Just back from another day at the beach: this time Mooloolaba which is an hour and a bit north of Brisbane. The sky was a perfect blue and a terrific breeze chopped the tops off some of the waves.
There are no camels at Mooloolaba. But I see today a story at ABC Online about camels at Broome’s cable beach and how they will soon be fitted with ‘poo bags’.
I guess the bags can be emptied where the poo can be mulched – rather than washed out to sea? I don’t know about the ocean off the north west, but parts of Australia’s east coast are nutrient poor. I wonder what the decision to mandate ‘poo bags’ was based on?
I will be in Darwin later this week at a conference on ‘population’. In preparation I have been reading a paper by Ron Brunton titled ‘The End of the Overpopulation Crisis’. He quotes from Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 book ‘The population bomb’:
I have understood the population explosion intellectually for a long time. I came to understand it emotionally one stinking hot night in Delhi a few years ago … The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people sleeping. People visiting, arguing and screaming. People thrusting their hands through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. AS we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat and cooking fires gave the scence a hellish aspect.
Brunton remarked “Clearly, Ehrlich felt some revulsion at the culturally unfamiliar use of personal and public space by a people who were physically different from himself.”
I reckon Ehrlich would also be intolerant of camel’s pooing on the beach.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.