Culture
Culture is the response of the community of a species to its environment, encompassing behaviour and rituals that give meaning to its values, and motivate the group to survive. In man, cultural attributes include dance, music, religion, language and art.
We need to organise our communities to support each other, and develop a lifestyle culture that minimises energy consumption. At the same time, we can enhance the community wellness, but within the earth's population constraints. Wellness can be measured as the health, wealth and education of a society.
Australia has developed as a multicultural society, largely tolerant and respectful of its diversity, and it is interesting to define what we mean to be an "Australian". Even Aborignal people, who were here for over 60,000 years migrated from another land. They have been great custodians of the land, protecting bush-tucker regions and wild fauna as they traded with adjoining tribes.
Australia has a great asset with its tremendous diversity of cultures that can provide great food variety, building styles, transport preferences, health remedies, and community building elements such as music, dance, religion and art. As such we should fight racism in all its forms.
One unifying aspect of being an Australian is that the official language is English, although many are priveliged to speak more than one language. Another is our democratic rights, but these have been recently eroded with severe security laws.
Groups or individuals may wish to add a comment (Just register first) about what elements and level of lifestyle culture we should adopt for sustainability, and how we can achieve this, given the finite resources of the earth eg. higher density living to encourage more communal support activities, more bush-tucker eg. eating kangaroo meat (Ch22, pp547) where its production has a much lower greenhouse gas that beef cattle.
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Comments
Blog: My year without spending
I cam across an interesting blog by an woman from Los Angeles, Angela Barton, who is trying not to buy anything new for a year. It looks quite interesting and can be found at http://myyearwithoutspending.blogspot.com/
I thought this experiment of going a whole year without buying anything
new would bring up a lot of interesting questions and challenges that
are relevant to a lot of people: How much is enough? I know I'll save
money, but how much time will I save by not purchasing any new
possessions? What about gifts? Will my friends think I'm cheap? What if
I see the perfect pair of boots, the ones I've been looking for my
whole life? Will I fall immediately off the wagon? Making this
commitment and writing about it seemed like the perfect way to converge
my desire to live on less money with my interest in living a simpler
life and trying to lessen my carbon footprint. It just seemed like the
right thing at the right time for me, and I suspect a lot of people
will be able to relate. (Angela)
Graeme
Transition Town Newcastle
Consumerism throw-away culture
With the large amount of energy required to make some products, and the introduction of the "planned obsolescence" idea, means that we are buying more and more goods that have high emissions (particularly plastics - especially one-use bags, take-away boxes, and some aluminium goods like foil, and highly-packaged goods).
Our Australian developed nation lifestyle has been found (see 2007 ACF report, Consuming Australia-Main Findings report at http://www.acfonline.org.au/consumptionatlas/), to have a higher level of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions than the energy we use at home and our car travel.
In fact buying goods and services and food accounts for almost 60% of our GHG emissions, with 20% for household energy, 10% for transport and the remainder on constructions and renovations.
So we should buy quality items, repair them when they break, and buy second-hand etc.
Non Comsumeristic Car Culture
RIDING A BIKE. It is the fun environmentally sustainable way to transport you, your family and things. Get there without noise, air pollution or climate changing, green house gasses. Foster fitness and friendlier, gentler community spaces rather than competitive, angry, fat, lazy, egotist car culture.