…and ought to be.

So said Richard Neville during his “Future Quake” talk last night as part of the University of Western Australia’s Universitiy Extension program.

In the late 80’s I lived across the street from school, and rushed home at lunchtimes to see whether a particular sparky brained, fast talking “social commentator”was on the Mike Walsh Show . The Trials of Oz was my favourite book as a teenager, which made me wish I’d founded a radical underground magazine and been arrested in the late 60’s for “encouraging urination in public ” (Australia) or “conspiring to corrupt public morals”(Britain).

(If you want your mind expanded, baby, here’s an archive of each Oz magazine. If you venture there, ensure the under 18s are not near your machine)

One of his theses last night was that “your whole life can change by noticing something and acting on it“. For example Felix Dennis, co-defendent in the Oz trials, made an awful lot of money with hand printed Bruce Lee posters, and a Kung Fu magazine, after noticing the crowd at a cinema showing one of the first Bruce Lee movies in London. In 1971, if you saw one of the first hand held calculators you may have said “good, that will help me add up”, but what you probably wouldn’t have noticed was the “weak signal of portability” that it encompassed. These “weak signals” are all around, but noticing them, and then acting on them is the key.

He’s an incredibly mobile speaker -fast talking, wide hand gestures and often threw questions to the audience to answer (How many people worldwide are moving to urban areas each week? How much did the CEO of Exxon earn per minute?) – and prompting us with “come on, come on” when an answer wasn’t forthcoming.

We looked at how future perils may hold promise – like the creativity that we’ll need to embrace to cope with environmental crises. Here’s some new ideas I picked up:

• Bio-mimicry – observing nature and applying its solutions to our technical problems.
• The Eastgate Building in Harare which using principles from a termite mound for cooling
• Ratio of poor:rich worldwide changed from 6:1 in 1980 to 220:1 now
• Glocalization – being able to think and act both locally and gloabally at the same time
• Dong Tan City in China is a new eco-cty which aims to be energy neutral.

Nice to learn new ideas, but for the teenager in me, the highlight was this exchange:

• RN: What was one of the starting points for the information revolution in the 60s?
• Crowd: Televsion, TV???
• Me: Paperbacks
• RN (to me): You’re a soulmate
• Me: I’m a librarian