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.

Considering the opening gambit of global warming

Australia’s most recognized scavengers stalked the park as the media repeatedly told us that Cyclone Yasi was stalking Queensland’s North coast.


Frederick Buell's From
Apocalypse to Way of Life,
 available from Amazon.com.



The common crows, mouths agape, prowled about and there seemed something symbolic with their black image considered by some a harbinger of death or, at least, difficult times.

A further mental complexity arrived through the reading of Frederick Buell’s 2004 book, “From Apocalypse to Way of Life”, in which he discussed the environmental crisis in the American century, a scenario easily extended for the whole world.
Yasi made landfall some 2000 kilometres north of where I read and watched the crows, but the impact, beyond clear skies and a slight breeze, was endless warnings and then constant news about the devastation.
The effects of the cyclone, strangely, are being felt in other places, for instance, in Victoria with a deluge across the state, sufficient to see rescue and emergency services hard at work.
What we are experiencing is the opening gambit of the global warming that climatologists have been predicting for decades.
Humans have long imagined themselves as standing apart from nature, but the arrival of Yasi illustrates the fallacy of that view, just as nature driven difficulties in disparate parts of the world also clearly illustrate that same fact.
Like many other authors, Buell warns us of how we rationalize the deterioration of the planet, or how we repeatedly excuse ourselves of deforestation, freshwater depletion, ocean pollution, biodiversity loss and how human narrative says little about how we resolve, or escape from this impasse.
Having read only about 80 page of Buell’s work, I’m unsure what way of life he will suggest, but should he reflect the thoughts of many others, it seems likely he will discuss the need for a more restrained way of living in which we put fewer demands on earth’s environmental resources.
Huge industrial throughput of the past two centuries and the resultant refuse and toxins have stressed nature’s sinks, but that which is probably most stressed is the human psychology “sink”, something facing even further demands as it contrives, understands and deals with a new way of living.

Proposed levy will ultimately be ineffective

Australia’s new flood levy will ultimately be ineffective.

Individually the cost is insignificant, but with most Australian workers tipping into the fund, it will have sufficient financial clout to see much of what has been damaged, repaired.
Returning to a business as usual paradigm is understandable, but it is a lost opportunity.
Australians should work together to ensure their fellows are safe and not alienated from comforts that bring contentment and allows a worthwhile contribution, but rather than rebuild processes and infrastructure that worsened the difficulty, we should be exploring and investing in a strikingly different way of living.
Most of us, including me, have been seduced by the bounty we enjoy in this modern life, a way of life funded by the consumption of what those who follow should inherit.
So rather than spending with enthusiasm to re-build a life dependent on practices known to worsen climate change, that money should be directed at understanding a different way of living.
Australia already has many voluntarily set up Transition Towns organizations, groups that are working to prepare their communities to live and flourish in a low-energy future, and they, and their communities, would benefit greatly from Federal Government recognition and funding.
Resilience is an idea often discussed at such groups and it is essential those presently dealing with the aftermath of floods understand that concept.
Transition groups, we have one in Tatura (about 18km east of Shepparton in Northern Victoria), explore how we can live a fulfilling and contented life in a future that is missing many of things now considered normal.
Rather than simply return to a life as it was, Queensland and Victorian people affected by the floods, along with the broader population, need to re-imagine life and apply cash from the levy to re-engineer of life.
The starting point in any community re-building process is equality, something many would argue is impossible to achieve, but that error in thinking doesn’t devalue its pursuit as research illustrates equality positively impacts on the poorest to the wealthiest.
This levy is an opportunity to help communities become resistant to similar future difficulties and resilient enough to survive them should they happen again, something climate change makes almost certain.

Machiavelli's thoughts from five centuries ago are relevant today

Consider what the Italian philosopher, Machiavelli (below right), said during the 16th Century Renaissance – It must be remembered that there is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than the creation of a new system.

Having considered that, now let us contemplate that our survival, literally, hinges on us, that is you and me, agreeing on a new system of living, implementing it and nursing it to success.

So the journey ahead is going to be challenging, risky, the outcome elusive and to plagiarize the five century-old Machiavellian observation, dangerous to manage.

Human instinct sees us turn away from such difficulties to retreat from the unknown and seek solace in what it is we know, that is, put simplistically, business as usual.
Retreat, to that known way of life, is pointless as it is exactly what brought us to this impasse, a place at which human induced changes to the world’s climate have left us with a restless planet.
Science – we rely on it every day for everything from beer to brain scans – has repeatedly warned us of the difficulties ahead and yet many of us seem unable to accept, or understand, its increasingly urgent protestations about climate change.
Massive weather events (floods, storms, blizzards or droughts are now called “events” as that seems softer even though they are equally destructive) have now troubled every continent on earth and yet the skeptics still cling desperately to ideologies that science has long shown to be seriously misleading, in simple terms, wrong.
The idea of capitalistic growth brought many benefits to mankind since it emerged a couple of centuries ago following the Industrial Revolution, but the ideal is now exhausted.
Arriving at the difficult and dangerous system Machiavelli discussed begins with psychologically freeing ourselves of the growth dogma and within that considering something like a steady-state economy that puts human happiness ahead of tumour-like expansion.
Our planet can no longer sustain capitalism as we know it and while it has served us well, it is time for us to take that difficult, doubtful and dangerous journey, a journey whose destination is survival.

Grandsons will live in truly interesting times

My grandsons will live in truly interesting times.

I don’t want that to be the case, but we have exploited the earth to such an extent that such an outcome is not just possible, it is unquestionably certain.
Although my generation is not solely responsible for what is unfolding, it has continued and worsened a pattern of consumption that evolved since the Industrial Revolution some 200 years ago.
Subsequently, should we be looking to ascribe the tribulations facing my grandsons to someone, look no further for it is I, along with anyone else working to support, maintain and expand developed Western-style economies.
The “Living Planet Report” of 2010 released in December showed that as of last year humanity was using nature’s services 50 percent faster than what Earth could renew them.
It illustrated that a projected “moderate” business as usual scenario over the coming decades would lift those demands to the point where we would need two and a half times earth’s capacity to survive.
The arithmetic is simple, by 2050 life on earth is going to become a rather risky affair, so risky in fact that many of us will not survive and with my grandsons in their early forties, they will be in the heart of calamitous times.
Conscious of a friend’s views that “what” requires little thought and the real innovations emerge when thinkers successfully explore “how” and so let’s begin with the personal – you, and your approach to life is the first step in making life more comfortable for my grandsons, along with all your descendants.
First, we must support and encourage anyone, politician or otherwise, who advocates a stable-state economy in which the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity; we should support anyone who advocates a society that has a public bias as opposed to the private wealth of a few over the exploitation of many; that same support should go to anyone insisting on equality throughout society; and, critically, we should support any morally philanthropic soul who works to break the hold of the military/industrial estate.
My innocent three and one-year-old grandsons have the unknowing expectation that we will act. Will we?

Although Malthus was wrong, he was dead right

Earth’s population is the elephant in the room.

Thomas Malthus (right) first alerted the earth to population difficulties when he wrote about the issue in the late 1800s.

Many of his predictions were well-wide of the mark and so his credibility collapsed, however the elephant is still there and getting bigger.

Malthus’s predictions, as time illustrated, came out of a vacuum of understanding about man’s innovative nature or his growing grasp of technology because, in fact, most of the technology that transformed life on earth had not been thought of, let alone invented.
Human numbers on earth are growing exponentially with nearly seven billion jammed on board and the best estimates put that number at about nine billion by 2050.
Sixty years ago, 1950, earth’s population was about 2.5 billion and although the bus was then a little overloaded, it seemed the planet’s resources were coping.
However, the numbers have since crept inexorably upward as we have become better at preserving life, despite our seemingly blind insistence throughout the 20th century at slaughtering millions of our fellows.
We have become technologically smarter and although we can see things whose existence is small in the extreme and beyond the understanding of most, we can’t see, or don’t want to talk about, the elephant in the room, earth’s population.
Those around the world with sufficient influence to alter attitudes on population, simply don’t, or won’t, go there as it means promoting or espousing ideas that question a fundamental of humanity, procreation.
Various plagues have decimated humans on an off for centuries, but the worst plague – that’s you and me and our fellows – goes on largely unnoticed and additions, certainly in the developed world, are greeted with celebration.
Opportune times to grasp a kindly solution seem to have passed with nature poised to illustrate that our place here hinges on collaboration, friendliness and the abandonment of perverse human traits that has seen the human landscape forever troubled by competition and confrontation.
Humans, like all other life forms, have an insatiable need to maintain and extend their gene pool, but forces most don’t understand will soon halt that and decimate humanity

Weather worsened events distract from understanding knotty reasons

Floods, fires and other weather worsened events seriously distract us from understanding and acting on the more knotty issues that contribute to their complexity.

Although Queensland’s floods (right) and Victoria’s fires, along with the many other weather-based difficulties around the world, are catastrophes of immense dimensions, with a huge human cost, they are simply symptoms of a grander world event.
Struggling with floods, fighting fires and marshalling our forces to get back to business as usual has honourable intent, but it misses the point.
Mute nature may be,  its actions speak louder than words it can’t speak and through its massive weather events, it is attempting to alert us that we do not act with impunity and so are not beyond its influence
Rather, however, we are a part of it and as the past century has shown, just a fragment, although a critical and influential fragment.
The urgency with which we seek that return to business of usual following such disasters as floods and fires is misplaced and ignores warnings from decades ago that without a fresh approach to our politics and way of living, decided difficulties were certain to emerge. Record droughts and hitherto unseen flooding suggest the accuracy of those predictions.
True, the floods and fires are not directly attributable to climate change, but weather events arising from changes to our climate worsened those present and recent difficulties and should be seen as another warning that all is not right.
Rather than rush to a return of business as usual, we should be re-examining our life-styles, our ideas and the management of our ways in the interest of reducing our carbon footprint remembering that it was the former Chief Scientist with the British Government, Sir David King, who said that climate change is the most severe problem the world faces, bar none.
Neo-liberal inspired growth has opened up the good life to most in Western economies and the resultant accompanied comforts have psychologically trapped many of us leaving us with a misplaced obligated sense that we must return to business of usual as quickly as we can, whatever the cost.