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.

Living the 'good life' demands a Steady State Economy

It is dramatic, but humanity stands nervously and with decided uncertainty in shadows cast by a pall of serious environmental degradation.

Herman Daly.

The world shudders as man, who equates success with growth and has long enjoyed a free ride, can hear the banker, nature, saying “enough is enough”.

Rather than reach for an economy that is always expanding, it is time we reset the economical thermostat and attuned ourselves to understanding and living with a Steady State Economy.

Growth for the sake of yet more growth, an author and professor of environmental studies and politics, David Orr, says is a bankrupt and eventually lethal idea.

Author and Canadian academic, science broadcaster and environmental activist, David Suzuki has said: "Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal."

One of the founders of the field of ecological economics and a leading critic of neoclassical growth theory, Herman Daly, has defined a Steady State Economy.

He says it is: “An economy with constant stocks of people and artifacts, maintained at some desired, sufficient levels by low rates of maintenance ‘throughput’, that is, by the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy from the first stage of production to the last stage of consumption.”

A Steady State Economy, therefore, aims for stable or mildly fluctuating levels in population and consumption of energy and materials. Birth rates equal death rates, and production rates equal depreciation rates.

Complex? Probably, but no more than that which would confront us if we sat down now with a blank slate to design what exists; a process that has unleashed massive inequality and equally distressing environmental ruin around the world.

What we have works for a rich minority – less than one per cent of Americans control most of the country's total wealth, and although Australia is different, it is similar.

A Steady State Economy would inherently embrace a redistribution of wealth, arriving at a point at which rewards were not recognized in dollars, rather in happiness and contentment enabling an escape from the proven pointless rigour of the traditional measure of economic success, the Gross National Product (GNP).

The GNP is simply the flow of money, that in no way separates good from bad and so payment to skilled workers is measured just as is the cost of providing relief to communities damaged by recent tornado in north-east Victoria; repairing flood damaged Numurkah or Nathalia; restoring large swathes of Victoria drowned in flood waters or attending to the death and damage of Victoria’s Black Saturday fires.

A Steady State Economy makes the good life possible, uninhibited growth condemns it.