$20 billion to maintain our overseas aggression - Why?

Armed with all the destructive technology available, or more correctly what we can afford to buy from the state supported military-industrial complex; our politicians roam the world looking for a fight.

Look hard enough and, of course, you will find one and we claim that the subsequent violence is honourable, moral and in the greater good, whatever the cost, be it in the obscene amount of money it costs or the death and momentous disruption caused to the lives of others.
Our overseas troop commitments, primarily in Afghanistan are, according to recent figures, costing us, that is you and I, people who are raising kids, attending church, working, enjoying a beer and sunny days in the park, nearly $2 billion a year to maintain our rage.
Australians have been in Afghanistan for more than a decade and simple arithmetic puts the cost, at present value, at $20 billion, an amount that makes any major public and civilian project here seem like small change.
Applying different values our alternative energy systems could be stunning, our train network brilliant, our education life-changing, health services spectacular and poverty eradicated.
The thought of the disarray we have wrought upon another culture through force in the name of the greater good sees me reach for the anti-depression medication.
A decade of confrontation in those distant countries sees the maintenance of a mentality solidified after a life soaked in violence that is embedded in our psyche during teenage years spent watching aggressive movies, television shows, computer games and then, later, surviving in today’s competitive commercial milieu.
Ask those you next meet about Australian values and you will probably hear about such things as “fair dinkum”, “mateship”, “honesty”, ‘’friendship” and “giving people a fair go”.
All honourable and worthwhile attributes, but after a decade of plunder, and death in another country’s culture they are somewhat transparent leaving us entrenched in a disagreement that has mutated into something we no longer understand.
Supporters of the conflict, trapped by politics, pride and militant personalities, want us to stay the distance – I ask how far? At what cost? And, critically, why?

David Suzuki takes centre stage, vicariously

David Suzuki is responsible for this column, well, not directly, rather vicariously.

Several other already written pieces, in my view equally important, but not having the same urgency, were pushed aside after reading the scientist and environmentalist’s newest book, “The Legacy: An Elder’s Vision for a Sustainable Future”(below right).
Dr Suzuki (right) took less than 100 pages to articulate the difficulties we (humanity) face, how those difficulties evolved and then provided an understanding of the biological equations on which humanity depends and must observe if it is to endure.
Earth’s thin biosphere and the richness of its buried sunlight (fossil fuels) has enabled us to prosper in every sense, allowing our numbers to grow exponentially and now, according to Dr Suzuki in a word picture he painted, we are just one minute away from exhausting everything that makes the world habitable for humans.
He illustrated our nearness to the precipice through encouraging readers to imagine a test tube of food with just one bacterium when the clock starts and then just 59 minutes later, because the bacterium grows and divides and experiences exponential growth, the test tube is all but filled.

The test tube in its finite size and food supply represents earth and its other resources, the bacterium represents humans (us) and as there is no other test tube, and so space, Dr Suzuki illustrates that we face an uncertain future.

Humanity faces a dilemma that most can’t or won’t comprehend and the urgency Dr Suzuki illustrates collapses for the want and strong a decisive leadership, a leadership that will introduce restrictions to and imposts on our freewheeling lifestyle that is eroding, quickly, our place here on earth.

Humans are, unquestionably, the smartest beings in the universe, but that intelligence brings with it a burden; a burden that could see the human race extinguished.

The need for those strong, decisive and positive leaders is, after reading Dr Suzuki’s newest work, pressingly urgent, but equally urgent is the need for followers – people who understand and accept the articulated dilemmas and want to work with those leaders to ensure the world we bequest to those who follow continues to be habitable.

Island's collapse and book launch dynamic similarities were unsettling

Similarities between the 17th century collapse of the Easter Island population and the social dynamics at the recent launch of a book acknowledging Shepparton’s 150th birthday have crowded my thinking.

Listening as the former Member for Murray, Mr Bruce Lloyd, launched the coffee table-like book – Water: The Vital Element, 150 Years of Shepparton’s Growth – I couldn’t avoid thinking about the demise of the small Pacific Ocean island’s population.
That, you could argue, may be a long bow to draw and although I might agree, the similarities were unsettling.
The people of Easter Island (above right) lived comparatively happily, but for reasons not fully understood they were addicted to building huge monuments to assuage their superstitions and used most all the island’s trees to enable their transport.
Here in Shepparton our superstitions might be different, but allegiance to them is as damaging as those at Easter Island for instead of our community blooming into beautiful fulfilment it limps ahead paying homage to values that trouble our planet.
Those at the book launch celebrated many things, and people, as they should, but in doing so helped perpetuate the many myths that negate the long-term unfolding welfare of Sheppartonians.
The idea that growth is good prevails and the subsequent contagion, although it has always been a human instinct, accelerated wildly with the impetus of the industrial revolution and so has been a part of Shepparton’s 150 years.
Growth has served the district well, but then in the 1970s scientists began to truly understand what impact humans were having on earth and so while our addictions were enriching they also had a dark side.
That dark side was only surreptitiously evident at the book launch in that our inherent drive for growth that is the energy of Shepparton’s history is also the essence of the paradigm now holding the world hostage.
Our insistence on the growth and success equation is now such that it is almost superstition and myth, but those beliefs bring difficulties similar to those of the Easter Islanders and to use the words of recent visitor to Shepparton and former Greenpeace CEO, Paul Gilding, threaten “the survival of human civilization”.

A challenging conversation that needs a truly visionary outcome

Those who attend today’s (Tuesday, October 12, 2010) consultation to consider proposals for the conservation and management of water in the Murray-Darling Basin face a significant challenge.

It seems they will need to look at the proposals in the here and now and then, importantly, consider them, in what is near a magical and seemingly impossible trick, through the prism of 1000 years hence.

According to the Murray-Darling Basin Authority’s “Guide to the Proposed Basin Plan”, the basin is a critical part of Australia’s economy and the nation’s food security. The basin, it says, contributes 39 per cent of national agricultural production and provides water for three million Australians.

Today’s conversation is about a finite resource and infinite aspirations.

What is advocated and how Australians respond to the proposals is obviously important to the here and now, but it is the “1000 years’ time” question that is truly and deeply important.

Most of us can comprehend what has happened (the past), but it is a rare soul who can project his or her thoughts to encompass the unfolding of events (the future) and so most live in a short-term world where 25 year view is considered visionary.
The Murray-Darling Basin has been, in one way or another, implicated in the Australian landscape for millennia and in just 200 years we have raped, exhausted and plundered its resource to sate our thirsts and grow rich and fat on the abundant food it allowed us to grow.
What has been proposed has been described as a “slap in the face for primary producers” by one commentator and as “un-Australian” by another.
Critically, and importantly, we need to rise above such views as they are founded on populism ignited by concerns for the here and now, but in what seems an odd contradiction we need to apply ourselves and act appropriately in this moment to ensure the basin continues to serve the nation’s water needs for 1000 years.
It is somewhat generous to imagine the authority was looking that far ahead, but at least it appears to go well beyond the here and now, something that deserves our applause.

Fire warnings hit a psychological road block

Living in Shepparton was no disadvantage to knowing what was happening in the Victorian districts devastated in February’s Black Saturday bushfires.

Some caught up in that maelstrom declared they had not been warned of the impending disaster. Shepparton was remote from the firestorm, but most in would have known, I’m sure, that some of their fellow Victorians decided difficulties.
Recently the Victorian psychologist and author, Danielle Clode, talked about her new book, “A Future in Flames” (right), and in answer to a question about why people had not heard the advice in the lead up to the fires or warnings about the collision of ideal fire weather events, she argued most were mentally and emotionally unable to assimilate those alerts.
Life had evolved as imagined, but they had never visualized it being interrupted by fire and so smoke was, until they actually saw threatening flame, nothing more than a controlled burn-off.
The psychological road block we witnessed in February is again evident as we plummet toward decided difficulties brought on by significant human induced changes to our climate and an oil scarcity that will upend our lives.
Look around and most everything in sight is there because of oil and that bountiful supply of energy has shaped our way of living, and, more importantly, our mindset.
We have been mentally crippled, myself included, by earth’s generousity and it is a rare soul who can see how they and their fellows will live in a low-energy future.
Scientists around the world constantly alert us to our excesses, but with fossil fuels and resources so implicated in our lifestyles, few of us are able to imagine an escape or even see a need for one
Beyond that, comforted by doubters who excavate irrelevant detail attributed to an equally irrelevant fields of science, most of us who are unable to make sense of complex climate science, continue with business as usual and so worsen emerging and existing difficulties.
Warnings about the bushfires were many and frequent, but strangely not heard by those who most needed to hear them; the warnings about global heating and oil scarcity have been loud and frequent, but I doubt we are listening.

Adversity may help us avoid true difficulty

Personal adversity, a friend recently suggested, is the only thing that will convince most people of such things as climate change, oil scarcity or food security.

That idea was echoed on Friday night by one of the speakers at the 20th anniversary celebrations of the Goulburn Valley Environment Group (GVEG).

Nearly 200 people gathered at Shepparton’s Eastbank centre to acknowledge that moment in group’s life and listened as Paul Gilding (right) warned of serious looming adversity.

Gilding - a former chief executive officer of Greenpeace, both in Australia and overseas, a consultant who discussed and worked on environmental issues with some of the world’s largest companies, an advisor to many government and private organizations and one who has always encouraged social justice - suggested the adversity, pointed to by my friend, might only be five years away.

Gilding reflected earlier congratulations to the group but then added: “This is no longer just an environmental issue, rather the survival of human civilization”.

Friday night’s message from Gilding was not all glum as he was excited about human capacity to deal with a crisis and our willingness to act quickly when our “backs are to the wall”.

He pointed to the adversity of World War Two as a demonstration of our ability to deal with such a difficulty when just four days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor the American car industry switched from the civilian market to building war machines.

Friday night’s conversation appeared in stark contrast to another held only four days earlier in an adjoining Eastbank room when Governor of the Reserve Bank, Mr Glenn Stephens, predicted a “fairly robust upswing in the domestic economy”.

Rather than a robust economic upswing, Gilding said we will soon see the end of growth bringing on an era when things will get “ugly”.

Among those riveted to Gilding’s comments was the founding president of the environment group, Mrs Barbara Leavesley, who had travelled back from Airey’s Inlet for Friday’s anniversary.

Other speakers were the former GVEG president and co-convenor of Solar Valley Goes Solar, Geoff Lodge, and director of the Victorian Office of Environmental Sustainability, Gordana Marin.

'Reality Bites' gives us the truth about non-fiction

A note to your partner or a business email are mostly non-fiction writing as is "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" (below right) by English historian Edward Gibbon.

The former are little more than daily doings while that latter is the exquisite sustained art of a non-fiction author.
While fiction writing demands a special type of imagination, the author of a work of non-fiction also needs a generous amount of those thought processes, combined with an instinctive adherence to facts.
Interestingly, the nonfiction author has, in terms of their writing, an allegiance to fact and it was that very need to lead to the birth of Australia's only specific literary nonfiction festival, Reality Bites.
Working at the time with the then Noosa Council, Bernice Child, discovered Queensland's Sunshine Coast to be poorly served in terms of writing and books.
Conscious of that fact she instigated the festival three years ago and although Council still supports it, the event is now organized independently by the Sunshine Hinterland Writers' Centre, a group of volunteers, including the program director, Annette Hughes, who moved to Cooroy on the coast's hinterland to care for aging parents.
Annette, previously a literary agent in the publishing industry, now devotes much of her free time to organizing, planning and articulating the festival's vision.
The 2011 festival will be the fourth and rather than being over two weekends, it will be scaled back to just one with particular focus on workshops enabling local, developing writers the opportunity to learn from established authors.
The one-weekend festival will be an opportune time for fresh volunteers to learn about the workings of the event before embarking on the longer, more complex two-weekend biennial event.
Cooroy has a new "green" library, opened earlier this year, and early plans for next year's festival call for a tent to be pitched on its grass covered roof as a venue for much of the program.
Details of the 2011 festival have not yet been finalised, but just as soon as they are, Annette says they will be posted on the Reality Bites blog.