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.

We missed a chance we never really had

We have missed our chance.

Well, not really for we never, in fact, had a chance.

Rachel Carson wrote
'Silent Spring' warning
us that our
 capricious wants were
damaging the earth.

Humanity is headed in precisely the wrong direction for rather than improving the values under which humans flourish, they are worsening.

Inequality is greater now than ever; fewer people than ever control the world’s wealth, be that economic or material; class distinctions are greater than ever; and peace is more distant than ever.

What exists and the choices offered on Saturday, is and were contrary to what is needed if society is to thrive and arrive at a point from which we can build resilience.

A friend argues that “what” is without substance or reason until we understand the “how”; demonstrable realities, both big and small, refute that view, illustrating that until we understand “what” we want, “how” is hollow and irrational.

What we need is to escape from the environmentally destructive rigours of the corporatocracy that has routed democracy and in which the economy is sacrosanct, while the wellbeing of people is seemingly irrelevant.

We live in a world in which authoritarian or totalitarian governments are eschewed, but that is exactly the guise under which most of the world’s corporations and other successful businesses operate.

Solidarity and success for them comes through a command and control system, which, beyond a few rare instances and the constructed guise of democracy, are effectively despotic with an allegiance only to profit and growth.

Donella Meadows
told us about
the realities
of the 'Limits
to Growth'.

Rachel Carson, warned us in her 1962 book “Silent Spring” of how our industrial way of life was destroying nature at an alarming rate and a decade later, a team led by Donella Meadows, wrote and published “The Limits to Growth.

Carson and Meadows were castigated by the business as usual brigade, but the authors told truths, which today are being realised with the added complication that the ceaseless and careless burning of fossil fuels has damaged our climate to the extent that civilization itself is under threat.

Professor David Karoly from the School of Earth Sciences at the University of Melbourne recently warned at Swanpool that immediate cessation of our carbon dioxide emissions was our only hope of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

No option on Saturday offered anything remotely like that, in fact quite the reverse, and so now it falls upon us to gather under the umbrella of intergenerational responsibility and bond with those who want to preserve people rather than profit.

What do we do? We acknowledge that not all is not as is should be and that the promises that influenced our vote on Saturday will do naught to ease the situation; and stand and work with those mostly volunteer groups that aim to build resilient communities able to endure an unfolding age of scarcity.