Wife Mother Activist

What Would You Say to Julia Gillard Today?

2011-07-19T09:58:00.001+10:00

Just after Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd had taken over leadership of the Labour party, I saw her at Evandale market. They were about to interview her and she was standing in the doorway. There was a cameraman and people milling about, and a pram in the way too, (mine). By the time I’d negotiated all those to get near, somebody else was shaking her hand and engaging her in earnest conversation.

What would I have said if I’d got there first? I spent the car trip home mulling it over and came up with something like this:

‘Well done! At last the Labour party has got a leadership team in place. And you’re a woman too - great! Don’t worry about not having children. A fantastic career and lots of disposable income for shoes is just as enjoyable. Buy yourself some sling-backs and get to it. Interested to see what you’re going to do with that background in law, industrial relations and union negotiation. Seems like a good skill set for a Prime Minister. Good luck.’

Something like that.

That was then, and this is now. Over the weekend the carbon tax details have been announced. What would I say to her today?

Well, contrary to all the people who’ve been giving it to her in the neck in the polls, I’d like to say that I think she’s got what it takes to be a standout Prime Minister for Australia, at a pivotal time in the world's history. I don’t have a great political brain, and I’m not an economist or an analyst. I’m just calling it how I see it in my own, housewifely way.

She’s got the experience in standing up to the corporate end of town. She’s got the experience in negotiating tough deals. I suspect she’s committed to doing something about climate change. I’m hoping that the carbon tax is the first step in dragging Australia into place alongside other developed countries in finally facing up to creating a new world.

Paul Gilding, influential ecologist and commentator, has a theory that it will be a ‘Big Five’ group of countries which leads global change and creates a new world order. Under Julia Gillard, perhaps Australia has a chance of being among them. We’ve got Buckley’s with Tony Abbott, that’s for sure.

I believe Julia has started to leave Tony Abbott for dead, and that I’m relishing, as I’m sure she is too. He's got the intellectual dexterity of a brick, so it's not hard.

The one thing I’m having trouble with in Julia’s leadership is the Malaysia solution for refugees, that other live export trade. The new world has to be built around community and compassion. Wars are going to increase as resources get scarcer. Climate change migration is going to become huge. Vast tracts of people will move around the globe chasing water, energy and viable living conditions. It’s going to happen between countries, and within countries. We need to practice assimilating people and allowing them to contribute to our new communities, and our new steady state economies, not turning them away.

I believe the recent spate of programs on SBS and the ABC is part of a change of tune in the debate in Australia. And I hope Julia jumps on that movement and creates a forward looking nation.

That’s what I’d say to Julia today.

What would you say? Leave your thoughts below!

Go Back to Where You Came From

2011-06-26T15:10:00.001+10:00

At last, reality TV has found something useful to do – it’s found social justice, and they’re a match made in heaven. Or are they?

The question is, how much can reality TV affect people’s views? Not just those taking part in SBS’s ground-breaking program Go Back Where You Came From, but those watching it.

If it showed us anything, it’s that you need a ready-made sense of compassion and all-rounded decency to be able to shift in your views. Some of those taking part had that. And some didn’t. Just like the rest of us.

You gotta love the horsey woman, who wanted to shoot everyone in the detention camp bordering her property at the outset. Easy access to her emotions and an immediate sense of fellow-feeling saw her come to her senses quicker than you can say ‘offshore solution’.

What a shame for the army bloke who couldn’t trust, acknowledge or even access his emotions as a justifiable input into his rational processes. That’s not an all-rounded person.

You’ve got to take your hat off to the people involved for exposing themselves to the experience. But after you’ve taken your hat off, you’re probably going to have an opinion.

So if I’m being judgemental here, it’s because the program invites us to make judgements. Is that good? I believe so. It ignites debate about the refugee issue, and surely that’s what the program makers wanted?

Australia is about to send refugees and asylum seekers offshore to be ‘processed’ in Malaysia. I reckon the makers of ‘Go Back’ want us making judgements - before that legislation is passed and Australians everywhere open a stubby and settle back with the problem out of sight and out of mind.

And then there’s Raquel, the Bogan Princess. You can take the girl away from the bogans, but you can’t take the bogan out of the girl. Can ya? F*cken hell, no. Will Raquel have learnt anything from her experience? I doubt it. I predict it was too confronting for her, but I’ll be happy to be proven wrong. She retreated to ‘it’s not my problem.’

Sadly, refugees will be very much her problem, and the problem of young Australians like her, when Australia is so beset by drought, coastal flooding and lack of fresh drinking water that we start moving around our own country in huge numbers and domestic migration becomes an issue. Let’s hope she’s developed a sense of fellow-feeling by then.

But the biggest bigot of all was the dumb blond Deputy Leader of the Young Liberal Party Roderick Schneider, who provided the program’s most show-stopping moment, and its most inappropriate t-shirts.

In his conversation with the African refugee who was deputy leader of a political party in his country of origin and who described being tortured, Schneider didn’t know where to put himself, didn’t know where to look, and worst of all, almost didn’t know when to stop. Clearly he had no idea that such atrocities occurred, and didn’t have the maturity to deal with being confronted by a personal account.

That’s a situation any of us would find confronting and difficult. But we’re not deputy leader of a political party. If you position yourself as leader and take a stand on a particular issue in expectation of people following you on it, shouldn’t you at least know the facts? If you can’t have visited every war torn country in the world, shouldn’t you have listened to enough Radio National to have informed yourself adequately?

And if you’re to be a leader of men, shouldn’t you have the maturity and simple human grace to be able to show your compassion to a fellow human being?

Schneider didn’t have any of those things. He became fidgety and distracted, laughing nervously and looking at the camera for help. God help us if we’re to be led by such an imbecile. One can only hope he grows up before he gets voted in.

And then there’s David Corbell, who fronted the program with graceful restraint. What thoughts must have been whirling round his head and what sick feelings in the pit of his stomach? He did more listening than most presenters, perhaps wanting to let these people of Australia speak for themselves. Sadly, they also speak for us. That’s a broad cross-section up there on the screen. Thank god for Gleny.

What is undeniably fact is the quality of Australian news programs compared to that provided by the BBC. That’s where we Australians get our broader view of the world from – our media. And in that, we are undeniably impeded. It’s a shame that we have to get our facts from a reality TV show – rather than our news programs.

Let’s hope Go Back helps to set the record straight.

The Unlikely Optimist

2011-04-05T14:53:00.000+10:00

Unlikely though it may seem, renowned ecologist and climate change activist Paul Gilding has written a book with hope at its heart

The Great Disruption; Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World
By Paul Gilding
Bloomsbury Press, 304 pp, $25.00

It’s hard to imagine a person who could sum up the likely shape of the future. As natural and man-made disasters pile one upon the other, geo-political eruptions accumulate and national economies spiral, peak and sink as if nobody’s at the wheel, a reliable view might be welcomed as prescient.

Imagine that such a person existed and that against all the odds, they were an optimist. Imagine they wrote a book which took a bare faced look at the almighty pickle we’re in and came up with a plan. That’s the book Paul Gilding has written and he’s uniquely placed to have done so.

Gilding has been campaigning, consulting and advising in various guises and forums since a prodigiously early age. The Great Disruption; Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World - published worldwide last week by Bloomsbury, distils forty years of reading and reflecting upon the latest science and being at the vanguard of activism.

One-time leader of Greenpeace and paradoxically also a trusted consultant to many of the world’s most highly resourced corporations, Gilding’s expertise straddles the environment and the economy; latter years have seen him become one of the world’s most sought-after and influential commentators on the subject of ecology and our impact upon the planet.

It’s no accident that he’s chosen to write a book with optimism as its central premise. Gilding has made a study of leaders with a gift for bringing people along with them. Hope, he says when we talk by phone from our respective homes in Tasmania, is a stance he opts to take; a belief system he works within. It’s more effective and it makes him feel better. More importantly, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela did not win their particular movements by advocating despair.

The book is described by publishers Bloomsbury Press as a bracing assessment of the planetary crisis, and the once-in-an-epoch chance it offers to build a better world. Early reviews describe it as essential reading, a refreshing counterpoint to ‘doom-and-gloom’ fore-runners.

Gilding’s crystallised his ‘Great Disruption’ theory in 2009. Living beyond the means of our planet’s ecosystems and resources was bringing about catastrophic planetary impacts which could only end in global economic crisis, he said. Other commentators circulating the same view included Pulitzer winning columnist Thomas L Friedman of the New York Times. His surmise was that the Global Financial Crisis was not merely a recession, but the moment ‘where Mother Earth and Father Greed have hit the wall at once.’

Gilding first rose to prominence at age 33 when he became international head of Greenpeace. He led them for some years but ultimately disagreed with the Board on their policy of not engaging with the corporate world - except as an opponent. He ruffled feathers in the environmental world by going on to set up Ecos, a consultancy which worked with some of the world’s largest corporations, hard wiring sustainability into their business planning.

Making the transition from activist to businessman seamlessly, Gilding quickly gained credibility in the corporate world. He believes his activist credentials helped him, that business leaders were fascinated to talk to a former head of Greenpeace safely inside corporate walls. His own ability to meld into the ostensibly opposing worlds of activism and business is not something he sees as in any way paradoxical. ‘I think activism and entrepreneurship are very similar.’

Ecos’ client list included DuPont, SC Johnson, Ford and several major Australian financial companies, some of whom changed the core nature of their business, recognising sustainability as a key factor in commercial survival.

Mike Hawker, former CEO of Insurance Australia Group, worked with him from 2002. ‘What made Paul interesting was his realisation that he could create more meaningful impact on society if he could get business leaders to understand the economic value of sustainable operating standards. They had the money and resources to affect more radical change.’

Perhaps largely because of Gilding’s efforts and those like him, and the gradual metamorphosis taking place in thinking at Board level, the business community increasingly became a catalyst in the matter of climate change. ‘Just to have them on board was an important change in the debate in Australia,’ he says. ‘It changed the nature of the debate from being environment versus business, to one where if we don’t act on climate change and sustainability, that will threaten the economy.’

Through his years with Ecos, Gilding continued to be in demand for public speaking, his expertise as both an ecologist and business leader giving him a uniquely integrated perspective. In 2007 he sold Ecos to focus on his work as a writer and communicator, and joined the core faculty of the Prince of Wales’ Business and Sustainability Programme at Cambridge University. An invitation-only programme for the upper echelons of the world’s corporate executives, it’s widely regarded as the premier networking forum for sustainability in business.

There comes a point in talking to Gilding when his vision of the future slides into focus. Despite the optimism, it’s not pretty and might go some way to explaining why denial and scepticism still feature large in the public’s mind. Outside my windows is a bucolic scene; alpacas grace the paddocks and a brown hawk the skies. Gilding’s measured voice pours from the phone expounding his post-Orwellian theory on why the human race must shortly move into controlling the climate intelligently rather than accidentally.

This, he believes, is only part of the catastrophic change lying head and the unfolding drama of our response. It includes resource wars, economic calamities and conflict between nations; potentially billions dying in famine; and a dramatic changes in lifestyle akin to those experienced in wartime.

Gilding has studied World War II as an example of our capacity to respond to a crisis when forced to. War is not a nice analogy but it’s the best one we’ve got, he says. The difference between the current impending crisis of climate change and that of World War Two is that there will be no single event such as Pearl Harbour, as catalyst.

Somewhat incredibly, he has always maintained a position of optimism, choosing to believe in human ingenuity and our capacity as a race to effect a solution. Like many, he believes that the technology required to provide resources for a new world already exists. He also recognises in himself the anthropocentricism that is required in order for us to make the next extraordinary leap. ‘I recognise that this is an evolutionary leap that we need to make, and I want my kids to be around in that process. I want there to be a human society which is loving, caring and environmentally sensitive, so I am about saving the species.’ This places him at odds with the likes of James Lovelock, whose Gaia theory says that the earth is a self-regulating system and that we have ‘thrown a hand grenade into it and it’s all over.’ In Gilding’s world, that’s not a view which wins you friends and influences people.

Family comes up in Gilding’s conversation and also in his public speaking. It’s clear that he’s an involved parent, and that family and quietly held spiritual beliefs sustain him. The family’s relocation early this year from Sydney to Tasmania was very much in preparation for a more self-sufficient lifestyle in the coming years of shortages, conflict and global change.

Mike Hawker says of him, ‘Paul has spent his life committed to educating people around the world about the collision course between global population growth and the finite resources of the planet. This journey has taken him from demonstrating against Governments and big business, to working with them from within, or creating his own new generation businesses. He’s a risk taker and a fascinating person who is passionate about the planet we inhabit.’

Gilding is currently on a two month tour to promote the book worldwide. As natural disasters gather force and impact upon civilisation in the southern hemisphere, the timing could not be more prescient.

The Great Disruption is published worldwide by Bloomsbury Press from April 2011.

Intelligent Life

2009-10-03T20:39:00.011+10:00

Paul Gilding has headed Greenpeace and advised the world’s largest corporations. He’s now a leading thinker on the planet’s sustainability.

To hear Paul Gilding speak at the Sydney University Ideas form in April this year, you’d be forgiven for thinking he’s an ordinary bloke. Despite the seriousness of the subject, he’s using terms every tin miner, graduate, housewife or corporate executive can understand. It quickly becomes clear that this is the nature of his gift for bringing people into the debate. When he refers to sea level rise as “a shitload” or tells us that if the global economy continues to grow on its current model, “we are stuffed,” he’s not being flippant or uninformed. Far from it.

It’s an intelligence honed by life rather than formal education that gives him this ease with ideas and people, and has put him in leadership positions in the ostensibly opposing worlds of activism and business. Success in both fields is not such a paradox to Gilding. “I do think activism and entrepreneurship are very similar,” he says.

Leadership
At 33, Gilding became international head of Greenpeace, leading them for some years but ultimately disagreeing with the Board on their policy of not engaging with the corporate world, except as an opponent. He ruffled some feathers by going on to set up Ecos, a consultancy which worked with some of the world’s largest corporations, hardwiring sustainability into their business planning.

Gilding made the transition from activist to businessman seamlessly and quickly gained credibility ‘inside the tent’ in the corporate world, but reckons his activist credentials helped him. “There was a fascination for business people in talking to a former head of Greenpeace safely inside the corporation.”

Mike Hawker, former CEO of Insurance Australia Group, worked with him from 2002. “What made Paul interesting was his realisation that he could create more meaningful impact on society if he could get business leaders to understand the economic value of sustainable operating standards, rather than protesting against them. They had the money and resources to affect more radical change.”

Ecos’ client list included DuPont, SC Johnson, Ford and several major Australian financial companies, some of whom changed the core nature of their business, recognising sustainability as a key factor in commercial survival.

Business community engagement
In the past five years, the business community has increasingly become a catalyst in the climate change debate. “Just to have them on board saying this is an important issue was an important change in the debate in Australia,” says Gilding. “It changed from being an environment versus a business debate, to one where if we don’t act on climate change and sustainability, that will threaten the economy.”

Even so, the engagement of the business community is not going to force change. “The business community would argue that the conditions aren’t right for them to do much. They can make more money by being dirty than they can by being clean.”

Great Disruption
During his time in the business sector, Gilding continued to be in demand for public speaking, his expertise in both environmentalism and business giving him a unique perspective and integrated view of the world and the future. With an eye firmly on the main game, in 2007 he sold Ecos to focus on his work as a writer and communicator.

In June 2008 he sent an email on his theory The Great Disruption to a thousand contacts worldwide, asserting that the effects of environmental and climate change, and the fate of the global economy, were inextricably linked. With fuel and resource prices spiralling upwards, he contended, the global economy had ‘entered the crash zone’ and was hitting its global resource limits.

Gilding’s theory was picked up on by Pulitzer winning columnist Thomas L Friedman of the New York Times. He had already surmised that the Global Financial Crisis was more than a mere recession, describing it as the moment “where Mother Earth and Father Greed have hit the wall at once.”

Fundamental to both Gilding and Friedman’s theorising is the now universally accepted theory that we are drawing on the earth’s resources at approximately 150per cent of its capacity. Our global economy based on a model of infinite growth has outgrown its finite resource - the earth itself - and become unsustainable in the truest sense.

Rationality
Gilding has been labelled a pragmatist, an idealist and a subversive radical in the press. Whatever the case, he has been interpreting the science for some 35 years, and is clear about distinguishing between science and opinion. “We have a scientific community that has analysed this issue to death, and come to a very clear conclusion by consensus. There is a certain level of risk that we are going to have very serious impacts with social and economic consequences. And there is a material level of risk that we will have catastrophic consequences. A rational response would be to reduce the risk by cutting CO2 urgently. The most crucial point in the whole debate is that we are not framing our response rationally. We have become irrational in our response, and that’s incredibly dangerous.”

Gilding regards the reporting of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Control (IPCC) as the adopted baseline, but adds that it is always out of date, because science is always ahead of it. The most recent science is no longer about reduction in the economy’s CO2 emissions, it’s about the elimination of net emissions in a few decades and removing billions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every year for decades after that.

New reality
There comes a point in talking to Gilding when his vision of the future slides into focus and you understand why he refers to it as ugly. It includes resource wars, economic calamities and geo-political tension. “I do believe it’s going to be catastrophic by today’s standards. Potentially billions will die in famine, there will be conflict between nations, there will be a dramatic change in lifestyle enforced by a war-like effort in response.”

Gilding cites World War II as an example of our capacity to respond to a crisis when forced to. He believes that a war-like response is required now. “We should be on a war-footing, not setting policy.” The difference between the crisis facing us and that of WWII, is that there will be no single event to trigger a response. “There isn’t going to be a bombing of Pearl Harbour.”

Technology
The technology already exists to allow us to produce renewable energy. “We can fix this issue with all currently invented technologies. We know how to do zero CO2 energy,” says Gilding, a view upheld by the IPCC.

As our response to climate change becomes later and more urgent, the measures required for our continued existence take on a post-Orwellian feel. “We are going to move into climate control, there’s no question in my mind. And for an environmentalist, that is a nightmare. The earth should self regulate and we shouldn’t interfere with it that way. But we’re going to have to, to keep civilisation vaguely stable. The question is, do we do it intelligently or do we do it stupidly?”

Optimism
Somewhat incredibly, considering the material he faces on a daily basis, Gilding has always maintained his position as an optimist. “I’m an optimist relative to people like James Lovelock, famous UK scientist who invented the Gaia theory that the earth is a self-managing system. He says it’s all over, and that we will now collapse as a society and end up with somewhere between 200 million and a billion people if we’re lucky.”

Gilding chooses to believe in human ingenuity, and our capacity as a race to effect a solution. “I am philosophically a human, so I am anthropocentric. I recognise that this is an evolutionary leap that we need to make, and I want my kids to be around in that process. I want there to be a human society which is loving, caring and environmentally sensitive, so I am about saving the species.”

Family comes up in Gilding’s conversation and also in his public speaking. It’s clear that he’s an involved parent, and that family and quietly held spiritual beliefs sustain him.

Optimism is a key component of his work as a motivator too. “Hope is a stance. It’s a belief system I choose to work within, because it’s more effective - it makes me feel better. And most importantly, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela did not win their particular movements by advocating despair.”

Gilding is now a member of the core faculty of Cambridge University’s sustainability focussed Business in the Environment Program, an invitation-only program for the upper echelons of the world’s corporate executives, and widely regarded as the premier networking forum for sustainability in business. He’s also still a regular speaker on the international circuit.

Mike Hawker says of him, “Paul has spent his life committed to educating people around the world about the collision course between global population growth and the finite resources of the planet. This journey has taken him from demonstrating against Governments and big business, to working with them from within, or creating his own new generation businesses. He’s a risk taker and a fascinating person who is passionate about the planet we inhabit."

It’s an extraordinary journey, from activist leader to businessman, motivator, thinker and writer. Gilding continues to speak to tin miners and graduates, housewives and corporate leaders. And he continues to wait for us to catch up, in the hope that we can make the next extraordinary step together, sooner rather than later.

© Fiona Stocker 2009

This article appeared in TableAus, the magazine of Australian Mensa, in Nov/Dec 2009.