The Horizontal Falls are one of Australia’s strangest natural attractions, a unique blend of coastal geography and powerful tidal forces that visitors pay big money to see up close.
But all that is about to change.
Located at Talbot Bay, a remote spot on the country’s northwestern coastline, the falls are created when surges of seawater pour between two narrow cliff gaps, creating a swell of up to four meters that resembles a waterfall.
For decades, tours have pierced these gaps on powerful boats, much to the dismay of the area’s Indigenous Traditional Owners, who say the site is sacred.
It’s not the only reason the boat tours are controversial. In May 2022 one boat hit the rocks resulting in passenger injuries and triggering a major rescue operation. The incident led to calls to halt the tours for safety reasons.
Although the boat trips have continued, the concerns of the Indigenous Traditional Owners have now been heeded, with Western Australia, the state in which the falls are situated, saying they will be banned in 2028 out of respect.
Our Abrahamic concept of “religion” bundles together a lot of tendencies that aren’t necessarily linked, anthropologically. If we translate another culture’s relationship with some natural phenomenon as “sacred”, that doesn’t mean it has the same specifically religious connotations for them that the term would imply in our culture. And it doesn’t mean that our attitude toward religion should carry over to their relationship with their environment.
Does the relationship invoke supernatural forces driving the phenomena? Then it’s superstitious nonsense and has nothing to do with abrahamic religions other then them also invoking superstitious nonsense. Does someone own the land and want to keep people out for idiosyncratic reasons? Fine, rule of law says they get to control the land for whatever reasons they want. Is it public land? Then only safety concerns or preventing the degradation of a natural wonder should affect who can visit and for what purpose.
that’s the thing, we need to invoke superstitious nonsense to strong arm the colonial government into respecting the land they stole. do the elders believe it? who cares, get off my lawn.
Then petition to get it made a heritage site or something, get controls put in place to stop obnoxious and abusive use of it such as the reckless rafting trips such that the area isn’t been degraded for future generations, but if it’s open to anyone to enjoy it should be open to everyone to.
This isn’t public land
Not necessarily. And even if, that doesn’t mean that those supernatural forces are considered to be real in the same sense that some Christians might consider prayer to have a physical effect.
Somewhere in some Asiatic mountains don’t remember where there’s a tribe which practices slash-and-burn agriculture. Western visitors were worried, telling the tribe “we’ve heard of many tribes doing slash-and-burn, it depletes the earth over time, there’s other ways to do it”. The tribefolk said: “We’ve been doing this for at least a thousand years in this small area and never had a problem, look around you, things are lush, our harvests are plentiful”. They invited the westerners to look all over the place and see for themselves, but not enter some specific sacred place.
That sacred place? The whole reason why the scheme worked: It was left untouched, completely to itself, a refuge for nature, meaning that each time an area would be burned, it was very quickly re-populated from that very place. The site of the site didn’t really matter, all that mattered was that it’s there, and that it was taboo to disturb. Is it supernatural? You might say no, a Daoist might say yes – I got that story from a commentary seminar on the Dao De Jing, as an example of what the text meant with the “eternal feminine”. The physical representation might be physical, but without the supernatural principle, physics wouldn’t exist in the first place.
And we have these kinds of places here in the west, too. Though we generally let the appropriate kind of priests (ecologists or adjacent folks) enter it to commune with the spirits there.
Except you have a false equivalence, we don’t have sacred sites that are left undisturbed so as to keep the forest spirits happy and the scientists who go there are not communing with anything. Your parable of the sacred site functioning as an ecological reservoir doesn’t change the fact that the local people’s reason for leaving the area alone was wrong unless it was specifically understood that it was a reservoir for biodiversity and not some supernatural explaination involving spirits.
It was understood as the sacred source of life. People by and large aren’t stupid, just because not everything is coated in a veneer of materialist jargon doesn’t mean that interrelations aren’t understood. It’s a specifically western trait to be so adamant about that distinction, making it a hard delineation people don’t want to think across, want to keep separate, and that has something to do with the church retreating to matters of the spirit when science figured out how to explain the material world better than Aristotle. That left a deep scar in our collective psychology and frameworks that’s still not even remotely healed.
Consider psychosomatics: It’s a discipline all of its own only because people first decided to make a harsh distinction between psyche and body and analyse them independently of each other, the more reductive the better, while in truth it’s a deep interrelationship, so now we need a third thing to somehow connect them up again. The same is true about cultures and the places they live: In reality, there’s no boundary between the two, so you get ecology to somehow connect them up again. The difference between that tribe and us isn’t the level of understanding about what’s happening, but them not having had the hare-brained idea to see themselves apart from nature in the first place.
As to ecologists communing with spirits: If you talk to an animist, yes they very much are. Doesn’t matter what the scientists believe they’re doing, they’re still doing communing with spirits stuff. If you don’t think so then you’re using another idea of “spirit”, that’s all.
You insisting they are the same doesn’t make it so, an ecologist studying the effects of leaving an area fallow or untouched leads to greater understanding and allows optimisation and application to other areas. Believing the spirits reside in a particular grove does not allow the same and confers no greater understanding because the basis for the practice is incorrect even if the practice itself is sound. But sure, you tell yourself that they do to justify holding onto supernatural explaination despite the fact they have little corelation to reality.
Are you expecting that everyone looking at their fields come up with the whole backlog of western philosophy and science before you allow them to come up with conclusions that are in perfect alignment with their observations? Is it immoral to conclude “things fall down” without simultaneously explaining the movement of the planets?
Then, western science itself is not at all free from supernatural explanations: Because at the end of it, we don’t know everything, either. The tribe has an understanding of ecological interrelationship, but preciously little about chemistry and none about quantum physics, while we have preciously little justifications for choices such as disliking Boltzmann brains: Yes, that is a supernatural belief. “The universe dreaming itself, that’d be silly”.
So not just is your stance here hypocritical because science itself holds on to supernatural concepts at the edge of our understanding, it’s also arrogant as that kind of attitude makes you prone to ignore perfectly correct insight just because it’s expressed in a language you don’t like.
This is a bit more than just a language difference and shows just how little you really know or understand the differences between supernatural belief and scientific method.
Let’s take your example of the observation (not conclusion) that things fall down. Let’s say you have your conclusion that the spirits of the earth always pull things down for reasons. I have the conclusion that it’s because mass attracts mass due to gravity. Based on the one observation we have the same evidence supporting our theory’s so how do we tell them apart? Well if gravity is true we have all kinds of predicted phenomena that should also happen, it also explains why the sun and moon behave as they do. What does the spirits of the earth theory predict… nothing other than things fall down. It’s useless for being able to predict other phenomena, it wouldn’t even predict things would fall down on other planets as they might not have pull things down spirits and we might not even have asked why the spirits pull things down.
Also, it isn’t “western science” which again betrays some kind of nationalistic agenda on your part. It’s just science and anyone can do it, it doesnt belong to “western” countries.
As for “supernatural” explaination in western science, you act like every random hypothesis is taken seriously… They aren’t, they are picked apart for lack of predictive power, unless a hypothesis makes hard predictions of how the world would work if it were and weren’t true it’s pointless as it can’t be tested or used in any meaningful way. The “boltzman brain” you mention is just a thought experiment and isn’t even a serious scientific hypothesis. Scientists as a whole know and accept they don’t know everything, otherwise they wouldn’t be wasting time doing science would they?
It is you who hears the word “spirit” or “sacred” and goes straight for “those people can’t look at things in a scientific way”. Meanwhile, elsewhere, people engage in cargo-cult science, coating their magical thinking in technobabble. It’s not the language that makes the method.
True. Limited amount of experimental data only allows a limited theory and limited extrapolation. It’s not the amount of accumulated data that makes the method, either. You should be more worried if someone watched an apple fall and, with no further information such as centuries of observational data about the movement of planets, concludes “that is why the planets move that way”. It would be correct, but it would still be an unjustified leap.
Indeed, science doesn’t belong to the west which is precisely why I specified “western science”: You can do science without following the western (actually, European) course of first imposing the mind/body dualism etc. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you all the time. Insisting on that kind of delineation is a particularly western scientific mindset, not a neutral scientific one.
The Boltzmann brain is a heuristic: Every time statistics say that some theory would imply that the most likely reason for why we observe phenomena is that it’s all dreamt up by a Boltzmann brain physicists discount that theory. It is, thus, a negative hypothesis, but a hypothesis nontheless and indeed a very serious one. The reason physicists don’t like to investigate in those directions is because they think it’s unsatisfying. But that’s not a scientific measure. Similar things are valid for preferring beautiful over messy maths etc: There’s no reason why the fundamental maths of the universe should look beautiful to us as our sense of beauty evolved for completely different reasons.