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The Sustainable Hour no. 520 | Transcript | Podcast notes
Our guest in The Sustainable Hour no. 520 is Monica Winston, founder of Transition Streets Geelong, which has four events coming up in Geelong region, the next of which is this Sunday 22 September 2024:
- Plant-based whole food cooking – good for you, good for the planet! Sign up here
- Permaculture Connections – on 27 October at 1:30-4:40pm at Vines Rd Community Centre
- The third is yet to be confirmed in October or November
- Sustainable Business Shift on Wednesday 6 November at 6-9pm at City of Geelong Golf Club, North Geelong
The events are supported by the City of Greater Geelong through it’s Environment & Sustainability Program.
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The 520th Sustainable Hour emphasises the need for a cultural shift in how we approach climate activism, the role of businesses in driving change, and the connection between health, diet, and sustainability.
Highlighting the political challenges and lobbying efforts that hinder progress towards sustainable energy solutions, the dialogue explores the global impacts of climate change, local initiatives for sustainable living, and the importance of community engagement.
We never hide the truth about the serious nature of the climate crisis that is unfolding all over our amazing planet right now. Right from our start 11 years ago, we’ve felt a strong responsibility to do this. At first we faced a lot of criticism for this. Comments like “You’ll scare your listeners into inaction” often came our way. Still we persisted. This responsibility was accompanied by a just as strongly held belief that we also had to show that people working together can really make a difference.
Our chat with Monica Winston on this week’s show is a prime example of this. We learn what her group has planned and how others can be involved and become part of the solution. All this leads to people gaining hope and inspiration. As Monica emphasised, these connections nurture communities and make for more fulfilling and vital lives. We look forward to these stimulating and insightful discussions both next week as well as in all our future shows.
“Transition Streets is really about connection, primarily, because when we’re connected with others, first of all, we can reduce the stress of what we’re reading, what we’re experiencing in terms of what’s happening in the world. We can also actually enjoy ourselves, we can have more influence on each other, we can share items, can share knowledge and resources. And if things get really bad, know, say my roof blows off and I know my neighbours or I know people who live around the corner, it’s a haven, you we can offer to each other. So first of all, connection, I think it’s a nurturing space. We’ve been very focused on not adding to the trauma that people are experiencing by being willing to expose themselves to what is going on, but to actually comfort people.”
~ Monica Winston, founder of Transition Streets Geelong
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are broadcasting, the Wathaurong People, and pay our respect to their elders, past, present and future.
The traditional owners lived in harmony with the land. They nurtured it and thrived in often harsh conditions for millennia before they were invaded. Their land was then stolen from them – it wasn’t ceded. It is becoming more and more obvious that, if we are to survive the climate emergency we are facing, we have much to learn from their land management practices.
Our battle for climate justice won’t be won until our First Nations brothers and sisters have their true justice. When we talk about the future, it means extending our respect to those children not yet born, the generations of the future – remembering the old saying that, “We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.”
The decisions currently being made around Australia to ignore the climate emergency are being made by those who won’t be around by the time the worst effects hit home. How disrespectful and unfair is that?
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→ One Step Off the Grid – 9 September 2024:
“Cowardly decision:” Victorian Labor flinches on fossil exit, says gas cooktops can stay
Transition Towns webinar: Grounding Resilience and Regeneration
Earth Based and grounding practices can increase our capacity and resilience. Jul Bystrova will be leading a webinar session on that topic on 20 September 2024.
This offering brings together a synergistic combination of different tools to connect to the Earth: We use a practice that combines meditation, visualisation, breathwork and most notably, a somatic based sensing practice. From this foundation, we can cultivate a nourishing relationship with ourselves and with nature and receive the power of self healing.
We will go through a basic practice and then be able to apply it to some challenge in your life right away. You will experience first hand how it works, bringing healing, helping challenges in relationships or offering insight to a problem or your life in general. When you integrate these practices in your life in a way that works for you, you will enjoy greater balance and a deep centeredness. Especially helpful when integrating new project ideas, navigating challenging issues or conflicts, feeling overwhelmed or burned out, confusion and distraction.
When this practice is applied, you will feel the difference! You will feel lighter, more at ease and regenerated. You will feel a sense of empowerment when you apply the principles, and will watch your life transform with greater focus, inspiration and well being.
Building a personal climate strategy
“We’re no longer capable of preventing a massive planetary crisis — we’re in one. And while it is critical that we take every measure we can to slash greenhouse gasses, cut toxic pollution and reverse ecological destruction, nothing we can now do will roll back the clock. A pathway to an orderly transition with minimal disruption and a return to continuity no longer exists.”
“The uncomfortable truth: if you don’t have a strategy for managing the impacts climate chaos and discontinuity in your own life, you probably haven’t really got a plan for the future.
The planetary crisis is here, now, and much fiercer than we hoped. Our assumptions about climate politics, action and response must now all be re-thought. That crisis is the context in which every major life decision we make will play out.
We still need to do everything we can to limit global heating and ecological collapse. Yet even as we limit the extent of further destruction, we now know we’ll be living through an unprecedented upheaval in every natural system around us.
We need to take bold measures to ready our communities, infrastructure and economy for those ecological disasters worsening around us. Yet, even as we try to adapt to new realities, we now know that what we’ll be able to save is limited, and the losses will be catastrophic in the most exposed places.
We need to come together to help one another, as millions navigate these disorienting impacts. Yet, even as we fight for better plans and policies, we now know the hard reality that none of us can depend on others coming to our rescue, and that each of us has to develop our own strategy for living through the coming decades of planetary crisis. As climate adaptation professor Jesse Keenan says, “You’re on your own.”
The crisis is here, our society is still almost completely unready, and no one else will protect your future for you.”
~ Alex Steffen, futurist – in his newsletter The Snap Forward, 6 September 2024
“Near-total collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet by 2300”
→ SciTech Daily – 14 September 2024:
After 2100, All Bets Are Off: Climate Scientists Reveal Dire Antarctic Ice Projections
“A study led by Dartmouth, involving over 50 climate scientists from around the globe, offers the first clear projection of how carbon emissions could contribute to the loss of Antarctica’s ice sheet over the next 300 years. All the models agree that once these large changes are initiated, nothing can stop them or slow them down.”
A recent Bloomberg Intelligence analysis said most US companies have “significantly scaled back” discussions of ESG and similar topics on quarterly earnings calls. And for those whose goals appear increasingly out of reach, the temptation to keep quiet is even greater.
The legacy we’re living to future generations will not be looked upon kindly by them – unless an increased awareness of the climate urgency and widespread long-term thinking emerge – little of which we can perceive, unfortunately, in 2024.
We need ‘Great Wall of China,’ Ankhor Wat and ‘Pyramids’ style multi-century thinking to guide long-term public and private investment, but we’re cruising along in exactly the opposite direction – towards an abyss.
Prior to that collapse, ‘net present value’ project economics savagely discounts future benefits and totally ignores the buildup of stranded assets and future liabilities.
→ Le Monde – 12 September 2024:
From Guinea to Chad, floods affect 3.5 million people, killing nearly 900
“These new severe weather events have hit areas where the situation is already catastrophic due to food insecurity and conflict.”
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Transcript of The Sustainable Hour no. 520
Antonio Guterres:
Climate change is here, it is terrifying and it is just the beginning.
Jingle:
The Sustainable Hour. For a green, clean, sustainable Geelong: The Sustainable Hour.
Tony Gleeson:
Welcome to The Sustainable Hour. We’d like to acknowledge that we’re broadcasting from the land that the Wadawurrung people nurture and are custodians for. We are speaking on stolen land, land that was never ceded – always was and always will be Aboriginal land. There is so much ancient wisdom for us as we navigate the climate crisis, ancient wisdom that’s been honed by nurturing the country and their communities for millennia before their land was stolen.
Mik Aidt:
First we have a carbon tax and then we don’t. Then we have a ban on fracking and then we don’t. And last year we had a ban on gas connections to new homes and businesses here in Victoria. And now we don’t. It’s such a zig-zagging experience, isn’t it? – to watch how politics go back and forth.
Apparently it’s hard to be an Australian politician and do what’s “right for the climate and for our collective safety and food security. Instead of just doing what’s right for the gas and for the coal industry.
A little over a year ago we heard the Andrews government here in Victoria announce a shift away from gas. And a new rule that there would be a ban on gas connections to new homes and businesses starting at New Year. Which happened here the 1st of January 2024. But now, nine months later, we suddenly hear State Premier Jacinta Allen, who took over after Andrews, saying to the media, ‘I’m going to be really clear today that Victorians can continue to keep cooking with gas. This is important because we’ve listened to Victorians and they’ve asked for this certainty to be provided. And so we’re providing that today.’
‘Listened?’ Who have you listened to, Jacinta? You have listened to the fossil fuel lobby groups. That’s who you have listened to. And which ‘certainty’ is that you’re talking about there? Certainty that you will wreck the climate? Certainty that we are going to wreck our climate completely, destroy our ecosystems and mess up our future.
But hey, didn’t we see it coming? Right from that moment when we began to see on TV this incredible term ‘renewable gas’ being marketed – the gas industry coming up with this incredible term just to try and make gas into something that sounds clean and harmless. And so they put their money… they sponsored Australia’s top rating Masterchef, and even proposed promoting renewable gas in Victorian schools.
And we saw the Herald Sun and the Australian and Sky News all getting upset about this gas ban. There was even polls from the gas industry circulated in these News Corp outlets, and opinion articles from top lobbying organisations, countless anti-renewables editorials from people like Andrew Bolt and so on.
Australia’s largest gas heating manufacturer, Sealy Australia, ran an ad campaign in marginal seats in Victoria against this gas ban, and across Australia gas companies were spending a fortune on Facebook and Instagram posts every month.
Belinda Noble, founder of Comms Declare, has followed all this and she said: ‘There was an army of gas linked lobbyists. They won the day over health and future of Victoria’s.’
Jingle:
Scott Morrison: This is coal. Don’t be afraid.
Senator Whitehouse: At the heart of this conflict is a battle between truth and science and power and lies.
Mik:
Gas lobbying has boomed here in Victoria with 25 gas-linked lobbying contracts now currently in place across 12 lobbying firms. Many of those apparently linked of course to the Labour Party. But… And there is a big ‘but’. And that is, for instance, that 12 per cent of childhood asthma here in Australia is attributed to exposure to gas cooktops. And electric cooking and heating is not only cleaner and better for children’s lungs, it’s also a lot cheaper.
So I bet that people and businesses will be making their own decisions and cowards like Jacinta Allen will be put to shame. There is a movement on the way. And an example of that is if you look to Europe, where the third largest city in the Netherlands – in Holland – called The Hague, has just taken a world first step against climate pollution, because they will stop any advertising for fossil fuel products and highly polluting services such as air holidays, cruise holidays, petrol cars and gas supplies and so on. And this will come into force in The Hague already at New Year. And from then on, all advertising for fossil fuel products on public and private land will be forbidden.
For something like that to happen here in Australia, we need a major culture shift away from a culture of lying and doing dirty deals behind closed doors. And that, I’m afraid, is going to require a new breed of politicians. People with values such as honesty, responsibility and integrity.
And yes, I know I should probably stop rambling now because we do have another important item here in the beginning of the sustainable hour this week and that’s Colin Mockett OAM who’s got the global outlook and Colin what do you have for us today?
COLIN MOCKETT’S GLOBAL ROUNDUP:
Yes Mik, well like you were saying I’ve got both good and bad news. There are floods in Romania, Moldavia and the Czech Republic. Also in Nigeria. Vietnam and neighbouring countries are recovering from super typhoon Yagi, but our roundup this week begins right here in Geelong, where Viva Energy’s plan for Australia to start importing giant shipments of liquefied gas has been resubmitted for environmental approval.
The company claims that Victoria is headed for an energy crisis and its only solution is to import what they describe as LNG, the initials stand for ‘liquid natural gas’. That’s their euphemism for methane, which is 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide at warming the atmosphere and usually found by fracking. It’s super-chilled down to a liquid so it can be transported from overseas and then stored. Viva’s plan is to store it on a permanently moored tanker at Geelong’s North shore, some 2 kilometres from Corio Village shopping centre, 4 kilometres from Geelong Grammar School and just 10 kilometres from Geelong’s CBD.
The company first submitted plans for what it called it’s a ‘floating gas terminal’ in 2021, which attracted storms of public protests and public inquiries.
The new plan has been re-launched against a background that Australia is now one of the largest exporters of LNG on the planet. We’re second only to the United States in this regard, and well ahead of Saudi Arabia in third place. Viva’s proposal would be the equivalent of Spain importing olive oil for domestic cooking, Scotland buying in whisky or Denmark importing Lego bricks. It’s ridiculous.
What’s more, all of our governments are committed to reducing carbon emissions, eventually to zero, and replacing them with renewable energy. You can’t do that by importing and burning methane.
Viva’s plans for the project went on public display last week and will be open for public scrutiny for 30 days before a hearing in December. If the Victorian government gives the green light, the company predicts that its project could start construction by 2026 and deliver gas by 2028. That’s it’s best-case scenario. But that would only deliver imported gas into Victorian homes, at a time when our government is attempting to get householders to remove household gas appliances and replace them with clean electric ones.
Viva’s plans don’t include converting any of our power generators from coal to burn methane, which I’ll state again is a toxic fossil fuel. All of our government’s plans are to close those generators and replace them with renewable solar or wind farms. So our advice to every listener is to view Viva’s proposals – you can do this online here – and then object to them as sensibly and stridently as you can. Because, put simply, Viva’s plans will cost us millions of dollars and they’re simply designed to delay and slow the roll-out of renewable energy and keep us dependent on 19th century fossil fuel technologies.
Now to Brazil, where the climate changes that scientists have been warning about for decades are actually in force. Brazilian scientists say that it’s more obvious in some regions than others, but all are linked to human-caused climate change.
The nation is mostly affected by deforestation, which is cooking the north of the country, while the largest area – more than half of Brazil – is in long-term drought. In recent years this has dried out swaths of the Amazon forest, killed scores of river dolphins and caused some territory to be reclassified as arid.
“Along the Rio Madeira in Amazonas state, locals are trekking kilometres on the hot sands of the dried riverbed in search of water,” according to researchers at the University of São Paulo. “In the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland, fires have scorched an estimated 20,000 square kilometres. The vast Cerrado region is in the grip of the worst drought in at least 700 years and the air in São Paulo state has grown so heavy with forest fire smoke that authorities have urged people to avoid physical activity outside,” their report said.
There’s different news in China, where a new report shows that the nation’s demand for imported oil has dropped from a norm of 500,000 to 600,000 barrels a day last year to roughly 200,000 barrels a day this month. For the first seven months of this year, China’s oil imports have been about 320,000 barrels a day lower than for the same period last year.
The rate at which China is electrifying its transport fleet appears, if anything, to be accelerating. That, along with the nation’s slowing economy represents a significant change in its demand for oil and it’s causing panic in the global markets.
While elsewhere, the rate of growth in EV penetration seems to have slowed, the uptake of EVs in China is still strong and will add to the longer-term reduction in demand for oil.
At a gathering of oil executives, traders and investors last week in Singapore, one of the world’s leading commodity traders, Trafigura Group, forecasted that producers would need to cut production yet again and the world oil price was likely to go down To $US60 a barrel sometime relatively soon. That prediction was proven right almost immediately.
Put simply, the oil producing nations group called OPEC+ are in a constant panic trying to find ways to put a floor under the price of oil.
The group’s monthly oil market report, published on Tuesday, foresees a growth in demand of 2.03 million barrels a day this year, reduced from its previous forecast of 2.11 million barrels a day, and reducing further to 1.74 million a day next year.
But that’s more than twice the growth predicted by the International Energy Agency, which has forecast growth of 970,000 barrels a day this year and less than a million barrels a day in 2025.
That’s the effect of the lack of demand from China – and it also might explain why Viva Energy is taking out full-page ads in the local press saying how we need to import methane to avoid a future Victorian gas shortage.
Viva’s gas is a fossil-fuel, and the figures show that world demand for fossil fuels is in decline while production is varied but mostly up. Reduction of demand is happening fast elsewhere, not just China, and it’s now in our hands to catch up with world trends in Victoria by objecting to Viva’s gas import plans and insisting our government ramp up renewables instead.
And that piece of obvious advice ends our global review for this week.
Except for a little bit for Tony. The Forest Green Rovers are second on the ladder at the moment. They drew this week, but that one point was enough to put him up to second place behind York. There, that’s our Global Outlook for the week.
Tony (at 16:27):
Our guest today is Monica Winston. Last week we had on Anita Rickey from Diggers Veggie Garden talking about the workshop that she’s going to be running. Today we’ve got Monica Winston. Monica’s been organising a series of six workshops and yeah, she’s coming to talk… we’ve spoken about two so far – and she’s come on to talk about the other four. So welcome Monica, thanks for coming on.
Monica Winston:
Thank you, Tony. I like your version of Digger’s Veggie Garden. It’s actually Digger’s Veggie Kitchen, but it sounds perfect for a garden as well.
Tony:
Yeah so tell us about the final four workshops that are coming up over the next month or two.
Monica:
Okay, so this Sunday 22nd of September, we’ve got a very exciting workshop with Anita as you outlined. And she’s going to do a cooking demo, but also there’s going to be six cooking stations. So people will learn, they’ll have a go and probably rotate a bit in doing food prep and cooking to make a main meal and a plant-based white cheese that you can use in a variety of ways and a dessert, and Anita will present the nutritional science on why this is a good way to go and also the environmental science on why it’s a good way to go and then we’re all going to eat some of what’s been made.
Colin:
Well that’s a lovely idea Monica but surely you’ve got to grow it before you can cook it. That’s a longer process isn’t it? You can’t do that in a day.
Monica:
Well we don’t want to put people off by making it too hard, Colin, but you know, obviously it’s easier to grow and eat whole foods than it is to try and manufacture some meat substitute in your own kitchen, like what’s being sold in the supermarkets. And anyway, that stuff’s quite tasty, but not healthy and it’s not going to make a big difference probably to the planet in the long run.
Colin:
Are we talking about the meat substitutes that are actually, well, they’re biological, aren’t they? They’re not plant based. They’re micro based, are they not?
Monica:
Yeah, that’s another thing where they’re growing meat in a lab. What we’re talking about is actually a really critical thing because people think vegan and plant based is the same thing and it’s not. Coke and Chip’s are vegan. You can be a very unhealthy vegan and a lot of people say, “I’m not going that way because I know a vegan who is really sick and blah blah blah”. But eating whole foods is eating more the way our ancestors used to live. But we’re focused on the plants and part of the reason that people shifted to a lot of animal foods was basically marketing that happened around meat and it doesn’t actually have science to stack that up.
Colin:
So what’s on the menu for this weekend?
You want me to give away all the trade secrets? Well, it’s going to be a korma curry with rice and then Anita is going to make a plant-based fetta which sounds like it’s from a totally different culture but you can use it with a curry the way it’s made and it’s super quick only about four ingredients and you can use it in South American food you can use it in burgers, you can use it in all sorts of ways. Then I think muffins are on the menu. Muffins. And I might bring some plant-based yoghurt that’s made from bonsai that’s super easy to make and delicious that you can use in a whole variety of ways as well. That’ll go with the curry.
Colin:
Now what about chutney?
Monica:
Yeah, well, we might bring some chutney. We’ve got a limited time,
So we’ve got 12 till 3 and at the moment we’ve got about 15 people booked in 15 to 20 I think it is and there’s still spots available we can go right up to 50 people. Some people might be happy to just observe some people want to have a go we want to make it quite interactive. So whereabouts is it? It’s going to be at this amazing venue called the monastery in Breakwater. Have you been there Colin?
Colin:
Yes, they hold really, they had a couple of really interesting concerts earlier this year with Wondrous Mary. Yes.
Monica:
Yeah, it’s a beautiful venue, floor to ceiling glass windows and beautiful grounds.
Colin:
Excellent acoustics. And it’s got a good kitchen as well I assume.
Monica:
It does, yep. And it’s actually got a dance floor and we can get people to break out and do that, but that’s often what people are…
Colin:
Your curries, is it? Sorry – that’s the effect of your curries!
Monica
Exactly. Yeah. Well, you’ll be put on an energetic high if you eat this way. You’d be able to do anything and start doing gymnastics at the age of 90.
Tony:
I guess it’s not just a dietary thing. It’s about reducing emissions?
Monica:
There’s huge amount of land that’s cleared continuously for animal agriculture, actually to grow the crops to feed the animals so that people can eat what they think is the best form of protein and iron and that sort of thing. But there’s a whole lot of problems with that apart from the land clearing, which is that animals are the middlemen. We get more than enough protein just from a plant-based diet, we don’t need it to go through animals and to be doing that whole industrial clearing. But I can get some facts up for you, Tony, if you like, about it’s not just land clearing, it’s pollution of waterways. There’s a whole lot of rivers now that don’t reach the sea because of the water used in industrial animal agriculture.
Tony:
Yeah, I imagine at the end of it, there’ll be a people sit down and they consume the meal together, the food together.
Monica:
Absolutely. Yeah. Depending on how many people come, it may be a full meal or it may be a taste of things. And this one we are asking for some payment, but we’ve got everything from $5 up to 40. I’ve created eight different tickets. So people just choose what they can afford. It doesn’t get you anything different. Terrific.
Tony:
And there’s something about sitting down and eating a meal together to increase the conversations.
Monica:
It’s going to be a lot of fun. Yeah. Terrific. Okay.
Tony:
So that’s the second workshop out of the way. Let’s have a look at the last four.
Monica:
Okay. So that’ll be the third one. We’ve already run two and then there’s three more. One of them is not yet scheduled. It’ll either be in October or November. The other two, the next one’s going to be on the 27th of October which is a Sunday straight after Sustainable House Day on the Saturday. So it can be a weekend of sustainability and stimulation. That one will be about permaculture and it’ll be, I’m yet to pin a few people down, but the idea is based on a workshop we ran a few years ago called Permaculture Speed Dating, where we match people up with permaculture designers to get some ideas about their life or their property or their garden, whatever it is.
And then the last one, you guys are actually involved, and Mik’s involved. It’s going to be called the “Sustainable Business Shift”. And that’s on an evening, Wednesday evening, the 6th of November. And that’ll be at the City of Geelong Golf Club.
Colin:
Are there any details on that yet?
Monica:
Yeah, we’re working with B Corp who are a global sustainability and socially good certification process. There are already some B Corp certified businesses in Geelong, but they would like to reach more. And we’re going to have some speakers and then some sustainable businesses having little stalls inside the actual restaurant.
Mik:
And we’ll be talking also, of course, about the possibilities of networking and getting to know each other better. There are some frontrunners also here in Geelong who are turning their businesses green or decarbonising, looking at circular economy, and all this. And I think the purpose of this particular meeting is to get some of those in the same room so they can get to know one another. You know, we can maybe build a little bit more both knowledge and confidence, plus some positive energy around that it’s actually also a good deal of fun to be in that space.
I attend many business events here in Geelong… For instance, the Chamber of Commerce has a monthly event and so on. And then there’s never a single mention of anything in this direction of that we actually need to change the way we do business. We can’t just continue. We need to look at our emissions, need to look at our plastic use, and how we become more circular in our thinking. What about our supply chain and all these questions? So I think since, you know, the bigger organisations in this town, the business organisations, are not taking this up at all, then this is a way of maybe starting something you could say from the grassroots where we begin to talk about, well, we talk about ‘the business revolution’. It’s a big word, I know, but that’s what our podcast has taken that name because we want to see some bold action in this field. And the politicians obviously don’t know what to say, or do, because they are sort of wishy washy because they don’t know what people will, how they will vote if they do this, or if they do that. So politicians are useless at the moment. And the only hope we have left is if some businesses begin to step up and do the right thing. And that brings us sort of a bit full circle to what we started with because one of the biggest sponsors of the Chamber of Commerce in Geelong is Viva Energy. So how are we going to encourage people to move away within that realm?
Colin:
We can’t, but we can start another movement without that kind of bias. And you could say that one business that did do the right thing was Alcoa, which did the right thing by closing down. But it didn’t feel like it was the right thing at the time. in the long term, in what Paul Keating used to call the big picture, the long term, Geelong losing Alcoa will probably be seen as being one of the most positive environmental things that Alcoa could have done.
Tony:
Geelong is very heavily fossil fuel based, if you look at Alcoa, Ford.
Yeah, and Ford.
Yeah, out of those ashes, the phoenix can rise and business has to be a big part of that. it’s kind of sad that it’s reflective of the times that the Chamber of Commerce, the group set up to represent business isn’t going down, doesn’t realise the importance of doing that. And in a way that will lead to their demise because it’s something that has to happen. It’s going to be legislated.
Colin:
It probably does, Tony, to be really honest. When you look at the way that our city has changed over the course of the 21st century, we went into the 21st century, as you say, very, very fossil-fuel based.
We still had Ford, we still had Shell. Viva hadn’t taken over Shell at that time. And we had Alcoa. What we have now is an insurance- and a health-based economy. You know, we’ve got the TAC and we’ve got WorkSafe and we’ve got more and more big businesses moving in into tower blocks. And they’re service economies, essentially.
There, look off, that’s put a cat among the pigeons, hasn’t it, Mik? We are changing, that’s what I’m saying. We’re just not, and I think the Chamber of Commerce does reflect that because when you look at its makeup, it’s got many of the members of City of Geelong employees or they’re from Barwon Health. It’s another big employer in Geelong. Yes, we are changing into a service-based economy from a manufacturing-based economy.
Colin:
And I got in front of you there, Mik. Sorry, what were you going to say?
Mik:
Now that we have Monica Winston with us in the studio and Transition Streets and what Transition Streets stands for in terms of, you could say, people at a personal level beginning to take action, becoming more proactive in creating both community and resilience and having a bit of a climate strategy at the personal level. You know, we are at a strange time right now where we’re seeing big companies around the world actually winding down on their ambitions. Suddenly, I heard the news from Denmark that two of the biggest companies working with energy, Vestas and Ørsted, they have sort of called off some of their big developments, both in America and in Europe. Volvo is giving up on its plans to sell only electric cars. Air New Zealand has dropped its 2030 targets completely, and so on. So there’s this sort of lack of ambition going through the business world at the moment or a little bit of disillusion maybe that things aren’t going as fast or as they should. all this, of course, boils back to lack of political will, lack of money.
So, Monica, what is it that Transition Street offers in this world of, you could say, where things are going this way or that way, we’re seeing more and more impacts of the climate crisis. Not only the news from far away, I don’t know if you heard the latest news from Greenland where the ice, because it’s melting, fell into the water and created a 200 meter tall wave, a real tsunami, 200 metres tall. Luckily, there were no people around because it was in a remote part of Greenland. And luckily, the 200 meter wave stayed inside a fjord. So it didn’t go out on the sea and create havoc. But these kind of news come from far away. And then we have the near news with the wild weather – and the strange weather. Suddenly it’s much hotter and all these different things. Global heating, and the confusion in the weather that comes from that, is here as well. So what’s the Transition Street response to all of this?
Monica:
Thanks, Mik. Just before I go down that track, I just want to add Deakin University and the Epworth hospital to Geelong’s blend of new… changing – new scenario enterprises.
Yeah, look, the way I see it, people are not separate. People… the same people who vote, the same people who work and run businesses and shop, and do things at home. They’re often doing things at all these different levels, you know. So, transition streets is really about connection, primarily, because when we’re connected with others, first of all, we can reduce the stress of what we’re reading, what we’re experiencing in terms of what’s happening in the world. We can also actually enjoy ourselves, we can have more influence on each other, we can share items, can share knowledge and resources. And if things get really bad, know, say my roof blows off and I know my neighbours or I know people who live around the corner, it’s a haven, you we can offer to each other. So first of all, connection, I think it’s a nurturing space. We’ve been very focused on not adding to the trauma that people are experiencing by being willing to expose themselves to what is going on, but to actually comfort people. And so there’s certain things that we’re not going to discuss on the Facebook page.
Trying to offer a space where people can meet like-minded others. Some people report before they came into transition street groups, they felt like a freak amongst their friends, you know, in the days when even recycling was unusual. And their friends would joke about them and make fun of them and some people would put up with that. And then they met other people through the transition streets Geelong network and they suddenly could have a big sigh of relief that they make people who also care?
Colin:
Well, I actually place myself in that basket. I’m seen as being somewhat eccentric because of my beliefs on the planet and the lifestyle that my wife and I choose. Really, it’s just common sense as far as I’m concerned.
For the majority of people in Geelong especially, I’m viewed as being out there and eccentric. And I don’t think I’m eccentric at all, I think I’m just bloody sensible.
Monica:
Absolutely. We met when you opened your house for Sustainable House Day, didn’t we?
Colin:
It’s gone completely carbon free since then. Our lives have become completely carbon free and we are much happier, believe it or not, because we’re not worried about high power prices. We’re not worried about polluting the country. We have far fewer worries all around. And look, if I were to be really honest with you, way, way, way back when I first left school, I trained as a butcher. I am at base a master butcher. I qualified as a master butcher when I was 21, and that’s a long, long time ago. I’m probably closer to being… I don’t know, not vegetarian, but not a meat eater nowadays. Meat plays a very small part in our diet. And it’s not something that we go around boasting about and saying, ‘I’m vegetarian’ or ‘I’m vegan’ or whatever. We just eat sensibly. And we eat, as you do, whole foods. We choose not to eat snacks or drink Coca-Cola, and that’s been the case for decades, never mind years. And it’s just not on the agenda for us. And yet we’re seen as being relatively strange because we don’t hit the mainstream, I guess. But I love it. And I wouldn’t change at all. I wouldn’t go back to when I was a chain smoking butcher, who became a newspaper person and the scales fell from their eyes.
Mik:
The story keeps changing and I think where we are at now is where certainly that’s one voice from the UK who is beginning to talk about that we need to, you know, tell the truth as it is, which is that we have as climate activists failed because, you know, all the efforts that we’ve put into trying to stop us from, you know, hitting this climate emergency point, it didn’t work. Emissions are still going up today. A spokesperson for this sort of new narrative is Rupert Read, who is an academic. He was a co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. And he has sort of left the Extinction Rebellion group and started something else, which he will talk about, because I want to play an excerpt of a speech that he gave at the Green Party Autumn Conference in the UK – it’s autumn up there right now – and he spoke about, well, telling the truth even when it hurts, and then maybe finding a new strategy.
Rupert Read:
Excerpt from the youtube-video: Rupert Read | Climate Truthfulness & Its Positive Relation to Climate Adaptation | Green Party Conf.
Ordinary people, when they think about climate, they hear us talking about, well, 2050 and net zero, mitigation, colourless, odourless gas, very important to reduce it. It’s all very remote. I’ll tell you what’s not remote, is water coming in your front door, right? That’s not remote at all. The more we center climate adaptation, climate resilience building, climate preparedness, the more we will wake people up and get them to realise, ‘My God, it’s here! It’s getting worse, it’s real! It’s not some future abstract thing, it’s not about other people, it’s about us.’
And if you say to me, ‘well yes, but most people haven’t actually been affected’. Yeah, that’s true. More and more are being affected all the time, but virtually everybody at least now knows someone who has been affected. For example, here’s a little example. Many of you, like me, will have friends of Pakistani origin, everybody who is of Pakistani origin now has someone in their family who was flooded out back in Pakistan. So anybody from the Pakistani diaspora is only one degree of separation away from dangerous climate change now because of those impacts. And that is one of many, many examples and they’re multiplying all the time. A crucial thing that many of us who are in Extinction Rebellion learned is that this idea of, ‘If you get 3.5 per cent active, then you’re gonna win’, is an illusion. It’s not true. Even the person who said it, Erica Chenoworth, doesn’t actually believe what’s been attributed to her. She actually says, ‘No, that 3.5 per cent needs to be the tip of a much bigger iceberg, which needs to be at least 25 per cent of the population.’
What we say in the Climate Majority Project is, you need to get at least the kind of positive acquiescence involving voting for the right thing, if you’re actually gonna get the kind of action that you need on it. There is no way of dealing with something as huge as this through technofixes or technocratic or purely elite solutions. Involving the lease is crucial. We do a lot of that work in the client majority project. I work with senior insurers.
One of our main incubatees works with senior corporate lawyers. We talk with senior politicians, senior civil servants, senior media people. You need to have those elites on site and to get more more defectors from them. But unless you have active involvement from the majority as well, you are going to get sunk. You’re going to get sunk in one way or another through protests or through being voted out of office or whatever it is. Look at the Arab Spring. What happened in the Arab Spring? People said, ‘There could never be revolutions in the Arab world, those people are under the sun, those dictators have serious power over them, it’ll never happen.’
And they were all wrong. What the Arab Spring proved is if you have a population who are deeply discontented, even if you have a really seemingly effective authoritarian regime, sooner or later it’s going to go under. People might say, yes, well okay, but we’ve still got China, right? The Chinese government, they’ve got an absolutely iron grip. The Chinese government are terrified of their own people.
That is why, for example, they banned the showing, in effect, banned the showing of Avatar in China. Incredible fact, they banned the showing of Avatar in ordinary cinemas in China. Why? Because they were afraid it would ignite land revolts. They’re terrified of their own people. They think they have to keep economic growth figures high so that their own people get satisfied. But then they’re also becoming aware that their own people, that their people are getting more more dissatisfied because of the degree of air pollution in their cities. And they’re like, which of these things do we do, which can give… which has priority. There is no government in the world that can afford to ignore the will of its citizens, not even the Chinese. This is a basic way in which democracy prevails everywhere. So we need to have a way forward, which effectively involves elites and the majority. And if we do not, we will be overturned. We will be stopped in our tracks in the kind of way that happened eventually to Extinction Rebellion and even more so to Just Stop Oil.
So my pitch to you here today is we have an unbelievably difficult task before us. The odds are absolutely stacked against us. We have to make a good faith endeavour to involve the majority and get the majority to some degree at least actively on side. Unless we succeed in doing that, we will not get the transformation that we are after.
If you believe that, then I would urge you to get involved with the climate majority project, go on our website, register, et cetera. If you believe that, I would urge you to argue for that and to get involved in whatever way, wherever that is in your life with, among other things, crucially, projects involved in the space of adaptation, resilience, and preparedness for the reasons that I gave. And, and often this can be the same thing, ways of talking about and manifesting and acting on the situation which are truthful about that situation and which builds a sense of the population can have of trust in the people who are telling the truth about how bad the situation is truly powerful thing, the really awesome thing would be if Green Party leaders and Green Party MPs and Green Party councillors and Green Party activists, if all of us were to increasingly say not just You know what, we’ve got to take adaptation deeply serious now, seriously now, it cannot be avoided. But if we were to say it, if we were to add to that, and part of the reason why is that we need to be clear folks, we are deep in the danger zone, and we in the Green Party are to fess up, we have been unable to do, and I know about you, but I feel very emotional when I say this, we have been unable to do the thing we longed to do, to get into power by 1990 or at least 2020 or 2000, to not just have four MPs at a time when we are absolutely up against it. But that is where we are. We need to be honest about it. We need to tell the truth. If we do, it will be immensely powerful. And it always starts with you. Thank you.
Mik:
Monica?
Monica:
I don’t quite align with the idea that we failed. And that’s not to say that we’ve succeeded, but there’s a lot of parties in the room and some of them are not willing to negotiate. Just because you have a certain number of people willing to negotiate. If the other parties are not involved.
That’s not a failure on the part of the people who willing to do everything that they can. That’s a failure on the part of other human beings and their corporations who are not willing to do everything they can.
Mik:
The Trumps and the alike?
Monica:
Yeah, we don’t want to abuse ourselves. I think that’s really important that we don’t… Things are hard enough as it is and we can’t take responsibility for other people and make ourselves feel worse, it’s not going to achieve anything.
Colin:
Yeah. I think that it’s worth remembering, and remembering often, that the most effective modern government that Australia has had was led by Julia Gillard in coalition with the Greens. And they put up the most forward thinking progressive policies that were dismantled by the Abbot government immediately afterwards. But if we hadn’t voted in Abbott, if he hadn’t come up with Trump-like lies about this is a carbon tax and it’s going to make everything more expensive and blah, blah, blah, and we’ve swallowed it, if that hadn’t been the case, we wouldn’t be staring at the same set of figures and the same lifestyle now if we had just continued with the Gillard government or the Gillard Brown government as it was back in those days. So we can do it. It’s just that the fossil fuel industry is incredibly good at, what should we say, funding smears which work incredibly well.
Smears and lies, the same sort of thing that fuels Donald Trump. We’ve seen it in an Australian element decades ago. And it had the effect of pushing Julia Gillard on one side onto the world stage when she should still be a very, very potent politician of Australia.
Jingle:
Scott Morrison: This is coal. Don’t be afraid. Don’t be scared.
Senator Whitehouse: At the heart of this conflict is a battle between truth and science and power and lies.
Mik Aidt:
That’s all we could fit in one Hour. Any last comment from you, Monica, as we are departing this sort of mixed hour of both good stories and somewhat sad stories. But I believe that, Monica, you can cheer us all up?
Monica Winston:
OK, I’ll have a go. First of all, there’s a poll that Geelong Advertiser have put out on Facebook. You can have a say about what you think about the gas import terminal there. Secondly, the plant-based whole-food diet is amazing because there is a huge and growing community of medical professionals who have done the research to show that you can prevent, arrest and reverse the major Western diseases using this.
So for example, my mother was in aged care. We got them to change her diet and in four weeks she had no more symptoms of type 2 diabetes and she did no extra exercise. That can be done. It’s been proven over and over again. You can reverse cardiovascular disease, diabetes, some cancers. It’s so much about the food.
Mik Aidt:
And inflammation? You know, a lot of people suffer with one sort of chronic inflammation or the other.
Monica:
Yeah, you know, there is no drug on the planet that we get marketed to every day, all day, wherever we go. But crappy food is everywhere. So it’s worse in a way, but we can take control of that. There’s something we can take control of, Mik!
Tony:
That’s right. That’s right. It’s like we’ve got all these assumptions that, well, all these things we just assume have to happen. But once we start to look at them closely and as Colin said, the scales drop off our eyes.
Yeah, that information being educated is such a crucial part in it. And it’s so much easier, so much harder than to just continue with what we’ve assumed is the right way to go.
Monica:
And you know what, if we want to have a big impact, we have to be well. Because as soon as someone’s unwell, it’s not just them, it’s the whole family. So if we want to win this situation, we need to really look after ourselves.
Colin:
I’m a very elderly person these days.
Monica:
‘These days?’
Colin:
I’ve been involved in the Geelong Seniors Festival for more than 25 years and that’s longer than most because that it tends to be run by seniors and they tend to die off after a bit, but I’m one who didn’t. And so I’m doing a couple of things during this year’s Senior Festival that I’ve tried to sort of aim at getting people to eat properly and exercise, because you put those two together and it’s a recipe for not dying off and not losing your faculties. So I’m holding a thing called, It’s a free thing. It’s funded by the city’s Positive Ageing. I’m hosting a Sunday afternoon thing called “Laughter, the Best Medicine for Avoiding Old Age”. And so it’ll be really fun and it will be me talking about how to do it, basically. And that’s all comes out of sustainable living.
Mik:
And on that note, and in the spirit of what you talk about, Monica, with Transition Street and becoming closer to your neighbours and all this, science has shown again and again that if you’re looking for happiness, one of the best ways to live a happy life is a life where you give rather than a life where you take. So I believe that that’s also the beauty of being connected to your neighbours. It actually makes you feel really good if you’ve made too much food at home and you go over to your neighbour with a meal and say, here you are. And you can see the big smile on their faces and it just makes you feel happy.
Monica:
True. Very true. Absolutely. And just on what you were saying, Colin, they’re now saying dementia is called type three diabetes. It’s a lifestyle, mostly lifestyle created condition. And I think the way you live, just coming back to the way you live Colin, you will have influenced a lot of people I imagine over the years.
Colin:
I’ll go along with that. Because really, one of the things that really is crucial about living a good life is having a good social connection around you, family and friends. It’s one of the things that you do notice if you really make a study of ageing. The people who really last a long time, eat well, exercise and have good social connections and a good social life.
Mik:
Monica, what would be your ‘Be…’-something?
Monica:
Be satisfied. Be content.
Colin:
You know what enough is. Like, be content. Yes, be content is very helpful.
Monica:
Even in the eye of the storm.
SONG:
Mats Rosenblad and Majoma: ‘The Storm’
It’s time to go
Storm is coming with increasing speed
The storm is coming now
storm is coming
Yeah It’s time to pull the brakes and deep
In the rich man’s pockets
Turn it tight
It’s coming, the storm is coming
Hey, we didn’t
The politicians need to show some courage
Let it shine on everyone
Storm is coming, storm is coming
Tears, I see tears in the children’s eyes
I see fear in the children’s face. What have we done?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Events we have talked about in The Sustainable Hour
Events in Victoria
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