Sustainability Bites

Is it conspiracy or just common sense, and should we ever listen to it?

Word on the street has it that Cyclone Alfred (that has recently just missed Brisbane but brought damaging floods and waves to SE Queensland and the north coast of NSW) was geoengineered, possibly by the deep state – ‘they can control the weather, don’t you know’.

Tosh and rubbish, of course, but this is what happens when you mix growing uncertainty with increasing vulnerability, and a decline of trust in our institutions, and hypercharge it with social media and powerful vested interests trampling principle and convention. Plant this tosh in a rich bed of prejudice and fear, and watch a hundred conspiracies bloom.

Here are three stories from the street bearing this out, true stories from my own experience (ie, not second hand or apocryphal), with a fourth tale suggesting other people’s conversations can be worth tuning into.

Privilege and ignorance

Of course, we all carry prejudice around, but most of us only think of it as ‘common sense’ when it’s shared by those around us.

I remember hearing two middle aged white Australian women complaining about the unfair advantages being handed out to First Nation’s peoples. Specifically, they were appalled that ‘Aborigines’ were allowed to light fires on total fire ban days, and at the time we were experiencing many of these.

Now, I was unaware that First Nations peoples had this right (and indeed a quick web search suggests it’s misinformation) but what made this exchange memorable to me was their follow up comment: “What about the natives of this country, don’t we have rights?” This floored me; they saw white Australians as ‘natives’ and First Nations peoples as some outside interest group receiving privileged entitlement.

Okay, this ‘word on the street’ was a few years ago but the ignorance and prejudice at its core burnt that conversation into my memory. And that memory resurfaced quite recently when Australia voted a resounding ‘no’ to giving First Nations peoples a Voice to Parliament. “Why should they get a right not afforded to us” was the common refrain in the lead up to the Voice referendum.

First Nations peoples in Australia never ceded their lands to European colonisers back in the Eighteenth Century, and they have suffered ever since on any score you care to measure: education, health, life expectancy, employment… The word on the street that they are privileged and enjoy special entitlements is based on self-reinforcing ignorance.

A fire of conspiracy

My next word on the street was sparked by someone listening in to my conversation while coffeeing with a friend.

We were discussing the sad state of the media and the news, and how both of us had relatives who were sharing with us unfounded conspiracy theories while simultaneously discrediting institutions like the Bureau of Meteorology and CSIRO; often because politicians were attacking them telling the public you can’t trust them.

Point in case, the Leader of the Opposition, Peter Dutton, attacked CSIRO’s findings that nuclear energy was a poor choice for Australia (because CSIRO presented extensive evidence it’s too expensive and will take too long to implement). Dutton accused CSIRO of becoming politicised because the numbers it presented went against his nuclear policy (which calls for more coal-based energy and ditching Australia’s greenhouse commitments). It seems he was happy to discredit Australia’s leading scientific agency on party political grounds, heedless of the long-term cost.

But I digress; there we were having a lovely chat about the decline of media and trust in Australia (and maybe I was growing a bit loud as I am wont to do when the passion rises) when a young man, he looked like a tradesman, came up and interrupted us. He said he had overheard what we were saying and then shared with us what he knew about the global banking cartel that was behind the simultaneous lighting of bushfires around the planet; he’d done his own research. How else could we explain all the fires starting at the same time, he asked?

I replied, “it might be climate change”, but he had already moved on, content in the knowledge that he had done his little bit to share the ‘truth’.

This little conspiracy about global banking cartels setting fires is one I had seen before on the internet, but I was shocked to have a stranger thrust it on me in public.

Of course, a world on fire is not something any of us would wish for but it’s easier to dismiss if you think a small powerful elite is behind it rather than engage with the complex truth that humans have pushed planet Earth into a new way of behaving – the Anthropocene (or maybe it’ll become known as the Pyrocene).

As a side note, I know many tradies (tradesmen) who are typically 20-something macho males who live on a diet of hyper masculine podcasts spewing far right conspiracies. I think it’s a problem, but I don’t know what the solution is here.

Contesting the fireground

My third word on the street also involved coffee and talk of wildfires; but this time the interaction grew quite heated.

One of my coffee colleagues in this incident is a leading researcher on the value of hazard-reduction burning and property protection, and this is what we were discussing. His peer reviewed research has found that the four most important variables critical to house loss when big bush fires strike are (in order of importance): the weather, the amount of woody vegetation close to houses, proximity to large blocks of native vegetation and, last and of least importance, hazard-reduction burning close to houses (with hazard burning undertaken further away not having any significant influence). This is consistent with a growing body of evidence that hazard burning is a tool of limited value when it comes to protecting people and property.

An older gentleman, sitting a few seats away from us, then butted in saying what’s really needed to beat these fires is just getting in there with big machinery and clearing away the native vegetation, opening up fire trails and getting the fire fighters into the forests before the fire gets away. That’s what they’ve done in the United States, he said, and that’s what we should have been done here in Australia! It’s outrageous, he exclaimed, how we’ve allowed this situation to get so out of hand.

We were a bit taken aback by this guy’s uninvited and forceful interjection. We asked him where he was getting his information. The United States, we pointed out, was experiencing its own wildfire catastrophes; the evidence clearly shows hazard reduction has limited value; and when a fire starts in the middle of a forest (often by lightning strike) there’s no way fire fighters can get in and contain it before it gets out of control. To even try would be putting their lives at danger.

Well, contesting his ideas did not please this man at all. He said we were talking rubbish prompting one of us to walk off commenting “I cannot stand such ignorance.”

The interjector then threw down his newspaper (the right-wing paper The Australian) and accused us of getting all our information from The Guardian, and that we didn’t know what we were talking about – and then he stalked off as well.

What a buzzkill. We were all left feeling quite flat.

I wrote this story up some time ago in Sustainability Bites as an example of different truths being held by different tribes and our growing failure to even share ideas between tribes. From our perspective, the man was a nosy fool taking his information from the Murdoch press and accepting the denialist cant that the fires are simply a management problem that could be fixed with greater resolve. From his perspective, I expect he thought we were a pack of big talking, know-nothing latte sippers (for the record, none of us were sipping lattes but we do like a good coffee). Our conversation angered him, he threw his beliefs at us, we acted angrily, challenged his ‘facts’, and he stormed off. Nothing changed, no-one questioned their own tribe’s truth; if anything both parties probably hardened their position.

Welcome to Westphalia

Word on the street is diverse, frequently flawed and often contested. Ignoring it, however, doesn’t make it go away, and listening in to other people’s conversations can sometimes reveal rich insights. Consider this fourth tale.

I’m fond of a radio program called The Minefield on Radio National which aims to help you “negotiate the ethical dilemmas of modern life”. It’s philosophy rubbing up against political science, and I love the difficult topics it considers though I frequently have no idea what it’s comperes are talking about as a lot of jargon is used. One term frequently cited is the idea of a Westphalian nation.

In any case, I was standing in line waiting to get onto a plane in Cairns, chatting with a colleague who knows his history and I asked him what a Westphalian nation is? Is it something to do with Western Europe or Western civilisation?  

No, he explained. It relates to the German province of Westphalia where, in 1648, a series of treaties were signed in which countries agreed to respect the religion of other countries and not impose their own religion on them. The agreement brought to an end the Eighty Years’ War between Spain and the Dutch and the German phase of the Thirty Years’ War. In Westphalia itself Catholicism and Lutheranism were on a relatively equal footing. The treaties laid a foundation for international law and established modern political principles such as the sovereignty of all nation-states regardless of their power and size, making the Peace of Westphalia a turning point in modern history. All countries that respect the sovereignty of other nations are referred to as Westphalian nations.

As my colleague finished this little history lesson, the women behind us in the line spoke up. “That’s fascinating,” she exclaimed, and then she looked down at the little boy beside her. “See what you can learn Johnny when you listen in to other people’s conversations. I hope you remember what you just heard.”

Word on the street can be cheap, but it can also be precious depending on how you use it. Maybe we should all be taking note of Westphalia and practice more tolerance of the values held by other groups.

Banner image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay