Roaming brings many benefits both to individuals and communities

R

iding a bike was a skill learnt in the historic-fog of personal history.

Professor Trevor Hancock used
this image to illustrate the
advantages to a community
of "roaming" - advantages
now largely lost.

That relatively simple skill brought many bonuses and chief among them was freedom.

Suddenly the world was my oyster (well, the geographical wilds of Echuca east at least) and I was free to roam, pretty much at will.

That wonderful freedom allowed to myself and my friends was not considered much until recently when a Canada’s Professor Trevor Hancock talked about how stronger, resilient and healthier communities were when kids had the freedom to roam.

That roaming, he explained unintentionally informed kids about their community in that they got to know a variety of people, understand how it worked, its strengths, weaknesses and along with that understood and learnt much about themselves, all things that enriched them personally and aligned them, ultimately with the unstated aims of their community.

A pictorial image illustrated clearly how our roaming has been reduced to almost nil as the decades have passed taking with it an almost inexplicable sense of community that arose from kids roaming about the place.

The image illustrated that a kid of today could roam, unaccompanied, about 300 metres from his home; his mother less than a kilometre; his grandfather nearly two kilometres and his great grandfather regularly roamed about 10 kilometres to go fishing.

The visiting professor lamented the loss of roaming and was able to equate it with the decline in the broader wellbeing of community, suggesting that it illustrated, in a practical sense, our personal disconnect with nature.

Humans are unquestionably a part of nature and have long and rich history of being a part of it, until modernity really took hold.

Professor Trevor Hancock - he extolls the
community benefits of "roaming".

Humans have been hand-in-glove with nature for most of their existence, and many still are, but as Professor Hancock pointed out, we now spend 80 per cent of our time in a building, and so disconnected from nature, and of the other 10 per cent, half of that is spent inside a vehicle..

That disconnect from nature is now almost total and what is happening in the world indicates that such remoteness is bringing unintended consequences – we are almost absolutely insensitive to the impact our behaviour is having on earth’s climate system.

Roaming, of course is not the solution, rather just a small part of it.

The almost incommunicable health roaming brought to our communities appears to be lost forever as most people, reacting to the few stories given broad coverage in our popular media about isolated violent behaviour keep their children pretty much within reach, killing off their natural adventurous spirit.

Learning to ride a bike was about freedom and primed my willingness to engage with the other, a desire still with me today.

We need to look 'up-river' if we are to resolve domestic violence

D

Australia's PM, Malcolm Turnbull - he
sees the solution to domestic violence
 in a "rich spend", while it
is really an 'up-river' problem.

omestic violence is an “up-river” problem.



Malcolm Turnbull’s plan to spend richly to slow what is mostly men attacking women and the “up-river” theory arrived personally about the same time.

The $100 million spend was something about which I was inherently uncomfortable for it seemed about mistaking the poison for the cure.

Domestic violence arises for a host of reasons, but prime among them is our market-driven consumerist based society that creates mostly unfilled aspirations manifesting frustration and anger that frequently erupt as domestic violence.

The PM’s market driven-like response to domestic violence was unveiled on the same day as the co-founder of the world’s Healthy-Cities movement, Professor Trevor Hancock from Canada’s University of Victoria, talked about the “up-river” problem to a room of about 150 people.

He told of a small river-side town that hauled a floating body from the water; day after day the bodies kept floating down the river and so the town developed a complex rescue and morgue infrastructure to remove the bodies and decently dispose of them, until someone suggested maybe the town should lift is gaze and look up-river and see if the source of the problem could be found.

The scenario discussed by Professor Hancock and proposed resolution of domestic violence sound strikingly similar – the PM’s approach to domestic violence focusses on the symptoms and so sees a change in the behaviour of men as resolving the difficulty.

Many of those assumptions are correct, but the actual violence is naught but a symptom for there is a deeper malaise.

There is a broad and sweeping societal malignancy that can be directly related to the profit and growth society that already exists in Australia and one Mr Turnbull wants to further strengthen.

Many directly link domestic violence to the less than honourable male behaviour and of course they are correct, but what causes that corrupt conduct, what frustrates men, why does our way of life disturb personally held understandings of status, erode aspirations, or contort their confidence to such an extent that they seek control by physically lashing out at those nearest them, mostly their female partner?

Existing systems epitomized by the commercial success of our PM promise much, but are analytically foreign to human betterment for they discriminate against equality, while celebrating individuality.

Each of us is of course an individual, but the individualism encouraged and almost enforced throughout modern western societies is foreign to what we really need, which is a sense of belonging, purpose, friendship, collaboration, fellowship and a belief that you are an integral and vital part of your community.

The perpetrator of domestic violence is estranged from his community, and despite appearances, probably frightened, emasculated, lonely and socially impotent and in accessing the only power he has left, he physically or emotionally damages his partner.

Yes, it is up-river; many of our men are thrashing about in a society created pool of frustration, disappointment and powerlessness that causes them to exercise the worst feature of their maleness - violence.

Grand court house proposal assualts good sense

I

deas reminiscent of the energy-rich 20^th Century and appealing to and warming egos are embedded in a plan to build a large, glamourous and centralized court in Shepparton.

The grand new court house proposed
 for Shepparton - energy scarcity
and information abundance
makes it already obsolete.

Cutting to the chase, it is simply the wrong thing to do.

Shepparton people frequently lament the centralization of government and health facilities in Melbourne, and a few major regional centres, and now, in a Goulburn Valley sense, we are doing the same thing.

Centralization of services was good sense in the energy rich and information poor 20^th Century, but the circumstances have reversed; we now have an overabundance of information and a scarcity of energy.

Living in what is colloquially known as the “information age” and the officially deemed “Anthropocene” – an era in which humans are now the major influence on the earth’s biosphere – leaves us no option but to design our lives around those two facts.

Rather than taking the people to where the infrastructure is, we should be taking the infrastructure, which now is frequently little more than information, to where the people are.

So instead of spending richly on creating a soon to be impractical 20^th Century piece of infrastructure, we need to understand how the disruptive information technology works and take the until now court house-bound law processes to the people.

The modern court house need be nought more than a mobile, compact team of people, armed with a barrage of technology around which the information age has been built, and through that take what is a virtual court house to the people.

True, the virtual court house idea is not ideal but even a cursory look at world events, with just a hint of understanding, illustrates that Shepparton will not be afforded exemption from the unfolding rigours facing humanity, such as resource scarcity and a seriously disrupted climate, and so maintenance of our civil society might need some less than ideal ideas.

It seems that the concepts upon which the last century were built have infiltrated our being to such an extent that we can no longer think beyond the horizon and our subsequent sclerotic thinking prohibits us from imagining that there might be another way; a better way of doing things that allows us to take off the blinkers that so limit our view and subsequently our perceptions.

What is proposed is unquestionably impressive, but for those of us interested in creating a community that is both sustainable and resilient, and ready to withstand the unsettling and difficult decades ahead, it assaults good sense.

Shepparton should be applauded for its ambitious endeavours in providing the city with a grand new art museum and now an equally grand court house, but considering the needs that our different future will demand, both are inappropriate.

Living life, vicariously

R eporters mostly live life vicariously. They watch, record and write about what went on, but usually as a spectator, looking on from outside the arena. Thinking of this, the words of the late U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt ring loud: Theodore Roosevelt. “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” Quietism, with its philosophical overtones, in some ways describes those who stand outside the arena for they neither challenge nor support anything and in Australia’s prosperous decades of the 50s, 60s and 70s it was a profitable stance. The decade of the eighties changed all that, it continued apace in the 90s and now in the second decade of the 21st Century, it is critical that people, including spectators and reporters, not just watch and report, but join the conversation. Shepparton presently, and urgently, needs all hands on deck, everyone needs to step into the arena, join the affray, take a chance on victory and risk defeat. The city, and it is not alone, needs ideas that will equip it to live with weather quite unlike anything it, and the greater Goulburn Valley have ever experienced. Climate scientists use evidence to illustrate changes in our weather and so they are in the arena using both their skills and knowledge to help us see what is happening and explain why we should join them. Having mostly lived vicariously as a journalist, insisting on objectivity, fairness and balance, my life has largely been that of the spectator, but that all changed about a decade or so ago when it became obvious that because of our behaviour the earth was warming and so the Goldilocks-like climate that has allowed humans to prosper was changing. Climbing the fence and stepping into the arena was the easy part, but struggling with the “dust and sweat and blood” arising from blatant indifference, apathy and the grossly misplaced confidence that technology and man’s inventiveness can resolve all, makes the vicariousness and inculcated quietism of my other life mighty attractive.

Walking and Cycling given priority in five-step city plan

W

alking and cycling in line with a “five-step plan” should have priority when imagining Shepparton’s town planning and infrastructure needs.

The need to acknowledge and implement that plan falls upon both the city’s paid officers and its elected representatives.

Let’s look at the plan.

A sign of the times
 in Shepparton.

Step one: The plan and it associated infrastructure must first and foremost be walkable.

Pedestrians must be able to use and access easily wherever it is in the city they want to go.

Step two: Once the needs and convenience of those on foot are attended to, the cyclist should be considered next, meaning that after pedestrians’ needs are resolved, facilities and amenities should be such that cycling is not only easy, but next to walking the preferred method of moving about.

Step three: Obviously, in city as geographically large as Shepparton, walking and cycling are not always feasible or possible and so the next option is public transit and so that should always be close to the top of the planning agenda.

With fossil fuels become less viable, private transport will become an ever reducing option and so the city needs to reinvent Shepparton around one of the many forms of innovative public transit systems.

Shepparton was recently visited by a fellow who explained how the city could be serviced by battery-powered, Google-controlled, driverless vehicles that would circulate throughout the city, taking both people and freight wherever they, and it, needed to go. Such “pods” are already technologically possible.

People and freight would arrive in the city by sophisticated rail and then taken around the city on their Google-controlled, driverless pods.

Step four: This is about land and property use – for a town or city to be walkable, there has to be somewhere to walk to and so our designers need to ensure the city is dotted with beautiful public spaces where people simply want to be.

Property use is also about ensuring the present and preferred idea of sprawl, that is growth at the cities edges, is reversed with the emphasis being put on infill and the development, or redevelopment, is concentrated on the inner-parts of the city where the infrastructure is at its most intricate and developed. The city’s rating system should reflect that, rates being the cheapest in the centre and more costly as you get toward the periphery,

Step five: When steps one through to four are completed, the city’s attention should turn to road transport, but not until all four of the first steps have been totally developed and all options exhausted.

Five fundamental steps toward making Shepparton a city that may just endure the rigours of the 21^st Century; a century that beyond doubt is going to be different from all those passed, particularly the energy-rich 20^th Century.

Considering the terror that is alcohol, the legal drug that tears at society's heart

D

eaths of Australians at the hands of terrorists have been comparatively few and rare, but some 15 others from the “lucky country” die every day and hundreds are admitted to hospital in the same 24 hours, all because of alcohol abuse.

The 'legal' drug tearing
at the heart of society.

Governmental and the essential social response has been sorely missing as the  nation has been stampeded into a near state of panic about terrorists, while frighteningly little is being done about our distorted consumption of a legal drug.

So, which is more damaging, or tears more at the fabric of Australian society – the remote possibility that someone might die at the hands of a “terrorist” or the undeniable, unequivocal reality that, as 2010 research shows, excessive and long-term consumption of alcohol kills 5554 people and results in 157 132 hospital admissions in just one year?

Alcohol is legal and is easily accessed and the damage it causes both to those who use it and all those around them, easily surpasses that of those drugs declared illicit and catastrophized by the media.

Heroin, crack cocaine, methamphetamines, marijuana or even tobacco do not come close to the health and safety hazards caused by alcohol.

A recent discussion between friends about the use of methamphetamine (“ice”) produced an argument for the doubling of police numbers, as a minimum, to limit the spread of what was seen as a drug able to rip at the essence of Australian society. No one mentioned the real terror – alcohol.

Coincidently the American-based website, “Wisdom Pills” listed just five reasons why alcohol, the most dangerous of all drugs is not illegal - all five reasons were about the economy.

Alcohol is deeply implicated in most every strata of society and those who have the power to limit its use and restrict its easy availability are mostly just like everyone else, they are “users” and so are stripped of motivation to make the necessary changes.

So while our Prime Minister talks endlessly about “death cults”, engages Australia’s armed forces in pointless confrontations and spends without restraint to attend to the supposed safety of Australians, he sits idly by as thousands die every year from a drug which is both legal and commonly available throughout our communities.

Being a non-drinker, the title of wowser probably fits but such a crown is uncomfortable as the driver is an interest in the facts, devoid of emotion for any person, government or other institution genuinely concerned about societal safety would strip away the sentiment and sensation and consider objectively what it is that is killing so many Australians and what can be done about it.

True, many Australians drink responsibly, but those who oversee the sale of this drug need to act equally responsibly in limiting both its sale and promotion, starting by emulating the cigarette example.

Blood in the streets leads to only more violence, trouble and personal sorrow

B

lood in the streets was, I once thought, the only possible resolution for our troubled and dysfunctional world.

Blood in the streets - it doesn't work,
 leading simply to more violence.

That in itself was rather strange for violence was something I found abhorrent, yet “blood in the streets” seemed to a youthful mind as the path to a better world.

Fortunately, age and philosophical maturity saw that sense quickly evaporate, bringing an understanding that the difficulties of the world cannot be resolved through violence of any sort, rather only worsened.

That “blood in the streets” ache was a combination of youthful vigour, aspirations and hope tangled up with a sense of uselessness, desperation, isolation and impotence.

Fortunately other influences in my life were absent, I didn’t drink nor smoke and although heavily maternally influenced as a young boy, I had risen above religion and my sense of self was secure.

Fortunately, also, the times of more than four decades ago were different; dramatically different and the contemporary rash of discontent sweeping around the world was a distant and unimagined reality, as was the internet.

The idea then that people could be radicalized and so embark on a bloody crusade against ordinary people to make a point about ways of life, and philosophies they disliked seemed inconceivable.

Questions about why young men, and young women as illustrated recently by the fleeing of three British girls into the embrace of ISIL, appear to have obvious answers; answers many leaders throughout the world, particularly in the developed nations would not like to hear.

There is, of course a large slither of what most perceive to be religion involved, but in a more human way it is about people responding, as mistaken and distorted as it may be, to the damage that you and me, and all our fellows, are doing to our only home.

People, regardless of where they are from, all have a profound sense of place, their home, and when they see that threatened they will react, frequently violently.

Beyond that, our modern corporatized and globalized world promises much, but delivers little, particularly to most people, exampled by the fact that just one large bus-load of people have control of more wealth and resources than nearly half the world’s people.

Such inequality breeds discontent; discontent distorting the minds of people such that it manifests itself as blood in the streets.

Violence presently witnessed around the world is becoming ingrained and will not be easily resolved, but the first step is about more equitable sharing of the world’s wealth and resources.

Beyond that the governments of the world need to reinvigorate democracy and regain control that by sleight of hand has been surrendered to the world’s corporations.

The option is more blood in the streets.