Aboriginal Physics Newsletter

Canadian Youth Climate Coalition - G8/G20 Pledge

I will hold the Canadian Government responsible for their failure to take action to stop climate change. If the government continues to dismiss its residents, I will come to the G20 meeting in June or participate in demonstrations in my community. I will make it clear to the world that people in Canada care about climate change and won’t accept inaction any further.

Ok, I participated in ‘activism’ in my student days and I think there is a need for the upcoming generation to ‘stir it up’ and make people think.   But, … a partnership with the Pembina Institute!?!  Is youth the victim of the ‘politicizing of science’?

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I believe that the motivation for the statements on ‘climate’ by Elizabeth May, Nadia Nowak and Peter Carter is ‘the health and harmony of the community/habitat’, and this is true also for myself.  This common motivation makes of us a kind of ‘virtual team’.  But as in many teams, there is not always a common understanding of ‘the issues’.

My virtual ‘team-mates’ and I currently differ in our understanding of ‘climate’, me being the ‘odd man out’, and I wrote a letter (click here) to the ‘Islands Independent’ (which may be published in the June 11^th issue) thanking the paper (Laurie Kay) for providing fair and open access for comments on such issues. (more…)

spatial habitat-inhabitant resonances orchestrating individual and collective behaviour

The argument between the ‘Pro-Life’ and ‘Pro-Choice’ factions might take on a very different complexion if the notion of ‘choice’ were to be examined more closely.

In particular, the notion of human ‘control’ over ‘population’ could be exposed as an artefact of science confusing ‘idealised models’ for ‘reality’.  Human beings are not ‘in control’, not when they are understood as being ‘a strand in the interdependent, mutually supportive ‘web-of-life’.  When they/we label insects as ‘pests’ and attempt to ‘control their population’, we are spitting on the web and in so doing, we spit on ourselves.  When they/we identify and label bacteria as ‘pathogens’ and attempt to ‘control their population’, we are spitting on the web and in so doing, we spit on ourselves (keeping things in ‘resonant’ balance is another matter).  As Pasteur said, in refuting his own ‘germ theory’ which labeled microbes ‘pathogens’, and as Hippocrates had said before him, when one lives in a web of interdependencies within a dynamic space (Nature) that one is merely an inclusion in (man did not invent it but was invented by it), the issue is not ‘control’ but ‘sustaining balance and harmony’. (more…)

What if scientists had labelled ‘field’, ‘spirit’, instead of field?  Would science and religion then be ‘more together’?

Buoyant spirits ................................... Sinking spirits

‘Spirit’ seems to be a property of nature that shows through in the dynamics of the diverse forms in nature.

However, our western culture decided to build a common worldview based on material existence rather than ‘field’, and we are so heavily invested in it now, that doing a ‘retro-fit’ to put ‘field’ or ‘spirit’ first, is like the proverbial ‘changing tires on a car while it is speeding down the freeway’. (more…)

darwin................................... emerson....................................newton

Darwin, pausing briefly on the wave-washed decks of the Beagle, contemplated how close to the edge of an early ‘recycling’ in nature that the ship, its crew and passengers were now hanging.  The thought of the ship being broken open by the sea and its plummeting descent to a peaceful resting place in the briny depths was not entirely unpleasant, in view of how it would bring an end to his frightful mal-de-mer.  On the sea bottom, his body would be food for algae and the algae would be food for plankton and the plankton food for fish.  Some other human mariner would eat that fish that ate the plankton that ate the algae that ate Charles Darwin and the circle of life would go on.  In his log he wrote;

“In the Bay of Biscay there was a long and continued swell, and the misery I endured from seasickness is far far beyond what I ever guessed  … Nobody who has only been to sea for 24 hours has a right to say that sea-sickness is even uncomfortable. The real misery only begins when you are so exhausted that a little exertion makes a feeling of faintness come on.”  — ‘Charles Darwin and the voyage of the Beagle’. (more…)