Those European settlers who first put down roots in the Goulburn Valley in the mid-19th century were obviously consumed by the immediacy of survival, while all along living with the long view of what a wonderful place this could be.
Some might have succumbed to ‘short-termism’, but most had the long view and so what we enjoy today is a comfort and satisfaction we owe to our ancestors.
It seems important to me that we reflect on that vision, courage and boldness of those pioneers for what we have today, we owe to them.
The idea of ‘ancestors’ and why we need to be good ancestors came when a cacophony of moments came crashing into my life. And that all took some sort of quiet purpose upon reading Roman Krznaric’s book The Good Ancestor.
Early in his book, Krznaric writes: “Becoming a good ancestor is a formidable task. Our chances of doing so will be determined by the outcome of a struggle for the human mind currently taking place on a global scale between the opposing forces of short-term and long-term thinking.”
He quotes medical researcher and the fellow responsible for finding answers to polio, Jonas Salk, who said, simply, “Are we being good ancestors?”
According to Krznaric, Salk believed that just as we had inherited so many riches from the past, we must also pass them on to our descendants.
Salk was convinced that in order to do so — and to confront global crises such as humanity’s destruction of the natural world and the threat of nuclear war — we needed a radical shift in our temporal perspective towards one far more focused on long-term thinking and the consequences of our actions beyond our own lifetimes.
So those who colonised the Goulburn Valley had what is missing today in terms of the long view and although their dedication to that warrants praise, looked at through the prism of what we know today, they were actually misguided. That, of course, is unfair, as it is always easy to see the fates and follies with something after it has happened.
The Goulburn Valley was once rich with flora, but in the name of progress just three per cent of that original greenery remains and so gone is a critical habitat for many critters and what for millennia had been a natural carbon dioxide sink.
Greater Shepparton City Council is controlling what it can and has embarked on a ‘One tree per child’ program with the aim, and hope, of broadening and deepening the city’s tree cover to better prepare it for a warming world, in that it will be cooler and play a small but critical role in absorbing some of the planet-warming carbon dioxide from our use of fossil fuels.
Taking the long view reminds me of the French gentleman who asked his gardener to plant a particular variety of tree, to which the gardener said, “But sir, that takes 100 years to mature” and the French gentleman replied, “Well, you had best plant it this afternoon!”
And so that French gentleman was a good ancestor.
However, what will you say when your great-grandchild asks, when the temperature is edging towards 50ºC, “What did you do, grandpa, to help the world avoid this?”
Being a good ancestor is not about quietism, accepting the status quo or swimming with the current. Rather, it is about being something of a contrarian, feeling the harsh wind of reality on your face and acting to realise a world that is fairer, more generous and one that listens to the ‘inconvenient truth’ as told by former United States vice president Al Gore.