An almost impassable chasm stands between articulation and implementation

Between the articulation and implementation of a goal lies an almost impassable chasm.

We need to step back from the edge,
re-think our behaviour and choose a
wholly new direction.

The journey from promise to reality is pockmarked with disappointments, deceptions, social and economic difficulties and consequences, both unexpected and unintended.

Intertwined with this hazardous journey from promise to fact is the added confusion of ideologies, and although firmly believed by their protagonists, they frequently do little to help people break free of the many myths and fantasies that colour and confuse our lives.

The recent Federal Budget, and now the Victoria State election, ignited near endless ideological conversation about what will and won’t work, but rarely, if ever, are we able to judge anything without first reflecting on its economic cost.

That is understandable, but sad in the extreme and is the outcome of a market driven-life in which reward for effort is measured in money, with intelligence and influence is mostly attributed to those who have excelled in commercial life and have both burgeoning bank balances and life loaded with consumerist goods.

Our understanding of success in a life measured only by physical possessions and the instinct for gambling and craftiness that survival in our embedded market system demands is wrongheaded.

Rather than being slaves to the economy, we should be working hard for people, putting humanity first, and we are not.

Ideologues repeatedly tell us that until the economy is repaired, as is the chorus from the present Federal Government, Australia is not secure and cannot progress.

The latter are both subjective and beyond that are ideologically conditional and bound-up in myths and falsehoods sold to us as unavoidable realities.

Those “unavoidable realities” are nothing more than human constructs – we built them and so we can be re-build them with intent and effort equal to what it took to assemble them.

Post World War Two brought
burgeoning budgets, but the arrival
of the 2000s saw them fall away.

So the goal is that we build a life in which the rights and welfare of people are more important than profit, but between us and our destination lays that near impassable chasm and crossing it means a re-think, the fracturing of our allegiance to the military/industrial complex that feeds off conflict and human misery and the recognition that needs will always trump our wants.

The responsible men claim their ideological growth-driven pragmatism will ensure a re-birth of the post Second World War halcyon days when fossil fuels were abundant and cheap.

The game, however, has changed and never again will we see the once commonplace surging economies and so rather than dither on the edge of the chasm, we need to step back, re-imagine our lives and strike out in a wholly different direction, one in which we find contentment from collaborative communities; places where the economy again becomes a tool and a servant, rather than a template and the master.

Building has a life of 200 years, but is it renewable?

Tony Abbott makes his prognostications from a building in Canberra designed to last at least 200 years.

Australia's new parliament house
 - under construction in the eighties
 and designed to last 200 years.

The PM’s predictions, even considered generously, might apply to the next 20 years; just a tenth of the life of our “new” Parliament House opened in 1988 in Canberra.

Architect Romaldo Giurgola faced constraints in creating Australia’s new administrative home, among them that the building must remain viable for 200 years; an idea deserving applause and one, you would hope, would apply to decisions made by the occupants.

The ideas, policies and processes they consider need to be arrived at and seen through the lens of the long-view; that is they need to look far beyond the damaging limitations of the electoral cycle and plan for a future far exceeding the limited horizon of modern politics.

Writing in the “Clock of The Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World’s Slowest Computer”, Stewart Brand discusses ideas that go well beyond the 200 years mandated for our 1988 parliament house.

He argues that we should all, and that includes politicians, be thinking thousands of years ahead.

The Shepparton-based group, Slap Tomorrow, has its ideas and hopes clearly rooted in today, but are sharply aware that tomorrow is going to be decidedly different place in that it will insist in on a fresh approach to living.

Conscious that energy in all its forms allowed for the creation of what exists today, but understanding traditional forms of energy are finite and in serious depletion, Slap Tomorrow is organizing a public September forum at which energy will be discussed.

The keynote speaker for that event will be the associate professor from the University of New South Wales, Mark Diesendorf, who presently teaches environmental studies and was the author of “Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change” published last December.

Writing in his new book, Prof Diesendorf, who like the Slap Tomorrow group is conscious of existing societal dynamics, said that without credible visions of a sustainable future and strategies to achieve them, it will be impossible to avoid devastating, irreversible changes to earth’s climate.

Discussing the transition to an ecologically sustainable, energy secure future, Prof Diesendorf said there will be “winners and losers”

“Jobs in fossil fuels will decrease, while jobs in energy efficiency, renewable energy and public transport will increase,” he wrote.

He discussed the need for government policies to ensure a socially just transition away from a fossil fuel-based society to one relying on renewable energy.

“Unfortunately,” he wrote, “some governments articulating the dogma of ‘leave it to the market’ appear reluctant to make any effort to smooth industrial transitions”.

Parliament House will be there long after Mr Abbott has left the building and we can only hope that somewhere in his legacy is a flicker of renewable energy.

The demise of Holden brings moment of sadness, spiced with apprehension about our response

Strangely, I felt quite emotional when the news broke yesterday about the 2017 demise of Holden.

Strange, because of vehicles my dad owned, I grew with an allegiance to Fords, but had never really identified with the Ford-Holden debate.

The past decade had seen me become quite sensitive about the inordinate amount of public money being spent on the car industry, either in its sustenance or in provision of roads and other public infrastructure afforded the motor vehicle.

Public transport made huge sense in that the cost to individuals was vastly cheaper and the societal costs, including such things as injury and death and damage, that which is obvious and that which is not so readily apparent, was equally massively reduced through the use of trains and buses.

Good sense told me that the world didn’t need a private car industry, rather an intricate, efficient and well quipped public transport system that would be rich in jobs and having made the transition from private transport use to a public system we would find most of our needs adequately answered.

The demise of the car industry, even this tiny segment, seemed for someone concerned about the impact of private cars on earth’s atmosphere, and their wasteful use of earth’s finite resources, like a moment for jubilation.

So why the sad face

Rather than sad it is apprehensive for from here we can evolve to become a society that puts the public need ahead of private wants in that we could see this as an opportunity to launch a new way of doing things.

The need for Holden epitomizes
our addiction to private
answering our private wants.

Apprehension arises from our deep addiction to private wants that will likely frustrate the much needed societal changes that are about resilience, sharing and putting the public need ahead of individualism, a much celebrated trait in modern society.

Interestingly, Holden has been a part of my life – the car first rolled into Australian life when my first birthday rolled by and the last Holden will roll off the assembly line when my 70s roll along.

That, really, means nothing, just the hope that another 70 years will not pass before we can understand the folly of our dalliance with globalization, and how dearly we are paying for that liaison.

Hopefully we will also apply ourselves to creating processes not beholden to the mercy of fossil-fuelled fantasies such as those to which the motor industry is obliged.

Holden played an integral and important part in Australia’s development, but it’s time is past and rather than hover over the corpse we need to shift our gaze to a future that will be quite different from what was.

Declining energy reserves, a damaged climate and a disordered economy suggest we should be focussing on affairs closer to home.

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.

The sun sets on the era of cheap and abundant energy

Pause, if you will, look back and take in the spectacular sunset as the era of cheap and abundant energy slips below the horizon.

Windmills could again be common as we
 witness the sun set on the era of cheap 
and abundant energy.

It’s over: nearly three centuries of phenomenal growth ignited by humanity’s cleverness and hard work, made possible by the unleashing of ancient sunlight in the form of fossil fuels, is ending.
The feast is finished and a famine of energy is shaping to bring on what is in fact a true famine, a decided dearth of food to feed earth’s ever-growing population.
As with other life forms, human numbers ballooned when the circumstances allowed and in that goldilock’s-like epoch, those years when it was not too hot or too cold and we had, thanks to oil, a team of labourers working non-stop for us.
However, those “labourers” are tiring and soon, after a couple of centuries of our wasteful use of the ancient sunlight that became, among other things, oil, the tireless work they have done will again fall to us, changing our lives in ways we can’t yet even contemplate.
Enjoy the sunset for the following sunrise will be a red sky in the morning, which, if we take note of a sailor’s adage, will be a warning.
I feel like weeping as the realization that this wonderful life is ending sweeps over me, but then my optimism returns as the wonder of human resilience, innovation and tenacity fills my mind.
We have lived for nearly three centuries as if the limitations of nature were irrelevant, arrogantly striding the world confident that humanity had successfully manipulated the world to suit itself when all along it was Mother Nature who was actually in charge.

The late
E.F.Schumacher.

We stand between an emotional sunset and a troubling dawn that will introduce us to a new era in which the comforts of the past couple of centuries will evaporate, meaning the essential positivity that has sustained us for decades will still be in demand, but directed at different outcomes.
The dichotomy between never-ending growth, something most economists consider the epitome of good business, and earth’s ecological finitude illustrates an alarming, and a societal threatening, misunderstanding of realities.
The late author, E.F.Schumacher, discussed the realities of primary and secondary goods with the former being provided by nature and the second by human effort.
Beyond that, however, there are tertiary goods where fanciful abstractions on the world’s economy created from nothing are ultimately worth nothing.
The serious shrinkage of fossil fuels, complicated by a crumbling economy takes us closer to the abyss, but standing between us and that fall is the richness, versatility, resilience and tenacity of our fellows and if we stand with them, then that striking sunset will lead to a different,  but better,  day.

A secure and non-violent future demands a daring, daunting and perilous mission

Grand and heroic projects are sadly most often allied with violent historical epochs, but life has evolved to present us now with an even more daring, daunting and perilous mission.

Nonviolence will play a
key role in addressing global
 warming.

Faced with global warming; entrenched inequality; crumbling economics; the exhaustion of our fossil fuels, particularly oil; exponential population growth; the degradation of the world’s top soils; vandalism of our forests; the looming crisis of our food supplies; the erosion of our humanity by God-like technology; the collapse of earth’s bio-diversity and endless wars brought about by a surreptitious and misunderstood anger that has infiltrated life at every level, we look, with desperation, for the exit sign.
Many turn to supernatural forces or beings in their search for a solution, but the answer they seek is right here, with us, we hold it in our hands or, at least, in our way of thinking.
The remedy rests with nonviolence and although that might seem easy and achievable, it is not. Living a genuine, and unflinching, nonviolent life is only possible through a courageous and radical reshaping of our lives: a truly grand and heroic project.
That said and accepted, where do we start? Facing sweeping emotionally and seemingly overwhelming difficulties, many do nothing, but to lean, for a moment, on a cliché – the journey to anywhere, in this case nonviolence, begins with the first step.
That first step can be here, in Shepparton, or more intimately, in your mind and that beginning is simply about using language that is nonviolent, both in terms of the words you use and, importantly, their intent.
Although subtle, such a change can alter your understanding and interpretation of events and equally how others feel about what is happening in their lives.
Along with paying attention to what we say, and how we say it, we should consciously avoid anything that normalizes violence, something about which the mainstream media is frequently guilty.
Television is among the worst offenders and so should be simply turned off, and other information sources – newspapers, magazines, books, movies and the various forms of social media – should be treated with caution and accessed selectively.
Much of what we imagine entertainment, and frequently sport, is fanciful cloaked violence and our modern commercial world is about winners and losers in which covert violence boosts bank balances.
Genuine nonviolence is a concept so difficult to both comprehend and employ that is rarely has any true traction prompting the observation from one that nonviolence was tried for a week and abandoned as it didn’t work, ignoring the fact that centuries of violence have completely failed humanity.
Bad things happen quickly, good things take time – violence springs from our ancient, reptilian brain; nonviolence arises from modern, sophisticated and mature brains.

Turn out the lights before our lights go out, literally

People around the world engage in various pursuits aimed at preserving our fossil fuels and so help avoid the implications of climate change.
In the early 60s we had an important idea, widely implemented, that did both those things and actually was cheaper and was without the need for any complex carbon reduction pollution schemes.
Turning of street lighting may well make low wattage light globes, green shopping bags and hybrid powered cars redundant.
Walking home as young man from the weekly Saturday night dance (yes, we had them then and they were alcohol free, which didn’t mean drunks were not about) at one o’clock in the morning (the dance ended at midnight) and the streets would suddenly go dark.
Our way of life then saw all our street lights turn off at 1am - an inbuilt country-wide Carbon Reduction Pollution Scheme (CPRS) that must have had a huge impact on our demand for electricity.

'It is as simple as throwing a switch'

Leading US climatologist, Dr James Hansen, is overtly concerned about our burning of coal to generate electricity as it is, he argues, the most voluminous of all those gasses that impinge on the effectiveness of our atmosphere.
It is as simple as throwing a switch and turn off the lights, but the resultant complications are not so simple – darkness shrouds the playground of those who strain at a law abiding life and who often play in the dark by their own rules, mostly at the expense of others.
There are few workable alternatives to coal powered electricity generation with nuclear power most able to meet base loads being (something Dr Hansen advocates), but which brings with it baggage that humanity would be unwise to lug about.
Beyond helping save the planet, turning our street lamps out early would save money – presently some 6000 lamps cost the Greater City of Shepparton about $40 000 a month.
The answer appears obvious to those of us who nervously fear the other and what is different, and the dark, but unimpeded thinking, free from distraction and emotion can see a clear distinction – our failure to understand how we can live without night being day will soon the lights go out, literally, for all of us.