Home Object Activities Contact Who's who How to join NSF How to support NSF What's on Nature and Society Editorial Apparently 2007 is the Year of the Idea, according to an announcement by the Australian Institute for Commercialisation on Australia Day this year. Amongst other aims, the organisers want to inspire collaboration towards the solutions to local, national and global challenges. That is great, but they need to be cautious, not all ideas should be encouraged. An old saying is that necessity is the mother of invention, and so it can be. On the other hand many people have had bright ideas, and then gone looking for a use for them, essentially creating a want where there was no need. In the advertising feature in The Canberra Times which promoted the Year of the Idea, there were three new lifestyle inventions. One was a domestic lighting system to enable users to create light ambiences to suit a wide range of feelings, using a multiple light source to project patterns on the floor and ceiling. Choices included the dappled lighting of a forest, seaside sunlight, moonlight and many more. A set of interactive tiles would encourage children (and adults) to play interactive games, stimulating the body and the mind, providing physical activity and social interaction. The game could be a traditional one like hopscotch, or something that the children themselves thought of. This was seen as an answer to sitting at a computer or in front of the TV; it would combat childhood obesity, boredom and other ills. The third gadget makes any wall into a virtual drawing canvas, without producing any mess, using an electronic light brush and eraser. These all sound great fun, until you realise what they are doing. They are, indeed separating people from the real world, so the outside world could seem like a pale imitation, less interesting than the virtual world within doors. The real world is messy and does not pander to your moods – and it does not need batteries or an electricity supply to make it work. Most importantly it is the real world to which we must pay attention if we are to solve local, national and global challenges. It is in the real world that Australians have just woken up to a crisis in the Murray River. Heaven knows there has been enough said and written and even pictured over the last few years to enable anyone to see a crisis developing. Yet politicians and indeed most Australians, living in the artificial environment of our economic and political systems, have assumed that the Murray-Darling Basin will go on indefinitely producing food for export as well as for domestic consumption. They even thought that it could do this for an increasing population while at the same time selling the irrigators’ water entitlements to townsfolk. And indeed, if good rain falls in the nick of time, they will go back to believing such fairy stories. We have been nurtured on the fairy story of perpetual growth, the myth that we can have more of everything, for more people, forever: that growth is essential. The myth says that we can continue to use more water, extract more from the soil, that we can even satisfy our gluttonous consumption of oil by growing crops for fuel. The environment is expected to sustain our ever increasing consumption. Well, it won’t work. Surely by now we can recognise the disaster towards which this myth is leading us. Oceans are acidifying and so polluted that fish and whales have been found carrying loads of industrial pollutants. Forests, those essential carbon traps, are diminishing daily. Innumerable species are teetering on the brink of extinction, including our cousins the great apes. Climates are changing so fast that the New Scientist suggests that climate replacement is a more accurate term than climate change. Humans are not immune to these processes. Quite apart from all the other impending dangers there is the additional risk of major diseases from which the industrialised world has so far been shielded. Recently the first totally drug resistant case of tuberculosis was reported in Italy. This could herald a momentous change. A classic story in grand opera is of the heroine dying of TB. This was not a myth and it was not just the heroine who died. In the nineteenth century TB was called the White Plague, and it killed as surely as the Black Death of earlier centuries. The future could be very grim indeed, with floods of environmental refugees, mass starvation, major epidemics and a sadly depleted and less beautiful planet, unless we change our ways, starting now. Stephen Hawking has offered us his opinion that the future of humanity must be in space. This would be an updated version of slash and burn agriculture – trash the planet, and move to a new one. Slash and burn worked well while human numbers were small, and forests had time to regenerate. It will be much more difficult to do with planets. It would be very much more expensive than looking after the earth. It would certainly mean saving a lucky and adventurous few and leaving the rest of the population to suffer on an increasingly hostile earth. It seems a sorry way to go; surely this planet is worth looking after. We need to replace the myth of perpetual growth with a more humane idea and ideal of progress, maintaining Earth as a habitable planet. It could have been called the pro-life movement, except that that term has already been co-opted for a different purpose. We want a biosensitive society, but that is not a catchy phrase. We are stuck for a name that will suit the beginning of our essential new myth, our new story. Our story must change from exploitation to conservation, from growth in numbers, consumption and greed, to one of knowing when enough is enough, an acceptance of sufficiency. We must exercise the sharing and caring side of our nature, not the competitive and aggressive side. We cannot know just what the future will hold, how people will think and act. But we can be fairly sure that in that future, ideas that use electricity and other resources unnecessarily to satisfy superficial wants will get short shrift. We can also expect that war, at least as we know it, will not be waged. It is just too environmentally expensive. Maybe this future is really a bright one, where people, rather than feeling deprived, can be more satisfied, healthier and more peaceful. Jenny Wanless June - July 2007 edition accessible here Back to top ________________________________________________________________
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