We Can Sit Back and Let The Future Happen …

Or We Can Learn How To Shape It.

This short essay was written at the request of ABC Radio National

for broadcast on the Perspective Program and heard on Monday November 7th November 2005

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Back in the 1980s, there was a bumper sticker which read – if you believe education is expensive – think about the cost of ignorance.   Our current “climate” of hurricanes and new diseases amid our greater concern with fuel prices, suggests that we humans have much to learn about how the great natural systems of the planet Earth work.  

We have become expert at wealth creation and materialism – but now it’s time to enrol in ecological-sustainability 101.

Lesson number one is to see the ecological writing on the wall.  Anybody who has watched, read or listened to the news in the last five minutes or so must at least suspect that we are witnessing accelerated environmental decline… manifest most alarmingly in the extremes of weather – from drought to hurricane.

We also sense that there is no time to waste.

The Earth is five billion years old.  Difficult to comprehend.  However, if we think in terms of one year, with January the 1st being “the big bang” and the 31st of December the present day, the perspective changes.

For the first six months or 2.5 billion years, no life existed.  Earth was a hot, soupy swamp of noxious gases and lava like surfaces.  Not until late “June” did the first single celled organisms appear.  More than half the history of the planet to evolve a germ.  Through October, marine worms, sponges and jellyfish showed up on the fossil register and animals with backbones around mid November, more than 4 billion years into the Earth’s journey. 

Atmospherically, by around mid to late December, a fundamental change was occurring in the “sequestration” of carbon - into what we now call fossil fuel reserves.  This took millions upon millions of years to “create” the stable levels of carbon in the biosphere which allow the habitat diversity and climate structure we’ve take for granted.   In a very short century or so, we humans have managed to profoundly reverse that work.

But let’s get back to the calendar to find the dinosaurs.  Interestingly, when people imagine the “start of the Earth”, we think of the dinosaurs.  Proportionately speaking though, the dinosaurs didn’t appear until around the 25th or 26th of December, and they were gone the next day.

More amazingly, our human ancestors did not begin to walk the Earth until around December 30th, while recorded human history represents a few minutes before midnight.  Most sobering of all however – the last century or two of our industrial and economic super growth equates to mere fractions of a second before midnight.

In this brief flicker of geological time, we humans, who are but one species of life among maybe as many as thirty million other species, have managed to impact on every other lifeform and every centimetre of the planet.  Repeat.  Every single natural system. 

So, is there any hope?

As environmental educators we say yes, yes emphatically yes!

We often ask people to define the opposite of sustainability.  The universal answer is one word - un-thinkable. 

So, how do we achieve the ecological sustainable economy?

Ironically, the very creativity and determination which has seen humans so successfully “develop” the planet - will also provide the ingenuity and will required to find the solutions.

Our 20th century culture of consumption and waste needs to be converted into an eco- post modern culture which values sustaining the ecology which sustains us. 

We can all sit back and wait for the future to happen, or we can choose to shape it!

And here’s where one of the greatest of human achievements, education, kicks in.  Education is the cradle of culture. We protect what we value, we value what we understand, we gain understanding through education.

To those who cry “but what about jobs and profits” – I offer this basic and thoroughly axiomatic truism.  No ecology, no economy.   No planet – no profit. 

There is no doubt that historians will look back on this period, the genesis of the 21st century as Earth’s ecological watershed.  They will describe a transformation of economic and social culture, born of necessity and nourished through education.

They will cite the groundswell of communities who are coming together in programs such as walking school buses, Land-Care or the Sustainability Street movement.  They will acknowledge the Companies who have demonstrated leadership in Corporate Social and Ecological Responsibility pursuits. And hopefully, the historians will applaud the long overdue, new breed of governments of the smart and successful States of the future who understand, as everyday communities now do, that the opposite to sustainability is unthinkable!