Brighten up a dull life? - try volunteering!

Volunteering is sure way to brighten up a dull life.

Volunteers play a key role in helping
 maintain the Cotton Tree cenotaph.

People have myriad wants and needs, but chief among them is a sense that they belong, they are connected to someone or something, they are valued and important to the welfare of others. Volunteering answers those needs.

Thoughts that people have a worthy purpose are not only personally life-affirming, but through volunteering their community becomes a better place.

Everything about volunteering is advantageous for both as the volunteer benefits immeasurably and their efforts can change the lives of others.

Modern life appears to be about “me, me, me” with individualism being championed by many corporations and some governments who camouflage the endless pursuit of profit and growth as democracy.

The idea that people must be beholden to and servant of the economy has stripped people of the rich, important and intricate beliefs that can be found again through volunteering.

Our need for a common purpose, the essence of volunteering, and the sense of camaraderie inherent in groups has been exploited for centuries by political parties, commercial operators and those in the military.

The power of volunteering and the potent sense of wellbeing it brings to participants existed for all to see, and feel, at the recent 2014 Volunteer Recognition Awards in Shepparton’s McIntosh Centre.

Some 300 people gathered at the centre to hear who had been recognised by the City of Greater Shepparton as being among the city’s best volunteers.

The warmth and humility of these hard-working volunteers was tangible and so thick in the air, it was almost possible to imbibe it, suggesting that volunteerism is something that almost feeds upon itself.

An example of how the benefits volunteering brings to communities can be seen at the Cotton Tree war memorial on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, which a decade ago was in rather sad disrepair – today it is wonderful.

A local retired fellow, know to all as “Prickles” and whose father had died in the First World War, felt his dad deserved better and so began volunteering his time to tidy the surrounds, making the cenotaph something of which to be proud.

Prickles worked hard mowing the grass, creating some flowerbeds and brightening up the precinct until a request to the local council for some garden soil saw him caught in a bureaucratic controversy that, because of public risk and similar matters, forced him to become an official, but unpaid member of council’s staff.

Illness has forced “Prickles” into retirement and for the past four or five years Michael Powell has trimmed the plants, mowed the grass and generally kept the memorial tidy.

However, Michael is also stepping back a little and another local volunteer Bill Shaw is to become the “keeper of the cenotaph”.

Flailing, falling to his death, leaving many emotionally numb

A recent noisy and aggravated conversation on the eleventh floor of the resort caught the attention of many.

Those looking up from below, including my wife, watched as a fellow threw himself to his death.

 

My wife didn’t actually see the fellow climb over the balcony railing, but she did see the flailing, falling man.

Many tradesmen, mostly younger rather than older working nearby on the roof of a single story building, saw what happened as their attention had also been taken by the commotion.

Emergency people were called and the police, in dealing with what was in fact a suicide, offered the opportunity of counselling to all who had seen the man fall to his death.

News of the man’s death ricocheted around the community leaving those who had seen what happened asking “why” and along with that being emotionally damaged.

The man’s fall from and death at the Maroochydore resort is a microcosm of a near non-stop daily dilemma in which millions of people from around the world are trapped.

Many die from direct violence, thousands of lives are wasting away because of institutional violence and the world is held at ransom by the military/industrial complex which sees every problem as a nail that needs to be driven by a hammer.

Those in other parts of the world trapped by that direct/institutional/military violence that fill news broadcasts everyday are meant to find comfort in the idea that peace will evolve from overt use of force. It won’t.

The counselling offered to those who witnessed the Maroochydore calamity is a great compliment to a police force that has morphed from being in the early 19^th century little more than a protector of the propertied, profit makers to being a general guardian of society’s wellbeing, while maintaining law and order.

What we experience here in Australia is entirely absent in other countries with the devastating complexity of “there is no other way” view bringing down upon people degradation and violence of extremes that few here can even imagine.

Those living with, and dying from the application of that belief have only personal resources to fall back upon for no one is going to be there offering counselling or other emotional support to deal with whatever might be threatening them.

Emotional fragility can afflict even the strongest, but take away the support mechanisms we all take for granted, along with a lifestyle rich in comforts and even “strong” is a subjective term.

An almost impassable chasm stands between articulation and implementation

Between the articulation and implementation of a goal lies an almost impassable chasm.

We need to step back from the edge,
re-think our behaviour and choose a
wholly new direction.

The journey from promise to reality is pockmarked with disappointments, deceptions, social and economic difficulties and consequences, both unexpected and unintended.

Intertwined with this hazardous journey from promise to fact is the added confusion of ideologies, and although firmly believed by their protagonists, they frequently do little to help people break free of the many myths and fantasies that colour and confuse our lives.

The recent Federal Budget, and now the Victoria State election, ignited near endless ideological conversation about what will and won’t work, but rarely, if ever, are we able to judge anything without first reflecting on its economic cost.

That is understandable, but sad in the extreme and is the outcome of a market driven-life in which reward for effort is measured in money, with intelligence and influence is mostly attributed to those who have excelled in commercial life and have both burgeoning bank balances and life loaded with consumerist goods.

Our understanding of success in a life measured only by physical possessions and the instinct for gambling and craftiness that survival in our embedded market system demands is wrongheaded.

Rather than being slaves to the economy, we should be working hard for people, putting humanity first, and we are not.

Ideologues repeatedly tell us that until the economy is repaired, as is the chorus from the present Federal Government, Australia is not secure and cannot progress.

The latter are both subjective and beyond that are ideologically conditional and bound-up in myths and falsehoods sold to us as unavoidable realities.

Those “unavoidable realities” are nothing more than human constructs – we built them and so we can be re-build them with intent and effort equal to what it took to assemble them.

Post World War Two brought
burgeoning budgets, but the arrival
of the 2000s saw them fall away.

So the goal is that we build a life in which the rights and welfare of people are more important than profit, but between us and our destination lays that near impassable chasm and crossing it means a re-think, the fracturing of our allegiance to the military/industrial complex that feeds off conflict and human misery and the recognition that needs will always trump our wants.

The responsible men claim their ideological growth-driven pragmatism will ensure a re-birth of the post Second World War halcyon days when fossil fuels were abundant and cheap.

The game, however, has changed and never again will we see the once commonplace surging economies and so rather than dither on the edge of the chasm, we need to step back, re-imagine our lives and strike out in a wholly different direction, one in which we find contentment from collaborative communities; places where the economy again becomes a tool and a servant, rather than a template and the master.

Looking at the future through a frame shaped for yesterday's conditions

Matt Nelson.

Future opportunities are viewed by many through a frame built around what was and presently exists.

Most projects, new or otherwise, are locked into a canon that because of rapidly changing planetary circumstances will be largely irrelevant before, or soon after the idea hardens.

Excitement about and commitment to the idea will be insufficient for what is coming in just years, rather than decades are changes that humanity has never before encountered.

Humans have always psychologically sought certainty and the only inevitability we can count on will be a difference quite unlike anything we have ever seen.

We have seriously depleted one energy source, oil, and coal, our other prime energy resource, needs to stay in the ground.

The relish we have exhibited in burning those two fossil fuels has irreparably damaged our atmosphere and rather than using our inventiveness and inherent anticipatory abilities to ensure growth, we should be applying them to build community resilience and adaptability.

An unfolding energy scarcity threatens most everything critical to modernity from food to human movement and because of oil depletion most everything within reach, including the computer upon which this is being written, will be threatened.

Just recently the Committee for Greater Shepparton CEO, Matt Nelson, talked about reasons and circumstances that led to the formation of the body and the four “strategic pillars” upon which it would shape its business plan.

Those four pillars are a productive, creative, connected and inclusive community that considered in terms of what was are wonderful and even in a dramatically changed situation, have merit and worth.

It is not, however what we say, rather it is what we do and in this case it is vibrantly important that an inclusive, connected, creative and productive community is all those things, but one that builds community resilience within the confines of a setting in which water will be scarce, along with energy and food, all worsened by an increasingly disorderly climate.

The drive, sadly and to our ultimate demise, for infinite growth is clearly unsustainable in a finite world.

Institutions from our Federal Government through to myriad organizations in local communities see their salvation in economic growth, but fail to acknowledge that the tireless pursuit of such growth has edged humanity onto a slippery slope.

The ideals and goals of the Committee for Greater Shepparton are honourable, but upon closer examination it appears eager to build on values and strengths of yesterday; tenets we must purge if humanity is to endure and thrive.

Tomorrow is going to be decidedly different even from today and rather than ogling expansion we should be considering orderly contraction; a change in behaviours that is about diversifying activities within communities to make them feisty, adaptable and so durable

Wolves, externalities and finding balance

Externalities are not something most of us understand or have ever had to concern ourselves about, until now.

The idea of putting a cost on carbon was just a small step toward helping us understand that an externality is a real cost that someone, somewhere has to burden.

The Yellowstone National Park - the
 return of wolves brought new
life to all aspects of the park.

Corporations and businesses of the world, including all those in Australia, have for centuries cheerfully ignored, to the benefit of their bank balances, the real cost of externalities.

Of course, it is unfair and irresponsible, to lump responsibility for ignoring externalities upon only business, as individuals, you and me, are equally liable for how the machine, that is the economy, works as we are also intimate players in the activity.

Speaking on a panel at Shepparton’s Eastbank before the naming of the winner of the 2014 Indigenous Ceramic Arts Award, Arts Victoria’s Liz Little said “Everything affects everything else”.

Liz was obviously speaking about art, but she could have been talking about externalities for everything we do clearly impacts everything else.

A clear and obvious example of that comes from America’s Yellowstone National Park where wolves, which had been missing for 70 years, were reintroduced in 1995.

Although a predator, the wolves controlled the size of deer herds, forced them to different parts of the park, allowing amazing regrowth or trees, plants and shrubs encouraging the return of birdlife; beavers began damming streams and rivers again encouraging the return of various species that thrived in the pools; and balance was returning to the park.

Ms Little wasn’t talking about wolves in Yellowstone Park and nor was she talking about externalities when she said “Everything affects everything else”, but her comment was prescient.

Her truism takes us direct to the problem and until we are prepared to put a cost on our externalities, those things we dump in our atmosphere, our oceans, our rivers and many landfills, we will continue to soil our own nest, making it ultimately unliveable.

Australia’s “great big new tax” (the carbon tax) was a first, and timid step toward seeing people here at least acknowledging that “Everything affects everything else”.

It was also a somewhat apprehensive move toward having us understand the real costs, financial and otherwise, of externalities and the complication of ignoring the rather brutal reality that “Everything affects everything else”.

Solutions to this dilemma are straightforward and simple, but as they require significant changes to our behaviour they are not socially palatable.

However, necessity will soon override any reservations as our abuse of those externalities will brings changes to what we see as normal.

Maybe it is time we familiarized ourselves with the idea behind the Yellowstone Park wolves and brought the balance back into our lives.

 

Advice for all who draw a breath from Professor Jeffrey Sachs

Goulburn Valley people were probably few among those who recently almost packed out Melbourne’s Town Hall.

Professor Jeffrey Sachs.

Globally renowned economist Professor Jeffrey Sachs talked about matters that maybe appeared remote to the concerns and interests of northern Victorians, but in fact were relevant to everyone who draws a breath.

The professor has credentials sufficient to near fill a lengthy document, but he was visiting Australia, and subsequently speaking in Melbourne in his role as Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

Welcomed to the discussion on Wednesday, May 21, by the chair of the Monash Sustainability Institute, Professor John Thwaites, and then by City of Melbourne’s chairman of the council’s inner Melbourne climate action network. Cr Aaron Wood, Prof Sachs outlined the wonders of modernity.

He gave credit to coal for the growth of civilization – electricity equates with growth, he said  – even heaping praise on the contribution it had made to human life on earth, but was then critical of the unintended damage electricity arriving from coal-fired power stations had caused to our atmosphere.

John Thwaites.

As one of the world’s major exporters of coal, Australians, Prof Sachs said had to make some serious decisions to make either in stopping the mining and sale of coal or investing heavily in helping the world understand and use carbon capture and sequestration, an unproved process and yet the only one that could make coal safe and so useable.

He was concerned about the future welfare of the world saying that climate change could not, and would not be resolved by putting up a few extra solar panels.

We needed, according to Prof Sachs to make significant changes to how we lived as we were pressing many planetary boundaries and had already exceeded some.

He said we are pressing on the accelerator when we should have our foot on the brake.

The professor is astonishingly erudite when considering global economics, and appears to stand with most others when reflecting on how humanity advances and yet successfully mitigates the worst impacts of climate change, or at least what is causing our climate to change.

Our ceaseless and careless use fossil fuels has unquestionably improved many aspects of human life lifting us from what was virtually a hand-to-mouth way of living when the prime source of energy was animal, human and a limited use of renewable energies – wind and water.

The modern live that is now so entrenched that the needed change is almost beyond comprehension, and yet it is the very energy that has made everything we enjoy possible that has seriously disrupted and damaged our atmosphere.

The optimists among us admit to serious changes in how we live, but generally and broadly life appears to go on pretty much within boundaries of what exists.

Prof Sachs appears to stand with that group and although he didn’t articulate how he saw the future, he did say that it would be dramatically different if we failed to attend to the drivers of climate change.

However, many it seems pretend (and maybe that is too strong a word, but few can articulate a workable alternative) that what we presently enjoy will continue in some recognisable form.

Cr Aaron Wood.

Prof Sachs urged those at the town hall not to discount nuclear power pointing to clear difference  between the deaths suffered from coal, which were in the millions, compared to nuclear, which was only in the hundreds.

He is not, in any sense, as advocate of the “business as usual” scenario, which he illustrated through graphs was simply a journey to disaster; difficulties for  humanity arising from global temperatures five and six degrees in excess of pre-industrial revolution levels, taking conditions on earth way beyond anything that humans have ever experienced or lived through.

Evidence clearly illustrates, a point made abundantly clear by Prof Sachs, that nearly all of the known fossil fuels must stay in the ground if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change and to do that we have no option but a dramatic and never-before-seen change to human behaviour that demands an immediate reversing of human consumptive and fossil-fuel energy usage.

Rather than globalization, we should be looking at, and working on “localization”, building resilience in our local communities and switching to what some described as “10-minute life” – that is a situation where everything we need to day-to-day contentment is within a 10 minute walk or cycle of where we live.

Work, or at least purpose, is psychologically important to humans and conscious of what Prof Sachs says, we need to re-shape, redefine and reorganise human purpose away from the idea of profit and growth to one of collaboration and resilience that is about human survival.

Idealistic and utopian? Maybe so, but it is a dream we must follow for the only other route is that which denies humanity its fulfilment and sends us crashing into disruptive times from which escape for most is impossible.

A budget built on ignorance, arrogance, elitism and social naivety

Ignorance, arrogance, elitism and social naivety underpin the latest Australian Budget.

Everything is life is ideologically driven, even these thoughts, but opinion that surrounds them and their associated beliefs that endorse them, or otherwise, are disparate and seemingly limitless.

A financial budget arising from a democracy and intended to serve those living within that democracy is a complex beast and the author, or authors, always face an intrigue that exceeds their ability to deliver.

Present budgetary intent to deliver smaller government camouflaged as savings and efficiency, and “repairing the budget”, contrasts with the facts as explained by Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph E. Steglitz.

Writing in “Globalization and its Discontents” about the East Asia crisis of the late 1990s, Steglitz argued that nations that best endured the crisis where those with strong government participation.

Using the recent budget to pursue its ideologies, our government seems to have dropped the reins, and even dismounted, and handed control of its charger over to chance and private enterprise.

As we rush ill-equipped into a world unknown, it seems we are being asked put our trust in faith and leave fact and reason to rust.

The rather brutal facts are that humanity, and that includes you and me, and of course Tony Abbott and his cohort, presently faces its greatest ever threat and urgently needs both scientific facts and all the information it can get about those realities from reliable sources.

Joseph E. Steglitz.

The institutions that both provide facts and help us understand that information were punished or disbanded in the recent Budget, yet millions have been set aside for the provision of chaplains in schools – a place where science should be exemplified, but it is being usurped by faith.

“Trust us” is the plaintive cry from Joe Hockey as he tries to assuage our wounded intellect that is left limping and staggering about from a blizzard of broken promises.

Trust is not one of those things that cannot be bought and beyond that, the intent of our present government became obvious, and our suspicions triggered, from the moment it left the ministerial science seat empty, illustrating it preferred fantasy to fact.

Anecdotal asides, driven by populist credos seem preferred, leaving the administration of Australia locked into thought processes that might have had some relevance a century ago, but inadequate in every sense for a future that every shred of scientific evidence illustrates will be quite different for what was.

With yesterday’s men at the helm, and collecting knights and dames as we go, we sail blithely about with the poor, pensioners, students and the states stoking the boilers, allowing the rich, flaunting their ideological map, to loll about as we seek refuge on Fantasy Island.