Hope was ominpresent at ethics conference

Julia Benkart introduces the panel
 at yesterday's Sustainability
 and Ethics Conference.
 

“Hope” was omnipresent although not on the agenda at yesterday’s (August 15) Melbourne Sustainability and Ethics Conference.

Most topics had pessimistic overtones, but their gloominess was equalled by the quiet optimism of the youthful organizers from the Melbourne Academy for Sustainability and Society.

A full day of discussions in the Yasuko Hiraoka Myer Room at the Asia Centre, University of Melbourne, attracted a “moving” audience of about 50 people.

A multidisciplinary cohort of students from the Melbourne Academy for Sustainability and Society assembled the day-long program under the guidance of mentor, Professor Marcus Wigan.

Older people frequently exhibit a rather jaded view and although present at the conference, more in terms of the questioning, it was overwhelmed by the youthful optimism that roamed free easily countering any negations.

The impressive array of speakers, including the immediate post-lunch keynote presenter from RMIT, Professor Michael Buxton, covered everything from emotion and aesthetics in sustainability to religion and resilience and then from public transport research to the ethics of sustainability.

Prof Buxton’s team is studying peri-urban areas in both regional Victoria and at a national level and yesterday he noted that having completed his PhD in philosophy and was delighted to part of a conference that had ethics as a focus.

He talked about the connection between values and planning, lamenting the reality that the brutal of planning legislation paid no heed to the tenets important to people.

Prof Buxton was enthused about many of his students from RMIT and had been optimistic that at least one of them would infuse the state’s planning regime with a sense of the values important to resilience of communities.

He was saddened that, as yet, none of those former students had seriously impacted the planning values he attempted to pass on while at RMIT.

The program wound up with a panel discussion involving Professor Kate Auty; Professor Yoshihisa Kashima from the University of Melbourne; Dr Jacques Boulet from the Oases Graduate School; and Dr Sagar Sanyal, from the philosophy department at the University of Melbourne, who discussed the ethics of sustainability research.