The Dead Heart
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The Mighty Australian Outback

(Original article online here)

"The mighty Australian continent, it's huge. And in the tourist brochures it looks beautiful and unspoiled. And it was up until about 50 years ago. But it seems like overnight our forests started to vanish; our coastlines started to disappear under the weight of development; suddenly we were seeing heavyweight pollution in the cities of Australia. And you know, if it wasn't for the activities of the activist, the people who went up and chained themselves to the trees in the rain-forest in North Queensland, Australia wouldn't have any rain-forest left at all.

It's an incredible place, I love it very much and it's home, but just like anyplace else in the world, the pace and the punishment over the last decade or two is really starting to tell. We've got our problems here and we really want to solve them, but we've got a fair way to go.

Like Australia, America faces a number of environmental problems. When the Oil was touring in 1993, one of the things we noticed was the incredible number of toxic and nuclear waste dumps all around the country that weren't being monitored or properly being looked after. You know, when you think about the big story about creating nuclear energy, and all the bombs that went down in 1980, and the amount of money the taxpayers, your moms and your dads, and probably one of these days you as well, have put into that stuff, it's amazing that they haven't even figured out a safe way of dealing with it. It's a mighty problem and we noticed it wherever we went.

Another thing we noticed in America is what's happening to the coasts. The development that takes place along the coast, the drilling for oil, the development for marinas, for high-rise, not thinking about the kind of run-off from toxic waste from factories and farms that go into the coastlines. You have to consider the fact that on that West Coast of America, people are used to swimming, surfing and fishing in that water. Now, that ocean is getting dead meat.

I think that's of the things that Americans are really starting to confront now. We noticed a lot of people starting to get active when we were in California.

The final thing in America that's really obvious to us when we travel, is the fact that there is so much waste. So much stuff that gets chucked away. And you know, one way of looking at the measure of what the world has to offer us, we reckon, is the fact that we have a whole lot of stored capital, of stored wealth, that has built up over millions and millions, and in fact billions of years. But now what's happening now, is that it's being used up pretty quickly. Now I guess we ask ourselves, "who is making the money? And "what are we getting for it?"

If what we end up with in the Northeast of the United States, you know, are the Great Lakes sort of perishing; if we end up with a situation where you are swimming in seas of junk; then you've got to say to yourself, 'hey, enough is enough.' And it seems to us, that time has come in America."

From Rock and The Environment, by Craig Kasnoff

(Note: this article has not been approved for reproduction.)