Fidelity to your values, ideals, beliefs and passions is critical for wellbeing.
Sadly, I have been somewhat unfaithful to mine of late and that lack of loyalty is annoying, personally hurtful, and it brings on an intellectual dissonance.
Yes, we owe to ourselves, family, friends and others, to be, and say, what we believe in.
Reflecting on my life, it was at its richest when surrounded by a warm sense of community, when it felt as if we were all in this together, when the aim was understood, when altruism prevailed and we were remote from the root values of the market-driven world.
However, seduced by the baubles and trinkets of the consumerist world, I forgot for some time the naturally attractive lessons found in the early 70’s book “Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered” by E. F. Schumacher.
Primed by Schumacher and his ilk, I fell into learning about climate change more than a decade ago and it was reaffirmed, after listening to and reading many books by the world’s sharpest thinkers, that small really is beautiful and, unless something hitherto unknown happens within a year or two, then a “small” and restrained way of living is that is open to us.
So let’s talk briefly about values, ideals, beliefs and passions, well, mine at least.
Our addiction to 20th Century development ideals, along with our dependence on what is a broken economic system that favours a few and disenfranchises most, while tearing at Earth’s essence leaves me intellectually struggling to understand why we can’t see the senselessness of our behaviour.
We have known, unequivocally, for nearly four decades that using fossil fuels as an energy source was wrong and yet even today, those able to make the necessary changes to renewable energy still procrastinate, equivocate and lack the requisite courage to kick open the door to give humanity just the slightest chance of finding its way out of this mess.
Plans to build a new Shepparton Art Museum (SAM) costing nearly $40 million are controversial, but it seems mostly about the cost and not with regard its environmentally offensive nature.
Rather than an entirely new building, the City of Greater Shepparton should have turned to existing futuristic-like communications technology to allow the placement of administrative staff at existing buildings throughout the city, freeing up most of its headquarters building in Welsford St, Eastbank, for use as the new SAM.
Our legal processes are similar and so rather than forcing everyone to travel into Shepparton to see and feel the law at work, we should be taking the law to the people, that is we should have a virtual courthouse in every village throughout the district.
The energy we presently rely on for transport will become prohibitively expensive, and beyond that significantly disrupts Earth’s climate systems, human movement will revert to what it once was and local communities will be forced to become more self-sufficient.
Recently it fell to me to defend the idea of a super secondary school for Shepparton and although the consolidation of educational resources has clear benefits, it is an idea that offends beliefs that small is beautiful, a concept that we are going to have get much closer to and better understand as a disrupted climate system forces us to all live in a more localised way.
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| The new SAM at Shepparton's Victoria Park Lake. |
Privately owned vehicles for personal transport, cars electric or otherwise, are problematic, as is air transport; profit at the expense of another’s wellbeing falls into the same purview; privatisation is about private gain at public expense; our taxation system is fundamentally unfair favouring the few and heaping the heaviest costs upon those least able to afford it and unable to pay for legal and financial advice to avoid their moral responsibility of paying tax; our electoral system is flawed favouring a homogenised class of people in our so-called classless society - sortition (choosing names out of hat) will resolve that; yes, work is important, but not so that we have little time for anything else meaning we need to accept artificial intelligence freeing us and enabling us the time to fulfil the promise that flickered during the Renaissance, that is the embrace the arts, literature, science and learning.
We are too rich and wealth equates with an energy use and a lifestyle beyond the Earth’s resources.
Climate change, that is human-induced changes to Earth’s climate system, makes all other concerns redundant and a certain personal calmness, and wellbeing comes from learning about what is happening and why, and then being a part of a positive response.
