Chairperson: Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon. Good evening.
Welcome to the last session and the awesome Adelaide
festival of ideas taking place in the city of infinite
enlightenment and endless possibility.
We'd like to begin this session by acknowledging the Ghana people,
the traditional custodians of this land,
and one of the great cultural and moral hopes for its future
The festival has had a number of themes.
The themes are trying to deal with the actual core issues
that are facing this country and this population. And of course, by extent,
extension the rest of the world.
One of the reasons I moved from Los Angeles to south Australia is because south
Australia has hit the wall. First,
This sense that you have here in south Australia,
the genuine worst case scenario of, you know,
a completely collapsed economy and that a
lot of the issues that the rest of the planet is going to face over time are
actually in terms of the industrialized world,
presenting themselves in their most extreme and immediate forms right here.
And right now,
which puts this population in a leadership position.
So what's helpful when you're a leader is to have the best advice.
And the festival of ideas has been gathering some of the wisest
people in the world to come and share with us and with each
other particularly in the context of an interdisciplinary discussion.
I think we live in the 20th century, we've escaped from the 20th century,
that disease of expertise the sense of experts talking to
themselves.
And I think one of the tasks is engaging in the questions
before us in holistic manner in which the disciplines
are engaging with each other,
in which we begin to realize the dimensionality of many of the things that we're
confronting in which our culture of intervention,
which has usually been across a very, very narrow spectrum.
We will intervene on drugs,
or we will build a dam in China without awareness of a larger set
of cultural consequences without awareness of a larger set of environmental
circumstances without, you know,
constantly not noticing the dimensionality of all of the things we're
facing. And in fact,
that very dimensionality and the need to engage in a
democratic interdisciplinary intercultural dialogue is
three quarters to solving the problem,
Which is why not try little democracy and why not actually
try some coalition building and some attempt to reach outside one's
own sphere so that we begin to arrive at
collective ways of understanding in this new paradigm.
And I think that's what we're gathered here on our last session to discuss.
I want to emphasize that the question of water and population was at the
core of the crucial questions around the Federation of this country.
Those questions have not gone away as we're celebrating the centenary of
Federation.
Those questions just have to be dealt with in actually a much deeper way than
ever before. When we asked about water and population,
the fact that the world's population is about to double that water is a finite
resource.
We're getting beyond just a flat statement of statistics.
We're moving into the fact that the essence of life itself will not be
available.
And the question is who are the extra people,
which of us votes to eliminate our grandparents or our next child?
If there are too many of us who are the people who are going to go?
Who are the people who are going to make sure don't reproduce?
We're into questions. So shocking.
In fact,
the only way to deal with them is to deal with what those questions are.
In fact, asking us. Wishes,
it's time for a major series of paradigm shifts
in the whole culture. The
extraordinary group that we have today is
a fairly courageous bunch. We're going to
begin by asking a series of individual questions and
then open out into fairly free-wheeling discussion of ideas.
Because at this point there is nothing to lose and everything to gain.
And then we'll open that out into questions from the floor.
Before embarking on this adventure.
I would first like to acknowledge and thank the
organizers of the Adelaide festival of ideas.
Thank you.
[inaudible] I'd like to thank very deeply the extraordinary
staff and volunteers that have made this possible.
Thank you, beautiful people. You know who you are. Now to
just set things rolling.
One of the most powerful and extraordinary voices in Australia who will bring us
sharply into the local context of these issues is a woman who's
devoted her life to taking a, what could be obscure,
scientific research and giving it to a large public in the
most vital and beautiful manner possible.
This translation process has made Mary White, a seminal figure in this country,
and we are so grateful she's with us today.
And we're so grateful that her voice is raised in this country. Mary,
would you please begin our session?
Mary White: I'm just going to set the scene by reminding you all of what Australia is.
And then why it is so dangerous that we still think like
Europeans,
instead of thinking like Australians when we're facing all the problems that we
are facing, because we are the driest vegetated continent,
70% arrowed, in fact,
40% is desert 15%,
not as acutely arid, but still pretty arid and subject to drafts.
As you know,
so only 15% of this continent is reasonably
well-watered and everything is subject to
an in. So the El Nino Southern oscillation,
whether Walpole or whatever you like to call it,
that means that we have the most unpredictable weather
and our, a land of drought and flood,
which makes it extraordinarily difficult to manage.
Those are things that you've got to take on board originally, United nation,
constantly warning that the arid lands of the world are desert are firing at a
dangerous rate, and nobody's doing anything that is stopping that process.
And the huge biodiversity loss that is particularly serious in the arid
lands. And of course,
Australia has a pretty poor record in that area,
the extraordinary fragility of the arid lands of the world.
And you only have to have, I've lived in the middle east.
You only have to know what those lands of the middle east are like,
and then see that they are in fact, manmade desserts.
They didn't build the pyramids in a desert.
They were built in a well-worded quite hospitable place.
And the desert has simply encroached and Australia has got a great
deal to learn by looking at what happened elsewhere.
This continent is unique and we can't regulate it or manage it
or even think about it in terms of what happens in other places.
It's been an ancient land mass for so long,
with no renewal of its soils by glaciation for 300 million years,
very little vulcanism.
So its soils are made from ancient weathered rocks and are
inherently extremely poor in terms of agricultural soils.
And of course the Pleistocene ice age we're living in an integrase seal at
the moment it has created,
it has turned Australia from what was previously already a fairly dry
land in the last 2.6 million.
It has become the driest vegetated continent.
And at the last glacial stage for instances,
land of ours was 80% virtually desert subject to blowing sand
twice as dry, the whole continent,
twice as dry as it is now and twice as windy.
And if you can imagine what Australia was like a little cooler,
but that horrendous sort of condition you realize that we've only had maybe
16,000 years of recovery from something that was quite amazing
and completely different from what happened in the Northern hemisphere as age
for their mentor renewal of their soils by great ice sheets,
grinding across the landscape, creating deep new fertile soils.
And then when the ice retreated,
the climatic patterns settled down and they have dependable climate
spring, summer, autumn and winter, nothing like what we have here.
We had an ancient bettered con continent to begin with ice age,
just put the didn't, put the icing on the cake,
but it put the drawing on the whole thing and a completely different history.
And coming from the Northern hemisphere and settling in Australia and
expecting the land use and water use and
all the practices that were suited to Northern hemisphere lands to
be suitable for our continent has been at the root of all our troubles.
So my major thing is that we have to think like Australians because
everything is different here. Even our rivers, I mean rivers,
or to rise on high land and run briskly to the sea.
Most of our rivers, except around the very edges of the continent,
don't do that. They run inland.
Some of them don't run anywhere in particular and a great number. Of course,
don't run at all. They only are active at times of flood.
So a river is not just a river.
It's something with a very strange pattern of behavior.
And we're only just beginning to understand what is needed to,
to keep these things sustainable.
We have the most variable flow river flow in our rivers of
anywhere on earth. And of course that doesn't suit us.
We've tried to regulate rivers so that we've got continuity of.
And by doing that, we are essentially killing the rivers.
They need the very variability. That's not much use to us.
And we complain endlessly when floods occur on floodplains,
not realizing that floodplains are essential parts of river systems as
essential as the channels and banks. So we have major major problems.
And with only 15% of the continent reasonably well-watered
the use of water in very large quantities for things like
dark irrigation in particular, and being part of the globalization movement.
We heard that amazing talk yesterday from the lady on the
platform here with me,
Dr. Shiva talking about the absolute madness that the world is
undergoing at the moment,
a sort of global insanity with the sort of agriculture that
we're practicing,
being completely incompatible with the landscapes as often as not.
And the fact that we are in Australia,
we consider ourselves an agricultural nation in spite of the nature of our soils
and our water suppliers.
We are feeding 80 million people without exports,
20 million in Australia, too, for that matter.
But an awful lot of the stuff we feed the Australians is imported or part of
that, that madness that we heard about so eloquently yesterday,
and we are doing it by mail mining, our soul soil,
and water resources, upsetting the hydrology in our food,
only couple of food basket areas,
the Murray basin and the west Australian wheat belt losing great
stretches of those areas.
Great proportion of those areas to salinity and rising water tables and all
those sorts of problems. There are solutions,
but they're not the sort of solutions that governments are likely to take until
we've actually gone over the edge of the precipice that we're sitting on the job
now. And we are in a moment,
so unusual situation in Australia,
we still can make decisions and decide what
we want to do.
We don't have the enormous population pressures that other lands have that keep
them locked into only attending to people.
We have the luxury of being able to think a little about biodiversity and the
things that really matter.
And if we restructure and practice what I would call sustainable
intensification using the reasonably sustainable areas for a
much wiser sort of agriculture,
getting rid of the huge businesses that are now
running things and realizing that we cannot go on
trying to be in the global,
in the globalization business and producing cotton.
And if the next generation is going to have just about nothing to inherit from
us. So I asked for a complete change in attitudes,
in expectations, and for God's sake,
let's try and get the people who have the power to do things,
to listen to the fact that we don't want to hand
thoroughly deserve to fad land onto the next generation. Thank you.
Chairperson: Thank you, Mary. That was extraordinary. Thank you very much. Okay.
Just to get another sharp picture of reality we have from the us
geological survey,
the extraordinary hydrologist Warren Wood who will also
carry on,
I think from where Mary left off and paint even a larger picture of
where this is as a global phenomenon carrying on from recognizing where we
are here in our store here in Australia, Warren.
Warren Wood: Thank you, Peter. I really would like to expand what in one way,
focus in another way,
expand on Mary's initial comments as a hydrologist,
my thoughts center around the physical resources and the the risk of
inducing great sleep at this time of the afternoon.
I would like you to bear with me for a few minutes.
As I lay out what I think are some kind of fundamentals.
And then we can speculate a little bit about the questions relating to our,
the title of our talk.
But first we know that the present population of the
earth is 6 billion people,
and it's a reliably predicted that it'll reach 12 billion in a hundred years.
We know that the presently one person in five on
earth does not have sanitary drinking water.
And that one half of the population has grossly inadequate sewage
disposal.
We know that approximately 3 million people
currently die each year from waterborne diseases.
We know that at any given moment,
approximately one half of the people in the developing world are suffering from
disease caused by drinking contaminated water,
eating food contaminated by sewage or from insects breeding and manmade
water structures.
We know that all of the fresh water has been identified and that we
have approximately 40,000 cubic kilometers of fresh water renewed each
year in our global water. Well,
we know that global warming is occurring and it will change our
existing estimates of available water.
We know about 70% of the world's water is used for
irrigate [inaudible]. We know that 21
of the world's population, the so-called developed nation use about 80% of the Earth's water, energy and minerals.
And finally,
we know that we have destroyed much of our aquatic habitat and biodiversity
by using our rivers for sewage disposal,
industrial waste and agricultural runoff.
From my perspective,
this knowledge constitutes a management and policy see crisis,
this knowledge, how do we address the management of water resources?
All of the fresh water in the world is allocated. As I've said, thus,
if you give water for one use, you must take it from another.
So water management in is conflict resolution between the
interested stakeholders. Choices are not easy. For example,
in Australia,
we'd increase the flow in the Murray darling for the ecosystem maintenance.
Yet you need to plant trees and reduce the white cancer of
salinity. And the trees are sift,
going to significantly reduce the flow in the Murray darling.
So you have a mix which way do you go? How do you balance this?
How do we address water management?
The concept sustainability is one management model that has been proposed.
Sustainability is on everyone's radar,
it's in the daily papers and every environmental newsletter, the term, however,
in my opinion is used loosely without careful thought.
It means different things to different people.
Instead of one picture being worth a thousand words,
we have one word that is worth a thousand different images.
Sustainability is a relatively new word, less than 30 years old.
According to the Oxford English dictionary was first used in the early 19 seven
to explain an economy that was unchanging in time in
1987,
the Brundtland commission of United nations popularize the term in a sense it is
now used by managers of natural resources.
This commission defines sustainability as the ability to meet the
needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future
generations to meet their needs. In other words, don't use all the resource,
save some for the future. While this may be a desirable, philosophical role,
a goal,
there are a number of bumps in the road when one attempts to implement it as a
viable water policy, it does not address important management questions,
such as sustainability at what level,
sustainability for whom sustainability and what time timeframe
sustaining sustainability using what economic model nor
does sustainability address the distribution of resource amongst the competing
factions.
A more fundamental problem with sustainability is the logic population
growth is exponential,
like multiplying rabbits that you're so familiar with in Australia,
and yet the resources are finite. Thus at some point,
the demand must outstrip the resource supply.
It is the classic no fusion argument in the past new land,
new water resources and new technology have saved humanity from starvation
predicted by this argument, we have no more new land. In fact,
as Mary alluded to,
we are losing tens of thousands of hectares each year to the white cancer of
salinity and erosion of our wonderful top soil.
We have no water that has not been allocated. And from a technical standpoint,
we are constrained by the laws of thermodynamics.
Sustainability is like most resorts management philosophy is a
wealth distribution philosophy.
Remember I said earlier that 20% of the population use
80% of the resources.
It should be no surprise to you that most of the 20% is white.
Who are we to tell the rest of the world that we've got hours and you can't have
any more because more use is not sustainable. In my opinion,
the policy is racist in nature and less.
The developed nations want to reduce their lifestyle.
This response seems unlikely as most people are unwilling to voluntarily reduce
their standard of living.
We must recast sustainability in terms of renewability think
of the 40,000 cubic kilometers of fresh water as we receive each year as
renewability. So get away from the sustainability concept.
If sustainability is not a viable policy,
as I claim that there are some problems, what are some of the alternatives?
First,
we need an international debate on our failed 13,000 year old
paradigm of using the world's rivers as conduits for domestic sewage,
industrial waste and agricultural runoff. Second,
we need a serious debate about global population to a size that will known
to fit the known existing resources. Third, we needed a bait,
the concept that topography soil and climate determined the choice of crops
rather than historical prejudice.
These debates must have necessarily start at the grassroots as most politicians
follow and do not lead.
Maybe it'll take a crystallizing book or event to get serious thought much like
the silent spring, the book silent spring by Rachel Carson did in the early,
late fifties and early sixties in our form of government only sex
sandals seem to get the politicians' attention. Thank you.
Chairperson: Well, that was stunning. Thank you, Warren.
It's telling it like it is Warren's point of course is about
a very comfortable group of people who are primarily Caucasians
speaking to the rest of the world as if Caucasians are the majority of the
world's population, simply because of their,
they represent the majority of the world's banking systems.
And obviously that's a very, not a reality.
In fact,
it's a minority community that keeps speaking on behalf of the rest of the
world.
Dr. Vandana Shiva has been one of the most extraordinary voices
speaking against bio piracy for bioethics in
terms of the complication of food distribution,
in terms of a more equitable series of possibilities.
Her voice has international Australians will recall her best as the only
person inside the casino in Melbourne last year,
who could speak to the people outside. Dr. Shiva.
Dr. Vandana Shiva: [Inaudible] thank you, Peter.
And thank you Australia for that compliment of receiving me.
As one of you, you
know,
when I think of the 40,000 cubic kilometers that Warren just talked about
as available,
not the 113,000 cubic kilometers,
that's coming as precipitation petition
to the earth.
And then I think of the fact that the majority of water supply
even today in most parts of the world is a woman with a pot on her
head walking 10 miles. There's a limit to how much you can carry
just by the fact that water supply is literally subsidized by women's
energy.
There is a huge limit put to the,
on the use of the large numbers who don't have access to
water.
So I really don't think the problem is the numbers on the planet
at all. The problem really is they're getting too little
and we need better water justice.
If there is scarcity and there is scarcity,
not because water can disappear that much,
113 cubic kilometers will keep recycling. It's not a fixed resource.
I don't think it's a fixed resource. It's a beautiful, renewable resource.
We've just messed up the renewability systems.
And in messing up the renewability systems,
two things are happening too much of it is not available
for human use because having to our water catchments
by mining and deforestation, the moment a drop of rain falls,
it rushes off doesn't seep through doesn't recharge aquifers,
doesn't recharge our Springs and streams.
So we get the double problem of floods and drought,
especially in the monsoon kind of climate that we have in south Asia.
And the second we enrich,
we have started to mess up the water is turned abundant supplies into
non-available supplies by pollution.
I've seen river after river of sacred India.
Every one of these was the sacred river. One by one.
Each of them has been killed.
I work in Bangalore in the early eighties,
and we spent a lot of time trying to save the tongue.
[inaudible] We're one bulk factory drop the life of the river and the
millions who depend on it.
It just needs one polluting activity along the river to make
that amazing abundance disappear into scarcity.
So scarcity and and abundance are not,
are not physical constructions, physical,
the very much determined by culture then determined by our production systems.
They are determined by our paradigms of how we view the world.
And I think part of our paradigm that's gone wrong is it has been cut easy in
the fractured resources into just rocks, just timber,
just meat, just a bit of canned vegetable.
And because water was abandoned,
every bit of the development paradigm of industrialization has a zoom that you
can Bayswater as long as you save something somewhere else.
And the one thing they'd been desperate to save is human energy,
but just so in such a button and supply.
And I think the one thing we need to shift is stop measuring productivity in
terms of per capita efficiency,
because it's basically a way of getting rid of people from gainful livelihoods,
and instead have just one indicator for development.
How much water did you use if you use water efficiently,
then you're more productive. If you wasted it,
you are inefficient.
Now just look at the way we have managed to wastewater.
Everyone's being told to grow vegetables,
especially the third world is being told, not to Google grow greens anymore,
but just grow vegetables for export. And I was reading some figures.
It takes 17,000 gallons,
but tongue to back green beans for export because you
can't really be, you know, I mean they do of course ship them around to one,
right? But by and large, to make it accessible,
you know, you've got to start counting your peaches and pears beans.
And every bit of that is Hughes.
You using amounts of water that are never part
of the consumption awareness. At the end of the chain yesterday,
we were told in a panel here, I think it was you wore. And when you talked about
tons behind every ton of meat exported,
10,000 tons of water in every ton of meat exported from Austria.
So we paradigm shift that tells that reminds us that rocks our water,
our forests are the best natural dams.
And even the food we eat is actually embodied water.
We were told, I remember the beginning of the ticket,
this lovely word de materialization, we're moving into the information age.
Therefore we'll have no pressure on resources.
Look at the figures for making Silicon chips.
It takes for a six inch wafer,
2000 gallons of deionized water and lots
of chemicals, which then go to pollution,
a plant making 2000 wafer
4.5 million gallons a week of water.
And that is 23 billion gallons a
year behind those chips in our computers.
We do not yet have the awareness of the embodied water.
In fact,
most conflicts in the U S at this point are around the
huge use of water by the high-tech industry.
I think the second paradigm shift we need besides recognizing the,
the water that's been made invisible.
And I'll give you just a very quick example.
I worked on the state of Maharaj when the drought became so perrenial and
permanent, that every village was having to get water through tankers.
Fossil fuel was delivering our water.
And I went in to look at why was this permanent scarcity created,
turns out the world bank in the seventies,
insisted that the state move out of growing millets that require 400 millimeters
into growing sugarcane, because it has higher value,
which requires 1,200 millimeters in an area where there was only
six millimeters of recharge into the ground.
Those are standard straightforward recipes of creating a water famine.
I think the second major shift we do need,
given that we are now being told the solution really is
privatization and marketization of water. And there's a book on water markets,
which is the big question for water is where the Adam Smith's invisible hand
will be unshackled.
And if and reliance of markets will increase the supply of
water through trade, oh,
the one thing the hydrological cycle tells us is you can't increase the supply.
You can just move it around. You can move it from rural areas to cities,
from agriculture to the high tech industry, but you can't increase the supply.
And that's the part of the problem that the building created,
where it was assumed.
I remember the phrase they would use for making dams was always augmenting
water. Somehow you will creationist always.
And I think that's the other paradigm shift we need.
It's high time to leave creation to creation
with this dominant paradigm. It just the ruling paradigm,
the idea that water is a commodity just sell. It will somehow increase.
Scarcity will go away. You don't have to worry about anything else.
I think we do need to get back to categories. One, the category of the commons,
this is our common responsibility.
What is our common responsibility from the local level,
all the way to the global level and at the local level,
the beautiful thing about water is it has a habit of falling in a decentralized
way.
So the only way to really manage it with justice is through
respecting every drop where it falls and make it available to the
largest number of species and largest number of people for their vital needs.
Part of what's happening in climate change was mentioned both by Marianne,
by Warren is the fact that even though there's lots of debates
about what it means, we do know it means climatic extremes.
It does mean where there's drought,
the drugs will get worse and where there are floods and cyclones they're going
to get to us. And they already are. It means both ways.
Climate change translates into a water crisis of either
hurricanes and floods or average city and lack of water.
And that's why sometimes think of Mr. Bush, not just as an atmospheric criminal,
but a water criminal by basically saying he's going to satisfy the
oil lobby and do nothing about the water ethics that all of us need to be.
If we have to survive together.
[inaudible].
Chairperson: Dr. Tim Flannery is a well-known and recent south Australian
and most of us have a problem of barely being able to think five
minutes ahead or in, in five minute you know units,
Tim of course,
is used to thinking his usual unit is a million or so years
or several arrows or epochs. Tim has,
of course as a who's worked, you know,
across fields of science, anthropology, and biology.
Tim brought out a book which then became a TV series quite
supercharged called the future eaters, very intense title.
Speaking about the impossibility of sustaining certain types of
growth in Australia from
Palin Tajik paleontological evidence and a whole range of
speculations.
Tim was one of the key voices in a rather
sharp population debate that said that Australia must
stop growing and close its borders.
That of course turned into an extraordinary immigration saga that we find
ourselves still in em, immeshed in Tim,
would you please step up and into the next paradigm shift?
Dr. Tim Flannery: Thank you very much, Peter.
I probably would have added my voice to the,
to the chorus of doom that we've heard this evening.
If if others hadn't done it so very, very well
we've heard from Peter,
the sense that there's time,
some of us got off the boat that there's too many of us on the planet,
and that perhaps the time has come for us to decide who amongst us will be.
That will be no more it's a frightening thought,
but it is the thought that our species has lived with as a reality of life
daily reality of life for most of the 300,000 years that we've been in
existence. And it's mostly been women that have been making those choices.
People have been self-limiting in terms of their population in almost every
culture that I think I can think of except that of
the contemporary culture that we now live in, in the 19th and 20th centuries.
And that's self limiting capacity was often done
for the very reason that people knew there was insufficient resources either at
the immediate time or at some time in the future. And as you say, Peter,
it's been the young and the old those at the ends of the spectrum that have been
asked to get off the bus most frequently.
And the way we've escaped from that horror that evolution has imposed
upon us is by borrowing from the future we've borrowed resources that future
generations will need by developing unsustainable means of creating
a surplus. And that has allowed us to fuel population growth that has otherwise,
and certainly no long-term is entirely unsustainable.
So I think that your questionnaire Peter is shocking as it may have,
may have appeared to the audience is one that we,
we can see being a return to normalcy. If you want,
it may not be desirable. We may not want to do it,
and we may be able to find another way around it.
But if we continue as we are, choice will be taken out of our hands.
It won't be asked that we'll be asking, who's going to get off the bus.
It'll be nature herself who will decide that there's just too many of us and in
her own inimical and ruthless way,
we'll make the decisions about our future.
So I think it is a very serious question that you've raised there,
which has been very amply backed,
I think by Mary and Warren and Shiva and others about how this,
the situation you see simply unsustainable environmentally,
the one person I would love to have seen here tonight though,
was Malcolm Fraser who was built to be here,
who represents a very different view.
And one that I don't think we can walk away from this room this evening,
without considering as much as I violently disagree with him.
Malcolm Fraser's view is much more mainline in Australian society than my own.
And I think it's worth just considering briefly what he would have said tonight.
Malcolm Prizer would have almost certainly said that this continent,
it was capable of sustaining many, many millions of people,
perhaps 50 million people,
and that we should be having a much enlarged refugee,
the program and immigration program as a whole,
but certainly a refugee program as well.
And I think that that's a very admirable thing,
but it's worth us very carefully asking
how,
what the size of the population for our nation is and what
the costs are of overrunning that in the short term,
to meet some other aspects of common good,
because that's one thing we may want to look at. We may decide as Australians,
that we will have 50 million people in this continent,
but I hope we do it with the understanding that that's an unsustainable figure,
given current technology and use of resources and that we work very hard to
bring things back into balance because in the longterm mother nature out there
is out there. She's an old lady with very bad habits and she carries a very,
very big stick.
And if we don't do anything to make sure that we don't get in the way she will
fix things up gas,
but the thing that's interested me most about Malcolm Fraser's view over the
years is that he fully very powerful Australian.
He was prime minister for a number of years,
and he lived for a long time on a volcano in the richest
and most seasonal, the reliable part of Australia.
And when he looked around from Noreen at his flocks of sheep in the land,
that knows no drought, the only part of Australia that really does,
and the rivers that flow through the year,
you can be forgiven for thinking that this country might be able to
sustain 50 million people.
If he'd gone up to visit his fellow farmers in the Mallee, however,
he may have had a different view of things.
And probably if he had a Mallee family,
wouldn't have made it to the prime minister sheep,
the place just isn't rich enough to sustain a squat ocracy and an influential
power base in the longterm. People run through their resources out there very,
very quick. But at these that the bite that we face now, as much as we,
we may want to address these critical issues of sustainability,
it is the impact on us that we're going to have to take into account.
And the one,
the first major issue will be effectively debating Malcolm Fraser's
position. It probably is. Well,
if not if not the majority,
at least a very widespread view in Australian society. And I feel that for us,
the first step forward to regaining some sense of control over this
situation is a widespread debate among us all about how many of us they
should be certainly debates also about technology
levels of resource utilization,
but it's very difficult to Dodge that main question,
the big question of how many of us they should be and how much more should we
borrow from the future in order to give ourselves a soft landing in the medium
term, beyond that,
we can look at our society, particularly in Adelaide,
as Peters said, that was a glorious introduction. Peter, who was splendid,
you pointed to the crisis.
So south Australia faces in terms of a very slowly growing and soon to be
declining population CT,
that's looking very at critical water use and water
restrictions in the future. And yet look good to see you this evening.
Do we consider ourselves poorer than other Australians?
Just because we have an older society, one that's growing less rapidly,
we are in a sense the future and your right to come here,
to look at what the future may look like.
And there is a very special obligation on us, I think,
to S to lead the way,
instead of being seen to be sort of a rust bucket off the side to
actually say, no, no,
this is the way the whole of the developed world going to look in the next
century. The developed world is declining in terms of population.
The developed world is struggling with issues of immigration and how much they
should subsidize population growth.
It will soon be S be struggling very hard with issues such as declining house
prices and very minimal returns on superannuation.
And we'll probably be hit with those things first,
but they are the necessary payment back to the future to create
sustainability.
We've borrowed so much from the future to maintain an unrealistic level of
growth that we,
as a society will have to face those costs in order to pay back and the way we
face them in a way we,
we deal with those issues will enlarge pat determined a quality of life. We, we,
we, we have in future.
So it's with those thoughts really that I'd like to perhaps close and and,
and hear from our other speakers about what the future might hold for us.
Thank you.
Chairperson: [Inaudible] Thank you very much. Of course.
It's really quite intense that we're all coming out of,
you know and I'm speaking as much as an American, but, you know,
you've had your version here in Australia of a severely limited and
limiting rather shocking period of economic rationalism of
poverty mentality. Since that there limits, we have to cut this,
we have to cut that where this is the era of that cut budget.
South Australia had its big jolt of the failure of the state bank and image
that, you know, not only is there nothing to go around,
but it's going to stop going around whatever there is
that sense that most human beings are born with innate
sense of generosity. And the world around us tells us to silence. That
creates a very profound internal crisis and struggle in each one of
us and in this society that has grown colder and colder and has actually
retreated from public space and has actually made, you know,
any notion of public life turn into a cheap public relations
scam.
Most of us feel in some way violated, but don't know how to speak of it.
It's in this context that the philosopher Raimond Gaita
books have touched an extraordinary cord, and we were taught that,
you know,
philosophers aren't that important in our society because they're not good for
business.
And amazingly there's been a huge Poplar
outpouring because people are looking for some way
to resolve something that they're feeling inside with the world around him,
around them.
So I'd like to call on one of the most extraordinary philosophers.
Raimond, would you please step up
[inaudible].
Raimond Gaita: Well, I, I hope philosophers. Aren't so good for business actually, but
one of the things that
sort of pleases me about a philosophy being a philosophy is I usually don't have
to know too much. You don't have to know many facts anyway,
so you can see,
you'd probably understand why it might hit fields in a bit of a spin at the
moment.
And the and I, I know absolutely nothing about water.
I have to tell you there's,
but listening to what what's been said
there are two things I I'd like to talk about very, very quickly.
One is that well, it's something I felt when,
when the ecological issues first became important to people
in the sixties.
And I had a sort of sense when people started really disliking one another and
sort of saying nasty things about one another,
because they would use color colored toilet paper. I thought, my God,
is there an issue more ripe for fanaticism?
Because after all you can say that's in one way or another,
but colored toilet paper you use really has something to do with the
destiny of humankind. I mean, there isn't a isn't,
as it were a bigger and more important sort of cause,
and to think about what will,
what will promote and what will inhibit the survival of humankind on
the planet. And so I've always been a little bit fearful,
I have to say about, about,
about green issues and not because I don't think they're important.
I think they're enormously important.
It's just because they're so important that I'm fearful about them.
My, my political consciousness was very much shaped by the mass murders of the
last century,
by thinking about Stalinism and by thinking about the Holocaust
and how many people were murdered for the sake of,
in one case for a better future for working people or for human kind more
generally in the communist caves and for the folk in the
second codes.
And so I'm very fearful now in an age where it seems to
me, two things are coming together.
One is an increasing sort of instrumental conception of what morality is about.
It's a set of rule to promote the human good,
for example and a real crisis with respect to the human good.
And unless we're very,
very careful those two things will come together in
a group of experts because after all, just like, I know nothing about water.
So most of us know nothing on don't know enough to contradict the
experts about water or about the various other issues that
affect us in those areas that are called green issues.
And therefore there's a great danger of a kind of instrumental view of
morality, which has all of the human good will be,
as it were directed by a group of people who are experts.
And that will mean that people are some,
some groups of people will be listed to be eliminated.
I think I fear and I don't think anybody thinking about
the history of the last century can be too sanguine
about the possibility that large groups of human beings will be seen
as disposable.
Th the other thing that I want to just very briefly to talk about is that it is
that in my own sort of intellectual lifetime,
there was a move from kind of internationalism, which was, was,
was a sort of ideal of,
of people who thought themselves to be progressive and on the left to a new
sense of sort of rootedness and ethnic identity, which is now
I suppose, dominates a lot of ethical thinking, but there's a new move to,
because of partly because of concerned with ecological issues and partly because
of a concern with human rights legislation to a kind of internationalism.
And there's an interesting tension here. I think for a lot of people,
I know myself, I'm quite confused when I try to, to think about it, but,
but I bet the people who are,
who are now increasingly skeptical of what they
might call ethnic politics are. So for very good reason,
that there's so much hatred that is,
is a consequence and that lies behind it. So I,
so I, but on the other hand, it seems to me,
people have discovered how important it is to have more,
much more local identity. It's not just to be human beings,
but to be somehow rooted in more in the,
in the life of the people and the natural language of the people and the arts
and the history of that people.
And I'd just like to leave you with one thought, it's not my thought,
it's the thought of someone I've spoken up before on this platform Simone
veil who was concerned in the second world war with
how the the allies,
when she was specifically concerned with the friend might develop a kind of
energy, which matched the ferocious energy of the Nazis,
but wasn't based on that brutal for that a CISM and her thought was that the
energies that sustain the Nazis was a consequence of a kind of
a sense of nationalism that was based on the glorification of status and power
and glory. And she thought they might be in fact,
another way of loving one's country,
which would give people the same kind of energy to fight as ferociously,
but not degenerate into a horrific jingoism,
which despised all other countries.
And she thought it was a kind of nationalism based on a compassionate regard
for the fragility of all the good things in one's nation, not the great,
not constantly be talking about greatness and glory, but to have a sense of, of,
of the things that are very good in Australia in fact, has,
has that marvelous tradition.
That's one of the wonderful things about the Gallipoli and Anset tradition,
but it's not you know
net such an admiration of glory. And so, and if I were to think of how it,
how it's possible for people still to have a love of
country and the love of what roots them and the love of what's shaped their
identity without fearing that that same love will cause them to look down
upon, or even vilify other nations.
It would be to think about that marvelous thought of smoke vases,
that the love of country,
or to be a compassionate love for all the things that are fragile. You know.
Chairperson: Thank you very much.
If some of the basic facts and situations that the
speakers have put forward to us tend to read like some kind of
shocking old Testament prophecy about the end of the world.
Our next speaker has actually spent many years looking
deeply into the old Testament and opening it out into a
set of possibilities for a new society and a new generation reading
deeply in between the lines and finding of
course,
a richness and an infinitude within a moral universe
that can be reimagined in a different cultural
context, opening out the sexism,
opening out a certain, you know,
minor historical circumstances and trying to say, well,
is there a larger picture that does translate Regina
Schwartz? A professor from Chicago has very,
very powerfully reinterpreted, the old Testament in new paradigms.
And I'm wondering Regina, if you would speak for us this evening.
Regina Schwartz: Well forgive me for bringing up a very old story,
but there is an old story that God planted a garden
in Eden and put some rivers in the garden for,
to be precise.
And then he planted man in that garden and told him to tend and keep
the garden. And I think there's an awful lot of wisdom in that story.
The rivers flow freely,
but man is to tend to it and keep it not look elsewhere for solutions
that's countered, of course,
by the first creation narrative in which God has to separate the waters,
the salt waters in order for the land to appear.
And the idea there is that somehow the salt waters are threatening
and re inundate the land and destroy the land.
So the biblical story begins with the distinction between hostile waters
that you have to keep at bay in order for the land to
prosper on the one hand and these marvelous waters that flow
through paradise and, and water, the garden that God has planted.
And we've inherited. I think these,
these basic paradigms of water as both life-giving on the one hand and hostile
on the other.
The other thing that I've learned from the biblical story is
that there are paradigms of scarcity and plentitude
that seemed to me to go beyond notions of
material scarcity and plenitude,
and that can inform our lives and the ways in which we treat one another.
And I, I became the longer, I read biblical stories,
stories of limited blessings and scare supplies.
I became very frightened of what I've come to call scarcity thinking.
The kind of thinking that, that, because our supplies are dwindling,
we might have to hoard them.
And I have come to embrace the idealism
and utopian thinking. Yeah,
that generosity is based upon the generosity that says, look,
there are unlimited supplies and all we have to do is keep them in circulation.
Now, how can we put all of these thoughts together when we've learned from our
esteemed scholars up here that in fact supplies are dwindling on the one hand,
but we want to be generous on the other, what, what should we do?
How do we handle this crisis?
It seems to me that utopian thinking isn't right order,
and isn't such a bad thing.
And that if we do presuppose an unlimited supply and take a walk on the
beach and look at the ocean and you can be overwhelmed by,
by how much water there is, if we do think that way,
we might strive harder for solutions as you were indicating strive
harder for solutions in which we do distribute
this abundant resource and do handle this abundant resource that is tended
and keep it with respect.
Finally we were asked tonight to think about the future and the 21st
century and new paradigms,
and I've come up with a rather humble one, which is conversation.
That means not using language instrumentally,
not using one another instrumentally,
but really being able to see and hear and talk to one
another across identity divides across
material divides of all kinds.
And I've learned the value of conversation actually from mystical,
which asks us to think of praise,
even as a gift that has been made to us.
It's an offering that we return as a pure expression of desire.
It can also take the form of a lament to lament about the crisis of our world
today.
Nonetheless in the very act of lamenting lamenting about our scarce
resources, lamenting about the tragedies in our world,
we are in inevitably celebrating.
And what we're celebrating is a sense of gratitude that we have a
listener that there may be someone to hear us
that kind of gratitude comes from the depths.
It's the praise of Jonah from the belly of the whale or the praise of Joe.
It's the kind of song that God gives in the night, as it says,
hauntingly in the book of job,
it's also the praise of Christ from the cross. When he says my God,
my God,
why have you forsaken me as so many of us are saying feeling that we
have been forsaken as last night's panel on,
on God and science indicated.
But Christ is quoting the Bible.
When he says that he's quoting Psalm 22,
and that isn't only a Psalm of lament. It's also a Psalm of praise,
indeed of gratitude. For our world,
it begins the Psalm, my God, my God. Why have you deserted me?
How far from saving me? The words I grown,
I call all day my God, but you never answer all night.
I call and cannot rest.
Then the speaker recalls that once upon a time,
his calls were heard and his calls were answered. That that is in fact,
his very genealogy. He says in you, our fathers put their trust.
They trusted and you rescued them. They called on you to help.
And they were saved. They never trusted you in vain.
Yet the speaker then proceeds to abandon the temporary comfort of seeing
himself in that genealogy of having calls answered.
He sees himself instead in the present through the eyes of others,
constituted by them as a victim and says yet,
here am I now more worm than man's scorn of mankind,
just of the people, all who see me Jarrett at me,
they toss their heads and sneer and they say, rely on God,
let God save him. Let God save us. If God is our friend,
let God rescue them. They say cheering me.
This is the language that Matthew invokes to describe the taunting of Jesus
before his crucifixion and in the Psalm, as at the crucifixion,
this misery is miraculously answered.
Those who trust that God will save, speak the truth unwittingly.
It seems rely on God, let God save him. You know,
is that a mockery agir or is that something that could happen?
The Psalm proceeds? I'm at verse 24 now nearly done for,
he has not despised or disdained.
The poor man in his poverty has not hidden his face from
him, but has answered when he called.
I just like to conclude by saying,
I think that in the 21st century where craving an
answer when we call and that we've accepted that it's our
responsibility to forge that answer. Thank you.
Chairperson: Thank you very much.
I'd love to move this into a discussion mode and
for the public there are, there's a microphone down here,
halfway back in the hall and again, up above in this corner.
So if people who want to ask questions that enter the discussion,
we'll move to the microphones. Can I just ask in the meantime two short,
quick questions?
I think one is I know that there are a lot of people in in
Australia, but aren't there even more sheep
119 million sheep. I mean, so they're 10 times more sheep than people here,
right? I just checking. Yes. Okay. And, and, and cattle.
Yes. Yeah. I don't know how many cattle, but there's a lot of tens of millions.
So they, in a certain way put the people to shame.
I just want to check on that. I mean, a visitor. Okay.
And I know that in, in, in California where we're specializing, you know,
the U S has perfected the gap treaty so that we can forbid Korean farmers from
growing rice.
And we are currently draining the rivers in the Northern California to
create rice patties in the central desert of California,
so that we can sell rice to the Koreans at profit.
Mary you're suggesting that some of this profound logic is underway here
in Australia. What will it take in terms, you know,
the usual question of reform is to follow the money trail.
How does one actually create the,
the sense that there is a force that's equal to the money trail
in that sense and can turn around something that is so deeply embedded. I mean,
if you look at the Justine art, you know, the,
the Tom Roberts paintings, you know you know, the,
the Australian self-image is so much about, you know,
cattle and, and, and cotton and all of that stuff. I mean,
aren't you talking about a very,
very profound shift of national identity in terms
of the larger white culture here?
Mary White: Or to some extent,
I think what's happened is that so many farmers have gone broke because their
land is so degraded that the small pieces of land that are owned by
individual people are not productive.
And therefore they've sold out wherever possible. I mean, if you,
or even if I, knowing what I know about things, which isn't all that much,
but some if I was a farmer who was struggling on a small piece
of land with the price of wool gone down and all those sorts of
things, and I had kids to illustrate it, to educate at a distance, you know,
expensive education and all those things.
And if somebody came along one of these big agro things, you know,
the big conglomerates of people who are making money and said, look,
we're going to put in a cotton gin on the road. We can guarantee you,
if you let us add your farm to all this,
if all of you add your farm to our enterprise,
we can guarantee you a salary of whatever,
nice and large, you know, after tax and all the rest of it.
I think you might be desperate enough to go ahead with,
because you love the land. You love the place.
You've seen it slipping away from you in spite of your hard work and your best
intentions,
because what you were doing was really not compatible with what the land
required,
but not because you weren't doing best practice according to the book or
anything else.
And then hardly any of us who wouldn't be tempted under those conditions to go
ahead with it. And yet, you know, or I know,
and I'm sure somebody else knows too,
that what you're doing is totally unsustainable when your farm can no
longer produce anything, because you've turned the soil into a dead thing.
Soil is a living thing full of microorganisms and whatnot.
And when you go on irrigating, adding that amount of fertilizer and whatnot,
you're killing it.
And you know that you're taking too much water out of the local river and just a
little way down stream. It looks as though the darling is dying or something.
You have these enormous dilemmas.
And if by joining these what's going on,
you get the local town then thriving. I mean,
I've seen what's happened to Berks since cotton took over in that area.
It was a depressed, absolute hell hole, 10 years ago. It's now booming,
small town. Everybody's got hope and all the rest of it.
And they deserve that sort of encouragement.
They've lived the hardest sort of lives, all of them. So it's,
it's a dilemma of a size that I honestly don't know what the answers
are.
Chairperson: I'd like to just turn the diner for one second to
a different kind of question if I could just since we're on cotton and this
textiles, I mean, for me,
one of the most interesting questions is you know, India had,
of course for many centuries,
a textile production that created not just
lots of textiles,
but actually the most extraordinary level of craftsmanship pieces that were
treasures,
that every single piece of cloth is unique made by
master artisans and craftsmen.
And so that it is a work that adds meaning to life.
Obviously we're in a globalization paradigm where goods have
almost no value at all are being created in ways in which the work itself is
degrading.
And those types of jobs are being offered to people as their only hope.
I'm wondering,
is there a way in which this current breakup actually could lead us
back towards a different understanding of the meaning of work?
Dr. Vandana Shiva: I think it can lead us to a different understanding of the meaning of work.
If we actually see the work that goes into a
product just as we could have a different understanding on water,
if we can see the water that goes into a product,
now you might remember we were the best textile producers.
Then we were colonized and our cotton and indigo used to go to England,
come back as finished products.
It had destroyed our textiles and I independence movement was around reclaiming
the ability to make our own cloth.
That's why Gandhi picked up the spinning wheel.
We were down to 5% of producing our own
clock. When we got independence by one single policy,
those beautiful fabrics came back to our lives and
accounted for 75% of India's textile production till about 10 years ago before
globalization.
And that policy basically was that large numbers of
products were reserved for what was called the handloom sector.
Shoulds like this.
The only reason you still get beautiful shawls from India is they were reserved.
They couldn't be made in, in big mills,
saris, loonies towers,
and entire group of products that everyone could use then created the market
for the local production.
What globalization has done is two things to that base and that's part of our
struggle again. And that's why we are in a new kind of freedom movement.
One by allowing the floods of
subsidized, not, not cheaply produced,
but subsidized because subsidized because the water polluted didn't go into the,
the atmosphere polluted in going to the cost.
That's starting to flood in and reservation policies are being
treated as illegal.
The fact that certain products will only be made by certain sectors,
a small sector,
our food processing was in the small sector that has to be opened up to
agribusiness. That basically means you wipe out the weavers.
In one season, we had 2 million weavers go out of work,
and these are master craftspeople. You know,
they are the ones who made those beautiful clothing.
The second thing it's done is changed the nature of our cultivation.
I'm happy to hear somewhere.
There's a boom around cotton in India with globalization of
cotton and exports of cotton.
We've also had a flooding of new varieties of cotton because a handle
can deal with the short staple indigenous varieties,
which are very drought resistant can grow under rain fed conditions in extremely
arid areas. But the hybrid cotton,
which gives you long fights staple fiber is required for the machine
production. And that's what global market wants. So you shift to hybrid,
which needs irrigation.
We need pesticides and farmers are getting into debt of a hundred thousand,
200,000 for drilling deep tube Wells in everyday areas,
buying the pesticides deep, such deep debt,
that they are then consuming the pesticide to kill themselves.
And we've had 20,000 farm suicides in the
cotton areas of India in the last three years.
So we are having Viva suicides.
We are having farmers suicides and our cotton culture is under severe threat.
Our textile culture is on the tips of your thread.
I know with the new information technologies,
we've got yet another wave of displacement. And I think just like,
we need to make transparent how much water went into our production and
consumption.
We really need to distinguish between products that give
dignity and meaning to work products. Products
that leave space for the human being.
And don't turn us all disposable. Not just because there isn't enough water,
but also because there isn't enough work.
Chairperson: Thank you. Warren, from your situation occupying an office, which, you know,
advises a fair number of people who are pulling a fair number of the key levers
in the world. Do you see any progress in terms of getting,
you know, people who are in charge of larger economic questions to actually
begin to think in terms of appropriate crops,
appropriate location of certain types of work in industry
in certain places in the world, or are we getting that, you know,
people in entirely inappropriate areas are trying to create something from
somewhere else.
Warren Wood: And, and there's no turning back that tide. Well, largely it's,
it's economically driven. It's not government driven.
People make their own choices.
The use of water it's not a policy.
The policy and most democratic systems is determined by a legislative body.
We give them the,
make them provide them the value judgements in
the United States. I can speak for, there is a great number of lobbying,
a great deal of lobbying going on by large industries.
Probably not peculiar just to the United States,
but it's basically a free market system.
And if you feel that you can make money in importing water,
or importing, putting farm in a certain area,
and you're willing to take the risk, then that's the nature of the game.
The policy and management, as I indicated in my presentation,
I think it was in crisis.
I think we're really some of we've,
we've violated the common good in some cases,
I'm not sure how you ever recover that,
but it's it has been, our rivers are well,
they're not as bad as they used to be.
They're much better than they were 20 or 30 years ago,
but there's still not a work.
They're not suitable for the purposes that they should be.
Chairperson: Could I ask briefly, and then we'll move to the first question,
but may I just ask, is there anybody who would give a,
a short sketch of the process of healing or river
putting things into it?
Warren Wood: It's very simple. It's incredibly simple.
We make great strides. All.
You have to do a river renews itself every month or so.
All you have to do is stop putting things in, in a matter of a few months,
it'll be recovered.
Dr. Vandana Shiva: Two other things. You know, I come from next to the Ganges.
That's where my home is. And again,
the glaciers that feed the Ganges are receding heavily because of climate
change. I do think we will have to need, and we need to do something.
And the government in your country is so captive
to the lobby groups that it is government decision for the private
interest.
But I think our rivers will die if we are
going to, especially the snowflake fed rivers are going to suffer tremendously,
and we really need to take a big step there.
And the second is we need to let them flow.
And the idea that somehow water was being
augmented. And you said this morning,
Mary that's every drop of water going into the sea is waste that engineering
mentality that could not see the life of a river as a life of integrity.
I think that's something we really need to shift.
Chairperson: I think the other thing is Australian rivers are just a bit different from
rivers overseas in that there's high variability from year to year.
So once you start regulating Australian river systems,
she changed me to something quite alien and weed species and weed animals like
car proliferating them.
So our river systems have to be allowed to go dry at certain times of the year
and have to be allowed to flood,
which is a great challenge to people who want to use the water in those systems
or even live beside them.
But the second you move away from that and start regulating them.
You start creating environmental disaster.
Warren Wood: To make a point on this that a 40% of our crops are a
result of irrigation and the era we aren't, we irrigate about 15% of the land.
So if we're going to not irrigate,
we have to figure out where this additional food supply will come from.
Dr. Vandana Shiva: From rain fed agriculture.
That's 70% of the food production in any way in Africa, Asia,
Latin America comes with the rain with your ability to conserve moisture.
The reason you're having desertification as you've depleted your soil organic
matter and zoomed chemical fertilizers in urea could replace that
magical water conservation, soil, fertility,
and renewal and food for the microorganisms in the soil
or, you know, arid zones produce as much food, in fact,
more nutrition per acre than the irrigated desert of California.
And I think we need to shift our calculus. Also you nutrition per acre,
and the idea that if you don't have a dam and you don't have a tube, well,
the food land does not produce food,
actually violates the experience of humanity where most food has been produced,
adapted to the amount of rainfall foods being produced in the desert,
growing very drought resistant millets and the idea that everything must become
a Paddy field all over the world.
I think that monoculture is part of the destruction of our water systems.
Chairperson: [Inaudible] To the first question here at the microphone.
Audience member: Dr. Shiva, thank you. You've given me a very useful link to my question,
which was sparked by the comments of an Australian historian
Jeffrey Bolton some years ago where he said it was a great pity that the British
in fact ended up claiming Australia for Europe and colonizing it because
if the Spaniards had done it they would have handled
agriculture far differently having had better experience at dry land
farming. I think I've got that quite right. I'm only,
I'm interested in I guess,
tying that into the present
and continuing Australian experience and expertise in dry land farming.
And I'm wondering, although we apparently provide this to the world
but we read about a great deal.
Is this something that other members of the panel are aware of and is it
something that we can concentrate on picking up again from what Dr. Shiva just
said?
Dr. Tim Flannery: I can, certainly, yeah.
I can certainly say something about dry lands grazing which in Australia
is is,
is is a fine art now I've been fortunate enough to visit the lake here,
basin area where people have pastoral activity
there,
which has carried out in the driest region on the planet to support permanent
pastoral activity,
about three and a half inches of rain a year in parts of that country.
And they still sustain a pastoral ministry there there's very few cows to the
square mile is one property of about 4,000 square kilometers.
I visited that has 1700 head of cattle on it.
And what people in that part of the country do is they don't look at the
condition of their cattle.
They look at the condition of their pasture as it stands and pasture,
they can include little gray burrs and things that you'd never notice sitting on
top of the soil. But it does appear to be sustainable.
I've had a look at at record stock records and also photographs of vegetation
over the last 30 or 40 years in that country.
And it's clear to me that it is sustainable and it's relatively which soil,
because you're dealing with the flood plain of the Cooper,
it's relatively rich soil by Australian standards.
So I think that there is hope for that sort of, that sort of thing.
But we've got to remember that we're dealing with a world that will soon have 12
billion people in it. And, and those areas, you know,
1700 head of cattle over 4,000 square kilometers. It's not a big resource.
So I don't know whether we're looking at something that's going to make any
difference in the longterm.
Chairperson: Any other could, could we go upstairs to the.
Audience member: I'd like to start by making two short quotes by Mahatma
Gandhi. That lead me to a question that I've had for a long time,
that I think is somehow tied up with what we're talking about tonight.
One thing he said was the world has enough for everybody's needs,
but not for the agreed, which, which we all agree with, I think,
but the second statement it's been a really challenging one for me.
He said that the rich must live more simply that the poor may simply live.
Some have feel that that is tied up with this question that we're talking about
tonight. And in some way,
the answer is embodied in there because an ideal that we all hold in the Western
world,
but how do we make that step to actually bring that ideal,
that embodied in that statement, you know, statement of candies to a reality,
because it's very difficult for us in the Western world brought up in the way we
have been?
Dr. Vandana Shiva: Actually Ghandi. His coat was slightly different. The first one,
it didn't say that the world has enough for everyone's need,
but not for the agreed. He said it has enough for everyone's need,
but not for some people's greed.
You just need a few greedy people around to suck up every aquifer.
1: [Inaudible].
Dr. Vandana Shiva: And one of the reasons I am so critical of globalization.
It is really the first time humanity is attempting to organize itself
around organized greed and this planet can sustain it.
The boards are early on holy water, wonderful panel.
And just talking about recognizing the fact that all life
is water and therefore it's life is sacred water sacred,
and we got to start treating it as that.
But if it is the basis of life and everyone's life is
sacred, then everyone has a share of water. And I think what,
instead of trying to spend our heads about water markets,
what do we need to be thinking about is how do we establish water democracy.
Chairperson: Regina, do you want to go in on the second half of that one? The rock,
my soul on the wisdom of Abraham concept around Lazarus and diabetes,
or do you not want to go there?
Regina Schwartz: My, my memory, Could you remind us what the second half of your question was.
Audience member: Yeah. The, the second quotation you mean of
the rich must live more simply that the poor may simply live and
we in the Western world are the rich and how do we bring that ideal,
which I'm sure we all agree that that's a wonderful idea,
but how do we actually make the step to bring it to a reality?
Regina Schwartz: Let me bring my
supposedly literary expertise to bear on that,
that statement and ask us to focus on the word live,
which I think is, is really fraught with meaning and,
and shifts,
obviously in the statement if the rich have to live more
simply, obviously that it means live means one thing there,
and it means something else when you say so that the poor may simply live exist.
I think we actually owe each other more than simply
living in the sense of simply existing and that we should go to the most
enhanced understanding of live in life and, and do,
do our damnedest to provide that for one another. We,
we owe one another more than simply living that at the least it's like saying
you know, let's tolerate one another.
Let's let's allow each other to take a breath at the very least let's let's try
to do even better.
Audience member: I think it was meaning more that we have to begin to share what we have with
them.
Regina Schwartz: Yes. Oh, overtly obviously. Yes.
Raimond Gaita: Yes. Ma'am
both those quotations I think bring out the importance of
that I bring up the importance of the thought that the our primary sense ought
to be of obligation, to need rather than responses to rights,
because after all it's, it's, it's, it's,
it's appealed to a certain conception of rights that will protect
the monies and the properties of the greedy.
And it's only if we can start thinking,
I think much more fundamentally about people and their needs and their
obligation to meet and to try to
undermine some of the reliance we have on the language of rights that we have
much chance, at least intellectually of convincing people.
Dr. Tim Flannery: I'm going to have to be the croaking pessimist here in this, this,
I think how long have we been talking about this?
How long have we been talking about the need to share and the need to,
to help the poor? It goes back way beyond Christianity. It goes back forever.
When has anyone ever done it in a realistic way?
Show me one idealistic society that has lived by that creed.
It's not in an highchair. And I choose to,
to always strive for that, but do we ever do it?
And at the moment the, our, our, our tenure in the planet hangs in the balance,
you know,
and that's why I feel so strongly that it's that fundamental
issue of, of numbers and technology.
Those big issues are the things that we,
we should address because we know that we can affect them.
The issue of sharing is one. I don't,
I hate to see us as a deprived species,
but I don't think at least in the timeframe we've got to deal with this issue,
that we will make a difference there. We may love to do it.
It's probably the ideal way to do it,
but is it possible how many people in this audience would take a half cutting
pay tonight? If you knew that you could do away with child poverty in Africa?
I wonder if the checks had to be in the post. I'm not Downing people's goody,
but I think that it's a really, it's, it's, it's,
it's a wonderful ideal,
but probably since we first got up on two legs and started speaking.
Dr. Vandana Shiva: I think when we are talking about conditions of living and
species survival, we are not talking about checks in the post.
We are talking about our share of the comments in the atmosphere we are
talking about not overusing and abusing hydrological
systems.
We are basically talking about resources that become scarce because of the
way we end up handling them.
And I think that's precisely where that th the issue
of, about sharing and compassion and the obligation to need comes up.
Just give you a very simple example. Bolivia,
the water was privatized with a world bank conditionality Bechtel entered with a
huge thing.
It basically meant that people's price for water ended up being four or
five, more But more important.
Rural communities were forbidden from drilling Wells or digging Wells in their
land, because now the water was owned by this water company.
And it created a rebellion like contemporary Bolivia has not known.
They eventually through Bechtel out, but I think that's the issue.
Will it better have the right to say, ah,
$800 billion market along with other water companies is
what has to be protected.
And you will not be able to have access to water in the land where you've
been born and where an ancestor's war,
or will a peasant in Bolivia be able to have access to their way.
And I think that's really the context we're talking about.
Audience member: Yes, please.
Raimond Gaita: I'm pessimistic too, about, about human nature. But, but,
but I,
I take it what we think does matter to some degree and if
that's a,
then it's better that we should think in ways that condemn the base aspects
of our nature than to think in ways that encourage and rationalize it.
And so, you know, I mean,
it's just awful living in a society where kids just routinely talk
about losers. We're, we're, we're desperate farmers for,
for example are being told by by people supporting
globalization that these poor buggers want the world to stop.
Won't want to get off until the world or stop all setting tones of great
contempt.
If only we could turn that way of speaking about so that someone would be
ashamed to speak that way about these desperate people.
Chairperson: [Inaudible] and the other magnificent opportunity. Of course,
that takes that is different from what Tim just proposed is. Of course,
Tim asked you if you're going to take a pay cut, in fact,
the way the next century is coming, you're not being consulted.
Next question at the top.
Audience member: I'd hope that Melvin Fraser would be here tonight because my question really,
I think, is directed towards him. But seeing as Tim spoke for him, perhaps Tim,
Tim can fill the question at the moment.
I think we're in danger of a lost generation of youth
due to the mismanagement of the whole drugs issue,
the cuts to education and research.
We've got 20% youth unemployment.
We've got the intergenerational effects of separation in the Aboriginal
communities. We've got high numbers of youth in detention,
particularly Aboriginal youth.
We've got the three strikes and you're out in some parts of Australia
with economic rationalism,
and it's mad scramble after profits companies are being taken
overseas, where they exploit cheap labor, including child labor.
We've got the lack of will to raise the labor standards of the world.
Instead of that,
we're trying to reduce our own labor standards down to a lower comment,
lowest common denominator. So instead of immigration,
Mr. Absent,
Malcolm to look after we own these,
wouldn't it?
Why isn't the question being asked more often of people from the
floor and on the platform.
Why is the government being forced to take the necessary
steps and the courageous steps to look after our
own young?
Dr. Tim Flannery: If I have to pretend to be Malcolm Fraser to answer that one I'm in trouble.
I suspect that what Malcolm Fraser would say...
Is that is that we have an obligation in
terms of immigration that we have where there's international treaties,
there's a moral obligation,
which is very strongly felt to alleviate some of the suffering and poverty
in the world. And that, that has to come at some sort of cost to ourselves.
The focus on young people, I imagine he's just as appalled at the situation,
particularly in rural communities for young people,
as anyone after all he's lived most of his life in one of those communities.
But just for me, speaking for a moment, I think that there's some fundamental
that our society faces some fundamental problems. You mentioned the drug issue,
and today there was a splendid session on the drug issue and problems,
the drugs representing our society.
And I came away from that convinced that the drugs
themselves weren't a problem.
It was that we had become almost people in suburbia had become
almost like animals in a zoo. There's not enough for a lot of people to do.
And in an evolutionary sense,
we're built to live life in a rather full and complex way.
And those opportunities just aren't there for many people.
And so they turn to drugs or other destructive things. And I mean,
it's great getting high, but in,
in the Pleistocene or in societies where people are busy,
you just can't afford to do it all the time.
So it doesn't become such a big problem. You know,
people get addicted to everything we learned today to six and to gambling and
to, to whatever. But it's the affluence of time. It's,
it's like being an animal in the cage at the zoo. That,
that that's one of the fundamental problems.
I don't know whether Malcolm Fraser would agree with that,
but it seems to me that that trying to address,
trying to create a site,
a society where we can somehow meaningfully live in a real
way and enjoy those simple things that evolution has built us to enjoy
over millions of years,
whether it's chopping wood or making a garden or socializing,
or just having the time of the day split up into regular bits that somehow
satisfies is something very desirable that this
society we've built and the technology we've built around us prevent us from
doing.
Chairperson: May we have the next.
Next question at the microphone.
Audience member: Can I pick up,
can I pick up on the comments that were made by Peter Sellers and
Tim Flannery and add to them a quotation from Thomas Carlyle
talk,
which does not end in any kind of action is better suppressed
altogether.
What action should we in Adelaide be taking in the next
12 months to follow up on this admirable feast of
ideas?
Chairperson: Mary can
well your, your, your rubber has met the road on more than one occasion.
I'm wondering if you would cause you've been so clear about...
An action that you would like to see come out of this weekend?
Mary White: Okay. Can I think about it?
I think one action that does say, you know,
I mean this whole idea of, I mean, because the question was about Adelaide,
it wasn't about that or dune.
I would just say designing Australian economy
around the water endowment of Australia,
including the land use just that one
simple thing would change hell of a lot.
Chairperson: Warren, that's over to you now, Warren, I believe.
Warren Wood: Well, I, I thought that that was that's the point I was trying to make.
And my closing remarks that I think you do need to fact look very
carefully at the environment, the climate and the soil and what you have.
And I agree completely that whether you can remake that realistically in a
global economy and still not starved to death is not clear to me.
Dr. Vandana Shiva: Well actually it's the only way you want staff to death. Otherwise you will.
Warren Wood: I said, let the, as I, my, I meant to say anyway,
let's us debate these questions. And I think I phrased it is the,
there are several questions that need debating. I don't know the answers,
but I think these are the kinds of things that should come out of this forum is
that these are several debates that should occur,
but get some experts in different opinions.
Chairperson: I think Carlisle's put an entirely new spin on scotch Pasomany,
I've never heard of anything spectacular, but really if,
if I was to have my wish out of this festival, it was,
it would be that we would work towards a society where we could hold this
festival again in two years,
time profitably with as larger crowds in a place like Elizabeth or one of the
less affluent areas of South Australia.
Audience member: Thank you. Could I add to that one.
How do we get more young people along to these festivals?
Chairperson: Well, I think primarily it's having more young people on the panel.
I think right now we are in a situation where we have way more to
learn than to teach in many cases and at the moment
we're not listening. And I think that question of allowing the next generation,
that is anything but apathetic, but actually it's quite on the case.
And there are any number of people in the streets of Melbourne who can young
people who can tell you a lot more about most of these issues,
then you'll read in any issue of the newspaper.
What's very powerful is the level of activism that is
moving across a new generation.
And that is the renewable resource and it is renewing itself.
And it's very powerful.
And obviously here in south Australia where we've all seen the studies that this
is an aging shrinking population, there will be no young people here soon.
And anybody who has any talent better get on the next train,
I think to Darwin would be bar that's going.
The question is what opportunities are being offered to young people here
to in some pathbreaking way actually create a society that does live
differently.
That has actually a different cultural underpinning.
I think one of the most powerful things about rave culture,
about all kinds of cultural manifestations of young people,
which are endlessly criticized is the fact that they're way more democratic
and way more acknowledging the existing resources.
And I think that's very, very profound.
A lot of solutions are emerging for young people right now.
And the question is they're being not being empowered.
And obviously most of our governmental structures are
primarily weighted by the most powerful lobbyists.
And the question is, in what ways will the best ideas prevail?
I think a very,
very serious step in south Australia would be the privileging of
youth.
Raimond Gaita: I like just,
just register a protest against carlisle because you know, it's,
it's very important to act obviously, but one of them are very great figures in,
in at least in the Western tradition has been Socrates who spent his life
talking and it's necessary to have the Socrates who spend their life
talking to put a break on some of the people who want to act and don't care a
about the means.
Regina Schwartz: [Inaudible]
. I Also Profoundly, Obviously I'm Going To Disagree With Someone Who Says That There's, That It's Mere Conversation. If I Think Conversation Is In Fact The Way We Need To Go. and in terms of a suggestion, I would make your la
mence heard s
o that they can be answered by the appropriate people. That is an enhanced sense of conversation. So figure out who needs to hear whether it's politicians or NGO, they don't listen. Yeah. Well, keep talking, keep, keep, and keep lamenting and
, a
nd, and, you know, don't stop. I'd love to pick up on that in a moment, but let's go back out. Yes. Thank you.
Audience member: I'd just like to propose something it's
apropos of sharing and inviting the youth and having the politicians
listen.
I'd wanted to do this for some time and just put it out to people who may be on
to make this a reality.
We could create here in Adelaide an open public library,
especially dedicated to solutions for these problems that we
have addressed in this wonderful festival ideas.
Just call it the solutions library and the books, for example,
have a Chanel Schaumburg, sorry,
a water expert whose works are very hard to find.
He has many suggestions of how to revive a river.
He wrote in the 1930s and he's still not widely known.
His briefly his ideas were to plant along the banks to provide
shade because rivers need cooling because when they heat up all sorts of
biological things happen, which are not good for water.
And to put shaming at the side of rivers to focus a vortex in the center,
which automatically cleans the river and aerates it.
That's two of the very excellent and cheap ideas that he had.
And I'm sure that a lot of young people would love to be employed in creating
these structured artificial structures and implanting.
They would enjoy that it would be good work and they would feel deeply empowered
in changing things for the better. That's just one example.
There were, of course,
the works of Suzanne George in the transnational Institute in Paris,
which are very hard to find even the Mitchell library in Sydney has only one
copy. I believe,
I think they bought got another copy now of her work since I made such a fuss
about it, but they do listen, but people don't know even exist.
Most people once people had read those also the works of Fritjof Capra
turning point. For example, we have the models of our society are explored.
That was 1979. And most people still don't have know where they exist.
And of course his latest book, the web of life,
which is about everything we've been speaking of here,
most people can easily access that knowledge and it'll give them the language
and the ability to understand what's happening without being experts.
Thank you.
I just like to say in closing that what will it profit a man if he
controls the whole world and loses his soul?
Although the the topic and focus today has been Australia and Adelaide and wash
and population in Australia,
I'd like to address a couple of questions to Dr. Shiva about India. If I could,
as India as a most fascinating country and culture.
And the first question relates to the fact that I understand that India and
China are sort of naked, naked becoming the world's most populated country.
And is there any will in India to try to stabilize the population in India?
And the second question I'll, I'll I'll hold until you answer that one.
Well, the second question,
I might get it out in case you forget to come back to my pillar is that I
understand India and China are both rapidly industrializing and their,
that their greenhouse gas emissions are increasing quite rapidly.
And I just wondered if Dr. Shiva could tell us if she knows the contribution of
India to the world's greenhouse gas emissions as a, as a total, as a percentage.
Dr. Vandana Shiva: Very quickly to the first one India's doing a lot.
It's just that the target oriented population control systems don't work,
but in many states, there is a very,
very radical decline in population growth.
And the state that cited most frequently is the state of Carola. Now,
the interesting thing about the state of Carolina,
they didn't have reduced population growth through coercive
measures. They had the three equity, they had the through land reform.
And if you just look back at history,
the big boom in population happened in England.
When the comments were enclosed and the sheep started to eat men
and the displaced, disposable people, some of them came here,
convicts preferred coming here, sent here. The rest went to north America
in the same way, the population of India till 1800 was very, very stable. You,
you talked about self limiting factors, population explosion, as it's called.
I don't like the term, because really sounds like women's wounds. I exploding.
There's some kind of warm,
but it's a rational response response of dispossessed people trying to
find security when every other security has been taken away.
So I would basically say that you're going to have a huge problem at
your hands. If you have made large numbers of people, dispensable,
and the best population pill is ecological security
and economic security and Carola shows the way in that.
We just need to take it more seriously in terms of your second question.
I don't know the exact figures,
but there has been part of globalization has been the
relocating of sea of CO2 pollution into
the countries like China and India.
Globalization is about Enron being able to set up power plants in India,
the GM and Ford and Mitsubishi selling cars.
The thing I really worry about is the population explosion of cars on the
streets of Delhi. I can't walk down the streets
And that's part of the globalization phenomenon.
We need to do something about it.
And I'm among those in India who do not support the fact that it's all right,
as long as we emit the CO2, because first of all, the Indian people,
don't,
it's a globalized economic system wanting to create a consumer middle-class in
India and replicate the fifth, 14% consumer pack consumption patterns,
which are not replicable.
And I think we have lots of alternatives that are being squashed. They have,
you know, the pollution in Delhi,
70% is of it comes from vehicular pollution and guess what they start to
do to clean up the city,
shut down the cycles and the cycle rickshaws,
and this notion of cleanliness that mutates from CO2 emission to
people and suddenly population becomes the polluting factor.
I think those are some of the confusions that are really creating a mess,
but you can be absolutely sure India's ecology movement is going to take on the
fossil fuel culture.
That's replacing our renewable energy culture very rapidly because long before
that CO2 destabilizes the climate,
it has displaced the person and destroyed the livelihoods.
Chairperson: Let's have our last question and then we'll close.
Audience member: I've got a question. It's more of a wish actually, but first I'm going to say,
as a young person here, I don't feel hopeless.
I feel very burdened and overwhelmed, but I don't feel hopeless.
What makes me feel hopeless as being told that I'm apathetic and that I have no
choices. My,
my wish is that I would like to see abundance and generosity
applied in terms of our attitudes and policies towards refugees and
immigration. And I'd also,
I'd like to throw that open to Vandana and Regina because they seem to be
offering things in, in, in that order. And
a question I guess, for team is
is by closing our borders saying, well, it's us, you know, we choose us.
And, and what does that mean? Thank you.
Dr. Vandana Shiva: The first thing on on migration,
nobody likes to leave home.
The best place is home till it's made, made, and viable to be there.
And globalization is going to create refugees of scales.
We've not known before because sustainable society and
societies with livelihoods will have increasingly redundant
people and people will find whatever means they can to follow the cash
wherever it's flowing,
just like they follow the soil and they follow the water,
they follow the money and an unequal world raging where devaluation
destroys our currency.
Our farmers are uprooted will mean that more and more, you know,
you remember the Chinese who froze to death in a freezer and
the Indian sick boys who drowned in the
Mediterranean that's kind of phenomena is a symptom
of the theft of livelihoods and economic security from people. Now,
I would say the first step is really to rebuild societies
where people have meaning place and
economic security. And then in addition to that,
have the generosity to receive people when they want to come to our home.
Audience member: Thank you.
Regina Schwartz: It seems to me that the twin issues of
exile and conquests are preoccupations of people
who focus a great deal on,
on property and on owning land and on the
borders of their own land.
And I think those borders really have to be permeable for us
not to be a violent society and allow people to flow
out and,
and flow in as the water flows as the river of
life. So I, I think it's quite tragic to,
to
think in terms of possession as much as we do.
And I think we have a lot to learn from the native peoples in the,
in the land both in the natives,
in the United States and Aboriginal peoples here who have all this respect for
land without the concept of ownership,
this conference began by thanking the Ghana people for
welcoming us to their land. But the rhetoric was,
was filled with the language of ownership,
which seemed to be at odds as well-meaning, as that was,
as that gratitude was it seemed to be at odds with the very
understanding of land that indigenous peoples have as something to
be tended, cared for and held to be sacred, but not owned.
So that would be my response.
Dr. Tim Flannery: I'd just like to clarify,
I've never believed or suggested that we should close Australia's borders.
I think that there was always going to be a need for an immigration program in
Australia.
The problem that I see is that we don't have a population policy that informs
that immigration program. So we don't have a population policy,
which has the wide support of the Australian people,
which then allows us to all see that immigration is serving the good of the
country, because the first thing, I mean, if the first thing,
any sort of immigration program or population policy has to do is to serve the
interest of those who support it otherwise they won't support it.
And what we're seeing in Australia at the moment is a withdrawal of support from
the immigration program.
And that adds up to a very serious problem because there is many people who
don't make migrants feel welcome.
There is the way we deal with them as often and dignified.
It makes them very resentful.
It starts building divisions in society that don't necessarily need to be there.
So we need to have a debate, as I said about the population policy,
that immigration program can be part of beyond that though,
the issues that you both identified as so critical because we, we in Australia,
we see that we are doing some human good in terms of
immigration program as well. We're helping immigrants come to Australia,
but we don't ever think through that totality of what we're willing to give or
willing to spend, to increase human. Good.
And I think I would love to see a population policy of which an immigration
programs apart, but then a budget for increasing good in the world,
which includes foreign aid, the immigration component,
and look through and see if we can spend that in a way that maximizes the good
that we can do. We're not gods. So we can't change the world.
We're a small nation at WARF nation in a world with problems.
And we need to just think through rationally how we can get the best outcome.
And we're failing to do that quite singularly at the moment.
Regina Schwartz: Just really briefly I would respond by admiring how
practical you are,
but worrying about the cost of giving seems a little
ironic to me. I mean, I th I think giving is free. So yeah.
Dr. Tim Flannery: If everyone agreed, I think that would be wonderful.
Regina Schwartz: We would have a different world. Yeah. That's why you're here.
And I'm here to get people to think this way,
basically.
Dr. Vandana Shiva: Thinking of your thing,
you need an immigration policy that allows us Trillia to decide what's
good for Australia. Who's good to bring in.
And I was just thinking of the cherry picking that's going off of India,
software professionals. India is a fascinating country.
80% of India has been declared redundant by the global economy and the software
professionals. Everyone wants one cherry pick.
Everyone's got giving green cards. Everyone wants them,
but then the day they are useless,
they're sent right back as happened with the collapse of the information
technology stops and the closure of firms in the United States.
There's a big debate going on in the WTO,
in the general agreement on trade and services. Interesting debate.
And it's worth watching because the third world countries are basically saying
you've globalized the movement of capital and made it totally free and mobile.
And the only way you will bring balance back into a global economy is make the
movement of people equally free. Because after all, it's a factor of production.
Now that's the big tussle on how services issues will be addressed.
The corporations want a solution where they're saying, yeah,
we do want movement of people, but we will offer them special gaps,
visas in which we will go find the people we want to take.
They'll have no immigration control.
They will have no social security in the country they come to and they can be
sent back the day we finished using them.
I think one of the lessons I take from this evening is returning statement to
stop thinking of other people, other cultures,
in an instrumental way of usable and nature and water,
usable, exploitable and disposable.
I think that's the mentality we really need to transcend.
Chairperson: [Inaudible] In closing me,
I asked each panelist for one last thought to
close the
2001 Adelaide festival of
ideas that we will leave Adelaide with,
or is that people satisfied, Raimond?
Raimond Gaita: This was just a comment taking up.
It, it follows up my little comment about, about,
about needing people who talk a lot.
So the brakes might be put on people who act a lot because I don't care a about
the memes they choose for their enemies.
And it, it, it's, it's,
it's opposing this sort of instrumental conception of rationality.
That seems so fundamental.
And for us to remember that as well as thinking about meetings that are
efficient to certain ends, we other modes of discriminating,
which means to choose. And one of them,
one of the modes of discrimination is a moral ones. We might say,
this would be very, very efficient and achieve a hell, hell.
Maybe even achieve a lot of human goods, but it would be decent to do it.
And so we have to pronounce it that I think is a thought we have to keep holding
on so that we might sometimes be forced in the interest of
decency to announce enormously efficient means to good ends.
Chairperson: Other well, that was a lovely statement.
That was a very beautiful statement.
And could I please add just briefly that people have said earlier,
politicians don't listen. Well, it's a question of how we're talking.
And I think Regina's use of the word lament and praise is one of the most
powerful paradigms we've actually been offered is first of
all, we're living in a society that is masking the true cost,
the true human costs.
How do we express that in a way that people can't miss it?
How is that really expressed in a way you must hear?
And also we live in a very negative cycle at the moment where people are trying
to improve the world by making everyone else feel terrible.
And actually it is the act of praise, which is renewing.
It is the actor joy, which is renewing.
It is the act of hope,
which is the renewable resource and needs to be cultivated, practiced,
and extended. Thank you for attending this weekend.