Shepparton book launch will aid GV Community Fund

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r Kerryn Higgs will talk in Shepparton soon about her new book, “Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet".

The author and educator is being brought to Shepparton by Slap Tomorrow and the GV Community Fund.  

She will speak at the GoTAFE Harder Auditorium at 7:00pm on Wednesday, April 29.

The evening, for which there is a $10 cover charge, will include a light suppers and tickets are available from Collins Booksellers inMaude St, Shepparton, or Andrea at the GV Community Fund 0409 323 842.

Books will be available on the night for both sale and signing and all ticket sales for the event will go to the fund.

 

Endless Growth to be discussed in Shepparton

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ustralian writer Dr Kerryn Higgs will speak in Shepparton later this month.

She will talk about her new book, “Collision Course - Endless Growth On A Finite Planet”.

Dr Kerryn Higgs, she will
speak in Shepparton
 on April 29 about her
book "Collision Course".

Her visit has been co-ordinated by the Shepparton-based Slap Tomorrow and the GV Community Fund.

She will speak at the city’s Harder Auditorium (TAFE College) on Wednesday, April 29 with the $10 entry fee including a light supper.

Shepparton’s Collins Booksellers will also be at the auditorium and have books available for purchase and signing.

Dr Higgs examines how society's commitment to growth has marginalized scientific findings on the limit of growth, calling them bogus predictions of imminent doom.

She was recently interviewed on Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor in the program: “Limits to growth”.

Consumption and inordinate demand on resources explored in Shepparton

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onsumption and the inordinate demand it puts on the world’s resources will be explored in Shepparton later this month.

Writer, teacher, editor and environmentalist, Kerryn Higgs, will talk about her new book, “Collision Course: Endless Growth on a FinitePlanet” on Wednesday, April 29, at the GoTAFE auditorium at 6:30 for 7:00pm.

Kerryn, who graduated from the University of Melbourne with honours in history and English, also graduated from the University of Tasmania with a Diploma in Environmental Studies.

Meanwhile, the International Society for Local Futures says, in its story headed: “The Global Economy’s ‘Impeccable Logic’” that there will never be enough resources to bring all those billions of people (those people who are becoming expendable every year) up to the levels of income and consumption common in the west.

“This,” the story adds, “is something that even pie-in-the-sky economists who dream of endless “sustainable growth” must realize.”

Kerryn, who is being brought to Shepparton by both the GV Community Fund and Slap Tomorrow, was recently appointed a Fellow of the International Centre of the Club of Rome.

Tickets, which will soon be available at $10 each from Collins Booksellers in Maude St, the GV Community Fund and Slap Tomorrow members, will include a light supper.

Kerry brings the 'collision course' message to Shepparton

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t was 20 years ago that the world was warned it was on a “collision course”.

Author, environmentalist, Kerry Higgs.

And now that warning has been echoed by writer, teacher, editor and environmentalist, Kerryn Higgs.

In August last year she wrote the book, “Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet” and late in April she will be in Shepparton to talk about what motivated her to write the book.

Kerryn graduated from the University of Melbourne with first class honours and the Kathleen Fitzpatrick prize for combined History and English Honours.

She also has a Graduate Diploma of Environmental Studies and a PhD from the University of Tasmania.

She said the notion of ever-expanding economic growth has been promoted so relentlessly that the public is now convinced that “growth” is the natural solution to virtually all social problems—poverty, debt, unemployment, and even the environmental degradation caused by growth in the first place.

“Warnings from scientists that we live on a finite planet have been ignored or even scorned as bogus predictions of doom and systematically resisted by economists and the corporate sector,” she said.

Kerryn has taught at the University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales. She is currently a University Associate with the University of Tasmania and was recently appointed a Fellow of the International Centre of the Club of Rome.

Her visit to Shepparton is being co-ordinated by Slap Tomorrow working with the GV Community Fund and she will speak on Wednesday, April 29, at the Harder Auditorium at 6:30 for 7:00 pm.

Admission to support the GV Community Fund will be $10, including a light supper. Shepparton’s Collins Booksellers will also have copies of Collision Course available for purchase and signing.

Twenty years ago by the Union of Concerned Scientists produced a report entitled “World Scientist’s Warning to Humanity” and that statement from 1,700 senior scientists, including 104 Nobel Prize winners, suggests we are living through something like a slow motion train wreck.

The opening words say:

Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course. Human activities inflict harsh and often irreversible damage on the environment and on critical resources. If not checked, many of our current practices put at serious risk the future that we wish for human society and the plant and animal kingdoms, and may so alter the living world that it will be unable to sustain life in the manner that we know. Fundamental changes are urgent if we are to avoid the collision our present course will bring about.

Those with any questions about the April 29 session can direct them to Robert McLean at 0400 502 199 or Cheryl Hammer at the GV Community Fund at 1300 651 224.

Considering externalities and damning infinite growth

The idea of growth – infinite growth on a finite planet – is repeatedly damned by Kerryn Higgs in her new book: “Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet”.

Infinite growth brings with it consequences the world is unable to bear.

Considering externalities, she writes:

“Perhaps the most pressing externality in the second decade of the twenty-first century is the emission of carbon dioxide and methane from as great range of human activities.

“Not only has the market failed to dampen these down – global emissions grow at an increasing rate every year – but the corporations controlling the world economy resist the process.

“Global warming was reckoned by the economist Nicholas Stern, who wrote the UK report on the costs of a response, to be “greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen” – where the market reflects neither true environmental, not true economic costs.”

Out spacious country distorts peoples' view of finitude

Australia is a spacious country.
 

Seemingly so endless, that it distorts peoples’ view of the finitude of the earth.
 

Kerryn Higgs new book.

The ideals of capitalism of growth and whatever cost and profit again regardless of the cost fit well with the apparent limitless size of Australia.
 

That perception is wrong in the extreme for Australia, despite protestations of the boosters, is poor in every sense – we have remarkably little water, out ancient soils are nutrient poor and already, in terms of population, we are overstocked.
 

Many have lamented the damage done by and the voracious of capitalism with the latest being from Australian writer and researcher from the University of Tasmania, Dr Kerryn Higgs, who has further amplified that criticism.
 

Writing in her new book, “Collision Course: Endless Growth on a Finite Planet” she says “Consumption is now seen as our principal role in the world”.
 

And, of course, it is that very consumption, particularly of energy-rich goods and products that has taken us down the path upon which the only destination is climate change.
 

The short-termism of capitalism is offensive to the natural world as the profit and growth demands of the market system have no respect for ecological fundamentals upon which humanity depends.
 

“Growth,” Dr Higgs writes, “became the ‘common-sense’ solution to virtually all social problems – including, paradoxically, the environmental degradation it was causing.”
 

Dr Higgs quotes Georgetown University environmental historian, author, and professor, John Robert McNeill, who characterized modern times, especially the last 50 years, as “bizarre, anomalous and thoroughly unsustainable”.
 

So, it seems, the idea that the world is infinite is not simply peculiar to Australians, rather it is human-wide misunderstanding that is manifesting itself in climate change.

 

Read a review of Dr Higgs' book by Ian Lowe.

Robert McLean.