The Wheels on the Bus…

do, in fact, go round and round, but here in Australia they do it so often and over what turns out to be not great roads that traveling by Greyhound is worse than singing repetitive children’s songs.

Whew.  Sorry. Past two days I’ve done 17 hours of bus travel, most of it overnight, and I’m barely half-way up the coast!  This country is huge.  I am now in Mackay (Mack-AYE. like a pirate).  I was in Agnes Water and the town of 1770 yesterday (named after the year Captain Cooke landed there – the first place in Queensland, maybe the entire east coast. I’m not sure).  Tiny towns – no more than 100 people each.

They are just on the southern tip of the Barrier Reef, and most of the tourism has stayed far to the north (where I’m heading to eventually).   The area has actually had some extremely good luck in terms of its preservation, but that could all change as the cities grow (and they are at an alarming rate) and put pressure on the near by resources (the local Park Service representatives says that the biggest threat they have is population pressure.  and the towns have less than a 1000 people!)  One, the reef in this area is far enough south that the temperature hasn’t risen significantly. and there has been less coral bleaching.  Then, it’s farther from the coast, so tourism has been slower to develop.  There isn’t as much agriculture in the area, so that isn’t a big problem.  Basically, these two hamlets (I always wanted to use that word) are perfectly situated to have a sustainable tourism industry here.  The Reef Authority has done a pretty good job in not allowing many business to pop up (permitting is hard to come by).

But, then again, the problems might just be too global for anything local to affect it.  I got to talk with a wonderful couple who just bought a tour operator eight months ago and has been doing snorkeling and dive trips out to a reef nearby.  They are one of the few tourism operators (granted, I haven’t seen many) that has a really strong commitment to educating their clients about environmental sustainability -they were great.  She’s from Melbourne, he’s from Germany, and they met at the University of Minnesota, where they were both studying agriculture.  Eventually, they got into a debate about the extent of the damage to the reef, and it got way too technical and scientific for me to understand.  But fun to listen to.

Anyway, it’s looking like the first cloudy day I’ve had all week and I have some sights to see before I get back on my bus (ugh. more greyhounds.  We at least watched Independence Day last night.  So much less scary than when I saw it as a kid.

Which reminds me of another movie I watched recently – the International.  It has some lessons I could relate to my project, but it’s also Clive Owen kicking butt in the Guggenheim.  Very fun movie.  Anyway, there were two kind of themes in the movie that stood out to me.  For one, the bad guy asks his son how you escape an inescapable situation – the kid deliberates, and then says, if there’s no way out, you have to find a deeper way in.  Basically, stay the course, or put even more effort into your chosen path.  Clive Owen on the other hand, is trying to catch said bad guy, but always gets stopped by the corruption and the influence of the bad guys organization (even into the police and everything).  So his wise mentor (this time, a typically old gentleman) says that, if the system has failed, you have to go outside the system.  Basically, he’s encouraging Clive (an Interpol agent) to become a vigilante and take justice into his own hands.

All in all, the two ideas are very very different, and I thought it was extremely interesting to see them both played out in the movie.  It’s Hollywood, so I think you know what happens in the end, which for my little microcosm, means maybe I’ve been wrong all this time to insist that people don’t give up on national parks – maybe we should just scrap the whole thing and create a new system.  If it works for Clive, it should work for me.

But, this isn’t Hollywood, so I don’t think that would work, as nice as it would be.  In Chile, a big opponent to creating a new Ministry of the Environment (a good thing) is the current managers of the Park, the forest service!  so it’s more complicated than that.

But, if it was Hollywood, I’d let Clive Owen play me in a heartbeat.  I think we share a certain rugged, unshaven quality that’d make him perfect for the part.