Climate change - taking the gloves off, carefully

It is time to take the gloves off, carefully.

Good advice and near endless research suggests it is unwise to “take the gloves off” as most people are more comforted and secure in living their lives within a cocoon of myths, fantasies, and wrapped in the warmth of the rhetorical political mumbo jumbo that rains down every day.

The former leader of Australia's Youth
 Climate Coalition, Anna Rose, was among
those who came to Shepparton in 2013.

“Don’t tell them the truth,” the advice runs, and “Don’t confront them with uncomfortable facts,” the argument continues , and, “Don’t say anything that will cause their pool of worries to overflow,” we’re further told.

The first serious attempt to give people in and around Shepparton a chance to better understand the realities of our changing world was orchestrated in 2013 when a clutch of knowledgeable people were brought here.

That trio of speakers attracted more than 600 people to the city’s Eastbank auditorium and in just a couple of hours those listening heard how our behaviour was taking the world down a path from which return would be difficult; adherence to what was would lead only to catastrophe.

What was espoused in Shepparton that night was the continuation of a story being told around the world and has since been echoed and reinforced at forums, seminars, lectures, and conferences from Mooroopna to  Manchester and Paris to Euroa.

A couple years ago, U.K communications specialist George Marshall came to Shepparton and reiterated the warning of confronting people with uncomfortable facts arguing that what people wanted was a metaphorical hug from a loving mother-like figure, with a gentle stroke of their brow and an assurance that all will be fine.

UK communication specialist brought his
arguments to Shepparton a few years ago.

Well, since George was here things have only worsened and we are beyond any soft and easy solutions as it seems the world, Australians and Americans in particular, has sleepwalked into a perfect storm from which escape will be difficult. 

That 2013 warning, as powerful and combustible as it was, dissipated within weeks and although a few may have changed their habits and behaviours, broadly people here and the city itself continue to live as this is still the 1970s and not early in a distinctly different, and dangerous, 21st Century. 

And so here we stand at a difficult and confronting time; a time when what we ache for is a story that all will be fine, that the richness of Australian life that has been a staple for most of our modern history will continue unabated and the promised jobs and growth will miraculously appear defying compounding realities.

That reassuring story is not, however, to be found.

Instead we hear the professor of atmospheric science at Pennsylvania State University and director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center, Michael Mann, warning us via an article in The Washington Post , that climate change is a serious challenge, one that the evidence says we must tackle now, but one, the professor also warned, that can only be confronted if we avoid the paralysing doom and hopelessness stories. 

So, how do we avoid those stories? Learn more about the causes of climate change, understand how our behaviour worsens the dilemma, what we must do to ease the trouble and so ignite a new sense of hope, and speak up against anyone who obstructs climate mitigation.

Beyond that, we should listening to people like Filipino born Laurance L. Delino, from Munich’s Ludwig Maximillan University, who calls for the phasing out of fossil fuel-based passenger transport and its replacement with public transport, along with the increased cycling and walking and a reduction in the use of private cars.

America climate scientist Michael Mann is famous
for his "hockey stick" description of climate change.

Calling for wartime-like mobilisation in response to climate change, Delino notes that people are at their best in emergency situations, adding though that humans are generally hostile to any change in the absence of a perceptible driver - climate change is real, but in the minds of most its catastrophic consequences are distant and will be eased, if not erased completely, by technology. 

That is not true.

Former Echuca man, and education editor at The Age, Geoffrey Maslen, wrote in his newly released book, “Too Late”: “Clearly, the situation is dire. Yet the Australian government continues to act as if nothing terrible is about to happen”.

Political rhetoric will not solve the trouble; Paris promises will not provide an escape; but your behaviour and local action will help and so the City of Greater Shepparton council should be given licence by its ratepayers, that’s you and me, to reduce the city’s energy needs, build resilience through design and create a city able to thrive in a hotter and drier climate.

Capitalism, and its progeny, neoliberalism and globalisation, has fouled its nest

Capitalism, and its progeny, neoliberalism and globalisation, has fouled its nest.

Richard Denniss - richest country in
the world, at the richest point
 in humanity’s history

The market driven system, in which individualism, nihilism, and privatisation have prevailed, has brought humanity many wonderful things, but even more distasteful deeds, outcomes, and events.

Shepparton has enjoyed the bounty of modernity and largely avoided the dagger of inequality that, like a shadow, follows the market system and is an essential ingredient to its ongoing success.

However, there is no need to look to far or search too hard to see the evidence  of poverty within our community.

Modern capitalsm is competitive and as with any competition there are winners and losers, and sadly the losers, in what seems a weird juxtaposition, are the clear winners.

Most reading this newspaper have heard about inequality, and its near inequality,   some actively work to alleviate it, but few, if any readers, have actually lived it.

But that is all relative of course for what is inequality and poverty to one is living a gilded life to another.

And inequality is probably the most obvious marker of the present economic system and if measured by the present state of humanity, what exists has failed; our economy is in disarray.

But there is more than that. That inequality breeds a particular restlessness among people that manifests many things and chief among them is today what is known as “terrorism”.

People disenfranchised and excluded from the promises and glitter enjoyed by the favoured few, resort to all that is left to them, violence.

The modern world promises much but delivers little, leaving many living a life of desperate poverty; a poverty that few readers could grasp, and yet the idea of profit at any expense perseveres.

Each of us has a sense, that within the constraints of particular cultures, we will live a satisfying, rewarding, and complete life free from hunger, violence and economic intimidation and be allowed to express ourselves as human beings.

Denied those basics and chided by promises of the developed world, those people, like a cornered animal lash out to hurt those they see as responsible for disabling the promises once inherent to their lives.

Today it is labelled as “terrorism” and attributed to religion or extremism, but is only a reaction to the world’s pervasive inequality, an inequality that sees fewer than 10 people, according to a recent Oxfam survey, controlling more wealth than half the world’s population, that’s nearly four billion people.

Imagine, for a moment, that everyone in world enjoyed a living wage (we can afford that) and so there was equality; there was no poverty  or hunger (we can achieve that); everyone had a house, and home (we can do that); the economy, a human construct, becomes a servant rather than a master (we built it, so we can change it); people were still able to do as they pleased, but their priority is about helping their neighbours, their community and more broadly humanity (that is instinct), rather than helping themselves, as they are presently encouraged to do.

Yes, we can afford any of this for as the chief economist with the Australia Institute, Richard Denniss, points out it is simply a choice and only last year he said, “We are the richest country in the world, at the richest point in humanity’s history.”

Terrorism arises among people and in communities that are disengaged, disenfranchised, and remote from the sense of being an important and integral part of the human experiment; being connected. 

People who are fed, housed and engaged in enhancing their wellbeing and that of their neighbours mostly have their frustrations and disappointments eased, or eliminated, and so see no need to express any bitterness on others through random acts of violence, which, in today's colloquial terms, is terrorism.

After decades of living under a system that puts profit ahead of people, memories of something better have been lost and so we need to rekindle our imagination, conceiving of something that is happier, fairer, more decent, respectful, and equal.

Patrick Crudden forced you to look inward and unearth our better selves

Some people unintentionally force us to look inward and unearth our better selves.

Patrick Crudden was on of those people. He made you a better person, simply by knowing you.

He died last week and gone now is a stalwart of Shepparton’s literary scene, a gentle yet sweeping knowledge, and a man who helped make Shepparton an intellectually richer place.

Patrick became known to me through his creation of the Country Festival of Writing in Shepparton, and then through becoming a member of the Goulburn Valley Writers’ Group, of which he was the then president.

We came though from different worlds for Patrick was a devout Christian and, which, in my view, are beliefs substantiated by myth, but those fundamental intellectual differences did not impair our friendship rather, they strengthened it.

'He made you a better person, simply by knowing you' ....

How could that be?  Respect, it seems, was the key ingredient as we could both see the passion with which the other held their views and so never ventured into what was an unspoken no-go area. 

Never in the 20 years I knew Patrick, did he proselytize, attempting to change my views, but it was always obvious where he stood and what values he endorsed, which comfortingly and interestingly, were strikingly similar, except for that one basic and fundamental difference, he saw the world through the prism of Christianity, I didn’t and don’t.

Patrick was a true gentle man, passing through life pushing a significant bow wave, but, oddly, never making a ripple. He had a sense of decency about him; a decency that surpasses that of most people I know.

Oddly, the detail of Patrick’s history never seemed that important to me, rather, the man that stood before me had such a consuming presence that it was only the “now”that mattered.

Patrick’s presence was in my life long before actually meeting him as his daughter, Julie, her husband Wayne and children lived just two doors away.

Holding Patrick’s hand late in the afternoon and several hours before that last sentence was written, Julie and I reminisced about being neighbours and her lively son, Andy, who was the primary conduit.

Andy, about three or four at the time, was urgently in love with my daughter and her best friend, both about 16, and we smiled about the wide-eyed tale he told of finding a wombat hole while on holidays.

Patrick had been a confidant, counsellor and an inspiration to many and with a life anchored in Catholicism, it’s not surprising that he was a regular volunteer at Shepparton's Vinnies store.

Friend John Lawry was eager to introduce a philosophy-like session at Shepparton’s U3A and Patrick quickly aligned himself with the idea and along with John became the prime driver of what was to become “Socrates’ Cafe”, something which he said helped fill the vacuum left after the death of his wife, Bev, and was “Keeping me alive.”

Patrick was a thinker, a man of the word (literally) who loved, and told a good story, seemed to enjoy all forms of writing, whether poetry or prose, fact or fiction, and just last week, with the final chapter written, the book of his life was closed.

Bringing WWI (or at least a Cash Mob) to Shepparton's Maude St Mall

Shepparton needs you!

Apologies for plagiarising a mythical British WW1 slogan and even though our circumstances maybe differ (thankfully), Shepparton, and whatever community you consider home, still needs you.

The slogan, apparently never actually used for recruitment during the war, become known about and mythologized later, had, at its heart, the idea of encouraging societal engagement.

The WW1 slogan.

And so there is nothing new under the sun. 

Communities everywhere pine for engagement from those among their number, but those offering to help, must first struggle from a psychological morass thickened by clash of values.

The predominant market system ensures the enrichment of just a few by encouraging individualism and celebrating a status that equates with consumerist behaviour.

Conversely a stronger a more successful community is one which adjusts its value hierarchy to ensure communitarianism supplants the modern ego-fired, and market system inspired idea of “doing your own thing”; a twist on narcissism.

An example of engagement and a positive response to the call from Shepparton for help came recently when about 30 people turned out for the city’s fourth “Cash mob”.

Led by Ronni Druit, this enthusiastic band of “city helpers” headed, on this occasion, for the Maude St store of Collins Booksellers, all with the intent of spending at least $20.

The Cash Mob descended on the store and within minutes the cash registers were pumping out receipts, the work of the “mob” was done.

What ended, so to speak, in Shepparton’s Collins Booksellers on Saturday began in 2011 in the American city of Buffalo, New York.

Oddly, it was a relative newcomer to Shepparton, and Australia, Ronni who initiated the Cash Mob in what has become, in just several years, her home town.

Ronni met her Shepparton husband-to-be while travelling and their first home as husband and wife was in New York, until a deteriorating US economy drove them to pack up and move.

Eager to do something to help her new hometown, and having always worked in Shepparton’s CBD, Ronni, encouraged by her husband, and inspired by an idea about Cash Mobs she saw on television that had been used to support businesses whose trade had been slowed by rail crossing works in Melbourne, brought the idea to Shepparton.

What she is doing epitomises how Shepparton can be helped, in a practical sense, but Ronni quickly, a freely, admits that her cash mobs will not save CBD businesses, but they bring people to the precinct and exposes them to what is available, encouraging them, hopefully, to return.

Shepparton's Maude St Mall.

Yes, Shepparton needs your help, Ronni is helping, as is her Cash Mob, and how the responsibility falls upon the rest of us.

A Tatura friend who has no reason to shop in Shepparton’s Maude St Mall, visited recently and bought a simple item and has the view that if everyone shopped, or visited the mall, just one extra time each year, it would become more viable, both economically and socially .

However, the Cash Mobs bring us to a strange philosophical and practical contradiction for they are about the maintenance of growth-based economy and true sustainability is about de-growth; a question of more complexity than those presently faced by the city generally.

The future is not where many people think it is

Ideas about a trial opening of Shepparton’s Maude St Mall to motor traffic are contrary to where the future lies.

The motor car is becoming increasingly irrelevant to a good life and that is not the view only of academics and environmentalists for even the executive chair of the Ford Motor Company, Bill Ford, says we’re heading for “global gridlock.

It's driverless vehicles such as this that should be the
only "cars" we see in Shepparton's Maude St Mall.

Personal mobility is an inherent good and people have resorted to many modes to fulfil that need, but the motor vehicle has stolen the march on them all.

Our towns and cities have evolved around the idea of the car, as has most everything else in modern life, and so here we are now hostage to a machine of our making and from which escape will need the dexterity of Houdini.

Technology, however, has handed us that agility and the world, and naturally Shepparton, stands on the cusp of society free from a life living as the motor car demands.

The demise of the traditional privately-owned fossil fuelled motor vehicle is upon us and within a decade or so, the on-demand electric vehicle will be scurrying around our roads.

Roads will not be roads as we understand them, rather small paths dedicated to electric vehicles, driverless, controlled by satellite navigation and responding to smart phone-like requests to ferry people, and goods, around the city. 

Shepparton will not be isolated from this paradigm shift and rather than bow to ideas rooted in the 20th Century,  councillors need to illustrate courage, avoid the intrusion of short-termism of those wanting cars back in the city’s mall and map out a plan allowing Shepparton to embrace 21st Century transportation.

Most people have an innate resistance to change, but this, unlike a different shade of colour on your living room wall, this is tectonic, and as such disruptive.

Rather than trialling the idea of putting conventional cars back in our mall, council should be using our money, and the city’s resources, to trial an on-demand, driverless electric vehicle, just as they are doing in other cities around the world. 

Just a few days ago a report from Stanford University economist Tony Seba, entitled “Rethinking Transportation 2020-2030”, went viral in green circles and caused spasms of anxiety in the established industries.

Seba’s report said people would stop driving altogether,  switching en masse to autonomous electric vehicles (EVs) that are ten times cheaper to run than fossil-based cars, with a near-zero marginal cost of fuel and an expected lifespan of 1 million miles.

He predicted petrol or diesel cars, buses, or trucks would not be sold anywhere in the world within eight years, with the shift, according to Seba, being driven by technology, not climate policies.

Climate policies will, of course, benefit but so will Shepparton generally, especially if the council can opt for the city becoming a place to trial the autonomous vehicle and take us beyond the anachronism of putting cars back in the mall.

A technologically thorny future for workers in the Goulburn Valley, well, everywhere really

Those presently with work in the Goulburn Valley may well have a rather thorny future.

Some estimates forecast that technological change in the next 10 to 15 years will make nearly 40 per cent of jobs in Australia redundant, including many highly skilled roles.

Comments about the end of work as we know and understand it were made recently in an article by the University of Melbourne’s Dr Gwilym Croucher.

Prof Melbourne Centre for the
 Study of Higher Education from
 the University of Melbourne,
 Prof Gwilym Croucher.

He said: “Technology has long been predicted to disrupt working lives but as inequality grows and many lose out, its wide-reaching affects become all too clear for whole communities”.

Considering that, what do we do? Rejection of the technology will not work as it was tried in the 19th Century by a group of English textiles workers and weavers who destroyed the new weaving machinery as a form of protest.

The “Luddites”, as they became known, were protesting about the use of machinery in a fraudulent and deceitful manner too avoid standard labour practices. 

History illustrates that their efforts were for naught as technology leapfrogged them, continued its inexorably march and is now poised to pounce upon work never imagined to be victim of technology.

Interestingly, technology is of itself neither good nor bad for it is neutral and so it how we use it and for what purpose that colours its value.

Economics has been the primary driver of technology and its growth can easily be traced and linked to what it will do to financially enrich  individuals, companies and corporations.

Of course, countless examples can be identified in which technology was good for people, irrespective of their station in life, but again that technology was only developed because it brought profit to someone, somewhere.

If finding work in the future is going to be thorny, working through the issue of about whether or not we care more for profit than people is going to be prickly in the extreme.

As with most everything the understanding of something depends entirely upon from where you stand and whether or not the prism through which you view life is that of an idealist or a pragmatist.

Up front, idealism has my favour  for if we are not doing what we are doing to makes things better for people, then what are we doing, and why?

The Luddites - they were unhappy about
 the advance of technology.

Immediately the conversation gets particularly prickly for better is subjective and what is “better” for one in measurably worse for another.

And so here we stand in the Goulburn Valley, a place inextricably intertwined with the market orientated capitalist system, something we unknowingly signed up to on the day we first drew breath.

The capitalist economic system has given us many wonderful things, but within that has been the God-like technology that has sprung what many see as a trap in taking away our work.

It’s not a trap, rather an opportunity for us to reconsider our behaviour and decide, at least here in the Goulburn Valley, whether we prefer people or profit.

Let's play our part in ridding Shepparton of plastic bags

Pay five cents for the convenience of using a single use plastic bag! Yes, and that is exactly what they do in the United Kingdom.

And again, yes, that could and should happen here in Shepparton. 

Professor Wouter Pooretinga
from Cadiff University.

Of course, the first question is why? 

Put simply the plastic bags we use, almost casually and then throw away, are resource intensive and cause huge damage to our environment; an environment you and I, not to mention myriad other species depend upon to survive.

Plastic bags and petroleum are intrinsically linked. Nearly ten percent of our oil supply goes to making plastic. It is estimated that some 12 million barrels of oil a year are used in making the plastic bags used in America alone.

Our behaviour reflects that of Americans who throw away about 10 bags a week and just like our U.S. counterparts, we do pretty much the same. That’s a lot of bags. 

Most of the plastic ever produced by humanity still exists, somewhere. 

The success of the UK plastic bag charging program, the disruption it has had on habit and resultant “spillover” effects was recently discussed by a professor of Environmental Psychology from Cardiff University at a University of Melbourne lecture.

Professor Wouter Poortinga was openly excited about the success of the UK program pointing the “spillover effects” that drew people into talking about the reasons for the plastic bag charge, subsequently making them more conscious of environmental matters.

The program to charge for single use plastic bags, introduced late in 2015, has had, he explained, overwhelming support and was now been accepted by most people (95 per cent), who had switched to taking their own reusable bags when going shopping.

The reasons to rid the community of plastic bags, he explained are clearly understood by environmentalists, but even those less conscious of those urgencies, seemed to embrace the idea.

Questioned about why people took up the idea so quickly and enthusiastically, Professor Poortinga said the the money raised from the charge went to charities named by shopkeepers.

He said that it was clear to people that beyond doing the right thing by the environment, they were also helping out, even in a small way, various community charities.

It would be a wonderful project for the Shepparton Chamber of Commerce and Industry to play a part in initiating a plastic bag charging system throughout the city - it’s a classic “win win” situation.

The experience of Prof Poortinga illustrates that it is something welcomed by both retailers and the shoppers. Oh, and of course the environment!

Should we in Shepparton follow the lead suggested by Prof Poortinga, not only would we rid ourselves of the accursed plastic bag, but we could help groups such as the Shepparton-based, The Community Fund.

A wild ride into our workless future

Hold on readers, this could a wild ride!

The Goulburn Valley of today is the product of work, damn hard, concentrated, committed and thoughtful work.

Tim Dunlop's revelatory
book about work.

Let’s put that in context a little – that was, however, another and different world; a world in which much of what happened was only possible because of human effort, mostly physical and then increasingly intellectual.

With the closing of 20^th Century and now being well into the second decade of the 21^st Century, those roles are quickly being reversed – we stand on the cusp of a technological era in which work, as we now understand it, will be something fewer of us will do and unemployment will be the norm.

Is that a bad thing? Not necessarily so, particularly if we are prepared to embrace the technology our large brains have afforded and at the same time let go of trenchant ideas of jobs and growth, the mantra Australians voted for at the last federal election.

Today’s technology has the capacity to easily, effectively and economically replace people through automation with research illustrating that we are edging toward being able to use artificial intelligence for nearly half of the jobs now held by humans.

Yes, the Goulburn Valley has been built on hard work; work that has brought many practical and social benefits, but work driven by an obsession with wants rather than needs, therefore has become so distorted that many of our fundamental human characteristics have been sacrificed on the economic altar.

Much of what is good about being human has been purloined by the jobs and growth paradigm with our inventiveness, sociality, and our inherent need to thrive almost surreptitiously directed at enhancing the wealth of just a comparative few.

A workless future in which computer controlled machines do most of the work -  a computer loaded with the appropriate algorithms have been shown to be consistently more reliable than medical doctors - we must begin with the restructuring of our existing, and predominately market and profit-based economic system.

Any suggestion that we divest ourselves of capitalism, which in its modern iteration is neo-liberalism, is an anathema to those who draw sustenance from what exists.

However, Tim Dunlop wrote this year in his book, “Why The Future is Workless” about a universal basic income (UBI) for all and said: “A world that no longer revolves around paid employment, one unpinned by a universal basic income, opens up the possibility of a life of, for instance, more civic, social and community engagement.

“Of using our skills for personal satisfaction and free exchange rather than channelling into the need to earn income or profit,” Dunlop wrote.

Later he says: “Equally it follows that if technology causes rising and sustained unemployment and we don’t introduce a UBI, then we are dooming ourselves to massive social dysfunction where a small band of elites will prosper and most everyone else will live hand-to-mouth in the most obscene version of what is called trickle down economics.”

Having people with their shoulder-to-the-wheel and locked into an economic system that favours only a few, makes them more governable and so the elite will immediately argue such an idea is impossible.

However, remember what Nelson Mandella said: “It seems impossible until it’s done.”