Coming up next week is Tomorrowland on Thursday and night before, on Wednesday, will be our Tomorrowland Soirée – a night of “wild ideas” & wild and (tame) food. At last, we can confirm there will be edible crickets to sample, mealworm cookies and green ants. Amid a grazing table of (non-insect) canapes, with drinks both alcoholic and not.
Both events are about learning, thinking and provocation.
And we need it.
The news from COP27 is bad. We are nowhere near turning this Titanic. Today we spoke briefly to someone in Queensland, where a stream of people have been moving in ever growing numbers in the hope, no doubt, of enjoying the nice weather and lifestyle.
What they may not be aware of, our source said, is the huge stress on infrastructure, the growing pressure to allow development on flood zones, the realisation that cyclones are moving further south and that cyclone resistance will need to be retrofitted to buildings all the way down past Brisbane and possibly to Sydney. Because Sydney is no longer immune.
That’s on top of the floods that inevitably turn to drought and fire.
And that’s before we talk about insects and pests such as mosquitos that are so thick in central NSW they leave newborn calves lifeless and crowd out the view to the edge of the verandah at night, a farmer told ABC radio last week.
So far, mozzies are not tipped as any sort of food source in most of the world (but don’t google mosquito burgers if you are easily queasy) but other insects are quite popular in many parts of the world.
In Australia we may not need to eat insects quite yet but we do need to start thinking about food security, and especially as a property development matter as urban sprawl invades more of our arable land.
We may need to start losing our cultural inhibitions in relation to insects and other invasive species at least as a provocation and the need to expand our thoughts and strategic thinking beyond food to pretty well everything we do.
At the Soirée, Kirsha Kaechele of Mona will channel some of her amazing Eat the Problem banquet at Mona in Tasmania, with camel, deer, and feral cat served up among some of her other environmental sustainability focused shenanigans.
Why we’re doing this is because we all need to shine a powerful laser light deep into our creative hearts and use it to shake out the really bold and wonderful ideas that can shift the trajectory we’re on.
Kaechele is an architect by training so that signifies there’s structure and thought behind her projects.
For instance, it’s not so crazy to eat invasive deer or other animals instead of letting them rot in place when they’re culled. Compare this practice to the damage caused by conventional farming, Kaechele points out.
What she does in essence is challenge cultural habits.
We can add more. For instance instead of consuming carbon based materials to make up our GDP perhaps we can carve out a non- extractive economy based on creative socialising or story telling or singing in groups… like we used to.
New thinking on old buildings
On Wednesday night Craig Roussac’s Buildings Alive and team celebrated their 10th birthday, with the venue at Grosvenor Place – for good reason we discovered and one that aligns with the thoughts above.
We arrived at the building just as John Derrick, executive director of the building was speaking. We heard the words “fully electric”. Interesting, we thought; this is an old building. The date on the label says 1987, making it a massive 35 years old.
Roussac, whose company is working with the building, later filled in the gaps. When Harry Seidler originally designed the building, Roussac says, he “threw everything at it”. It was the epitome of a modern office building at the time, with uninterrupted floor plates and so on, but also with thermal water storage for 80 megawatts hours of energy, equivalent to 2000 Powerwalls.
What makes this electric building different is that storage. Come Monday morning big buildings like this need to fire up the heating system and make the floors fit for human habitation. Even if the energy source is all-electric that early morning consumption will be coal fired from the grid or gas driven.
Storage changes all that and makes the energy consumption pattern something that can be controlled and made flexible. So flexible energy.
“The storage capacity shifts the load,” Roussac says.
“It’s essentially transferring sunshine from the middle of the day on Sunday to Monday morning.”
Roussac is now working with NABERS and the Green Building Council to create a model for “grid interactive flexible buildings”.
The Opera House is another all-electric building that has flexible energy usage. But there are more.
Town Hall
At Town Hall, Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore’s annual Christmas reception was also in full swing on Wednesday night with a bevy of people who helped her create a pretty interesting legacy for uncompromising work to improve both the profile and environmental outcomes of this city.
Mutterings among the crowd though focused on woeful outcomes as the B Team development lobby continues its push to downplay anyone’s rights but their own.
Among the guests was Elizabeth Farrelly who will be at Tomorrowland to take part in the Big Debate and who has recently launched her bid to change that particular game and its related hobbies by standing for NSW upper house at the state election on 25 March next year.
Farrelly’s policies look ready made to address the huge and growing frustrations of how to deal with an expanding world that is rapidly losing its livability if not viability in some places.
For instance:
- end the misuse of ministerial interventions and loopholes to override heritage constraints, environmental restrictions, council and community objections
- eliminate the nonsense of environmental offsets in planning proposals
- legislate that all new development is preceded by the parks, public spaces, schools, street trees, resilient energy systems (including backup storage), affordable broadband and transport options implied by public-centred planning
- end private certification paid by the developer
- actively encourage walkable neighbourhoods and the 20-minute local lifestyle
- proactively implement buy-backs and relocations and ban development on vulnerable lands
On energy and environment there’s more:
- ensure that all sectors address their contribution to greenhouse gases backed by strict reporting standards
- eliminate vegetation and biodiversity offsets
- ban all future fracking and new coal mining
- create transition plans with local councils for districts currently reliant on coal, oil and gas extraction
- impose royalties on mining to create a sovereign fund dedicated to generating green jobs in mining communities
On affordable housing, the policies are:
- end homelessness by investing 1 per cent of NSW budget in high-quality public housing within local, regional and metropolitan centres
- require 20 per cent affordable housing in all new developments
- include free or heavily subsidised housing for essential health workers or healthcare students in multigenerational aged care
Some people might see some of these policies as highly ambitious.
But that’s the point, right?
Getting different better outcomes is about aiming high. The old Moonshot agenda.
Emotional attachment regardless of the odds? Your name is human, especially in flood ravaged Lismore
Meanwhile at Lismore the local mayor shows how complicated things can get when humans are freethinking beings that want what they want no matter the consequences.
According to the news this week many people in this flood ravaged community might be interested to move further uphill but not the mayor.
Mayor Steve Krieg told The AFR that was his stance, despite the final estimates on the cleanup approaching $5 billion – and up to 1000 people still living in emergency accommodation nine months after the flooding.
At 14.4 metres the flood peaked at the second floor of most of the town’s shops and the town relied on generator power for almost four months after the second flood event.
What do you do when communities face such a scale of disaster, and yet refuse to budge?
There’s an $800 million joint state and federal government buyback scheme to move more than 2000 households out of harm’s way, and help thousands of homeowners to retrofit or raise their homes.
This is hailed as a blueprint for post-flood reconstruction, especially since recent Central West flooding in areas including Eugowra in November.
But Krieg says he won’t budge on the town centre with its century-old historic buildings, and will rely on flood levees and other flood mitigation strategies.
Victorian election
Victoria is heading into an election this weekend with Labor’s Daniel Andrews predicted to win a third term as premier against opposition leader Matthew Guy. The teal independents are hoping for a repeat on their federal election success, and the Greens are hoping to follow their best-ever performance at the federal election.
In Western Melbourne, there are hot-button issues.
The Age’s Chip Le Grand wrote: “A rehashed anti-Greens dirt-sheet. A baseless claim that Matthew Guy would conspire with Gina Rinehart to frack Victorian farmland. Frenetic attempts to plant newspaper stories about the Liberal Party being infiltrated by Nazis.
“Depending on where you live, you will have received a Labor-endorsed ad on Facebook urging your local Liberal candidate to ‘frack off’, or driven past a street poster that accuses the Greens of bullying, discrimination, sexual assault and transphobia.”
If Andrews wins with a slim majority or forms a minority government, he needs to fast track all the sustainability and resilience and bring on the creative approach to our problems – in bucketloads, without fear or favour or care for even being elected once more.