow soil in which grass roots penetrate less than two inches, can be converted in three years into a very fertile soil five or ten times deeper.


• This is the Keyline soil making technique which authority has rejected for two decades. They have said soil cannot be made that way, it can only be improved by the constant use of chemicals.


• A cow--if she is given a choice--and the pests, are good judges of pasture, but few men are.


• CHAPTER ELEVEN Soil And Trees


• In nature the deep soil and the trees created each other because the climatic conditions were right--and no doubt they took their time about it!


• For the development of the soil for the City Forest there is this difference; the objective is not eight or even sixteen inches of soil but the rapid development of four feet, five feet or more, of fertile and absorbent soil.


• A hundred or more trees were planted a year after the purchase of the farm, (1943). The ground was opened up with a post hole digger; the young trees were watered for a time. The planting was a failure.


• Immersed in the problems of water, no further attempts were made to grow trees for a few years. But becoming interested later in the treated round post type of fencing, it was decided to grow a perpetual forest of fence posts. This planting was so successful that in three years there were more trees ready for posts than could be used. When some of the trees were cut, a selected sucker was left to grow from each stump. They were large enough for posts in only two more years. The trees were spotted gums, (Eucalyptus maculata).


• Of course this planting had been done differently, because in the meantime something had been learned from our soil experiments.


• The poor shale derived soil, the exposed subsoil and the yellow shale was torn-up with an early version of chisel plow and sown as for a pasture and soil development programme and managed as such for a year. There was one significant change; the area was chiselled when dry enough after every fall of rain for the one year. In the successive cultivations the chisels penetrated a little deeper. The lines for the rows of trees were deeply ripped--16 inches. By the end of the year the clovers and grasses had become healthy looking and vigorous, the poor soil material now looked like soil for seven inches down and there were some earthworms to be seen. In this moist soil the young six leaf seedling trees were planted


• only rain thereafter. The soil between the tree-rows was chiselled twice during the year after planting, by which time the roots of the young trees had gone down over 20 inches. Two years after tree planting the soil was found to be loaded with various grain and thread-like fungi, the character of the earthworms had changed to big and fat and clover plants persisted among the trees. I had not seen such forest soil since digging in the rain forest of Queensland's Atherton Tableland before the Second World War.


• It would require 20,000 acres or even up to 40,000 acres to use for optimum profits, the waste water from a city of 2,000,000 people. A large area? Perhaps, but certainly no giant in rain forests--or in grazing properties.


• There is another that would belong to the City Forests and is even more significant; they would be fire proof.


• CHAPTER TWELVE Water The Forest


• [keyline pattern plowing and flood-flo irrigation] [basic dam, lockpipe, irrigation channel, steering bank descriptions] [water effluent from the city would let the city forest grow fast]


• CHAPTER THIRTEEN The Desert Rainforest


• Natural landscape of trees and grass have been turned into desert and given a desert climate by the action and the innocence of man of the way to work with the soil.


• Each time the dam filled, the water was used to irrigate, when the soil required it, until none was left. The response of the soil and the fodder growth was nearly immediate and from the pictures received by the author this section of the property was quickly transformed. (See colour plates 6, 7 and 8)


• [focus area = 5000 acres of hardpan irrigating 500 acres for good tree crop]


• However, one point was the matter of cost. All the construction for the project could be done by a lone grazier with the chisel plow to loosen the earth and the ditcher to sidecast it into position. The first outlay would be for fuel and oil. Progressively the water fields would be fenced for stock control.


• This summary is the outline of a way to get a landscape design started off in severe drought and under conditions of financial hardship. The second stage could be the construction of a dam as little as six feet higher to collect and store water for even more effective use on the focus area, which then would become fully controlled irrigation land.


• CHAPTER FOURTEEN The Barstardisation of Agriculture


• The concern for the non-renewing resources of Nature which lie below the earth has not been how they can be used more rationally and be made to last longer, but principally a matter of finding better and faster ways of getting them out and using them up.


• There is a critical need that a firm line be drawn between the legitimate use of the surpluses of Nature and their straight-out destructure exploitation. But who is to draw the line and who could maintain the line? Authority? Not likely! Youth then? Perhaps they had better, because they and their children are the people who will be worst affected.


• All through history the fertility of the soil had been squandered and great areas have eroded away and were abandoned.


• The scientific event was Leibig's "Chemistry in It's Application to Agriculture" in 1840. By analysing the ash of burnt plants he disclosed that they contained chemical ingredients. This was a great scientific advance in knowledge of the soil at a time when science had not started its intrusion and its compartmentalisation of agriculture.


• At a time of such little knowledge Liebig's teachings appeared wide and illuminating. Soil and humus were now regarded as dead things. There was little appreciation that soil was a community of living things or that bacteria and fungi peopled the humus of the soil and played a critical role in the production of plant life.


• The function of chemicals in the soil dominated this intrusion of science into farming


• Now farming could be taken by 'scientists' into the laboratory and in pots of sand, plants could be grown by adding to the sand a little of this and a pinch of that


• Even today, when it should be apparent to everybody that the great bulk of farming research and experiments should have been done on working farms under the watchful and critical eye or practical farmers, the researcher mostly avoids the wind and the rain for his pots and tubes in the laboratory.


• artificial 'fertilisers', (in reality plant stimulants)


• N.P.K. mentality came to dominate agriculture.


• The eco-systems in the soil, which depend on plant roots for their source of energy, became starved because the roots stay nearer the surface where the drugs are. The plants become hooked and eventually can not grow without them. Progressively more artificial fertilisers become necessary as the eco-systems collapse and fail in their task to feed the plant. Thus the cycle of fertility in the soil is destroyed by a process of artificial defertilisation.


• Darwin's "The Formation of Vegetable Mould Through the Action of (earth) Worms with Observations on Their Habits" (1882) established the interlocking nature of life. But it did not affect the 'Chemicals on the March.' Nor did Pasteur's discovery of the part played by the microbes


• So-called scientists with superb arrogance said they had only to put the ashes of burnt plants in a test tube, analyse them, and scatter the equivalent quantities of chemicals over the soil to produce successful crops.


• After the First World War ended, every authority--education, science and government--advocated artificial fertilisers. The factories set up for 'fixing' nitrogen from the atmosphere for the manufacture of explosives, turned to the production of sulphate of ammonia which flooded the market and the farmlands. It greatly stimulated plant growth, depleted the remaining humus in the soil and started the process of poisoning the water run-off and eventually all food with nitrates.


• Departments of Agriculture were installed in the universities and agricultural experiment stations were established over the world. All deliberately or unconsciously laid emphasis on the N.P.K. mentality and forced the farmer to believe them. Another great mischief was being added--the fear of the parasite, the pest and the weed.


• It was not long before the Strangest Depression in history engulfed and sickened mankind. But most people today won't know about that, they are too young and the historical record is none too clear. It was the era of POVERTY IN THE MIDST OF PLENTY. Traditional finance collapsed on the stockpile of abundance. It appeared that over-production threatened sales.


• Economists and financial 'experts' advising governments, were so naive they forecast that Germany could not fight a war because she had no money and Japan could never challenge anybody because she had no money. They thought money was the thing when it was only the token for real things. It was the time when confidence was lost in the great confidence trick of traditional finance.


• Roosevelt's plans were well laid. In one year, 1933, there emerged firstly the New Deal which was sock-it-to-everyone'; billions of government dollars for the unemployed millions, for the impoverished farmers, and in loans to desperate businessmen; secondly Dr. Hugh Hammond Bennett and the Soil Erosion Campaign--half a million men were soon employed in the Civil Conservation Corp alone, and thirdly, David Lilienthal and T.V.A. (Tennessee Valley Authority). The cost was unbelievable although cheaper than the Second World War poised only a few years ahead. Then in May 1934 the weather joined up with Roosevelt's Public Relations campaign: Out of the west, where South West Kansas, South East Colarado, the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma and North East New Mexico all meet on the great plans, the earth lifted and moved eastward across the Northern American Continent to be "sifted through the windows of New York Skyscrappers". (H. H. Bennett -"Soil Conservation"). DUST BOWL! What a name for their Public Relations machine to play with.


• But what had happened to agriculture which had caused soil erosion--still the greatest soil remover of all time? What happened to the soil? It should have been the greatest programme for enlightenment on soil, its processes and its functions; instead it became just the opposite. H. H. Bennett, who was called the father of American Soil Conservation, invented a concept--THE IRREPLACEABLE NATURE OF SOIL. It was expressed in innumerable ways in every class of media throughout the great campaign and on into the years to the present day.


• Bennett wrote: "Once this valuable asset (soil) leaves a field, it is as irretrievably lost as if consumed by fire . . . . ." "Soil is produced from the parent material so slowly that we may as well accept as a fact, that, once the surface layer is washed off, land so affected is, from the practical standpoint, generally in a condition of permanent improverishment." And . . . "it takes Nature under the most favourable conditions, including a good cover of grass, trees or other protective vegetation, anywhere from 300 to 1,000 years or more to build a single inch of topsoil. . . . The time involved may be much longer; the building of the second inch may require many more years than the building of the first inch at the surface, and so on downward."


• So the great cry of the soil erosion campaign was "Save the soil that is left."


• the choice of the term 'soil conservation' was absurd since CONSERVATION IS NEVER ENOUGH.


• The nation which was the greatest despoiler of soil in history--natural soils as fertile as any on the face of the earth had been so damaged in only ten to 15 years as to be washing away--set out to teach other nations--how to 'conserve' their soil. Soil conservation was even elevated in America to a new "science" with its own graduates in 1948.


• Soil conservation is so well oriented to the chemical mentality that the whole scheme could well have had its basis in big business. Certainly, the decreasing number of organically and biologically inclined farmers were being brain-washed to believe they were wrong. And again Australia devotedly followed America.


• When the submarine menaced Great Britain in the Second World War the farmers were urged to grow more and more food. It was the co-ordinated Defence and Financial policy to force farmers to buy the chemical stimulants. The finance given to farmers was in fact a subsidy for the chemical industry. The government itself became the partner of the producers of artificials to ensure their greatly increased use.


• There are no huge profits for business in health but plenty in disease and in controlling its symptoms.


• rise of the pests and the parasite. Now the new and efficiently business oriented chemical sciences are those of the pesticides, insecticides, weedicides and the defoliants.


• It matters not how offensive the waste substances of life may become, which in its effect has been named primitive pollution, they are still foods for some other natural forms of life. Their disagreeable aspects arise from unnatural accumulations, or because they are out of their normal place in the landscape or because they have been prevented from returning to the soil where they belong.


• In spite of the debasing effect on agriculture which attended Liebig's discoveries, they were and still are of great usefulness. Firstly, the application of chemical fertilisers (except nitrogen) is an excellent way to ascertain quickly if soil is fertile or infertile. If plant growth is markedly improved, then the soil is infertile. Secondly, they have their most important province in assisting the kick-off of a soil development and improvement programme. The best way to make soil fertile is to follow the way of Nature and hurry it up a little. The clovers and the grasses can be stimulated to grow where they are reluctant to grow, by using these plants stimulants--once.


• chemical manufacturers promoted the more theory--"if a little is good more is better" and instead of the plant stimulants assisting in the development of a healthy soil, the soil became a medium of holding the plant in place to receive the growth promoters.


• The simple and obvious way to measure the success of farming is that there is no disease in the soil, the plants are free from attack by insects and from fungus and virus diseases and the animals and the people who feed on the plants are healthy and vigorous.


• CHAPTER FIFTEEN Water, Life Or Death


• [air/water in soil:] It rains! Water goes down into the soil and pushes out the air. The rain stops! The free water drains from the soil and sucks air back in.


• thigh bones of rabbits from both the wet and the dry regions are of almost tissue paper thinness compared with the normal thick and strong bones of rabbits from the moderate regions, (W. A. Albrecht, "Soil Fertility and Animal Health", and his concept "insoluble yet available").


• Thousands of years ago a method for creating fertile soil and for irrigating, was developed in Egypt along the River Nile. This river overflowed each year with precise regularity carrying with it and spreading over the land, great quantities of silt of both mineral rock and organic origin. The early Egyptians diverted the richly laden water behind banks and in canals, to far beyond the limits of the natural flood plain. The water was finally led into embanked fields where the rich silts were deposited and the water soaked into the dry land. Countless millions of workers soon cultivated, mixed and aerated the soil: they were not people; they were Egyptian earthworms. Crops were sown and later harvested without any further water from the Nile or from rainfall.


• This is the "basin" system of irrigation. It was permanent and successful and it did not deplete the fertility of the soil, but improved it. It is a system of irrigation which, on its long record, may be classed as universally successful. It is based on one inundation, then a cultivation and sowing when the soil has drained sufficiently. One application of water grew the crop to maturity.


• This was the system of irrigation used in ancient Egypt. But now things have been changed. The Nile has been dammed to create large reservoirs for perennial irrigation, so that the same land can be watered periodically to grow cotton and other crops. The silts are also impounded with the water and remain lost forever in the reservoirs. Now the Egyptians will need to develop real skills in the management of their soil otherwise their agriculture will follow the chemical way toward destruction. Artificial fertiliser will trigger off invasions of new pests to be poisoned with ever more potent insecticides. This is already happening and the polluted Nile waters are helping to turn the Mediterranean into another dead sea and causing a great loss of food from the sea for the people of the Mediterranean countries.


• The failure of irrigation from the point of view of the landscape is occasioned by the design of the system which was done by engineers. Recently the Murray Valley Commission, who control the Murray Waters, received the report of the Murray Valley Salinity Commission which it commissioned in 1967 to seek the causes and to find the cures for the destruction of irrigation land by salting--the 3,000 years old problem of irrigation land. This report on an important landscape matter and one which should have received wide comment, was not noticed in any news media of mass circulation. The following references are taken, therefore from a small Victorian monthly "Irrigation Farmer" November issue, 1970 and December-January issue 1970-71. Headlines include, "SALINITY REPORT PROPOSE HUGE REMEDIAL EXPENDITURE FOR MURRAY AREAS . . . . . "MORE THAN A MILLION TONS OF SALT ANNUALLY POLLUTES THE MURRAY RIVER." "BEAT THE SALT PROBLEM OR ABANDON THE AREA" and goes on to say "The facts of life will force all water users (farmers in government irrigation districts) to unite in common brotherhood for their own eventual survival" and "The clear warning in the Salinity Report of the inevitable consequences of accepting the continuing deterioration of the irrigated lands of the Murray-Goulburn River systems justifies a searching review of the priorities of reclamation of the existing irrigation areas--or of the construction of new reservoirs that encourage demands for the opening of new irrigation districts."


• This last statement seems to be asking; should the polluted land be abandoned and new dams built and new canals constructed to supply water to new irrigation districts to ruin more land and to pollute the rivers? Yet of the public who pay for these highly photogenic government irrigation catastrophies, how many have even heard of the Salinity Report?


• THE HUGE REMEDIAL EXPENDITURE mentioned by the magazine is $110,000,000. It is by no means 'huge' by comparison with the original costs or with the damage already done to the region. A particularly disquieting aspects of the "Salinity Report" is that it was produced by engineers and proposes an engineering solution for a calamity of engineering design. There was no report of any solutions, alternative to engineering, having been sought for the salt problem from the less financially involved sciences of the ecologist, the biologists and other more landscape orientated professions.


• CHAPTER SIXTEEN The Family Farm


• During nearly 40 years of the constant concern and efforts by conservationists, and the spending of huge sums of public and private money, the deterioration of the environment has continued to accelerate. CONSERVATION NEVER WILL BE ENOUGH!


• The nature of the species Homo sapiens led eventually to the winning of all the freedoms he demanded. But the freedoms of man left freedom itself open to be abused. Man finds himself again enslaved by the institutionalisation of his freedoms.


• The freedom of organisation has given business the right to kill. It is obvious that murder shortens life, but many enterprises do not agree that shortening life is killing. So they continue their onslaught on human life by using the power of money to persuade us to buy things which as food or in use, shorten life. These selfish money interests are causing us all, particularly little children, to be less alive in life and quicker dead. Their deadly game has been the cause of an irrevocable split in society. An expanding group of people will not take part in any activity which will help the continuance of the established order which sanctions such activities. They have rejected and left the rat races of the business world and the workers life. They are not drop-outs, but they opt out of the machinery of the Establishment. In a large measure they think as great numbers of other people think but there is this difference; they are backing up their convictions by acting on them in their lives. They already constitute a head society since they include in their number so many with outstanding intelligence and sincerity.


• forced into line by financial circumstances alone


• arrogant demand of the Establishment for farmers to "get big or get out".


• Status symbols also played a part in the loss of the wholesomeness of food. There was the status of "White." White bolted flour, white refined sugar, white bread, white rice were at first dearer than their wholesome counterparts. Only the more affluent could afford them, so everyone wanted them and later got them as they became staple items of diet.