THE first step to saving planet Earth is working together.
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That was the message from guest speaker Dr Steb Fisher when he attended the Bathurst Community Climate Action Network’s (BCCAN) Resilience Long Lunch on Wednesday.
Dr Fisher, a former petroleum executive and now consultant on changing to a cleaner, greener economy, was invited to speak by BCCAN’s outgoing president, Tracey Carpenter.
The pair are long-time friends and Ms Carpenter felt he could share some great insights with the members.
On the day, it turned out her instincts were correct.
Dr Fisher said the members were “very perceptive and very engaged” with what he had to say.
Much of his talk centred around the impact of humanity on the planet and how vital it was to work together to prolong its life.
“The Earth is being fairly systematically destroyed by humanity and the question is, if we decide to do something about it and we survive the next 100 years … what would we have done to do this?” Dr Fisher said.
He relied heavily on analogies and metaphors to get his main arguments across.
In one of these, Dr Fisher said to think of Earth as an ecosystem in a bottle, then introduce 10 pairs of mice.
The mice breed, causing the population to exploded, at which point they consume all the food and resort to eating each other, causing all the mice to die.
He said this is similar to what humanity is in the midst of.
“If the mice were much smarter than humans, what would they do? They would agree to control their population and to share resources,” Dr Fisher said.
People are encouraged to combine conservation actions with conversation.
“The first thing to do is obviously the normal things people are doing, which is reducing energy consumption and reducing waste, but the most important thing people can do is talk to their neighbours and work out what they can do,” Dr Fisher said.
“It is about community.”
He added that, collectively, humanity needs to “reduce consumption by a factor of three”.
“We’ve got to start to live within the capacity of the Earth to supply us with what we need,” he said.
The most important thing people can do is talk to their neighbours and work out what they can do.
- Steb Fisher