Flooding rains 2

This time last year, I had just written an article on flooding which started with “this time last year I was writing about bushfire resilient design in response to the tragic 2019/20 bushfire season”. Anyone else feel like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day?

And just when it seemed like our Covid pandemic was about to turn endemic, Mr Putin thought it would be a good idea to invade Ukraine. If you weren’t an optimist, one might have the thought that this could all be the beginning of the end. I think it might be having an effect on Tasmania’s property prices. I feel like every time the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases a new report, I lose another friend to the Apple Isle! Watching the news reports it does seem difficult to keep the pessimism at bay.

Well, once upon a time, I came across the term Rational Optimism and it’s something I try to adopt as much as possible to cope with the steady stream of ill-tidings. I’ve also found the work of the Stoics to be more pertinent than ever. These guys all met with some pretty awful ends but remained somewhat philosophical in light of their fates.

Where am I leading up to, you ask? The answer is inflation. The floods have dissipated (for now), the war in Ukraine seems like it could go for some time, Covid figures aren’t being blasted down the tube to us anymore and climate change, well, climate change is a gift that keeps on giving, isn’t it! The immediate and net effects are: more pressure on our timber supply, ever more increases in the cost of living, and petrol prices you have to take a mortgage out for every time you fill up the tank!

Just before the floods there was an article on the ABC website with the headline, Building costs go through the roof, dashing homeowner dreams. It was a little piece on how a family in the far north of NSW had some plans drawn up for their dream home only to be forced into withdrawing their mortgage application due to the uncertainty over building costs. Can you imagine the cost of a stick of pine up that way now – that is, if you could find one! In the article, a local quantity surveyor relayed the cost of framing timber had jumped from $3.20 per lineal metre in January 2021 up to $8 a metre in November. And he further attributed this to the effects of bushfires destroying large tracts of pine plantations both here and in America. Do our politicians need more evidence of the potential cost of climate change?

On and on the article goes with more woes, including links to other articles dating back as far as March 2021 (and I’m sure I could go further back than that if I didn’t have the time pressure of getting this article in ink!). We keep looking for a break in the upward climb of construction costs but they just don’t come. Even a slight plateau would be good. Those who wait seem to just get stuck in a cycle of just not quite getting there or over-extending themselves for fear of missing out.

Okay, time to get my crystal ball out. Will that ever elusive stabilisation in construction costs happen? Not anytime soon, that’s for sure. (Full disclosure: I’m not a soothsayer and I don’t actually have a crystal ball). All things considered it seems highly unlikely that costs will plateau and if I was a betting man I would say that, unfortunately, they’ll be going the other way.

So what does a rational optimist or a stoic do in the face of all this uncertainty? I’m not that sure either so I googled it. According to further.net: “Rational optimism means taking a realistic assessment of the present moment. It means maintaining the belief that you can put one foot in front of the other, take action, and overcome a challenge or reach a goal”.

Meantime, TheSchoolOfLife.com had this to say of the Stoics: “Rather than appease ourselves with sunny tales, they proposed – to courageously come to terms with the very worst possibilities – and then make ourselves entirely at home with them. When we look our fears in the face and imagine what life might be like if they came true, we stand to come to a crucial realisation: we will cope.”

I know, I know – kind of brutal, right! There’s another quote that I think perhaps is a bit more constructive and that comes from our good friend Plato and has evolved into “Necessity is the mother of invention”. That is, we’re just going to have to get smarter about the resources available to us, put them to better use and find alternatives.

Mud bricks anyone?