I have a dream! Join me and we can 'dream large'

I have a dream.

The late Martin Luther King Jr (below) had one too and although different in specifics, it was driven, however, by similar ideals; ideals that ensured human flourishing.

King dreamed of equality between humans, something I dream of too, but beyond that, I dream also of small tight-knit, self-reliant, resilient, interlocked and prosperous communities in which the people who live there and the communities in which they live, stand as one as they address tomorrow.

My dream is not proprietorial and so you, or any others, may step into the dream and taking the advice of the University of Melbourne, “Dream Large”.

Our generous, spacious and prosperous future is not about traditional growth or profit, rather a stationary state of capital and wealth that one of the 19th century founding fathers of economics, John Stuart Mill (right), said would be both necessary and desirable.

Mill, an enthusiast of the stationary state, imagined such a position did not imply a stationary state of human improvement.

Join me in my dream as we consider life in our finite world and on how we best can unleash the endless bounty of the human intellect, innovation, spontaneity, charisma, kindness and the social necessity of mingling and sharing with others.

Join me in my dream - join me in my contemplations about why our world is divisive, competitive, consumptive, and violent with an addiction to wasteful and destructive fallacies and superstitions.

Join me in my dream - join me as we ponder the way ahead and contemplate a community in which most of what we need is within easy walking or cycling distance.

Join me in my dream - join me as we think about how we liberate people from the shackles of what modernity terms progress, a progress that sees the young who ache for the wisdom of their elders are starved of it and those who can give are trapped in the iron cage of consumerism.

Martin Luther King dreamed of equality; I also dream of it, but in small tight-knit, self-reliant, resilient, interlocked and prosperous communities free of narcissism that are physically and psychologically prepared for our low-energy future.

Rich benefits awaits communities that adopt cycling

The rich benefits awaiting any centre that embraces cycling were explained recently in Melbourne.

Shepparton was not specifically mentioned, but implicit in the comments of the bicycle manager from Portland, Oregon, Roger Geller (right, centre), was the observation that people here need only adopt cycling to access those benefits.
Mr Geller spoke to more than 100 people at the University of Melbourne and then repeated his story about the transformative value of cycling again two days later as the keynote speaker at Melbourne’s Bike Futures conference.
Portland is in every way different from Shepparton, but the essence of Mr Geller’s message migrates without any lessening of its worth.
Shepparton, along with all other communities, has evolved around the mobility allowed by the motor car and easy access to cheap fossil fuels and in a time when there was no knowledge of, and therefore interest in, such things as climate change.
All that has changed – oil is becoming scarcer so will, in the foreseeable future, become impossibly expensive and it is now clearly understood that human actives are impacting on our climate.
Cycling can play a significant role in easing those difficulties.
Portland did not have any sort of real cycling culture 20 years ago, but now 10 per cent of “Portlanders” consider cycling as the prime means of transport.
In a city of nearly 600 000 that is a significant number and retailers, about 130 of them, reacting to the social change have asked for on-street car parking in front of their shops to be replaced by bicycle parking, “corrals” as they are described .
Portland has 500 km of developed bikeways, both on-road lanes and specific bake paths, and every day they are busy with commuters on bicycles traveling about the city.
Those developed bikeways cost about $60 million, which is equivalent in cost of two kilometers of traditional inner-city freeway.
The savings in road costs are obvious and with research illustrating most car trips are just six kilometres and as bicycles travel nearly as fast as a car, they save money and help the environment, and beyond that cycling boosts our broader wellbeing.

Professor Karoly will bring his knowledge of climate change to Shepparton

The intimate and intricate challenges of climate change will be explained in Shepparton on Tuesday, November 23.

Melbourne University’s Professor David Karoly (below left) will talk about the implications of climate change and, in particular, its impact on Victoria.

Prof Karoly, a lead author in the third and fourth assessment reports for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is currently with the School of Earth Sciences at the university.

All of his research, he says, has confirmed that the main cause of global warming over the last 50 years is due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

His address on Tuesday will be at the university’s School of Medical Health auditorium in Graham St, Shepparton, starting at 7:30pm. Admission will be free.
Prof Karoly will provide an update on the extensive scientific basis for observed climate changes over the last 100 years and the reasons why most of the observed increase in global temperatures is due to increasing greenhouse gases from human activity.
His address is entitled “Climate change: an update on the science”.
He will also describe the likely climate changes over the next 100 years and what we need to do if we want to slow the rate of global warming.
Prof Karoly will discuss coming global changes and how they will affect Victoria.
Those with any questions about the November 23 lecture should direct them to Robert McLean at 5822 1766 or via email at robed@sheppnews.com.au.

Professor's 'Arrow of Time' brings some understanding about the world's dilemmas

A discussion about the origin of the universe and the “Arrow of Time” helped explain much about dilemmas presently troubling the world.

The California Institute of Technology’s Prof Sean Carroll (right), from the institute’s Department of Physics, recently expanded on his ideas to an over-flowing auditorium at the Elisabeth Murdoch Building at the University of Melbourne.
His discussion was not about resolving, or discussing, the world’s difficulties, but as he spoke to the riveted crowd those complexities, at least for me, became a little more understandable.
Explaining our 14 billion-year-old universe, Prof Carroll discussed entropy, which, he said, will, according the second law of thermodynamics, increase in an isolated system. Our universe is an isolated system
Measurable and understandable physics indicate that disorder and entropy was low when the universe first took shape, but all these years later, and it just happens to be “our” time, both are increasing to a point where they are threatening to escape our understanding and let loose on the world largely unknown happenings.
What’s evolving, it’s important to note, is not a response by any supernatural being reacting to human behaviour, rather it is a predictable and physical eventuality that is being hurried somewhat by the sheer number of humans who seem obsessed about rushing closer to the precipice.
Our world, which is an isolated system in its own right, is subject to the same dynamics and we are struggling with the resultant entropy.
Sadly we rush about dealing endlessly with the manifestations of that entropy believing them to be the doings of some super-natural being or some sinister other, rather than the expansion of our universe and so galaxy simply doing what it is they do.
Being thinking and doing organisms, we have mistakenly elevated ourselves to a pre-eminent position on our planet and have done that without much thought about tomorrow.
Our time here, in a geological sense, will be brief, but with a thoughtful approach to how we should live, we can employ entropy to our advantage.
As with aging it is about slowing down and disorder, and so considering that, we should aim at living more restrained lives.

The idea of food security and the coming famine resonate

Food security and the coming of a certain global famine resonated with about 300 people on Wednesday night (May 14).
They packed into the Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre at The University of Melbourne to hear author, journalist, editor, communicator and principal of Julian Cribb and Associates, Julian Cribb (left), discuss “The coming famine: risks and solutions for global food security” in the 2010 Dean’s Lecture Series.
Visit Science Alert, the website of Julian Cribb and Associates to read what he said on Wednesday in Melbourne - here is the link.
The presentation illustates what Julian said on Wednesday night, including the illustrations that help explain, in a pictorial fashion, what he was describing.

Busy week, alarming realities

This week has been wonderfully busy, but within that equally alarming.
On three occasions it become clearly evident that two people, unquestionably highly qualified, entrenched in the decision making echelons of our society and therefore people of undoubted influence, were not aware of peak oil and didn’t understand it complications.
Also, one fellow could not, or would not, advance an opinion and to worsen matters, that same speaker, who in my view should have had a definite opinion, avoided my question about nuclear power.
The first moment arose during a meeting involving members of the Victorian Urban Design Forum, many architectural and design people and several from the Victorian State Government organization, VicUrban.
That meeting held in the new VicUrban offices helped those attending understand something about four major community re-establishment sustainable projects within Melbourne – one at Maribynong, another at central Dandenong, Avondale Heights and the re-development of Harbour Esplanade at Docklands in central Melbourne.
At the end of the presentations, those at the meeting were able to ask questions and one about peak oil, directed at no-one in particular, but which seemed to fall upon VicUrban landscape architect, Mark Haycox, drew a response that seemed to indicate that he was at least confused only to see fellow VicUrban employee, Lynn Sweeney, quickly answer that peak oil was the reason the projects were being pursued.
The following evening, Wednesday, the University of Melbourne presented the free lecture – Unnatural disasters, the fractured science and politics of climate change – featuring Professor Barry Smit (above) from the University of Guelph in Canada.
He opened his presentation with a self-penned song about climate change that he sang to the Beatles tune of “Let it be”.

Arriving early at the lecture theatre, I filled in the time reading David Strahan’s 2007 book The Last Oil Shock that is about what he describes as “the imminent extinction of petroleum man” and in pre-lecture conversation with Prof Smit I asked for his view on peak oil.
He said it was not something he knew enough about and encouraged me to continue my reading.
Following his presentation, he is a truly personable man with extensive knowledge about climate change, questions from the audience brought many including one from me in which I mentioned that American Dr James Hansen, who works for the government and is described by some as “the grandfather of climate change”, has advocated for nuclear power to end our reliance on coal fired power stations and in answer to his thoughts on nuclear power, Prof Smit had no opinion to offer – it was a staggering response our dependence on coal-fired power, a process that Dr Hansen believes is the major contributor to climate change.
Prof Smit, a co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, was at the Melbourne University as part of a speaking tour of Australia and New Zealand in a program organized by the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand.