I attended a small conference/meeting on Monday entitled "The Victorian Convergence on the Global Sustainability Emergency." Sounds like heavy stuff. And it was - co-hosted by Philip Sutton, Friends of the Earth (FoE), Beyond Zero Emissions, The Australian Centre for Science Innovation and Society (ACSIS) et al. The major thrust of the event was to discuss whether a formal "State of emergency" should be declared... and whether our political leaders should be lobbied to come clean, review the science and trends and make the declaration. I imagined our PM coming back into the country and a member of staff at the airport asking him if he has anything to declare before entering.....! ;-p
It was rather interesting sitting with Philip Sutton, Cam Walker (from FoE), and Frank Fisher (for part of the time), trying to write a press release, when it came to me: "An Inconvenient Emergency" as the headline, with the lead in sentence:
There are many inconvenient truths – climate change is only one of them. They all add up to a global sustainability emergency.
I don't think it was picked up by any media outlets though... :-(
On reflection, I thought it would be an interesting exercise to imagine that the Declaration was actually made and to explore what the consequences might be. I've made this the topic of another op-ed piece that I sent off to The Age newspaper this morning. Fingers crossed on getting it published... it also tries to highlight the benefits of conducting 'wild card' analysis - to try and entice business into imagining this possibility, even if they don't think it's plausible.