Cosmopolitan Green Ecology (CGE) by The Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

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Global Warming, Cosmopolitan Green

Architecture (CGA) and Cosmopolitan
Green Ecology (CGE)
©2018 Dr Romesh Senewiratne-Alagaratnam
I have developed a comprehensive solution to the problem of global warming and harmful climate
change. It is called Cosmopolitan Green Ecology (CGE). CGE includes Cosmopolitan Green
Architecture (CGA) and Cosmopolitan Green Agriculture (CGAg). This integrated architectural and
agricultural program has been developed at the Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB) which serves as
a site for research, experimentation and analysis in Moorooka, a suburb of Brisbane on the east
coast of Australia.
Australia does not have a good environmental record and Australian universities and research
establishments such as the CSIRO have contributed to the problem. They have been focused on
biological and chemical means to rid the continent of “pests” and “noxious weeds”, which were
previously introduced by the British colonists for “sport” (shooting) and to make their gardens look
more British. This included lawns, the size and upkeep of which were a source of pride and status in
society. Maintaining impressive lawns required motorised lawnmowers (when these became
available) and gardeners. Golf courses, tennis courts and cricket pitches had prized turfs and horses
and dogs raced around the grass tracks for rich and poor men to bet on and the Mafia and Masons
Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)
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to profiteer from. This is the culture that successive governments and universities have supported,
not just in Australia but also in the USA, Britain, Canada and New Zealand.
In terms of agriculture and irrigation, the British and Australian governments have been staunch
supporters of monocrop agriculture, notably that of wheat, and the building of dams and river
diversion schemes to provide water for the growing of wheat and other monocrops and the mining
industry. The paradigm by local and state governments has been to spray poisons – insecticides and
‘weedicides’ - for a variety of poorly considered reasons. This paradigm has gone relatively
unchallenged, though there is widespread concern about drought, salination and degradation of
soils, deforestation and loss of biodiversity and threats to the health of the Great Barrier Reef.
The paradigm of the governments in Australia – municipal, state and federal – has been focused on
what they call “water conservation”. The slogan on the TV when I was growing up in the 1970s was
“every drop counts”. People in the cities on the east and south coasts, where there was not usually a
shortage of water, were discouraged from wasting water – or from developing irrigation systems
other than sprinkler systems, which were later banned except for government-supported
institutions. People were encouraged to grow drought-resistant native plants rather than tropical
plants, especially those from Asia. There were laws against long grass and bamboo, on the premise
that they “harboured vermin” in the case of flowering grasses and because they “spread” to the
neighbourhood in the case of bamboo. There are also laws in Australia against the use of bamboo in
construction.
I have been reading a short article in the University of Queensland alumnus magazine Contact on
global warming and climate change. It is authored by Linda Selvey, who is an associate professor at
the UQ School of Public Health. She is described as an “infectious disease researcher” and “public
health physician”. Linda is a medical batch-mate of mine, and I have known her since 1980 when she
entered my year. I did not know her well when we studied together, but met up with her again in
2002 after I returned to Brisbane from Melbourne after being locked up several times for my claim
that I had evidence in support of the serious allegation that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV)
was a genetically-engineered virus that was unleashed on the so-called ‘Third World’ in response to
concern about ‘overpopulation’. I finished a 600-paged thesis titled Eugenics and Genocide in the
Modern World: the Cause of the AIDS Epidemic? in 2001 and discussed my research with several of
my medical friends including Linda. She was not convinced by my arguments and has not yet
responded to the copy of my thesis that I sent her a couple of months ago on Linkedin, where she is
one of my connections. With her interest in infectious diseases I had hoped that she would respond
sooner.
Linda is concerned about global warming. She claims that:
“We are now, of our own making, experiencing a destabilisation of our climate, with global
average temperatures 1° higher than pre-industrial levels. This is accompanied by increased
climate extremes – including extended heatwaves, floods, storms and droughts and wildfires
– while rising sea levels are already threatening the homelands of some Pacific Island nations
and some Torres Strait Islanders.”

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Linda claims that a heat wave in Russia in 2010, which she cites as an example of the catastrophe of
global warming, claimed 56,000 lives. I am sceptical to say the least about this claim and the claim
that a 1 degree rise in global temperature since the pre-industrial age is significant or reliable.
Accurate measurements were not made and recorded in the pre-industrial age, so where is she
getting her figures? If it’s hot, one can always take some clothes off, grow shade trees and keep the
windows open to ventilate the house with natural breeze. This is what is done at HUB 76.
Basic science and rudimentary understanding of the water cycle indicates that if it is warmer on
average it will be also wetter (due to more evaporation). This is what has long been termed the
‘greenhouse effect”. Plants grow well in greenhouses because they are warm and humid. These
plants absorb carbon-dioxide and replace it with oxygen, regulating the strength of the greenhouse
effect (and cooling the atmosphere and planet). It is possible to augment this natural regulatory
effect on climate by planting and watering the full range of useful plant species. And there are many
to choose from, that have been valued and cultivated by people around the world for millennia.
Linda has written about the “millennial drought” as causing high prices for vegetables in Australia.
There has been worsening drought for 200 years in Australia due to the water management policies
and the activities of the agricultural, pastoral, timber, chemical and mining industries since Australia
was first invaded by Captain Cook and his soldiers and settled by Britain as a series of prison colonies
and later free states within the British Commonwealth. Captain Patrick Logan, the unpopular first
commandant of the Moreton Bay Colony offered a silver shilling for every acre of land “cleared”.
What it was cleared of was forest, both Sclerophyll Forest and Rainforest. The states were only
federated as ‘Australia’ in 1901, when the city of Canberra was built between the rival cities of
Sydney in New South Wales and Melbourne, the capital of the State of Victoria. Both Queensland
and Victoria were originally parts of the state of New South Wales but they achieved the status of
separate colonies in the 1850s under a young Queen Victoria, who insisted that the new colonies be
named after her (some Queenslanders favoured the name Cooksland).
The myth was promoted in the White media and institutions, including the universities, that the east
coast of Australia had been sparsely populated before “settlement” (invasion) but this was not the
case. The fertile east coast forests and coastal areas of Australia have natural resources that were
used in a sustainable way by thousands of Aboriginal people for tens of thousands of years. Brisbane
was called Meanjin and the area that is now occupied by the suburbs of Moorooka, Yeronga and
Tarragindi (and others with Western names) were home to the Yuggera (or Jaggera) people. It is
from these hard-working people that the Australian word “hard yakka” (hard work) originates.
The Original Ecology of Brisbane
Brisbane was selected by Governor Thomas Brisbane as a good spot to move the prison colony the
British had established on the coast at Redcliffe. The prison buildings were ‘donated’ to the
Aboriginal people of the area who refused to go in them calling them “humpy bong” – dead houses.
An interesting historical journal from the 1870s refers to “wild” and “tame” Blacks. The tame Blacks
were employed by the White men to police the wild ones and drive them out of the expanding

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pastoral and agricultural areas. Resistance by the Aboriginal people was punished by death, inflicted
in numerous cruel ways. Elsewhere in Australia flour was laced with strychnine and waterholes were
poisoned. If you drive west from Melbourne to Adelaide along Australia’s southern coast you pass
Massacre Swamp, Massacre Cliff and Massacre Lagoon. In Queensland such macabre but revealing
names were never made official. The fact that there are next to no Yuggera people in Moorooka is a
testimony to what was done to our original people.
The first Englishman to discover the mouth of the Brisbane river and lead the British colonial
explorers and government to what became Brisbane was an ex-convict by the name of Thomas
Pamphlett. Pamphlett was shipwrecked with 3 other men who had sailed from Botany Bay in search
of timber. They had intended sailing south to Tasmania and did not realise that they had been blown
far to the north.
The Aboriginal people looked after Pamphlett and his friends, who soon fell out among themselves
(one died before reaching shore and the others lived with different groups of Aboriginal people). A
year later, Pamphlett was “rescued” by John Oxley and crew, only to be jailed again for further
crimes. He had, however, learned the source of the river that opened into Moreton Bay, which had
been named by Captain Cook almost fifty years earlier. Captain Cook also named “Mount Warning”,
once the biggest shield volcano in the world, and venerated by the Aboriginal people as
‘Woollumbin’. Mount Warning is now in northern New South Wales, but its geological history has
relevance to the fascinating geology and ecology of Toohey Forest.
Toohey Mountain is named after James Toohey an Irish migrant who made his fortune in the
California Gold Rush. Toohey selected the lands in 1972 and his family owned it until it was bought
gradually after the war by the Brisbane City Council. The south-western end of Toohey Forest was
owned by a different Irish family that did well in the new colony. This was the Mayne Family,
descended from Brisbane’s original butcher, and major benefactors to the University of Queensland
and the Herston Medical School at which I studied in the early 1980s. The property at 76 Fegen Drive
(HUB 76) and the surrounding area was owned by the Pegg Family, who had a homestead called
‘Mayfield’ in what is now the plusher end of Moorooka. Homestead Road, Pegg’s Park and Pegg’s
Lookout are historical reminders of the Pegg Family’s influence in Moorooka.

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The mountain is the remnant of a range that was thrust up from the sea floor 380 million years ago.
Orange and red sandstone boulders that can be seen along the Main Ridge Track are remnants of
the ocean floor, when the eastern coastline was far to the west. The main rock type is quartzite in
folding bands but there is also sandstone, conglomerates and a range of other rock types. The forest
has a small creek on its northern aspect but south of Toohey Road (the south-western quarter) there
is no running water, though a pipe has been laid on Main Ridge Track for people and dogs to drink
when they walk along the track through degraded sclerophyll forest. The biggest trees were felled
long ago, and any creeks that ran off the mountain have dried up, while the mountain itself was
quarried.
Woollumbin (Mount Warning) shaped the geology of south-eastern Queensland and northern
coastal New South Wales. The rim of the huge volcano has eroded since its last eruption 30 million
years ago to create spectacular rainforests and waterfalls over cliffs of rhyolite. The volcano’s
remnants reach as far north as Mount Tambourine, and do not extend to Brisbane (and Toohey
Forest) however their ecology is related in terms of fauna and flora. Brisbane also had riverine
rainforest and a few rainforest species survive in gullies in Toohey Forest. These could be augmented
by establishing a permanent outlet for fresh water on the southern side of the forest, where there is
presently a disused and littered quarry, and a valuable frog-breeding site that the Brisbane City
Council has finally made some efforts to conserve. The efforts are inadequate, to say the least, but it
shows that there is concern about the frog habitat and the need to preserve it – and nurture it.

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South-western entrance to Toohey Forest. This track was completed around 2002.
Steps lead up the mountain to Pegg’s Lookout, which has recently (2015) had a protective fence
erected. There is also a park bench. There are views over the industrial estate of Salisbury with the
Archerfield Airport with the Teviot Mountain Range (including Mt Flinders) in the distance. On clear
days you can also see Cunningham’s Gap, that leads from the east coast to the inland Darling Downs
agricultural area.

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There are two tracks leading from Pegg’s Lookout. The main one is the beginning of the Main Ridge
Track which leads along the main ridge of Toohey Mountain, or what is left of it after it was mined. A
few hundred metres along Main Ridge Track is a track on the right leading down to the old quarry.
This quarry was in use before and during the Second World War and has interesting geology. It was
also used as a rifle range and all the wallabies in the forest were shot long ago. The biggest trees
were felled and others have been the victim of bushfires. The quarry has enormous potential for
development as an ecological asset, tourist magnet and prototype for a Cosmopolitan Green Ecology
(CGE) frog-breeding project. It may also serve as a prototype for a system to prevent future flood in
Brisbane, as I will explain.
Brisbane is built on the bend of the Brisbane River on a flood plain. There have been several major
floods, the last in 2012, when delay in releasing water from the over-full Wivenhoe Dam resulted in
the flood (which had been warned about by the Wivenhoe engineers). The Brisbane River has been
polluted over the years and there are few fish in it unlike 200 years ago. Judiciously running water
from forested areas into the creeks that feed the river will help unblock the drains and pipes and
also clean the river. This project needs to be done with care and according to sound ecological and
environmental principles, focused on a minimum of poisons and maximum of native biodiversity.
The HUB Ecological Plan for Toohey Forest could serve as a model for future environmental
developments aimed towards greening Australia and mitigating against future floods by establishing
a network of channels to divert floodwaters though regenerated forest and bushland. This will also
allow a recovery of Brisbane’s original Riverine Rainforest, which is currently under threat.

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View from the northern end of the quarry, where the water flows in a short-lasting waterfall after
heavy rain. The water drains downhill and pools in the southern end of the quarry, though some also
flows into the gully leading down to the industrial area. I have been observing the quarry for 10
years, since I have been living in Moorooka. One thing that I noticed 10 years ago was an overseas
shipping container in the quarry, which was removed about 8 years ago. There is also a mimosa
species common in Asia (shy weed) which grows along the unsealed road that leads up to the quarry.
I have never seen vehicles and the road is closed to the public, however there are small piles of
rubble as well as broken bitumen removed from roads. This is presumably to surface the tracks.
The area where the water pours into the quarry after the rain is littered with sharp rusted pieces of
metal which have been there for the past 10 years. They are a danger to health and it is surprising
that the BCC has not made an effort to remove them and clean up the area. It is a sign of the neglect
that the southern end of Toohey Forest has suffered.

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Rusted steel refuse that has been at the “waterfall” for 10 years.

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This cliff has a short-lived waterfall after the rain. This could be made permanent by running water
constantly from the tap at the top of the hill (on Main Ridge Track). It would be a scenic and tourist
attraction and if the water is managed well could be a haven for kingfishers and other birds. If a
series of frog-breeding ponds is established it could be a prototype for conservation efforts and
counter threats to biodiversity.

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The Brisbane City Council’s unsuccessful frog-breeding program

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There known to be at least 6 species on native frog in Toohey Forest. Several frog species were
successfully bred at the HUB 76 frog-breeding project in 2013 and 2015.

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The deepened pond is already almost dry. There are a few tadpoles in it, no vegetation and lots of
bees enjoying the moisture.
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Cosmopolitan Green Ecology (CGE)
The HUB Ecological Project
CGA in 2015
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SM4jPtTGU4g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo_8i44Jyfg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=crK1WKnogPM
The HUB Ecological Project is based on the principles of sustainability and promoting biodiversity. It
includes Dr Romesh’s Bird Sanctuary, the HUB Frog-Breeding Project and the HUB Mini-Zoological
Gardens as well as the Cosmopolitan Green Architecture (CGA) and HUB Irrigation Project. The
ecological project completely disavows pesticides and other poisons and aims to produce a pure,
harmonious environment with clean, fresh air and gently flowing water running through a series of
picturesque ponds in which the several species of frog endemic to the area can breed all year round.
Rather than lawn, the project has allowed the garden to grow wild and free, with introduced species
as well as indigenous Australian species of plant for both canopy and shade, as bird, bee and
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butterfly-attracting plants and for their aesthetic value. The trees that were already on the property,
which are of both native and introduced species have been allowed to grow without artificial
fertilization. They are all very healthy and provide a playground and hunting ground for several
species of bird and lizard.
It is our firm belief that seeing plants and greenery is good for the health. Growing a variety of plants
is good for the health, as well as health of the planet. Many plants are good for the health when
consumed and these can be planted in the garden using cosmopolitan and utilitarian principles.

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This house was built around 1943 by American soldiers during the Second World War, when
Brisbane served as a command centre for the Pacific War. Much of the suburb of Moorooka,
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including the site of HUB and the HUN HQ, were rented to the US military, and many worker’s
cottages were built out of asbestos, with asbestos walls, ceiling and roof. It is not that they did not
know that asbestos fibres cause lung fibrosis and cancer – this had been known since the 1920s.
However, asbestos is cheap, strong and fire-resistant. Intact asbestos sheets are not dangerous –
only the broken fibres. Most of the asbestos houses and roofs have been replaced by fibro or brick in
Moorooka, and this includes almost all the houses in Fegen Drive, on which HUB 76 is located. This is
a winding road that connects Beaudesert Road with Mayfield Road, which leads from Pegg’s Park to
the Moorvale Shopping Centre. Fegen Drive was named posthumously after an Irish ship’s captain
who went down with his ship in the Atlantic in 1942 by the name of Edward Stephen Fogarty Fegen.
Fegen was awarded the Victorian Cross for bravery by King George the Sixth, the father of the
current Queen Elizabeth the Second. Fegen’s sacrifice for the British Empire prompted the Prime
Minister and former War Minister, Winston Churchill to declare on one of his radio broadcasts that
Captain Fegen’s sacrifice showed that the Irish were not that bad after all. Churchill was a very racist
man and was a staunch White-supremacist, racist and promoter of eugenics. He was also a powerful
Freemason, as was King George VI himself.
This bit of history provides some background to understand the peace-making, harmony-creating,
life-creating and green initiatives of the Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB) and the Holistic
University Network (HUN).
HUB 76 after the garden and landscaping were destroyed in 2015:

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This is what was destroyed in October 2015. Numerous trees and shrubs were removed (and
presumably sold) – some were in full flower, and included Grevilleas, Wattles, a Gum Tree, several
Pine Trees and Frangipani Trees, a Banyan Tree and the large Philadendon on the Royal Poinciana
Tree in the front. The fern garden and rock garden were destroyed and the tap sealed.

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This gum tree (Eucalyptus) was chopped down by my father’s workmen in 2015, when the garden
and landscaping I had done was bulldozed. The house was also emptied of my possessions and I was

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locked up as a mental patient at the Princess Alexandra Hospital. The accusation was that I was
“flooding my yard” and “building trenches” in my garden!

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Dr Romesh’s Bird Sanctuary
Scaly-breasted Lorikeets (Trichoglossus chlorolepidotus)

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Black-headed Manorina (Manorina melanocephala) also known as “Noisy Miners”
Brush or Scrub ‘Turkeys’ are not really turkeys but belong to the family of Megalopodians (“big feet”)
with of the Alectura genus. This species in Alectura lathami. The genus is also found in New Guinea.
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Torresian Crows are very intelligent birds, like all crow family. The species name is Corvus orru, race
ceceliae. There are two races in Australia. Corvus orru orru I(found in the Cape York pensinsula of
northern Queensland and Corvus orru ceceliae found in the rest of Queensland as well the Nothern
Territory and Western Australia. Crows can be distinguished from ravens by white on the downy
proximal end of their feathers (the ‘afterfeather” as opposed to the vane).

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Rainbow Lorikeet adult and juvenile (Trichoglossus haematodus moluccanus)
Pied Currawong (Srtrepera graculina)

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Crested Pigeons (Ocyphaps lophotes)
Laughing Kookaburra (Dacelo novaeguinea)

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Scrub Turkey chick
Blue-faced Honeyeater (Entomyzon cyanotis)

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Cosmopolitan Green Ecology (CGE) by The Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

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Global Warming, Cosmopolitan Green

Linda is concerned about global warming. She claims that:

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

The Original Ecology of Brisbane

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

The Brisbane City Council’s unsuccessful frog-breeding program

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)

Holistic University of Brisbane (HUB)