Sohail Inayatullah is a man of vision, peace and good sense

Brainstorming with Sohail Inayatullah is an experience where you are taken on a journey to future horizons, to a limitless array of possibilities and social scenarios – whatever he can bring your mind to imagine.

To some people they might be mirages never to be grasped, for others with a different mindset it’s like a door being opened not only to the potential of real global change but also a ray of light on one’s inner self.

Sohail, only if you want him to be, is the gentle guide to changes for the better. This humble man with an aura of wisdom and peace opens up in the heads of his clients vistas for alternate, more sustainable futures. Some times the opening vista is featureless, requiring Sohail’s soothing encouragement to form a picture, to form an idea.

This engaging man who spent  the first six years of his life in Pakistan, then travelled the world, first with his family as a boy and then by himself as young man, studied at the University of Hawaii where he did a PhD in political science focusing on macro-history and the ‘grand patterns of change’. He also became deeply interested in the thoughts of Indian philosopher PR Sarkar, the founder of Ananda Marga..

He was especially taken by Sarkar’s theories of time, change and the future.

Because of his father’s work with the United Nations, he’d had an early grounding as a boy in global affairs, having lived also in the US, Switzerland and Malaysia. But that was just a taster for Sohail who beyond his early formal studies is now recognised as one of the planet’s great thinkers and futurists and is in demand worldwide with his ‘foresight workshops’, travelling widely.

In Hawaii, where like many other young men he found a love for the surf, he spent 10 years working with the justice system, looking at the future of law, future of mediation and the future of robotics. He also set up the court’s foresight program in one of his earlier challenges.

At that time he had not anticipated his own change, his own future. While travelling, a chance meeting in a Finland sauna with a QUT academic led to a working association where they held courses in Fiji and Thailand. But from that point he was destined to live in Australia and become an Australian citizen.

It wasn’t long after that  that a position became available at the Brisbane tertiary institution where he worked for nearly four years. But the old call of the surf was strong and in 1999 he moved up to the Sunshine Coast.

He now lives at Mooloolaba in a comfortable home with his wife Ivana, who he met in Barcelona in 1993, and two teenage children, just a two minute walk to the beach and, of course, the surf.

At first glance, his lifestyle would appear to be very laid-back, but this very fit 51-year-old guru of future thinking possesses a CV that is exhausting just to read, let alone enact.

Although Sohail maintains a massive workload, he seems to carry it effortlessly on his shoulders. There’s hardly a line on his face from contemplating future solutions at a time when the planet is in so much chaos and argument.

While meeting many groups from big business, politics and local communities who are either searching for real future answers or going through the motions of the exercise, he maintains an inner peace with himself, although he does admit that some unseeing people can mildly rankle him on a bad day. But in the big picture he can look past that.

In his long list of commitments, Sohail has one which is important to him and that is to attend this year’s Woodford Folk Festival. It’s a place where he sees some of his ideals in practice, where the stiff wall of formal protocol and business bullshit has been swept away with enlightenment, social acceptance, plain good fun, hugs and smiles – not to mention some great entertainment and the delicious dandelion drink that Sohail searches out.

Indeed, Woodford’s famous festival transports Professor Sohail Inayatullah back to his childhood and his place of birth.

“It has a Pakistani feel about it – village environment, people sharing, exchanging goods and ideas, a special colourful vibrancy,” he said while stirring the tasty smoothies he was making for us.

“Woodford is a great example in showing that play is important in creating a better society.

“In my formal work I try to bring in play. But in play there needs to be a structure. The foresight workshops people love the most involve scenarios and drama and where we find a way to play with ideas, to play in the space and see what emerges.”

At the festival, he will also be putting on his thinker’s hat, to get the Greenhouse house audience to consider the topic ‘Spirituality – The Quadruple Bottom Line’. He will also take part in a forum alongside intellectual and environmental heavyweights Clive Hamilton, Professor Ian Lowe and Dr Patricia Kelly. Their discussion, which invites questions from the audience, addresses the topic ‘Can Humankind Make the Change?’

His topic on adding a fourth condition of spirituality to a business’s triple bottom line of financial, social and environmental responsibility to make it economically sustainable should bring lively response.

“We have learned from the Green movement that you can’t talk about economic progress without Gaia as the base,” he said.

“At nearly every workshop come the questions ‘Why am I on this planet? What is my purpose?’ It all leads to a spiritual question – but I don’t see it as a religious issue.

“A spiritual issue is one of the social technologies which allow us, firstly, to be more inclusive; secondly; to allow us to create a better world in terms of justice; and thirdly, to lead us into more inner bliss that comes from yoga, prayer, tai chi, meditation etcetera.”

Sohail, says his role as a futurist is not as a planner or consultant dealing in detail, but as one with a sense of trends and with methods and tools that can help people make different and wiser decisions – to explore different pathways to different futures.

“At a time of global transition it’s hard for many people because there isn’t certainty and they feel insecure. It’s hard for people to make that jump,” he said.

“Our role, and the work at Woodford, is how to create the imagination first that makes a different world possible. Then it’s into conceptual theories and all the practical examples – real live things we can hang our hats on.”

In his work of finding alternate pathways to the future for any organisation, Sohail persuades people to look closely at their inner selves. In terms of ego there may be multiple sub-personalities in all of us, he says.

“There might be an 18-year-old self, a wise self, a hurt self and others all driving us,” he said.

“The first thing I do is get people to have a dialogue with their sub-personalities. Once I can find out what their inner story is and which of their inner selves is active we try to find ways to speak to the self that’s more future-oriented, that’s more wise and can think through the changes that are happening.

“A leader could be operating, not from their wise self but from an immature self .

“With those in leadership positions, it takes the successful pusher/achiever self to get there, but in doing so it disowns other selves such as the emotional self, the child self, the creative self, the spiritual self. This disownment process and the lack of integration within the mind can lead to bad effects

“If you look at the past 500 years the collective world ego nature has been disowned. Now it’s fighting back as global warming.”

So Sohail always asks leaders what they have disowned.

“Hopefully, what they’ve disowned will come back in a positive way and help them change, but if they’ve totally disowned it, it could come back in pathological, evil way and strike them on the head,” he said.

To bring about positive change, Sohail says it requires firstly a conversation of selves then a conversation of outer scenarios.

“With any group, it’s how to integrate different sub-personalities and use that integration to create a different future. If there’s not that inner questioning of the future, the questioning of oneself, it’s the same old default future, the unquestioned future,” he said..

“The core of my work is questioning the future so we can change the present.”

Sohail says that in his foresight workshops he gets people to first consider their inner story, the shared history from their particular community and try to create a map for its future and how it might look, what are the trends and drivers.

The next part is to consider how that map might be disturbed by a range of inputs, such as climate change or even artificial intelligence. Out of this, more robust maps are created and a rescripting for the desired future.

“Once we’ve done that we do scenarios for alternate futures and then do a closed-eye visualisation of what they want the world to look like. It’s very personal, emotive, whole brain stuff,” he said.

“Once we can define the vision, the last question I ask is ‘what happened to get there?’

“I don’t do strategic planning, such as saying it’s now 2010 and what three things need to happen to get to your 2020. It’s more like you are in 2020 in your preferred future, what does it feel like, what does it look like? Now tell me the three things it took to get here.

Sohail said he was not looking at a masterplan approach, but back casting to find ways to achieve a vision.

Into his own future, he hopes to continue linking the global and personal.

“My vision is to continue to ?play a role in creating a different planetary future,” he said.

This man says he tries to live up to his first name which means ‘from the star’ and his second name which means ‘one who gets the benefits of God’; implied expectations but which he readily and generously passes as gifts to the future.

Professor Sohail Inayatullah has been and continues to be in great demand worldwide. As well as holding a number of academic positions such as adjunct professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast, professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan, and visiting academic at QUT.

He has authored/edited twenty nine books, journal special issues and cdroms.He has held countless ‘foresight workshops’ with major business, political and community groups around the globe.

Professor Andrew 'Wilf' Wilford

Andrew Wilford is a professor with a passion, a really clever bloke, but he prefers to be known simply as Wilf.

Wilf, who lives with his wife Rosie in an oasis-like, three-level hill-hugging home in Brisbane, at one time had a sharp haircut and wore an air force uniform before he flew higher and eventually into the complex world of big business at Boeing Australia.
It’s been a long flightpath full of incident for Wilf who has ended up making a steep tight turn into the greener world of environmental sustainability, a place where he is able to apply and teach much of the conceptual knowledge and wisdom he has gained as a project management guru working with complex systems.

He was responsible for setting up the F-111 program for Boeing Australia, principally a defence contractor in this country. While Wilf says he is ‘not really an aeroplane guy’, he still has an afterburn of affection for the military aircraft that invaded and took over his personal universe for a long time.

He draws many parallels between his present endeavours in providing answers to save a threatened planet and that of his experience in enabling and introducing what he calls safety-critical, mission critical management systems for the swing-wing F-111.

But now he is in a larger theatre of war, a war of minds and action, where victory for him would see the earth on its way back to environmental recovery but where defeat could eventually cast the human species into oblivion.

So Wilf has important messages to put out. Now, as an associate professor at Bond University on the Gold Coast, a position he has held since 2007, he has a different way of dealing with the dangers and, as you might guess, it’s very systematic way.
At Bond he has the chance to pass on his acquired knowledge, get students thinking on a new level and to add new voices to the ultimate campaign – to save the planet while confronting the problems of climate change.

“I’ve been asked to set up a new subject that I’m going to call either ‘The Principles of Sustainability’ or ‘The Principles of Sustainable Development’,” said Wilf.

“You start with exposing students to the concept of systems – how do systems work. In the process of that I develop a new definition of sustainability and I stay away from the green stuff and talk about how any system relates with its environment and regulates its own affairs or activities to promote enduring health in the whole system. A very different approach – it comes from a systems lexicon.”

Wilf has a Svengalian way about him, but he has good rather than evil in mind. Unlike many academics, he has a hypnotic, energising effect once he gets fired up. What was supposed to be a short interview turned into a full-on discussion/debate/mini-lecture lasting nearly three hours. So necessarily, this story has to be an encapsulation of what Wilf said.

Wilf , who was born in Barnsley in the UK said he came from good pit stock. His grandfather worked as an explosive expert in the mines.

“I’ve got coal in the blood and I’m trying to get rid of it,” he joked.

“It was my grandfather who first came to Australia, working on highway projects out of Sydney. My father followed him out and we set up home in Campbelltown to Sydney’s south west.”

Wilf’s early education at Campbelltown North Primary led him to the unique and highly-acclaimed Hurlstone Agricultural High School.

“It was just a great immersion into understanding the land,” said Wilf who was a day student at what he called a ‘public selective agricultural quasi boarding school’.

“We got exposed to all sort of facets of agriculture. It was fantastic.”

It was at this time that the young Wilford, coming from what he said was a ‘pretty challenged socio-economic environment in Campbelltown’, learned quickly how to mix with different people, especially as Hurlstone was a place for many sons of the well-heeled set and all boys wore blazers and ties.

“I’d like to think that some of my growing up, my formative years of dealing with lots of different people has been really helpful in developing my character and being someone who likes to integrate things,” said Wilf.

“Not that I recognised it  at the time, but clearly there was a calling for me to get involved in dealing with complexity.”
Wilf did well enough at Hurlstone to be selected for a university scholarship.

Having a father who had been in the British air force, the RAF, helped steer him into winning a cadetship in effect to go to university. The air force paid for him.

“At the time, in the early 80s, the Australian Defence Force recognised it had insufficient aeronautical engineers to cope with the next round of new aeroplanes coming into the Australian air force’s fleet,” said Wilf.

So Wilf, who had done well at maths, physics and chemistry at school, ended up at the West Australian Institute of Techonology (which became Curtin University) doing an engineering degree in electronics.

“It was hard. Many of the concepts that you needed to grasp were quite abstract, so you had to play with things that you couldn’t touch — complex engineering, mathematics, control systems and the like,” said Wilf.

“While I was immersed in technology, my main interest was in the application of technology. It was a great environment for learning and in hindsight the subjects I did well in have maintained a common thread through my entire career and through my life.”

Wilf translates that time, when he learned to work at uni with other people on complex technical devices and systems and lived in an air force environment that encouraged creativity, to the present.

“All along I’ve been a very people orientated person, and in my current employ at university  –  I love the teaching environment – to provide students with an opportunity to see the world through a different set of lenses that might help them better understand, then make good decisions,” added Wilf.

Wilf, on attaining his degree, was soon into proper air force life as a young officer and his first posting was to Richmond near Sydney, where he was involved in looking after the C-130 fleet on maintenance, engineering and technical management

“My background has come more from the technical management side which is looking at systems and understanding how to manage. I have also learned a lot from concepts of supportability and preparedness which applies in the broader sustainability field,” he said.

Wilf’s next moves in managerial roles included taking him closer to the inner engineering sanctums of Qantas and Air New Zealand which were doing maintenance and engineering work for the RAAF.

After working in New Zealand for seven years on air force projects and later in commercial aviation he had a phone call out of the blue. It was an invitation to set up the F-111 program for Boeing in Australia.

It was one of several major life-changing calls for Wilf. It provided a great challenge.
At the peak of the $500 million F-111 program in Brisbane, Wilf had a staff of 450.

While it was a rich and challenging learning curve for him, it was also a trajectory to burn-out because of the intense stress and working hours involved.

While in that Boeing hot seat, Wilf was dealing with an array of complex projects – being, in effect, director of project management capability across the company, covering things such as looking at all the communication architecture for the entire defence force and creating systems for managing air warfare and integrating air warfare, land warfare and marine warfare.

He remembers those times well and his attachment to that special F-111 plane.

“These days I use it as an example to demonstrate the systems principles of sustainability. I’ve learnt a lot from this aeroplane,” said Wilf. “ I come at sustainability from a very different perspective to most people. It allows me to show how we get people engaged in supporting complex endeavours.”

In that three-year stint with Boeing, Wilf was sent to Canberra for three months to help the defence department develop its project management capability.

In the process, the work he was involved with was ‘profoundly important’ and led to the development of a competency standard now a universal benchmark used by many of the biggest companies in the world.

Another spin-off was the establishment of the International Centre for Complex Project Management for which Wilf helped write the strategic plan.

But it was also the time during which he had a serendipitous moment that refocused his life and led him eventually to some greener connections, to academia and eventually to Woodford.

On a plane trip back from Canberra, Wilf found himself seated next to man named Andy Lowe.
It turned out that Andy was an associate professor at the University of Queensland working in their biology area.

“He said he was an interpretive biologist looking at the impact of climate change on plant ecologies, in particular food crops,” said Wilf.

“I am just thinking this is serious stuff. We’d better understand that we have more than 6 billion people to feed. I then told him that I was involved in working on ‘complexity’ and systems engineering.

“After a while we realised, ‘hang on, we could work some stuff here’.”

Professor Lowe was in the process of moving to Adelaide University to work as the director of the herbarium and to also work on a new initiative, to set up a research institute in climate change and sustainability, which was the brainchild of environmental activist Tim Flannery .

So began a dialogue that went on for months before Wilf was invited down to Adelaide to provide an input on project managing such an initiative. Even though Wilf helped them, their bid was unsuccessful and the facility became a consortium of several other universities headed by Griffith.

All of this was happening while Wilf was still with Boeing and using leave time to wing his way into other areas. When he had finished the assignment with Defence and returned to Boeing, he found his seniors had not recognised or understood the strategic importance of what he had been doing.

“By this time I’d had a gutful,” said Wilf.

But it was also the time when he ‘had been taking an active interest looking at the bigger frame of reference for sustainability’.
“I started getting invited to talk at conferences. I was invited to a conference in Sydney and I spoke on ‘leadership and emotional intelligence in complex project management’,” said Wilf.

There were about 150 people there, mainly engineers and the controversial nature of his talk had everyone fired up so much that his talk went far beyond his timeslot and into lunchtime with question sessions.

It was that presentation that drew admiration from a significant audience member who invited Wilf to have coffee with him the following morning. It eventuated that this was man ultimately became Wilf’s new boss, but at Bond Uni.

“He said ‘We’d like to see whether you’d be interested in taking an adjunct professor’s role at Bond. Your industry experience will easily stack up’,” said Wilf.

For Wilf it was an opportune offer, especially as things for him had started to fall apart at Boeing and he had lost his enthusiasm.

As they say, the rest is history.

At Bond he is teaching project management ‘through the lens of sustainability.

“We are living on a planet where every living system is dying. We urgently need people who can manage projects effectively.”
Wilf’s final days at Boeing were preceded by a time when the work pressure was intense and he was having to handle the situation when a government decision was made to retire the F-111s. The government was looking for cuts in costs and Wilf was given the job of reviewing the entire program.

At that time in 2004 he and Rosie were planning to get married and life was full-on with working hours more than 90 hours per week. The writing was on the wall soon after they returned from their honeymoon and Rosie treated him to a session at a yoga retreat.

“I hadn’t done things like this before. We did a lot of meditating and I really switched off,” said Wilf.
At one session Wilf said he ‘disappeared off the face of the universe’, and they had to wake him up because he had started to convulse because he had been so wound up.

“The release of that was phenomenal, I didn’t realise how significant that was,” said Wilf.
He was soon back at work where he found that everything he had left behind had only got worse.

“After 10 days back I was rat shit. I imploded and ended taking three months off work. Boeing didn’t know what to do with me.
“But when I returned I realised the Boeing hadn’t done this. I’d allowed it to happen. At that point freedom came.”

That’s when Wilf started reading more and turning his mind to the complexities of saving Planet Earth. Part of that mission is winging in to the Woodford Folk Festival to spread his message. And it’s a festival that has won him over.

“It’s the ideal social laboratory. It’s an example of how we could all live if we wanted to. It’s a quantum leap towards the humanity that’s worthy of us,” he said.

“For me, from here it’s to try to engender that vibe in everything I do.”

He thought the Woodford project management was pretty good, too.

Words of Wisdom

TAKEN FOR GRANTED: These days I have lots of discussions with people who take for granted systems that we have in western society – quite happy to jump on an aeroplane but not really understanding the complexity, the layering, the interdependencies of all of these systems that come together to ensure a level of technical and operational airworthiness. In other words safety and risk management. All of my career has been involved around this sort of stuff.

TEACHING TROUBLES: At a time when every living system on this planet is in decay, I think most tertiary education needs to step up to the mark. Many students arrive at university knowing bugger all about sustainability. In order to practise something in an applied way you need deep conceptual understanding.

BIG PICTURE: We need to take a whole systems view. I always come from the biggest picture view I can before I start going to the detail. For instance – what are the pattern of dynamics in the system? Is it moving in the direction of pathology or towards a state which is promoting health in the system?

MARS BOUND: If the universe had its way in its expansion phase it would turn the earth into Mars or Venus – that’s its driving force, to dissipate energy and matter. This is a pattern dynamic called entropy.  The only thing that is forcing that back, as far as we know, is life. Life is pushing back on that entropic engine. Without life on this planet, the universe would drive us to Mars.

LOVE LIFE: Life has capitalised on every niche you could imagine – holding back the tide of the universe. So while we’re here let’s try to maintain a set of operating conditions on the planet for life to continue. It’s my view that it’s our highest responsibility as human beings to cherish life, not just human life, but all life.

KEYSTONES: When it comes to resilience systems there a several characteristics. One is diversity, another is modularity which means you can take something out of a system and the whole system doesn’t fail. There are things you can take out of an F-111 and for it still to operate. And there are things you can’t take out. Also, in an ecologies perspective there are things you can’t take out – they might be a keystone species for instance. You take that species out and the whole ecology suffers.
When we look at planes we understand its tree of functional building blocks. Through modelling, durability and damage tolerance tests before we even go and fly an aeroplane we determine what the consequences would be if any part breaks in terms of a safety-critical, mission-critical system. What if that breaks before something else or the other way round or if they break at the same time. We use all that stuff as a set of baseline information to see if the plane is getting healthier or less healthy. A hell of a lot of stuff that we can use and transfer that knowledge in an ecological sense.

CATASTROPHES AHEAD: Whether natural or whether caused by an inability for people to understand what we’re doing and in a world where resources become more scarce – we only have to look back in time to see what our natural behaviours are. To find a big stick!

FLESHING IT OUT: Going back 150 years, if we had gathered all of the planet’s mammalian flesh in a big pile, weighed it and then worked out the proportion of it from human and domesticated animals and pets, it would have amounted to 15 per cent.  If we were able to perform that exercise now the figure would be about 90 per cent.

TIGHT CONTROL: The operating conditions that have been around since mankind has grown from a few to a lot of us have had some variability but within a fairly tight control band.

WATCHING PATTERNS: While, as an engineer I am interested in numbers, I am much more interested in looking at the pattern of systems and saying ‘if this pattern continues where does it take us’. Very few people do that. Most look at the numbers. Are these patterns of behaviour converging, what are the potential futures that will result from that. Are they futures that are worthy of our highest humanity or are they actually taking us to places where we have no other option but to fight.

FOR HIGH FLYING POLITICIANS: You jump on an aeroplane knowing, or may not even know, that the guys up front are the biggest danger in aviation. It’s not technical failure, it’s complacency in the guys up front. They should be one step ahead of what could go wrong, you’re not flying now, but in five minutes time. For someone with a career in aviation it’s in their subconscious. They also train in high-fidelity simulators where instructors throw problems at them, a sequence of failures imposed on the aeroplane, and debrief them over what could have gone badly wrong in a real life scenario. We need that sort of stuff at the top level of our country – especially when we’ve got issues like climate change, energy, food, water, social unrest all at a time when the population is rising.

SUMMIT’S WRONG: At a recent Queensland climate summit I soon realised it was more an economic summit about climate change, not about climate change. It was irking me. No one was talking about the super ordinate system pattern dynamic, and that is to get as many people in here to keep the economy crunching. The over-arching system is growth and we’ve not done any work, any fidelity about carrying capacity. It’s like getting on an aeroplane without knowing the fatigue load, sticking more passengers on, not knowing how much fuel you’ve got and just go. This is wrong.

RUNAWAY MACHINE: The political response out of the summit was to find ways to get ‘good, green infrastructure’ to catch up, catch up because we have got more people than the infrastructure can deal with. And so on – building more infrastructure to catch up. And what does that do. It creates more debt. So more debt, and how do we pay it off? We’d better get more punters in to pay more rates to pay off the debt. Now we’ve got more people, more infrastructure – oh dear, more debt, need more people – this is a perpetual runaway growth machine.

POPULATION PUZZLE: Australia’s endemic population growth is low, so where is the balance of the extra 13 million (government population target by 2050 at 35 million) coming from. Obviously,  from immigration and primarily from third world and developing nations. We’ll give them an opportunity  to make a go of it here, but if they had stayed in their countries and procreated there, per capita many of those countries consume less than a planet’s worth of their ecological footprint share. They come to Australia  where the figure is 4 to 5 times planet’s worth per person. We’re bringing them up to a standard of living that we’re all quite happy to live with. Very tough personal things in all of this stuff as well, because you have to look at yourself. It’s pretty hard. We are taking here is a person who will be have 10 times his previous impact on the planet. So Australia maximises its own prosperity at the expense of the whole system which is the earth.  That’s dumb. From a systems view of it, that’s wrong. It’s accelerating the collapse. As we continue to bring ourselves up at the same time, all we are doing is liquidating our natural capital and consuming all of the natural income derived from that natural capital. It’s not sustainable. I use those big systems dialogues, get on the white board, paint them, show them, have You Tubes and explain this is where we are going.

FEVER: This idea of 2 degrees C — what does it really mean? Let’s not go beyond 2 degrees C above over pre-industrial average global temperature. Let’s look at another system – the human body is a system – it has its own thermal engine, our own body core. It has the capability for oxygen transfer, and to convert glucose so we can operate as human beings. We have an average core body temperature of  37 degrees C. The average surface temperature of the earth is about 15 degrees C. For analogous purposes, if we increase our core body temperature to 39 degrees C and keep it there, we get incredibly sick with serious fever – on the road to death. That’s more than a six percent increase. Adding 2 degrees C to the planet’s average temperature is more than a 13 per cent increase and proportionately much bigger on a varying finely balanced system. What if with our patterns of behaviour on the planet, with our use of resources, our inability to step off the growth and energy intense ways in which we live plus the earth’s climate inertia etc, we have induced in the system not a 2 degrees C but a 4 degrees C increase. Raise the human body’s core temperature by 4 degrees C and you’re dead. On the planet, 4 degrees C would represent a 25 per cent increase and it’s on a very tightly balanced system where there’s great sensitivity in all of our living ecosystems and our terrestrial, atmospheric and marine ecologies. The 2 degrees C is just an average figure – at the poles there would be an increase of 6 or 6 degrees C. So once we take this bigger systems frame of reference and see where our behaviours and our ideas, which we hold so dearly, are taking us. Is that where we want to be taken? I don’t want to be taken there so I try to be as outspoken as I can to ask the deeper questions about our systems.

DEALING WITH SCEPTICS: I would take them through a systems dialogue using F-111 systems analogies. I talk about uncertainty, and the ultimate safety-critical system (our planetary conditions) and challenge them though a systemic critique. I also carry around in my bag four coloured whiteboard markers and I say ‘ OK, here are the pens – draw up how you reckon this works, and then have the discussion’. I tell them they’re picking little bits out of the system and taking a scalar view rather than a systems view. Then I say ‘Write it up, draw it, show me how you think it works and then let’s examine the logic in it and the ethics in it’. As a starting point I come from a place of biophysical reality.

Graeme Taylor, author of Evolution's Edge

Canadian-born Graeme Taylor used to be an emergency paramedic before he found his way into academia and later becoming an award-winning author.

Whatever he does, he does it with passion. You hear the urgency in his voice as if there’s no time to lose. It’s probably always been his way.

But saving accident victims lives is nothing compared to looking after his latest patient – the planet. If Graeme had his way, it would be rushed immediately to the solar system’s intensive care unit. There’d be red lights flashing and sirens wailing while our Earth was prepared for major surgery.

Graeme, who lives almost spartanly with his wife, in a unit overlooking the Brisbane River and Queensland University at St Lucia, is also a social activist, having been involved in a host of issues since the early ’60s when he was working with social justice and peace organisations.

But his latest task is not small for a man who lives relatively humbly. He’s helping to organise an international coalition to prevent total environmental catastrophe and to restore the planet to health by creating an economically and culturally sustainable world system.

He believes the world’s hundreds of thousands of different yet responsible non-governmental organisations, large and small, should have one voice in the fight to fix climate change.

Graeme Taylor on climate change deniers: “They don’t have a right to destroy my future amd that of my family, to kill the planet and kill my kids’ future. I care and I’m pissed off — it’s so tragic!”

One of the world’s leading environmentalists and mover and shaker for social change, Paul Hawken, has written a book called Blessed Unrest which explores the diversity of the largest movement on earth, a movement which has no name, leader or specific location and is emerging to be an extraordinary entity that gives creative expression of people’s needs globally.

This has been part of the inspiration for Graeme who is lead author for a manifesto being put together with the World Transformation Initiative, a forum for the Great Transitions Initiative which is a growing international network of scholars and activists.

When we met in late November, Graeme was working on an introduction to that manifesto which would set the ground for this grand coalition to take effect.

“These groups from every country in the world are working on every conceivable issue, from taxation to aboriginal rights, stopping deforestation, preserving species right through to climate change,” said Graeme.

“These people are not coordinated. We’re not taking all this energy and putting it together in a common direction to ensure that we rapidly change the planet and put it on a constructive course instead of a destructive one,

“You only get listened to if you have numbers and if you have a clear voice.

“For the vast majority of the people on the planet, it’s not in their interest to have it polluted, to create wars, to let people live in slums. It’s only in the interest of a very few to continue with the suicidal policies we have.

“But those few, those big corporations are able to hire lobbyists able to manipulate the media. Unfortunately, it’s their voice that gets heard.”

Graeme, in his book Evolution’s Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transformation of Our World, is not all doom and gloom. In fact, many critics say it is the book ‘Most likely to save the planet’.

The only problem is getting the right people to read it.

He says the type of transition we need is to turn from ownership to relationship.

“We have to make a shift from having to being. Having more things doesn’t make you happy. We should start looking at the quality of life rather than the quantity. You can be a very lonely billionaire,” he said.

“You can cut down trees,  pollute your air in the short term. You can have bigger houses, faster cars and more gismos, but in the long term process you’ve had no time for your family and you’ve helped destroy your environment. No happiness or good health out of that – you’ve just accelerated your own destruction.”

Graeme has also taken himself out of the Christmas-time commercial rat race. At one time when his kids were young and he had a full-time job he’d spend big time on Christmas.

“One year I was buying presents for 60 people and thought ‘this was insane’. I was spending money on buying stuff for people who quite likely didn’t need it and already had their homes stuffed with things,” he said.

“So I decided there and then that in the future I would do something different – write stories. I wondered whether they’d ever talk to me again, but they actually liked them.”

At Woodford, Graeme will appear at the Greenhouse on the Monday to talk about ‘Growing Crises: Growing Opportunities’. He’s just the man to give oxygen to the growing campaign to save this precious planet.

Author Graeme Taylor is a PhD candidate at the Griffith School of Environment in Brisbane and an honorary research adviser to the Australian Centre for Peace and Conflict studies. Since 2003 he has also been coordinator of the BEST Futures project

Avid gardener: Jillian Rossiter also looks after a special greenhouse where ideas grow and minds are fertile. Image: Brian Rickards

The woman behind the Woodford Folk Festival’s Greenhouse program prefers to be the quiet, effective achiever in the background, rather than spearheading campaigns.

That woman is Jillian Rossiter – she’s not exactly a shy, retiring person but she does respect her self-imposed limits and does brilliantly within them, working hard to bring people together to discuss and act on the environmental challenges facing us all.
Jillian, who began he working career as a teacher, is well-loved and admired both within and outside the circle of Woodford activities as she embodies a strong spirit and optimism while others might wilt in the ‘war’ to save the planet.

Her interest in the environment was awoken when she was a young girl and visited her aunt Jill who lived in north-east Victoria on part of a family property handed down from Jillian’s great grandfather.

Aunt Jill, a very independent lady and ‘self-funded’, was a field naturalist and an activist who wasn’t averse to writing the occasional scathing letter to neglectful politicians. She and her cousins were also interested in conservation; some of the farming land was even given away as National Park.

“My aunt and I got on really well together. She was an activist in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. She also started a wondrous garden from seed,” said Jillian who has also become an avid gardener, nurturing nature on her hillside home at Buderim.

“Back then activists were more focused on conservation, conserving trees and wildlife, stopping natural vegetation being ripped out for pine forests, saving National Parks. Today it’s more about environmental issues – pollution, climate change and so on.”

Although the youthful Jillian, who was born in Melbourne, had maintained an interest in things green, her focus in life later changed upon getting married, raising a family and then helping run her ex-husband’s business. Indeed, matters green turned to amber as she began pouring beers and running the office at the pub they ran.

“We owned the Beerwah hotel and had been in the hotel business since 1975. Before Beerwah we had the Landsborough hotel,” said Jillian.

But Jillian eventually split with her husband, retired partially from the business and was looking for new horizons.
But the trigger had already been pulled when she was working in the pub back in the 80s.

“I had learnt in the pub about some trees coming down. Our customers were the fellows who were clearing this native vegetation in the area called Caloundra Downs. They were clearing it for contractors, to plant pine trees – they piled it up and burnt it all,” said Jillian.

“So I went out there and they showed me the devastation. I saw a link-up of six D9s with chains between them. They just pulled the vegetation down. I saw a bird flying back trying to find its nest – it had been in those trees. That’s how quickly the vegetation is cleared.

“It was heart-wrenching. What had taken 200 to 300 years to grow had been destroyed in five minutes.”
That moment was seared on Jillian’s mind. It was a turning point. She was determined to do something. She started joining conservation organisations.

“I joined quite a few – the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Australian Natural Society and the Sunshine Coast Environment Council,” said Jillian.

As she was leaving the pub business she found she had the time and opportunity to use more of her energies elsewhere.

“At that point I wanted to do something for the community which had been good to us, to put something back in because I had become financially secure. So I was able to volunteer,” she said.

It was no surprise she chose environment because she had already joined some of the organisations.
So Jillian became more active, especially from the time she was introduced to SCEC.

“When I joined SCEC, all my children were grown up by then and I was free to follow the path I had really wanted to follow,” said Jillian.

Her work as a ‘green’ volunteer took her into new areas, firstly in SCEC’s environment shop, and then to acquiring new skills in the office and becoming secretary on the committee. In 1992 a position arose when somebody left SCEC and she found herself editing its magazine Eco Eco.

“It was known as the ‘Green voice of the Sunshine Coast’ and I went on to edit it for 10 years,” said Jillian.

“The thing about working as a volunteer is that there are no expectations and you’re empowered to have a go at something you really perhaps not wholly skilled at and you have to teach yourself on the job.

“However, Bill Hauritz, now the director of the Woodford Folk Festival, was then able to give be some help, showing me how to use the computer and other things. Putting out Eco Eco was a wonderful way of giving voice to some of the wonderful environmentalists on the Sunshine Coast.”

It was a job that brought new connections in the environment cause and laid some of the some of the path that eventually led her to Woodford’s Greenhouse.

It was Des Ritchie, the Irish inspiration and elder of the Queensland folk scene and supporter of SCEC, whose gentle persuasion led Jillian to the Woodford (then Maleny) Folk Festival.

“I’d only been at SCEC for a few months and Christmas time was coming up and Des said to me ‘are you going to the festival’. I said ‘what festival?’. So I went with my daughter for a day, walked inside and both of us fell instantly in love with it,” said Jillian.

“The next year I went for the whole time and have done so ever since.”

But Des did more than introduce Jillian to the festival. He became her inspiration.

“He also empowered me to do all the things , develop all the skills I’ve developed and given me confidence. In everything I did in the environment movement he gave me confidence. He was not only a great empowerer of me, but also for many other people.”

The move from the hotel scene, which Jillian describes as ‘male-dominated’, to the SCEC environment was dramatic.
“They were two different worlds. When I went to SCEC I was stunned that women were regarded equally. When I first arrived project officer Mark Ricketts offered me a cup of coffee. From then I thought ‘I love this’,” said Jillian.

Now, Jillian is also one of the ‘green’ leaders, but she’s pretty humble about her Greenhouse role.

“It’s probably because I stayed a long time at it. There are many others who have achieved far more by actually make a change,” said Jillian.

“I have stuck with the environment council and then through the Woodford Folk Festival and the Greenhouse. I’ve been there a long time more in an educational role and perhaps changing people’s consciousness rather than actively being an advocate of change as a campaigner.

“I have always felt it an absolute privilege to do the Greenhouse because it’s unique. It has the ability to touch ordinary people who would normally not go to a talk by an environmental expert or a scientist.”

Jillian, who describes her younger self as having been a ‘fairly little feminine girl, a good girl’, said her schoolteacher mother (Mavis) was her early inspiration.

“She instilled into me a sense of social justice. We used to discuss all kinds of subjects at the dinner table  — right from when I was young enough to be aware of global issues,” said Jillian.

However, Jillian admits, even though she has been a teacher, that it’s not easy for her to speak in public.

“I had to force myself to do it when I became president of SCEC. Really, I’d rather be behind the scenes organizing,” she said.
So when it comes to designing a successful Greenhouse program, what are the essentials?

“The subject matters. I try to bring something fresh. Perhaps focus on an expert in a particular topical subject and to find enough people to make a forum session.” said Jillian.

“Some times ideas come to me in the middle of the night. I also keep a notebook with me and go to as many speaker events as I can to head hunt and talent spot. I look to see if they are able to present well to an audience”

As for the future Jillian hopes to see the Greenhouse venue employ new video technology to link festivalgoers instantly with overseas speakers.

“I would like for us to be able to tap into people such as David Suzuki. Then we can be more green and not have people actually travel. Also, by then I would like to hand over to a younger person,” said Jillian.

As far as changing the minds of sceptics, Jillian says they have  to have an epiphany themselves and that Woodford is a great place for that.

“For instance, they might try a permaculture workshop and discover some realities in the principles of sustainability,” she said.

“I hope we get the people who are ready for change – where their consciousness is at a tipping point.

“I don’t have the courage or the abilities to get to the sceptics. I’m just the facilitator of the Greenhouse – not necessarily the one to make change. I just provide the stage for those that can.”

This woman with the big smile, gentle humility and a heart full of passion for this planet still believes there is hope. It seems her quiet determination has as much power as anything in the quest for success.