We must adapt to new climate

Fate landed me in Shepparton early in the 1980s.

Soon after, I became the editor of this newspaper and not much later, by chance, I bought and read the new book by the late Neil Postman, Amusing ourselves to death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business.

That book reshaped my values and ethics and what he was discussing in 1985 has become even more entrenched in society today.

Just today, I posted a story on my blog, Beneath the Wisteria, that told about millions facing drought-related deaths in Africa and then the same day an Australian television station promoted some frivolous entertainment about various celebrities wrestling with life in the African jungle.

Yes, we rush about our country and our world pursuing amusements, sport and a host of other entertainments seemingly unaware that those very pastimes are hurrying our demise; well, if not our death as suggested by Postman, certainly hitherto unseen difficulties.

Postman knew what he was talking about 25 years ago and his prescient observations appear to have even more traction today.

Nearly 15 years have passed since I first began listening to lectures about the travails of what it is that humans are doing to Earth’s climate system and everything, but nothing has changed.

Here in Shepparton, life goes on almost unchanged from what it was like nearly 40 years ago.

However, below this powerful sense of normality there is a change afoot, even though you wouldn’t think that if you looked at the dayto-day life of Shepparton, and everywhere else.

People are still rushing about building, travelling, working and amusing themselves in the embrace of an energy-rich modernity, seemingly unaware that in their addiction to “show business”, in Postman’s terms, they are amusing themselves to death.

“They” is misleading as that suggests an “other”, but the blame falls upon all of us, myself included, and it is timely to remember the observations of University of Melbourne anthropologist, Hans Baer, who says that we are all deeply implicated in behaviours that manifest such things as the bushfires ravaging much of Australia.

In what is an unsettling contradiction to this thesis, I write sitting in the “Bluff Bar” at the Alexandra Headland Surf Club on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, a place that epitomises the behaviours that must change if we are to adapt to the quickly unfolding climate crisis.

Life, here in the Bluff Bar, is seductive and is unquestionably seen as reward for the labours of those sitting about, enjoying the venue’s hospitality.

Working hard and playing hard is fine, but a forensic examination of the present dynamic, suggests we misunderstand the fundamentals of what we do and are confused.

Working and playing hard as we understand and practice them, is a tribute, a eulogy, a homage to the wrong Gods and so rather than the mirage of money, it is to the community that we should be addicted.

It seems the energy-rich amusements of modernity hold our gaze, paralyse our thinking and prohibit thoughtful and urgently-needed responses about how we should be modifying our behaviours to ensure we can adapt to Earth’s disrupted climate system.

An opinion piece from The Shepparton News by Robert McLean - “We must adapt to new climate.”