biologists-from-australia

"Each year—as a result of , automobiles, , , and tropical —humankind spews some 8 billion tons of , , and other carbon-based pollutants into the atmosphere. The net effect, as we all know, has been an alarming rise in air pollutants—particularly carbon dioxide, which has increased by more than a third, from 280 to 380 parts per million (ppm), since the onset of the industrial era. Equally distressing is that these emissions are accelerating, because countries like the United States have failed to rein their burgeoning emissions and because rapidly developing countries like China, India, and Brazil are increasingly adopting the energy-consumptive lifestyles of industrial nations. From 1800 to 1960, for example, the average annual increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations was just 0.2 ppm, but this jumped to 1.4 ppm from 1960 to 2000 and has since risen to 2.3 ppm."

"Humankind has dramatically transformed much of the Earth’s surface and its natural ecosystems. This process is not new—it has been ongoing for millennia—but it has accelerated sharply over the last two centuries, and especially in the last several decades. Today, the loss and degradation of natural history can be likened to a war of attrition. Many natural ecosystems are being progressively razed, bulldozed, and felled by axes or chainsaws, until only small scraps of their original extent survive. Forests have been hit especially hard: the global area of forests have been reduced by roughly half over the past three centuries. Twenty-five nations have lost virtually all of their forest cover, and another 29 more than nine-tenths of their forest ( 2005)."

"s are the most biologically diverse and ecologically complex of terrestrial ecosystems, and are disappearing at alarming rates. It has long been suggested that rapid forest loss and degradation in the , if unabated, could ultimately precipitate a wave of species extinctions, perhaps comparable to mass extinction events in the geological history of the Earth. However, a vigorous debate has erupted following a study by Wright and Muller-Landau that challenges the notion of large-scale tropical extinctions, at least over the next century."

"In the , alters forest–climate interactions in diverse ways. On a local scale (less than 1 ), elevated desiccation and wind disturbance near fragment margins lead to sharply increased tree mortality, thus altering dynamics, composition, dynamics and . Fragmented forests are also highly vulnerable to edge–related fires, especially in regions with periodic droughts or strong dry seasons. At landscape to regional scales (10–1000 km), habitat fragmentation may have complex effects on forest–climate interactions, with important consequences for atmospheric circulation, water cycling and precipitation. Positive feedbacks among , regional climate change and fire could pose a serious threat for some tropical forests, but the details of such interactions are poorly understood."

"Passing by the mountain village of —a quaint, artsy town known for its Saturday tourist markets—the changed abruptly to open . Stately rainforest trees were replaced by s, s and s, with a ground layer of punctuated by large, oddly shaped . s and s, their flowers shaped like bottle-brushes, grew in dense clumps along a few meandering creeks."

"I am a Professor in the Departments of Earth and Planetary Science and Environmental Science, Policy, and Management (see contact information below)."

"My research group studies microbial communities, primarily using cultivation-independent approaches such as genomics (metagenomics) and community proteomics."

"Jellyfish as a group holds some astonishing records. The world's most venomous animal is a jellyfish, the Australian Deadly Box jelly-fish (', page 50). The largest invertebrate discovered in the twentieth century is a jellyfish, the so-called Black Sea Nettle (', page 114)—thought it is practically a toy compared to the lion's mane jellies of the North Atlanta (' spp., page 52), which can reach three meters (ten feet) across the body and drag tentacles nearly 30 meters (100 feet) long. One jellyfish helped scientists win the Nobel Prize (page 198). Another grows ten percent of its body length per hour (page 208). And the world's first known case of true biological immortality was discovered in the diminutive and aptly named Immortal Jellyfish (', page 74)."

"Imagine one of Australia’s foremost jellyfish specialists, a robust scientist with an encyclopaedic knowledge of jellyfish taxonomy and a deep understanding of their place in the . Now make them enthusiastic, unashamedly and female. This is Lisa-Ann Gershwin. Dr Gershwin this year was named one of The Science Show's Top 100 Australian Scientists, along with greats such as Sir FRS, Sir FRS, and Professor FRS. Her road to science has not been a smooth one though. ... Lisa-Ann describes her neurodivergence as central to her science and who she is. While it has been a source of joy as she has been able to immerse herself in the details of jellyfish taxonomy and ecology, it has also come with difficulties."

"s are nothing new. In fact, fossil evidence shows us that jellyfish have been blooming for hundreds of millions of years. Around the turn of the nineteenth century, it became fashionable for naturalists to report all sorts of odd and unusual events from the natural world. The early issues of the and others like it are full of such interesting tidbits. One such report described ' as so abundant in , Germany, that an oar pushed down between the jellyfish remained standing upright ( 1880). Today, just about any bay or harbor has Aurelia shoals so dense that one may wonder whether there is actually enough water between each jellyfish for it to obtain enough oxygen to survive."

"Improving our understanding of leaf oyster reefs requires more comprehensive mapping of the remaining populations and gaining a better understanding of their life cycle."

"Our concern extends beyond the survival and protection of the single species, to the entire ecosystem the leaf oysters underpin."

"Not only in research, but also in the everyday world of politics and economics, we would all be better off if more people realised that simple nonlinear systems do not necessarily possess simple dynamical properties."

"To a rough approximation, and setting aside vertebrate chauvinism, it can be said that essentially all organisms are insects."

"The golden toad was the first documented victim of global warming. We had killed it with our profligate use of coal-fired electricity and our oversize cars just as surely as if we had flattened its forest with bulldozers. It was as if, having experienced it, we did not recognize what happiness was."

"Some time this century, the day will arrive when the human influence on the climate will overwhelm all natural factors."

"At the time the Danes decided to back wind power, the cost of electricity produced this way was many times greater than that produced by fossil fuels. The Danish government, however, could see its potential and supported the industry until costs came down. Today Denmark leads the world in both wind power production and the building of turbines; and wind now supplies 21 percent of the country’s electricity. One striking aspect of the way that wind power has developed there is that some 85 percent of the capacity is owned by individuals or wind cooperatives, and so power lies in the hands of the people."

"Kyoto questions the philosophies underpinning societies such as America and Australia, which cling to the myth of limitless growth."

"It is imperative to get the smelters to pay a fair price for their power; otherwise, market forces can never induce them to limit their emissions."

"If humans pursue a business-as-usual course for the first half of this century, I believe the collapse of civilization due to climate change becomes inevitable."

"This problem may not occur for several hundred years, but by the time we see the first signs, it will be far too late to do anything about it."

"Nothing in predictive climate science is more certain than the extinction of many of the world’s mountain-dwelling species."

"In our Gaian world, everything is connected to and influences everything else."

"Coal fires are a notorious risk for coalmines. In North America whole towns have had to be relocated because of fires that have been uncontrollable.”"

"Induction was shown to be untenable as a scientific method by Popper in The Logic of Scientific Discovery (1959). Instead, advances in scientific understanding come ideally from hypothetico-deductivism: firstly, development of a hypothesis in relation to a problem situation, and secondly, its testing in relation to all relevant knowledge and furthermore by its great explanatory power."

"I can now rejoice even in the falsification of a cherished theory, because even this is a scientific success."

"In order that a "self" may exist there must be some continuity of mental experiences and, particularly, continuity bridging gaps of unconsciousness. For example, the continuity of our "self" is resumed after sleep, anaesthesia, and the temporary amnesias of concussion and convulsions."

"I believe that there is a fundamental mystery in my existence, transcending any biological account of the development of my body (including my brain) with its genetic inheritance and its evolutionary origin. … I cannot believe that this wonderful gift of a conscious existence has no further future, no possibility of another existence under some other unimaginable conditions."

"Our coming-to-be is as mysterious as our ceasing-to-be at death. Can we therefore not derive hope because our ignorance about our origin matches our ignorance about our destiny? Cannot life be lived as a challenging and wonderful adventure that has meaning yet to be discovered? (95)"

"I have read a great deal now on the neurological side and much on the anthropological side and on the philosophical side and we have had all these discussions and all the time I have the feeling that something may break. I mean that some little light at the end of the tunnel may be sensed or some flash of insight may come. I of course know very well that there is no guarantee it will come, but I have already got myself into this state of expectancy that something will come to my imagination which has some germ of truth about it in this most difficult field."

"I maintain that the human mystery is incredibly demeaned by scientific reductionism, with its claim in promissory materialism to account eventually for all of the spiritual world in terms of patterns of neuronal activity. This belief must be classed as a superstition … we have to recognize that we are spiritual beings with souls existing in a spiritual world as well as material beings with bodies and brains existing in a material world."

"The more we discover scientifically about the brain the more clearly do we distinguish between the brain events and the mental phenomena and the more wonderful do the mental phenomena become. Promissory materialism is simply a superstition held by dogmatic materialists. It has all the features of a Messianic prophecy, with the promise of a future freed of all problems—a kind of Nirvana for our unfortunate successors."

"The materialist critics argue that insuperable difficulties are encountered by the hypothesis that immaterial mental events can act in any way on material structures such as neurons. Such a presumed action is alleged to be incompatible with the conservation laws of physics, in particular of the first law of thermodynamics. This objection would certainly be sustained by nineteenth century physicists, and by neuroscientists and philosophers who are still ideologically in the physics of the nineteenth century, not recognizing the revolution wrought by quantum physicists in the twentieth century."

"The concept of substance leads to a materialist aspect of the mind. I speak instead of the spiritual existence of the self without mentioning any 'substance' properties. The great problem is 'how the self controls its brain'. This is dualistic, but not in terms of two substances. Instead it relates to the two worlds of Popper."

"The hypothesis has been proposed that all mental events and experiences, in fact the whole of the outer and inner sensory experiences, are a composite of elemental or unitary mental experiences at all levels of intensity. Each of these mental units is reciprocally linked in some unitary manner to a dendron … Appropriately we name these proposed mental units 'psychons.' Psychons are not perceptual paths to experiences. They are the experiences in all their diversity and uniqueness. There could be millions of psychons each linked uniquely to the millions of dendrons. It is hypothesized that it is the very nature of psychons to link together in providing a unified experience."

"Stupidity is an attempt to iron out all differences, and not to use or value them creatively."

"For priority in location, we need to first attend to Zone 1 and Zone 2; these support the household and save the most expense. What is perhaps of greatest importance, and cannot be too highly stressed, is the need to develop very compact systems. … We can all make a very good four meters square garden, where we may fail to do so in 40 square meters."

"Type 1 Error: When we settle into wilderness, we are in conflict with so many life forms that we have to destroy them to exist. Keep out of the bush. It is already in good order."

"What is proposed herein is that we have no right, nor any ethical justification, for clearing land or using wilderness while we tread over lawns, create erosion, and use land inefficiently. Our responsibility is to put our house in order. Should we do so, there will never be any need to destroy wilderness."

"Order is found in things working beneficially together. It is not the forced condition of neatness, tidiness, and straightness all of which are, in design or energy terms, disordered. True order may lie in apparent confusion; it is the acid test of entropic order to test the system for yield. If it consumes energy beyond product, it is in disoder. If it produces energy to or beyond consumption, it is ordered."

"I confess to a rare problem—gynekinetophobia, or the fear of women falling on me—but this is a rather mild illness compared with many affluent suburbanites, who have developed an almost total zoophobia, or fear of anything that moves. It is, as any traveller can confirm, a complaint best developed in the affluent North American, and it seems to be part of blue toilet dyes, air fresheners, lots of paper tissues, and two showers a day."

"You can hit a nail on the head, or cause a machine to do so, and get a fairly predictable result. Hit a dog on the head, and it will either dodge, bite back, or die, but it will never again react in the same way. We can predict only those things we set up to be predictable, not what we encounter in the real world of living and reactive processes."

"Most biologists," (says , 1981) "seem to have heard of the boundary layer, but they have a fuzzy notion that it is a discrete region, rather than the discrete notion that it is a fuzzy region."

"…the end result of the adoption of permaculture strategies in any country or region will be to dramatically reduce the area of the agricultural environment needed by the households and the settlements of people, and to release much of the landscape for the sole use of wildlife and for re-occupation by endemic flora."

"It is my belief that we have two responsibilities to pursue: Primarily, it is to get our house and garden, our place of living, in order, so that it supports us; Secondarily, it is to limit our population on earth, or we ourselves become the final plague. Both these duties are intimately connected, as stable regions create stable populations. If we do not get our cities, homes, and gardens in order, so that they feed and shelter us, we must lay waste to all other natural systems. Thus, truly responsible conservationists have gardens…"

"Steps in total planning are roughly in priority:"

"Peat preserves timber, animals, and such unexpected treasure-troves as hoards of acorns and firkins of beech butter from the forests which preceded the bogs. A whole archaeology may very well lie in peat, and the pollen record may reveal past history. At the base of Irish bogs the ' (the little people), their axes, bridges, butter, and forest life are well preserved. They and their forests were banished, as if by magic, by the ' (the Children of Diana) who now dig the peat. Diana was displaced in turn by Mary, mother of God. But all are mixed in the peat and the tongue of Ireland."

"A great many film stars perched on unstable ravine edges in the canyon systems of Los Angeles will, like the cemeteries there, eventually slide down to join their unfortunate fellows in the canyon floors, with mud, cars, and embalmed or living film stars in one glorious muddy mass. We should not lend our talents to creating such spectacular catastrophes..."

"Few people today muck around in earth, and when on international flights, I often find I have the only decently dirty fingernails."

"It is possible, in Iran, Greece, North Africa, USA, Mexico, Pakistan, and Australia to see how, in our short history of life destruction, we have brought the hard bones of the earth to the surface by stripping the life skin from it for ephemeral uses. We can, if we persist, create a moon-landscape of the earth. So poor goatherds wander where the lake-forests stood and the forest deities were worshipped. The religions of resignation and fanaticism follow those of the nature gods, and man-built temples replace trees and tree spirits."