Page 3893 - Week 12 - Thursday, 23 November 2006
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The government has the important role of implementing across the jurisdiction the larger policy decisions related to transport, urban planning, the design of public buildings and so on. In that way it can directly impact on the amount of greenhouse gases we produce. But it is really at the local level that the actions that involve everyday people occur and there is really no way of avoiding this intermediate step between the government and the household.
We talk about the things that individuals can do. They can change their light globes and they can leave the car at home. But those actions need to be socially acceptable so that they are not forced. We all know that human beings on the whole have a herd mentality. We do not like to admit it, but we do like to do pretty much what the Joneses next door do. That is why it is important at the neighbourhood level that we look at ways in which people can live more ecologically sustainable lives with fewer carbon emissions.
While climate change may be the pre-eminent environmental problem of our time, it is also an economic problem with social implications. I believe that the solutions are social and economic and that there need be no conflict between all these aims of government. As I said, the Kyoto levels are only a start. The new science is indicating that a 90 per cent reduction by 2050 is realistic if we actually are determined to do something about climate change, something that will make the world liveable for our children’s children and for all the many other species that we share the earth with.
Unlike Mr Howard, I do not believe we can put it off until 2050—he seems to have got the wrong message—because there is at least a 30-year lag in terms of climate change. The atmosphere we are experiencing today was actually set in place by emissions that were produced some decades ago. That is what I mean. We have to act.
How can the neighbourhood that we live in facilitate or hamper efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? For a start let us look at the environmental setting. The way that suburbs are designed often disguises the fact that we live in a bioregion. More specifically, we live in a water catchment, an ecosystem. A computerised model is then applied to the landscape to set out the suburb. We have had the Radburn model and a number of other models. We know that since about the 1950s suburbs have been designed to facilitate cars moving around our cities. At that time they really could not see that there would be an end to that. Oil looked like it would go forever and the car brought so much freedom. We would all love to keep doing that because it has opened up our lives, but the fact is that we cannot.
Watercourses were turned into drains and gutters and roads defined unnatural barriers compared to the ridgelines and drainage lines that would have formed the boundaries of an ecosystem. Paradoxically, while all this design was meant to facilitate movement, it also impeded movement—what I call the moat effect—on major roads that divide suburbs. For instance, I live in Narrabundah and I find Sturt Avenue, which separates my suburb from Griffith, very difficult to cross on foot because no-one thought that people might do that. In fact, for the whole of that road, from Jerrabomberra Drive to Canberra Avenue, there is no safe crossing. To me that is a traffic moat.
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