Before a town grows old, we should…

To hear a 17 minute podcast of a talk I gave as part of the Murray Darling Basin 2009 Ranges to River Science Forum on the 25th August 2009, go to:

http://www.samdbnrm.sa.gov.au/Board_Podcasts/2009_Ranges_to_River_Science_Forum.aspx

The forum was convened by The South Australian Murray-Darling Basin Natural Resources Management Board (SA MDB NRM Board) along with the Ranges to River NRM Group and in collaboration with Bremer Barker Catchment Group Inc.

It was a very good forum, held in Mount Barker Golf Club, and very well attended despite the night being cold and wet.

The other five speakers (me too, I hope) were constructive and informative and I don’t think any of us wasted time being pointlessly critical of government, however, it is my personal opinion that there is real dissatisfaction with the state of the state in SA and, I think, some well-founded cynicism about the preparedness of the government to listen to any feedback that it may receive on the 30 Year Plan.

Despite this, there is a readiness in the community to do something serious about planning, development and climate change, so dear elected representatives of the people, do something serious other than pander to vested interests! Please.

What? More bad weather?

Climate, wars, accidents and indifference

YOUR CHILDREN'S FUTURE IS A FANTASY

As an architect and designer of ecological urban systems – ‘ecocities’ if you will – I was very excited when I heard news of Barak Obama’s brilliant initiative in bringing together both developed and developing countries to make a public commitment to try and avoid more than an overall 2 degree celsius temperature rise. There were tears in my eyes!

After all, the passive acceptance of nature’s ways, implied by climate-responsive, environmental design won’t work too well if the climate insists on changing too fast. And I’ve got 6 grandchildren to remind me that the so-called ‘future generations’ we love to talk about in sustainable development are already with us. They’re much more likely to be around in 2050 than I am, but they’re real people I know and love who will have to live in whatever the world of 2050 is like – and, sorry Mr Plimer, I think the evidence is well and truly in to demonstrate that humans have transformed the planet and will continue to do so. So it is our responsibility to look after the basics of life as much as we can – and try to ensure that the climate doesn’t change so much that the homes we build today can’t provide shelter for our children and their children.

So, yes, there were tears in my eyes, tears of relief, I think, that at the top level of governments around the world there was finally a recognition that there are absolute limits to what we can do on this planet if we want it to keep us alive.

That was a few days ago, and I’m still deeply impressed by what Obama achieved. After all, herding cats is nothing compared with trying to get nations to agree to go in the same direction.

But I remain worried because I don’t sense a groundswell of support for actually doing anything to achieve the massive cuts in carbon emissions that the goal requires. There just doesn’t seem to be any sense of what the goal implies, and the media reporting has utterly failed to convey the urgency of the message underlying the innocuous sounding ‘2 degree’ message.

Check out the ‘Synthesis Report on Climate Change’ from the conference in Copenhagen 10-12 March this year, a conference convened by the International Alliance of Research Universities, and on page 32 in ‘Key Message 6 – Meeting the Challenge’ you’ll find this statement:

Marginal changes to the current socio-economic and technological trajectory of contemporary society will not be sufficient to facilitate the societal transition required to keep climate change within a 2°C guardrail. (http://climatecongress.ku.dk/)

See that? “Marginal changes will not be sufficient.”

But that’s all we ever get in civil society until we’re faced with war or disaster, which is why, perhaps, that the most cursory review of the world’s media reveals that nothing very substantial is being done to combat what James Lovelock calls ‘global heating’. Although green groups of all kinds – and many savvy business interests – express an increasing frustration about the issue, a number of climate commentators have suggested that there is so much inertia that only some kind of major climate-related disaster can convince the general population of the need for really urgent action to stop climate change.

The reasoning is obvious, if a little ghoulish – only massive amounts of death and misery are newsworthy enough to gain people’s attention and goad the world’s leaders into making the epochal decisions that are needed to tackle such a complex and difficult challenge as fixing the climate of an entire planet.

I’ve been one of those commentators, but I no longer think that disasters make a difference. Hurricane Katrina upset people for a while and has been seen as a climate catastrophe, but neither this, nor over 50,000 deaths in one European heat-wave, have precipitated anything beyond a ritual out-pouring of grief and promises to somehow reduce the number of avoidable deaths the next time around.

We humans may be moved by tragedy to pen epic poems, or interminable soap operas, but such upwellings of emotion are, by nature, passing events. People who remain permanently trapped in such a level of tragedy become socially dysfunctional; that’s how we’re wired. Like war, it comes, and it goes. The best we can hope for is that a particular tragedy becomes the defining event for precipitating changes in the way society is organised, so that such things don’t happen again.

War offers us any number of examples. After 15 million people died in the tragedy of the First Word War there was such misery and deep social shock that it was said ‘this is the war to end all wars’ and ‘never again’. A League of Nations was formed. Yet little more than 20 years later another world war slaughtered over 50 million people and less than half of them were combatants. Again the cry went out ‘never again’, and so was formed the United Nations.

Wars require fantastic levels of cooperation and coordination of people and the massive mobilisation of resources. They are usually waged by governments – those organisations that we are now asking to stop climate change. And yet, whilst every rational person would agree that war ought to be preventable, it continues.

Every year, the death toll from car crashes exceeds the number of people killed in armed conflicts and many, many more die from inadequate sanitation and medical services, or simply lack of food or water. These are all very immediate tragedies, and all preventable, yet the deaths continue.

The tragedy of our mutant climate is much less immediate than a car crash, it’s harder to feel and understand than metal and glass smashing into human flesh, but its ultimate impacts are no less deadly. Given that the eternal tragedy of war and the tacit acceptance of sacrifice in the service of transportation seem to be etched permanently into our collective psyche, what chance is there that more bad weather is going to upset anyone enough to change the face of politics or the self-destructive patterns of human nature?

I don’t think that another disaster will make any difference – and despite the timely presence of Barak Obama at the centre of the world’s stage, I’m wondering if anything ever will.

PFD 6 and 13 July 2009

Fire-proofing homes – an architects perspective

Unfortunately at the end of the day most decisions about building are made on price. After all the other issues are taken into consideration, whether it’s gold-plated taps, a second ensuite, or double glazing, if the money isn’t there, it isn’t going to be part of the solution.

Builders and developers build to the minimum standards required by law. Of course they do. Why spend extra money putting in things that are not typically provided by your competitors in the market place? If you’re a builder trying to be competitive, you’ll find ways to give your clients the cheapest price – ‘Don’t bother with double glazing. Sure it’s environmentally better than standard glazing and reduces your energy bills, but so do other window treatments, hey, tinted glass will do, OK?’

Only the dedicated and well-informed will find the dollars to do better than the minumum, because building is an expensive business. So when it comes time to consider fire safety we don’t worry too much, clients, designers and builders all look to what the fire services require as a minimum provision and dutifully specify and install whatever it is – bronze window screens, sprinklers, whatever. Just as with everything else in the building program, there are very few people who demand higher levels of protection than the certification process demands.

Now we’ve all been moved to tears and outrage by the Victorian bushfires, and, as one might expect, there are calls for better protection, maybe better regulation. Some even talk of banning the building of houses in certain areas altogether – although they tend to get short shrift in a society that increasingly seems to worship the divine right of the individual to get themselves into a pickle over and above social responsibility and broader community interests. It seems highly likely that the only viable forms of protection for humans caught up in firestorms of the recent Victorian intensity is to have dug-outs that provide substantial, cool, protected shelter or rainwater tanks with relatively thick concrete walls and large water storage volume. Neither of these solutions are particularly ‘cheap’ and neither of them are mandated (at least in South Australia). Regardless of how much chatter and posturing there is now, while everyone is still upset, with the awful images and stories of the fires in our eyes and minds, when building decisions are made in the cool of winter and the money is being stretched, the need for shelters that aren’t mandated will slip into the category of ‘nice if we could only afford it’. The only way to ensure that vulnerable human beings can escape to safety in extreme bushfire conditions is to legislate for the provision of fire-proof shelters. They will need to be designed properly, to deal with the need for heat protection, the avoidance of suffocation, safe egress and evidence of occupation to alert the authorities when they’re in use, but all of that is do-able. So let’s do it.

Let’s have some gutsy, pro-active legislation on providing serious fire safety right now – before the next fire season anyhow. And let’s not fluff around worrying about whether it’s affordable. The cost of not making such provisions is, as we know all too well, extraordinarily expensive in terms of property – and lives. And remember that when it’s in the legislation, and everyone has to do it, it just becomes part of normal business.

The Building Code of Australia is a powerful and useful tool that can deliver across-the-board improvements to every building in the land; the legislative means to introduce serious bushfire safety provisions exists, so let’s use it.

Dodos, Denial and War

There is much ado about the paltry cuts promised by the Rudd Government, not without cause. But the Rudd Government reflects the mood of the nation extraordinarily well. Its pronouncements on climate change and what to do about it differ little from those of the average concerned consumer – they are worried about the environment, but don’t want to pay too much to get it fixed and don’t really want any changes in their lifestyle. For all their pretty words to the contrary, they are in denial.

Concern about the price of carbon is one thing, but how about concern about the state of ecosystems? We’ve learned to worry about water – and now feel somehow more comfortable discussing it because it’s been turned into another dollars and cents issue, like the price of petrol (which is cheaper than bottled water). But does this chatter in the marketplace really address anything fundamental in regard to the climate and the biosphere?

The idea of putting a price on carbon seems to be reasonable, even if there are a whole raft of questions about the detail of how a pricing system apples, but it is all based upon the idea that ecological systems and their components can be turned into commodity.

In a market economy it seems that the only way to get people to understand the value of the services provided by ecosystems is to put a dollar value on them. But there are real problems with commodifying nature in this way. For one thing, there is the changing value of the numbers on the measuring stick – we have seen recently just how astonishingly volatile the stock market is and how a company can change in value by millions, even billions, of dollars from one day to the next. We can choose to regard an ecosystem as analogous to a company. It is a system composed of biotic (living) and abiotic (non-living) components with various inputs and outputs and it operates over time.

Companies can be more or less successful in producing their goods, and ecosystems can be more or less successful in maintaining themselves, but it would be a nonsense to suggest that because a particular species had arbitrarily decided that the value of their supporting ecology had halved overnight, that it was any less functional or valuable. We do this with companies, of course, which is part of the reason people involved in them feel so disempowered and devalued when stock values collapse.

Does it make sense to try and protect natural systems by commodifying them? Aside from the arbitrary and unrelated valuation regimes associated with placing ‘market values’ on anything, there is the curious, inescapable and surely pertinent fact that increasing value related to increasing scarcity did nothing to help the Dodo, which became ever more valuable as its numbers decreased, and is doing little to assist the end of ivory trading.

Trading carbon may not do much at all to reduce emissions, but it will provide some short–term wealth for people rich enough to be able to buy and sell our Dodo atmosphere.

Pricing carbon and trading essential trace elements in the atmosphere won’t deliver effective action on climate change. Only legal enforcement will do that. That’s what happened with the chemical depletion of the ozone layer. The situation was recognised as urgent and governments acted decisively. Had we waited for a trade-based system in chlorofluorocarbon credits the ozone depletion would have continued to worsen and its manufacturers would still be arguing about the threat to their profit margins represented by any serious attempt to heal the ozone hole.

Legislation is what produces a level playing field, not unbridled competition. Legislation sets the ground rules for play. A football match can only take place once the boundaries of the pitch, the size of the ball and the number of players have been agreed, and rules put in place that say what behaviour is allowed and what is not. Commerce is no different. Without rules football isn’t playable. Without rules a manager who really wanted to annihilate an opposing team would be able to go ahead and do so. Literally.

We need to get the various players in our society playing the same game, and that game is ecological restoration; if that doesn’t sound sexy enough, how about calling it ‘life support’? We need to agree on the boundaries of the pitch (it’s about one earth diameter) and limits to growth (sound familiar?), we need to establish what behaviour is allowed and what isn’t.

If we’re talking about living systems then, despite what politicians and pundits think, there are given limits to what works and what doesn’t, which behaviours are acceptable and which are not. Nature doesn’t negotiate. And, to mix a metaphor or two, nature bats last.

It is all about establishing unequivocal rules and behaviour based on guaranteeing survival, and the only times we have ever maintained that kind of social rigour and sense of collective purpose has been during times of war. Unless we go onto a war footing there is no way the necessary social mobilisation and hard decisions can come about.

I said it back in 1990, others have said it since, the only way to halt and then repair climate change and ecological devastation is to declare war, and commence the struggle to get back into some kind of balance with this planet.

 

Short Supplies

Adelaide has a land shortage and needs a new land supply, according to South Australian Planning Minister Paul Holloway.

Minister Holloway, where are you planning to get this land? Last I heard, they’re not making anymore, except where there’s an occasional volcanic island.

The myth that land is a commodity seems to be well enough entrenched that even the most sensible and well-educated people behave as if it really were a discrete thing that can be bought and sold, with a value measured in the marketplace, separate from any biological, climatic or geographical reality.

The entire building industry has been maintained for decades on the basis of land being continually supplied for the marketplace as if it were packets of cornflakes on supermarket shelves that needed to be periodically ‘topped up’.

This absurdist nonsense underpins the economics of housing prices and is taken seriously by investors, developers and politicians whilst being sold to the general public as a sort of semi-divine truth. Challenge the conventional wisdom behind the manipulation of ‘land supply’ and you’re quickly marked down for being a spoiler, maybe an environmentalist.

The industry insists that land must continue to be ‘supplied’ or else houses will cost more than people can afford. Well, maybe there’s something wrong with the houses?

The living landscape is our life support system. The land factory of zoning does not create land. What it does do is place the fading, remnant patches of our living environment in the hands of people who convert its biological complexity into construction sites and thus conspire to kill it. When the conversion process is complete, dead concrete, bricks and steel smother something that used to be alive.

This is the process that feeds growth on the urban fringe, it provides housing for the least well-off, but at a price they cannot pay.

That’s not how it seems at first, of course. The inexorable, deceptive illogic of the market means that when land prices are kept lower (land supply = reduction of scarcity = price is low) then building blocks are more affordable. But on these blocks sit houses built to be as cheap as possible, to the minimum standards allowed by the building code, expensive to heat and cool, and tenuously connected to jobs, schools, shops and essential services by long stretches of bitumen that can only be travelled by machines driven by an energy supply that has passed its peak, is doomed to be ever more expensive, is poisoning the atmosphere, and driving climate change.

If there were any real sense of responsibility among those in government or commerce who make the decisions about land use, they would stop ‘releasing’ land and insist on all new development taking place within the framework of existing zoning. With a freeze on new land releases, there would have to simultaneously be a determined, urgent and focussed effort to undertake some real planning and reverse urban sprawl.

Instead of the incremental, extrapolatory (we’ll have a bit more of what we had last time…) process that we have come to think of as planning, we would have goal-focussed planning that was about making positive decisions about the future.   

But that doesn’t just require a sense of responsibility, it requires imagination – and that does seem to be in short supply.

Agreeing to Disagree

The lovely thing about living in a democracy is that we can disagree with each other without there being any damage – no fisticuffs, gun-fire or bombs going off, just polite demurring and occasional raised voices, and life goes on.

When it’s time to make important decisions, we talk, discuss, chinwag and waffle until we find enough common ground to say ‘Yes, this is what we’ll do!’. It’s wonderful. It’s what civilisation’s all about.

And all of this can happen because of an underlying stability in our social system which, like the world on the elephants’ backs, is supported by a benign and beneficent natural world with its reassuring parade of creatures and seasons offering a cornucopia of material for us to mine, grow, harvest, weave and transform into the basics and luxuries of daily life. Any changes in that natural world have been happening much slower than in our busy human society. Poets and sages can speak about the seasons from centuries apart and still make sense to one another.

But what if the elephants were to become disturbed? What if the steady rhythms of nature were to shake, rattle and roll into an unsteady cacophony and things started to change faster than we were used to?

That ‘what if’ is now a ‘guess what?’. Guess what? The elephants are starting to shake. Things are changing so fast that even the fashion industry is being wrong-footed by seasons that are no longer changing as they are supposed to.

The building industry is used to much slower rates of change than the fashion industry and buildings last a long time, but we really don’t seem to have got the message about the speed of change in the world. We are still fussing and arguing about whether to change the building code to make buildings more energy efficient and whether to mandate double glazing, whilst the elephants jig and jump and the ice caps melt.

It’s great to live in a society that allows us to be disagreeable, but it’s time we recognised that we no longer have the luxury of time to chew over our debating points, or wait for more evidence before doing something substantial about improving the energy performance of our buildings.

Green build Design & Technology Show – Syd

Green TECH Australia is presenting the 3^rd Australian International Green Build, Design & Technology Show on Friday 7^th – Saturday 8th November at Sydney’s Darling Harbour.

Special features include:

• Eco House of the Future,
• Smart House Zone
• 100% Green by Design – exhibition for students, young designers, architects ,engineers and inventors.
• green inventors
• SRD ChangeX 08 (Graduate Sustainable Design Exhibition)

http://greentechshow.com.au/what_is_greentech.shtml