The fragile candle of our future flickers in Shepparton on
Thursday night.
 |
| The passionate and articulate, Arundhati Roy. |
A trio of speakers, marshalled on the night by Professor
Kate Auty, will talk about opportunities arising from our changing climate, but
deep within that conversation will be an urgency on which our understandable future
hinges.
Thursday night’s “Slap Tomorrow – A Wake-Up Call” is about
our communities understanding, accessing and utilizing opportunities that
surface as we adapt to our changing climate.
Beyond that, Thursday night, in an almost unrecognized
sense, is about this community re-imagining how it lives; it’s about our
institutions; it’s about our governance; it’s about how we treat each other;
it’s about regaining a sense of who we are, understanding why we are here and
what is our purpose; it’s about an appreciation of our intergenerational responsibilities;
and it’s about, importantly, securing
the resources on which humanity is dependent –clean air, drinking water, food
production, stable climate and a rich biodiversity for natural ecosystem
function and the benefits of nature in providing human psychological health and
the sustenance of countless other species critical to our lives.
It is not a debate about whether or not climate change is
happening for the evidence is conclusive; humans have interfered with earth’s
atmosphere to the extent that the Holocene, an epoch in the world’s history
that has allowed humans to thrive, is collapsing.
Our voracious capitalist and market driven world has
polluted not only most everything in the biosphere, but it has also invaded our
minds leaving many of us intellectually crippled and so unable to understand
and comprehend the threats to our future.
Helping us break out of that status quo-induced mental
prison will be the co-founder of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Anna
Rose; a Sydney based professor recognised through the world for her innovative
ideas about the re-use of materials, Prof Veena Sahajwalla; and environmental
communications consultant, Rob Gell.
Thursday night’s conversation is about recognizing and
adapting to opportunities emerging from our changing climate, but deeply
implicated within those discussions are questions about what happens next?
Writing in her 2009 book “Listening to Grasshoppers: Field
Notes on Democracy”, Arundhati Roy, asked what happens now that democracy and
the Free Market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin,
constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of
maximizing profit?”
She argues that what we need now for the survival of
this planet, or at least conditions in which humans can thrive, is long-term
vision.
Thursday night’s conversations are about that
urgently need long-term vision; they will be about our intergenerational
responsibilities; and they will be about escaping from what Roy describes
escaping from our “greatest folly”, our near-sightedness.
Roy wrote: “Our amazing intelligence seems to have
outstripped our instinct for survival.
“We plunder the earth hoping that accumulated material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable things we have lost,” she said.
“We plunder the earth hoping that accumulated material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable things we have lost,” she said.
Thursday night begins a journey, though rather late,
when we can ponder the questions Roy asks.
