There is (No) Time

I never told you
“I am fond of you
I found solace in your
life,
solace being part of the team
that picked rocks off your paddock,
sorted the seed maize.
ate corn-beef sandwiches for lunch
and that you asked me,
when I was 11,
to join your card group
to make up the numbers for
a monthly saturday night
of 500 or Canasta,
that you were my father’s
best friend
and farmer companion
you at ours
we at yours
and always machinery
books out on the dining table
you both mulling
and discussing how to fix,
re-engineer, or make,
a solution.
and after that,
talking about social things
with my mother.”

you never married
settled in your isolation
attentive to your neighbours
attracting select visitors.
it just seemed
the natural thing,
after my father died,
to cook food and
rally my mother
and go to your place
one unplanned
New Year Eve.

I last saw you,
sitting at lunch
in the nursing home
as I marched
my brief contracted time
and thought,
“I’ll come back another day
and have a yarn to Clive”.
and you died during your shower
the next morning.

Now, 5 years later,
amidst my disappointment
with myself
failing the solace of a memory
of a last conversation,
I am still given to believing
there is time.

Scarcity, Energy, Climate Solutions, and a New Civilisation

Andrew Nikiforuk of The Tyee, writes, “So, if our current civilization is to survive in any shape or form it needs to fundamentally rethink all energy spending, from how we harness it to what we use it for. As Michaux concludes in his number-crunching report, “replacing the existing fossil fuel powered system (oil, gas and coal), using renewable technologies, such as solar panels or wind turbines, will not be possible for the entire global human population. There is simply just not enough time, nor resources to do this by the current target set by the world’s most influential nations. What may be required, therefore, is a significant reduction of societal demand for all resources, of all kinds.”

Erin Remblance responds, “How we make that transition to lowered demand should be the most prominent discussion in our media, classrooms and households. Why is it nearly invisible?”

She goes on to note, “Years ago the great psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote a book about what happens to people in dehumanizing environments. Having survived two Nazi concentration camps, Bettelheim knew the subject well. Near the end of The Informed Heart, he offered this prescient observation. Jews who accepted the status quo and believed in business as usual perished. Those who did not believe in business as usual left before the Germans arrived, sailed to Russia or America or joined the resistance. Many survived. “Thus in the deepest sense the walk to the gas chamber was only the last consequence of a philosophy of business as usual,” wrote Bettelheim. It was “a last step in no longer defying the death instinct, which might also be called the principle of inertia.”

Now a widespread inertia prevents us from seizing control of our fate. We must do all we can to overcome that torpor. The implications are plain. Those communities that reject business as usual and cut their energy spending and all the materialist values that go with it, just might survive the long emergency and write a different ending to this story.

I have two responses to Erin’s points. They are my elaboration on the two key notions in her comments: Business as usual, and scarcity of energy.

I open talking about business as usual because seeing this clearly is the foundation of any transformation of civilisation, and technological and energy paradigm shift is pivotal in sweeping civilisation transformation along. (See particularly the copious and optimistic works of Jeremy Rifkin). What some have called ‘spiritual malaise’ and others “tranquilised obviousness”, business rarely is as usual, and if, like the history of European Jews, you punish a group regularly in small to harsh ways, I reckon they might just think the next bit of noise is just more of the same.

It does take quite a bit of training to be able to get up in the morning and take a fresh look at what’s happening, and that requires even putting yesterday in the past. It also requires being fully cognizant of our biases and mindsets. Anyone who says they don’t have any are doomed to play them out. What then do we hold to that gives us some predictive viability? First is cultivating an independence of thought, a detachment from the tribe whether professional, national, sub-cultural, or party as usual. And that is not antipathy, even the opposite, what others have called “indifferent love”. This stance supports an ability to: follow the evidence from several fields of science; hold doubt without discarding anything until resolved in evidence; and reviewing fully any arguments against. This ability for independent thought supports the interdependence of all independent thinkers for it is only in the recognition of true independent inquiry (search for truth) that a collective of thinkers can divine a greater magic.

This situation we find ourselves is a call to be so much more than we have ever been, so much more than we wound up being, individually and collectively. We will either rise to the call or we will fall. And whatever happens will be what happens. As the WWII holocaust found traction, Lydia Zamenhoff chose to go back to Poland from the USA in the face of immanent danger, she chose to support the last moments of her community and die with them. We don’t know how many hands she held but we do know she died with them. Those of us in the frontline of transforming this civilisation may well find ourselves in a future of ‘holding hands’. We must accept that this is one possible future.

In terms of policy, economics, and human behaviour, the basic economic reality of scarcity does work. Many people living in rural Australia grew up looking after water usage. If you have to make a meagre annual rainfall and a watertank last a year, you have watch usage like a hawk. On the other hand, if old people can’t afford heating in winter, they could die. Well, that’s a time honoured tradition. Australia has ineptly allowed gas companies to sell much of its gas, internationally, leading to scarcity and high prices for energy as we enter winter. I’m expecting an unusual winter death rate among the elderly this year. Feeding into an inflationary boom, those on more basic incomes can be expected to suffer housing dislocation. This in, perhaps, the wealthiest per capita nation on the planet.

Meanwhile the environmental impact of windfarms is already been felt and the next phase of renewable energy farms will not be given such an easy ride. The real difficulty is that we aren’t learning fast enough because, here in Australia, for the last 20 years 80% of our intellectual energy has been spent on arguing climate change denialism with our government. In the end, the example of the holocaust goes to one characteristic of modern politics so far – we are often very slow to the table. Timing being the essence, and we can’t escape the clear timing the IPCC have provided, we will damage our way out of this catastrophe. The question is, which is the lesser poison or the better trade off? Presumably the one that improves the chances of the ecosystem and human civilisation. There’s not much chop in voting for the view that 1 or 2 or 3 billion people can just suffer and die. There’s not much chop in loosing much more of the world’s ecosystems and species than we already have, because that will inevitably lead to the billions of people suffering and dying. The inextricableness of human development and a narrow range of climate and a particular variety of ecosystems, is conclusive. I support the work of the Foundation for Climate Restoration, the third and often overlooked leg of climate solutions. The scalability of technologies of removing CO2 from the atmosphere over the next decade is likely to have less impact and perhaps even a very positive total impact on ecosystems, than any other climate change solution, namely renewable energy development and population adaptation. To solve this crisis, to transform global civilisation so the next phase of human development is of a higher order of workability for people and ecosystems, we’ve got to work urgently together on all fronts, even if it means government ordered rationing.

The UK in WWII proved that a people faced by a single existential threat can adhere to austere rationing policies for several years. Even in the 1930’s the mathematical and nutritional knowledge was ample so that there were no cases on malnutrition in the UK during WWII. Today, we certainly have the capacity to design sophisticated systems for the allocation of energy, the development of renewables, the weaning from fossil fuels, and the equitable establishment of systems worldwide, together with an food security systems. What is still required is for nationalistic governments to get to the table put aside their extreme patriotisms for the future of humanity and the planetary ecosystems that support us.

We have a political choice: the easy choice or the hard choice. The easy choice is for all national governments to come to the table with good will to design global systems that will create both equity in resource access and as rapid a transition from fossil fuel energy as possible. The hard choice is to continue to bicker and terrorize each other.

Either choice will lead to the new civilisation, will lead to the transition off fossil fuels and to equitable distributions of resources. Even if making the hard choice, once a billion people have died and billions of others have suffered through the defensive and aggressive attitudes of extreme patriots, the billions of people of good will remaining,will see those extremists off. Such has been the way of history to date. Will this be the moment we will be able to put our past in the past and take the easy way, or will we insist that the past dictates our actions and only massive numbers of deaths will convince us that another model of governance and social organization is viable.?

On Structural Racism or The Colonial Tragedy of the Commons.

Author’s Grandparents and children. Author’s father as a baby. 1930.

From my Australian context, as a middle class middle aged white man, here’ s what I see about structural race-based inadequacies.

1. My grandfather came to the country I live 105 years ago and took up land which at that time was inhabited by an aboriginal clan who lived or tried to live as they had for at least 10,000 years. My grandfather paid the government for the land. The aboriginal clan got blankets and clothes once per year.

2. Eventually there was not a life to be had as hunter gatherers as the forests were cut down and fences erected. Church and the state government collaborated to transport the local people to missions. Rebellious people esp young men were sent to an island outside their country to live with other rebels from other countries (sic aboriginal). Such artificial settlements are the hallmark of dysfunction today.

3. Mission raised peoples were bible trained, had great work ethic, but were afforded only minimal education. My grandfather’s legacy was to set up a middle class life for his grandchildren. A descendant of the mission of my age told me, I’ve got a university degree and I cannot get a job at the supermarket checkout. Today there is a growing middle class in the aboriginal community, mainly around jobs that are ether public service or aboriginal based businesses such as tourism.
These are the broad facts of the matter in my life. My family did not and perhaps could not pay for the land that gave us our station in the society. There is a sense of shame I have around this, that we were party to robbery. It is clear to me that the welfare of a society can only flourish on the fair recompense to all others of anything we wish to take from the commons. Whenever there are new people resident to the commons, they do not have automatic rights to the commons nor recompense (economic rent) from the use of the commons. Indeed the newcomers must permanently value add to the commons to a degree of a share of every originator or the commons, before being considered an equal share of that commons, including their own value added to which a share is now owned by everyone else. Now it can be shown, I think, that we interlopers since 1770, have value added to the commons of the territory of Australia. However we have also been party to damage to the commons and the sustainability of the resourses. It is a fact that we have not ever full consulted or negotiated with the originators of this commons, neither made a treaty nor recognised their primacy of stewardship. It is also a fact that we have made, and still make, a lot of excuses why we shouldn’t do that. Those excuses have led to a form of paternalism- maternalism that maintains a declining social resilience in certain parts of the nation.
Ultimately I believe that there is a social reconciliation, a balancing of the books of justice if you will, that works like a mathematical ‘strange attractor’. This ‘strange attractor’ of justice determines that a form of repeated social crisis occurs over time, such crisis as can only be diminished by the efforts exerted towards fulfilling the outstanding recompense. For mine, I cannot, even if I wanted to, give up my advantage. What advantage would anyone else receive from that? So I need my government to fully reconcile on my behalf (and all our behalfs), the outstanding recompense owed the commons, both to the indigenous community and the loss of natural resource and ecological status for our human flourishing. To the extent they make efforts and we can, therefore, all make effort, the lesser shall be the crises following. And to the extent they don’t, the worse those crises will be.

Indelible Memories – When I was 9….

I am trudging down the dry water run-off table drain in front of the family farm in tropical far north eastern Australia.
I am thinking about some games I was playing that week, with my friend, Eric.
It occurs to me that Eric had quite a different approach to game and how he talked when we were playing.
It occurs to me as strange that there was this boy called Eric whom “I” did not inhabit at all, yet somehow “I” inhabited and WAS, this boy called Owen.
I wonder why this should be so. Why shouldn’t “I” see through the eyes of Eric, of Eric’s world?” What was it that had me in this place and he in his. What stopped us from just moving from place to place.

Me at 13 years sitting on the car bonnet with siblings and cousins

For a Treaty

My middle class status, career, wealth, comes from that my grandfather was able to get away from the early 20thC steel mills of Hull, UK and come to Australia where he could pull down a forest and take up farming. The family stories tell that indigenous people’s roamed through that land, they knew the new farmers, and then were picked up by government officers and placed on missions. My life, as it is, is the life created by divesting indigenous people of their land with no agreement or recompense. There are some who believe that they can make this work without attention. I caution against this as the view of disassociation. Perhaps under hypnosis we can cut gouges out of our body and pretend we are ‘okay’, but we will surely become debilitated with the loss of our life force that ebbs from the wounds. To me a treaty is the only healing act, an honouring in financial recompense for the resource we stole, a belated conversation in attempt to come to an agreement about who we are to each other, and what we can be for each other. “Sorry’ was the first step. However there is no true sorry without cleaning up our relationship messes to the satisfaction of those we have distressed.

in Australia we have the benefit of just having to look at a very immediate past and it’s ramifications for the people living today. We can address this immediately and completely, if we choose. Otherwise, all over the world, people are in conflict around deep ancestoral issues because we refuse to entertain the notion taught and stood for, by all the Great Educators¹, that some call radical forgiveness². Even here, though, radical forgiveness can only truly take place when every cruelty is owned and spoken.

Any harm, not resolved, causes an ongoing conflict in the body politic. That will occur many generations after anyone even knows the original harm. LOOK CAREFULLY at the human dynamics that are unleashed with every instance of harm, and you will realise that the major harm been done to the indigenous peoples of Australia, is, right now, both overtly and insidiously, eating away at the possibility for Australians to achieve their greatest potential. It is a disease like having a bacterial infection. Ignore it at peril. Our ‘body’ is ringing alarm bells every day and trying to fight the attack. But, being unsupported by the neglect of “nothing happening here’, the disease encroaches. The burden we carry both spiritually and materially because we haven’t been responsible for the damage, has slowed the whole nation down into a sloth of failure to create or produce. As soon as we waken to that our future is completely founded on our recompense for the harm and theft that we are living off, we will embrace our responsibility with enthusiasm. Not because we are doing something special, but because we will be bringing our body politic into full performance.

1. Great Educators is a broad term for the founders of the major religions who all stood for justice and forgiveness as cornerstones of healthy and progressive societies.