Living in news vacuum, yet living in a real world

Many kids live in something of a news vacuum.

Some will cheer and whoop in support of that idea, others would be equally critical of such parenting, reflecting pretty much any position taken in life about most anything.

Backers of the idea argue that young and innocent kids should not have the graffiti of news scribbled on the blank slate that is their nascent minds.

Such a position sadly fails to acknowledge the instinctive resilient capacities of the young and adds only what weight to any issue as to how it is framed by those older people around them.

The idea that in blocking out the news of the day as a way to protect children is really little more than parents refusing to personally engage with the events of the day and so play a key role in helping their children understand whatever is happening and put it in context.

Helping your children understand the news of the day, the news of the world is among one of parenting’s prime tasks.

Inexplicably, at least to me, the same parents who create that factual news vacuum in the name of protecting their children, allow those same kids embrace the most perverse fictions.

Writing in his 2018 book, “Fictions of Sustainability: The Politics of Growth and Post-Capitalist Futures”, Boris Frankel said: “Now, countless children are raised on a diet of blockbuster disaster movies, speculative dystopias and computer games featuring the collapse of civilisation brought about by terrorists, aliens, environmental catastrophes, unstoppable pathogens and other ‘monsters’ of the commercial imagination.”

Apparently, for many kids it is OK to have their behaviours distorted by the products of that “commercial imagination”, but reality is a no, no.

Fortunately, our schools adhere to the facts and even those which engage in the pursuit of fanciful distractions do take their young students on exploratory mental expeditions, allowing them to bivouac in learning places ensuring the expansion of their thinking, helping them better understand the real world.

The arm wrestle between market-driven imaginary mutations and fact-driven realities favours the latter as illustrated recently when thousands of students from across Australia went on strike to protest our government’s inaction on climate change.

The students understand and accept the irrefutable realities of climate change, illustrating that the thousands of striking teenagers had not been locked in a news-free bubble, but were in fact much more aware of what is happening than our dismissive government.

Late last year, The Guardian newspaper reported: “The science is clear, the facts are incontrovertible, and it is unconscionable to us that our children and grandchildren should have to bear the terrifying brunt of an unprecedented disaster of our own making”. 

The news aware students simply know and understand this reality and their schools should be congratulated for encouraging such learnings and parents who ensured and embraced these realities also deserve praise.

A wicked problem defies contemporary or traditional solutions

A wicked problem is one which worsens when subjected to contemporary or traditional solutions.

The Queensland bushfires gave us
some remarkably unusual scenes.

Here in Shepparton, we were comfortably geographically remote from the hitherto unseen bushfires in Queensland, but metaphorically living next door in a climate-changed world.

The fires that were unquestionably aggravated by our disrupted climate system and many even say “caused”.

The solution, interestingly, was to fly firefighters and equipment in from all around the country using fossil-fuelled energy sources that further enrich the damage caused by a conflagration with their direct links to climate change.

And so the fires caused by climate change - not at all, according to the business a usual brigade, or almost totally in the minds of climate change advocates - fell directly into the “wicked” realm as in fighting them, that’s the solution, we added significantly to Australia’s carbon dioxide emissions.

Let’s accept for a moment we are facing a wicked problem (we are), but that is rather difficult to grasp here in Shepparton as life appears OK, beyond, that is, a striking absence of rain and severe temperatures.

The Goulburn Valley has fortunately avoided, certainly, of late, the headline-grabbing climate change-driven events that have brought catastrophes to many communities throughout Australia, and the world.

Writing in “Defiant Earth: The fate of humans in the Anthropocene” the Australian author and public intellectual, Clive Hamilton, said, “The greatest tragedy is the absence of a sense of the tragedy”.

The Professor of Public Ethics at Canberra’s Charles Sturt University, said: “The indifference of most to the Earth System’s disturbance may be attributed to a failure of reason or psychological weaknesses; but these seem inadequate to explain why we find ourselves on the edge of the abyss.”

Interestingly as some sort of hint, the America news website has said that: “It’s almost easier to despair or to will oneself into ignorance than to begin to grapple with the future”.

During a recent discussion, it was suggested that the way ahead, the way to deal with this wicked problem, was to embrace meekness, and idea that contradicts the essence of the capitalist economic system that champions aggression.

And turning again to Clive Hamilton, he points out that the forces we hoped would make the world a more civilized place – personal freedoms, democracy, material advance, technological power – are in truth paving the way to its destruction.

Albert Einstein’s suggestion that madness was doing the same thing repeatedly an expecting a different result seems to equate with the solution to the Queensland fires - using fossil fuel powered devices to solve a problem caused by a disrupted climate system that has been primarily unsettled by humans dumping excessive amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

A Yale professor of law and psychology, Dan Kahan, says climate change had become a symbol of whose side you are on in a “cultural conflict divorced from science”.

That adds to the wickedness of the problem and so one solution is the immediate change in our behaviours to encourage adaptation, along with a more restrained way of living.

Joining me at the launch of the book “Degrowth in the Suburbs”.

You, dear reader, joined me at the recent launch of the book “Degrowth in the Suburbs”.

Well, you were not actually there in person, but it was such an important moment that I took you along in spirit.

Why did I bother? 

The book, the work of Samuel Alexander and Brendan Gleeson, gives a clear understanding the difficulties arising from the energy-intensive economic system that prevails here and points to the need for altered behaviours if we are to avoid a collision with resource shortages and climate extremes.

Dr Alexander, a co-director of the Simplicity Institute and a lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Office of Environmental Programs, co-wrote the book  with the Director of the university’s Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, Professor Gleeson.

Interestingly, I have been an advocate for the densification of Shepparton and so rather than allowing, or encouraging the city, to spread in what I consider a haphazard manner into adjoining farmland, we should be restructuring the city’s rating system to make densification irresistibly attractive to developers.

However, Alexander and Gleeson were not enthusiastic about densification as we first must learn to live with a built infrastructure that will be an integral part of a towns and cities, suburbs in particular, for many generations yet.

In an interview just last week, Alexander said everything needs to be taken in context and it was dangerous to make sweeping generalisations about what is an inherently complex problem, but he said it may well be appropriate to consider a degree of densification for Shepparton.

Most of Shepparton’s infrastructure has existed for about a century and so what we are building now will have to endure whatever it is the next 100 years will bring and having listened to Alexander and Gleeson, we need to think carefully and deeply about what we build, why we build it and where we build it.

And in their book, the authors point to a “crunch” moment when there will be a collision between the world’s finite resources and human aspirations, and if not within the next few decades, then most certainly before this century is over.

Degrowth in the Suburbs is not a cheap book, something for which Professor Gleeson apologized during the launch noting that it was problem of contemporary publishing, but people here will have the chance to read it soon for free when a copy is secured by the Shepparton library.

Dr Alexander is an example to us all as his way of living, which by today’s standard is austere and yet according to him complete, rich and happy, is about sharing, living with just enough and being dependant wherever possible on renewable energy, growing his own food, and investing himself in his neighbourhood.

The work of Alexander and Gleeson allows a glimpse of the future, suggests what our response should be and, in a charming way, gives us hope.