Isherwood: “Tony Burke: I challenge you to debate!”

Citizens Electoral Council leader Craig Isherwood today issued a stinging challenge to Environment Minister Tony Burke to debate the “science” upon which rests the entirety of the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s Proposed Basin Plan—that of “ecosystems”.

“Most people know by now, that the MDBA’s proposed devastating cuts in irrigation derive from John Howard’s Water Act 2007. It is also generally admitted that that Act, in turn, was written specifically to conform to the dictates of the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, founded in 1971 as a spin-off from Prince Philip’s WWF. And Ramsar’s entire outlook, including their justification for such actually genocidal cuts, is in turn based upon the ‘science’ of ‘ecosystems’, as one glance at the home page of Ramsar’s website will convince you.

“So the justification for Burke’s planned devastation of the whole Murray-Darling Basin—which has actually been under way for years now via ‘voluntary’ water buybacks—rises or falls on whether ‘ecosystems’ actually exist, or whether the whole notion is a scam no better than the hocus-pocus of some tribal witchdoctor. In my two speeches to the CEC’s 23^rd-24^th July national conference of this year, ‘Cosmic Radiation Beats Green Fascism’, I proved the latter beyond any reasonable doubt.

“Imagine my happiness, then, to have just learned that a documentary recently aired on Britain’s august BBC, has buttressed my argument 100 per cent.

“I encourage everyone to go watch the documentary itself, entitled All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. But, to summarise briefly, the second of its three parts aired on 30^th May 2011 on Britain’s BBC2 under the headlines: ‘This is a story about the rise of the machines and our belief in the balance of nature. How the idea of the ecosystem was invented. How it inspired us. And how it wasn’t even true’.

“In terms very similar to mine, this BBC special documented how and why the British Empire’s Sir Arthur Tansley (who basically invented the science of ‘ecology’ in the first half of the 20th century), had coined the term ‘ecosystems’ in a famous 1935 article. After World War I, said the documentary, Tansley had had a dream in which he murdered his wife. In order to find out what the dream meant, he went to visit Sigmund Freud in Vienna in 1922. The film recounted, ‘an obscure part of Freud’s theory that said the human brain was actually an electrical machine. That the sense data that came in through the eyes and the ears created bursts of energy that flowed around networks inside the brain, just like electrical circuits. Tansley was fascinated by this … he decided that he could take this model of the mind and apply it to the whole of the natural world.’ And so the notion of ‘ecosystems’ was born.

“Then, the documentary continued, this Tansley schema was popularised by two of his acolytes, Howard and Eugene Odum, ecologists who were also heavily influenced by the post-World War II, cybernetics ‘systems theory’ doctrine of Norbert Wiener, which was just as mechanistic as the Freud/Tansley notion of the human mind as an electrical appliance. Eugene’s book, the Fundamentals of Ecology, a fusion of Tansley and cybernetics, ‘became the bible of the science’ of ecology, the documentary reported, pivoted upon the idea of ‘ecosystems’. There was only one problem, as explained by a couple of modern ecologists whom the documentary interviewed: this utterly mechanistic model of nature has now been proven to be completely false, in that it boiled down the processes of life (i.e. of Nature), to those of mere machines. And the processes of life, of nature as a whole, said these ecologists, are very dynamic and highly evolving, unlike the now-discredited ‘equilibrium’ models of Tansley and the cyberneticists.

“Therefore, in light of the proof presented in our latest New Citizen, and in this BBC documentary that the notion of ‘eco-systems’ is just shameless quackery, I challenge Tony Burke to debate this matter.

“However, I suspect that the former Wilderness Society activist Tony is both too gutless, and too ignorant to debate me. In that case, I will happily take on any champion of his choice. He can pick from any of the academic or governmental citadels of Green Fascism, whether from his own Sustainable Population department; from the hacks at the CSIRO or the Australian Academy of Science; from the stable of greenies at the Wentworth Group of quackademics, at the ACF, or at Ramsar; or from any other gaggle of ‘environmental experts’.

“After all, it’s just ‘objective science’, right Tony? So what do you have to lose? You of course are well aware that the CEC is the most relentless, most informed opposition to your genocidal Basin plan. So surely one of your experts can discredit me and the CEC just on the basis of the ‘science’? Or are they all just gutless liars as you are?”