Our first duty is to our health, for without it everything becomes irrelevant

Without your health everything else becomes irrelevant.

A person who is both mentally and physically intact is as well-equipped as they can be to confront and deal with whatever challenges life might present.

Shepparton-based group, Slap Tomorrow, is concerned unfolding changes to our climate threaten community health and so has arranged for four speakers to visit the city on Thursday and discuss how we live in and deal with a climate different from that with which we are familiar.

Your health is, of course, your business until, that is, that moment when “your business” becomes someone else’s business and so is a measurable cost to society.

Climate change, shown to be unequivocally real and a clearly a result of human activities, will unquestionably injure our health and as is the case individually, be a measurable cost to society.

Rather than taking the Federal Government’s present course of dismantling everything that helps us understand and mitigate climate change, we should be working to build a nation that instinctively lessens the damage and creates a resilient society.

We, that is you and me, have elected a national government that sees itself beyond the limitations of science and although it claims acceptance of climate change, its behaviour suggests something quite different.

Extreme weather events, worsened by climate change, throughout Australia have produced obvious massive physical damage, but largely invisible has been the health costs that often don’t appear until months, or years after the event.

Health, as is the case with so many other things, is not something you appreciate until it is gone.

Climate change has the potential to erode our health, not just individually, but in penalizing all of society and although we all lead busy lives, each of us needs to spend a couple of hours learning about how we can best understand and behave in a different climate, particularly if we value our health.

Listening to and learning from the quartet coming to Shepparton on Thursday can be the edge of a local individual response, but nationally it is somewhat more complex as our present government has declared Australia “open for business” taking us down a path contrary to what is needed if Australia is to play a meaningful part in easing the causes of climate change.

Australia was, until recently, among the leaders in climate change mitigation, but Tony Abbott and his cohort have dismantled our global warming-defence infrastructure, exposing us to the mirth of the world and hugely risking the health of Australian’s.

The wealth of a community is not truly measured in acquisitions and wealth, rather in that same community’s general health and a broader wellbeing that is remote from the celebrated profit and growth mandate of our market driven system.