Forty five minutes of life lost, never to be recovered

Some 45 minutes of my life was lost, never to be recovered, sitting through a rather pointless discussion at a recent meeting of the City of Greater Shepparton.

A common sight in the 19th
century, but motor oil trucks
will be a rarity in the 21st.

It wasn’t just my life, it was also that of all seven councillors, its staff at the meeting, the gallery of about 50 people and a reporter from this newspaper.

My views about where humanity is heading are less than encouraging and the intellectual fracas at the recent did little to alleviate or in fact change them.

Sitting through the discussion, I was unable to escape from the thought that in being unable to avoid status quo thinking, all ideas are dead on arrival.

Discussion about drainage in Shepparton East appeared at first something of a “no-brainer”, but quickly the conversation devolved into one about the meaning of words, amendments, notices of motion, withdrawal of amendments, explanations about existing council policies, conversations about procedural matters between the mayor, Cr Jenny Houlihan, and senior officers, until the original motion was finally put and passed.

In a world where all will be as it was, the near hour-long deliberation probably made some sense, but any thoughtful person willing to dispassionately acknowledge the unfolding dilemmas is sharply aware that cumulative changes illustrate the future will not be anything at all like what was.

We face disturbingly different times and so rather than having our council discuss such distractions as drainage schemes, we should be having a council of war.

Although the responsible men, from our PM down, never talk about such things, our future will be punctuated by problems of food, water and energy shortages, complicated by a climate foreign to human needs.

So rather than use valuable time discussing parochial problems, council needs to avoid such narrow thinking, consider the wider picture and then apply processes that will ensure the resilience of our communities; resilience that will prepare us for fulfilling lives, despite serious reductions in both energy and food.

Agriculture and so our present food system is critically dependent upon oil and natural gas, both of which are seriously depleted, despite the chest-beating about how to retrieve previously inaccessible coal seam gas and unconventional oil.

The bounty common in our
supermarkets may soon not
be so common.

Science illustrates that recovery of both is limited, can disrupt much of the surrounding geological structure, pollute aquifers causing irreparable damage and is water-use intensive, all processes we can ill-afford.

The bounty we see on our supermarket shelves is there, obviously, because of much hard work by many, but primarily because of the hydrocarbons that allow for modern food production processes.

Council needs to dramatically reduce our water use and plan for a robust resilient future in which surplus energy in all its forms will be short supply, being dramatically different from what we have known.