Denial? It's universal!

Just watching Kevin Anderson: Climate Change Communications Workshop DCU (With Slides) and in the first few words he coupled with the meme obsessing me these days: Denial! It's universal, it's everywhere. There are climate change deniers. On the other side there are people — some very sweet people — who think that by slathering their roof with solar panels and getting the government to legislate that solar panels be engineered under roads, the problem of climate change will be solved! Hooray! People who believe things like that of course depend on what they think are reliable experts, but these days, reliable experts are very rare indeed. 

What we have instead is all-pervasive PR driven by management imperatives, because almost everything has been corporatised and corporations are run by managers, right? Any smart manager knows the first thing you need to manage are perceptions. And that just comes down to PR, the wholesome face which now covers what has become almost universal racketeering. 

Notice all the insurance ads on TV? Notice all the calls you get trying to sell you insurance? In the words of the late Julius Sumner Miller, a former chocolate salesman who traded on his cred as a science educator, "Why is this so?". Well if you read the financial news and you pick up the soiled edges of some cover sheets over things-people-at-the-top-would-rather-you-didn't-know, you might find underneath that the insurance industry world-wide is suffering from a major cash flow crisis brought on by zero interest rates and a stock market which has become a casino, so that the money which formerly was invested and then drawn on to pay out claims is no longer there. How do you fix the problem if you run an insurance company? Well once you realise you're in charge of a giant Ponzi scheme, you grasp the nettle and try to reel in more marks to pay up-front fees to keep the ship afloat while praying you can cash in your chips and bail out before the whole sucker goes down.
  
Jim Kuntsler's latest picks up the same theme:

The mystery is at last revealed: why does the field of candidates for president score so uniformly low in trust, credibility, likability? Why are there no candidates of real substance, principle, and especially of real charm in this scrim of political basilisks? (Surely there are many people of substance and principle elsewhere in America — they just don’t dare seek the job at the symbolic tippy-top of this clusterfuck of faltering rackets.) The reason is that the problems are unfixable, at least not within the acceptable terms of the zeitgeist, namely: the secret wish to keep all the rackets going at all costs.

This is true, by the way, of all parties concerned from the 0.001 percent billionaire grifter class to the deluded sophomores crying for “safe spaces” in their womb-like “student life centers” to the sports-and-porn addled suburban multitudes stuck with impossible mortgage, car, and college loan debts (and, suddenly, no paying job) to the deluded Black Lives Matter mobs who have failed to notice that black lives matter least to the black people slaughtering each other over sneakers and personal slights. None of these groups really want to change anything. They actually wish to preserve their prerogatives.

Jim is turning into a grumpy old fart these days and his posts are getting shorter and shorter as he riffs on fewer and fewer old themes. But that doesn't mean he's wrong.

The other day I was talking to a very nice woman whose son I had the privilege of meeting via a film course I was involved in a couple of years ago. He is an intelligent — maybe even brilliant — young guy from an ordinary background. Like nearly every nerdy kid I've spoken to in the past few years he wanted to be a game designer and sure enough he has cracked a uni course leading (supposedly) that way. But like everyone creamed off as the best by the education system, he has been led astray by the denialists running the show. "Work hard, jump through our hoops and the future will be yours!" But there will be no future in the Greenhouse World for over-educated and specialised keyboard thumpers, except exploitation and slavery in one way or another followed by the scrapheap. And of course at some level my friends son realises this and is wobbling on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Because no other path has been shown to him! For Industrial Civilisation, it's double down or death. Of course those at the top are still doing well out of this meat grinder and can rustle up any number of justifications for such criminal exploitation of the vulnerable young. 

So where does this place us individuals? Ok, so you've taken on board that the system is screwed. Then the question becomes, what do you do? Of course the so called 'selfish' types will look after number one. Some will want to commit suicide. I'm going to assume that you've chosen to live. It soon becomes obvious that No Man (or Woman) is an Island. Our survival depends on having a functioning society to live in. At this point many of us get stuck. It seems so much less stressful to go with the flow and bury the evidence piling up. Maybe the SWHTF after we're dead. Whew, dodged that one! But do you have any children? Do you have no younger person you care about who will have to live on, into the alien future bearing down on us? A detached attitude is all very well, but as even the arch-murderer Stalin is supposed to have said, "One death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic." What about that one, or half-a-dozen who you really care about?

I tried, when I first realised what was going on, to help my local community figure it out. I have little faith in committees but I was persuaded to form a Transition Group. It didn't work, as far as I was concerned. The concerned citizens who joined didn't think the way I thought. It ended up folding, much to my relief, as I felt my main job had become keeping the group going instead of doing something useful. Additionally I held three public meetings, one of which Nicole Foss of the Automatic Earth addressed. Maybe those meetings had some effect but it's difficult to know. No-one talked to me about it afterwards. I had one friend who said I was being way too negative on this blog. Fair enough. Anyway that last public meeting was just over four years ago and I felt I'd done all I could usefully do, without becoming regarded is yet another cranky weirdo, which is no way to be regarded if you want people to listen to you.

All that has remained for me has been to go on living and acting, as far as I am able, in the knowledge of what is coming towards us. There are heaps of analogous situations, some of which can be a bit disheartening. How would it have been to be a Jew and have the Nazi Blitzkrieg rumbling towards you in the Ukraine in 1942? One the other hand there is the example of Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, former Roman good time boy, who when he saw the way things were with the Empire, sat down and wrote The City of God in the early 5th century AD. From each according to their ability you may say. There are lots of contemporaries doing the best they can in their own ways.

I've been preoccupied for the past three years with building a house and working, so my community involvement has decreased to almost nothing. I've resigned as secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, the committee on public transport in the Shire which I was on wound up, I spent nine years on the Secondary College School Council until my last kid had left. I had some involvement with a local alternative energy group but realised when I went to their last get-together that I was in grave danger of saying something which would threaten the Consensus among the Alternatives (see this & this). I'm not powerful enough to make unnecessary enemies and I hate to hurt my friends. Hell, I've even become nervous about what I post here. Maybe I should post anonymously?

My problem personally is that I am a classic nerd whose people skills are not terribly well developed, so I must be very careful not to offend people through some stupid oversight which any ten year old could avoid. And when you are dealing with a whole society of other people in various stages of denial, that's not easy to avoid! But we will soldier on and see what the future allows.

Another good clip…

Guy McPherson

I just came across this guy. He has a blog which I've added to my blog list. Check out his talk: it's dark but good…

Sugar coating a cow pat

This Monday all over the world (in our more "advanced" nations at least), public relations people told their partners over breakfast it was going to be a busy week. After all, the various leaders of these advanced nations were winging their way home from the Copenhagen conference, back to the bosom to their constituents, whose shining expectant faces need to be fed the right mixture of optimism leavened with the need for caution against any moves which might rock the boat, upset the apple cart, or wreck Christmas. Our leaders would need help with this.

And as they sat in their Lexus or Audi or Merc crawling along the freeway with the radio chattering cheerily in the background, our public relations types would have been thinking about what they could pull out of the file as a template to fit the task. A simple job — making an abject failure look like a work in progress. There would be some meetings of key people straight off to outline the problem, but once it was roughed out it could go down the line for the juniors to flesh out the campaign. Nothing out of the ordinary, but a good solid couple of days worth of work that would be nicely billable at a tight time for a lot of firms.

You'll be able to make your judgment of their efforts yourself, but with only a couple of sleeps till Santa comes and then with New Year and the other distractions of the festive season I expect our interest in Copenhagen will have faded and we'll be gawking at Tiger Wood's porn-star lover's latest revelations on page one, while climate change will be back buried at the bottom of page six.

For some reason, I am reminded of the last scene in Zola's novel La Bête Humaine, where the driverless train careers on through the night full of happy, drunken, doomed soldiers.

Let's put my emotionalism to one side. Everything is going to an inevitable plan now and there is nothing we can do to stop it at any level above the personal. If we have made the decision not to go down with the ship, or join the drunken soldiers on the train, our task is quite simple, although not particularly easy, as we will be coming up against the resistance of those who take the p.r. spin seriously. But in essence it is to find the right place to live, get out of debt, have a maintainable shelter over our heads, a reliable food supply and a non-toxic community surrounding us. Good luck!

Edit: from Tagonist, a quote…

Speaking of Copenhagen (and the health care bill) I have a new motto: baby steps equals failure. Suck it up, spinboys...

Riffing on the Archdruid's latest

He strikes again! The Archdruid rarely disappoints and this week's post is another ripper, as he meticulously pulls apart our hopes and fears over climate politics and expiates on the folly of betting on the big end of town, political or business, to save our arses (or asses for US readers). Because it's over folks! Till your garden, mend your fences and talk to your neighbors, because that's what matters now.

Transition Town blog for Corner Inlet district

Fiona Mottram and I have set up a new blog, Transition Corner Inlet, which will be a vehicle for communication about transitioning to a low energy/low CO2 future. Our first function will be a film, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, which will be screened next week at Foster Community Health Centre on Thursday October 22 starting at 7.00pm.

I'll keep this blog going as my personal take on the world, but the new blog will be a communal effort.

Planning day at CERES

I nipped up to Melbourne for the day yesterday as I'd been invited to a planning day at CERES, the Centre for Education and Research in Environmental Strategies, in Brunswick. CERES is planning for the next five to ten years taking into account what we face as a result of Peak Oil and climate change, especially the social needs which will arise. It was great to spend a day with twenty people who talked about what I think about! And thanks to Serenity Hill and Kirsten Larsen from the Australian centre for science, innovation and society at Melbourne University who dobbed me in as a participant.

Despite my wife running a nursery in Foster I'm no plant guru, so my contributions were restricted to the social aspects of the future. David Holmgren was there with his partner Su Dennett and briefly sketched in his future scenarios which we worked off. Then we broke up into small groups and came up with our plans.

The day went very quickly and I had to head off at the end of it to do some business for the nursery which meant I didn't get a chance to talk to the very many interesting people there other than Serenity, Kirsten and Chris Ennis, the Manager of CERES Organic Farm and Training. What the day did do is confirm my belief that the inner urban parts of Melbourne are probably going to to do reasonably well with the changes we are now in — they have a critical mass of bright, committed people with enough power in their hands and the right priorities to steer their communities in useful directions.

Great population post by an ex-government minister

Everyone should read this great speech by Andrew McNamara, ex-minister for the environment in Queensland which Rob Windt has posted at the Naked Mechanic.

The Carbonic Civilisation & its Discontents

Various legislative bodies around the World are busy pushing out laws which are meant to address the issue of greenhouse gases. How effective these laws are will be inversely proportional to the wealth of the country each legislature controls. This is because people are very bad at sawing off branches they happen to be sitting on.

Us ordinary folk may labour under the delusion that technology can solve any material problem. We see glossy pics of electric cars and solar panels, and imagine the only thing stopping the adoption of low-carbon technologies are some fossilised politicians and industrialists. But this is not so. The real brake on cutting carbon dioxide outputs are tens of millions of families with 2.4 kids, two cars, a hefty mortgage and orthodontists bills. The real costs will be very high for such folk, which are a lot of the people we know.

Why? Because you may recycle your plastic, not waste water, buy organic and do all the things we are told to do, but there is a whole lot of stuff "out the back" in the industrial suburbs of every city which has to operate on copious fossil fuels in order that we can live our lives, and this stuff — the factories, warehouses, freeways, waste treatment plants, hospitals, offices, roads, mines and railways — are expensive to rebuild and will take a long time to change. "Expensive to rebuild" means we must find the time to rebuild them. Either that or we must work to pay someone else to do it. And that assumes it is possible to rebuild them in a more benign form, which in many cases it is not.

We've just had a big materialist binge over the past few years, where the cost of the stuff we use has been kept artificially low because the Chinese have paid their workers a low wage to build it. That situation cannot last. We will soon go back to paying the real cost of living. This will mean less money to change our built environment to a less carbon intensive arrangement. Add to that the decline in oil availability and we have a real problem.

And then there is the unspeakable, uncomfortable truth that lies under all this — there are way too many people on the Planet. How are we voluntarily going to reduce our population to something more in line with what the Earth can support?

The truth is that we are animals like any other on Earth. We expand to fit our environment and then some. We want more, usually not much more, just that little bit, even the richest amongst us. Do you know anyone who wants less? No, I didn't think so!

We've expanded very successfully until now. Of course we always have Problems. And we always have earnest people, experts, discussing and proposing Solutions to these Problems. These Solutions, strangely enough, always need More of something. More spending on health care, education, law and order, supervision of industry. Surely a solution to the crises looming over us at the moment is a lot less of everything? People, cars, cows, strip mining, commercial fishing, driving, flying — well, make your own list!

But of course having a lot less means things get very tough for the great mass of people with the 2.4 kids, cars etc. They need to work to pay for their lives, they vote, or even if they don't, they can make trouble for the People In Charge. And of course we all want the world to be better, we just don't want it to be at our expense. Let the less worthy pay! So we will see the hunt for people to blame — scapegoats — intensify. But of course all that is in vain if the problem is all of us.

So what is my Solution? Well, it's in several parts.

Firstly it's your problem so you've got to solve it! OK, you didn't choose to be born, but can you tell me the name of anyone who did? So get over it — you're in charge of your life.

Secondly a lot of us, maybe most of us, don't feel we're really up to scratch in a lot of ways. We'd love to be told by some competent person what to do. We believe in experts. Well guess what? Experts are often wrong! And the more they say they know and the less you do, the wronger they tend to be. Sure, listen to what people say. But an honest heart and an open mind is of more value than believing any appearance of certainty. This may mean you run against the tide of opinion a lot of the time. Learn to deal with it. You don't need to broadcast your contrariness. But practice the courage of your convictions in small ways, because one day you may need to find it for something big.

You will come across people who believe that the world was made for the use of themselves in any way they see fit, and others who will tell you the human race is a blight on creation. Avoid these types — they are both expressions of arrogance, in that they make value judgements which no-one can truly make. And both attitudes lead to trouble.

The world will re-adjust to make everything right again. Nature has a way of dealing with these problems. Those who best protect themselves from what is coming will part of the future of life on Earth. Let that be a guide for your actions.

I don't think we can do anything at a world-wide or even nation-wide level about the greenhouse problem because of the pressure of population and the prior investments we have in our industrial civilisation. So we will have to deal with the consequences of dramatic climate change over the next few decades. That's the way it is folks. Just think about how you and those closest to you can survive the coming changes. Forget about survivalism and Mad Max scenarios. Most people will survive or die where they are, dependent on the conditions in their local area. So for a start, understand where you live, how it works, how people survive in it now and how they and you might survive in the future. If it doesn't look good, move to somewhere better while you can!

Understand how nature works. Darwinian selection works through the survival and reproduction of the fittest. That doesn't mean the ones who can win races, it means the ones that fit the best into their environment, who can gain sustenance, shelter and safety without wrecking where they live.

We are used to seeing ourselves in a very upwards and outwards way. I'd say the dominant story of our civilisation for the past sixty or so years has been "Everything will be fine once we get the settings just right and all those other people learn to behave themselves". But unfortunately that just isn't so, and we are going to be flung into a world soon where we wont necessarily have any idea of what's coming next. We'll be reacting to crises right on our doorstep, not trying to make the Afghans or the Somalis jump when we say jump. For a lot of us this is going to be a bitter pill to swallow. So preempt the change and embrace your inner powerlessness now! Just concentrate on what's close by and attend to its needs: self, family, community and the enclosing natural environment. Forget saving the world-as-a-whole. That's always been a totalitarian dream powered by cheap fossil fuel.

The hard part for many of us who wake up to what's really going on is we can feel very isolated. If our Significant Other doesn't share our new view of reality, what do we do? I don't know what the answer is here other than patience and good humour. Reality will impose itself on us all eventually. Your job is to make sure you're as right as you can be. Not that anyone predicting trouble gets thanked for it, but speaking from a little experience in these matters, time is on your side with this.

What do you tell the children? I have my way with this one too, but it may not be for everyone. I have four children, two of them step-children, the oldest of whom is thirty-four. My attitude has always been that children make their own way in the world and what you need to do is keep them safe, well-fed, emotionally secure and don't let them get away with bad habits. Everything else they will pick up themselves. If you push them in a particular direction you will get adults who either will do nothing unless they're pushed, or adults who believe in pushing other people.

I've been very lucky so far with how things have turned out, but I'm aware that it is luck and not good management. The problem is, if you do something to assure success, like spend a fortune on private tutors, all you do is create someone who can't live outside that sort of system. To my way of thinking the best you can do is let children grow up in an environment which is healthy, with not enough money to get them into trouble but enough to keep them fed and give them a few basic tools for their growth. As long as they don't feel crushed by the society they grow up in, or that they are too good for it, things are generally alright. As for us breast-beating about how we elders have squandered the inheritance and left them nothing, give it a break! The last thing anyone needs is an excuse for failure and by saying something like that, you will produce either arrogance (I'm not as stupid as the person telling me this!) or a victim's mentality (I'm one of you and therefore I'm doomed too!) in a child who isn't sensible enough to say "Phooey!" to you.

Education is important but I can't say that it is necessarily effective to spend twelve or more years sitting at a desk. Looking at the corner we're busy painting ourselves into with our mighty civilisation, one needs to question some of our basic notions here. It may become more difficult to fund in the future in any case. Opportunity is the most important thing, plus the ability to take advantage of it, which involves such things as good health, common sense and a lack of timidity. Character is something which matters more than just about anything and it matters a great deal when you're younger. And character is what will distinguish the survivors from the doomed in the next, difficult stage of our history — providing they are in the right place!

The next pillar of survival is community. We ordinary folk will find it much easier if we're part of a real community. Communities are the normal human social arrangement, but they have not fared well in our industrial world which demands loyalty to abstract functions and specialisations, and prefers humanity to be broken up into single, bite-sized functional units for easier deployment to places of highest profit. The Soviets did it by force, through murder and deliberate starvation in the nineteen-twenties to break up the village structure of the Soviet Union. Our more modern societies have done it through education (get the children away from their parents and environment) and propaganda (most advertising), and by driving local, small businesses under or by making them into empty shells, fronts for a franchise. All this has so undermined community that in many places it is vestigial, especially in big cities. As a natural human artifact, it is forever being rebuilt. But building community takes a long time, generations in fact, so in the face of the rapidity of the changes we're facing it's better to find one already in existence. I've had some experience of intentional communities (I'm an old hippy) and they tend to be unstable for a variety of reasons. So I don't recommend cults or communes unless they are embedded in a larger functional community and have good relationships with it.

The final step is for us industrially disabled types to throw away our crutches. Learn to walk or ride a bike — leave the car at home — grow some of your own food, talk to your neighbors, get involved in the work of your local community. Don't be like a little bird, lying back helplessly with your beak open, squawking and waiting for Big Daddy to drop something into it. Cause Big Daddy wont be there much longer.

The solution to the greenhouse problem of carbon dioxide will be a radical fall in its production by individual people, and this is going to happen not by executive fiat, but through the uneven collapse of the great industrial civilisation which has been built up on the back of the copious use of fossil fuels as these fuels stop being affordable to the great bulk of us. The cheap stuff has all gone, and the expensive stuff is too expensive to keep the wheels spinning. We will have wars for resources and people saying we've turned the corner and that new technology will save us — it's only five or ten years away! It's always just five or ten years away.

But the show is over. It will appear to run in for years, as the elites who manage to command remaining resources claim that everything has returned to normal and those who aren't benefiting have only themselves to blame, but that's the age-old story of the relationship between the haves and have nots. Forget alternative energy. It will provide only a tiny fraction of our energy. It simply costs too much compared to dirty old oil and coal.

Will life be worth living? Of course it will! This is an amazing time to be in. We have lived through and seen the peak of the greatest civilisation the World has ever known, and we get to decide how to deal with its dissolution and the shape of what comes after it. It would have been nice to have flying cars and holiday trips to the Moon, but there's still plenty of other good things to enjoy: wine and love, children, good friends, food, music. Have fun!

Cheers!

Lloyd

The blame game

It's very easy to slip into a whiny tone when looking at all the nuttiness going on in the halls of power. There's natural human tendency to look for causes when things go wrong and the easiest targets for blame are other people. I've done my share of flailing the economists and politicians who sleepwalked us into our present mess. The solutions they seem to be proposing are simply more of the same, or more metaphorically (from Dmitri Orlov) "this new compulsion sweeping the land to shoot oneself in the foot while simultaneously setting one's hair on fire."

But it is important to remember that underlying everything are titanic forces beyond human control. From an ABC story which caught my eye this morning…

Towns in rural Australia are at risk of dying off as drought and Federal Government policy takes a toll on agriculture and forces a "mass exodus" in some regions.

But the government does not control the climate. The role of politics is and always will be the distribution of scarce resources among competing claims. But the game is set by nature. The climate is changing. The amazing bonanza of cheap oil and the power it has given us is a geological fact, not a political one. We must look beyond the blame game and see what nature has in store for us if we want to survive.

This is the year of change for us

From John Robb's latest post...

The Resilient Community Alternative
The option for those not interested in advancing economic interests through the projection of violence, is to disconnect or firewall your community via efforts at resilience. The most critical element of that effort in the short term is a tremendously difficult judo move:

How do you prevent the undertow of the failing global financial system from gutting your community via foreclosure/bankruptcy and debt (and thereby driving the development of global guerrillas) while at the same time building alternative forms of local commercial and/or cooperative endeavor? That's the big question.

Indeed. I was at our local Foster Chamber of Commerce & Industry meeting last night (I'm secretary) where we discussed among other things the impact of the huge fires on our local economy. We are being hit here from all sides. The global financial crisis has been slow to impact us: people talk about it but so far it's just been TV news. Not so the effects of climate change. At the end of last winter someone I know who works in Wilsons Promontory National Park, our biggest tourist drawcard, told me moisture levels in vegetation at that time were typical of the end of summer, not the end of winter. Now a huge area of the Prom has been burnt by a fire started by lightning several weeks ago. As the winds blow from all points of the compass the fire drives this way and that, pushing into all corners of the park with the exception so far of a patch of rugged and damp mountain forest right in the middle. There is no sign of the end of this fire and we have some extreme heat and wind coming up on Friday.

Naturally the park is closed. Melbourne has been blanketed with smoke from the fires for weeks. The result has been that the tourist industry down here has stopped dead. Schools are not booking school camps. Other accommodation providers are likewise without customers. The park will recover, but it will take a few years.

While tourism is important here we are fortunate in having other types of business. Agriculture has always been the main one, plus fishing and the oil field service port at Barry's Beach. However dairy farming has suffered through the international crisis killing demand, and prices have fallen steeply.

There is no doubt our community is going to come under a lot of pressure. Our great weakness is our dependence on international markets for dairying and for the imports of oil which everyone seems to take for granted still. We are a long way from being a resilient community.

Like organisms living on a coral reef, our small businesses depend on the economic currents carrying the nutrients we need to within our grasp. The great international current is faltering. Can we generate enough local capacity to (a) employ people living here in activities which they find sustaining enough to stop them leaving for greener pastures and (b) gather from local sources those economic nutrients which have always come from elswhere?

Whatever happens we are also going to have to take the effects of climate change into account. The gradual drying out over the last twenty years has created the conditions for these devastating fires. They will continue each summer until all that can burn has been burnt. Then a different type of ecosystem will grow up which can cope with the changed conditions.

I don't think the kind of Mad Max world of violence which John Robb talks about is what we need to guard against here — not yet anyway and if we do have security issues they will not be as extreme as in a lot of other places. Our big issue is how do we live in this land? How can we transit from being a European colony treating the land as a resource to be mined with the products thus produced sold to far-off strangers in return for the goods they send us in return, to a semi-closed system where most of what we need come come from local sources in a sustainable way.

This is a project which will take more than one generation.

Our holiday

We've just had a week of blazing heat, a fitting end to the holiday season. My wife and I had a few days off (the first reasonable break since June of last year) at Port Albert, about fifty kilometres to the east of our home town of Foster. While we were there the load tripped out sections of the power grid (including where we were) due to everyone running their air-conditioners, while tracks buckled and other technical problems closed down a lot of the suburban rail system in Melbourne. We sweltered like everyone else but could at least walk across the road and go for a swim next to the wharf. It was OK, but in some ways like a foretaste of the end of the world as we know it.

Port Albert is a ghost port. It is one of the earliest settlements in Gippsland, and was a destination for goods and passengers when travel on land was difficult before the coming of the railways and decent roads. It also supported a fishing fleet. It has some charming old buildings, and the arty types who like that sort of thing have moved in on the town, renovating places into bed-and-breakfasts and a café which inside looks as if it's a transplant from Brunswick Street Fitzroy. But half of these places had For Sale signs and the café, also for sale, was closed without explanation.

The fishing fleet has dwindled to almost nothing. A few yachts have made their home at the port and there are a scattering of recreational vessels of various vintages. Amateur fishermen from out of town roll in with their huge twin-engined white-hulled toys behind bulky four-wheel-drives and cluster round the launching ramp.

The pub (the oldest continually licensed hotel in Victoria) is an unrenovated mouldering remnant with a certain shabby charm. We had dinner in the bar one hot, breezy evening in the company of a scattering of various well-worn habitués hunched over their beers. There's a very new and quite large upmarket restaurant on the rebuilt pier which brings in the well-heeled of the district from many kilometres away. I thought of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe when we had dinner there. It certainly seems to have little connection to the local community, which simply provides the ambience as seen through the wall of windows along the north side, where you watch the sun set over the town and the boats at the wharf to the west.

A short drive away was Manns Beach, a tiny cluster of fishing shacks and ancient, bent little houses on the edge of the mangroves. The place had Mad Max feel: dirt roads, old tractors under the carports, wooden boat hulls disintegrating on the mud flats, all hardly elevated above the surrounding lagoon. It was noticable how newer houses are on raised foundations as the place must flood regularly on high tides. The whole area between Manns Beach and Port Albert seemed hardly above sea level, even the farms some kilometres inland had creeks running through their paddocks which were obviously tidal.

It would seem that global warming will see the whole area slowly reclaimed by the sea, a gentle euthanasia.

By then the retirees who make up a large percentage of the place's population will have passed on. And the young people, the teenagers of the town, boys and girls, who came every afternoon down to the jetty to dive and swim (despite signs forbidding such hedonism) and who as the afternoon wore on, would climb the derrick of the pile-driving barge tied to the wharf and dare each other to jump from higher and higher platforms — they will follow their vigorous anarchic impulses and move on to where the grass is greener and hope springs higher.