It is so hard for people to understand that everything is connected. And as Mollison says in the quote--the trees are already dead from OUR ignorant cultural practices--the bugs are only there to clean up the mess. [As an aside I recently read a similar explanation of cholesterol. Doctors are so concerned about cholesterol levels and prescribe medications to lower it--but the cholesterol is only there to heal the damage caused by inflammation. What is needed is to fix the inflammation. Indeed another example of treating the wrong thing too late because the systemic properties of the human body were not understood.]
I mentioned earlier that I grew up in the beech-maple forest of Northern Michigan. This forest is rapidly deteriorating --again the explanation is the phasmid theory. This time of year is the time to tap the maple trees and collect the sap for making maple syrup.
I did this job on skis as a kid. A visitor from home tells me that this may be the last year for the maples. The elms are gone--dutch elm disease. The ash trees have succumbed to the Emerald ash borer. And now the maples are being attacked. No one seems to think that the loss of the big trees is due to random clear cutting which has destroyed the structure of the forest.
I think this is exactly what you are seeing in Hawaii. And it will continue until we learn to live within our natural environments instead of despite them. And of course that's what permaculture seeks to do.
Archaeology. I studied anthropology at the University of California (and as you know archaeology is one of the subdivisions of anthropology). Some of the best anthropologists were then at Santa Barbara (they fled when Ronald Reagan became governor of California), then I entered the graduate school at San Diego State University--again majoring in anthropology. I got a job as a teaching assistant for a new PhD who had just returned from doing archaeology in East Africa. (salvage archaeology to recover cultural information before a dam was put in along the Niger.) This association turned me more in the archaeology direction. Then my education took a side trip, and I wound up at Stanford University. From there I went to the University Kentucky and was accepted into their PhD program. And at that time I started doing archaeology on TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority) salvage projects, were archaeological information was being destroyed by modifications along the Tennessee River. So my archaeological experience is mainly in the Southeast US with a focus on the Tennessee and Tombigbee River valleys. And the work was mostly salvage archaeology--recovering information that would be lost by construction or flooding. Today I work as an editor for an outfit called Tennessee Valley Archaeological Research--so I can work at home on my computer.--Shovel getting rusty!
Do the Wiliwili trees have red flowers as the erythrina trees do here? [There was a erythrina blooming out side the anthropology building where I taught classes on the San Diego campus.]
