Grandsons will live in truly interesting times

My grandsons will live in truly interesting times.

I don’t want that to be the case, but we have exploited the earth to such an extent that such an outcome is not just possible, it is unquestionably certain.
Although my generation is not solely responsible for what is unfolding, it has continued and worsened a pattern of consumption that evolved since the Industrial Revolution some 200 years ago.
Subsequently, should we be looking to ascribe the tribulations facing my grandsons to someone, look no further for it is I, along with anyone else working to support, maintain and expand developed Western-style economies.
The “Living Planet Report” of 2010 released in December showed that as of last year humanity was using nature’s services 50 percent faster than what Earth could renew them.
It illustrated that a projected “moderate” business as usual scenario over the coming decades would lift those demands to the point where we would need two and a half times earth’s capacity to survive.
The arithmetic is simple, by 2050 life on earth is going to become a rather risky affair, so risky in fact that many of us will not survive and with my grandsons in their early forties, they will be in the heart of calamitous times.
Conscious of a friend’s views that “what” requires little thought and the real innovations emerge when thinkers successfully explore “how” and so let’s begin with the personal – you, and your approach to life is the first step in making life more comfortable for my grandsons, along with all your descendants.
First, we must support and encourage anyone, politician or otherwise, who advocates a stable-state economy in which the emphasis is on quality rather than quantity; we should support anyone who advocates a society that has a public bias as opposed to the private wealth of a few over the exploitation of many; that same support should go to anyone insisting on equality throughout society; and, critically, we should support any morally philanthropic soul who works to break the hold of the military/industrial estate.
My innocent three and one-year-old grandsons have the unknowing expectation that we will act. Will we?

Although Malthus was wrong, he was dead right

Earth’s population is the elephant in the room.

Thomas Malthus (right) first alerted the earth to population difficulties when he wrote about the issue in the late 1800s.

Many of his predictions were well-wide of the mark and so his credibility collapsed, however the elephant is still there and getting bigger.

Malthus’s predictions, as time illustrated, came out of a vacuum of understanding about man’s innovative nature or his growing grasp of technology because, in fact, most of the technology that transformed life on earth had not been thought of, let alone invented.
Human numbers on earth are growing exponentially with nearly seven billion jammed on board and the best estimates put that number at about nine billion by 2050.
Sixty years ago, 1950, earth’s population was about 2.5 billion and although the bus was then a little overloaded, it seemed the planet’s resources were coping.
However, the numbers have since crept inexorably upward as we have become better at preserving life, despite our seemingly blind insistence throughout the 20th century at slaughtering millions of our fellows.
We have become technologically smarter and although we can see things whose existence is small in the extreme and beyond the understanding of most, we can’t see, or don’t want to talk about, the elephant in the room, earth’s population.
Those around the world with sufficient influence to alter attitudes on population, simply don’t, or won’t, go there as it means promoting or espousing ideas that question a fundamental of humanity, procreation.
Various plagues have decimated humans on an off for centuries, but the worst plague – that’s you and me and our fellows – goes on largely unnoticed and additions, certainly in the developed world, are greeted with celebration.
Opportune times to grasp a kindly solution seem to have passed with nature poised to illustrate that our place here hinges on collaboration, friendliness and the abandonment of perverse human traits that has seen the human landscape forever troubled by competition and confrontation.
Humans, like all other life forms, have an insatiable need to maintain and extend their gene pool, but forces most don’t understand will soon halt that and decimate humanity

Weather worsened events distract from understanding knotty reasons

Floods, fires and other weather worsened events seriously distract us from understanding and acting on the more knotty issues that contribute to their complexity.

Although Queensland’s floods (right) and Victoria’s fires, along with the many other weather-based difficulties around the world, are catastrophes of immense dimensions, with a huge human cost, they are simply symptoms of a grander world event.
Struggling with floods, fighting fires and marshalling our forces to get back to business as usual has honourable intent, but it misses the point.
Mute nature may be,  its actions speak louder than words it can’t speak and through its massive weather events, it is attempting to alert us that we do not act with impunity and so are not beyond its influence
Rather, however, we are a part of it and as the past century has shown, just a fragment, although a critical and influential fragment.
The urgency with which we seek that return to business of usual following such disasters as floods and fires is misplaced and ignores warnings from decades ago that without a fresh approach to our politics and way of living, decided difficulties were certain to emerge. Record droughts and hitherto unseen flooding suggest the accuracy of those predictions.
True, the floods and fires are not directly attributable to climate change, but weather events arising from changes to our climate worsened those present and recent difficulties and should be seen as another warning that all is not right.
Rather than rush to a return of business as usual, we should be re-examining our life-styles, our ideas and the management of our ways in the interest of reducing our carbon footprint remembering that it was the former Chief Scientist with the British Government, Sir David King, who said that climate change is the most severe problem the world faces, bar none.
Neo-liberal inspired growth has opened up the good life to most in Western economies and the resultant accompanied comforts have psychologically trapped many of us leaving us with a misplaced obligated sense that we must return to business of usual as quickly as we can, whatever the cost.

Shopping online means range, price and, of course, service

Let’s begin with an admission: I sometimes shop online.

Why? Beyond being remarkably cheap, I have whatever amount of time I like to consider my possible purchases, it is easy to compare products and prices, the range is near endless and although the face-to-face contact is missing, the service is spectacular.

The benefits of shopping online are massive and to combat them, local traders need to consider what it is they do, upgrade every aspect of their service and make the most of what they are, local.

My online shopping begins with research that takes me to “stores” primarily in Great Britain and America and from those two places I can usually find what it is I’m searching for.

Many things I go online to buy are not items I would expect local stores to stock and being aware of that, I understand that it would be necessary to order it.
It is right there that the local trader hits their first hurdle. Ordering something is not an issue, but I would like to know it has actually happened and have some written acknowledgement of that action, exactly what I get when I shop online.
Besides having my order confirmed online, I’m then told when it has been dispatched from the warehouse and depending on what level of freight I’ve paid for, when I can expect it to arrive.
Secondhand books (above right) are an interest of mine and locally, and that is wherever I happen to be, I’m mostly simply directed to the area of interest to be confronted by a mass of books.
Searching through the books can be interesting in itself, but online I simply type in the title and I’m given a range to consider ranging from ex-library books to never read near-new books or, if I’m looking for something special, I’m able to consider “collector’s” books.
The local trader has the huge advantage of being just that, “local” and should exercise that edge to cater for customers’ specific needs and add to their business the things that attract people to online shopping – service (and more service), price and range.

Rich benefits awaits communities that adopt cycling

The rich benefits awaiting any centre that embraces cycling were explained recently in Melbourne.

Shepparton was not specifically mentioned, but implicit in the comments of the bicycle manager from Portland, Oregon, Roger Geller (right, centre), was the observation that people here need only adopt cycling to access those benefits.
Mr Geller spoke to more than 100 people at the University of Melbourne and then repeated his story about the transformative value of cycling again two days later as the keynote speaker at Melbourne’s Bike Futures conference.
Portland is in every way different from Shepparton, but the essence of Mr Geller’s message migrates without any lessening of its worth.
Shepparton, along with all other communities, has evolved around the mobility allowed by the motor car and easy access to cheap fossil fuels and in a time when there was no knowledge of, and therefore interest in, such things as climate change.
All that has changed – oil is becoming scarcer so will, in the foreseeable future, become impossibly expensive and it is now clearly understood that human actives are impacting on our climate.
Cycling can play a significant role in easing those difficulties.
Portland did not have any sort of real cycling culture 20 years ago, but now 10 per cent of “Portlanders” consider cycling as the prime means of transport.
In a city of nearly 600 000 that is a significant number and retailers, about 130 of them, reacting to the social change have asked for on-street car parking in front of their shops to be replaced by bicycle parking, “corrals” as they are described .
Portland has 500 km of developed bikeways, both on-road lanes and specific bake paths, and every day they are busy with commuters on bicycles traveling about the city.
Those developed bikeways cost about $60 million, which is equivalent in cost of two kilometers of traditional inner-city freeway.
The savings in road costs are obvious and with research illustrating most car trips are just six kilometres and as bicycles travel nearly as fast as a car, they save money and help the environment, and beyond that cycling boosts our broader wellbeing.

Was a new government really needed or were we just in want of novelty?

Recently I listened as a fellow talked about how governments, good or bad and even if they are of the former variety, reach the end of a cycle.

Is that the case or is the idea of novelty is so entrenched in modern communities that people reach out, and vote for, a new government just as they search for a fresh novelty?
The success of our modern consumerist world hinges on our raging desire for novelty, a concept that underpins the new models of widgets each year paradigm, although the changes may only be cosmetic.
Our drive for novelty is helped along by our insatiable need for new, whether that be a new widget or, as the case in Victoria just recently, a new government.
This conversation is not about our displaced government being good or bad, or whether that which replaced is better or worse, rather it is about entropy, the fact that everything we know and understand is subject to depreciation and, ultimately, death.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics explains entropy, but here is not the time or place to discuss it, rather simply consider the decay of all around you, including yourself, and in accepting the reality of entropy, live with it rather than attempt to forestall it.
Governments that have reached the end of their “cycle”, assuming they are still operating relatively successfully, have simply not refreshed their image sufficiently to underpin their novelty.
It is a sad state of affairs when the future wellbeing of our communities hinges on our distorted, and often perverse, need for novelty, something fresh and so something new, not necessarily better, rather just fresh and new.
Also, it is worth noting that the word “new” is considered to be the most powerful word in advertising lexicon, followed closely today after decades of mass produced foods by the term “fresh”.
New and fresh appear to be antidotes to entropy, a concept most might not think about too much, but which are instinctively reassuring to people who are presently wrestling with the possibility of their demise brought about by human induced changes to our climate.

As it will be for all of us, a winning streak ends

Future Christmases for many extended family members will not be seasons of joy.

A niece’s husband, whom I did not know too well, died just two days before the annual celebration after failing to recover from a heart attack.
The father of two, only in his mid-forties, had collapsed while making deliveries and by the time he had been found, attempts, made to resuscitate him and then taken to hospital, his brain had suffered lasting damage.
His family knew he had wanted to donate his organs and so after it was determined that his brain was irreparably damaged and recipients were organized, his life support equipment was turned off.
Brian lived in another part of Victoria and so I had little to do with him and strangely knew more about his kids as my wife kept me abreast of their movements through Facebook.
And so although he was somewhat of a stranger to me, his final scene was unexpected and sudden, he was family and his death was a shock.
I can’t imagine how traumatic it will be for immediate family next Christmas, the Christmas after and I can only guess at how difficult it will be in following festive seasons.
There is a strange finality about death that seems to escape our understanding and every time we encounter such a moment involving family or friend, promises of living a better life erupt, but in the maelstrom that is life, rarely, interestingly, are those promises ever kept.
Life, no matter our approach, is a vibrant affair and that, alone, outside whatever affiliations we might have or superstitions or addictions we have, warrants care and respect for it is a fragile thing and our time here is limited.
Poet and songwriter Leonard Cohen (above) discussed the vibrancy and fragility of our lives in his poem, “A Thousand Kisses Deep” when he wrote:


The ponies run, the girls are young,
The odds are there to beat.
You win for a while, and then it’s done –
Your little winning streak.
And summoned how to deal
With your invincible defeat,
You live your life as if it’s real,
A thousand kisses deep.