Where Will the Children Play

Last weekend I was visiting my family at Portland in Victoria. While I was there an extremely large school of tuna was passing to the South of Portland and fishermen from many miles away had come to fish for Tuna. The spectacle of the entire fishing wharf area of Portland covered in boats and boat trailers was quite a sight to see. But amidst the sight was a sad reality.

There have been questions over the total fish stock left in Australian waters for a long time. The size of the catch seemed to indicate that perhaps stocks are recovering as a result of recent initiatives. However I could not help but wonder if there was something wrong with what was happening. As boat after boat came in laden with tuna it became obvious that this school was going to be significantly depleted if not destroyed by the level of fish take. Whilst individual fisherman may observe bag limits etc, the aggregate catch was probably more than the school could bear. On Saturday evening as I watched the catch being processed by the fishermen I was informed by a council worker that they had already taken over 160 tonnes of tuna waste to the tip. And the fishing went on for several more days.

Two of the post inflection society values put forward by Jonas were tapping in my mind as I watched this spectacle. Firstly the value of inter-dependence - as we make decisions on the utilisation of resources we need to be mindful of the inter-dependence between elements of the system. Secondly - reduction - the intent to reduce our footprint on the planet.

Whilst each fisherman may think that they have done the right thing, collectively the recreational fishermen have had a huge impact on that one tuna school. And this was one weekend and one fish school. As we ponder the future state of human development, we actually need to see our impact collectively on the environment. It is true that the behaviour of one person or one family can have a small impact on the utilisation of the resources in this closed system known as earth, it is actually only in the collective behaviour that we can have the largest impact. I could not help but wonder also how much of that tuna will actually be consumed before it is discovered in the bottom of the freezer and thrown out.

In Australia we are covering our prime intensive agricultural production areas with houses which consume vast amounts of energy to maintain. We are not in the habit anymore of producing food in those same yards for individual family consumption. Instead we put in swimming pools to consume an already depleted resource even further. We build large shopping malls to consume more energy and sell more "things" which we probably don't need.

I am reminded of the words of a sung written by one of the musical oracles of my generation - "Cat Stevens".

In one piece of music he sung:

Well I think its fine, building jumbo planes.
Or taking a ride on a cosmic train.
Switch on summer from a slot machine.
Yes, get what you want to if you want, cause you can get anything.

I know we've come a long way,
Were changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Well you roll on roads over fresh green grass.
For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas.
And you make them long, and you make them tough.
But they just go on and on, and it seems that you can't get off.

Oh, I know we've come a long way,
Were changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

Well you've cracked the sky, scrapers fill the air.
But will you keep on building higher
til theres no more room up there?
Will you make us laugh, will you make us cry?
Will you tell us when to live, will you tell us when to die?

I know we've come a long way,
Were changing day to day,
But tell me, where do the children play?

So as we consider the shape of post inflection society, I think we need to consider our behaviour "in the collective" and be able to answer the question "where will the children play" and where will there food and water come from. We cannot wilfully consume our resources with no thought for tomorrow and nor can we continue to destroy food production areas to accommodate more construction, more housing.

About slade

Slade is an Enterprise Architect, Business Analyst and Project Manager with extensive experience in the Defence, National Security, Emergency Services and secure systems environment. Slade has been in the IT industry since 1988, and is experienced in systems engineering, systems architecture, systems integration, security assessment and development of sustainment frameworks for new systems. He is also a thought leader in human factors for the design of critical decision support systems and environments and the development of enterprise and solution level architecture for high information workload environments. Slade is the Director of EcoThought Pty Ltd