Our first duty is to our health, for without it everything becomes irrelevant

Without your health everything else becomes irrelevant.

A person who is both mentally and physically intact is as well-equipped as they can be to confront and deal with whatever challenges life might present.

Shepparton-based group, Slap Tomorrow, is concerned unfolding changes to our climate threaten community health and so has arranged for four speakers to visit the city on Thursday and discuss how we live in and deal with a climate different from that with which we are familiar.

Your health is, of course, your business until, that is, that moment when “your business” becomes someone else’s business and so is a measurable cost to society.

Climate change, shown to be unequivocally real and a clearly a result of human activities, will unquestionably injure our health and as is the case individually, be a measurable cost to society.

Rather than taking the Federal Government’s present course of dismantling everything that helps us understand and mitigate climate change, we should be working to build a nation that instinctively lessens the damage and creates a resilient society.

We, that is you and me, have elected a national government that sees itself beyond the limitations of science and although it claims acceptance of climate change, its behaviour suggests something quite different.

Extreme weather events, worsened by climate change, throughout Australia have produced obvious massive physical damage, but largely invisible has been the health costs that often don’t appear until months, or years after the event.

Health, as is the case with so many other things, is not something you appreciate until it is gone.

Climate change has the potential to erode our health, not just individually, but in penalizing all of society and although we all lead busy lives, each of us needs to spend a couple of hours learning about how we can best understand and behave in a different climate, particularly if we value our health.

Listening to and learning from the quartet coming to Shepparton on Thursday can be the edge of a local individual response, but nationally it is somewhat more complex as our present government has declared Australia “open for business” taking us down a path contrary to what is needed if Australia is to play a meaningful part in easing the causes of climate change.

Australia was, until recently, among the leaders in climate change mitigation, but Tony Abbott and his cohort have dismantled our global warming-defence infrastructure, exposing us to the mirth of the world and hugely risking the health of Australian’s.

The wealth of a community is not truly measured in acquisitions and wealth, rather in that same community’s general health and a broader wellbeing that is remote from the celebrated profit and growth mandate of our market driven system.

Trapped in a vacuum of imagination

Shepparton is trapped in a vacuum of imagination.

Worse than that, we have so enthusiastically pursued what it is we already understand and are comfortable with, that we now find ourselves stumbling about in a blind canyon.

What the Goulburn Valley needs is imaginative leaders; those who understand the choices that confront not just people here, but society generally.

The history of conflict; conflicts whose costs are measured in millions of lives, serious disruption to many of those left alive and a financial cost beyond measurement, is simply a matter of poor choice and the failure to imagine that there was, and is, a better way.

Shepparton faces challenges which are simply a microcosm of the malign difficulties presently facing the world and the challenges they present can be eased, or avoided completely, by making the right choices.

The City of Greater Shepparton council has set out to “Make Shepparton Greater” listing commerce, health, justice and transport, both road and rail, projects as priorities on which both it and the community should focus.

The enthusiasm and excitement about this idea is to be applauded, but with restraint for although the projects are of themselves worthy they contribute little to building a Shepparton that will endure the unfolding differences ahead.

Rather than building on what exists, all of us, from the council down, should be stepping back, learning about how the world is going to unfold and understanding that the creation of a resilient Greater Shepparton, one able to withstand the inevitable shocks spinning off from energy depletion, and food and water shortages arising from a damaged climate, demands imagination.

What do we do?

Rather than constantly expanding our boundaries, we should imagine ways of moving people toward the centre of the city, making walking and cycling nor only easier, but preferable because it is both quicker and cheaper; we need to develop a public transit system, not only within the city itself, but one that links-up all the towns and villages that make up the Greater City; we need a complex mosaic of community vegetable gardens throughout the city; frequent (monthly?) programs should be aimed at helping people understand why we need to embrace resilience and within that begin to talk about the importance of sharing.

We don’t forget, however, about the health or justice aspects of Making Shepparton Greater, but we make them part of city whose maintenance is less energy-intensive.

We have a choice – we can follow the energy-intensive business as usual trajectory or we can use imaginative thoughtful ways of living that will see us break the business as usual mould; consider and implement renewable energy and in contemplating sustainability, build a resilient community and, in doing so, “Make Shepparton Greater”.