Hamish McKenzie will be pitching an idea or recommendation at the youth session on the GLF theme ‘landscapes and the green economy’.
Learn more about the GLF youth session here! If you will be attending COP20 in Lima, build you professional skills and knowledge by attending the youth masterclasses.
I grew up in a drought. From 1995 until 2012, Australia suffered the greatest drought in its recorded history. For the city children of the ‘millennium drought’, as it came to be known, that meant showering with buckets, checking the newspaper daily to monitor the reservoir levels, and playing sport on fields of parched yellow grass. For rural Australia, it meant economic devastation, a spate of farmer suicides, industries collapsing and communities disappearing.
We Australians live on the driest inhabited continent in the world, and we stand to suffer drastically from a changing climate. Our cities are poorly designed and are devouring the countryside as they grow. Our agricultural sector is sucking the rivers dry to grow crops ill-suited for a dry land. And we are addicted to dirty coal for our energy and our exports, even destroying the Great Barrier Reef in our constant effort to export more and more of it. We are a nation that is mismanaging the precious natural resources endowed to us.
But there are also examples of incredible green innovation here. In our arid outback, we have food ‘factories’ springing up that intensively grow crops in carbon-neutral greenhouses, using land unsuitable for traditional agriculture, powered entirely by solar energy, using entirely reclaimed water, and eliminating the need for pesticides. In our World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park, eco-tourism ventures are creating green jobs in Indigenous communities. And in my home town of Melbourne, the City Council has pledged to become carbon neutral by 2020, building new zero-emissions buildings and retro-fitting old ones.
I have a background in development, and I just finished my basic training in anthropology. As such, I am keenly interested in the possibilities that the green economy represents for re-invigorating the quality of our communities, sparking sustainable and equitable economic growth, and ensuring that we as a species can come to live in symbiosis, rather than competition, with the planet. I know that we have the ability to grow enough food, produce enough energy, and provide enough homes for everyone on the planet. But it’s only possible if we embrace the promise and the problem of a changing environment.
I applied to be a pitcher at the Global Landscapes Forum because I feel we need an inter-disciplinary discussion about the way we use the scarce land available to us. The old thinking about what constitutes a city, or a farm, or a community, needs to be shaken up, and I look forward to working in an environment with diverse people from diverse backgrounds unite to rethink the possibilities for how we live as a species. As young people, we have the greatest stake of all in the future, and we need a plan to ensure it’s a bright one for all. At the GLF, I hope to be part of making that plan.
Here in Australia, we have no plan. Our population is set to double by late century and we have nowhere to put those people. The agricultural demands on our land will triple, and we have no plan on how to make that happen. Our rainfall will go down, our temperatures will go up, and if we do nothing, our country will suffer. The world is changing, and our economies must change accordingly. At the Global Landscapes Forum, I look forward to being part of that conversation.
This belongs to a blog series profiling youth and leadership in landscapes. Tell us your youth story – submit blogs to landscapes.youth@gmail.com.
