Epiphany-like experience seemed somewhat prophetic

Suddenly, I was saddened that this is all going to slip away.

Melbourne's Swanston St in
 the midst of its redevelopment.

The epiphany-like experience engulfed me as I crossed Swanston St walking toward the Wheeler Centre for Books, Writing and Ideas.
It was not a longing for any specific thing, rather the perceived erosion of the cacophonous life and the overwhelming and embracing sense of community that existed as thousands went about their disparate affairs in a wonderful public, shared space.
The Melbourne experience was little more than what I frequently feel in Shepparton - a microcosm of bubbling life in which individual intents are different, but from which intuition discerns co-operation and collaboration.
Melbourne’s spacious inner-city streets, which some claim were the outcome of a misinterpretation of street plan dimensions, a refreshing error, have always had a welcoming and wonderful human-scale about them.
Central Melbourne is emerging from an epoch in which the motor car had almost uninhibited dominion of the streets with the pedestrian pushed to the fringes.
That, however, is changing and Swanston Street is being redeveloped to make it essentially car free and people will again prevail, although Melbourne’s wonderful trams will still course up and down the street.

Roy Neel

As I write the sounds of what could be a dying dinosaur reach my Ashenden St home from the Springcar Nationals at the city’s showgrounds as people engage in an activity, which I can understand, but within a few decades be something people will equate with the final deathly moans of the petroleum era.
The epiphany-like Swanston St experience and the Springnats appear at first glance to be unrelated, but they are not for the purpose of my visit to Melbourne was to hear the Adjunct Professor of Political Science from a Tennessee University and Al Gore chief of staff and former U.S. assistant secretary of state, Roy Neel, talk at the University of Melbourne about a just and sustainable post carbon economy.
Prof Neel gave optimistic and pessimistic views of how the world will unfold between now and 2050 and in either scenario pedestrians will still be in Swanston St, trams will be doubtful and nor will I, anyone else for that matter, be assaulted by the noise of events such as the Springnats.
The unanswered question, of course, will be: “What will the mood of the people be like?” after decades of living in an energy-depleted world with a desolate landscape troubled by massive weather events or living and surviving in a world that is understandable, but substantially changed from what exists.
That sounds, rather apocalyptic, but Neel’s pessimistic scenario was just that and although his optimistic scenario was somewhat better, it demanded understanding that civilization’s survival rested with co-operation and the embrace of the “other”.

Shepparton's 'shed dwellers' showing the way

Shepparton’s “shed dwellers” are at the leading edge of how life will be in coming decades.

Shepparton's shed dwellers
 are another critical piece
 in the jigsaw in the picture
of life in the future.

Our shed dwellers, a metaphor for those who chose to live where they work, is more common than we might think.
Those who have chosen this approach have done so for a variety of reasons, from economic to convenience and from an interest in reducing their carbon footprint to just good sense.
Man’s voracious appetite for energy is eroding our finite fossil fuel resources so much that anything we can do to reduce the distance between where we live and our work will be critical.
Most of our shed dwellers leave home in the morning walk a few steps and start work.
Such beautiful convenience in our emerging energy starved world makes absolute sense, but is objected to by many who, despite repeated warnings about collapsing energy networks, are addicted to a way of life that only exists because of fossil fuels.
Beyond that, many say they simply don’t want to be so close to their work; they want a physical divide, they want their work and their homes to be in different geographical places.
The news about that, sad or otherwise depending on you stance, can just as easily be in your mind and so as expansive, or as distant you want it to be.
Drive around Shepparton and within minutes the opportunities for a “live where you work” life becomes apparent and just awaits the arrival of some creative and entrepreneurial person to exploit the opening.
For centuries humans have created living spaces in what at first glance seemed like most inopportune places, but which eventually evolved to become hugely comfortable, community building, personally satisfying and, importantly, a wise economic decision that greatly reduced energy consumption.
Home-based enterprises were once commonplace, but a few things changed that – humans learned how to access and exploit fossil fuels, bringing on the Industrial Revolution that saw the gestation of corporations, that profited from labour, which enjoyed the products made possible by those fossil fuels, leading to the motor car, that produced suburbia built around a detached home on a large block, often many kilometres from where the home owner worked.
These sumptuous neighbourhoods lacked intimacy and so the true sense of community that are mostly connected to intensively settled and developed places in which, in times gone, your neighbour could have been a blacksmith on one side and the other, a fellow who repaired and built, by hand, furniture.
Times, obviously, have changed, but the shed dweller next door might be an engineer, or a computer specialist, but whatever they might be, the intimacy of the living and working locally is a resource upon which our future will hinge.