The world doesn't care what we do, it matters only to us

The world doesn’t care what we do, rather it matters only to us what we do.

Gernot Wagner of America's
 Environmental Defence Fund.

Of course, it is not just us, what we do matters to every other species that has flourished in the conditions that have been favourable to humanity.

Interestingly, we had little, or nothing, to do with this Goldilocks-like (not too hot, not too cold, but just right) epoch, rather it just happened and we benefitted, richly.

Had conditions been just a little different, a degree or two warmer or colder, what has eventuated might never have happened and if it did, then life would have been structurally and substantially different.

It took millions of years for conditions here to become favourable for humans and the network of other of our life-supporting species to flourish and in less than 300 we have put all at risk.

An environmental economist with America’s Environment Defence Fund, Gernot Wagner, wrote “But will the planet notice?: How smart economics can save the world” in 2011 making it abundantly clear that if one person drives less or changes all their light globes, the planet won’t know or care.

Wagner, a research associate at the Harvard Kennedy School and a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations, argues for more sweeping and systemic changes to our behaviour,  not simply individual efforts rather, rather a society-wide approach.

Reading Wagner and watching what is happening in Australian society, we face a dual dilemma, for as laudable bottom-up efforts are, they are presently disjointed and disparate, and appear to lack the cohesion necessary to excite the almost revolutionary-like dynamic needed to jolt the Abbott-led Coalition Government into serious mitigation of climate change.

In pointing to the rather lame efforts of most politicians, Gernot argues that frying the planet is much easier than getting burned at the polls.

He writes: “Individual actions, of course, only go so far, which points to the government’s role in helping to protect us and the planet and have everyone take full responsibility for their own decisions”.

In that, Gernot is effectively saying that Tony Abbott and his cohort need to step forward initiating and instigating changes to remove Australians from among the world’s worst carbon dioxide polluters.

Such a move will take courage, foresight and endeavour, traits the Coalition claim, but are yet to demonstrate.

We need an immediate, and serious, reduction in our carbon dioxide emissions, cuts that will reshape how we live and rather than celebrate growth, we should have no other focus beyond recognizing the collapse of resources and the unfolding dilemma of a changing climate.

Yes, the world doesn’t care what we do, but we should care that our leaders are distancing us from a possible solution to climate change.

Food security demands concentration and conservation

Food security is another of those things that demands our concentration and conversation.

Solutions to a collision of circumstances appear scarce, but answer them we must and subsequently we need to gather and talk how we ensure our food supplies.

Nourishment in all its forms, particularly food, is elementary to survival.

Writing in the introduction to “Rebuilding the Foodshed: How to create local, sustainable, and secure food systems”, the director of the Post Carbon Initiative, Asher Miller, said: “In the twenty-first century, we face a set of interconnected economic, energy and environmental crises that require all the courage, creativity and cooperation we can muster”.

That trio of values is to be found in community; not the community flippantly referred to in contemporary times, rather it is that place with a deeper sense of belonging, of ownership, an understanding that your survival is intertwined with where you live, how it works and how it connects with your food supply.

Being somewhat Shepparton-centric, then what is happening here is simply a more expanded version of what is happening to other towns in the area, our sprawling neighbourhoods are eroding what was rich and productive farmland, and the infrastructure inherent to their function.

Standing on the cusp of an era in which oil-rich industrialized farming will be disrupted and ultimately disabled, we need to be preserving those food-productive pieces of land that are either within towns or nearby.

It is short-sighted in the extreme to take rich food producing land, pave it over and use it for housing which accommodates only a few people per hectare and is wholly dependent upon oil.

Rather than spreading endlessly toward the horizon, we should be working to consolidate our towns, take a lesson from an oil-starved Cuba of late last century, and aim to secure what food we can from within town boundaries using community gardens, any open space, back and front yards and even town parks as places to grow food to feed ourselves.

Using the Australian developed processes of permaculture, the Cubans were quickly able to produce 70 per cent of their vegetables within the boundaries of their towns and cities.  

Most of the food on your dinner-table tonight is there because of oil, including, incidentally, the table itself, and the sooner we can figure out how to feed ourselves without such an unhealthy reliance on this vanishing fossil energy, the better.

Colliding circumstances, among them our changing climate, water scarcity, a burgeoning population, and the loss of the earth’s topsoil and so arable areas, insist that we act to secure our food supply.

That is “what” we need to do and so we should gather and figure our “how” we do it.

The gulf between public needs and private wants warrants discussion

Public transport comes in many
 forms and next to walking and
 cycling it is clearly the most
 efficient way to move
 people about.

People of the Goulburn Valley need to gather and talk about the gulf between public needs and private wants.

Both are many, but it is the former to which any reasonable, decent, thoughtful and community-minded person will acknowledge the most important.

Sadly, our individualistic and consumerist world has a slavish devotion to the latter, a perverse privatization that gives rise to despair and a largely unacknowledged and invisible inequality.

Many argue that we can only deal with society as it is or with what exists and although that might be an accepted philosophy today, it wasn’t when we abandoned, almost entirely, our rail network and decided the future belonged to the combustion engine, effectively the motor car.

The Goulburn Valley of the mid-1940s had a wonderful rail network, but gradually was dismantled as private wants prevailed over public needs.

We wrongly chose not to build-on our existing rail infrastructure, but pursue a privately energised idea, the motor car; a concept that has evolved to actually become a public disservice and in just 100 years has left a legacy contrary to human needs.

The purchase of a car is a private decision, but its use and convenience depends, almost entirely, upon a publicly funded infrastructure.

The era of the car is ending with the oil upon which it depends becoming prohibitively expensive to extract and deliver to users, as is the maintenance of the road network and without either the motor car has no reason.

It is time to gather and discuss how we can get thousands of road users back onto a tightly networked public transport system that would be vastly more energy efficient; enrich and strengthen linked communities; trigger a host of new job opportunities; be safer; and make a significant contribution to reducing the Goulburn Valley’s carbon dioxide emissions.

The idea of public transport contrasts with the modern market-driven individualism that has prevailed for decades to become an imagined part of our wellbeing, both emotionally and physically.

Rather than responding to Australia’s spacious geography, we should be consolidating our towns and cities; living close to our work; using a bicycle, or walking; negotiating our towns and cities on a tightly integrated public transport system of buses with light rail running as frequently as hourly between Goulburn Valley towns to connect with trains that unite us with all other destinations.

Establishing an integrated public transport network will be complex, difficult and expensive, but we must start now for as the world’s oil becomes increasingly scarce and subsequently expensive, it will be equally increasingly difficult to build the network upon which the future of the Goulburn Valley will depend.

That is “what” we need and now we need to gather and figure our “how” we do it.

Idea festival exposes a parallel universe

Much of a recent week was lived in a parallel universe.

It was a world of ideas, hope, imagination, dreams, the impossible, concepts beyond the status quo and although exciting in the extreme, it was tiring.

The latter, of course, was not unexpected for once we step beyond what is familiar and embrace the new, we find ourselves entangled with fresh intellectual rigour and through just being different, it induces both physical and mental weariness.

Contemporary society does not encourage us to abandon the familiar rather; the market system prefers us to have a somewhat narrow view of value, worth and the causes of contentment to ensure the mental poverty of most enriches the elite.

Spending much of the week and the University of Melbourne’s biennial Festival of Ideas is an indulgence; gastronomy for the mind, a reminder of how little we understand, how remote we are from wisdom, knowledge and intelligence and how distant we are from having any real grasp of how, what, where and when.

Some would argue such pursuits irrelevant to their lives for they know who won the footy finals, what’s filling the movie theatres, what’s on the television tonight and what they need to do to ensure the pay checks keep rolling in.

But life is more than that, it is more than bread and circuses for human flourishing is about engaging with an idea that is bigger than you, an idea that both expands and demands more of your thinking and it is an idea that at first seems without rationale, but then becomes the solution.

Many things now are humanity’s staples were once ideas resident on the fringes of society or only thought about in moments of lucid madness.

We need more such festivals and maybe that is a project for the new Committee of Shepparton – Shepparton’s own Festival of ideas.

Ideas, no matter how vague, poorly articulated or inadequately thought through were not, according to the founder of Minds at Work, Jason Clarke, to be discounted or allowed to wither for all should be considered and welcomed to the conversation.

Victor Hugo.

Shepparton is in urgent need of a new idea as the 20^th century inspirational drivers of several decades are dying and maybe a universe in which fresh ideas are abundant will be found at our own ideas skirmish.

Melbourne has its Festival of ideas, Sydney its Festival of Dangerous Ideas and we should have our own agora, that ancient Greece marketplace-like concept where people met talked, considered and determined for their community, the best way ahead.

It was Frenchman, Victor Hugo who said: “One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.”

Let’s initiate that “invasion” and find a new idea for Shepparton.

Climate change is bring a decidely different future

Survival is going to
 need deep thought.

Tomorrow will be different from yesterday, no surprises there, but gone will be the status quo and many perceived freedoms.

 

Unmitigated climate change, a dilemma presently troubling the world, is something to which many are antagonistic for it brings with it the inevitable demise of most everything people in the developed world take for granted, especially imagined freedoms.

The discovery of fossil fuels along with the realization of and release of its embedded energy, set humanity on a troublesome trajectory that at first brought unimagined bonuses, but has now created equally unimagined complexities.

Humanity, interestingly, has the intellectual capacity equal to what is happening to our climate for when looked at analytically, it was our endeavours that unleashed the process, and now we understand the science.

So, we know what causes the difficulty and we know how to approach the solution, but the question is still, and it has never changed, are we intellectually bold enough, and sufficiently courageous, to implement the solutions we know exist?

The burning of oil, one of the prime causes of climate change, along with coal, suddenly saw those in developed countries, and other places to a lesser degree, freed from much physical labour as a barrel of oil represents more than 20 000 hours of human work.

Almost overnight many people went from being tied to the daily toil of sheer survival to a comparative life of luxury as oil, and coal, were put to work ending, largely, man’s drudgery.

This emancipation of our time wasn’t, sadly, put to figuring out how to husband this effectively free energy and so ration it rather, we wrongly assumed this was party-time and in about three centuries, we have nearly exhausted this rich resource.

Correction, it is unlikely we will ever exhaust earth’s fossil fuel resources rather our continued burning of them will disrupt human life to such an extent that we will no longer be able access or use them.

Freedom is an elusive smoke and mirrors concept, now you see it and now you don’t, and subsequent to the fallacy of the liberation promised by the military/industrial complex, we need to look to another freedom in which the needs of nature are equal to the wants of man.

Modernity has brought many advances allowing humanity to thrive, but within most enhancements has been an almost secret ideology that has gradually removed our freedoms, ensuring our behaviour enriches a relative few with most of the costs lumped upon the environment.

Should we value our freedom, then its survival depends almost entirely up us happily relinquishing some aspects or it.

The successful mitigation of climate change rests with you and me foregoing many traditional wants, readjusting our aspirations and understanding that genuine freedom is inextricably linked to discipline.

A life of discontinuities and risk - certainly a strange affair

A promotional brochure
 for Al Gore's newest
book, "The Future".

Life is a strange affair, full of weird happenings and discontinuities and as a friend once said, “It’s so risky we’ll not get out of it alive”.

Much of it can be, and is, so intellectually dishevelled that it gives pause to wonder “why”, but then equally, many moments burst upon you leaving a beautiful sense of hope and an enrichment of purpose.

Recently while walking with my brother, two young boys approached on their bicycles and a step off the footpath to allow them to pass resulted in a rather clumsy fall.

Hurting all over, my spirits were repaired somewhat and for a moment made me forget the pain, when the two young boys who could have easily sped on laughing about the “old bloke” who fell over, stopped and enquired about my welfare.

The pain was momentarily gone and a few seconds, I was not feeling as glum about humanity as is often the case.

Just a few days ago while travelling on and standing in a crowded tram in central Melbourne, a young Indian fellow offered me his seat – again, for a moment, the world seemed like reasonable place.

However, those moments of personal encouragement seem irrelevant and trivial in consequence when by chance of birth, your country prefers to be governed by a group of people whose passions are driven by short-term objectives and beliefs that the good life is to be found in materialism and the momentary joy of acquisition.

Promises in the lead-up to Australia’s recent federal election were many, but rarely did anyone illustrate concern for, a suggest anything that might enable you and me to endure the unfolding decades that will be clearly, and unquestionably, decidedly different from which we have just emerged.

It seems our leaders are devoid of the robust and bold thinking that enables them to imagine equality, decency, collaboration and fairness; things not fundamental to the economy rather behaviours that evolve from sharing, friendship, caring and empathy.

Should you consider that utopian thinking then, for a moment, consider the alternative to which humanity has adhered to for three centuries and upon any reasonable measure, what we have is a distressing dystopia in which the world economy is vacuumed up by just a few and billions are left either in or teeter on poverty.

Complicating that is the fragility of world governance with our much fêted democracy being sold to the highest bidder leaving it obligated to corporatism.

Writing in “The Future”, Al Gore said: “The extreme concentration of wealth is destructive to economic vitality and to the health of democracy”.

Yes, it’s a weird world in which a few have plenty, billions are in poverty, democracy is almost a memory and uplifting moments are disappointingly rare.

Surviving soon will simply be tough enough without such things as 'Tough Mudder'

Personal fitness regimes appear proportional to the rise of our dependence upon fossil fuels for energy.

The massive amounts of
 human energy expended on
events such as 'Tough
 Mudder' will be needed soon
 to  simply survive.

The latter has led to the former as there is an obvious relationship between our addiction to fossil fuels and the collapse of the need for human energy to undertake work.

Hence the emergence of regimes, or places, to repair subsequent human feebleness, a natural by-product of the sedentary life that is dependent on energy from somewhere else, that arose in lockstep with our habitual use of fossil energy.

Becoming increasingly dependent upon fossil fuels for energy, human muscle fell into disuse and following the emergence of boxing gyms in the 1930s, exercise regimes became an increasingly regular part of life.

In the past decade many have profited handsomely from an increasingly bizarre array of exercise programs that have proliferated, including curiously named events such as “Tough Mudder”.

The personal energy we now use for what is mostly recreation, in which many exhaust themselves to collapse, was in earlier times needed to simply survive, although many continue to deny that our hungry wants are taking us back to what once was.

The discovery of fossil fuels, along with an understanding how they could be used as a substitute for human and animal energy, liberated mankind from the demanding daily necessary exercise regime of hand-to-mouth survival.

Fossil fuel energy companies plead a contrary view, but the simple facts, supported by undeniable realities, illustrate that the storehouse of ancient energy is becoming exhausted and on a human time-scale we will have little choice but to return to personal manual labour.

The gymnasium of ancient Greece, beyond being a place where people trained for major public events, encouraged political discussion and frequently had a library attached, which was quite different from the stack of magazines in today’s gymnasiums.

Much discussion presently goes on between those pursuing various exercise regimes, but most of it is shallow, of little consequence and frequently is of little relevance to fundamental human needs.

Human energy will soon be again in demand for although we might see and explosion of renewable energy sources, it is unlikely that beyond some energy source not yet imagined, our daily needs will still only be satisfied through the use of our muscles.

Obesity and diabetes are modern problems that equate with too much time doing too little, unlike our predecessors who had to spend a few hours every day to ensure food was available.

That usually vigorous endeavour included much incidental exercise denying obesity and diabetes, but left time to connect with family, neighbours and friends.

Our exercise in the future will come vicariously as we bend our backs to ensure personal and community resilience and Tough Mudder-like frivolities will be unimaginable, irrelevant, and unnecessary.