Sustainability has many dimensions, as innumerable as humanity itself. Pressure on environment from population growth feeds back, as exponential risk. How we organise to respond, to our own lack of planning, is critical. For communities, each test case and lesson is invaluable, for informing better preparedness – in disaster accumulating all around us, towards global catastrophe like none on record yet, barring the biblical flood.. Earth systems chemistry abhors us now.[0]
All the warnings are already in place. We will, without urgent revision as a social species, probably be gone. Dinosaurs have taught us this. – Are we to become another exclusively archaeological bone type too? An inability to adapt, quickly enough, is proven terminally fatal. An evolutionary ‘recovery speed limit’ is being breached, as we speak, by collective (in)action.[1] #TheMeaningOfSustainability.
The global poor bear the brunt of calamity, and always have done.[2] Wealth grows division, and itself, as top priority.[3]
So the lesson of Cashmere community preparedness sits within this frame. After the Canterbury earthquakes disaster, it grew as a natural response – of people coming together for mutual support and defensive prospect: as volunteers, we could do something about the seismic peril at our door. We made progress, based on honesty and trust – in helping each other to face the situation. This essence was critical, we would discover in future years. For when honesty was stripped away and replaced with distrust – the dominant failing of the wider society – our preparedness work was savagely halted.
If we don’t find ways to rely on each other, in a crisis, we really have nothing to rely on at all: within five days of blog publication, Technically correct crown agency advice leads Whakaari tour operators to lead 16 people (so far) to their deaths and many more to serious injury at White Island, 9 Dec 2019.
Not only ourselves, but our ability to help others – if there is no basis of community trust promptly restored – are significantly undermined when there’s local need of rapid evacuation plans: Large tsunami may flood more Christchurch properties than earlier thought – The Press, 03 Dec 2019.
So we must proceed with identifying and eliminating the sources of dishonesty distrust.
The first two are already gone: the residents’ group ‘Secretary’ who imposed as unelected Chair, to rob and disorganise Cashmere community, and the church minister who destabilised with false accusations to bring this on (and profit the church) – both resigned during 2019. These corruptions are now out, for good. Last is to track their fertiliser source, to ensure the noxious selfish – once so damagingly ‘in charge’ – can never return to influence here.
[Page draft – more words to come]
[0] Three days after blog publication, a moment of post-colonial history breach, when Heavy rain, slips and floodwaters close key roads and cut South Island in half – The Press, 8 Dec 2019.
[1] Climate change damage equivalent to asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs, warn scientists – Metro.co.uk, 8 Apr 2019
[2] Climate change forces 20 million people to flee each year, says Oxfam – Deutsche Welle, 2 Dec 2019 + Climate change has become a health emergency 14 Nov 2019
[3] Brand Crusaders chooses money over morality – Stuff, 3 Dec 2019
Sustainable Canterbury 