Painting Fakes

Well friends, you'll be happy to know that the Great Barrier Reef has been saved.   Over the past few months our government has been pulling out the stops to prevent UNESCO from listing the Reef as 'In Danger'.  The Government's 'Ambassador for the Reef', Cairns MP Warren Entsch, took a bunch of foreign ambassadors on a tourist jaunt to some choice snorkeling spots.  Meanwhile the woman who holds the title of Minister for the Environment, Sussan Ley, hopped on a RAAF jet with a bunch of advisors and visited capitals around the world, twisting the arms of the governments of the 21 countries on UNESCO's World Heritage Committee.  In the end, at least 11 countries voted to delay a decision for at least another year.  The list apparently includes Saint Kitts and Nevis, Ethiopia, Hungary, Mali, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Russia and Spain. Minister Ley said : “Our concern was always that UNESCO had sought an immediate ‘in danger lis...

So, over the past few years the fight has been on over the Beetaloo Basin.  This piece of ground in the Northern Territory, home to the Gudanji, Yanyuwa, Garrwa, Jingili, Mudburra and Alawa nations for tens of thousands of years, has the misfortune to be the site of a massive gas-field.  Never mind that we are cooking the planet, and that the world is trying to grope its way towards reducing its emissions.  Our massive energy companies and their flunkies in our parliaments are determined to 'open up' these gas-fields to fracking.  The Commonwealth Government has so far subsidised this enterprise to the tune of close to $200m.  The traditional owners don't want it and have been opposing it for years.  They have succeeded in getting the Senate to mount an inquiry into the enterprise.   So I followed the prompting from the Australian Conservation Foundation and made a submission.  You can do the same if you like, just follow the prompts her...

 After my speculations, aided by various authors, about whether trees are intelligent , or even fungi , Peter Godfrey-Smith has settled me down a little.  While I was returning Merlin Sheldrake's Entangled Life  to the library I saw his book  Metazoa: Animal Minds and the Birth of Consciousness  sitting awaiting re-shelving, begging me to borrow it. Godfrey-Smith is a philosopher of science who teaches at the University of Sydney and spends much of his spare time diving in the various bays around the Sydney area.  One result of this is an obsession with octopuses, about which he has written another book and which feature strongly in this one as well.  Both books deal with the question, part scientific and part philosophical, of what constitutes a 'mind' and what kind of creatures have them. Historically, theories of mind have varied widely.  One view is that the mind (perhaps equivalent to or similar to the soul) is an add-on which co-habits the b...