Shepparton people know or care little about sea level rise

Shepparton people mostly know or care little about sea level rise.

Why? Well, it is geographically irrelevant as it has none, or almost no effect on the daily lives of people in the Goulburn Valley.

Most see it as situationally unimportant as the nearest ocean is about 200 km away and on the other side the Great Dividing Range, and as Shepparton is about 115 metres above sea level concerns about rising seas simply don’t compute.

And of course that is correct and so the ocean shoreline is something mostly preserved in the minds of Sheppartonians for holidays; sea level rise is most certainly not front of mind.

However, the behaviour of the world’s oceans is, interestingly, something we should be acutely curious about as our behaviour here, as remote as we might be from the world’s oceans, impacts, in turn on their behaviour, or more correctly the world’s ice sheets that hold sufficient fresh water to raise the levels of our oceans by more than 60 metres.

Many argue such massive melts and sea level rise are unlikely this century and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has suggested only about a metre by 2100, but scientist Jason Box who is studying ice melt in Greenland believes we will see two metres by the end of the century.

And again, that is irrelevant to most in the Goulburn Valley as two metres is wholly inconsequential to people here, or is it?

Well, yes, it is a concern, or should be. 

We can be distracted by many things when the discussion turns to sea level rise, but in essence it is connected directly to human behaviour; our behaviour right here in Shepparton and whether or not we remain locked into our energy-rich ways or do we argue for, and support structural changes  to our community, including such things as the embrace of renewable energy and a total rethink of how we move about the city, and so what our city looks like and how its infrastructure works.

Shepparton is strangely contradictory for it is in one sense modern and sophisticated and in another locked into values, ideals and habits of the mid-20th Century and it is our adherence to the latter that manifests itself as sea level rise.

Writing recently in The Guardian, Jeff Sparrow discussed the wonder of technology, something from which Shepparton his richly benefitted, and quoted author Elizabeth Kolbert, who said: “It may seem impossible to imagine, that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we’re now in the process of doing.”

That observation, Sparrow wrote, was made 13 years ago and the warnings from scientists, he added, have grown both more specific and desperate – and yet the march to destruction has only redoubled its pace. 

Hard to grasp, hard to get you head around? Of course it is, but understand it we must and to better do that, read Jeff Goodell’s book, “The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World.”

We are either “Vogtians” or “Borlaugains”

Most in the Goulburn Valley are either “Vogtians” or “Borlaugains”.

That is, with a few exceptions, they have a vision for the rest of this century being rooted in either technological wizardry leading to growth or, for the “Vogtians”, a willingness to step away from the relentless idea of “more”.

Author Charles C. Mann alerted us to the work of Norman Borlaug and William Vogt in his book “The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Groundbreaking Scientists and Their Conflicting Visions of the Future of Our Planet”.

He wrote: “Prophets look at the world as finite, and people as constrained by their environment. Wizards see possibilities as inexhaustible, and humans as wily managers of the planet”.

Yes, we have many here as I personally know both prophets and wizards.

Mann continues: “One views growth and development as the lot and blessing of our species; others regard stability and preservation as our future and our goal. Wizards regard Earth as a toolbox, its contents freely available for use; Prophets think of the natural world as embodying an overarching order that should not casually be disturbed”.

The ideas and values of Borlaug prevailed personally from boyhood through to my early fifties when an almost sleeping penchant for what was public as opposed to private arose from its slumber slamming into my consciousness, waking, again, my Vogtian beliefs.

Author Charles Mann noted early in his book that the future of the world depended on science, and politicians being guided by science, and, of course, he was correct.

The Goulburn Valley is recognised as one of Australia’s food bowls and that niche has been carved out through adherence to ideas and values that reach back, and beyond Borlaug’s tireless efforts that led to what became known as the “green revolution”.

The Nobel Prize winner was relentless in his efforts to create seeds that given sufficient fertilizer and water would survive various diseases and other threats to thrive, producing bountiful crops.

It was his belief in science and its ability to feed the hungry that manifested what is known today as industrial farming; such farming has saved billions of lives, but in doing so has ruptured a nexus between humans and their environment, a connection William Vogt believed should never have been broken.

However, broken it is and now that fracture is manifesting itself as a disrupted climate system that many scientists and authors see as humanity’s greatest-ever challenge.  

And we don’t know what to do. We just don’t get it.

Adherence to Borlaug’s vision has enriched the world in many ways, and the Goulburn Valley has been among the beneficiaries, but now we find ourselves in a cul-de-sac; a dead-end street and we need to look to the likes of William Vogt, and science to find an exit and navigate out way clear of this difficulty, an escape no one alive today will experience as the changes to our climate are baked-in, and so are with us for hundreds of years, if not thousands.

Well, we really do know what to do, but those changes to our behaviour are so socially unacceptable and foreign to what we are accustomed that little will happen until it is too late, which it largely is already.

Vatican climate scientist, Veerabhadran “Ram” Ramanathan, recently noted that the fate of the world was no longer in the hands of the researchers and academics, “It’s now up to us,” he said.

The final word goes to Mann: “One (wizards) sees nature instrumentally, as a set of raw materials freely available for use; the other (prophets) believes each ecosystem has an inner integrity and meaning that should be preserved, even if it constrains human actions. The choices lead to radically different pictures of how to live. What looks like a dispute over practical matters is an argument of the heart.”

A technologically thorny future for workers in the Goulburn Valley, well, everywhere really

Those presently with work in the Goulburn Valley may well have a rather thorny future.

Some estimates forecast that technological change in the next 10 to 15 years will make nearly 40 per cent of jobs in Australia redundant, including many highly skilled roles.

Comments about the end of work as we know and understand it were made recently in an article by the University of Melbourne’s Dr Gwilym Croucher.

Prof Melbourne Centre for the
 Study of Higher Education from
 the University of Melbourne,
 Prof Gwilym Croucher.

He said: “Technology has long been predicted to disrupt working lives but as inequality grows and many lose out, its wide-reaching affects become all too clear for whole communities”.

Considering that, what do we do? Rejection of the technology will not work as it was tried in the 19th Century by a group of English textiles workers and weavers who destroyed the new weaving machinery as a form of protest.

The “Luddites”, as they became known, were protesting about the use of machinery in a fraudulent and deceitful manner too avoid standard labour practices. 

History illustrates that their efforts were for naught as technology leapfrogged them, continued its inexorably march and is now poised to pounce upon work never imagined to be victim of technology.

Interestingly, technology is of itself neither good nor bad for it is neutral and so it how we use it and for what purpose that colours its value.

Economics has been the primary driver of technology and its growth can easily be traced and linked to what it will do to financially enrich  individuals, companies and corporations.

Of course, countless examples can be identified in which technology was good for people, irrespective of their station in life, but again that technology was only developed because it brought profit to someone, somewhere.

If finding work in the future is going to be thorny, working through the issue of about whether or not we care more for profit than people is going to be prickly in the extreme.

As with most everything the understanding of something depends entirely upon from where you stand and whether or not the prism through which you view life is that of an idealist or a pragmatist.

Up front, idealism has my favour  for if we are not doing what we are doing to makes things better for people, then what are we doing, and why?

The Luddites - they were unhappy about
 the advance of technology.

Immediately the conversation gets particularly prickly for better is subjective and what is “better” for one in measurably worse for another.

And so here we stand in the Goulburn Valley, a place inextricably intertwined with the market orientated capitalist system, something we unknowingly signed up to on the day we first drew breath.

The capitalist economic system has given us many wonderful things, but within that has been the God-like technology that has sprung what many see as a trap in taking away our work.

It’s not a trap, rather an opportunity for us to reconsider our behaviour and decide, at least here in the Goulburn Valley, whether we prefer people or profit.

Looking to an alternate universe through the sliding doors

A “sliding doors”-like experience revealed an alternate universe during two recent and significant Shepparton events to become the marrow around which this was formed.

Interestingly and confusingly, what was happening was clearly and obviously of this century, but equally clearly and obviously, the events were driven by and rooted in values that prevailed last century and so dominated prevalent thinking.

Strangely and even more puzzlingly, what was happening, measured by modern standards ticked all the contemporary boxes, but oddly the processes were rooted in what was, and seemed remote from what will be.

Adherence to the principle of dealing with things as they are, rather than how we would like them to be may well be a pragmatist’s view but it was not a philosophy that sat well with our forebears; those who shaped the Goulburn Valley as we know it today.

Had they not been adventurous in their thinking and reached beyond their grasp, the bounty we now enjoy would still be hidden from us, locked in reticent reflections.

About 160 people recently gathered in Shepparton’s McIntosh Centre for what was the “Goulburn Regional Assembly” – one of about 10 such gatherings initiated by the State Government throughout Victoria – in the hope that they would “set the future for the region”. The Shepparton event was for Murrindindi, Mitchell, Strathbogie, Greater Shepparton and Moria Local Government areas.

That was clearly an event of today, but it appeared largely locked in ideas from yesterday – here we were in our modern times; times that are in urgent need of disruptive ideas when most appeared to be favouring conservative notions beyond their use-by date.

Personally imagined was a world driven and sustained by disruptive, and maybe dangerous ideas but the sliding doors “thing” illustrated that instead of having fun and wrestling with new and innovative thinking, we are still flailing about in a collapsing universe, impeded by an incomplete and imperfect imagination.

It was Einstein who said something about the fallaciousness of attempting to resolve a problem with the thinking that created the trouble and who also noted that imagination was the most important of our faculties.

Those at the recent regional assembly agreed on priorities for action and although they had some merit they could have easily been from a century ago.

The sliding doors/alternate universe thing arose again with a strange immediacy at the more recent final meeting of the year of the City of Greater Shepparton Council.

Again, all the contemporary boxes of meeting process were ticked and despite the fact that on occasions the discussion was somewhat confused, all was in order except that once again the alternate universe flooded the scene, at least for me.

Goulburn Regional Partnership
 Chair David McKenzie.

A brief chat with Euroa’s Shirley Saywell at the recent McIntosh Centre assembly was illuminating when she said: “We know what needs to be done, so why don’t we just do it?”

Agreed Shirley, but sadly progress is not that simple for as you well know, it is littered with false starts, wrong turns, false hopes, the pervasive individualism that distorts the human experiment, and anarchical-like values that frequently pander to personal passions.

Our PM wants us to be agile and innovative, but of course, that is within his ideological framework.

A few agile and innovative ideas we should be considering are: working fewer hours; a universal basic income; shifting from a competitive to a cooperative economy; returning to and renewing democracy in that we choose our leaders through sortition; cutting the nation’s war/defence budget by at least two-thirds; investing richly in the public infrastructure; and understanding and preparing for energy poverty.

Sheppartonians demonstrate generosity, acceptance, and kindness

Australians have long been generous hosts.

And the Goulburn Valley is unquestionably one of the better examples of that societal generosity, acceptance, and kindness.

It has not always been smooth sailing, however, but since the gold rush days, Shepparton and the greater Goulburn Valley has been the destination of many immigrants.

What brought them here then and still does today?

Well, many things, among them agricultural and commercial prospects, a perceived social cohesion and opportunities and, importantly, that chance to belong.

And if the City of Greater Shepparton can lay claim to anything, it has become a place in which people can “belong”; something that is probably the greatest of all human needs for it is important to feel as if we belong to something, someone or somewhere.

Modern Shepparton is a concoction of cultures and beyond the occasional minor disturbance, they all live comfortably together, each enriching the other as they willingly share and dip into hitherto unknown ways of living.

What is visible here in Shepparton leads only to a mystery as to why many people are uncomfortable with the idea of sharing their space with others whom they perceive as different from them.

Those who imagine themselves as “local” should be thrilled that others want to come here as it is clearly understood that people want to migrate to places where they see good resources such as healthcare, education, stability, order and a community ready to address environmental matters such as climate change.

Shepparton has traditionally been good all those matters with the exception of the latter, which has emerged as the most important and will stress all the former.

Just a fews days ago several people, among them GPs and other academics and a couple of “ordinary” people, gathered at the University of Melbourne’s Nossal Institute for Global Health to discuss “Climate change, conflict, and migration” not with the idea of reaching any conclusion, but to better understand the dynamic.

Greater Shepparton in north eastern
Victoria is home for many and the
destination for even more.

Discussion centred on a paper from a New York university suggesting that uncertainty about the future was one of the most crucial factors that can lead to violent conflict, and in some ways perceived insecurity is more critical than actual insecurity. The Goulburn Valley delivers that much sought after sense of security.

The paper said: “As such, even if in reality migrants do not pose a significant threat to political or economic power, the perceived risk may be enough to provoke conflict.”

Shepparton’s long history of being the preferred destination for people seeking to put down new roots has manifested a sense of tolerance and understanding that is credit to the wider community.

The New York paper says: “Climate change is one of the most significant threats that mankind will need to address in the coming decades, and the potential impacts of climate variability and change on migration and conflict will remain an important area of research and policy planning.”

The challenge for all of us here in the Goulburn Valley will be to deepen our tolerance and broaden our understanding as climate disruption worsens and subsequently the inflow of new people increases.

Considering Seneca's advice and avoiding the road to rapid ruin

Good advice can frequently be found in the past and it was a Roman philosopher who knew nought about today’s challenges but to whom we ought to be listening.

Lucius Annaeus Seneca, known as Seneca the Younger, talked about how slowly things came into being and yet how quickly they could dissipate.

He said: "It would be some consolation for the feebleness of ourselves and our works if all things should perish as slowly as they come into being; but as it is, increases are of sluggish growth, but the way to ruin is rapid."

Here in the Goulburn Valley, we have had our shoulders to the wheel for nearly two centuries creating what was to become one of Australia’s richest food bowls, seeing off many threats and being equal to countless challenges, but a largely unseen and misunderstood difficulty lurks in the shadows.

Seneca the Younger talked of “sluggish growth” and warned of “rapid ruin” and now after near 200 years of growth driven by energy unleashed from fossil fuels, we face the latter.

Interestingly, those who built this fertile place, face a never before encountered nexus with the refuse from the fossil fuels that has accumulated in the atmosphere threatening rapid ruin.

A 10 000 year “Goldilocks” era, highlighted by an Industrial Revolution ignited by the liberation of energy from fossil fuels, opened the door to utopian times which are now quickly becoming dystopian.

Earth, the only planet we have, is more than four billion years old and if reduced to 24 hours, humans have been here for maybe three seconds and so in about a tenth of a second we have trashed the place, in that we are behaving like a bunch of pleasure seekers at an out of control house party.

At this point, it’s probably worth considering the question asked by Italian professor in Physical Chemistry at the University of Florence, Ugo Bardi, who wondered if we have reached the limits of human intelligence?

Now there is a question and the sentiment it implies that will undoubtedly rile many, but considered objectively, the professor has grounds for his argument for even a cursory look around the world illustrates that even the simplest of things, that cost nothing, such as kindness, friendliness, sharing and collaboration are in short supply.

Measured on the aforementioned 24-hour time scale we have only tenths of a second left to make wholesale changes to our lives, shifting from our energy-rich, accumulative, individualistic and ego-driven ways epitomized by our existing market-driven economy.

Modernity, certainly for most Australians, is attractive, but to lean on a political mantra from the early 70s, “It’s time” to challenge the market myths and in putting people before profit, willingly forego some of those promised pleasures and work to build resilience in your community and help slow Seneca’s “rapid ruin”.
 

Searching for Shepparton's 'Big Idea'

Age is about wisdom, but for youth, it is fertility.

And, it is from the latter that a local group is hoping this year to source the Goulburn Valley’s next “Big Idea”, from youthful minds, teeming with innovative thoughts.

Shepparton’s Slap Tomorrow is working with the city’s Lighthouse Project, several senior local secondary education people and representatives of the  City of Greater Shepparton to set up “Big Ideas, 2016”.

Big Ideas 2016 is about encouraging young people to think about and explore concepts that could successfully and safely take the Goulburn Valley, and all the communities in it, safely deep into the 21st Century.

A Big Idea working group has agreed to further explore the project in the hope of launching it early in the new school year to engage students and teachers and encourage them to discuss what big idea they would like to explore.

The student initiated Big Ideas would need to be unique, or significantly different from what exists giving them legitimacy for the Goulburn Valley urgently needs fresh ideas; ideas that break free sclerotic 20th Century thinking; ideas that are environmentally, socially and economically innovative and responsible.

Discussions about the Big Idea project have been energetic and wide-ranging, but the essence of what is imagined blends beautifully with the calls for ideas and innovation from Australia’s Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull.

Those appeals from the PM will reverberate with hollowness unless Mr Turnbull and his government can legislate equally innovatively to ensure that any revolutionary thoughts from such concepts as Big Ideas 2016 don’t die in their embryotic state, but are energised by State support.

Success for most of the 20th Century’s great innovations and companies, including Apple, can be traced to work done within government research organizations.

Discussing the need for State involvement to apply the innovation needed to address climate change, the author of “The Entrepreneurial State” Mariana Mazzucato said: “…we are again in the need of an active State that takes on the high uncertainty of its early stages, which the business sector fears.”

Early discussions imagine the students, and their ideas, would be guided by an acknowledged entrepreneurial mentor who could play a role in ensuring the resultant big ideas actually implemented.

But more is needed for without demonstrable and vigorous State support, most any idea, regardless of its ultimate societal value, struggles to make it through what is known as the “valley of death” – that time from infancy to commercial maturity.

The possibility of Shepparton being a centre of excellence has frequently been discussed by some and now with Big Ideas 2016 as the focus, maybe we can imagine a better way, blending what already exists to innovate our way, driven by the fertile minds of our youth, to an even greater, Greater Shepparton.

The Goulburn Valley urgently needs optimists; optimists, however who are in context

Optimists are urgently needed in the Goulburn Valley.

Herman Daly - his sound advice
has been ignored by most.

However, optimism alone is not enough for what we need are positive thinkers who understand the context of the world within which they seek their utopia.

Many careful thinkers around the world have declared this to be the decade in which we, and that is you and me, must make some fundamental and critical decisions about our behaviour and so how we use and apply earth’s limited resources.

Being half-way through this vital decade our options are becoming fewer and so this is the year we must decide.

Yes, we either waste it pondering the past or apply our intuition, inventiveness and imagination and go somewhere we have never been before, the future.

And so what will we do?

With a country lead by people with values rooted in 20th Century and seemingly afraid of addressing tomorrow, it is likely we will continue to look at life through the prism of what was.

It is misplaced optimism that has brought us to where we are now; optimism that has diverted our attention elevating the economy to God-like status, blinding us to other possibilities, other ways of living, of being a healthy compassionate and considerate community; a community that understands that infinite growth on a finite planet is not only problematic, but impossible.

Embarking on the second week of 2015 and surrounded by what are generally narcissistic New Year resolutions, it seems we need to lift our gaze and consider the views University of New South Wales lecturer, Dr Ted Trainer.

Dr Trainer, who writes about sustainability and justice, has said on The Conversation (a joint universities website): “It is also now clear that increasing the GDP in a rich country does not improve the quality of life!”

“This is what the ‘limits to growth’ literature has been telling us for decades, but most economists, politicians and ordinary people still fail to grasp the point,” he writes.

Conscious of that we need to consider and act on what a senior economist in the Environment Department of the World Bank, Herman Daly, said in the early 70s about the need for a Steady State Economy.

Daly, like many others since, pointed to the weaknesses of our existing economic system, noting that it favoured only a few, marginalized most and left the bulk of humanity limping toward extinction.

Yes, we need optimists; people who can see beyond what exists, understand there is another way and stand up and holler in support of American linguist and  philosopher, Noam Chomsky, who has repeatedly argued that we should put people before profit.

Arguments that without profit we can do nought are fallacious – optimism and educative, innovative and ecologically responsible ideas are unstoppable.

Energy is the foundation of life

Energy is the foundation of life in the Goulburn Valley.

Whatever form you choose: it makes our cars go, warms and cools our houses, makes the trees and grass grow, fattens our animals, takes us around the world and takes our kids to school, allows us to make and use things and, in a more intimate sense, literally makes our heart beat.

Energy in all its varied forms is what has allowed humans, who have understood it best, to build and develop a complex society which, without energy would collapse.

Read Ugo Bardi’s “Extracted” and you begin to understand that fossil fuel-based energy upon which modern civilization is founded came from two specific periods in earth’s history, 90 and 150 million years ago.

It is unlikely the world will ever exhaust its fossil fuels, rather they will become so expensive and difficult to extract that economically, we will be forced to leave them in the ground.

Beyond that, there is the further complicating factor – the burning of fossil fuels has altered the chemical makeup of earth’s atmosphere and is changing weather patterns to such a degree that humanity is edging closer to the abyss.

Some people have thought deeply about this challenge and on Friday of next week, the Shepparton-based group, Slap Tomorrow, will present a forum in Mooroopna at which the idea of powering tomorrow will be explored and discussed.

Leading discussions will be the Associate Professor and Deputy Director of the Institute of Environmental Studies at the University of New South Wales, Dr Mark Diesendorf.

Dr Disesnedorf, who has written the book “Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change” is convinced, and can illustrate how Australia could be powered now by renewable energy, if we only had the will.

With him will be a director of Applied Horticultural Research and an adjunct Professor of Horticultural Crop Physiology with the University of Sydney, Dr Gordon Rogers

He has a PhD in crop physiology, and 24 years in agronomy and crop physiology specialising in sustainable horticultural production systems, crop water uptake and irrigation in horticultural crops.

Dr Rogers can help farmers understand how they can apply renewable energy to their agricultural processes.

Dr Mark Diesendorf.

A third speaker is a PhD student from the University of Melbourne, David Coote, who has focussed his studies and research on community-scale woody biomass energy systems, the integration of bioenergy with solar power, small scale on-farm use of renewable energy and biodiesel manufacture.

Overseeing the September 26 forum will be thinker, comedian and advisor to the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne, Rod Quantock.

The world’s conventional energy sources are either past their peak, or unusable and next week’s Slap Energy forum will shine a light on a new and renewable energy future.

Do what you can to ensure SPC Ardmona's future, momentarily at least

Yes, each of us needs to do what we can to ensure the survival of Shepparton’s SPC Ardmona processing plant, for the moment at least.

One need not look too far or too deep to see and understand good reasons why the factory and the infrastructure it depends upon play a critical role in the economic wellbeing of this community.

Visit The News to add you weight to campaign.

Broaden you view and quickly it become obvious that the much lauded level-playing field is, and always has favoured the few.

Yes, we need SPC Ardmona to stay about for a while, but just long enough for us to learn about, and understand what it is we need to do to build a Goulburn Valley-wide community sufficiently resilient enough to withstand the unfolding society-wide shocks of the next few decades.

Rather than allow our communities to become implicated in the narrow financial definitions of globalization and instead of pursuing ever expanding growth, we should be working for “just enough growth”.

Success of a business should not be measured by a particular percentage growth each year, rather through its contribution to the community from which it draws its workers and to how many people it provides regular employment.

Success should not be measured through the raw brutality of the bottom line, rather whether or not that company is an integral player in the richness of the community in which it operates and within that how it embraces and cares about everyone from initial suppliers to the final customer.

Without stumbling into the rhetoric of the doomsayer, let’s us acknowledge that the future, even the immediate future, is going to be different from what has been, and is.

So what do we do? First, and of critical importance is to support this newspaper’s campaign to press our politicians to support short term goals of SPC Ardmona.

We need as much time as we can leverage to ready ourselves for an energy-depleted future as we surrender a lifestyle that is enlivened, almost totally by oil and coal.

Technophobes promise all sorts of wondrous energy solutions, but the few existing and scalable ideas, beyond simply using less, are solar and wind.

Support solar and wind ideas; support projects that encourage people to initially use less energy; live closer to where you work; cycle and walk where possible and look to your community to source whatever it is you need, including your food.

Join and support groups which are doing what they can to help us understand how we live fulfilling lives in an energy depleted future; read, read and read, and listen, listen and listen to learn about the societal instability that is arising from the exponential growth of recent decades.

For the record: our Federal MPs have received my SPC Ardmona plea.

Emulating the complexity of nature

“What we failed to appreciate is how quickly the ‘scaffolding’ of civilisation became so elaborate and so energy intensive and so unknowable”.

So said Wes Jackson in his 2011 book “Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture”.

Jackson, a Kansas-born biologist who founded "The Land Institute" where he has attempted to emulate nature on a farm, studying environmental ethics, exploring appropriate technology and educating others, is alarmed at the amount of fossil fuel energy consumed in getting food from the paddock to the plate.

He says the fossil fuel epoch is ending, the world’s arable soils have been irreparably degraded or lost, and hovering above that fragile superstructure is the unfolding dilemma of a damaged climate.

Those thoughts or similar concerns will be on the minds of those Goulburn Valley people who gather on Sunday at Shepparton’s Victoria Park Lake to illustrate their concern about society’s disregard for matters discussed by Jackson, particularly climate change.

Sunday’s gathering at the lake is a part of the Australia-wide Get-Up National Day of Climate Action in which people from cities, towns and villages throughout the country will illustrate their concern for climate change.

The Tony Abbott-led Coalition has dismembered government bodies and through that has effectively ended any possibility of Australia, or Australians, helping the world ease what is becoming, or is, a catastrophic reality.

Where we are at, and how and why we arrived, is something easily understood.

Our predecessors saw their first sunrise about 200 000 years ago and we muddled along keeping everything pretty much in balance until the agricultural revolution about 10 000 years ago and with food being reliable and more widely available, our numbers grew exponentially.

Some 200 years ago came the industrial revolution and that coupled with our natural inquisitiveness, innovation, experimentation and application saw us access the billions of years of energy locked in fossil fuels, described by some as “ancient sunlight”.

All that was fine until it became apparent we had broken the pact with nature that assured balance and the earth’s biosphere was in desperate trouble as we considered nature’s sinks, the atmosphere and oceans, as bottomless pits for our refuse.

Humans have many laudable qualities, but an equal number of less than honourable traits, among them, recklessness and even though it is obvious we depend entirely upon finite and depleting fossil fuels that have given us exponential growth in every sense and with that a desperately damaged climate, we still allow ourselves to be governed by climate change skeptics who idolize growth.

Sunday’s National Day of Climate Action is about solidarity of thought and illustration to government that the people are restless about their apparent disinterest in climate change.

Neoliberalism puts profits ahead of people

A world order that profits on inequalities crafted to answer neoliberal desires is sliding into disarray.

Naom Chomsky

That paradigm, which enriches a few and financially, psychologically and physically cripples many, is bringing a disorder that most of Australia’s comfortable can’t understand.
Many in the Goulburn Valley stand among the comfortable and while just a few see the inevitable, many feel a shiver of uncertainty as “they” appear equally undecided about what to do next.
Neoliberalism is a notion that has surreptitiously swept up most political isms leaving nearly all vulnerable to an ideology that flourishes in a greenhouse-like magical aura that corporate financed public relations machinations have convinced us is right and proper.
The ideology is about smaller taxes for the wealthy, fewer limitations and restrictions on doing business, the dismantling of public education and social welfare programs and, of course, the removal of anything that might interfere with the working of the free market.
Writing in the preface for Naom Chomsky’s “Profit Over People”, Robert W.McChesney said: “At their most eloquent, proponents of neoliberalism sound as if they are doing poor people, the environment, and everybody else a tremendous service as they enact policies on behalf of the wealthy few”.
Neoliberalism is one of those places where democracy goes to die as its adherents are happiest when the citizenry is largely depoliticized and pre-occupied with various frivolities leaving it advocates unhindered as they continue to exploit the world for their private gain – in essence privatizing the profits and socializing the costs.
The arrival of neoliberalism has been so silent, and subsequently unannounced, that few have had the opportunity to attempt to understand the risk it brings to the broader well-being of our society.
Rarely can we point a finger at any one thing and argue that we are watching neoliberalism at work for it has permeated society to such an extent that its manoeuvres appear normal.
Its stratagems are not in the broader interest of society and so the responsibility falls upon each of us to step back from life’s distractions at least long enough to consider what is and isn’t in our best interests.
Having reached a workable conclusion, our task doesn’t end there for it is at that point we need to engage with democracy and have make our presence felt at the ballot box.
That, however, is not end of our involvement, rather it is really just the beginning of democracy and the casting of your vote should be little more than a prelude to involving ourselves in helping piece together ideas that will make our community more socially equal, and a collaborative and happier place that enriches communities, rather than individuals – that is the ideal, but the neoliberal doctrine delivers something quite different.

A steady flow of ideas boost and protect civilization

Civilization is a fragile thing.

The late Ann Rand
who said culture
cannot exist without
a constant stream of
 ideas.

Its veneer of decency is all that protects us from the brutality of the mob.
And that sliver of integrity between good and evil has, for the want of ideas, obviously failed in parts of Great Britain.
That scarcity of ideas has been equalled on two recent occasions here in the Goulburn Valley, although with a distinctively different outcome, thanks to restraint of those who felt the sharp end of that dearth of ideas.
Little protects us from what we have witnessed in England with the levee that stands between us and that angry anarchy being nothing more than one good life-affirming idea upon another.
A poverty of ideas, or a life built around muscle, brutality and a disregard for others, brings upon those in that life, the chaos seen in Britain or to a lesser degree what has happened here – the closure by Heinz of its Girgarre plant and the sacking of 150 people from SPC Ardmona.
Interestingly it is not so much simply an absence of ideas that creates the vacuum, as it is also a failure to even consider that there might be a different, and better, way to do things.
The late author and philosopher Ann Rand said that a culture cannot exist without a constant stream of ideas and the alert, independent minds who originate them.
Sadly the freewheeling values of our commercial world are the reverse of what their proponents believe them to be as they are contrastingly quite narrow, being primarily about growth and profit for a few at the expense of many.
What began in Britain as something of a pillory of those values was quickly seen by others as an opportunity to promote different values and so it exploded socially, resulting in death, injury and theft, and property damage.
Ideas are the oxygen of anything and everything – it was little more than an idea that first saw the Girgarre plant opened; an idea closed it; and an idea will hopefully see it reborn.
Today’s commercial world is nomadic and responsive only to profit and growth, but that will change as our access to abundant energy ends, within a decade or so, and businesses that understand and are able to operate in a steady state economy, will finally be putting down roots.
When that happens, what we know and understand as civilization will be given a significant boost for following the death of globalization, international trade and travel, we will see the re-birth of the true local community; a tight-knit social structure that hinges on the well-being of people, not things.
Civilization, just like nature on which it depends, is fragile and should we treat either badly, they will change, sometimes beyond recognition.

Famine in Somalia and U.S. debt problems have similar solutions

Famine in Somalia is linked inextricably to seemingly unrelated matters.
Obviously many are starving, but the reasons are not as clear as most imagine as hunger is just the most obvious symptom of deeper and more complex issues.

Nobel prize winning
economist, Amartya Sen,
  has views about life
  that would benefit
Somalia and probably
the U.S.

Oddly, and interestingly, those same matters are concepts to which we here in Australia, and by default the Goulburn Valley, should attend with both clarity and eagerness.
Democracy, uninhibited by greed and a lust for power, has rarely, and maybe never, allowed for conditions in which people have wanted for the necessities of life.
In a genuine democracy people have legitimate and ready access to decision makers and so can influence processes ensuring that food is broadly and readily available to all.
That same democracy also ensures individual rights, equality, and justice and within that safeguards access to food, which according to Nobel prize-winning economist, AmartyaSen, is best achieved through freedom, civil rights, economic freedom, social opportunities, transparency in dealing with government and others.
Those critical human civilities have been somewhat absent from Somalia and so the solution is not simply about providing more food, rather it is about helping the Somalians unscramble the workings of a society left emaciated after a few lunged for power and the rest of the world embraced globalization.
The solution for Somalia rests not with the economy, rather with an understanding of what it is that ignites and maintains human happiness and within and beyond that, an individual’s well-being.
The people of Somalia, and the rest of the world for that matter, will only be adequately fed when the focus is on people as opposed to things.
America presently wrestles with its multi-trillion dollar debt and sees the solution in economic terms when in reality the spotlight needs to be turned toward those things that are lamentably missing in Somalia – civil rights, equality, social opportunities, transparency and a return to the root meaning of democracy in which people actively engage with the administration of their lives.
The idea that economic growth can and will continue indefinitely is dead and survival on our finite world is now about building communities that are resilient, sustainable, adaptable and, of course, both happy and content.
A rare few, comparatively, find that ever elusive happiness and contentment through the economy, while most find nought but delusion and discontent.
The Somalian solution will not be easy, straightforward or simple, but it begins through the application of those things such as civil rights, equality and freedom as discussed by Sen.
The American situation is equally complex, for different reasons, but a solution for the U.S. is also to be found with a drive toward civil rights, equality, decency and the abandonment of the idea that a growth-based economy is a cure-all.