Saving simply depends on using less of the commodity, whatever it is

Saving anything depends, simply, on using less of that commodity in the first place.

Should you want to reduce your telephone bill, make fewer calls; reduce your petrol bill, drive less; preserve your bank account, don’t take money out; use less electricity, don’t turn it on.

That rather simplistic advice just won’t work in our modern, complex society as invariably the costs that overwhelm us, are all largely unavoidable regardless of what they might be.

Advice about all those matters proliferate and despite the claims of many it is not often you can find any, or even one, that allows you to hold your place in modern society while saving money.

GV Community Energy (GVCE) is a rare beast in that it operates within the confines of the commercial market, is not-for-profit and is truly there to aid and serve the community. It is driven by care, not profit.

The group “erupted” into life with a massively successful public meeting in Murchison at which more than 400 people almost unanimously agreed with the idea of establishing a bulk-buying scheme of residential solar panels.

From there, the group began considering the overall energy consumption of homes and has partnered with the Melbourne-based company, Cherry LED Lighting to show people how they can switch to LED lighting and benefit from the savings.

Cherry LED Lighting General manager Ben Wright recently explained the benefits of LED lighting at two Benalla seminars, the first in a series of roadshow to travel around the Goulburn Valley.

Ben explained that Cherry LED is Australian owned and all the products they sell are designed in Australia for local conditions and although made in China, the design and quality requirements are so demanding and specific that all production contracts are individually negotiated.

Working with Cherry LED Lighting, GVCE has arranged a group-buying scheme to minimise purchasing and installation costs leading to a home lighting system that dramatically improves savings, both financially and in terms of electricity consumption.

GVCE and Cherry LED Lighting have done the energy sums for you and those combined with the vastly longer life of the lights themselves, then savings, both economically and environmentally are clearly measurable.

The LED light is applicable in both residential and commercial applications and is evidence of how technology can play an instrumental role, albeit small in this case, in mitigating climate change

.

However, small individually it may be, but insignificant it is not when considered society wide.

Using the example of a house with 27 down-lights, Ben explained the savings in carbon dioxide gases annually was more than 2600kg, representing removing 2.5 cars from the road over a decade.

Saving anything, in this case energy, is simply about initially making the correct decisions.

 

 

New Year's Eve - a time to resolve to become more resolute about learning

New Year’s Eve is that moment in the year when many resolve what they will do to ensure changes in their life.

Bread and circuses were the staple
 diet of ancient Romans.

Such resolutions are usually about altering some personal behaviour, exercising more, being friendlier, drinking less, giving up smoking, changing a job or maybe, growing some vegetables at home.

All appealing ideals and worth pursing, but watching world events, listening to learned and articulate people and reading widely, it’s obvious that New Year’s resolutions will have to be less narcissistic, somewhat more altruistic and broadly more concerned about the other.

Life, as it is presently understood and enjoyed will become increasingly remote as this decade ends and another begins to unfold.

The bounty we presently enjoy every day, and especially at events such as Christmas just passed, can be traced to the first agricultural revolution about 10 000 years ago when humans made tentative steps from the life of hunter gatherers to settled agriculture.

Abandoning the practice of always being on the move in search of new hunting grounds, tribes put down roots, and geographically fixed communities took shape with civilization being born.

The arrival of agriculture bought a surfeit of energy, albeit small, but an excess sufficient to create an economy in which the resultant tokenism that allowed it to operate became known as money.

That tokenism has in itself no value being little more than a claim on past, present and future energy which was initially little more than human, animal or that provided directly by nature through wind, water or the sun.

Those energy sources where, for millennia, ample, but then we discovered and learned to exploit fossil fuels to build today’s modern world, but after about 200 years that resource is nearly exhausted and a by-product has been a damaged and disrupted climate system; a change the threatens humanity.

So, a worthwhile resolution would be to learn more about, and appreciate, the growing scarcity of energy and subsequently decide what you are going to do about your intergenerational responsibilities – how are you going to ensure that your grandchildren are going to live a contented life on a planet sucked dry of easily accessible energy?

The ancient Romans fed the populace bread and circuses in what was an abuse of the social compact and the distractions of that era are evident again with stories of moon landings, energy-rich entertainments, meaningless political chatter, resource-based wars and border confrontations are distracting us from the facts that energy is in short supply and our climate is seriously damaged.

A New Year’s resolution?

Learn about the world’s parlous energy state and beyond joining and supporting a local group encouraging resilience, learn about and respond with enthusiasm and optimism to climate change.

The demise of Holden brings moment of sadness, spiced with apprehension about our response

Strangely, I felt quite emotional when the news broke yesterday about the 2017 demise of Holden.

Strange, because of vehicles my dad owned, I grew with an allegiance to Fords, but had never really identified with the Ford-Holden debate.

The past decade had seen me become quite sensitive about the inordinate amount of public money being spent on the car industry, either in its sustenance or in provision of roads and other public infrastructure afforded the motor vehicle.

Public transport made huge sense in that the cost to individuals was vastly cheaper and the societal costs, including such things as injury and death and damage, that which is obvious and that which is not so readily apparent, was equally massively reduced through the use of trains and buses.

Good sense told me that the world didn’t need a private car industry, rather an intricate, efficient and well quipped public transport system that would be rich in jobs and having made the transition from private transport use to a public system we would find most of our needs adequately answered.

The demise of the car industry, even this tiny segment, seemed for someone concerned about the impact of private cars on earth’s atmosphere, and their wasteful use of earth’s finite resources, like a moment for jubilation.

So why the sad face

Rather than sad it is apprehensive for from here we can evolve to become a society that puts the public need ahead of private wants in that we could see this as an opportunity to launch a new way of doing things.

The need for Holden epitomizes
our addiction to private
answering our private wants.

Apprehension arises from our deep addiction to private wants that will likely frustrate the much needed societal changes that are about resilience, sharing and putting the public need ahead of individualism, a much celebrated trait in modern society.

Interestingly, Holden has been a part of my life – the car first rolled into Australian life when my first birthday rolled by and the last Holden will roll off the assembly line when my 70s roll along.

That, really, means nothing, just the hope that another 70 years will not pass before we can understand the folly of our dalliance with globalization, and how dearly we are paying for that liaison.

Hopefully we will also apply ourselves to creating processes not beholden to the mercy of fossil-fuelled fantasies such as those to which the motor industry is obliged.

Holden played an integral and important part in Australia’s development, but it’s time is past and rather than hover over the corpse we need to shift our gaze to a future that will be quite different from what was.

Declining energy reserves, a damaged climate and a disordered economy suggest we should be focussing on affairs closer to home.

A human plague worsened by untrammelled growth

Pope Francis - he has spoken out
about untrammelled growth.

Humans are a plague on the earth and one of their constructs further worsens their presence.

There is nothing inherently wrong with being human rather it is our behaviour in that we have colonized most every available space, domineering earth’s resources, almost to the total exclusion of other species.

The dilemma of our untamed tumour-like growth – population numbers are rising exponentially; energy use is surging; debt, both private and public, has exploded; our consumption of food, and the chemicals needed to produce them, is alarming; species are become extinct at an unprecedented rate -  is evidence of our wilful denial of earth’s finitude.

Concerns about blindly pursing growth were raised by Pope Francis in his first papal exhortation, “The Joy of the Gospel”.

He said, “While the earnings of the minority are growing exponentially, so, too, is the gap separating the majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few.

“The imbalance is the result of ideologies which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and financial speculation…. A new tyranny is thus born, invisible and often virtual, which relentlessly imposes its own laws and rules…. “The thirst for power and possessions knows no limits. In this system, which tends to devour everything that stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile, like the environment, is defenceless before the interests of a deified market, which become the only rule”, the Pope said.

Freeing people from doing things to simply survive and so being able to make things they could profit from was a spin-off of the agricultural revolution.

That revolution brought a security guarantee and being released from the need to find food every day, people could then spend time producing a “luxury”, trade it profitably and then enhance their lives.

The idea of profit was born and further enriched by the discovery and understanding of fossil fuels and with that trade and consumption became an entrenched way of life.

There was however, as with everything, an unintended consequence.

In our rush to build and boost profits, we were blind, wilfully or otherwise, to those effects, with few ever talking about finite resources or the additional complication of greenhouse gases that were changing, quickly, the human-friendly climate.

The profits grew, the resources became even more finite, and the human-friendly atmosphere worsened and the troubles described by the Pope became more ingrained.

The surplus of energy that first arose from the agricultural revolution that was small by today’s standards, but sufficient to allow people to engage in non-subsistence activities.

That new and “free” energy distorted and disrupted our values, disconnecting us from the balance we had long lived within and extinguished our understanding of how to live a worthwhile, resilient and sustainable life using less exogenous energy.

Maybe it is the kids we need in charge, rather than the adults

Daniel Innerarity's
is worth reading.

Kids love socializing, getting into groups and sometimes even gangs, and making up the rules as they go along, as they play.

Maturity brings marked changes in that their innocence vanishes and much of their sociability to become frequently dogmatic, insular, individualistic, hubristic and seemingly unable to take the advice of another.

The outcome for you and me, Australia and the world generally is toxic.

Now adults, our decision makers understand the concept of winning and losing, they are richer, more powerful and influential with measureable behaviour and yet, fundamentally, they still play games and make up the rules as they go.

Spend a week critically observing the news and in watching the behaviour of those at the top of the human food chain, it becomes obvious, even though we have been told, repeatedly, that the “adults are now on charge”, that we continually resort to rules that are politically convenient, ignore externalities such as the environment and rule to benefit a minority. Decency is dead.

Maturity is more than chronological status.

The accumulation of years does not magically open the door to wisdom for it is a status only arrived at, or achieved through earnest and endless endeavour to grasp and understand the human experience and the culture from which that experience arises.

Kids find the lure of the present irresistible and for many, age brings few changes and it was Daniel Innerarity writing in “The Future and its Enemies” who said people often repress their awareness of the future.

“Thinking about it (the future) distorts the comfort of the now, which tends to be more powerful than the future because it is present and because it is certain”, he wrote.

Prof Kate Auty.

Considering how the past and the present will congeal to become the future demands more than simple adulthood, rather it insists on a wisdom that understands that life is not linear – what was is not necessarily what will be.

Today we make the error of colonizing the future; a colonization that Innerarity says consists of us living at its expense in an imperialism of the present that absorbs the future and feeds off it parasitically.

Many are entranced by what was and long for those comforting times, but we can’t go back, rather we have to negotiate with tomorrow and in being somewhat like a kid, make up the rules as we go and avoid acting like an adult where we persist with ideas and beliefs that are dogmatic and remote from wisdom.

Warnings from Victoria’s Sustainability Commissioner, Prof Kate Auty, of endemic social wrongs fail to stir the adults and so maybe we need the kids to make up a few rules as they go – our future depends upon it.

Decisions based on media-driven arguments rather than brutal facts

Decisions about what is and isn’t dangerous to life hinge mostly on emotional media-driven arguments and rarely the brutality of the facts.

 Advocates of alcohol
never comment about
its deadly dark side.
 

Should the latter be allowed into the conversation, alcohol would be banned tomorrow, or at least its sale and distribution severely restricted.

What are presently illicit drugs draw most attention for there is something strangely, and dangerously romantic in the mystery that surrounds them and the bizarre changes they make to human behaviour.

Alarming realities arise from the use of these methamphetamines – the most common being colloquially known as “ice” – and although they are unquestionably socially and economically damaging, they pale when compared to the equivalent harms of alcohol.

Alcohol brings with it a litany of costs and social damage, bettered only by the ferocity of nature unleashed, as is presently unfolding with the changing climate to earth become less accommodating to humanity.

The Australian National Council on Drugs (ANCD) only this month released its “Alcohol Action Plan” and beyond pointing to an alarming death rate of young people from alcohol – one in eight under 25, it listed a tsunami of problems, suggesting that if it was new to the market, alcohol would be banned and declared illicit.

Chairman of the ANCD, Dr John Herron, said, “The level of alcohol related damage occurring in our communities is simply appalling and the Council has responded by developing a plan for action; for governments and communities to address the situation.

“The health, social and economic costs associated with alcohol use simply cannot be allowed to continue at the current level.

“We all understand that the culture of drinking and intoxication has a long history in Australia and we all agree that these levels of harm are unacceptable, however whenever we speak of culture change the industries that profit most from this culture run the same old fear campaign of a nanny state takeover,” Dr Herron said.

Alcohol consumption has been normalized to become an accepted and an almost fossilized way of life, but still with the criticality of tearing through the fabric of the society it permeates.

We lack the courage and intellectual skill to discipline ourselves and admit our addictions and failings and so continue to behave in ways that give this drug oxygen, despite warnings from those such as Dr Herron.

Viewed through the prism of a lifelong non-drinker, the answer appears clear and easily arrived at, but the idea of prohibition brings complexities that make brain surgery appear comparatively simple.

Those with the legislative power to control alcohol mostly enjoy a drink, and so it is unlikely they would vote to restrict sales because of personal and professional ramifications.

And so it seems, it is only through education can we escape this self-enforced alcoholic arrest.

Picasso's 'Geurnica' connects to coal seam gas

Pablo Picasso’s “Guernica” told of the death and destruction that disrupted life in the small Basque town in 1937.

Pablo Picasso's iconic 'Guernica'.

This massive piece of 20^th century iconic art told not only of the brutal tragedy of war, but warned of the violence energised and prosecuted by what was then modern technology.

Everything, but nothing has changed.

Leap forward nearly a century and today’s technology is unimaginably better, killing with precision in which the perpetrator is remote from the grisly consequence of their behaviour, but the intent is still the same.

Sitting through a recent day-long discussion about coal seam gas (CSG) there appeared to be a bizarre and yet tenable connection to Guernica

CSG is, as is with the extraction of any fossil fuel, about technology that when used inappropriately can bring difficulties, disruption, and at the extreme, death.

Picasso’s Guernica is the product of technology and human intent driven by a lust for power and the satiation of greed that has overridden decency and a sense of care for our fellows.

Listening to the CSG advocates it was difficult to escape a legacy of realities that equate with the terror of those Guernica people who were going about their business on a regular market day when aerial-borne technology left their lives in disarray.

The CSG technology is, however, at the other end of the spectrum, being something from below rather than above.

Victorians presently enjoy a moratorium on CSG, but the protagonists are ready to exploit our Victorian soils the moment the ban is lifted, possibly after next year’s state election.

Advocates of CSG praise it with enthusiasm and with equal conviction play down its disadvantages, of which they argue are few, contrary to their opponents who rate in such a way that it is as disruptive to communities as what happened in Guernica.

Depending on who is talking, CSG is either alarming or a wonderful boon to humanity.

Just as it is with climate change, personal ideologies inhibit peoples’ thinking, causing them to either rally behind this “new” gas or irrevocably damn it.

Exploration for and exploitation of the gas appears relatively safe and brings with it access to a fresh power source that allows for the continuation of an energy-rich life style.

Others adhere to a contrary view, arguing the process risks the purity of essential aquifers, rogue escaping gases damage our atmosphere and it consumes alarming amounts of water.

Complex and convoluted laws seem to favour the “drillers” rather than landowners and appear inadequate to administer a process that has sufficient potential to unravel the integrity of whole communities.

Picasso’s Guernica was of another time, but the passion it ignited is of the type needed today to balance this debate about an unconventional gas.

Each of us is captive to embedded ideologies

Ideology holds us all captive.

That, of course, is neither good nor bad, rather simply a consequence of being human with a large and contemplative brain

Robert Jensen.

.

Further, the ideology to which we are enslaved with was not present at birth rather it arose from our culture, family environment and the influences of our peer group.

Again, whatever myths, values and beliefs become the software of our lives are of themselves neither good nor bad either rather, it’s how we intimately experience them, apply them to our lives and relate to others through those ideas.

Beyond all that, the accident of our place of birth brings with it a host of ideologies, some that are simply about survival and others that reflect the essence of the society in which we are raised.

Australia’s recent federal election was a subjective struggle between ideologies; ideologies distorted invariably by the personality cult and played out before an audience frequently unable to distil individual emotions and wants from the broader and critical public needs of Australian society.

Ideologies are, of course, not fixed, although their permanence is such that to rise above or beyond them can be a task beyond the capacity of most and so although a prevailing ideology may spell doom, rarely can we escape it.

Our ideologies have changed because of major revolutions with the popular view suggesting that those of most significance are the America, French and Russian, but the better answer is really the agricultural, industrial and delusional revolutions.

The first gave us what is considered civilisation, but that robbed us of the egalitarianism of tribal living, the industrial revolution accelerated our extractive behaviour and now we live in delusory times.

Writing in “Arguing for Our Lives”, Robert Jensen says: “Perhaps the most stunning example of this is that during the 2000s, as the evidence for human-caused climate disruption became more compelling, the percentage of the population that rejects or ignores that science has increased.”

“Why would people who, in most every other aspect of life accept without question the results of peer reviewed science, dispute the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists in this case, he asks?

It is here that ideology intrudes, overriding good sense and leaving people marooned on what was once an isthmus, which science having sliced though leaving it remote from the mainland.

Our extractive behaviours take no account of earth’s finitude and nor do our pre-conceptions, our ideologies or our willingness to discount the future expand our chance of escaping from this delusory age.

Again, ideologies are neither good nor bad rather, it is how we respond and apply them to the lives of others and, of course, understanding how pursuit or ignorance of them can impact on the planet.

Emulating the complexity of nature

“What we failed to appreciate is how quickly the ‘scaffolding’ of civilisation became so elaborate and so energy intensive and so unknowable”.

So said Wes Jackson in his 2011 book “Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture”.

Jackson, a Kansas-born biologist who founded "The Land Institute" where he has attempted to emulate nature on a farm, studying environmental ethics, exploring appropriate technology and educating others, is alarmed at the amount of fossil fuel energy consumed in getting food from the paddock to the plate.

He says the fossil fuel epoch is ending, the world’s arable soils have been irreparably degraded or lost, and hovering above that fragile superstructure is the unfolding dilemma of a damaged climate.

Those thoughts or similar concerns will be on the minds of those Goulburn Valley people who gather on Sunday at Shepparton’s Victoria Park Lake to illustrate their concern about society’s disregard for matters discussed by Jackson, particularly climate change.

Sunday’s gathering at the lake is a part of the Australia-wide Get-Up National Day of Climate Action in which people from cities, towns and villages throughout the country will illustrate their concern for climate change.

The Tony Abbott-led Coalition has dismembered government bodies and through that has effectively ended any possibility of Australia, or Australians, helping the world ease what is becoming, or is, a catastrophic reality.

Where we are at, and how and why we arrived, is something easily understood.

Our predecessors saw their first sunrise about 200 000 years ago and we muddled along keeping everything pretty much in balance until the agricultural revolution about 10 000 years ago and with food being reliable and more widely available, our numbers grew exponentially.

Some 200 years ago came the industrial revolution and that coupled with our natural inquisitiveness, innovation, experimentation and application saw us access the billions of years of energy locked in fossil fuels, described by some as “ancient sunlight”.

All that was fine until it became apparent we had broken the pact with nature that assured balance and the earth’s biosphere was in desperate trouble as we considered nature’s sinks, the atmosphere and oceans, as bottomless pits for our refuse.

Humans have many laudable qualities, but an equal number of less than honourable traits, among them, recklessness and even though it is obvious we depend entirely upon finite and depleting fossil fuels that have given us exponential growth in every sense and with that a desperately damaged climate, we still allow ourselves to be governed by climate change skeptics who idolize growth.

Sunday’s National Day of Climate Action is about solidarity of thought and illustration to government that the people are restless about their apparent disinterest in climate change.

The world doesn't care what we do, it matters only to us

The world doesn’t care what we do, rather it matters only to us what we do.

Gernot Wagner of America's
 Environmental Defence Fund.

Of course, it is not just us, what we do matters to every other species that has flourished in the conditions that have been favourable to humanity.

Interestingly, we had little, or nothing, to do with this Goldilocks-like (not too hot, not too cold, but just right) epoch, rather it just happened and we benefitted, richly.

Had conditions been just a little different, a degree or two warmer or colder, what has eventuated might never have happened and if it did, then life would have been structurally and substantially different.

It took millions of years for conditions here to become favourable for humans and the network of other of our life-supporting species to flourish and in less than 300 we have put all at risk.

An environmental economist with America’s Environment Defence Fund, Gernot Wagner, wrote “But will the planet notice?: How smart economics can save the world” in 2011 making it abundantly clear that if one person drives less or changes all their light globes, the planet won’t know or care.

Wagner, a research associate at the Harvard Kennedy School and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, argues for more sweeping and systemic changes to our behaviour,  not simply individual efforts rather, rather a society-wide approach.

Reading Wagner and watching what is happening in Australian society, we face a dual dilemma, for as laudable bottom-up efforts are, they are presently disjointed and disparate, and appear to lack the cohesion necessary to excite the almost revolutionary-like dynamic needed to jolt the Abbott-led Coalition Government into serious mitigation of climate change.

In pointing to the rather lame efforts of most politicians, Gernot argues that frying the planet is much easier than getting burned at the polls.

He writes: “Individual actions, of course, only go so far, which points to the government’s role in helping to protect us and the planet and have everyone take full responsibility for their own decisions”.

In that, Gernot is effectively saying that Tony Abbott and his cohort need to step forward initiating and instigating changes to remove Australians from among the world’s worst carbon dioxide polluters.

Such a move will take courage, foresight and endeavour, traits the Coalition claim, but are yet to demonstrate.

We need an immediate, and serious, reduction in our carbon dioxide emissions, cuts that will reshape how we live and rather than celebrate growth, we should have no other focus beyond recognizing the collapse of resources and the unfolding dilemma of a changing climate.

Yes, the world doesn’t care what we do, but we should care that our leaders are distancing us from a possible solution to climate change.

Food security demands concentration and conservation

Food security is another of those things that demands our concentration and conversation.

Solutions to a collision of circumstances appear scarce, but answer them we must and subsequently we need to gather and talk how we ensure our food supplies.

Nourishment in all its forms, particularly food, is elementary to survival.

Writing in the introduction to “Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to create local, sustainable, and secure food systems”, the director of the Post Carbon Initiative, Asher Miller, said: “In the twenty-first century, we face a set of interconnected economic, energy and environmental crises that require all the courage, creativity and cooperation we can muster”.

That trio of values is to be found in community; not the community flippantly referred to in contemporary times, rather it is that place with a deeper sense of belonging, of ownership, an understanding that your survival is intertwined with where you live, how it works and how it connects with your food supply.

Being somewhat Shepparton-centric, then what is happening here is simply a more expanded version of what is happening to other towns in the area, our sprawling neighbourhoods are eroding what was rich and productive farmland, and the infrastructure inherent to their function.

Standing on the cusp of an era in which oil-rich industrialized farming will be disrupted and ultimately disabled, we need to be preserving those food-productive pieces of land that are either within towns or nearby.

It is short-sighted in the extreme to take rich food producing land, pave it over and use it for housing which accommodates only a few people per hectare and is wholly dependent upon oil.

Rather than spreading endlessly toward the horizon, we should be working to consolidate our towns, take a lesson from an oil-starved Cuba of late last century, and aim to secure what food we can from within town boundaries using community gardens, any open space, back and front yards and even town parks as places to grow food to feed ourselves.

Using the Australian developed processes of permaculture, the Cubans were quickly able to produce 70 per cent of their vegetables within the boundaries of their towns and cities.  

Most of the food on your dinner-table tonight is there because of oil, including, incidentally, the table itself, and the sooner we can figure out how to feed ourselves without such an unhealthy reliance on this vanishing fossil energy, the better.

Colliding circumstances, among them our changing climate, water scarcity, a burgeoning population, and the loss of the earth’s topsoil and so arable areas, insist that we act to secure our food supply.

That is “what” we need to do and so we should gather and figure our “how” we do it.

The gulf between public needs and private wants warrants discussion

Public transport comes in many
 forms and next to walking and
 cycling it is clearly the most
 efficient way to move
 people about.

People of the Goulburn Valley need to gather and talk about the gulf between public needs and private wants.

Both are many, but it is the former to which any reasonable, decent, thoughtful and community-minded person will acknowledge the most important.

Sadly, our individualistic and consumerist world has a slavish devotion to the latter, a perverse privatization that gives rise to despair and a largely unacknowledged and invisible inequality.

Many argue that we can only deal with society as it is or with what exists and although that might be an accepted philosophy today, it wasn’t when we abandoned, almost entirely, our rail network and decided the future belonged to the combustion engine, effectively the motor car.

The Goulburn Valley of the mid-1940s had a wonderful rail network, but gradually was dismantled as private wants prevailed over public needs.

We wrongly chose not to build-on our existing rail infrastructure, but pursue a privately energised idea, the motor car; a concept that has evolved to actually become a public disservice and in just 100 years has left a legacy contrary to human needs.

The purchase of a car is a private decision, but its use and convenience depends, almost entirely, upon a publicly funded infrastructure.

The era of the car is ending with the oil upon which it depends becoming prohibitively expensive to extract and deliver to users, as is the maintenance of the road network and without either the motor car has no reason.

It is time to gather and discuss how we can get thousands of road users back onto a tightly networked public transport system that would be vastly more energy efficient; enrich and strengthen linked communities; trigger a host of new job opportunities; be safer; and make a significant contribution to reducing the Goulburn Valley’s carbon dioxide emissions.

The idea of public transport contrasts with the modern market-driven individualism that has prevailed for decades to become an imagined part of our wellbeing, both emotionally and physically.

Rather than responding to Australia’s spacious geography, we should be consolidating our towns and cities; living close to our work; using a bicycle, or walking; negotiating our towns and cities on a tightly integrated public transport system of buses with light rail running as frequently as hourly between Goulburn Valley towns to connect with trains that unite us with all other destinations.

Establishing an integrated public transport network will be complex, difficult and expensive, but we must start now for as the world’s oil becomes increasingly scarce and subsequently expensive, it will be equally increasingly difficult to build the network upon which the future of the Goulburn Valley will depend.

That is “what” we need and now we need to gather and figure our “how” we do it.

Idea festival exposes a parallel universe

Much of a recent week was lived in a parallel universe.

It was a world of ideas, hope, imagination, dreams, the impossible, concepts beyond the status quo and although exciting in the extreme, it was tiring.

The latter, of course, was not unexpected for once we step beyond what is familiar and embrace the new, we find ourselves entangled with fresh intellectual rigour and through just being different, it induces both physical and mental weariness.

Contemporary society does not encourage us to abandon the familiar rather; the market system prefers us to have a somewhat narrow view of value, worth and the causes of contentment to ensure the mental poverty of most enriches the elite.

Spending much of the week and the University of Melbourne’s biennial Festival of Ideas is an indulgence; gastronomy for the mind, a reminder of how little we understand, how remote we are from wisdom, knowledge and intelligence and how distant we are from having any real grasp of how, what, where and when.

Some would argue such pursuits irrelevant to their lives for they know who won the footy finals, what’s filling the movie theatres, what’s on the television tonight and what they need to do to ensure the pay checks keep rolling in.

But life is more than that, it is more than bread and circuses for human flourishing is about engaging with an idea that is bigger than you, an idea that both expands and demands more of your thinking and it is an idea that at first seems without rationale, but then becomes the solution.

Many things now are humanity’s staples were once ideas resident on the fringes of society or only thought about in moments of lucid madness.

We need more such festivals and maybe that is a project for the new Committee of Shepparton – Shepparton’s own Festival of ideas.

Ideas, no matter how vague, poorly articulated or inadequately thought through were not, according to the founder of Minds at Work, Jason Clarke, to be discounted or allowed to wither for all should be considered and welcomed to the conversation.

Victor Hugo.

Shepparton is in urgent need of a new idea as the 20^th century inspirational drivers of several decades are dying and maybe a universe in which fresh ideas are abundant will be found at our own ideas skirmish.

Melbourne has its Festival of ideas, Sydney its Festival of Dangerous Ideas and we should have our own agora, that ancient Greece marketplace-like concept where people met talked, considered and determined for their community, the best way ahead.

It was Frenchman, Victor Hugo who said: “One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”

Let’s initiate that “invasion” and find a new idea for Shepparton.

Climate change is bring a decidely different future

Survival is going to
 need deep thought.

Tomorrow will be different from yesterday, no surprises there, but gone will be the status quo and many perceived freedoms.

 

Unmitigated climate change, a dilemma presently troubling the world, is something to which many are antagonistic for it brings with it the inevitable demise of most everything people in the developed world take for granted, especially imagined freedoms.

The discovery of fossil fuels along with the realization of and release of its embedded energy, set humanity on a troublesome trajectory that at first brought unimagined bonuses, but has now created equally unimagined complexities.

Humanity, interestingly, has the intellectual capacity equal to what is happening to our climate for when looked at analytically, it was our endeavours that unleashed the process, and now we understand the science.

So, we know what causes the difficulty and we know how to approach the solution, but the question is still, and it has never changed, are we intellectually bold enough, and sufficiently courageous, to implement the solutions we know exist?

The burning of oil, one of the prime causes of climate change, along with coal, suddenly saw those in developed countries, and other places to a lesser degree, freed from much physical labour as a barrel of oil represents more than 20 000 hours of human work.

Almost overnight many people went from being tied to the daily toil of sheer survival to a comparative life of luxury as oil, and coal, were put to work ending, largely, man’s drudgery.

This emancipation of our time wasn’t, sadly, put to figuring out how to husband this effectively free energy and so ration it rather, we wrongly assumed this was party-time and in about three centuries, we have nearly exhausted this rich resource.

Correction, it is unlikely we will ever exhaust earth’s fossil fuel resources rather our continued burning of them will disrupt human life to such an extent that we will no longer be able access or use them.

Freedom is an elusive smoke and mirrors concept, now you see it and now you don’t, and subsequent to the fallacy of the liberation promised by the military/industrial complex, we need to look to another freedom in which the needs of nature are equal to the wants of man.

Modernity has brought many advances allowing humanity to thrive, but within most enhancements has been an almost secret ideology that has gradually removed our freedoms, ensuring our behaviour enriches a relative few with most of the costs lumped upon the environment.

Should we value our freedom, then its survival depends almost entirely up us happily relinquishing some aspects or it.

The successful mitigation of climate change rests with you and me foregoing many traditional wants, readjusting our aspirations and understanding that genuine freedom is inextricably linked to discipline.

A life of discontinuities and risk - certainly a strange affair

A promotional brochure
 for Al Gore's newest
book, "The Future".

Life is a strange affair, full of weird happenings and discontinuities and as a friend once said, “It’s so risky we’ll not get out of it alive”.

Much of it can be, and is, so intellectually dishevelled that it gives pause to wonder “why”, but then equally, many moments burst upon you leaving a beautiful sense of hope and an enrichment of purpose.

Recently while walking with my brother, two young boys approached on their bicycles and a step off the footpath to allow them to pass resulted in a rather clumsy fall.

Hurting all over, my spirits were repaired somewhat and for a moment made me forget the pain, when the two young boys who could have easily sped on laughing about the “old bloke” who fell over, stopped and enquired about my welfare.

The pain was momentarily gone and a few seconds, I was not feeling as glum about humanity as is often the case.

Just a few days ago while travelling on and standing in a crowded tram in central Melbourne, a young Indian fellow offered me his seat – again, for a moment, the world seemed like reasonable place.

However, those moments of personal encouragement seem irrelevant and trivial in consequence when by chance of birth, your country prefers to be governed by a group of people whose passions are driven by short-term objectives and beliefs that the good life is to be found in materialism and the momentary joy of acquisition.

Promises in the lead-up to Australia’s recent federal election were many, but rarely did anyone illustrate concern for, a suggest anything that might enable you and me to endure the unfolding decades that will be clearly, and unquestionably, decidedly different from which we have just emerged.

It seems our leaders are devoid of the robust and bold thinking that enables them to imagine equality, decency, collaboration and fairness; things not fundamental to the economy rather behaviours that evolve from sharing, friendship, caring and empathy.

Should you consider that utopian thinking then, for a moment, consider the alternative to which humanity has adhered to for three centuries and upon any reasonable measure, what we have is a distressing dystopia in which the world economy is vacuumed up by just a few and billions are left either in or teeter on poverty.

Complicating that is the fragility of world governance with our much fêted democracy being sold to the highest bidder leaving it obligated to corporatism.

Writing in “The Future”, Al Gore said: “The extreme concentration of wealth is destructive to economic vitality and to the health of democracy”.

Yes, it’s a weird world in which a few have plenty, billions are in poverty, democracy is almost a memory and uplifting moments are disappointingly rare.

Surviving soon will simply be tough enough without such things as 'Tough Mudder'

Personal fitness regimes appear proportional to the rise of our dependence upon fossil fuels for energy.

The massive amounts of
 human energy expended on
events such as 'Tough
 Mudder' will be needed soon
 to  simply survive.

The latter has led to the former as there is an obvious relationship between our addiction to fossil fuels and the collapse of the need for human energy to undertake work.

Hence the emergence of regimes, or places, to repair subsequent human feebleness, a natural by-product of the sedentary life that is dependent on energy from somewhere else, that arose in lockstep with our habitual use of fossil energy.

Becoming increasingly dependent upon fossil fuels for energy, human muscle fell into disuse and following the emergence of boxing gyms in the 1930s, exercise regimes became an increasingly regular part of life.

In the past decade many have profited handsomely from an increasingly bizarre array of exercise programs that have proliferated, including curiously named events such as “Tough Mudder”.

The personal energy we now use for what is mostly recreation, in which many exhaust themselves to collapse, was in earlier times needed to simply survive, although many continue to deny that our hungry wants are taking us back to what once was.

The discovery of fossil fuels, along with an understanding how they could be used as a substitute for human and animal energy, liberated mankind from the demanding daily necessary exercise regime of hand-to-mouth survival.

Fossil fuel energy companies plead a contrary view, but the simple facts, supported by undeniable realities, illustrate that the storehouse of ancient energy is becoming exhausted and on a human time-scale we will have little choice but to return to personal manual labour.

The gymnasium of ancient Greece, beyond being a place where people trained for major public events, encouraged political discussion and frequently had a library attached, which was quite different from the stack of magazines in today’s gymnasiums.

Much discussion presently goes on between those pursuing various exercise regimes, but most of it is shallow, of little consequence and frequently is of little relevance to fundamental human needs.

Human energy will soon be again in demand for although we might see and explosion of renewable energy sources, it is unlikely that beyond some energy source not yet imagined, our daily needs will still only be satisfied through the use of our muscles.

Obesity and diabetes are modern problems that equate with too much time doing too little, unlike our predecessors who had to spend a few hours every day to ensure food was available.

That usually vigorous endeavour included much incidental exercise denying obesity and diabetes, but left time to connect with family, neighbours and friends.

Our exercise in the future will come vicariously as we bend our backs to ensure personal and community resilience and Tough Mudder-like frivolities will be unimaginable, irrelevant, and unnecessary.

Living in perilous times as civil religion unravels

We live in perilous times.

The civil religion of progress is unravelling.

Our careless use of fossil fuels is
changing the world's climate.
 

History is peppered with apocalyptic predictions that amounted to naught and to question someone’s religion is tantamount to foolishness for even disconfirmation of the belief frequently only deepens commitment.

Even though the collapse of progress is irrefutable, its adherents believe with religious-like fervour and to question or doubt it brings scorn and castigation driven by simmering anger, even a sense of insult.

Progress as presently known and understood became possible when we stumbled upon ancient sunlight and in discovering how to release the abundant energy stored in coal and oil, humanity’s trajectory changed, dramatically.

Progress of the past three centuries has been almost wholly dependent upon on the fossil fuels earth has carefully put aside for millions of years and after what is only a geological blink in time, we are scrapping the bottom of the energy barrel.

Many believe contemporary progress, essentially that profit and growth is infinite, but the finitude of our earth contradicts that and rather than maintain our focus on the contemporary idea of progress, we need to abandon the precepts to which we are addicted and re-invent the idea.

Progress should be about the broad betterment of the human project, based on a sweeping and fresh understanding of what leads to human happiness and flourishing; values, that when examined closely, are unrelated to existing beliefs of progress.

Present progress is built on the energy of our rapidly diminishing fossil fuels and because they have been used with such exuberance and foolishness, we are facing unimaginable changes in the human condition, complicated by equally unthinkable changes to the world’s weather system.

The garrulous among us praise the modern market system, but chief economist for the World Bank, Nicholas Stern, has described climate change as the greatest market failure in human history.

Rapid deterioration of our climate is a symbol of the unravelling of the progress myth, but it is not alone for evidence of its collapse can be seen in our refusal to acknowledge that we live in a finite world and that we need a new way.

Our consumer-based lifestyle revolves around and depends upon our continual gouging of finite resources; resources we need to husband rather than wastefully use to pander to a lifestyle that will leave our children, their children and those who follow with a world stripped of its essence.

Many believe technology will resolve emerging difficulties, but nothing exists, is being developed or is even imagined that is able to fill the void left by the seriously depleted fossil fuels.

Our devotion to progress and technology has removed the need for innovation, severely limiting our chances of inventing a fresh and resilient future.