AS guest speaker at the Bathurst Community Climate Action Network annual general meeting, Dr Steb Fisher invited us to engage in a thought experiment.
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Just imagine you've bought a new mobile phone.
You get it out of the package and read the operating manual. You don't realise it, but the operating manuals have been mixed up in production, and you're actually looking at the manual for a chainsaw.
But because you're committed to always reading the manual, you follow the instructions.
The instructions tell you to oil it, so you find the hole on the bottom and put some oil in there.
The instructions say to sharpen it, so you get out your sharpening gear and hone the end to a sharp point.
You try to make a phone call, but it's not working. You’ve wrecked it.
For Dr Fisher, just about all of our “operating manuals” for how to use the earth - our political systems, our economic structures, our cultures - are giving instructions that will eventually wreck the very thing we're trying to use.
The instruction to pursue infinite growth, no matter what, is providing short-term gains but leading to ruin in the future.
This was a very sobering thought experiment.
It was followed up by ideas and discussion about how we might re-write the operating systems so that they might work with the planet’s ecological systems rather than against them.
Easy to say, but actually very radical - revolutionary - thinking. Quite impressive coming from an Oxford-educated man who used to work as a high-flying executive in the petroleum industry.
The next day, we got to see what the revolution might look like.
Steb was also guest speaker at a “long lunch” outdoors on the grounds of Rahamim in Busby Street.
We ate from an exquisite menu of locally-grown food, looking out over the lush green hills surrounding Bathurst, at a table bedecked by wisteria that was attracting tiny native bees.
In this setting, Steb continued his subversive account of how we might change the world for the better. The first job, he said, was to strengthen community connections and work out how to tackle global problems locally.
Many of those of us at the table were already converts to this cause, so a lively discussion ensued.
For me, the global challenge of climate change isn't just gloom and doom but an opportunity to go back to first principles. What are we doing here? What are we doing to the earth we live on? What should we do next?
Fuelling the brain that was pondering these questions, a delicious leek tart from leeks grown on site and eggs from the chooks that were providing background music for our discussion.