Room for dawdling disappearing

If there was an appropriate message or phrase in response to many of the stories making news at the moment it would be ‘hurry up!’.

For starters, there is the obvious big one – could all involved in the nasty war unfolding in eastern Europe please ‘hurry up’ and find a way to stop the fighting.

Of course there are plenty of other big stories, either hitting us between the eyes, or providing more subtle reminders that we need to ‘hurry up’ in responding to key issues.

Perhaps the most persistent and constant reminder stories involve global sustainability and a need to rise to the challenge to combat or adapt to climate change.

Take your pick of stories in news headlines of late.

Many ultimately lead back to how humanity is managing or struggling to manage the environment on which we rely at household, town, city, region, state, country and international levels.

And yes, as we all know, most of these yarns have long had an underpinning we-need-to-hurry-up-and-fixit message.

Speculation about just how much climate change is influencing natural disasters such as fires and floods, including the latest devastation in

Queensland and NSW, have become the norm. It all appears to becoming so much more obvious.

Unending stories about the threat of global warming to the sustainability of global food crops and the survival of the Great Barrier Reef, rainforests around the world, species decline and extinction, pollution incidents and sudden fish kills, disappearing bees and other insects, the global buildup of human trash – the list goes on and on. Again, in this information, usually based on science, has always been a demand for a hurry-up human response.

We can even the rising price of petrol to a hurry-up message based on environmental management – we should hurry up in our development and adoption of an alternative-fuel motoring industry.

We’ve constantly heard stories about the need for greater education to better understand the binding connectivity between us humans and natural-resource management. The message, you guessed it, is that we have no time to lose.

The reality is that these days, most of us are probably well versed on most of the issues. We’re now just waiting for all the wonderful new technologies promised to save us from a global catastrophe to hurry up and become part of everyday life.

We’ve said it before – regardless of individual political philosophies, we all need to be a little bit ‘green’ to ensure we can eat, breath and live.

The new message might well be that in being a little bit ‘green’ we should as a society seriously all hurry up in our move towards greater security and sustainability.