Sustainability 101 Revisited

For my US readers, this is a letter to the editor of my regional community rag, addressed to my local state government representative.  He comes from the right side of politics and he and his Liberal/Nationals (Republican) government sit in the state capital of Victoria, Melbourne. They are hostile to environmental reform.

There is also a reference here to the conservative (Republican) Australian federal opposition parties in the national capital, Canberra.  The present government is vaguely leftish (Democrat) and sits extremely tenuously in alliance with the local Greens. They will likely be tipped out at the next election by the now opposition, who overthrew their former leader two years ago for supporting a carbon tax.

Because the mining/extraction industries are so large here, they exert immense influence on the political process.



"For readers of these columns, you will have noticed over the last few months that I have been needling Ken Smith, our local state member and speaker of the Legislative Assembly, to explain to his constituents if there were a rational evidence basis for his government’s policy to boot the wind farm industry out of the state.

I know Ken isn’t exactly a ball of fire, but I think if there were such a basis, even he would have come up with it by now.

It is becoming obvious, across a range of issues, and not just in relation to the wind farm industry, that Ken and his premier do not see environmental issues as a particularly urgent problem or priority.  And this is not just because they are complacent about environmental science, but because of the enormous power of miners in Australia and the coal industry in particular, .

Therefore it shouldn’t come as huge surprise to know that the Waubra Foundation, that backs the local anti wind farm Landscape ‘Guardians’, is connected directly and indirectly to mining interests, in the same way that the UK County ‘Guardians’ are backed by the nuclear industry.

By comparison, if you look at the Conservative Cameron government in the UK, very different attitudes prevail, because the British coal industry was closed down years ago by Maggie Thatcher, the North Sea oil that has been propping local energy supplies for several decades is starting to decline and nuclear energy is now off like a bucket of Fukushima prawns
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With rather limited options in front of them, the British Conservative Party backs the wind industry, has very ambitious wind energy targets and doesn’t indulge climate change skeptics to anything like the same extent as here.

It isn’t that the world’s climate science community is more persuasive in Britain than Australia.  They just don’t have to deal with the clout and money of a colossal mining/extraction industry and its numerous mouthpieces in our state and federal capitals, most of the country’s media and local communities.

Being a conservative does not have to mean listening to science cranks and lobbyists, being complicit in trashing the environment for the benefit of our powerful polluters and aborting industrial scale efforts to try and deal with the environmental problems those bastards are leaving behind for our children and grandchildren to struggle with.

The late lamented Leader of the Federal Opposition, Malcolm Turnbull, who appeared to have a clear grip on the threat to our future posed by coal pollution, was an example of a very rare form of conservative integrity.  But then he worked in Canberra, not London, so he was rolled for not seeing things the miners’ way.

Naturally, his industry lickspittle successor and his gang pump the line you have to have if you want to get into and stay in power for long in Australia.

This indeed maybe the realpolitic of our time, but it also makes the notion of a principled conservative a hideously embarrassing oxymoron.  While a continuing semblance of business-as-usual makes that easy to get away with for now, there is coming a time Ken, and sooner than you think, when you and your Liberal/Nasho mates are going to wish you had a genuinely conservative vision and some principles worth fighting for.  But being such relentless jobbers and time servers, you lot won’t have a clue where to even start looking.

But I’ll give you some hints Ken.

Conservatism is about sustainability in everything we do, from dealing with personal relationships to dealing with the global environment, to our notions of risk and benefit, to how we regard social governance and the social commons that underpins it, to how we regulate industry and our children, so that they and their descendents do not lose sight of the fundamental purposes of life and lose their way.

This is about what constitutes wealth and what the really important things are that we need to export from one generation of biological, commercial, social and familial asset, to the next, forever.

Real conservatives are not just risk and waste averse.  They won't tolerate people and institutions that try to burn down the common future.

Ken, you do not have to look very far to see what happens to societies that lose sight of the fundamentals and lose their way.  If I am not wrong, we are about to see what transpires at the end of the march of the lemmings.

And when that occurs, conservatives like me will appear on the stage.  You had better be wearing body armor, for we, in the language of another age, will bring in our wake a post-modern and secular vision, not just of the word, Ken, but the Wrath of God."