People

In response to Mr. Robson's plea for more participation, I submit the following, as an exstudent who has finally reached the point of no return.

Have you ever seen a cat spread out and squashed flat, with road visible where its rib-cage was? It was obviously hit by something fast and heavy because it's spreadeagled and there's a pool of glistening red liquid about the same diameter as the span of the legs, spread of bone glinting in the moonlight.

What about all the squashed hedgehogs, birds, dogs, possums, pets, little shapes of feathers, fur or needles, thrashing and flopping their lives away in agony. Those that get hit directly are the exception rather than the rule. Or perhaps you'd prefer a Flake—that girl really gets it on!

The world is literally running out of phosphate, the stuff is mined as a relatively insoluble material, treated with sulphuric acid to make it more water-soluble, then dumped on the land to dissolve in runoff and groundwater, collecting in places like Lake Tutira where it causes the suffocation of sub-aquatic life, through over nourishment of the plants and algae.

Meanwhile, I understand that the Japanese are set on harvesting plankton from the sea, using modified whaling vessels.

When you consider that plankton recycle something like 70% of the oxygen in the atmosphere, as well as oxygenating the oceans, remembering that the plankton float and drift, they don't swim, they can't escape from a trawled seive, they are easily 'fished out'.

Fish the plankton out of the oceans, you drown the fish, and you raise the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere, creating a 'greenhouse effect', melting a few polar icecaps a bit more and drowning a few cities as well.

If we quadrupled the present rate of world fuel consumption, and burnt all the plants for fuel as well, there would still be enough oxygen in the atmosphere to last us another 125,000 years or so (that's 3,750 generations peoplewise).

Our present rate of world consumption of fuel furnishes us with approximately 15,000 Gigacalories (1 Gcal. = 1000 million calories) per day, about half of which is wasted as heat before it's even put to work. The sun furnishes earth with approximately 2000 million Gigacalories daily.

There are companies who spend more on advertising than on protecting the environment, than on cleaning up their own discharges. A company which has an economic monopoly on a commodity is under little or no social pressure to change its processing methods—financial penalties for pollution are easily passed onto the consumer as increased costs

There are people in this society who claim to represent groups of peoples' interests, using arguements on behalf of the group, without having the facts to found the argument ( including the fact of representation.)

With our present information gap between those who are older or more experienced, and those who hold positions of control in society, I have no doubt that within a generation or two, the transfer of common sense skills from one generation to another, will, to all practical purposes, cease.

As the experienced people die or forget, the knowledge gets buried until destroyed or rediscovered by inspiration or an 'act of genius'. Those who are left capable, find more and more people demanding more and more of their time, at the mercy of those who own the resources, they work themselves to death through idealism, or sell out, or they become hermits.

Anyway, they don't pass on the information that will enable their children to stay alive in a material world, they prefer to let someone assumedly more qualified do that, and from my experience of student teachers, and knowledge of the number of teachers that a class goes through in a year, coupled with a bit of observation, I would conclude that it is easier to manipulate a class of pupils through a school that it is to gain their respect and trust by demonstrating facts reasonably and knowledgeably.

The teachers, at the moment, are the instruments by which knowledge is directed towards those who, at present in economic authority, also strongly influence the means by which information is disseminated to the public and thus concentrate knowledge and power in the hands of a chosen few. The fact that some people have woken up to this is evidenced by the attacks on centres of learning in the form of arson, sabotage of instruments and equipment, disturbances at school and university functions and vandalism to education department property.

I think that the spectacular dawns and sunsets we've been having recently are caused by pollution from the burning of too much fuel for not enough work, too much waste.

I have patented a machine for converting waste plastic to non-polluting fuel, flux and organic raw materials for reprocessing, I have almost finished developing a process for using sun and windpower to convert carbon dioxide from the atmosphere into acetylene.

I am thinking about a process to extract phosphate from runoff, using sun and/or wind power to reconvert it into a form suitable for use as an economical fertiliser.

Unless persuaded otherwise, I intend to form a company and make these and other ideas viable commercially, it takes two people ple to sign the articles of association. The other signatory will be female.

I would be interested to see what other people are doing environment wise.