In the face of serious drought, Brisbane residents have cut water use nearly in half. Dave Riley, who lives there, says let’s use this as a model for all resource management, for power consumption, recycling, and garbage. Then expand further to include public transportation and, of course, climate change.
Brisbane’s major advantage is that exercises like the water one can work because it is the largest municipality in Australia. So the scale to fiddle was already there and while I’m not advocating council amalgamations as a standard, the fact that the city could intervene at a large level of demographics suggests what could be done at state and federal level if the will, method and guts were in there to harness.