It fills me with great sadness to announce that sickness has caused me to retire from our ResourceSmart AuSSI Vic delivery although, if I win the health battle, I will still contribute with a small flexible role at CERES.

It is a comfort that our group is so full of fabulous people that it springs back into action. Schools will be so well served by the CERES staff looking after their needs.

Autopoiesis is a major feature of self healing in Nature to a point. The yellow robins are in the bush breeding back shortly after bushfires, our team restructures to return to service, and even I struggle back to work. One of the wonderful principles of self healing as long as we don’t push Nature too far. And so in the biophysical world.

As Bill McKibben from 350.org has been reminding us recently, we do have chances for healthy coral, a frozen Summer in Antarctica, moderate sea levels and temperature rise as long as we can hold greenhouse gases to 350ppm. Unfortunately we are already over 400ppm. We will be tested severely and every school, government and company must bend its back to the wheel. We may have to reduce the energy and materials we use – something we could easily plan for.

What wonderful achievements could be registered: more non-polluting energy, green technologies, biosecurity and a whole host of ‘wellbeing’ advantages which have been recently list in the Sunday Age (16th June 2013).

In the wise words of Australian social researcher Hugh McKay in ‘The Good Life’: we have to nurture our relationships, our responsibility for other’s well being: that’s what nurtures community and we are sustained by these communities. If we focus only on happiness and materialism, we’re neglecting the richness of the full emotional spectrum and we’re overlooking the fact that you couldn’t make sense of happiness if you didn’t know sadness (a human paradox).

So why should ResourceSmart AuSSI Vic schools be any different? We have hiccoughs, we have triumphs but all the while school successes mount. The article written by Pat Armstrong and myself, ‘Sustainable Schools – In the Beginning’ summarises the steps of the Long March, and the stories in the Projects section of the Hub illustrate school improvements.

What a movement we are all creating!

Love and best wishes,
Eric Bottomley