LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: This morning, Tuesday, I heard a farmer, Jess Fragar, speaking on ABC Radio National. He’s from Talgong, pretty much smack in the middle of New South Wales.
This came on the radio just after I read about Eildon Weir overflowing and Victorian communities suffering in the floods.
What the farmer was talking about was the unintended consequences of the flooding. The kind of thing we people in the city wouldn’t dream about. He described the dangers of driving on the roads where the bitumen is treacherous – it looks okay, but in fact it might be about to completely crumble. A friend of his got bogged the other day in the bitumen. So it’s dangerous to get supplies, dangerous to get medical help. In the field the crops are ripe but even if you can get to them the machinery has no fuel. Heaven help the local councils when the trucks start driving again on those fragile surfaces.
But it’s worse. The cows giving birth, he says, tend to hide their calves in the long grass. If you can’t find them quickly the calves will be attacked mercilessly by mosquitoes who suck the life out of the poor creatures. How bad is the mosquito problem? So bad, he says that the other night he couldn’t see to the edge of the verandah so thick were they.
In the daytime there are the flies to contend with.
With climate change – floods, fire and drought, we think about protecting ourselves from the rain and the heat, staying comfortable indoors inside a nice retrofitted energy efficient house as doing good for the planet. And ourselves. Not many of us think about what happens with the rest of nature. Because nature is not a kindly thing. Mother Nature is a deadly angry thing when mistreated. And there’s been years, decades, centuries of abuse.
It’s worth pausing on this notion because at the pointy end of the climate wars (and it is a war – the only “just” war we have ever had) the news coming out of Egypt is devastating. Evan Stamatiou has written a piece for us this week that lays it on the line.
We read through it yesterday evening as soon as it arrived.
“In the end it only took seven years to realise that the Paris Agreement’s goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C was dead,” Evan writes.
“UN Secretary General Guterres didn’t have the heart to break the news earlier this year, instead choosing to frame 1.5°C as “on life support”. But it’s surely dead now, buried under a mountainous pile of bad news detailed in UNEP’s Emissions Gap Report 2022, just released.”
For business, watch out, he continues: “As this bitter reality gains widespread acceptance over the next few years, corporations that persist with selling their green credentials through 1.5°C alignment disclosures will be at heightened risk of being called out for greenwashing by investor groups and broader stakeholders.
“Regulators (read ASIC and ACCC) will also soon wise up to our new reality, and we can expect to see guidance from them warning against 1.5°C alignment marketing. Inevitably, even the Science-Based Targets initiative (SBTi) will have to scrap its 1.5°C guidance once the UN signs the death certificate.”
Adrian McGregor, researching for his book Biourbanism, told us in a Tomorrowland briefing that the experts he contacted said we are on track for far bigger temperatures. We don’t want to mention them… just yet. Let’s digest this bit first. He also said he could find no country in the world that had stopped fossil fuel subsidies.
This reality is not something we want to confront. And yet… We need to do our best to hold back the extremities of warming. And we need to have faith in our human spirit. And the power of the mighty dollar, to see that this is where the action, the rewards. And how all the kudos these days is for being sustainable and fighting for our climate.
At the moment the new rousing cry is restoration. Protecting nature and making it stable is not enough with the damage we’ve done. We need to restore nature, restore the climate and restore the damage we’ve done to other humans.
Around the world, we see the impact of this new dawning slowly starting to filter through even as billionaires say they will give away their wealth (never mind the damage that the wealth accumulation has inflicted on its trajectory.) Even Jeff Bezos is having some kind of reaction to the groundswell of wokeness.
This supposedly second richest man has declared, after a lifetime of poor behaviour and a single-minded dedication to achieving great wealth (from our cursory reading) that he’s now going to give away his billions in his lifetime.
Well, there’ll be no benefit/kudos to giving it away after he’s dead, right? And is it all media spin to cushion the new he’s sacking 10,000 staff?
With all this bad news maybe there’s an upside to deglobalisation. Maybe it’s good to think about how we live within our means right here right now.
I know that there’s a negative impact to that: there are people in other parts of the world that rely absolutely on us buying the cheap goods they produce with their cheap labour. For them, it’s a no-brainer. But always cheaper is not always better. We need to become more attuned to our environment, to look at what it can yield for us.
You can’t do better than to look at the Indigenous of this amazing continent and how they lived before European contact, from what we have gleaned – it was a semi-nomadic lifestyle aligned to the available sustenance, moving according to the season, along walking routes that crossed the country in the form of Songlines. Managing the land sustainably, leaving something for the next group that came along, never completely depleting the feedstock.
For Tomorrowland, as we’ve researched the stories of the people who are the leaders in this country, the huge lesson that’s come out of this is that the scale of the challenge we have in front of us is absolutely immense.
When you think about Australia’s great achievements in sustainability there’s a lot to be proud of. And it would be so if we had another 30 or 50 years to go.
But we don’t.
To move faster we need to reframe the problem and the way we see the problem and what we love and cherish.
We are now starting to get the idea that to refurbish our buildings and to keep what we have is the most sustainable thing possible. So that’s our challenge – to look at what we have and maximise its value. Its efficiency. And its utility and pleasure.
What’s interesting about humans is that a reframing can change the way we see things. Not long ago tall buildings of glass, concrete and shimmering steel that dazzled the eyes would make the big corporates feel like they’d finally made it. Perhaps soon it will be a building of rustic old fabric that’s lovingly restored, that will make the corporate heart flutter.
We need to change the narrative. And as part of the media world, we know that that’s our responsibility, our job. But to tell you the truth, the raw facts are that we are just media, we don’t make the news. It’s our readers (you) that are doing all the work. It’s the people in property – the engineers, the designers, the tenants, investors and government officials – who are doing all the hard work, to yank us out of the disaster coming our way. We need to report it. But we also need to reframe it.
And that’s where the artists come into it.
The artists are the people who seed new thinking among the community so you don’t even notice the big changes that can come.
For instance, I used to loathe triple fronted brick veneer houses, the kind that AV Jennings built en masse in Melbourne. And then suddenly, as if overnight, I saw the beauty and value of these houses, how they provided decent affordable housing for so many people.
Partly the switch came from living for a while inside one of those triple fronted brick veneers and appreciating the efficiency of the design that yielded noise reduction with bedrooms separated from the living areas. Just the right scale to enable comfortable living without feeling squished or without being too large to clean, heat or cool. Suddenly, the exterior of these houses lost their ugliness and became beautiful, full stop. Young people have also embraced that 60s aesthetic.
That’s one of the things that we’re trying to achieve with Tomorrowland – that change in thinking.
It’s why we’ve invited the awesome Lisa Havilah of the Powerhouse Museum to Tomorrowland and Mark Raggatt of ARM Architecture, which has had a hand in several of Australia’s cultural buildings.
And it’s why we’ve got an arts theme in one of the sessions and also the welcome drinks the night before. It’s about how you can change perceptions. Get your tickets here.