Foolish Games

Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth has popularised the topic of climate change for some time now. Few I believe, who have watched the movie and subsequently followed the media’s coverage of environmental experts’ visions of doom and gloom, would genuinely dismiss the prospects of a world hell-bent on destruction.

But for the most part, I wonder if these prophecies of impending doom loom only as a hazy prospect that would require an immense amount of creativity and imagination to conjure up in our everyday realities.

The truth is, the cacophony of voices coming from scientists, environmentalists, and alike will be treated in the same manner as people like you and me do to the drone of passing traffic outside our windows.

In short, we are selfish, ignorant and bigoted. The rest of the world can perish for all we care as long as the bubbles we live in aren’t broken.

We shall ignore these calls to consciousness as long as our cars are still being washed, our gardens and nurseries are still flowering, and golf courses, footy fields and tennis courts are still playable.

As long as pools and spas are still full and we can find relief from the unbearable heat. As long as water still flows freely from our showerheads and taps at our command. As long as industries and organisations can still carry on business as usual.

Despite Melbourne’s water storage level hitting the trigger for stage 4 water restrictions, which include a ban on all outside watering for homes, public gardens and lawns and sporting grounds, as well as stringent conditions for washing cars and filling or adding to residential and commercial pools and spas, the Government has decided to maintain stage 3a restrictions.

“Playing safe on water is no longer an option,” The Age observes in their editorial.

“Extremes abound. Water shortage is not just Melbourne's problem and is, in fact, far worse outside of it. The widening disparity between this city of brown grass and withering trees and a state ravaged by the effects of a long, worsening drought that will take years to assuage is more than physical: livelihoods, sometimes even lives, are under threat, as those who work on and for the land wait in vain for the rain. In Melbourne, it affects gardens; elsewhere, it affects generations.”

No man is an island. To think we can keep building our own fortresses and indulging in our own pleasures while the rest of the world goes to hell. We would be fools to think so.

Related links from The Age:

• Playing safe is no longer an option
• Climate change: shock findings for Victorians