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.

Draughts are the enemy of energy efficient houses

Unwanted draughts are the great enemy of maintaining comfortable temperature in homes.

In the winter leaky house quickly becom

e colder and in the summer it is the reverse.

So in the winter the air you have paid to warm, and used lot of energy to achieve, escapes through the almost invisible gaps, while in summer you have again expended huge amounts energy, not to mention cash, to cool the interior of your house, only to have hot air leaking in.

Melbourne’s South East Council Climate Change Alliance (SECCCA), an amalgam of eight south east municipal councils, has worked hard to educate the community, and itself, about the challenges arising from climate change.

Understanding the limits of its influence, SECCCA has focussed, primarily, on housing and so through a collaborative project has built and set up a display home, which doubles as a community centre, where people can go to learn about planning and building a low energy use house.

Beyond housing, SECCCA considers agricultural emissions, electric vehicles, public lighting, education into schools and resource efficient farming.

SECCCA’s climate change project coordinator, Daniel Pleiter, puts draught sealing at the top “must do” things when building a new home.

He has said that also of critical importance was the orientation of the house on the block, double glazing, solar energy, insulation and shading.

Mr Pleiter has argued that draught sealing for both extremes of weather is so important in terms of conserving energy and the year-round comfort for the occupants, that people should be insisting home builder give it the highest priority.

He said new style material and processes are readily available, but even if those are not used, then a tightening up of general building standards, meaning the elimination of gaps allowing the creation of draughts, would make the home more comfortable and noticeably reduce its energy us.

That lift in building standards, something he said was relatively easily achieved, although it required some training, the correct positioning of the house on the block, insulation, solar energy and shading were relatively cheap, easy to do and would have measureable impact on both comfort and cost.

Mr Pleiter said builders were the first line of attack in improving Australia’s housing stock suggesting they needed to work hard to ensure homes they built were draught proof.

Selandra Community Place is a collaborative process involving the City of Casey, Stockland, Henley Properties Group and the SECCCA.

Members of Slap Tomorrow from Shepparton, together with the City of Greater Shepparton’s Sustainability and Environmental Officer, Mr Travis Turner, recently inspected the display building and spent nearly three hours talking with Mr Pleiter.

Slap Tomorrow is advocating for a similar house to be built in Shepparton illustrating advantages and cost savings to Goulburn.

The fragile candle of the future flickers in Shepparton

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.

Thursday night begins a journey, though rather late, when we can ponder the questions Roy asks.