The World we live in

Max Bound 2007

We have a new Government. We still have a 'duty to aspire'. There is hope for a human future if we act now to contribute to developing and having genuinely alternative policies implemented by our new Government.

In “The Good Society - The human Agenda” (pub.1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company Boston New York.) John Kenneth Galbraith made a major contribution to outlining an approach to organising society to replace greed with measures to meet human need. Galbraith supports governmental legislative action and trade union and community organisation to counter what he recognised as the power of the employer in the workplace and in capitalist society at large. He suggests the modern market system motivates society against environmental protection and particularly against the interests of future generations.

It is just over a decade since “The Good Society" was published. Now there is widespread recognition that greenhouse gas, created by human activities, is driving Global Warming and Climate Change. If our children and grandchildren are going to have a human future, we have to force governments and industry to change course now, not in a few years time.

Tragically like Howard, Costello and their associates the Labor Right Wing are focused on the economic fundamentalist nonsense known as economic rationalism. 'Greed is Good’ continues to be an underpinning if not always frankly admitted factor in ALP rightwing thinking. For example our new Treasurer’s "this is for the market to decide" reply to a question on further interest rate hikes by banks on their own volition from Kerry O’Brien on ABC television.

It is vital that we pressure our new Government into acting to make essential changes to government policies in the economic policy sphere. There are realistic possibilities. The long running dumbing down campaign has worked in many respects but it has succeeded in confusing rather than in destroying basic human instincts for cooperation and human decency. To wit the vote against Howard’s - all power to the boss work place laws - and support for wars of intervention.

In today’s world there is money to be made from investment in developing renewable energy and other environmentally friendly economic ventures. Thus the set of climate change crises, despite the horror of their current reality, does create a scenario for a broad approach to developing policies for and approaches to action now to save our planet for the young and their children.

However to try to separate off equity issues from global warming solutions, is obviously counter productive, as well as being immoral. Galbraith outlined important governmental actions necessary to facilitate developing a more cooperative, more equitable and less divisive approach to economic policy development. He advocated government intervention in economic planning and regulation and effectively described tax concessions for the rich as an economic negative. It is now clear that leaving critical economic decision making to greedily self interested, shortsighted and often inept and irresponsible corporation chiefs contributes heavily towards making our planet unfit for human habitation.

As Climate Change columnist Peter Boyer has put it (Hobart Mercury Oct. 30th 2007.) “Without resolute and well informed political leadership, everything we do as individuals, families, communities or work groups to limit the damage from our excessive greenhouse gas emissions will come to nothing.”

Individual responsibilities are real. But our main responsibility is to pressure governments for appropriate approaches and actions. The environmentally destructive capacities of just one plane load of bombs, for example, are enormous. The damage begins to occur even before the bombs are dropped and exploded because of the large amounts of green house gas created in the manufacture and transport of bombs and other means of injuring and killing fellow humans.

The Water problem

However we still need to recognise that appropriate new technologies already are, and will increasingly assist us in finding our way out of the set of crises that currently surround us. The issue here is not opposition to new technology, but proper decision making and open public discussion about what areas of research get governmental support. For example, support for solar energy in all its many aspects, investigation of ways to utilise the energy present in tidal flows rather than the illusive costly and too long, if possible to achieve, clean coal search.

Our clean water problems have of course been exacerbated by climate change. However, conquer nature philosophies, in Australia at least, have encouraged long standing basically faulted practices. Massive over use and allocation of rights to water that in the long run has been proven simply not there to be used are real problems.

Engineering ‘solutions’, like open dams, bores or water diversions through pipes can not change what are basic ecological or natural issues like what water have we actually got, and how can we use it. A Tasmanian water scientist, Dr. David Leaman, trained by a Reece Labor Government in the 1960’s to investigate water issues, has long been an advocate of changed practice. There are presentations of some of his work at www.nowwethepeople.org.

A central point in Dr. Leaman’s analysis and approach is recognition that there is only one fresh water system. Ground water is not an extra but is in fact the flywheel that drives the system. Water in the ground is the source of stream flow. Dr Leaman also shows how tree plantations on land previously used for agriculture and particularly clearing forests or woodlands for plantations results in water loss for other purposes. It takes several decades before areas of tree plantations begin to even approximate the ground water storage evident in natural long standing forests areas. Points made by the Wentworth group of scientists in their Nov. 2002 paper add considerable further weight to Leaman’s findings in this latter aspect - and also as regards the negative effects of land clearing on water available from bores, in particular, in the longer term.

The future

To aspire is to think, to study and learn and to act in a way that brings people together. As Australia’s counterpart of the great American economist, Galbraith, thinker and public figure of last century - H. C. (Nugget Coombes) put it in his last book “ …the logic of the economic system will tend to concentrate even further wealth, income and power with the few … But we are not inescapably dependent on this flood of commodities which our economic system is designed to produce. There are conceivable lifestyles more modest in their material demands, less destructive of the physical environment – lifestyles which are simpler, whose excitements are found primarily in the human relationships they provide scope for.…” ( Coombs H.C.”The Return of Scarcity pub Cambridge University Press 1990)

In short what really counts is not $ and power over others but human aspirations for a cooperative society that provides a good life for all in a manner that allows us to live within the limits of our finite planet.

*Max Bound is an octogenarian with a lifelong background of left wing activism in political, industrial and social movements and more than three decades of activism in environmental movements.