Ignorance and
Avoidance are often THE BIG ISSUES that stop really productive investment when the media/ audience is involved.The media /audience would prefer a
quickfix rather than real fix.,
Everyone is interested in conservation, but not everyone knows enough about it to act sensibly for the long term .
IGNORANCE
The media makes out that our choices are about BIG issues like global warming or greenhouse gases or ozone layers. This is often just to get people aware of the dangers with systems that are actually amazingly resiliant . It helps get public attention by making things out to be " sensitive" and "threatened". but where is the edge ,whose close to and why ? If we knew the answers here we would know what to do to prevent more casualities .
AVOIDANCE
So why not switch off ? Not our problem is it? Switch on because much threat now is avoidable - pointed surgery is absolutely necessary still!. Death and danger is still real to small communities all around the world . Most of the real choices for the minority of our population who live on the edge , like ecosystems, are small scale , with death and threat going completely unoticed unless we understand the process ( not the inevitable last in the chain of events ). The media driven preoocupation with death and danger means unhelpful reactions drive misguided and wasteful quick fix, hopelessness and
algophobia reactions.
Its like having taxi drivers trying to deliver babies - Focusing on the last minute may get press but it means ineffectiveness waste and alienation. The real need is to maintain momentum in the
professional matter of healthcare and long term land us change process ( key sustainability matters ) to flounder .
Take the silly ignornant panic about population growth in the middle of last century - Japan did not need more land to grow its economy ; Many huge western cities can be healthy places to live ( otherwise why don't people move out?)
So its actually possible to do something about env problems if we keep doing and training like we have been -
no need to change direction.
The reality is as JUNG intimated--- the problem is not nature but our handling of it . the glass is both half full and half empty. Some would have the watershed issue as all downhill,but no need to despair of man. He can be both an agent for protection or destruction as he has choice and that choice is critical for the future and powerful enough for progress to occur. As indicated above in relation to cities ,our big country can and IS being managed better in many areas as the decades go on .
So land management changes are needed - but
based first on locally effective action .
Land managers increasingly bear the burden for action on a local front . But are they being supported or condemned ? Are they pushing outr country to the brink as the worldview is suggesting . is the situation hopeless or parlysed by audience algophobia . Who needs the reality therapy - the city or the country or both ?
State of the Environment Advisory Council, 1996, p6-5
"Australia is a dry continent with infertile soils and high climatic variability.
These factors themselves do not put pressure on our land resource,
but human activities that fail to take them into account do "
Ignorance about what is needed in the country is best dealt with by land mangers having indipendant but
competent intermedairiesto both advise them and their concerned city cousins . Justice and education used to be where environmental dollars were spent, but not the major targets anymore!
This should not be so - ignorance panic and algophobia achieve nothing in the long term but education , protection , prohibition and prevention ( rural adjustment) will continue to make our world a better place in which all life can thrive !
Labels: avoidance, ignorance
