How You Can Change the Future Part 2

In this follow up to Part 1 of the article “How You Can Change the Future” I would like to provide a simple example to illustrate how applying the Socratic Method to reviewing an issue can help break it down to its essential components, isolate the potential problem areas and then help uncover the best options for dealing with it.

One of the examples described in part 1 of this article was of living near an industrial plant or on the site of an old industrial plant that may have been polluted but has been “cleaned up” and sold to home owners. Here are some questions one might ask;

• Do you accept that the site or nearby industrial plant is safe because the plant owner / property developer, State or local government declare it to be safe?
• If the community accepts these assurances should you question it?
• Do you take it upon yourself to check this fact regularly?
• How do you go about checking it?

§ If you ring and ask the plant manager are they polluting the air, the water or the soil and supposing they are, would they tell you they are because you ask them?

§ Would a developer admit that the block of land he sold you is unsafe if it meant going broke because of the high cost of properly cleaning up the site?

• Finally, taking into account all the difficulties listed above do you go with the accepted position because it is all too hard?

If you don’t want to run away from the issue but recognize that you alone cannot solve the problem, it becomes clear that your first course of action should be to concentrate on convincing the community that it can not harm them to “ask” the relevant questions but it may if they don’t.

Help them realise why they should act together because only united are they capable of achieving a solution even if that solution is to reinforce their peace of mind by confirming all is well..

The next question will be who is responsible for monitoring and who pays for it?

When discussing who is responsible for monitoring the situation including the cost, look at the position from the perspective of all parties; for example;

• If they expect the plant to monitor the pollution and report back to them the company may say that they are already bound to monitor it but have a commercial responsibility to report to their shareholders not to the local community.
• Even if they did issue a regular report how will the community know for sure it is true. Has any company ever lied about polluting before? If the answer is yes then this is not a satisfactory solution.
• Should the local council monitor the plant? This would spread the cost across a larger community and therefore make it very low for each individual rate payer.
• However the council may have many such communities within its boundaries and the aggregate cost of monitoring them all could be quite expensive even on a per capita basis.
• If the council takes on the responsibility will it do so effectively, will they do it effectively in the long term and during periods of recession or financial difficulty? If you don’t think they will then this is not a satisfactory solution.
• The same arguments apply to state governments who have a larger territory and many more such communities in similar situations.
• The same arguments apply to the national government.
• Governments set up departments of the environment to monitor this type of problem, isn’t that sufficient? If they have ever missed a serious situation or there are serious occurrences of pollution currently happening then the answer is clearly No!

So what action should or could the community take to ensure its own safety and where could this lead them?

In the above example, the solution might be to initiate a process (i.e. hire a consultant) that the community itself funds to regularly (say biannually or every five years) check the pollution levels and who report back to the community. They may decide to set up a fund so members can spread the cost over a number of years keeping it low.

Once they (the community) come together to achieve this solution they may decide they can address other issues better as a community (such as child care) rather than each going about it alone and this could lead to a fundamental shift away from the current conventions that keep people segregated and often feeling frustrated, lonely and “on their own”.

Some might see this as a shift “back” to the way things were raising the question how did we move away from this community approach to living and why?

What do you think?

P.S. I look forward to meeting you through your comments to the articles in this blog or in the forum. If you would like to write an article as a guest blogger please contact me to discuss your proposed article. Just go to the contact us page and email me.

Best Wishes,

Ric Vatner

shadowintheflame.com

www.estv.com.au