Globally there appears to be a housing crisis, with many communities facing their own country specific challenges. People, families, are suffering. How can this be?

Well, authorities quote rising costs of food, and electricity and gas and fuels, mortgage stresses, failure of real wages to meet basis needs. Construction companies are collapsing, building projects are stalling, and First Dog on the Moon tells us that 10,000 more folk per month, here in Australia, the lucky country, are joining the homeless ranks.

These are abysmal figures to contemplate, and when amalgamated with numbers such as 3 million folk daily going to bed hungry, mothers struggling to decide whether to divvy up their meagre cash resources on medications or school expenses or some food for an evening meal, then we need to stop and take stock of what is going wrong, and why we have reached this crisis point.

Now I’m not a statistician, or an economist, or a politician or a sociologist, but I’ve had a bit of practice joining up dots. So let’s have a bit of a crack at some ideas, shall we?

When I was an impressionable 24-year-old, in 1974, I read a seminal book titled ‘The Limits to Growth’, produced by a respected group of folk, the Club of Rome. Check Wikipedia if you want an explanation.

This tome forecast potential problems we might collectively face in the coming decades, in relation to use and depletion of our natural resources. I suspect from then on – with a rise in our global population, now nudging 8 billion – a move towards a more westernised lifestyle which includes the widespread expectations  to have more opportunities to travel or cruise internationally, change our mobile phone for a better one every 18 months, eat red meat more frequently, and upgrade cars and clothes and refrigerators and pets more often than sensibly required, we have exceeded our planet’s limits of growth.

A lot of this race to consume has been aided and abetted, subtly or not, via persuasive marketing and advertising. The race to keep abreast, to have the latest, is creating unexpected outcomes, and has actually become a race to the bottom.

We have a housing crisis: a habitat loss for thousands of humans.

Perversely, habitat loss creates problems for the rest of the species with whom we share this currently fragile planet.

When the recent international climate COP meeting held in Azerbaijan has the invited delegates (our representatives) outnumbered by lobbyists and representatives from oil, gas and coal companies, then we can expect the decisions made – which should be focused on the wellbeing of our planet and its inhabitants – to be skewed and adjusted and manipulated by the non-delegates. And so it came to be.

The Paris Climate Agreement of 2015, where over 105 countries accepted a pre-industrial global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees was something we could all regretfully adjust to and learn to cope with, has been reached.

And thanks to the dangerous and pervasive influence of the powerful fossil fuel industry, scientists now expect we will reach close to 3 degrees of global warming in the next 60 or so years.  That is our rivers and mountains and oceans and houses and cars and pets, and us. will all be hotter than before.

Now, I’ll play a little mind game here, just privately. If I was a fossil fuel CEO, focused on productivity, growth, competition, shareholder reward, profit and personal bonuses then I would fear the concept of my company ending up as a ‘stranded asset’. I’d be having a really good crack at growing the business, or as Donald Trump advocates, “drill, drill, drill.”

And so it came to be. Emissions are rising, global temperatures likewise, and habitat loss proceeds in lockstep.

Finally, let’s have a squizz at some of the consequences in our home base, little old Tasmania, where to an extent we are currently insulated (or so it seems) from the problems of hurricanes, wars and sinking coastlines.

We’ve all heard about certain parrots whose population numbers are in trouble: swifties, and an orange one as well. And the Tasmanian devils have some weird disease and it’s uncommon to see devil roadkills now. And there’s a skate over on the west coast, isn’t there? He also seems to be in strife, but they reckon they can breed some more, so we’ll be all right. And a red handfish, which we can’t eat anyhow, but it seems to be rare or threatened.

Five species eh! So what? Well maybe we aren’t so well insulated, here in Tasmania, as we had thought, or hoped.

Remember those bloody microplastics which everyone seems to know about? Tiny little plastic particles. They are now spread worldwide in the rivers, oceans, even in our own bodies. It seems that the Tasmanian insulation has some gaps and holes, doesn’t it?

And those five species we mentioned. Let’s look at the Tasmanian Threatened Species Act, and we find there a figure of 686.

Here in our safe little island state the threatened list includes some 490 plants, 120 invertebrates (grubs, worms, insects, beetles and so on) and the remaining 76 or so are vertebrates. Things with a backbone – our devils, those parrots, many shore birds. 77 if you include humans.

All are threatened because they are facing their own habitat/ housing crisis. Yet still we are logging our native forests, polluting our oceans and rivers, heating our world …

And so it has come to be – a housing crisis for the people, a habitat crisis for the rest.  We are all in this together.

I suspect the status quo will continue, unfortunately. But I quietly hope and expect otherwise. Politicians and legislators and leaders, I put you collectively on notice. The people are watching.

Scott Bell is a fifth generation Tasmanian, with two daughters and four grandchildren.  In a previous life he was a general practitioner. Now he spends most of his time living on a covenanted conservation property in NE Tasmania, working as an owner builder, monitoring and recording the resident wildlife, and caring for the remaining flora and fauna. He has an extensive police record with multiple court appearances, fines and convictions as a result of his NVDA climate activism. He enjoys his life, and living.