Using our opposable thumbs to rebuild the world

Nature equipped mankind with opposable thumbs.

Nature ensured, also, that man would evolve with soft, sensitive pads on both those thumbs and opposing fingers enabling us to exploit our fine, evolving motor skills.

Nature, sadly, was unable to ensure a certain, and necessary, equity between our physical prowess and our intellectual skills and abilities.

Mankind’s numbers were quite small in the early unfolding millennia of our history with only some 30 million plodding about planet about 2000 years ago.

In what seemed instantly, at least in a geological sense, the growth in our numbers became exponential and in just a blink of time our numbers this year passed the seven billion mark.

The earth was groaning; it was full.

Interestingly it is not our physical size that has filled the earth, rather what our ill-balanced intellect has allowed.

Fundamentally we have evolved from being a hunter-gatherer based society to a cultivator of food supplies and that, associated with other basic improvements in our way of living, primarily the development and use of medicine, has lifted our numbers to levels beyond which nature can cope.

Humanity misunderstands it reason.

Throughout its chaotic evolution, mankind has equated success with growth and consumption and within that contentment is measured by the accumulation of material goods.

We are mistaken: success and its associated contentment should be measured by, and equated with, the resilience of communities, their strength and enrichment of neighbourhoods; neighbourhoods that are the core of life, rather a place from which people disperse every day as they pursue growth and enrich themselves to enable even more consumption.

Rather than devote ourselves and our time to further exploit our traditional system, we need to focus on working less within the existing processes and use that “new” time to be a part of life, engage with your community to make it a more vibrant , interesting and so exciting place to live.

That, I acknowledge, is utopian in hope, but the present promise of utopia favours a few and access to that sympathetic place hinges on a brutal individuality, a willingness to exploit the other and nature, and within and because of that threaten the wellbeing and future of all other species upon which human life irrefutably depends.

Employing those opposable thumbs, and our powerful thinking processes through which we can consider, plan, anticipate, exercise memory and understand our past, and decide how to behave to provide for the future, we have built a world that is stumbling blindly, it seems, toward the abyss.

Now is the time for us to abandon personal wants, act altruistically and build a life that has a truly civil society: open our eyes, step back from the abyss and working together, rethink and reconstruct our world.

Our primary role is to multiply, but it is a process that can easily become dysfunctional

The primary role in life for you and me, as with any other species, is to multiply.

A sign of the tmes.

That is to procreate and within that behave in such a manner to ensure our genes are protected and have the best chance of survival.

Survival within the tumult of life is a brutal affair and it was Charles Darwin who arrived at a complex understanding of how life evolves and that has been reduced, in a sense wrongly, to “survival of the fittest”.

Reductionism is sometimes callous and unforgiving, particularly when it tears apart and strips bare the powerful and emotional human concept of birth that has been subjected to aggrandizement over the millennia of human life.

Humans have evolved to have a powerful thinking apparatus, the mind, and unlike most other species understand the past, present and future; memory and anticipation allow changed behaviour in the present.

Most other species, from microscopic to mammoth, survive on what might be termed instinct and humans, while also driven by that, have the capacity for consideration.

Equipped with that “powerful thinking apparatus”, an understanding of the past, present and future, having the ability to consider and plan, and, within that, physically change the circumstances of their environment, human numbers have, and are, growing exponentially.

The world already has in excess of seven billion people and although human endeavour broadly warrants applause an honest appraisal of our achievements should ignite a stern rebuke.

For decades now we have known about and understood the nexus between human numbers and resources – too many people gouging relatively scarce resources produces an inevitable collision; a collision, if left unattended will decimate the human population.

Like so many other difficulties facing the world, or at least humans, any workable solution to this one, limiting our numbers, is weighed down with millennia-old emotional baggage that inhibits clarity.

Birth is a landmark event for humans and is celebrated with enthusiasm in all cultures and having a deep and mysterious sense of success, it is a great leveller as birth is available to all, whether rich or poor.

Any suggestion that in some way birth should be restricted and human numbers subsequently limited is met with outrage, but if allowed to continue without restriction, we face unimaginable difficulties ranging from famines to water shortages and from conflicts to simply space to survive.

With a comprehensive tripartite understanding of life – that is the past, present and future – man needs to consider what was appropriate from the past, our present behaviour and how they equate with predictive predicaments.

Any workable solution is not obvious, but we need to stabilise the population; we need to have fewer people dependant on the planet; and we need to have a bias in which deaths exceed births.

The friendships of youth are a lesson to be understood

Friends seem unlimited when you are young.

Friendship in those uncomplicated days of youth were easy for few had managed to accumulate any real emotional baggage and so were still dripping with naivety and innocence.

We all have something to learn from
 the friendships of the young.

The friendships of youth are a lesson to us all as they are forged on an openness, unburdened from suspicion, threat and the understandings that emerges as we are exposed to the individualities and peculiarities of the culture we live within.

As a kid, we enjoy and wallow in the commonality of all – we were simply members of the human family, and that is all that mattered.

However, as we age many things, beyond our hair, thin out and our friendships also fall away and the arrival for most of a deep and meaningful friendship after 30 is somewhat rare.

It was Aristotle who said that the traditional idea of friendship had three components: “Friends must enjoy each other's company, they must be useful to one another, and they must share a common commitment to the good”.

In contemporary western societies, it has been suggested that we tend to define friendship in terms of the first component and, beyond that we find the notion of utility difficult to align with friendship.

Finally the idea of “commitment to the good” is so subjective that rarely do transitory friends find they are able to commit to such extremes, except on single issue matters.

Work is one of those “single issue matters” and with many companies diligently convincing workers that what they do is a “commitment to the good”, although considered broadly it may not be, it is a place where many friendships, often life-long, evolve.

Work has plagiarized what was once the province of the neighbourhood where the emphasis was once entirely on the good; the welfare of all who lived there and friendship was integral, arising from that trio of enjoyment, utility and commitment.

That common sense of endeavour produced enduring friendships, resilience and an unspoken agreement that all would “muck-in” to ensure the welfare of “the one” and therefore the greater welfare of the entire neighbourhood.

Aristotle understood
friendship.

Friendship is about many things, from the sharing of material goods, the acknowledgement of emotional needs and sharing with others in their joys, successes, sorrows and the many other manifestations of life, both good and bad.

As years pass, pre-derelictions, passions and past-times harden and become fewer as do meaningful friendships and accompanying that collapse is the dissolution of resilient communities.

Should we value community, then build friendships and in considering that we turn again to Aristotle who said: “Wishing to be friends is quick work, but friendship is a slow ripening fruit”.

However, free of forebodings, friendship was something the young seemed to accomplish in mere minutes.

Our troubled climate demands we 'avert our gaze'

Each of us has a sense of what it is that worsens our wellbeing but, it seems, we can’t look away.

Charles Mackay

It is a frequently witnessed reality: those moments when the life of someone who appears to have it all unravels because they are unable to avert their gaze.

However, the dilemma is not just a concern for individuals as with seemingly no effort it can quickly ratchet from just a few to engulf many becoming what 19^th century author, Charles Mackay, described as “the madness of crowds”.

Mackay wrote, seemingly prophetically with regard human-induced climate change, about the continuing folly of the human race and its institutions, along with the distortions and peculiarities that we abide by and make us less than we could be.

Mackay wrote with intensity in nearly 600 pages about everything from Tulipmania (a period in the 16^th and 17^th centuries when both the rich and not so rich were paying massive sums for tulip bulbs) and alchemy to the Crusades and haunted houses.

The “madness” Mackay wrote about continues today with many similarities, but loaded with, and worsened by, some modern distortions.

Mackay’s ideas are still relevant with some, fortunately a minority, being doubters of the unquestionable evidence of human impact on the stability of earth’s climate.

Charles Mackay's
 "Extraordinary
Popular Delusions
 and the
Madness of Crowds".

Most seem to acknowledge our impact on earth’s ecological wellbeing, but with it comes an even more sinister difficulty with just a few of us able to free ourselves from our consumptive behaviours: a way of living that considering the undeniable evidence is a sort of Mackay-like madness.

The broad well-being of society is presently inextricably linked to the economy and that is another madness from which we need to avert our gaze and consider with an equal passion the integrity, health and well-being of people.

The idea that is profit and growth has long been and intimate part of human affairs, but it is one which has had a royalty-like bizarre respect since the Industrial Revolution some 200 years ago and as that paradigm has enlarged, the quality of life for most has reduced.

Human induced climate change has an impact beyond the control of any one nation and we, certainly the developed nations, need to break the monopoly that the military, industrial and entertainment complexes have on our gaze, look away, take note of what we see and understand that all in the world is not quite as it should be.

The undeniable facts pointing to human induced climate change remind me what the late US Senator, Daniel Patrick Moynihan said: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts”.

Our gaze, and opinion, reveals its own facts and wrongly, we frequently cling to those illusions.

Climate change demands we adopt a war footing

Australia, along with all other countries in the world, should be on a war footing.

However, that is not to confront each other, rather to gather our resources and build resilience into our communities for what will be the biggest single challenge humanity has ever faced.

A decade-long drought for south-eastern Australia followed by record rainfalls of which many Goulburn Valley people felt the impact of both were little more than an entrée to the main event.

The resolute skeptics of human-induced climate change continue their doubt-mongering even though conclusive findings by some of Australia’s most respected organizations, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM), point to significant and dangerous changes in our climate.

Both those organizations have considered what is happening to earth’s atmosphere and by implication our climate and subsequently our weather, is unquestionable attributably to human activities.

Honourary president of the United Kingdom’s Campaign AgainstClimate Change, George Monbiot, said: "Climate change is perhaps the gravest calamity our species has ever encountered. Its impact dwarfs that of any war, any plague, and any famine we have confronted so far. It makes genocide and ethnic cleansing look like sideshows at the circus of human suffering."

Monbiot’s observation about what we are facing is as grim, if not worse, that what the world experienced at the beginning of World War Two.

It was then that all the great powers of the world took control of their economies and directed industry to make as many weapons as possible, as fast as possible, to kill as many people as possible and win the war.

Right now, the call to action is equally urgent, but for a different reason.

When the US entered World War Two in December 1941, government expenditure exploded and GDP (now understood to be an inadequate measurement of a nation’s wellbeing) doubled in three years.
The Soviet Union, Germany and Britain all did the same. This rearmament boom did not bankrupt the governments. Instead, it created jobs and lifted the whole world out of the Great Depression.

The same science that
puts froth on our
beer illustrates that
climate change is real.

That sweeping activity energized the people of the world to kill and destroy and now we need to do the same thing, but contrarily to save lives and protect property.

Individual efforts are honourable and need to be acknowledged, but only a society-wide, government backed initiative will create sufficient societal movement to help us endure.
That is alarming and catastrophic-like talk, but it is real and climate change being human-induced demands we behave differently and trust the science; the same science that puts froth on our beer.

Our lives of froth and bubble are about to end and although decidedly unhappy about that, we should, unquestionably, prepare as if for war.

Holden bailout leaves me 'weeping'

by Robert McLean

Announcements last week that you and I, through our Governments, were to spend nearly $300 million supporting a dying industry left me weeping, metaphorically.

My children, my grandchildren and their children, particularly the latter generations, will have forced upon them a difficult world of scarce hope because of such populist and short-term decisions.

Decisions to support a way of life, and an industry, that has socially ravaged the world and seriously depleted finite and so irreplaceable resources; illustrate a gross misunderstanding of how, and why, our world is unfolding.

Rather than stake our future on what is little more than an aging dinosaur, we should be looking for a “Black Caviar–like” winner that will enable us to gallop into the future with confidence.

Easier said than done of course as the motor industry is an intricate part of society, both physically and psychologically and to wean ourselves off it will be even more difficult than erasing the fondness we have for alcohol.

That shift away from our partiality for the motor car is for the good of our grandchildren, society generally, the earth in a broad sense and, in particular, our atmosphere.

Advocates of the $275 million bailout for Holden, defend the decision through argument that it brings massive economic and social benefits that are not just relevant to the company, but percolate through our society to benefit all.

That is a questionable position and one if examined closely and considered with reference to contemporary history is simply false.

The promise to sustain the industry for another decade is little more than digging a deeper hole to fill with ever more taxpayer cash and so rather than spend to prop up a failing, and already irrelevant, industry we should be spending to abate the convergence of climate difficulties, resource depletion and a worsening world economy.

The motor car is a significant contributor to the world’s climate difficulties, it success depends on a resource that is in terminal decline, the individuality it promotes erodes the strength of society and the cash it consumes would be better spent on building resilience, co-operation and consensus in communities.

The natural world can no longer sustain our insistence on endless growth and its reaction to that human resolve to grow is in evidence around the globe, including right here in the Goulburn Valley.

Our responsibility to those who follow is not about guaranteeing they will have a Holden to drive, rather they will have a habitable world; a world in which the seasons are predictable, rainfall is equally predictable; a world in which all species, from the largest to smallest are valued; a world in which the welfare of people is put ahead of profit.

A smile brings an understanding about life's complexities

A pretty young woman smiled at me recently.

That, in itself means nothing beyond the fact that it makes near 65-year-old bloke feel pretty good, but it does tap into the far broader psychological questions of life.

Edward O. Wilson.

The smile, altruistic and given in a moment of fleeting inclusive friendship, illustrated that what is best about life is simple, uncomplicated and without cost to either the giver or the receiver.

In fact a smile and its more exuberant cousin, laughter, is an international human language, just as are those other emotions of sadness, fear and distress – they make sense and we relate to them irrespective of colour or creed.

However, the simplicity of a smile and the force of its message are a timely reminder of the insistence and urgency of a message of which we should all take heed.

Human life is of such complexity that it now stands in direct conflict with the intricate biology that sustains all life on earth, including you and me.

Trying to make sense of a life he considered to be burgeoning out of control, E.F. Schumacher sat down in the early 1970s and wrote “Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People mattered” to quickly secure something of cult following.

The implication of Schumacher’s “small” was that something as uncomplicated as a smile and so simple seemed closely related and stands in contrast to the complexity to which humanity is now heavily embroiled.

Climate change, oil scarcity and the world’s economic difficulties are or little significance according to American biologist and author, Edward O. Wilson.

Edward O. Wilson's
"Biophilia".

Wilson, writing in “Biophilia” and then “The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth”, repeatedly emphasised of humankind’s need to ensure the sustenance and survival of every species, from the microscopic to the massive, to equally ensure its own survival.

Wilson explains that fewer than 10 per cent of the life forms on earth are known to science and of those, less than one per cent has been studied beyond simple anatomical description and few notes on natural history.

He said we don’t need a moon base or a manned trip to Mars, rather an expedition to planet earth.

Considering Wilson and Schumacher’s views, we don’t need the gigantism or complexity of our modern world, instead we need certain smallness, an understandable simplicity of life and a way of living that is on a decided human scale.

Contemporary growth, many claim, hinges on complexity, size and speed, but within such sophistication are often unintended consequences that alienate humanity and solutions are to be found in something that is smaller, slower and simpler.

That, by its very nature, would less demanding on our biosphere and so would make everyone smile, young or otherwise.