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August 13, 2009
A key issue for us today is how to make the shift from unsustainability – the dominant condition of our society – to sustainment, as an ethos, a culture and an economy. The term unsustainability is most often associated with negative biophysical impacts like the polluting of water and air, destruction of forests, climate change induced by accumulative emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. However, unsustainability is multifaceted and so a way of life can be unsustainable, due to its negative impacts.
How we undertake this transition is still very vague. Canberra is preoccupied with a weak emissions trading scheme that will do little to shift Australia from unsustainablity. Then there are those individual designers and architects preoccupied with ‘sustainability’ striving to realise their objective by designing artefacts and built structures with reduced environmental impacts and, to a lesser extent, retrofitting existing products and buildings. Sad to say, most new buildings are still being designed so that they depend upon energy generated from fossil fuels, which would themselves add to greenhouse gas emissions problems, thereby worsening the climate change problem.
Tony Fry in Living in a Changed Climate says that after more than a decade of analysis, projections and attempts to curtail greenhouse gas emissions:
the actors in this drama are now facing two discernible failures. First, is the failure to gain international agreement on adequate action to curtail greenhouse gas emissions. Second, is the less publicised, but equally significant failure to initiate adaptive measures to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Many conservatives view mitigation in terms of no longer being able to afford the creature comforts of a consumerist culture, and we humans will fall back into the privative animality of simple existences ---- a bare life reducing humans to survivalists.
We need, they say, to defend the car as the ultimate expression of an individual autonomy through appealing to the self's freedom, autonomy and authenticity. Techno mastery of the earth is cool Striving to conquer the environment is necessary.
What has not begun to be adequately contemplated in policy terms at a state or national level is that the complex inter-related consequences of climate change will generate massive social, cultural, political, economic and health problems. Fry says:
These problems will become evident in many ways, such as — growing numbers of environmental refugees (from floods, drought, heat, cold, lack of food and water); in the climatic inappropriateness of many traditions of building and dwelling; in conflicts, of various scales over desertification, fresh water resources and fertile soil; in failing agricultural economies (exacerbated by what will become inappropriate farming methods and nutritional health problems); and in the numerical increase and geographic spread of vector and non-vector delivered tropical diseases (because of climate change, sub-tropical regions are expanding, as are their populations).
One impact is that suburbs in some of our cites may have to be abandoned along with low lying coastal communities. In other parts of the world--eg., Bangladesh--whole cities may have to be abandoned. This indicates the more complex picture of climate change and it highlights the need to broaden the constructive responses to climate change beyond scientific and technological approaches.
This is not just an issue that many existing built forms will become more and more inappropriate to the emerging climate and a massive amount of the current built fabric will have to be retro-fitted to cope with climate change. The issue is more one of learning how to live with climate change --living in the still emergent consequences of our own and others actions.
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What's there to say. All this has been known since the eighties and we've actually gone only backwards since.
Earlier legislation enacted to incorporate sustainability as guidance for civilisation-friendly "development" has been trashed and not just (or worst) by the Tories.
The history of Tasmania over the last fifteen or twenty years is the perfect exemplar for the overall trend.