Future-proofing towns and villages.

Future-proofing towns and villages moves farmers and communities away from the breaking points.

Since Dorothea Mackellar wrote her famous poem, much has been said about droughts and flooding rains. Unfortunately, little has been done to future-proof or drought-proof our regional, rural, and remote areas in recent years. There is never enough action to match the rhetoric.

There are no easy answers. While it is not a one-size-fits-all problem, there is no one-size-fits-all approach.  Every town and village in Australia may look the same to the uninitiated. However, while there may be many similarities, they are all quite different, with different hopes and dreams for the future.

You have to ask, “Is the big thinking of yesteryear about such projects as the ‘Bradfield Scheme’ beyond the modern politicians, bureaucrats and community leaders”?

Today’s small regional towns and villages are alone and under attack from many angles, so they let future-proofing slip off the radar until it’s too late. People have become more uneasy, and many are reluctantly drifting to the more substantial regional centres and capital cities. 

Some towns are dying slowly and bleeding to death as they struggle to keep up with the modern globalised world and the lack of action on futureproofing their community.

New programs are needed to regenerate towns and villages to keep pace with the changing commercial environment driven by new technologies and the problems and frustrations associated with droughts, floods and fires. Everyone needs to adjust to the impact or continue to decline.

Every town and village must rediscover its reason for being and reinvent itself to retain an excited and proud population. Helping to create a great place to live and work is the difference between being a run-down community and a great community.

Challenge your assumptions.

Insight comes when you see the drought in a new light, when you rethink beliefs, and when you start to gather information and knowledge while challenging old assumptions. It’s time to show a little political will and stop stuffing around before the people take things into their own hands.

We all know or should know that livestock water and drinking water are fundamental to our lives. Harvesting and storing stormwater and reducing water waste are challenges. These challenges might be expensive to address, but the funds would be there if we were to harvest some of the money we waste as a country on extraneous issues.

Trying to please those who lack experience and motivation and stick rigidly to their old assumptions can be physically and emotionally exhausting. Good things happen once people figure things out, do what they were meant to do about future-proofing, and enjoy doing it. Unfortunately, many don’t consider how compelling their story is, how it can be improved, and how it could help others and their community.

Quotable Quotes

“When you confront people with new ideas, they often turn away. However, when you help them to discover a better way, they turn toward you and your ideas”. Peter Sergeant

“As a general observation: Every problem created by human beings started as a solution to a previous problem. Therefore, in thinking about any solution for any problem, it is important to think about how
it (the solution itself) would become a future problem”.  Chade-Meng Tan