“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.
