The fragile candle of the future flickers in Shepparton

The fragile candle of our future flickers in Shepparton on Thursday night.

The passionate and articulate,
 Arundhati Roy.

A trio of speakers, marshalled on the night by Professor Kate Auty, will talk about opportunities arising from our changing climate, but deep within that conversation will be an urgency on which our understandable future hinges.

Thursday night’s “Slap Tomorrow – A Wake-Up Call” is about our communities understanding, accessing and utilizing opportunities that surface as we adapt to our changing climate.

Beyond that, Thursday night, in an almost unrecognized sense, is about this community re-imagining how it lives; it’s about our institutions; it’s about our governance; it’s about how we treat each other; it’s about regaining a sense of who we are, understanding why we are here and what is our purpose; it’s about an appreciation of our intergenerational responsibilities; and it’s about, importantly, securing the resources on which humanity is dependent –clean air, drinking water, food production, stable climate and a rich biodiversity for natural ecosystem function and the benefits of nature in providing human psychological health and the sustenance of countless other species critical to our lives.

It is not a debate about whether or not climate change is happening for the evidence is conclusive; humans have interfered with earth’s atmosphere to the extent that the Holocene, an epoch in the world’s history that has allowed humans to thrive, is collapsing.

Our voracious capitalist and market driven world has polluted not only most everything in the biosphere, but it has also invaded our minds leaving many of us intellectually crippled and so unable to understand and comprehend the threats to our future.

Helping us break out of that status quo-induced mental prison will be the co-founder of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, Anna Rose; a Sydney based professor recognised through the world for her innovative ideas about the re-use of materials, Prof Veena Sahajwalla; and environmental communications consultant, Rob Gell.

Thursday night’s conversation is about recognizing and adapting to opportunities emerging from our changing climate, but deeply implicated within those discussions are questions about what happens next?

Writing in her 2009 book “Listening to Grasshoppers: Field Notes on Democracy”, Arundhati Roy, asked what happens now that democracy and the Free Market have fused into a single predatory organism with a thin, constricted imagination that revolves almost entirely around the idea of maximizing profit?”

She argues that what we need now for the survival of this planet, or at least conditions in which humans can thrive, is long-term vision.

Thursday night’s conversations are about that urgently need long-term vision; they will be about our intergenerational responsibilities; and they will be about escaping from what Roy describes escaping from our “greatest folly”, our near-sightedness.

Roy wrote: “Our amazing intelligence seems to have outstripped our instinct for survival.
“We plunder the earth hoping that accumulated material surplus will make up for the profound, unfathomable things we have lost,” she said.

Thursday night begins a journey, though rather late, when we can ponder the questions Roy asks.

A Federal Budget loaded with irrelevant numbers

Last week’s Federal Budget was irrelevant.

The idea of a budget is not irrelevant, but a list of financial strictures that pander to life as we know and understand it, is wholly inappropriate.

Life in Australia ranges in extremes from damn difficult to obscenely prosperous, but beyond our daily difficulties, most people live relatively happy and expansive lives.

Those who profit from what exists stand with the advocates of more and lament any budgetary changes that limit their opportunities to further boost their bank balances.

Contrarily, those on the other side of the scale and whom, for various reasons, have seen much of the country’s wealth bypass them, equally lament changes, with their protests being almost unheard.

Australia is unquestionably the lucky country; well, for the moment.

Australia, as does the rest of the world, faces a collision of events that any budget built around existing economic dynamics is fundamentally flawed.

The world is changing, no surprises there, but it is changing in a way that is publically unacknowledged by the world’s financial gurus, among them those who are calling the shots with regard Australia’s future, be it economic or otherwise.

There is a rude immediacy about how the world operates with liberal democracy holding us hostage to the next election and more colloquially, to the next episode of television’s “The Block”.

Rather than piece together a budget, good or bad depending on personal situations, ideology or political adherences, that responds to populist needs that further fuels business as usual, we should be endorsing courageous decisions that prepare us, for the shocks ahead.

The workings of the world, and by implication Australia and so the Goulburn Valley, depends almost entirely on oil or some derivative of it and with more than half the world’s easily accessible oil already gone, it is going to become increasingly expensive as it becomes more difficult to extract.

To counter that, the government needs to enthusiastically invest in the public infrastructure and discourage private profiteering that arises from exploitation of the public domain.

The issue that will trump all concerns our changing climate and although there should have been a budgetary response three decades ago, it is still not too late, although any effective response will now need to be innovative, bold, courageous and be an immediate break with the “business as usual” paradigm.

Australian society will need to be seriously decentralized; public transit systems massively refurbished and upgraded, while there is an equal divestment in the private infrastructure (roads); community infrastructure and resilience needs to be bolstered; food security needs to be localized; and while work is psychologically important, it needs to be re-imagined and restructured allowing people to work fewer hours, live closer to their work and spend more time strengthening communities.

The dilemmas brought on by impartiality

Impartiality frequently frustrates many decent things.

Singer's book, "One
World: The Ethics
 of Globalization".

Equally, it is also often the keystone in allowing less than favourable things to happen to individuals, the broader community and, in a wider and crucial sense, to the wellbeing of the planet.

Partiality among humans is immensely powerful among families and friends, but erodes as relationships between people become increasingly distant and then collapses completely to become impartial, even disinterested, once people become “the other”.

Writing in “One World: The Ethics of Globalization” moral philosopher, Peter Singer, said; “Our real desires, our lasting and strongest passions, are not for the good of our species as a whole, but, at best, for the good of those who are close to us”.

Singer wrote that more than a decade ago and although the challenges of climate change were then well known, they had not evolved to be so internationally divisive as they are now, but his observations were prescient.

Within Singer’s writings are the reasons for our disinterest, our impartiality, in how our behaviours are impacting on earth’s atmosphere.

Life, particularly for most in Australia, is pretty good and so with rare exceptions we imagine ourselves as distant from anyone or anything that is worsening climate change and so have little sense of how our behaviour contributes to what has be called the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced.

We are, it seems, trapped within the paradigm that Singer discusses where he says that “Our real desires, our lasting and strongest passions, are not for the good of our species as a whole, but, at best, for the good of those who are close to us”.

Addressing the dilemmas and dangers of climate change demands that we explore and understand impartiality, and embrace it with an urgency that will hopefully allow us to act appropriately to mitigate the unfolding damage to our atmosphere.

Impartiality has been one of the great frustrations experienced by international support organizations and they have found that through reducing their appeal for help to a personal level by using an image of a sole person needing help, they made the connection between recipient and potential donor partial.

With the reason for funding now igniting our “real desires, our lasting and strongest passions”, the support sought was frequently forthcoming.

The damage to earth’s atmosphere is happening, by human standards, so slowly and its effects are frequently so remote from our daily affairs that most of us have a decided impartiality about climate change.

Many of us are unable to make the connection between our behaviour and what is happening with our climate and subsequent worsening weather it brings upon us because we are impartial and largely oblivious to anything beyond family, friends and immediate concerns.

Growth idealogues celebrate as Australia's population tops 23 million

Growth ideologues should be smiling now that Australia’s population has topped 23 million.

Prof Tim Flannery posits
 Australia's ideal population
 carrying capacity is
between eight and 12
million.

More people, in corporate talk, equates with more profits.

Behind that shiny corporate facade, is a paradigm that encourages endless expansion; a tumour-like growth of which any talk about control is taboo.

Beyond that, any discussion about limiting population growth is equally distasteful for almost immediately reason and logic is abandoned and emotion hogs the spotlight.

The 2007 Australian of the Year, Professor Tim Flannery, presently a member of the Australian Climate Commission, has calculated that Australia’s long-term carrying capacity was between eight and 12 million.

He points out that Australia’s population had reached those marks in 1950 and 1968 respectively.

Considering Prof Flannery’s observation we have either, in the first instance, more than doubled Australia’s population carrying capacity or nearly doubled the second number.

The idea of a “big” Australia is out of step with what Australian’s actually need; rather than bigger, we need better.

Shepparton is bound for “bigger” with statistics on the City of Greater Shepparton website suggesting that by 2031 a further 16 500 people will live here, producing a population nearing 80 000.

Arguments that bigger is always better and more beautiful are riddled with fallacies; unintended consequences that are assembling on the horizon now, poised to disable humanity.

Questions about the cause of climate change, an undeniable scientific and practical reality, attract varied answers, most of which are in themselves correct, but rarely do they focus on the reality that there is simply too many of us.

Any suggestion that we somehow humanely control our numbers produces an almost immediate and sharp passionate response loaded with accusations of Nazi-like eugenics and a big brother-like forced abandonment of our responsibility to pro-create.

That “responsibility” is many faceted, yes, we do have a responsibility to pro-create, but at replacement level or less, but we also have an intergenerational obligation, a responsibility to those that follow to live with restraint, care for the planet and so leave the earth healthier than it was then when we arrived.

Population growth is exponential and the likelihood of us leaving the earth in better shape than we found it is becoming more remote as each day passes.

Education is the first, the last and beyond birth control, restraint and good sense, the only ally upon which we can call to slow the world’s burgeoning population growth.

Modern life is loaded with endless distractions and the corporate world, aided by myriad problematic institutions, would have us believe all is well.

It is unfair however, to blame upon the world’s corporations and our institutions as the real responsibility rests with us for we have failed to educate ourselves and so do not understand the limits to growth.

Youth talks and age listens

Age sat quietly and listened intently as youth explained the building blocks of life and what is “here?”

A view inside the Large
Hadron Collider.

A journey that began as a different way to take a “gap year”, hesitated momentarily in Shepparton recently to explain a sliver of particle physics.

Listening as the Shepparton born and bred, Kristian McDonald, told a little of himself and then explored the universe, the one we can see, and then, his speciality, the one we can’t, were about 30 members of Shepparton’s University of Third Age (U3A).

Kristian, 36, an advocate of education, at any age, exposed the wonders of modern particle physics in a two hour presentation to inquisitive, but older minds, some of whom described what they had seen and heard in rapturous terms.

Kristian had boldly taken an idea so broad in concept and yet so small in reality that it can’t be seen and helped those at U3A’s “Big Issues in Science” class understand “what is here?”

Oddly it was that very question that arose during a gap year after first studying aerospace and modified to “why are we here?” that helped Kristian understand that it was science that ignited his interest and spawned a whole new life for him.

The pursuit of science, specifically the examination of the near invisible, took him around the world to experience science in Canada and then for a time the excitement and wonder of working at one of the world’s leading science institutions in Germany, the Max Planck Institute.

After his brief stopover in his hometown, Kristian is now working at the University of Sydney.

Kristian has not been to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss-Franco border near Geneva, but sees this nearly 30 kilometres in circumference piece of equipment as a wonderful example of what can be achieved when people have a common goal and so work together.

The LHC was built in collaboration between more than 10 000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories, again from all parts of the world.

As an example of one of the great engineering milestones of mankind, the LHC, according to Kristian, epitomizes what happens when people collaborate for good, rather than behave in a confrontational manner.

Collaboration was also apparent in the room – the combined wisdom of the U3A members matched Kristian’s youthful knowledge and together they become a powerful resource that balanced his vigor, enthusiasm and acute understanding of physics with the prudence and scholarship that only age can provide.

Years of intense study for Kristian could not be articulated or illustrated in just two hours, but after that brief session, those listening understood more fully what is “here”.

 

War is a reality, but our imagination sustains it

Humans, it is believed, are unique among earth’s fauna in being able to imagine.



Lawrence H. Keeley
helps us understand
some about war in
his 1996 book.

In fact, it is such a powerful facility that the lives of many are completely derailed through an addiction to uninhibited imagination.

The power of the mind is such that it can lock an individual, a community, a nation or a whole raft of people around the globe into a mindset that draws criticism from an equal number.

Being right or wrong can depend upon one’s faith, belief in science or an alliance with whatever frippery it is that has swept around the world ensnaring the vulnerable imaginations of people as it went.

As humans we are loaded with frailties and those fragilities are capitalized on by those eager to see the life, and its various incumbencies, they prefer embedded in the world community.

Imagination, with all its distortions and blemishes shapes our lives and another of those moments upon which its continuance hinges on imagination has just passed.

The invasion of Turkey by Australian and New Zealand soldiers and other allied forces in April 1915 has set alight the Australian imagination and although fundamentally wrong, hundreds of deaths are made right through appeal to misplaced human sentimentalities.

The Anzac Day “industry” is driven by governments at all levels and they obscure the brutality and tragedy of war behind a murkiness that dissuades us from allowing our imaginations to focus on the actual catastrophe, rather to be drawn in by repeatedly retold stories of mateship, valour, courage and success in the face of overwhelming opposition.

Life for most of us, beyond a few personal highs and lows, is pretty bland and rarely do we ever experience anything like the dynamics of a war that allow us to unleash our emotions and imaginations.

Anzac Day is one of the moments that directly target those sleeping emotions and imaginations tapping into our covert nationalism from which our politicians draw their sustenance and legitimacy.

In his 1996 book “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage”, Oxford University archaeology professor, Lawrence H. Keeley, said: “The stimulus of war has incited human beings to prodigies of ingenuity, improvisation, cooperation, vandalism, and cruelty. It is the richest field on which to match wits and luck; no peaceful endeavour can equal its penalties for failure, and few can exceed its rewards for success.

“It remains the most theatrical of human activities, combining tragedy, high drama, melodrama, spectacle, action, farce, and even low comedy, War displays the human in extreme,” he wrote.

The good life is found in anchored emotions, with war quite the opposite when passions are let off the leash, set free and so able to respond without inhibition to our imaginations, wicked or otherwise.

Celebration as free-market juggernaut staggers

The free-market advocates should be celebrating.

Holden has worked the system perfectly in that the car manufacturer has privatized the profits and socialized the costs.

In the past decade, the Australian and State Governments, that is you and me, have given more than $2 billion to the company and now, to further enrich its takings, it has sacked 500 people – Holden has pocketed the profit and we pay the bill.

Simplified equations can always be interpreted in any way preferred, but this one is loaded with indiscretions that are not a public responsibility, rather the success, failure or otherwise of Holden should be contained within the free market it so idolizes.

The world in which Holden was founded, grew, boomed and profited massively was different from what exists today; different in that growth, as it is traditionally understood, equates with difficulties we can’t yet comprehend.

Rather than prop-up what is a struggling, if not dying industry, our governments, Local, State and Federal, should be using their resources to help us understand how we can flourish in a society that is not dependent on economic growth.

That is quite the opposite of the philosophy that saw us align ourselves with an industry that because of what it is and the appeal it has to our egoistic wants, holds humanity hostage as it plunders our fancies and earth’s finite resources.

It seems our governments believe they have a mandate, and maybe they do, to ensure the validity of these inappropriate businesses; inappropriate as they are entirely about only answering wants and pay little, or no role in ensuring human needs are attended to.

We face multiply difficulties, among them the fact that we live in a liberal democracy; a fundamental good that has within it a disabling difficulty enlivened by the inability of politicians, and us as the electors, to look beyond their present terms of office.

Humans have solidified their supremacy in the food chain through their unique ability to imagine, memorize and plan ahead, skills that have been absent as we have sacrificed altruism, decency, fairness and an ethical understanding of our responsibility to care for other species and the environment on which they, and we, depend to economic growth.

Rather than support a dying and monolithic industry, our energy, and cash, should be directed at reassessing the corporate world and replacing it with a more fine-grained society that emulates the belief of Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board and author, the late E.F. Schumacher, who said “Small is beautiful”.

If we are to have anything significant in society that has access to the communal bank, our taxes, it should be something that carries the pre-fix “public”, such as a nation-wide transit system.