Justin Murphy: These we must try to protect and preserve for two reasons. Our ideas are that we must, we have to be, to an extent, slaves to the twentieth-century civilization, or what we call the nowhere civilization. In other words, our function stops or is frustrated if a government won't give us money to continue our work and our research. So in other words, we have to direct a large part of our research towards people and making life and opportunities better for people. We can't, however, do that—we can't improve agricultural production, we can't improve forests, we can't improve recreational opportunities in the forest lands around cities—if we don't consider sympathetically, thoughtfully, and scientifically the natural resources of Australia. So it's interesting that you mentioned to begin with in the evolution, say of the evolutionary cycle in Australia, you mentioned the aborigines. The aborigines were in fact far better at maintaining and conserving the central Australian landscapes, the central Australian arid regions, than any Australian since European colonization.
The aborigines lived in almost perfect harmony with their environment for thirty thousand years, thirty to forty thousand recorded years—that's how far our research can take us back—whereas in a little over a hundred years, European man in Australia has done in places irreparable damage to not only the vegetation but also the soils of arid Australia. It's damage that will probably never, ever be repaired because the environment is so delicate in central Australia that as soon as our cloven-footed animals, our sheep and our cattle, for example, are brought into the arid areas, they eat, they trample, they remove vegetation. This loosens the soil; the soil is very thin. It's very unfertile, and it blows away. And virtually all you have left is rock. And nothing grows, of course, on rock. That's an over-simplification and perhaps an over-dramatization, but this has happened in Australia. It didn't happen when the aborigines lived here, undisturbed by us. It has happened since European man has come.
In Perth, in this city, around this city, since Europeans have come, we have removed forests, we've cut down trees, we've tilled the soil, we have changed the natural order of things, we have increased the amount of water from rain that flows through the soil. It's getting more and more salty. We are affecting our coastal wetlands, as we call them, the lagoons and the lakes and the marshes, so that they are becoming both more salty and more clogged with silt and soil and debris. Water birds can, in some areas, no longer live there. Fish are dying. A lot of migratory fish and crabs, for example, are no longer migrating to their traditional breeding grounds. So our work, our approach, is—and I have to stress that it is scientific and therefore it's long-term, and we're really a very young group here in western Australia—but our approach is to attempt first to understand what has happened, to understand what is happening, and then slowly to be able to suggest ways of improving or halting what is happening which is bad and putting forward ideas for what might happen which is good, which is good both for people...
We're stuck with that, we're stuck with our urban... Whether we like it or not, we're stuck with our urban civilization. We're stuck with our Western way of doing things, unfortunately. But, that being the case, we...
Prabhupāda: Did the aborigines...? They were growing their food, the aborigines?
Justin Murphy: Oh, no, no, no, no. The aborigines grew nothing really. They were nomadic. They were mostly meat-eaters and insect-eaters. There are... For example, one of the staples of the aborigines was a very thick and very fat grub called a witchity grub, which lived in the roots of certain low bushes, and they used to tear the bush over and these fat grubs would appear which would be eaten live and raw.
Prabhupāda: Without cooking.
