The NSW Government is abandoning a leadership role in planning for Sydney’s growth (why do we assume Sydney is under some divine commandment to grow? – it’s just what keeps happening in the absence of any plan to the contrary). Premier O’Farrell and Planning Minister Hazzard have determined that developers should be able to plan the city’s ever-westward expansion, without regard to infrastructure, transport, or nearby employment, and bypass local planning and zoning processes. So what is currently potentially or actually productive farmland may become 10,000 houses, and there is nothing anyone can do about it. Or, from the other perspective, land that you may have an option to buy now has a fast track to profit and there’s nothing those local reactionaries can do about it.

The problem with this is that Australia’s cities are already amongst the most spread-out and least dense in the world, which is a very inefficient way of making them function for transport, community cohesion, and employment. This dysfunction is a financial burden that the whole community pays for ad infinitum. For years the struggle has been to balance the demand for growth (as distinct from the need for growth), and the future demands of sustainability. This is a long running struggle which everybody who keeps half an eye on the news is aware of. In Sydney’s case, previous governments have established two growth corridors, with some form of mass transport at its core (although that is also an on-again off-again story), along and around which the sprawl of detached low density housing was to be clustered.

But today we learn that the O’Farrell mob can’t even stick to this simple discipline – they want anyone with an interest in any parcel of land in any location to be able to nominate it for rezoning directly by the government, bypassing council entirely. Viewed in one way, this can be seen as a policy created by a government absolutely bankrupt of creativity and design discipline. Their excuse is that the current policy “has not worked”. Really? By what definition? I suspect it is more to do with the free market ideology espoused by lobby groups like the Urban Development Institute of Australia, and Urban Taskforce has since joined the chorus. I cannot help wondering if their ultimate vision is for urban sprawl to cover the whole continent: they never speak of limits, they have no long term constraints. Their rhetoric is very strong on “solving the short term problems”. (I note with wry amusement that in pursuit of this goal they will soon run headlong into the jaws on the Minerals Council, who want the whole state – every square meter of it – to be available for mining.)

It is clear to any informed observer that rezoning land based on its profit potential is an extremely poor way to plan a city, and I think that is being kind. The old saying ‘markets make wonderful slaves but poor masters’ is as true as ever.

In world news today we also read of a 90% decline in Southern Ocean jack mackerel stocks over the last 20 years. Fishing companies, often with significant government support and subsidy, have plundered – there really can be no other word – this fishery to the point of collapse in the next year or two. Getting international agreement on such things is like herding cats, similar to the difficult progress on climate change. In climate change, all humanity has a stake and the vested interests fight to hold sway, but in fishery management, vested interests are more dominating and insidious. Direct commercial interference is rife. Governments seem to be mesmerised, in the sway of big fishing companies like PacAndes and Thai Union Group. Never heard of them? They sell a large proportion of the world’s seafood through brands like John West. Companies like these have undue influence on various governments, and thus have stymied efforts to limit fish takes, leading directly to the collapse of the whole food chain. The economic hurt they will suffer through their own short-sighted stupidity has not affected their decision making.

Why is it so hard for governments to adhere to good policy design in the face of pressure from vested interest groups? We see that the same principle is at work in both cases – Sydney’s ‘planning’ (loose use of the term), and protecting the world’s food security. That is a question we should be asking our elected representatives. Claiming a mandate is well and good, but they must remember – or be reminded – that the mandate is from the people, not corporations. We design buildings for the people who will occupy them, governments must also design cities for the people who live and work in them, not for the profits of land owner developers.

Good city planning takes guts as much as anything – once the design, with all its myriad inputs, is in place, you need guts to hold your nerve and say “this is where it will happen, not there.” It seems that the new boss is just the same as the old boss: beholden to the interests of the developer lobby. And Sydney, the Great Unplanned City, suffers onwards and outwards.

We can design the most energy efficient, water-sustainable buildings on earth, but they will never be sustainable unless the urban context that supports them is sustainable too. Is anybody in Macquarie Street currently aware of this? Hullo?

Or, if you prefer…

BUSHFIRE: A DEMON OF OUR OWN MAKING - APPLYING NEW RESEARCH TO LAND MANAGEMENT AND BUILDING DESIGN

Australia used to be one big farm. Before the days of when our wealth grew like sheaves of wheat, before the days of our wealth riding the sheep’s back, the country grew enough to create a varied diet of various vegetables, and a variety of sweet and savoury meats. Large destructive bushfires were unknown. These emerging facts must pique our interest, demand a closer look. It has major implications for the way we design buildings, and manage the whole land. In fact, it challenges all common notions of what is ‘natural’, ‘wilderness’, and ‘landscape’. And, how we plan city edges and design buildings.

Europeans used ploughs to tend the land, but these have never been suited to our soils or climate. Asians used water and terracing to bring forth their crops, but our land never had enough consistent rain to allow this. Here, the plough was made of flame, the terracing made of soil types and natural landform. Here, deliberate decisions were made about what to grow where, and why, all with a careful plan as to when to harvest. Fire was the implement, from Tasmania to the Kimberley. And these were not monocultures such as Europeans planted over thousands of acres, here was multiple cropping, sometimes rotational, with dozens of varieties, with a general focus on pasture.

Who could have made such sophisticated decisions? Well, it appears now that with the exception of Kangaroo Island and the far South-West of Tasmania, the whole of Australia up until 1788 was a managed landscape, a bloody great big farm. There were many ‘owners’, who variously cooperated and squabbled (just like the rest of the world), but all understood the farming method. According to newly published mammoth and all-encompassing research by the ANU’s Prof Bill Gammage, the traditional view of Australia’s vegetation cover is off the mark. The notion that Aboriginal people used to fire to simply flush out wallabies so they could be speared or clubbed, and to make the country easier to pass through, are about as accurate as thinking that buildings design themselves. This is a shocking notion, once sunk in. It means that not only was Terra Nulius wrong in law (aka Mabo, Wik, and the vibe of the thing), but also patently wrong to the eye of the observer, had they only known what they were looking at.

In economic terms, when a company is taken over, the buyer wants to see the books – to see the assets and liabilities, to understand what the sales and turnover are. In short, to get a complete picture of the business’s position. In its takeover of Australia, the British never undertook such an audit of their take-over target, they never understood how the business operated. Based on assumptions and ignorance, they started running the farm they way they had run farms in England. And that’s precisely where it all started to go wrong. There was never any real wilderness in Australia any time in the last 30,000 years at least, all the landscape was made, managed, effectively farmed, then as white settlers like my farming forebears spread across the continent, the land fell into disrepair. Drought hurt more than before, fire damaged where it had not before, water ran off quickly and floods wreaked havoc as never before. Landcare, Peter Andrews and others, have been trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again ever since.

What we see now, as we travel from the suburbs, through the peri-urban fringes, and beyond through national parks to the farmlands beyond (and beyond that to the desert if we make time!), is a land that is dramatically changed since 1788. Then, the most common description of the unsettled country was that “it resembled a gentleman’s park” back in England. This comment, and variations upon those exact words, are recorded thousands of times in contemporaneous documents. The “impenetrable scrub” of Banjo Patterson and Henry Lawson came much later. How can that be? Hundreds of these descriptions are referenced in Gammage’s book, each by trusted observers: explorers, surveyors, even Governor Macquarie. Paintings and drawings, painstakingly detailed in their representations of country – for these were the photographers of the times – show large tracts cleared or semi-cleared, in definite patterns, according to the various purposes of food gathering. No tractors, no ploughs, just flame. Suffice to say that fire was used little and often – here not there, now not then – as a way of encouraging some food types, discouraging others, and maintaining a generally safe livable environment on a continent with significant climate variability. Had they allowed mega-fires to occur, large scale population extinctions would have occurred with it, and there is no record in either archeological or in the dreaming stories.

The hot potato of this knowledge for us in the wider building industry, is that ‘bushfire’ is a demon of our own making. Megafires such as 2009’s Black Saturday, and others like it back through the 20^th century, were unheard of prior to the mid 1800s, when the well-treed grasslands had been either cleared totally, or allowed to regrow with dense “under wood” (archaic term). Yet now, we are expected to provide safe shelter in these changed landscapes, now severely fire-prone. This is a double whammy”, with climate change bringing increased extremes and variability with a general increase in baseline temperature, and changed bush management that encourages wild fires.

What concerns me is that the hot potato will become a big grey elephant which just sits in the lounge room, because the change in how we manage the wider landscape has escaped the attention of governments at all levels (to date). I have little confidence that any of them will react to this new and more complete intelligence with any kind of speed or alacrity.

For building designers, design and construction to the bushfire code AS3959-2009 is no guarantee of survival, and may lead to a false sense of security. It adds cost to construction perhaps for no better outcome, and encourages acceptance of the status quo of the likelihood of fires, assuming a sense of resignation, powerlessness. That cannot be allowed to continue, and we must challenge that lazy defeatist attitude.

Governments are representative of the people, and peak industry bodies such as BDA, AIA, and PIA have a responsibility to lead government from places of technical ignorance into the light of better technical understanding. We are the custodians of technical knowledge, governments acquire it from us. But we first must develop that technical knowledge, and Gammage’s research is a huge leap forward in that area. Now we must build on that, and get serious about how we manage this country, before we allow it to just burn up. Apathy and resignation to the status quo is as fatal as any bushfire.

[The Biggest Estate on Earth by Bill Gammage, published by Allen & Unwin, 2011.]

The new facilities are architecturally refreshing, low maintenance, and sustainable for a number of reasons. They look after their own water demand, harvesting roofwater for toilet flushing, and where tree cover permits, harvest solar energy for lighting and pumping. They are use precast concrete wall panels made from 95% recycled concrete (even the mix water is recycled), created in a joint venture between Fairfield Council’s Sustainable Resource Centre and Metromix Smithfield. The roof structure uses lightweight foam sandwich steel panels, which have flat top and bottom surfaces, enabling easy cleaning below, and a thin-film photovoltaic panel to be adhered on top.

The flushing mechanism is electronic, ensuring perfect flushing volumes without the need for a cistern, thus reducing vandalism repairs. Each facility has a male and female, and one lockable accessible toilet. The male and female cubicles are only large enough for one person, with outward opening doors, thus dramatically improving personal safety, especially after dark. Privacy has been provided by obscured metal screens.

Some Dutch politician may have declared multiculturalism dead, but he has never been to Fairfield! There are 159 identifiable cultural groups happily coexisting within the Fairfield LGA, and many have particular sensitivities around personal hygiene activities, all of which had to be considered in the design.

The design team at Envirotecture, coordinated by Tracy Graham, also included the structural engineer Damian Ienco at NB Consulting Engineers, and all details of the design are incorporated into one set of working drawings. The construction is undertaken by Fairfield’s own building team, under the overall direction of Mick Raby, Manager City Works, and on-site direction of Frank Meola. Frank produces the precast panels in house, as well as carrying out all site works with his Delta Team of council tradies.

The ongoing use of the solar power industry as a political football – variously as saviour or demon, depending upon the level of government and its political colour -has decimated its stability, and in too many cases, its commercial viability. This is a woeful situation, one which all governments should be ashamed of having allowed to develop, much less actively pursued.

A quick glance at the history: ironically, federal Labor’s Peter Garrett started the most recent slide with his sudden abolition of the rebate a couple of years ago. Then various state governments kicked the ball, up, then down – to the point of squashing it flat. The previous NSW Labor government’s Gross Feed-in Tariff (GFIT) is a great example: first jacked up to (a possibly unsustainable) 66c/kWh, then crushed back down to a ridiculously unrewarding 20c/kWh by the current Liberal O’Farrell government. Ted Baillieu’s Victorian Liberal government is continuing to wreak the same kind of uncertainty and unrewarding return on investment. (GFIT vs Net Feed-in Tariff is the difference between being paid for all the power your PV system makes, regardless of who uses it (gross), and being paid only for what is exported back to the grid, after your use comes out of it (net).)

What to do?

A viable alternative is to simply pretend your house is out in the donga (eastern states term – in the west that means your house was inside a demountable, which doesn’t have quite the same appeal). That would mean no grid power, and no choice about how to make your power: it’s stand alone solar, maybe with a little wind thrown in, or nothing. But if it works in the bush (and it does, for many thousands of installations) it can work in the suburbs.

What are the costs? Extra money and materials for the battery bank, to allow energy use overnight, and more solar panels to cope with making power in the worst normal conditions: short cloudy winter days. The extra costs may be offset by electricity price rises in the immediate future, and this is accentuated by the alternative of woefully inadequate GFIT paybacks of 30 years.

Is it ideal? No, for a number of reasons. One is that the clean power produced during the peak productive hours cannot be shared with the grid, thus having less of an impact on Australia’s total emissions. Also, the extra embodied energy contained in the batteries, and their currently shortish lifespan, increases the overall environmental impact of off-grid systems.

But if there was a significant trend toward stand-alone systems, the various pig-headed governments might take a bit of notice. Of course, that pre-supposes that real vision and leadership still exists among our politicians. Political aspirants who believe they possess such stuff, please stand up – you know who you are.

That has got be rubbish.

How can you even put a value on the life support systems that keep our air breathable, our water drinkable, and our agriculture functioning. $100 billion doesn’t even come close. In fact, I suggest it is an insult to life itself, and you and me in particular, to even attempt such a thing. It degrades the nature of existence. My existence is not something that can be measured in monetary terms. That’s why we do things that go beyond logic in attempting to save life. Life itself is worth more than mere money.

Have we come to the point where things can only be valued if their net worth can be measured in $ terms? Is our only language, or currency of thought, mere money? I’m worth more than that, I know you are, and so is the baby turtle crawling down the beach, and so is the microbe on the end of your nose.

We had three projects open for display:

Bathurst’s Sustainable Lifestyle House, cnr Blaxland Drive and McGirr St, Bathurst – we had 550 people through the door – amazing interest in this lovely sustainable home. See the story in the Western Advocate.

Ecobode 180L at Keinbah, Hunter Valley – we had 150 visitors here, all keen to learn about how to do stylish sustainability

Devonshire St Sustainability Hub, 34 Devonshire St, Chatswood (with Willoughby City Council)

Sees more at http://www.sustainablehouseday.com/

No need to say more – get out and see some lovely sustainable buildings for yourself, next year!

(and if you are in the Brisbane area, and looking for a great meal or a superb coffee in your travels, don’t go past the Gypsy Cafe - a wonderful piece of ‘adaptive reuse’ of our architectural heritage.)

When the average punter struggles to get their budget around the house they want, more often than not it is because their eyes are bigger than their wallet. Especially in Sydney. Envirotecture has worked as a specialist consultant to several of the country’s biggest project builders, and they all have the same message (even if they struggle to respond to it properly): people in Sydney want the biggest boofiest house they can afford, people in Melbourne want added style and features.

Unfortunately for Swans fans, this confirms the old stereotypes about the two cities, where Sydney is brash and Melbourne is stylish. “That is an outrageous generalisation” said the NSW Premier a few years back. But generalisations are of often generally true.

Fortunately, there are sufficient smart people in Sydney to keep smarter design practices like ours in business! But that doesn’t solve the wider problem. Most people buy project homes because that is seen as the more affordable option. We know that many of these buyers stand on incorrect and ignorant assumptions, and lack of experience of better options. They assume:

• Real estate agents know what they are talking about. Bad mistake – we are not all the same, and not every house should be the same either.
• Bigger equals better (compare a 70′s era cassette player to an iPod),
• ‘One floorplan fits all sites’ is the only way to design a house. They have never experienced a passively heated or cooled home, where each site’s orientation demands a responsive floorplan.

Big houses have a place, where a big family, or multiple families or generations will occupy it. The CommSec report indicates that household occupancy is up from 2.5 to 2.66. This may not seem like much, but normalising for smaller home units etc, it probably makes the detached dwelling number more like 3-point-something.

But even that begs the question about the long term likelihood that detached dwellings will be the norm for housing – a trend already well on the decline, much to the HIA’s chagrin.

So if we end up with either more people per household, or more smaller households, where does that leave Sydney’s archetypical Big Boofy Box? In need of removal or renovation is the short answer. Already some have done good work looking at converting McMansions into dual and triple occupancy units. Provided that can be done at the same time as dramatically improving their passive design, it is worthwhile.

But the key lesson here is – once again – passive design combined with modest but multi-functional size gives the best result all round. It is cheaper to build, cheaper to run, and inherently future-proofed against rising energy bills AND changing market tastes. It’s amazing how hard it is to get that through the thick skulls of estate agents, average punters, and the project builder’s marketing bosses (who tell their clever designers what to design).

Thanks to CommSec’s Savanth Sebastian for a neat bit of research.

We are often asked about the carbon tax and its expected affects on what we build, and how we build. While there are some unknowns at the fine level of detail, it basically means that energy efficient and passively designed buildings will be nice little earners for their owners and operators.

Householders on anything but the highest incomes, who reduce their energy consumption (and thus the amount of C tax they pay) will be better off by hundreds of dollars per year, maybe more. Businesses which reduce their operational energy bills will be better off than their competitors, and if they are really smart, may reduce their overall costs compared to present. This is all because the rate of the tax, and its attendant household compensation, assumes national average figures for consumption. If you have a very energy hungry building, and do nothing about it or they way you use it, you will be slugged. And that is the point: it is intended to reduce wasteful consumption. Residential renters are in the weakest position to make such changes to their buildings, and that is why the compensation is bottom-heavy.

Here is a two-minute explanation for the kids and those in a real hurry.

That Youtube is of course very simplistic, and does not address any of the detail, nor does it discuss any of the shortcomings of the C tax – and there are plenty. But Envirotecture supports it on balance, having reviewed the best economic and scientific advice Australia and the world has to offer (no matter what some of our high profile pollies think of scientists and economists). We certainly don’t want to see a repeat of the debacle that sunk Rudd’s CPRS emissions trading scheme – it wasn’t perfect either, but by wanting something more perfect and scuttling it in the Senate, the Greens ironically set the whole process back by possibly a decade – time will tell.

The sources we have reviewed include the following, and we advise you to check them out yourself, don’t take our word for it (heaven forbid that we should act like your average shock-jock!). Note – we do not list (so-called Lord) Christopher Monckton amongst the scientists.

On the science that tells us what’s happening to the climate and why, we turn to the CSIRO, NASA, the climate scientists at the University of NSW and the University of Melbourne. There are many others of course, but you probably don’t have all year to read everything. Other links can be found in a previous blog, but suffice to say that the universal consensus here is that human activity through industrial emissions is causing climate change. The solution then is that we need to reduce emissions…

On the economics that tells us the best ways of tackling emissions reductions without stopping economic activity, we turn to think tanks of both political colours, academics, and non-partisan commercial economists (ie, economists without any vested interests in any kind of energy production). These include the Grattan Institute, Westpac, The Australia Institute (and its analyses of Gillard’s and Abbott’s proposals),  The Economic Society of Australia (and its recent survey of members) to name a few. Other reasoned commentary can be found in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald by writers such as Ross Gittins. News Ltd media are more inclined to be anti-Labor and anything Labor dreams up, rather than examining policies on their merits.

To those businesses who oppose the C tax, but acknowledge human-induced climate change and the need to reduce emissions, we say “ok, so tell us what your plan is.” The economic links (above) lead to fairly damming analysis of the Opposition’s proposed Direct Action plan, which follows the pattern of so many other ill-fated government schemes before it, like the free insulation scheme, green loans scheme, and even the inefficient solar panel rebates and bonuses. In a free market economy, the market mechanisms provide the best levers – we just have to create the framework for them – once made, the market pulls the levers according to what gives the ‘least cost’ result.

Our support of the current Gilard Government proposal is contingent upon its transition to a proper market-based emissions trading scheme as soon as possible. Rudd had a clear mandate in 2007 to implement that, and his failure to do so has harmed our future prospects. Of course, we must always remember that markets make wonderful servants, but poor masters: our governments must establish the boundaries.

The one downside of democracy is that governments can so easily be scared off doing truly great things. We all have a voice though…

[Note this long term disclaimer: the whole currently prevalent paradigm of endless growth economies is on a short use-by date. In a finite world, this makes no sense. In the medium to long term we must find other ways of harnessing mankind's innate creativity and entrepreneurship to make life comfortable and still reward effort. That is a long and complex discussion - so for now, in this very short term argument about a carbon tax, we have put it to one side.]

GENERAL INTRO: http://www.skepticalscience.com/ – a good layman’s intro, especially if you start by clicking the  ”NEWCOMERS START HERE” button. This site references and presents the work of others, sometimes in summary. If you want the raw data from the data collectors, then read on…

CLIMATE SCIENTISTS’ FORUM: http://www.realclimate.org/ – a forum run by a small group of climate scientists for hosting the work of many more scientists.

NASA: http://climate.nasa.gov/ – NASA’s complete climate data website; lots of links go from this one.

NASA TIME MOVIE: http://climate.nasa.gov/ClimateTimeMachine/climateTimeMachine.cfm – NASA’s movie of climate change over time

IPCC: http://ipccinfo.com/ – the often-criticised IPCC. Like all UN organisations, it is heavy with bureaucracy, but it is also heavy with the major climate scientists from around the world. Ignore it at your peril – its advice is always conservative.

CSIRO: http://www.csiro.au/science/Climate-Change.html - one of the best in the business, our very own CSIRO.

UNI OF NSW: http://research.unsw.edu.au/search?keys=climate#search-results – most of UNSW’s climate researchers, and links to their papers. There is a good weekend’s reading here, and that’s just skimming the abstracts!

UNI EAST ANGLIA: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/ – Uni of East Anglia Climate Research Unit. This is the mob who supposedly blew the lid on ‘cooking’ the climate change data, but as time has shown, merely wrote some inappropriately worded emails about people who were attacking them. Their research stands – read it and weep.

That’s a start – there are many many more, but if you follow the links in just these, you will be busy reading for a year or more. But don’t worry about ringing Alan Jones or Andrew Bolt – they will just cut you off. Talk to your family and friends instead – they are more influential in the end.

PS: If you are interested in why Australia’s ‘debate’ on climate change seems to have slipped backwards, you may find this article interesting – it explains how in the face of grave challenges, all that needs to be done to cause inaction is for doubt to be sown…

…is humanity capable of change before it feels pain?

Animals are adept at avoiding pain, but generally only after at least one exposure to the cause. Sometimes we can see that ingrained in their innate behavior, other times it must be learnt from parents, or at its most risky by exposure to a previously unknown cause of pain. Where that pain is terminal, species that did not ingrain the learning in one way or another are generally extinct. Survival depends on whether the collective experience has time to adapt before extinction strikes.

In the broad sweep of human history, how many times has a great civilisation foreseen future difficulty, or catastrophe, and made changes to avert its worst effects, much less avert it altogether? I am quite prepared to accept that there are exceptions to the rule, but I reckon that the general rule is almost never.

Obvious examples include the Incas, the Mayans, Easter Island, the Egyptian Pharaohs, the ancient Greek and Roman Empires, Byzantium, and Angkor Wat. These are stand-outs, and each had its own unique situation and circumstances – yet each fell from their former glory when they failed to account for some unfolding reality that was greater than they were, whether political, military, ecological or climatic. In more recent times we have witnessed the decline if not fall of the British Empire, the USSR, and probably in future the USA. As each of these recent empires has arisen in a global context (unlike the more regional empires of the ancient world), the reasons for the decline are also more complex, and the USA may yet defy history and regain its previous pre-eminence. More likely, it will slide slowly beneath the increasing bow wave of the emerging economic behemoth that is the Indo-Chinese economies. If human society lasts long enough in its present form, in a hundred years or more we may witness the succession pass to Africa, which will probably follow the Asian path to economic development through the initial provision of cheap labour, followed by increasing capital growth and affluence – but that is crystal ball gazing.

My purpose here is to think about whether society as it now stands will look ahead at the unfolding climatic disaster we are confronting, and make drastic last minute changes that may avert the worst of it; or, is human society (and perhaps we individually) unable to take the warnings seriously until real harm – real pain, in fact – is inflicted upon those in the positions of power to make those changes. Or perhaps, if the pain is not felt directly by those in power, it will be felt vicariously, not through empathy, but through damage to the economic system that sustains their wealth. Among this group of apparently heartless individuals I find myself seated, comfortably for now: my home is not sinking beneath the South Pacific’s waves (the few inhabitants of Kirabati are not global decision makers); I am wealthy enough to pay more for my food (I am not a Bangladeshi peasant at the bottom of the rice supply food chain); I am not a polar bear whose feeding range is shrinking dramatically.

The great civilisations mentioned above (allow me the license to call Easter Island great – it was certainly interesting!) all declined or collapsed for different reasons, although some common threads can be found. The Inca and Angkor Wat ran out of water, which was either a trigger or the last straw. The Mayans may have had similar troubles. The Romans ran low on moral leadership and had overreached the limits of communications and logistics. The Greeks failed to see the Romans coming. The USSR had a failure of an inadequate economic model coupled with a rising desire for democratic freedoms by its many coopted states. Great Britain was blindsided by two world wars within two decades at a time when national independence, democracy and personal freedom were becoming de rigour across the globe. The USA’s decline – if it happens – will paradoxically be at the hands of unrestrained freedom in the hands of a powerful few with no sense of social responsibility, honesty or accountability, cast against the backdrop of emerging Asian super-economies which are unfettered by debt, or accountability.

We can look at each of these and see the cause of the downfall. We could have warned them. But would they have listened? Would the residents of Angkor Wat have believed us if we had warned of a series of failed monsoons, if such had never been experienced before? Perhaps the Greeks would have listened, but would they have had the political capacity to prepare? I’m sure the US Reserve was warned about the debt structure of banks Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac (who would trust banks with names like that?) but obviously paid insufficient heed. Perhaps the unnamed grey-faced men in the Kremlin foresaw the collapse of the USSR, and continued to rely on their trusted method of oppression in attempt to keep the ship together. Perhaps in retrospect they would try another method, but it’s too late now – the USSR is extinct (although Russia continues as something of a struggling quasi-super-power).

In the 21^st century, all global societies have a loose coalescence that sees humanity behave, for the very first time in all of Earth’s history, as non-homogenous mass. Ironically, it was John Howard who said “The things that unite us are greater than the things that divide us.” Ironic because he saw, and was happy to maintain, divisions between different cultures. Yet that unity is what is beginning to characterise humanity now – a disparate crawling mass that comes together, then separates into parts, then comes together again, in all manner of behaviours and activities. Some of these activities are primeval: food gathering/work, sex/family, even sleep. Some are characteristic of increasing affluence: buying/consumption, recreation/tourism etc. Others are reflective of the desire to provide protection to one’s own: xenophobia/oppressive immigration controls, trade barriers/protectionism, mono-culturalism/myopia. Yet others are the exact opposite, sometimes simultaneously displayed by the same societies: civic mindedness/charity support/foreign aid, cultural diversity/cultural curiosity.

In the absence of a global government (note that the UN is nothing like a government in its goals or practice), the various nations of the world appear to be the collective representatives of its people. But in reality, various other ‘representations’ give humanity alternative vehicles in which to gather, move, and galvanise for various actions. Examples include AVAAZ, GetUp!, and the various social media (as seen in the recent popular uprisings across the Middle East). Seen across all avenues of collective expression, humanity can now move loosely together, as one. It can now collectively react to information in a way it has never been able to before. But just because it can, doesn’t mean it will.

The growing reality of climate change is testing mankind’s ability to collectively anticipate potential harm, and change behaviours to avoid it. At present this actually means react to avoid the worst of it, since the opportunity to avoid any consequences at all has passed. Our ability to react quickly now will make the difference between the need for significant adaption with minimal social collapse (minimal pain), and significant catastrophic ecosystem changes resulting in major socio-economic collapse (major pain). Major pain in this case may not mean the extinction of the species, but it will certainly mean collapse of the current socio-economic system, with the death and suffering of billions of people. That is major pain. If I could live long enough, and detach myself sufficiently from my family and society, this would be an interesting experiment. Unfortunately, we are blessed or cursed with moral sense, and I cannot disconnect from making this very much a piece of action-research. Wake up Australia, wake up world!

Will we?