It is very interesting that the organisers have managed to make this much more of an interactive forum than most conferences I have been to previously. My personal feeling is that the methods they are using of having short content rich talks on a topic with no immediate questions, then a much longer forum for the last third of the session in some cases; in another case – a full session of forum; and yet another a café style interaction; is very much more respectful of a room full of additional minds that can be brought to problems rather than needing to be passively lectured to be an “expert”. It allows the expert and the audience opportunities to take topics further and gain more insights.

The café style interaction is very interesting and would be a very useful tool for community consultation and it is no coincidence it is being used in the 2-day stream on communication risk. The first session, which I had the honour of chairing, was more conventional with 5 x15 minute speakers followed by an interactive forum but it has been followed by sessions with 1 speaker then a question put to the session to be discussed in groups of 4 around small tables. One person at each table is the host and makes sure the group is recorded. Everyone is encouraged to write or draw their concepts on the A3 page, then all except the host move and go on considering the same question with a new group. At the end, the table host briefly summarises the discussion for the entire group and the pages are handed in.

This is a really interesting tool for public consultation. People do hear each other and be heard in a much less threatening environment than in a public meeting where the two extreme ends of the opinion bell curve try hard to influence the silent majority in the middle. People hear other views and a mind stretched never returns fully to where it was.

The last session tonight included food and drinks so the atmosphere was most enjoyable and made a very long day into a pleasant atmosphere to keep working

This morning I flew to Brisbane then caught the train to the Gold Coast where I am attending this year’s EcoForum conference and exhibition. This meant a 4am start to catch a 6am flight so I spent some time after lunch in the hotel pool. The conference is being held in the Conrad Jupiter Casino so it was a rather bizarre contract walking from a serious environmental conference, through a casino with a Mexican band and dancers on stilts who were about 10ft tall!

The pool was wonderful! It was set in trees with fantastic landscaping. The local small wildlife was living there happily so I sat and enjoyed a wonderful soak in a spa along side exotic pools with fountains galore and a delightful small lizard (an eastern dragon) who was happily ignoring me and catching small insects. He was around 15cm long and as thick as my thumb and the most delightful company. There was also an Ibis and a wild turkey walking around the edge of the pool complex and scratching in the bushes. Totally delightful and totally relaxing!

I have a deep love of lizards which are fascinating creatures and we have such a wide range of them in Australia, from miniature skinks to the huge monitors in the North. My personal favourites are the dragons with the big collars that run at you with a huge show of bravado with their collars up making them look so wonderfully fierce. I also have fascination with turtles and have had a pet turtle called Toots for the past 25 years. She started as a tiny thing the size of my thumbnail! Yes I do have a permit for her. I do not, however, like all reptiles. I regard snakes, both venomous and not, and also crocodiles with the deepest suspicion. What an interesting contrast. I must admit though that last time I was in Darwin; there were some utterly beautiful snakes around looking for flood refuges in the places we were working. They were lovely – but highly venomous and the guys were relocating them, without harm, away from the work area. Admired from the safety of a bucket, I could appreciate them.

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Very briefly my daughter had her second child on Sunday. A little boy called Dante. He is a very welcome brother for Luka after multiple miscarriages.

It is a real joy to see these little people grow – hopefully into sensitive and caring adults who are environmentally aware and able to think outside the square and cope with the world we leave them.

Luka’s favourite DVD is The Lorax by Dr Seuss. This is a fabulous story about conservation and ecology and I can’t recommend it highly enough. My children grew up with The Lorax book which is also really good so it was a wonderful find to be able to buy the DVD for the kids.

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Three days a week I walk to the local Gym and workout with a trainer for 30 minutes. I normally enjoy the walk down a back lane away from the traffic but this Wednesday it was very different!

The first obstacles were separate waste management trucks collecting recycling, general house hold and green waste from a series of bins in the lane. Very noisy and hard to avoid as they sped past me to the next bin, then stopped and mechanically lifted the bins, put them down, then sped on past me again to the next bin to repeat. It was horrendous in a narrow lane. Necessary I guess – but bad timing. They seemed to be leapfrogging me all the way to the main road which I need to cross to reach the gym.

Next came a council truck, mulcher and chain saw gang who were pruning overhanging branches – wow – they may have had ear muffs on to reduce the noise but the residents and pedestrians did not.

Then there were the frustrated commuters who were trying to reach their parking spots that access the lane and the more help up they were, the more furiously they planted their foot when there were a few spare metres between other obstacles.

All in all, the normally pleasant walk to gym was rather horrendous and unbelievably noisy. Not a pleasant way to wake up and get going in the morning. I am not sure that our inner city environments are really very human friendly places. I rather like the concept where people in many parts of Europe take their rubbish to the appropriate bins themselves. That way they all get some exercise as well as reducing the stop starts and the distances the waste removal trucks have to travel.

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The Cannon family have been reflecting on life and change in the last two weeks. One new baby born, another due in 2 weeks and 2 wonderful old ladies dying at 100 and 101.

When Margaret and Joyce were born in 1906 and 1907, life involved a lot more horses, no electricity, computers, phone or radios. Both were wonderful feisty ladies who brought up their children and lived very full lives. Margaret played competitive bridge nearly all her life and as she lived in the UK, used to like shopping in Paris until a very old age. Joyce got a passport at well over 80 years when her sight began to go and she traveled widely so she could still see the world while she could. Bravo to both of them.

What huge changes these two lived through!

What changes will the new babies see in their lifetimes? Hopefully human ingenuity will go on finding new ways to do things, but with less fossil energy used and more respect for the embodied energy in the “things” we all dispose of in such huge amounts.

The scary thing is that we seem to be bringing our children up with a huge emphasis on consumerism and the toys they have tend to confine their imagination rather than expand it. I heard the other day about research showing the a lot of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) in children is due to boredom and is best treated with different teaching styles. Why does that NOT surprise me?

I don’t pretend to have answers to the future other than that we must stop polluting out atmosphere and our seas. What I do know is that we need to do this urgently and we need to nurture our children’s lateral thinking and imagination.

In Australia they are raising the school leaving age but we do need to remember in all this training that we are training them for jobs that don’t exist yet, to do tasks that we don’t understand, using technology that does not yet exist. I am not sure that our education system is really geared for this. My experience as a student, former teacher, parent and observer is that we do not have either the facilities or the mindset to challenge the brightest minds and many of us feel safer with conformity. We are beginning to cater more for the disadvantaged but there is a lack of understanding of how to nurture those brightest minds who will be solving the problems that we leave them.

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I try to catch public transport – buses using LPG as fuel, to save carbon when I go into the city centre. This seems a sensible approach. However the public transport authorities have a responsibility for the safety of their passengers.

Recently I was coming home in a bus that had to stop very abruptly to prevent a serious traffic incident. I was thrown forward several metres and hit my head on a pole at the front, my collar bone on a seat and finally landed on my back on the floor. By the time I had been taken to hospital in an ambulance and used lots of xrays etc, any carbon savings I made by busing not driving had long gone and I had concussion, sore neck, purple face (best shiner you ever saw) and a broken finger – thankfully that was all I broke.

If the community are to reduce fuel use in our cities by using public transport, the authorities need to provide a regular service that is safe to use. If seat belts in cars are compulsory, how come they are missing in buses? How come wheel chair bays on buses do not have anchor points to secure wheel chairs in case of sudden braking. I am not crying sorry for myself – I am really grateful to my local gym for helping me to have a strong body but this is something that must be addressed urgently.

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I run a marketing business and my product is environmental management. Because my product is useful to a great many small business people I have a duty to let people know how I can help them and help the environment. Interesting way to look at it.

Last week I went to Perth, Western Australia for a marketing conference and this was my major take home message. I think they are right. It is no use being good at doing something that few people have heard of. If I am going to help my grandchildren and their friends have a better world to live in, I had better get out there and tell people how I can help them green their business and save money by increasing their efficiency.

So if I am more actively trying to inform people of how I can help, that is the reason. If a few people don’t want to be marketed to and just want information, perhaps those few are never going to be my clients or pass on information about my services and products to people who do want it. It is their choice.

I believe I have a duty to help people understand that it is easy to be green and it also makes businesses more profitable.

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I am catching an early plane tomorrow to meet up with the other authors involved in the “Secrets Exposed…” series of books by Dale Beaumont. I was a contributing author to “Secrets of Top Business Builders Exposed”.

I am looking forward to meeting a group of very interesting people during the day and evening in Sydney. Then I am scurrying back in time to hand out ‘How to Vote Cards’ then scrutineer as the ballot boxes are opened and sorted to see the count is done fairly which I do every election.

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I have been watching, with mixed feeling, a pair of mud larks making a most elaborate mud nest on a pipe above my car parking space. The mixed feeling come from the fact that birds and baby birds do not wear nappies! I can now take my car to the carwash and it will look less like a Christmas pudding than it does at present.

After a few weeks of shrieking anxiety when anyone came near, three little heads appeared over the edge of the nest. That is the sign of spring that really is delightful. After a few days only two heads appeared and over the last few days I have been witnessing flying lessons with multiple crash landings. One baby was smaller and less competent and its parents left with the stronger baby.

The other baby was abandoned and this morning I went down to look for it only to find its flattened body on the roadway. I cleaned it up before my small grandson who has been watching the nest with great eagerness, arrives for family dinner tonight. What a short little life that baby had. I am probably daft, but I shed a tear.

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We are at a time in history when we need to be able to think creatively and completely outside the box. We have to redesign our lives to use less carbon. At the same time our toy makers and media are stultifying out children’s minds!

I bought some new Lego for my grandson to add to the much diminished remnants left over from my own children. Eventually I found a tub of Lego but even that had pages of designs for children to follow and not really many blocks for $50. Most Lego now comes in sets to build a specific thing.

When my kids were young their Lego was a large collection of blocks with assorted strange shapes and a few “people” blocks. No plans or ideas because the idea was to encourage them to think for themselves and dream up their own grand designs.

When I was a child, we had wooden blocks that did not lock together and we needed to think about how things balanced and locked in together if we wanted to build larger structures. We also improvised and incorporated toilet roll tubes, scraps of wood from Dad’s workshop and cardboard boxes. We still built our grand designs but we used our imagination and created our own.

My children were born in a remote part of North Queensland in tropical northern Australia. We did not get television until my kids were aged 5, 4 and 3. They were attending the local kindergarten when the TV tower was commissioned at Bartle Freere, near Cairns. That week the children’s games changed. They all played the games they saw on TV because it impacted at once on the entire town. What a pity their old imaginative games were gone. They never came back.

During my time in NQ I taught biology and science in the local high school and was astonished at difference between those pre-TV kids and the ones I had taught previously in the city. They were not as good at writing BUT they were streets ahead in maths and most importantly, compared with city kids, they were really creative thinkers. They were the children of people who improvised, built their own lives, their own houses, their own workplaces and made their own fun. They were a joy to teach. I returned to the city and taught very well mannered sponges who did not think much. You can’t waste time thinking when you need to cram for exam results. I left teaching. Now I hear that you can do a “science” degree with no physics, chemistry or maths! How can you understand a fish with no concept of pressure? The world has gone mad!

We now need people who can think creatively and not be blocked by being told that it can’t be done. We need Government and other regulators to be tough on polluters but to be flexible for people who are innovating and trying new ways. We need to encourage our kids to be creative, even when it does make a mess.

We won’t solve the problems of reducing our carbon emissions and thinking about our use and waste of embodied energy unless we allow and encourage creative thinking.

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