Shepparton people mostly know or care little about sea level rise.
Why? Well, it is geographically irrelevant as it has none, or almost no effect on the daily lives of people in the Goulburn Valley.
Most see it as situationally unimportant as the nearest ocean is about 200 km away and on the other side the Great Dividing Range, and as Shepparton is about 115 metres above sea level concerns about rising seas simply don’t compute.
And of course that is correct and so the ocean shoreline is something mostly preserved in the minds of Sheppartonians for holidays; sea level rise is most certainly not front of mind.
However, the behaviour of the world’s oceans is, interestingly, something we should be acutely curious about as our behaviour here, as remote as we might be from the world’s oceans, impacts, in turn on their behaviour, or more correctly the world’s ice sheets that hold sufficient fresh water to raise the levels of our oceans by more than 60 metres.
Many argue such massive melts and sea level rise are unlikely this century and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has suggested only about a metre by 2100, but scientist Jason Box who is studying ice melt in Greenland believes we will see two metres by the end of the century.
And again, that is irrelevant to most in the Goulburn Valley as two metres is wholly inconsequential to people here, or is it?
Well, yes, it is a concern, or should be.
We can be distracted by many things when the discussion turns to sea level rise, but in essence it is connected directly to human behaviour; our behaviour right here in Shepparton and whether or not we remain locked into our energy-rich ways or do we argue for, and support structural changes to our community, including such things as the embrace of renewable energy and a total rethink of how we move about the city, and so what our city looks like and how its infrastructure works.
Shepparton is strangely contradictory for it is in one sense modern and sophisticated and in another locked into values, ideals and habits of the mid-20th Century and it is our adherence to the latter that manifests itself as sea level rise.
Writing recently in The Guardian, Jeff Sparrow discussed the wonder of technology, something from which Shepparton his richly benefitted, and quoted author Elizabeth Kolbert, who said: “It may seem impossible to imagine, that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we’re now in the process of doing.”
That observation, Sparrow wrote, was made 13 years ago and the warnings from scientists, he added, have grown both more specific and desperate – and yet the march to destruction has only redoubled its pace.
Hard to grasp, hard to get you head around? Of course it is, but understand it we must and to better do that, read Jeff Goodell’s book, “The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World.”
