In his final report on Australia’s options for addressing climate change,
Ross Garnaut argues for a "transformation of rural land use" to meet the challenges of climate change.
It might be a timely to consider a step beyond functional change, and start to reshape perceptions of what regional and rural life is all about.
Rural areas have tended to be the poor relation of the cities, despite the inescapable fact that cities are built from the soil that feeds them.
In the climate change equation, however, cities can only offer the planet a reduction of their emissions. That's not good enough, according to the climate scientists: the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere are going to cause us trouble for a few hundred years, even if all new emissions stopped tomorrow.
Rural Australia offers something better: biosequestration, the opportunity to put away considerable quantities of atmospheric carbon into soil and vegetation. Biosequestration directly addresses the problem; mitigation only modifies it.
There's a snarl of uncertainties lying between the theory and the reality of biosequestration—issues like where the land is and who's managing it, who is measuring the sequestered carbon and how, and the rules governing how sequestration is rewarded.
Yet if the situation is as serious as Garnaut, and others, say it is, a species that put its own kind on the moon 40 years ago should be able to resolve the comparatively straightforward challenges of carbon sequestration today.
If this is achievable, it's an opportunity to rethink the relationship that rural and regional areas have to the big urban centres.
Rural areas hold the cards in the war against climate change. They have the space, the soil and the vegetation to create biosequestration sinks, and to build new sources of green energy that unlike coal, allow farming and energy generation to co-exist.
The danger is that the financial rewards for these activities will leak to the cities, as the profit from rural activity tends to do. The challenge for rural regions is to not only capture carbon, sunlight and wind, but to hold onto the resulting profits.
Which is why it's time to rethink what it means to live in "the bush". This is an opportunity for the bush to reinvent itself, not in terms of its relationship to cities, but as a new entity, driven by new mental and physical energies.
In this reinvented bush, the usual flow of money and people from country to city is reversed—because it's in the bush that the most important activities on Earth, agriculture and the fight against climate change, are taking place.
History and the urban-rural divide tells us that its not the areas with the resources that capture the money, but the places that trade in those resources (I've got another blog post brewing on this). The bush needs to be not only the source of natural resources, but the place from which they are traded.
The new bush builds its towns, services and industry not in competition with the big cities, but to provide a completely different experience. This experience delivers the usual rural lifestyle qualities of space and community, but also the buzz of being engaged in a dynamic entrepreneurial business environment that attracts people and money.
The new bush can capitalise elsewhere on its natural strengths. It can better integrate its agriculture with its culture. It can build regional food systems, so that every area offers a unique cuisine in keeping with the local evironment, and unique identities that attract visitors tired of an increasingly homogenous world.
The new bush is where people want to be. There will be no Farmer Wants A Wife TV programs. There will be Urban Girl Wants A Farmer programs instead.
When you live in the space that’s undertaking the activities most fundamental to human and planetary wellbeing, it should be an exciting place to be. Shouldn't it?
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