The Stars are Fading

I have fond memories of the brilliantly clear and bright night skies of the Western Australian deserts of my childhood holidays,

My family (parents and the four of us kids) would load up the family car and a small trailer with all the paraphernalia required to go “car camping” out in the desert for a couple of weeks at a time during the August school, holidays. The days were hot and dusty as we drove from mining town to roadhouse and all places in between. We would find some deserted stretch of a little used road in the “station country where fences are a rarity and we would just drive off the road by a hundred meters or so, in amongst a few gum trees for shade and set up camp. It might just be for the night or it might be for a few days while we explored the area with day-trips. The earth was red and sandy, the spinifex grass was spiny, the days were hot and the nights were cold and clear. The food was all a bit smoky and the wood we collected for the nightly camp fire was all so incredibly dry and burned so well.

And I recall the skies were incredible… so many stars and so bright,,, The milky-way draped like a huge sparkling blanket overhead to stare at for hours.

Good memories indeed!

And then at some point I moved from the small country towns were we lived into the city to go to university… and the sky is never so impressive in the city with all its light pollution and other distractions. And after that, I moved to other Australian cities to work for a few years but it’s the same as far as the skies are concerned. And then as happenstance would have it I moved to Canada and have lived and worked there for the past twenty years… And there, even when I did get out of the city and away from all the bright man-made lights, I have to confess that the Northern sky is not as impressive at night as it is in the Antipodes…just the luck of the draw there though.

And on the occasions when I have ventured back to the southern hemisphere Ive rarely spent long looking at the night sky and even when I have, it hasn’t really been “an experience of note” so to speak.

And so we come to the present… And Im riding through southern Africa and camping in desert country almost every night and Ive had ample opportunity to stare for as long as I want at the southern night sky…

And sad to say, but that sky has faded… And Im sure of it… Its not as bright as it was!

Now of course, there are probably a billion or two more people in the world since when I was a kid, and no doubt we humans are kicking up lots more dust and creating lots more air pollution than we were in the seventies and eighties but I think that accounts for only a tiny fraction of the “fade”.

And I don’t think it’s a case of overly exaggerated childhood memories either since I was about 17 years old when I last went on one of those camping holidays with the family.

No, I think the cause of the change is far more mundane than that… I think my eyesight is on the wane… The stars are doing fine, its me that’s fading!

Not much to be don about it, just another reminder that everything is temporary and to try not to take the joys that we currently have for granted… and to cherish those golden memories of course …

 

Thanks Mum and Dad J

One Reason Why We All Behave Badly

Ive been thinking about all the selfish behavior we humans are prone to and all the ills that are caused therefrom… Actually, its more or less been a recurrent theme for my thinking for many years and I expect that’s the same for many other people too. I should probably note also that I frequently demonstrate the “bad” traits of human nature myself, and not infrequently to an exemplary level.  ...Bummer!

So as usual, Im really trying to get a better understanding of myself as well as the larger view of our species as a whole. And the state of my current thinking goes something like this:

I believe that no matter what you do or how long you wait or how much carful childrearing and social conditioning that you do, that the “bad” traits in humans will persist… And I expect many of you probably agree with that thought, but I also have some semblance of a “rational” reasoning to go with that statement which I feel like sharing :)  (not that that means that the reasoning is correct at all… I could be completely wrong!)

Anyway, my logic goes something like this:

The concept of “bad” is effectively asocial one. It’s essentially behaviors of an individual that are counter to the desired behaviors of the society that the individual is interacting with. So “bad” really means the individual is acting against the society… And I think we would all agree that individual and social objectives are often in conflict… And conversely, “good” behavior is also only valid when individual and social agendas are in conflict but in these cases the individual chooses to align with the social agenda instead of the individual one… And for the most part we don’t even notice when social and individual agendas are neatly aligned. J

Now I think its easy enough to see how individual oriented behavior is often good from an evolutionary point of view… survival of the fittest… If you have something I and Im stronger/smarter than you then I just take it and when the going gets tough, I survive and you don’t and thus nature selects the strongest genes (with the most desirable behavioral preferences) for the future.

And I think we can also all see that these purely selfish behaviors get modified for the purposes of reproductive success since we have evolved a sexual reproductive strategy (rather than an asexual one), and if we were all completely selfish then our species would long ago have come to a pretty swift and boring conclusion! J… And from there we can see that family units banding together in many situations again have a distinct advantage over the individual and the single family unit and so again we can see how evolutionary processes would favour the development of social behaviors at the genetic level. There are of course many genetically inherited social traits, the most obvious of which is probably our language skills that other animals just don't have. Note, even for many “solo” predators in nature that operate almost entirely as “individuals” there is usually a certain level of social behavior whereby they don’t just end up killing each other at the first encounter… species survival is better that way J

But the question is, with humans being so well adapted to “acquire” any social behavior that benefits survival through our amazing ability to learn, Why does the selfish behavior persist, when it might seem there are so many more advantages to operating as a fully constructive social system (instead of the only somewhat constructive social system that we have currently achieved)?... “Logically”, we would always get the best information available and let the most qualified people decide what was best for the group based on that information… We could easily create “decision processes” that would run our entire society to achieve whatever we deemed as the most desirable outcome. We would achieve immense technological and social heights in very short periods of time… Honestly, “progress” would be so fast it would be mind blowing…

But of course we would have completely sacrificed the “individual” and likely become something of “hive mind”… but isn’t that evolutionary success? Isnt that exactly what our genes want to achieve??

And I think it is yes, but I think it is also a self-defeating outcome!

I think that complete success as described above actually weakens the gene pool of the species… One aspect of (and perhaps the most important one) the human species success story is our ability to acquire new beneficial behaviors. But we have at least three ways of acquiring our behaviors.
 

First option is the original… genetic… we innately have responses passed down to us from our parents through our DNA… These are our instincts and the reason we still have them is that they work very well and they keep us alive in situations that we have not had the chance to “learn” about from our social group… And as you would thus expect, most of these behaviors are most clearly demonstrated when we are very young and have not yet “learned” much.

The second option is thus “learning” and this form pretty much overwrites all of our innate behaviors after we are only a few years old… We still have innate desires (like im hungry or Im lonely) but the behaviors we employ to address those desires are all learned from the other people we are around (ie whether we use out fingers or chopsticks or knives and forks etc, and whether we find the food, buy it, steal it. or ask someone for it etc… all learned behaviors). And this is where we get the vast majority of our behaviors from.

But the third option is the one that is absolutely critical and without it we would not be the evolutionary juggernaut that we seem to be… It’s the ability to “Invent” totally new and innovative behaviors (behaviors being just one sub-class of things that humans invent) from our imagination… without precedent in our experiences!

And the thing about “creativity” is that its necessarily “random” in nature (and by random I mean that you cant limit it to certain areas, It is a "general" ability) … If it wasn’t random then it wouldn’t be creative. The only thing that defines weather these occasional or frequent “invented behaviors” become entrenched in the individual and from there in the society is whether or not the new behavior is beneficial… And there is the rub!

It is the individual’s survival within the society that defines the “individual benefit” of the behavior, and it is the society’s survival that defines the “social benefit”… And the two can clearly be in direct conflict.

So, the ”natural” process is for a pretty much constant stream of invented behaviors to be being generated by people (both outright new behaviors as well as old ideas being reinvented again or simply re-tried again). And its up to the “selective environment” to determine which of these new behaviors (if any) get to “persist”.

So, in short, there will always be people who will be “trying out” new behaviors… No matter how much we “purge" so called “bad” behaviors from our societies; Even if we started with a clean slate of absolutely socially compliant individuals, there will always be a new batch of social lairs, cheats and thieves coming along to corrupt the social structure.

And those anti-social behaviors will always persist to the level that the society tolerates… It is societies constant task to weed-out (by whatever means it chooses) the new “bad” behaviors. And in fact, I believe there will always be quite a high level of lying, cheating, and stealing in human societies… And thats because the more socially compliant the society becomes (ie the less bad people there are) then the more opportunities there are for the few non-socially compliant individuals to thrive!  Its kind of like saying the ability to detect “bad” people is only developed by having “bad” people about… and the more there are of them, then the easier they are to detect and eliminate (well the behaviors at least)… But we are very clever creatures and we are always finding ways of out-smarting each other… so it becomes and indeed verifiably is something of an “arms race”.

So, what does that mean from an individual’s perspective within the society (as we all are). Well, in simple terms it means that if you want “bad” behaviors in society to stop then you must be active in supressing them because if you are not then they will spread and persist. The detection and suppression methods are of course defined by the society its self (and hypocrisy here is absolutely ineffective since it encourages other bad behaviors instead J… It all rather sounds like the state of the societies that we currently have to me… Its enough to make all those social revolutionaries who like to believe that any real “worker” would never deliberately take advantage of another real “worker” roll in their graves…. Bollocks! I say… We absolutely will take advantage if we can because it is our genetic birth-right… The right of “creativity”… unbridled, ,undirectable creativity! It comes down to our decision over individual vs social gain and we all get to make that decision hundreds of times each day... I know for a fact in myself that the individual choice often wins out over the social choice :) 

 And it means that the task of “suppressing” is an endless one…

There never will be a perfect society… Not even close!

… But that’s not to say that the “balance of power” in that arms race is forever locked where it currently is… On the contrary, it’s a very dynamic balance and one that can swing through very large ranges as history clearly shows. And I fully believe that we can do a lot better than we are currently doing (and social equity is a major player in the swinging of that pendulum).

Im not sure what others will make of this “argument” and Im sure there are plenty of holes in it from others perspectives, but for me this line of thinking helps me to understand at least one reason why we are the way we are and why there never will and never should be that mythical “perfect society” (in either the completely social or completely individual directions).

Back to riding my bike through Africa J

 

Mr Spots

I rode on from Vic Falls and made a stop at another Hwange Game Park. Its Zimbabwe’s largest and will probably be the last game park that Ill stop at for a while.

I had the usual problem of not being allowed into the park with my bike so I left it at a lodge just outside the park and hitched a ride into the main camp inside the park…

 

And then I had the problem of there being virtually no other people I could hook-up with to go see the game… I was really hoping to see some wild dogs here since they are very rare and this is a good place to see them. In the end I paid for my own private drive and though I didn’t see the dogs, I was very lucky to get a good view of a leopard as he casually strolled across the road … and regarded me and my guide with disdain before he disappeared into the long grass J

 

Later that night, I was camped all alone in the park camping area. All was peaceful till about 2am when I was woken up by a couple of baboons messing around in a rubbish bin near my tent… I was initially a bit concerned as baboons have a really nasty set of teeth and can be quite dangerous but in this case it was just a couple of them and they seemed to not be interested in me at all (I had been very careful to not have any food stored with me in the camping area).

So, I drifted off back to sleep but was awoken by something again about two hours later. I opened my eyes to the sight of a very clear moonlight silhouette of a big Hyena standing just outside of the tent looking at me … well, he was looking at the tent really but it felt like he was looking right at me J   I was quite startled and then somewhat alarmed… I stayed still and waited to see what would happen next… He sniffed a few times and then moved along the side of the tent and  started to poke his head under the entry flap of the tent… So I made a Sssst! Noise and that startled him off a few meters. But he came back sniffing a couple of seconds later. I decided that was enough and that I should “prepare for action” so I sat up , located my flashlight and a boot and stuck my head out the tent flap. There were two of them and after a couple more sniffs and me giving them some vocal discouragement, they gambolled off about 20m and regarded me with their glowing eyes in the flashlight beam. Then they seemed to take the hint and moved on. Of course, me not being a local, Im not sure how dangerous the local animals are but it seems that Hyenas are quite wary of humans (well at least grown up ones) … and that’s fine with me.

Next morning I packed up camp as usual and hitched my way back to the bike and rode on… Didn’t see any Wild Dogs though… Bit of a shame but I guess it gives me something to do if Im ever back this way J

 

The Smoke That Thunders

That’s the translation from a local language to English for Victoria Falls… Its my first stopping point in Zimbabwe.

Ive ridden further East and am now in Zimbabwe… again, the border formalities were very straight forward though this was the first time Ive had to use the carne’ for my motorbike (which is fine by me since Ide be very disappointed to have gone to all the time and trouble to get the thing and then not use it!)

Anyway, not too much seems different to me here yet, and everything is still quite expensive. The people seem friendly as usual though there do seem to be less people around with white skin… The population seems to be well over 90% Africans.

My first stopping point here is the Tourist hot-spot of Victoria Falls so I went in expecting the usual intensity of a tourist resort and was not disappointed J I would have liked to go for a short trip over to the Zambian side of the falls to the town of Livingston to compare but unfortunately ever since the Prime Minister of Canada said some less than flattering things about the President of Zimbabwe, there has been a heavy visa fee for Canadians in Zimbabwe… And I just don’t feel like throwing away $75 for a quick visit across the border… Oh well Ill just view the falls from the one side…

… And therein we have a minor issue. That is because its high water season here at the moment. And in high water season there is just so much water going over the falls that a pretty much impenetrable wall of spray and mist masks most of the falls from view… Unperturbed, I went to have a look… yep Its true…. After a thorough drenching and a walk of the full1Km of falls frontage I didn’t really see that much… But it was well worth doing anyway J

 

 

But I thought I might try to see a little more of the Falls from the air (a short helicopter flight didn’t cost too much and I definitely recommend it if its high water season…. Couple of pictures:

Pesky Pachyderms

 

From my very limited perspective, it seems that Botswana is pretty much saturated with Elephants!
On all the roads that I have traveled (which is only here in the North of the country and is only about 1500Km) I can say that barely a Km has gone by that I have not seen elephant dung on the road.

And pretty much all of the bush land that Ive driven through has shown lots of signs of heavy and persistent elephant grazing... All the bushes of certain types are reduced to about 2m high "posts" covered in a layer of leaves because the elephants constantly prune off the new growth.

 

And of course there have been plenty of "Drive-bys" of the beasts on the sides of the highway and Ive had to wait a few times while one or more cross the road in front of me... Cars and trucks can be less circumspect than I because they are significantly bigger and the elephants will move aside for them. But Im too small and they seem to like to "assert" themselves with me so I give them a wide berth :)

Briefly in Botswana

I decided that I wanted to see a little more of Botswana so I spent a day and drove South to a town called Maun… It’s the “gateway” to the West side of the Okavango delta and the associated Moremi National Park.

It’s a bit of an odd sprawled out town with no real centre but I found a cheap backpackers on the outskirts (the good thing about having my own transport is that I can look around for places to stay without the difficulties that people traveling on public transport have) and got myself settled in.

The firxt thing that you notice about Botswana when you are coming in from Namibia is that things are quite a bit more expensive… and tourist activities in Maun are probably the peak of the difference… Its all set up for “high-end” lodge stays deep within the delta region. That means fly-in stay a few days, do a few walks and canoe trips and fly out… But I don’t really have the money to spend on extended stays in luxury accommodation here ( Ive got a long way to go and not that much money to get me there). So, I looked into the options and decided Id go for a day trip in Moremi park and for a late afternoon flight over the delta to see what was there.

I had the usual challenge tho of being an individual traveler and I needed to wait for groups to form so I could tag-along on commercial trips… The flight took a day and the “game drive” took a couple more.

The flight was good and I got to see what I wanted. There was lots of game visible from the air and the pilot flew quite low too but air craft plexiglass is not that great for photography so I focussed on the experience of it rather than pictures… In the end, I thought the experience was worth the expense and Im glad I did it…

A few crappy pictures to give a bit of an idea…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The day trip in the park eventually came together and much like the previous drive in Etosha, it started out being very very quiet as far as animals were concerned, but in the last half hour or so there were a pride of lions to watch and even a bit of a “chase” between the lions and a couple of Giraffe, so again I was happy with the experience.

Lion thinking "mmm Rump Steak"!