After reading Bill McKibben’s book “Eaarth”, I reviewed the ideas that I wanted to present and came to the conclusion that I was basically on the right track.  However, I saw some great opportunities to extend them, not so much longitudinally, but rather laterally. In other words, not the “what” but rather the “how”.  For instance, if we are going to have small, remote settlements scattered all over the country, the necessary communications infrastructure would be much as I had imagined them. However, the construction of the buildings, the food production methods, the community organisation and other matters would almost certainly display the McKibben influence. Whether this would materially affect the absolute maximum value of the sustainable population of Australia (the point of this blog) is yet to be explored, but I am sure that the lifestyle which would be dictate the maximum population Australia would accept will undoubtedly more demanding of resources than if Bill McKibben’s ideas were not  incorporated.

Another way in which Mr. McKibben is influencing this conversation, is that the land-use analysis which I discussed earlier is going to be an iterative process.  The reason is that many of the issues which I have been thinking about predicate research into food production methods, construction methods, water conservation methods and so on, all of which will feed back into the land-use profiles on which the development process is based.

This area of inquiry is expanding at such a rate that, in the interests of my own self-discipline (not wanting to bore readers by being too dilatory), I here set down some dot-points for future discussion. Essentially, they fall into two groups:

Infrastructure:

• The nature of remote settlements.
• Transportation (trains, lighter-than-air vehicles, cars, aircraft, commercial vehicles, bicycles).
• Services (power, water, communications, waste disposal).
• Construction methods for roads, housing and so forth.

Living in remote settlements:

• Food production.
• Services.
• Working from home.
• Distribution of Commercial Enterprises.
• Taxation and other inducements.

This list is not complete or exclusive, but it will do for now. Also, the order of the topics will not necessarily be adhered to because, as is the way with blogs, commentary from readers so often raises new items of interest or prompts an extension of a previous post.