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Our coming NSF public meetings
Wednesday 19 November 2008 – 7:30 pm – Walter Jehne - How can we save the planet in 97 months? We have less than two years to implement the changes and ten years for them to be effective if we are to cool regional climates to offset greenhouse warming and dangerous climatic damage by 2030. This will be a think-tank/workshop giving an Australian perspective on the 100-month campaign initiated on 1 August 2008 in the UK newspaper The Guardian. At this event we will examine the practicalities of launching a similar public campaign in Australia. Intending participants can contact us for background reading prior to the workshop. Be there at the cutting edge of cool.
Venue: the ANU Emeritus Faculty. A map showing the venue can be found on the ANU website. The building is called the Fellows Lane Cottage and is building 3T on this map. It is to the immediate north of the Law Faculty buildings and east of the South Oval.
Recent NSF meetings
August 2006 - Sustainable housing and communities for Canberrans. Five speakers led us through their ideas and experiences with alternative, sustainable housing and communities:
• Fiona McIlroy, who has participated in intentional communities in their ups and downs,
• Craig Downsborough from Canberra co-housing,
• Anni Mather from ACTPLA described the One Planet Living proposal as it may apply in Canberra,
• Petar Johnson explained embodied energy and environmental load;
he also passed on his observations on the community he joined last year at Googong
• Derek Wrigley, author of Making Your Home Sustainable.
September 2006 - Annual General Meeting. Members voted to amend NSF's constitution to replace the Management Committee with a Board and to update it in a small number of administrative areas. With the constitution amended, NSF's new board for 2006/07 was elected. The meeting was followed with a talk by Frank Fenner about his new book (his 23rd) Nature, Nurture and Chance.
October 2006 - The biology of global warming and its profitable mitigation - Walter Jehne’s talk gave us a holistic, integrative approach to climate change, bringing in data from a far wider range of disciplines than is reported in the media. He argued that, while remaining concerned about atmospheric carbon levels (and the burning of fossil fuels as a cause of these) as one piece in the jigsaw, we should look for the causes of climate change more widely. These causes include water vapour (and, hence cloud albedo, which reflects heat from the sun back out into space) and the critical part played by bacteria seeded from leaves into the atmosphere. Deforestation, land clearing and the degradation of soils were pointed to as the main causes of climate change, as they affect albedo, carbon release and precipitation.
An outline of this important talk has been published in the December 2006/January 2007 edition of Nature and Society and republished in the CSIRO Sustainability Network Update. Discussion continued in the next Network Update and a follow-up article appeared in the April-May 2007 edition of Nature and Society.
November 2006 - Applying justice frameworks to environmental decision-making - Decisions concerning the siting of infrastructure developments or the use of natural resources have the potential to damage a community's social well-being if the outcomes are perceived to be unfair. However, justice is accepted as central to the well functioning of society with fairness being an expectation in day-to-day interactions. In this presentation Catherine Gross talked about her research into justice and environmental decision-making. She presented her findings from a proposed wind farm case study which she monitored in NSW last year and took questions from the audience - some supportive of windfarms, others opposed.
February 2007 - Origins of the nuclear/greenhouse impasse: a view from the Earth and anthropological sciences Andrew Glikson gave a stimulating to this Nature and Society Forum meeting. Andrew gave us a panoramic picture of the state of the climate based on historical patterns and present measures, juxtaposing this global problem with the neocortex of the species Homo sapiens which has caused the problem. Andrew's talk was bold, truthful and frightening and provides a benchmark for us to measure the boldness and truthfulness of our nation's political, business and civil society leaders on climate change.
A report of Dr Glikson's talk and a follow-up article appeared in the April-May 2007 edition of Nature and Society. Dr Glikson has contributed this critique of the television program The Great Global Warming Swindle.
18 April 2007 - Bushfires in Australia - A panel of two speakers: Paul Collins on the history of bushfires in Australia and what we can learn from that history, and Nic Gellie who has had years of personal experience fire fighting and is now undertaking research for a PhD on this topic. Nic told us about the relationship between the factors that drive fires in the landscape and how these factors have interacted over time to produce the severe fires we have witnessed in the last hundred years. Paul Collins had available for purchase copies of his recent book "Burn".
16 May 2007 - A discussion of the proposal initiated by Nature and Society Forum to have the ACT nominated as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. The workshop familiarised participants with the biosphere reserve concept and the ACT biosphere reserve nomination currently being considered by the ACT Government. Members and guests also discussed mobilising informed community interest in the nomination and ways in which the biosphere reserve might best function and how it could help Canberra in the future.
20 June 2007 - Recycled water: issues for Canberra - A panel of three speakers discussed the pros and cons of recycling and alternatives.
Paul Perkins (ex-senior exec of ACTEW and now adjunct professor at ANU) asked are we having the right conversation? Many institutions are still in denial about the gravity of the water shortage situation - he foresees famine in the next 5 to 10 years in the Northern Hemisphere in water stressed areas such as Northern China. Previous thinking and practice in Australia has been slow to catch up with the reality of the situation now. Paul's main points are here.
Dr Deb Foskey (Greens MLA) emphasised demand management approaches and required changes in our attitude towards water, questioning extravagances such as green lawns and swimming pools. Further, there is a need to frame the debate within an appropriately broad framework; e.g. current political commitment to population growth in the Canberra area to 530,000 by 2030 is nonsensical, given the water constraints. Deb's main points are here.
Dr Peter Colligon outlined why the current ACT proposal for water recycling is a high risk proposal on health grounds. He pointed to the unsustainability of the huge volume of water going downstream for rice growing (vis-a-vis that used in Canberra). He thinks there is a variety of measures that can be taken to obviate the need for Canberra to move to the high risk (albeit low probability) recycling strategy being proposed. Peter's main points are here.
The discussion period looked at how the public can engage effectively with and evaluate water issues within a sufficiently broad framework, and with the relevant facts to hand.
27 June 2007 - Canberra launch of "Greenhouse Solutions with Sustainable Energy" by Mark Diesendorf from UNSW Press. NSF hosted the launch of this new book. Mark himself and Dr Hugh Saddler of Energy Strategies spoke at the launch. A summary of Mark's address is here.
The publisher says: "This is a positive, proactive book that proposes a set of policies and strategies for implementing the most promising cleaner energy technologies by all spheres of government, business and community organisations. The book argues that despite being a coal- and oil-dependent country, Australia could achieve an ecologically sustainable energy system. All we need is the political will.
A partial table of contents includes: Basic concepts; Why this issue is important; Sustainable energy futures for Australia; Energy and its greenhouse gas emissions; Which technologies are sustainable? Saving energy; Wind power; Bioenergy; Solar heat and electricity; Other energy technologies; Transport and urban form; Coal and gas: can we bury the problem?; Is nuclear energy a possible solution? Ways forward.
15 August 2007 - Healthy places: an essential linkage between healthy people and a healthy planet?
People are attracted to cities for many reasons, including employment, education, social and cultural opportunities, and access to shops, food outlets, health care and other services. The United Nations estimates that during 2007 the human species has become a predominantly urban species. Currently, 90% of Australians live in urban settlements.
The way we live in our cities affects our health by influencing levels of physical activity, food choices, safety, social interaction and exposure to pollutants. These are determinants of common contemporary health problems such as obesity, diabetes, heart disease, some cancers, depression, injury and asthma. The way we live in our cities also affects the health of the environment through loss of biodiversity, changes to ecosystems, carbon dioxide emissions and the production of other pollutants. These environmental changes, in turn, have feedback impacts on human health.
Tony’s thesis is that to achieve our goal of healthy people on a healthy planet, it is essential that our cities are healthy places.
29 August 2007 - The first Australian screening of "What a Way to Go - Life at the End of Empire", a stunning presentation of four emerging threats: climate change, population overshoot, species extinction and peak oil. NSF members at the screening were delighted to see a movie so closely aligned to the work and vision of NSF. "It is a great feat for one movie to serve as an entire wake-up call and a complete analysis of our global dilemma" - Jan Lundberg.
17 October 2007 - Climate refugees - a forum discussion looked forward into the future, when rising sea levels begin to flood the heavily populated deltas of Asia and low-lying nearby islands, when some monsoons are diminished and others cause massive floods, when the rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in south and south-east Asia lose their dry-season flows from receding Himalayan glaciers and when China diverts their waters north. Australia's responsibilities as a neighbour, as a contributor to climate change, as possessor of a well-watered north with low human population densities will be debated in the context of Australia's own limited human carrying capacity and the implications of peak oil. The discussion was led by Dr Bryan Furnass from NSF and Kerrie Tucker from ACT Greens). A report will be published in our next journal.
Wednesday 21 November 2007 - A community forum on the need for more sustainable housing developments and the respective roles of government regulators, urban planners, architects and designers (and their educators) and developers, estate agents and house buyers in achieving more self-reliant housing that is also affordable. Nature and Society Forum began in August 2007 a project to enable the community to become more aware of the issues and empowered to respond effectively to the challenges, based on the booklet "Climate Change Needs Housing Change". A report will be published in our next journal. To find out more about this project, please contact the Nature and Society Forum office.
20 February 2008 - Launch of our new Biosensitive Futures website. The launch was by Deb Foskey MLA. Professor Judith Whitworth, Director of ANU's John Curtin School of Medical Research was the keynote speaker. Other speakers included our patron Frank Fenner, our chair Catherine Gross, medical activist Tony Capon and Keith Thomas who helped build the website.
17 March 2008 – A talk by Professor Steve Keen, author of "Debunking Economics". See his papers on the website of the Centre for Policy Development. Steve has found that in just 18 months time we may be spending as much of the national income on interest payments as we were in 1990 – when interest rates were at 17 per cent. Australia's level of irresponsible lending isn’t as high as that which brought on the US subprime crisis, but because our debt to GDP ratio is growing so much faster the impact of any slowdown will be more severe here – and the pain will be much more widely spread.
Steve outlined the probable economic consequences of the end of the debt binge, and offered advice on how to cope with the debt hangover, and proposes reforms to prevent it happening again.
Steve Keen is the author of Debunking Economics and his blog is http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/
19 March 2008 – Professor Tony McMichael's topic was Meat production and global warming. Tony, together with another NSF member, Colin Butler, and others recently had their article “Food, livestock production, energy, climate change, and health” published in the Lancet. Tony’s talk will built on that article and the international response it invoked.
“Eat Less Meat and Help Beat the Heat: A ‘Sleeper’ in the Climate Change Mitigation Debate?” - The world is eating more and more meat, and meat production is contributing increasingly to global greenhouse gas emissions. In late 2006 the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) issued an important report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, noting the impact of the livestock production sector on the world’s climate. The major greenhouse gas from the livestock sector is enteric methane from ruminant (digastric) grazers – cattle, sheep and goats. Methane, on a per volume basis, has much greater warming potential than does carbon dioxide.Nutrition scientists recommend an individual intake of around 50-100 gms of meat per day, to provide good protein, sufficient iron and vitamin B12. The high-income world, on average, now clearly exceeds that level, consuming 200-300 gms per person per day. The US has the highest per-person daily intake; the average intake in Sub-Saharan Africa is around one eighth of that US level. (Meanwhile, information this month from the World Food Programme points to a looming crisis of food prices and global malnutrition. Climate change will exacerbate this.)
In a recent paper Tony and his co-authors proposed that the world should reduce the global average daily intake of meat (especially red meat from ruminants). The fairest strategy would be ‘contraction and convergence’, wherein nations would agree to reduce average per-person meat consumption (currently just over 100 gms per day), and to do so equitably. High-consuming populations would reduce their intake and low-consuming populations could increase their intake up to the agreed average level. They recommend a global average target figure of 90 gms of meat per day – with not more than 50 gms from ruminant animals. This strategy, phased in over several decades, would be good for the planet, for assisting global equity, and for population health. The Meat and Livestock Association does not agree.
21 May 2008 - A monster problem or child’s play: coping with peak oil. Two major problems are associated with our ability to cope with peak oil: ignorance and denial. This presentation argues that a critique of a popular children’s movie may provide an entertaining way of introducing people to the serious issues of peak oil, children’s rights and child friendly cities. The Disney movie Monsters, Inc. is popular with both adults and children. Monsters, Inc. can be seen as an allegory about changing conceptualisations of children, an emerging energy crisis, and our responses to this energy crisis. However, a simplistic interpretation of the movie suggests that a technological fix will be found for the world’s looming energy crisis: peak oil. A more detailed critical analysis of the movie suggests that there are far more important messages hidden beneath this humorous children’s story. Paul's presentation explored the likely impact of peak oil on children’s well-being, and argued that while peak oil may present a crisis for children’s rights, it can also be seen as providing an opportunity, if we can only see peak oil coming and think about how we can change our cities now to prepare for it. A reflection on messages from Monsters Inc. suggests that coping with peak oil may well require the sort of creativity and openness to new ways of thinking that children exhibit in their play. In the real world, by taking a child’s perspective, and by making our cities more child-friendly, we will also prepare our cities for the challenges of peak oil.
Some of the themes outlined in the presentation have been explained in this paper by Paul.
Paul spoke to us two years ago on child-friendly cities.
18 June - Whole-of-community involvement in transformational change: an interactive workshop on collective thinking and action. This workshop template has been applied recently in a number of circumstances to bring together the areas of health promotion, community development, environmental management, professional extension, and strategic planning, in communities all over Australia. These are the areas of action required if we are to achieve NSF's mission of healthy people on a healthy planet.
To achieve effective whole-of-community change, all of these fields will need to pool their distinctive contributions. Individual change agents, community interests, specialised advisors, organisational power-brokers and holistic or integrative thinkers will need to be work together over the long term in any effective sustainability program. The workshop will involve all participants in designing a sustainability action plan for climate change in the ACT. The plan will be based on creating synergies between these interests in a collective social learning spiral.
16 July 2008 – David Dumaresq: Should we grow rice in Australia, or should we eat rice in Australia? Food and Water Flows: A Zero Sum Game. David suggested that at regional, national and global scales the flows of food and water human populations induce are a zero-sum game. Current use of water and resultant production of food in the Australian landscape results in surpluses and deficits that are traded away. These traded surpluses or deficits result in environmental loads being transferred between regions and continents rather than those loads being reduced or eliminated.
15 October 2008 – Lyndall Strazdins - Our experience of time in contemporary Australia. Time pressure is a modern malaise, reported by a large proportion of Australians. it is linked to reduced mental and physical health. It also poses problems for society because it gets in the way of actions needing sustained, long-term application to improve health, and to address environmental issues. Both sedentary and active individuals cite lack of time, ahead of income or knowledge, as the reason for not exercising regularly. They also give it as the reason for driving rather than using public transport. This talk took us beyond the superficial contemporary complaint of our "busy lifestyles" and why we find it so difficult to devote our time to those activities that we believe are most important. A detailed report of this presentation will be published in the next edition of Nature and Society.
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Updated 26 October 2008. For more information about what's on, e-mail our office