Professor Ian Lowe

I listened a while ago to terrific lecture by Proffessor Ian Lowe currently head of the Australian Conservation Foundation. He was speaking on Big Ideas, Radio National - on the series of lectures dedicated to the life of the late (and great) Rick Farley. Here is a slice of the transcript:


"Indigenous people recognised ... that if we look after the country, the country will look after us. The converse of course, is that if we don't look after the country, sooner or later it will bite us on the backside, and I'm going to suggest we can see some of the teethmarks at the moment in the settled parts of Australia.
We need to recognise that the relationships between our identity, our culture, our wellbeing and the natural values of this country are crucial to our future. We should never forget that the health of our communities is related to the health of landscapes, and the relationship flows both ways. You can't have a healthy community without a healthy landscape, and you can't have a healthy landscape without a healthy community.

He continues to comment on Australias economic rationalist model which has suceeded in draining our rivers of water to support and industry which in effect exports this water for the price of a bale of cotton!!

"Most of our decision makers still use what I call the pig-headed model, in which they see the economy as the main game, like the face of the pig, and society and environment as two minor protuberances propping up the economy. They genuinely believe that if the economy is strong, problems with society, problems with environment, can always be patched up. That's not just a wrong-headed model, but it's not working.

The unprecedented economic progress of recent decades has come at some social cost and very large environmental cost. I think we need a better model, and I've suggested the three concentric circles or the eco-centric model, as somebody called it 'the view from space model', recognising that if you look at the earth from space, you can't see the economy, what you see is the perilously thin membrane that supports life and the physical boundaries that separate some of our societies, like oceans and rivers and mountain ranges. And if you take that as your starting point, you recognise that the economy is an important part of our society but only a part. There are things we expect from our society, like security, companionship, a sense of identity, love, cultural traditions that are not even in principle part of the economy. The economy is part of our society, and our society is totally enclosed within and totally dependent on the natural systems of the planet.

The economy gives us some things we need, but overwhelmingly it gives us things that we have to be persuaded to want, which is why we have an advertising industry. But the natural world gives us the things we absolutely need: air to breathe, water to drink, the capacity to produce our food, our sense of cultural identity, spiritual sustenance. Economic development needs to be consistent with the aspirations of our society, and those in turn need to be kept within the limits of natural ecological systems. We have no future if we continue to use the old paradigm in which economic criteria are the basis for planning, hoping we can always repair the social and environmental damage."

You can also listen on line with this link.

Enjoy your day. more photos from me soon.....