13th International ACTS Conference: Keynote Presentation by Professor Ian Lowe

[00:00:00] So without further ado, let's kick off with our first keynotes presenter, extremely, extremely [00:00:22] in awe of this gentleman and just absolutely delighted that we have Professor Ian Lowe joining [00:00:28] us this year. So Professor Lowe is the Emeritus Professor of Science, Technology and Society [00:00:34] at Griffith University. He's President of the Australian Conservation Foundation and a Fellow [00:00:40] of the Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering. Ian was made an Officer of the [00:00:46] Order of Australia in 2001 for services to science and technology, especially environmental [00:00:52] science. In 2000, he received the Prime Minister's Environmental Award for an Outstanding [00:00:58] Individual Achievement and the Queensland Premier's Millennium Award for Excellence in Science. [00:01:05] And I'm not kidding when I say there are so many more accolades and things that I could [00:01:08] say about this man that it would take me another five to ten minutes. But without going on too [00:01:13] much, can I please say I'm thrilled to welcome Professor Ian Lowe to the stage. Please give [00:01:17] him a huge round of applause. [00:01:26] Thank you very much both for the invitation and the very generous introduction. I'd also like to [00:01:34] acknowledge the traditional owners of the land we're meeting on and pay my respect to their elders past [00:01:39] and present. Paying respect to elders is not an integral part of whitefella tradition, but I have to say the idea appeals to me more [00:01:45] as far as I totter unsteadily into that category myself. My basic message is that acknowledging the traditional [00:01:54] owners is now a bit of a ritual and even coalition ministers usually remember to do it, but it should be more than a ritual, [00:02:02] particularly if we're talking about sustainability. Because if you think about it, the original Australians [00:02:07] worked out over tens of thousands of years that for a society to endure it needs to have customs and [00:02:14] practice and a system of law that allows them to live in balance with natural systems. And that really [00:02:21] is the message of sustainability, that we need customs and practice and a system of law that allows us to [00:02:27] live in balance. And at the moment we are palpably not living in balance. And my message essentially is that [00:02:34] sustainability is so important, it should be an integral part of everyone's education. [00:02:41] When I studied at the University of New South Wales back in the Triassic, they had the idea that if you [00:02:47] studied science or applied sciences or engineering, you should also study the humanities, because the [00:02:54] university's first vice chancellor, who had some odd ideas, but like we should have not just nuclear energy, [00:03:03] but nuclear weapons to defend ourselves. But he also believed that you shouldn't be able to become [00:03:10] a professional technocrat and be ignorant of the society and culture in which you live. And I think we [00:03:16] could make the stronger argument today that whether people are studying law or commerce or accountancy, [00:03:23] whatever they're studying, they should understand that their choices affect whether we will have a [00:03:29] sustainable future or not. It's a lesson that Tony Knute clearly doesn't understand. He thinks that [00:03:36] politicians can stop boats and hold back the tsunami of evidence about climate change or hold back the [00:03:43] will of the community. Interestingly, when the coalition were elected in Queensland, the first thing they did was [00:03:48] scrap the premier's literary awards and the immediate response was that the community funded the literary awards. [00:03:55] The old adage is when the people lead, leaders eventually follow. And the sustainability revolution [00:04:03] is being led by the community. And sooner or later, our leaders will have to catch up with us. [00:04:08] 25 years ago, I spent a year directing Australia's Commission for the Future, back when we had the [00:04:13] idea that you were more likely to have the future you wanted if you thought about it, rather than trusting the [00:04:18] magic of the market or the generosity of international corporations. And its motto was, "The future is not [00:04:25] somewhere we're going, it's something we are creating." There is not one inevitable future to which we are [00:04:31] propelled by the laws of Newtonian mechanics or the dodgy laws of economics. There are a whole range of [00:04:39] possible futures. And which one happens will be the product of the decisions and actions we make as [00:04:46] individuals, as members of groups, as members of the community. I think it's a self-evident ethical [00:04:53] principle that we should be trying to shape a future that is at least in principle sustainable. One that [00:04:59] can be sustained, if not forever, at least for the foreseeable future. Now, these days it's almost [00:05:07] impossible to find a politician who will admit to not being in favour of sustainable development. But a lot [00:05:12] of the thinking is very woolly and it seems to be that we only need to change a few light bulbs and [00:05:19] fund a few more big roads and we'll have sustainable development. In 1996, when the previous coalition [00:05:26] Commonwealth Government took office, over the next year or so I was systematically disappointed from all of [00:05:33] the advisory bodies to which I'd been appointed by previous governments. And I despaired of ever again [00:05:38] being asked to advise the Commonwealth Government about anything. So I imagined that I'd been commissioned [00:05:44] by the new Ministry for Unsustainable Futures to give advice on how we could ensure that the future was [00:05:50] not sustainable. Now, you may find it difficult to believe that any government, even one run by Tony [00:05:56] Canute, could be in favour of an unsustainable future. But suspend your disbelief for a moment while I go [00:06:02] through this thought experiment. What would you do if you wanted to create unsustainable futures? [00:06:09] I guess the first thing you do would be to have rapid population growth because we know that no species [00:06:14] can expand without limit in a closed system. If population isn't stabilised by methods that are [00:06:19] socially acceptable, it will be stabilised by starvation and disease and fighting amongst ourselves. [00:06:26] And if the rate of population growth is not sufficiently rapid, perhaps you could encourage [00:06:31] people to have more children by financial incentives or facile slogans like one for mum, one for dad, [00:06:36] one for Peter Costello. And increasing levels of migration to previously unprecedented highs. [00:06:44] If you wanted to compound the impact of a rapidly growing population, you could have increasing consumption [00:06:49] per person and celebrate the fact that we now use twice as much energy per person as we did 20 years ago. [00:06:56] We now have the largest new houses of any country in the world. A great achievement. [00:07:01] And, of course, if you have both more people and more consumption per person, you are putting [00:07:07] compounding pressure on natural systems and on resources. [00:07:11] In terms of resources, maybe you could deplete significant mineral resources. Oil would be a good one to start [00:07:16] with. And if you wanted to ensure that had maximum social impact, you could base your transport system [00:07:22] around an implicit presumption that there will always be cheap petroleum fuels. And so the best way to [00:07:27] ensure mobility is to build larger and larger freeways to encourage people to drive one to a car and perhaps [00:07:34] have tax subsidies for large four-wheel drive vehicles, which one of my friends call urban assault vehicles, [00:07:40] to allow people to cope with the difficult terrain of suburban streets. [00:07:45] What else could you do? Well, you could overuse renewable resources like fisheries and forests and water [00:07:50] so that future generations don't have them in the same quantity that we take for granted. [00:07:55] You could maybe do significant environmental damage, perhaps disrupt the climate, maybe lose biodiversity. [00:08:01] What else could you do? Well, you could base your entire economy around a presumption that every year [00:08:07] you will ship larger and larger quantities of low-value commodities overseas using the cheap transport fuels, [00:08:13] which will be available forever, to pay for the things that we're not clever enough to make for [00:08:17] ourselves, like t-shirts and sand shoes. [00:08:21] In social terms, you could widen inequality. Embracing globalisation would be a good way of doing that, [00:08:28] because it drives managerial salaries up to telephone numbers to give us the world's best managerial [00:08:33] talent, which accounts for success stories like OneTel and HAH and Telstra. At the same time, [00:08:39] it depresses wages in labour-intensive areas to compete with third-world sweatshops. And if you wanted [00:08:45] to compound the impact of widening income inequality, you could steadily run down the public provision of [00:08:50] essential services like health and education and transport in favour of a private provider model, [00:08:56] so that those with heavy wallets had more choices and those with more modest means had fewer [00:09:01] choices. And perhaps finally, as a spiritual basis for society, you could embrace crass materialism and [00:09:07] encourage people to believe they'll be more fulfilled if they have the largest four-wheel drive or the [00:09:11] biggest plasma screen in the street. Or perhaps lurch back to a primitive fundamentalism in which ancient [00:09:17] texts written thousands of years ago are seen as literally true and a good guide to life in the modern world. [00:09:22] I won't insult your intelligence by going through all of those one by one, but I will make the [00:09:28] observation that if a visitor from another galaxy happened upon our civilisation, they would conclude [00:09:34] that we had all the policy settings that you would put in place if you wanted to ensure that the future [00:09:38] was not sustainable. The point I'm making is that a sustainable future involves significant change, [00:09:46] and we have to accept that in arguing for a sustainable future, we need to be courageous because we are [00:09:52] challenging some very fundamental assumptions, like the fact that you can have unlimited growth in a closed system. [00:09:59] At one level, there's nothing new about what I've said. There's now been four reports in the UNEP series [00:10:04] on the global environmental outlook, and the second one said our present course is unsustainable, [00:10:09] postponing action is no longer an option, although it was the universal response to the report. [00:10:14] I've said that our position is a bit like this picture, that our politicians concentrate on the road ahead and make little [00:10:21] decisions about steering the economy, oblivious to the large problems which are coming up behind. [00:10:27] And if you can't read the fine print, it says objects in the mirror are closer than they appear. [00:10:33] I'll just underline a couple of the points and then draw your attention to some recent reports and [00:10:39] the tsunami of evidence that's building up that we need to change fundamentally, and then talk about [00:10:46] what that means for education. This is a graph showing the discovery of large oil fields, not much of a pattern [00:10:52] there, so it could have escaped the attention of decision makers that it did peak and subsequently decline. [00:10:57] This is the most recent graph from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, showing that conventional [00:11:03] oil production has already peaked and is declining. Overall production is being expanded by gas condensates, [00:11:10] oil from deep water, and of course there's no technical or environmental problems with that, [00:11:14] oil from polar regions and heavy oil, which of course comes at a significant environmental cost. [00:11:20] But the overall peak is expected to be sometime in the next five years, and after that it's downhill [00:11:27] all the way. The consequences are that transport fuels will, if there is an orderly market and people play nicely, [00:11:35] just becomes steadily more expensive, but in the real world supply disruptions will become increasingly likely. [00:11:41] This doesn't just have impacts on our capacity to move ourselves around, but the entire system of food [00:11:48] production and distribution is critically dependent on petroleum fuels, as is our entire system of [00:11:54] manufacturing and distribution. Everything that you wear, everything that you eat, everything that you use, [00:12:00] was brought to you by transport fuels. And as transport fuels become more expensive and scarcer, [00:12:06] we will see significant disruptions of many aspects of modern life. But we go on planning as if [00:12:14] cheap transport fuels will be here forever. This is a schematic diagram of a proposed new interchange on [00:12:19] the Sunshine Coast to allow people to drive effortlessly using the limitless transport fuels. [00:12:26] Let me say something about what are usually called environmental issues. I prefer to use the word [00:12:31] ecological because environment suggests surroundings of which we are not part. But we are just as much [00:12:37] part of the ecological system as gum trees or galahs or goannas. Like them, we depend on natural systems for [00:12:43] our sustenance. We depend on natural systems to process our waste. This is the bottom line, the total [00:12:49] ecological footprint of humanity. When I was an undergraduate, we were consuming about half of the sustainable [00:12:55] productivity of natural systems. We are now consuming about 125%. In other words, we are operating at an ecological deficit. [00:13:04] And in this age of fiscal rectitude, where it's almost a hanging offence for a government to have a fiscal deficit, [00:13:10] it's surprising that we are as sanguine as we are about the ecological deficit, which is much more likely to put burdens [00:13:17] on future generations than a fiscal deficit, particularly if it was borrowing to invest in a sustainable future. [00:13:25] The fourth report on the global environmental outlook documented unprecedented environmental [00:13:31] change at global and regional levels, climate change, unsustainable land use, aquatic ecosystems heavily [00:13:39] exploited, water availability declining globally. And in biological terms, almost all well studied species [00:13:46] are declining in distribution or abundance or both. In fact, we are now in the sixth major extinction [00:13:53] event in human history. We are losing species at rates comparable with the great extinction at the end of [00:13:59] the Carboniferous. And we just don't know what the consequences will be for future human survival. [00:14:06] I don't want to depress you, but the Millennium Assessment Report went on to say there's established [00:14:12] but incomplete evidence that our impacts on ecosystems are increasing the likelihood of non-linear changes [00:14:18] with important consequences for human well-being. And the Millennium Assessment documented half a dozen [00:14:24] examples of non-linear change. One of the best known is the Newfoundland cod fishery, which was harvested [00:14:30] more or less sustainably at about 100 to 200,000 tons a year for about 100 years until better technology [00:14:37] made it possible briefly to catch about three times as much fish. The fishery collapsed, had a minor revival, [00:14:43] and then collapsed completely. Human system, natural systems are often non-linear and if pushed beyond [00:14:51] critical thresholds can change rapidly and effectively irreversibly to new stable states, which will be [00:14:58] much less suitable for human survival. I feel I should say something about climate change. Despite [00:15:06] Tony Knute's denial, it is getting warmer and human activity is the main cause. Just to remind you how [00:15:14] recent is concern, a friend sent me this advertisement which appeared in magazines when I was an undergraduate, [00:15:20] and Humble Oil paid good money to say proudly, "Each day Humble supplies enough energy to melt seven [00:15:26] million tons of glacier." It is true, as the deniers sometimes say, that there have been significant [00:15:37] changes in climate throughout human history. This graph of the Holocene shows the so-called Holocene [00:15:44] optimum when it was significantly warmer, the medieval warm period when the Vikings were in Greenland, [00:15:51] and Little Ice Age in Europe when Shakespeare wrote of milk coming frozen home in pale. But if you look at [00:15:57] the scale on the left, those excursions to the medieval warm period or the Little Ice Age are less than a degree, [00:16:06] about half a degree difference from the average of the last 10,000 years. We are now 0.7 degrees above the [00:16:15] average of the last 10,000 years and increasing at a rate of knots. The Academy of Science summarised what we know [00:16:24] about climate and said that you can look at fossil carbon dioxide emissions and changes in temperature [00:16:31] and sketch out two futures. One is business as usual, the Campbell Newman Barry O'Farrell future, [00:16:39] in which we can export unlimited quantities of coal with a clear conscience and not worry about [00:16:45] the consequences. The consequences are this band of red graphs which are the credible range of estimates [00:16:53] of the increase in global temperature if we follow that path of fossil carbon dioxide emissions. And it [00:17:00] averages about five degrees increase in average global temperature. And I'd remind you that the Earth's [00:17:08] average temperature has increased about 0.8 of a degree in the last hundred years, but the temperature in [00:17:13] central Australia has increased by somewhere between one and a half and two degrees. Five degrees average [00:17:19] doesn't mean five degrees everywhere. It means less than that in some places and more than that in others. [00:17:24] Essentially it means significant areas of the Earth will be uninhabitable. There is a better future which [00:17:31] involves scaling back fossil emissions and perhaps containing the rise in temperature to about double what [00:17:39] we've seen so far. The Academy's summary is to have a better than even chance of keeping the global average [00:17:44] temperature rise below two degrees. The world would need to be emitting less than half the 2000 amount [00:17:50] of carbon dioxide by 2050. So global emissions need to peak within the next 10 years and then decline rapidly. [00:17:59] That's why the International Energy Agency, which is composed of the fossil fuel industries, as well as the [00:18:06] much smaller industries that provide clean energy. Said in their world energy outlook in 2008, the world needs [00:18:14] nothing short of an energy revolution in which you use much cleaner energy and turn it much more efficiently [00:18:20] into the goods and services that people want. I was talking to David Hood earlier about Amory Lovins, [00:18:25] who famously said, "People don't want energy, they want hot showers and cold beer." And the technical challenge [00:18:31] is to provide hot showers and cold beer while doing significantly less damage to the environment than we [00:18:36] now do. The good news is that renewable resources are huge compared with any conceivable scale of human [00:18:43] energy demand. The sun supplies energy to the earth at about 10,000 times the rate of human energy use. [00:18:52] Or one number that I remember to illustrate this, the amount of solar energy that hits Australia alone in [00:18:58] one summer day alone is about half the total global annual energy use. I'll say that again because [00:19:05] most people have difficulty believing it. All seven billion humans in an entire year for all purposes, [00:19:10] cooking, heating, lighting, transport, washing, total global annual energy use is about twice the solar [00:19:17] energy that hits Australia in one summer day. The challenge is to convert just a tiny fraction of [00:19:26] those renewable energy flows to meet our needs. There are now quite respectable studies done by the [00:19:33] University of Melbourne and the University of New South Wales, among others, that show that we could, [00:19:38] within 10 or 15 years, be supplying all of our energy needs from a mix of renewables [00:19:44] at a cost that isn't much more than the current subsidy of fossil fuel supply and use. [00:19:51] I want to draw your attention to two recent reports. The 2012 report of the United Nations Secretary-General's [00:19:57] High-Level Panel on Global Sustainability: Resilient People, Resilient Planet. [00:20:02] Summary of key issues. No news here. [00:20:04] Unprecedented prosperity, but the planet under unprecedented stress. And despite the unprecedented [00:20:11] prosperity, more than a billion people still live in poverty. 500 million don't have enough to eat. [00:20:17] A billion don't have clean drinking water. Two billion don't have sanitation. And they said the [00:20:22] development model is unsustainable. There is a new nexus of food, water and energy which need to be [00:20:28] considered together. We need integrated thinking that understands that food production requires water [00:20:34] and energy, that energy production requires water and so on. And we need new sustainability indicators [00:20:41] so decisions are based on science rather than closing down bodies that supply advice on science. [00:20:47] They said by embracing a new approach to the political economy of sustainable development, [00:20:52] we will bring the sustainable development paradigm from the margins to the mainstream of the global [00:20:58] economic debate. So the cost of action and the cost of inaction will become transparent. [00:21:03] This is not greeny radicals. This is not left-wingers with a gin and tonic too many at closing time. [00:21:12] These are leaders of the global community on the UN Secretary-General's High-Level Panel on Sustainability. [00:21:20] The second report I want to draw your attention to is one on resource efficiency, economics and outlook [00:21:26] for Asia and the Pacific, produced for UNEP by CSIRO in collaboration with other research bodies. [00:21:33] I was one of the reviewers and the report said that the last 35 years have seen the most rapid growth [00:21:38] in natural resource use in the history of Asia and the Pacific, unprecedented economic development and [00:21:44] progress in most of the countries, but also greater environmental pressures, larger greenhouse gas emissions, [00:21:50] lower resource and energy efficiency, rising consumer waste. And they said today's pattern of [00:21:55] production and consumption are broaching the limits of what the planet can supply and sustain. [00:22:00] There are pressures arising from the scarcity of water, land, food, nutrients, oil and strategic materials. [00:22:07] And they concluded that a new industrial revolution that uses far less energy, water and raw materials [00:22:13] is becoming essential in the face of emerging global uncertainties in resource supply, economics, [00:22:20] environmental change and climate change. [00:22:23] Well they were scientists, I hear you say, but let me give you exhibit C. [00:22:29] The World Economic Forum is the big end of town at a global level. [00:22:33] It hosts the annual Love Inn at Davos at which Prime Ministers and Finance Ministers go and chat about [00:22:39] whether the rate of economic growth will be 2.1% or 2.2% next year. [00:22:44] The World Economic Forum had a summit on the global agenda in 2008 and their concluding statement [00:22:51] said among other things, the recent crises of fuel, food and finance are simply the three canaries in the mine. [00:22:58] The early warning signals that our current economic system is simply not sustainable. [00:23:04] Not that there are resource issues, not that there are environmental issues, [00:23:08] but the current economic system is simply not sustainable. [00:23:12] Again, not greeny academics, not left-wing agitators, but the big end of town at the global level, [00:23:20] saying the economic system is not sustainable. [00:23:24] Limits to Growth was published 40 years ago, and it said that if the growth trends in population, [00:23:30] resource use, industrial production, agricultural output and pollution were all to continue, [00:23:36] we would reach limits within 100 years, and the most likely result would be significant decline in [00:23:42] social, economic and environmental systems in the early to middle decades of this century. [00:23:47] Dr. Graham Turner of CSIRO has compared the Limits to Growth report with 30 years of data, [00:23:53] and on all those key parameters, we are tracking the standard run, [00:23:56] which leads to economic and ecological collapse before 2050. [00:24:00] Now, of course, no one has to change. Survival is optional, but I think it's a pretty good option. [00:24:06] Dr. Graham Turner: What are the responses to this tsunami of information that we are not living [00:24:14] sustainably and that a sustainable future will involve significant change? [00:24:18] Richard Eckersley has documented three alternative responses. The first, he says, "Denial." [00:24:23] John Kenneth Galbraith famously said, "Faced with a need for change, decision-makers will often try to [00:24:30] prove that change is not necessary, and if they're in government, commission a consultant to tell them that [00:24:35] change is not necessary, and if the consultant is telling you that change is necessary, [00:24:40] then you abolish that consultant and find another one." [00:24:43] That great sage Woody Allen said, "Don't underestimate the power of distraction. [00:24:48] You can avoid the problem by staging bigger and bigger festivals, [00:24:53] world cups, fuel cars and drive them around in circles to see which one can go the fastest, [00:24:59] and find people sufficiently degraded to pay money to watch the spectacle, [00:25:04] and avoid the problem." [00:25:08] And the third approach is one attributed to Margaret Reid, "Take responsibility for change, [00:25:13] recognising that a small group of determined people can change the world. [00:25:16] And indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." [00:25:19] If we're serious about sustainability, [00:25:21] we need to recognise that the underlying drivers of unsustainable development are that the population [00:25:27] is still growing, consumption per person is still increasing, and perhaps most fundamentally, [00:25:32] societal values do not see those as problems, but see those as achievements. [00:25:37] Dr. Paul Raskin, who heads the TELUS Institute in Boston, has argued that the values which have driven [00:25:44] progress for the last hundred years are domination of nature, individualism and consumerism. [00:25:51] And those values, he said, are now fundamental obstacles to the goal of a sustainable society. [00:25:57] And if we want a sustainable future, we have to have a new triad of values. [00:26:03] Domination of nature needs to be replaced by what you could call ecological sensitivity, [00:26:08] an awareness that our decisions have impacts on natural systems, [00:26:12] and a willingness to live within the discernible boundaries of natural systems. [00:26:17] Consumerism, the idea that you'll be more fulfilled if you spend more money and have [00:26:22] more things in your house that you never use, and a hallmark of that is the growing industry of [00:26:28] storage spaces so that you can store the things that you have bought but don't have room for in your [00:26:32] house. It needs to be replaced by an emphasis on the quality of life, the quality of the human [00:26:38] experience. And finally individualism, the rather dotty nation that we can paddle our own canoe in a world of seven [00:26:44] billion humans, needs to be replaced by a recognition that we're all in this together, [00:26:49] that we share a fate with the rest of the human family and we need to identify with their needs and [00:26:56] find ways forward that involve the whole human community rather than just those of us who live a relatively [00:27:02] privileged life in relatively affluent countries. So what does this mean for education? He said, [00:27:09] looking nervously at his watch and realising that I've got about five minutes to tell you about [00:27:13] education for sustainability. Above all else, we have to be preparing people for a world of rapid change, [00:27:19] but I think that's a very mild ambition. I think we should be going further than that. We should be [00:27:26] investing in our economic future. We should be enhancing our ability to assess complex ecosystems and human [00:27:33] impacts. We should be developing technological options, not just equipping people to cope, [00:27:38] but equipping people with the capacity and the willingness to shape the sort of future that they [00:27:44] want. I used to tell people that you shouldn't be asking experts to tell you what the future will be like. [00:27:49] You should be asking yourself what you want the future to be like and then telling the experts that that's [00:27:54] what you want and their job is to provide that sort of future. So the cognitive basis of education for [00:28:00] sustainability I think is relatively clear. We need to understand the impacts of human activities on [00:28:05] natural systems. We need to be aware of the finite scale of non-renewable resources and the limits on the [00:28:12] use of renewable resources. We need to understand the need for viable economies rather than running ponzi [00:28:18] schemes and we need to understand the impacts of social inequality. We also need to understand the [00:28:24] importance of cultural traditions, beliefs and practices because that determines what is socially [00:28:30] sustainable. What sort of solutions to our problems are politically viable. Again, there's nothing new about [00:28:39] this. The OECD Centre for Educational Research and Innovation in a report 25 years ago said education [00:28:46] should be enhancing behavioural dispositions such as cooperativeness, curiosity, initiative, [00:28:52] responsibility and independence as well as intellectual skills related to creativity, autonomous thinking [00:28:58] and efficient problem solving. It would be going too far to say that the education system [00:29:03] systematically suppresses those behavioural dispositions, but we don't do as much as we should to [00:29:08] enhance them. I remind you that the etymology of the word education is the Latin educera, to lead out, [00:29:17] not to cram in and education is far too much today about cramming in and not nearly enough about leading [00:29:24] people out of where they are into where they could be if we give them new capacities and new skills. [00:29:31] The educationist Patricia Kelly, who happens to be my partner, argues that the target should be to move beyond [00:29:38] "homo sapiens", which is both gendered and linked to our past and see our goal as producing what she's called "globo sapiens", [00:29:46] wise citizens of the world. People who are marked by empathy, by global consciousness, global awareness, [00:29:54] thinking beyond this generation, thinking about the generations to come, recognising the decisions we make [00:30:00] about energy supply and use, urban planning, transport, are literally setting in concrete where our options [00:30:07] will be for 50 to 100 years. But alarmingly they're mostly taken by people whose time horizon is this year's balance sheet or next year's election, unaware of the long-term consequences. [00:30:17] They have to be willing to embrace change. I think Einstein said one of the definitions of insanity is [00:30:24] insanity is doing what you've done before and expecting a different outcome. If we want a different outcome, we have to do things differently. And if you [00:30:31] accept that the way we are developing now is not sustainable, a sustainable future has to include a willingness to embrace change. And finally, it requires courage because all of the mainstream thinking, [00:30:45] all of the media, all of the media, most politicians are still locked in the delusion of unlimited growth in closed systems. [00:30:53] And it does require courage to challenge those assumptions and point out that the emperor has no clothes. But it's something that I believe we have to do. [00:31:03] Let me just finally touch on the issue of institutional operation. [00:31:07] I chaired a committee that reported to the Queensland Minister for Education about five years ago about [00:31:13] education for sustainability in Queensland schools. And we argued that the principles of sustainability should [00:31:20] be part of the core curriculum. But we argued also that educational institutions need to reinforce those lessons [00:31:27] by being models of sustainable development in their buildings, their energy and water use, their use of paper, [00:31:35] and perhaps most importantly, in the way they manage the transport demands of staff and students. [00:31:43] I noticed that there is a presentation about making transport to higher education more sustainable [00:31:50] because probably the largest carbon footprint of higher education is the transport of people to and from campuses. [00:31:58] That's, I believe, part of our responsibility [00:32:02] to ensure that our institutions reinforce and demonstrate in practice the lessons that are being taught in the classroom. [00:32:09] The conference, A Just and Sustainable South Australia, ten years ago, concluded that sustainability [00:32:18] must be integrated as the driving principle of education across all sectors. [00:32:23] It seems to me that the challenge is so important and so fundamental to our future that there is no excuse for allowing [00:32:29] people to graduate in law or commerce or science, for that matter, ignorant of the principles of sustainability [00:32:38] and ignorant of the impacts of their choices on future generations. So in that sense, we are developing a new story. [00:32:45] At the moment, it's a small and fragile plant, but great oaks from little acorns grow or from little things, big things grow. [00:32:54] It is the way of the future and in that sense, education for sustainability, there is no alternative. [00:33:01] Thank you very much. [00:33:02] Thank you.