Bill, Tom and Dog: The Great Sausage Sizzle

Bill had volunteered to organise the annual community sausage sizzle.

This was unusual. Bill generally avoided volunteering for anything that involved other people, but he'd been assured there would be free sausages and that nobody would expect him to make a speech.

He'd taken the job seriously.

By Saturday morning, four barbecues were positioned around the picnic ground. Bill had personally selected each location, measuring the available space, checking access and making sure there was plenty of room for the cooks.

He was rather pleased with himself.

"Look at that, Dog. Perfectly organised."

Dog inspected the nearest barbecue, discovered the sausages weren't ready, and wandered off.

By eleven o'clock, things were going badly.

Smoke from the first barbecue was drifting across the picnic tables. The second was beside the children's playground, where several parents were complaining. The third blocked the shortest path to the toilets, and the fourth was filling Dog's favourite sleeping spot beneath a tree with smoke.

Dog had already moved twice.

Tom arrived carrying a folding chair and an esky.

"What's going on here, Bill?"

"Sausage sizzle."

"I can see that. Why does it look like the entire district's on fire?"

Bill looked offended.

"Four barbecues, Tom. All properly positioned. Plenty of space around each one."

Tom surveyed the scene. People were moving their chairs, children were coughing, and a woman was waving a tea towel furiously at a cloud of smoke.

"Why have you spread them all over the park?"

"Because I found the best place for each one!"

"Best for what?"

"For the barbecue, obviously."

Tom considered this.

"Right. And did you happen to consider the rest of the picnic ground?"

Bill frowned.

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you've got smoke blowing over the tables, people walking halfway around the park to get a sausage, and Dog's been evicted from under his tree."

Dog, recognising his name, gave Tom a miserable look.

"That's not my fault," said Bill. "The wind changed."

"Four times?"

Bill ignored him.

"Anyway, what would you have done?"

Tom pointed to a gravelled area at the far end of the park.

"Put all four barbecues over there. Plenty of access, close to the water tap, downwind of the tables, and nobody has to walk all over the place."

Bill shook his head.

"Too crowded. That's why I spread them out."

"Bill, they're barbecues. They don't need their own postcode."

After a short argument, several volunteers helped Tom wheel the barbecues across to the gravelled area.

Half an hour later, the picnic ground was transformed.

The smoke was drifting away from the crowd. People were sitting at their tables. The children were playing, and Dog had reclaimed his patch of shade.

Even the cooks were happier. They could share utensils, supplies and conversation without shouting across the park.

Bill stood beside Tom, looking thoroughly unimpressed.

"Well, I still don't see what's so clever about it."

Tom handed him a sausage sandwich.

"Look around, Bill."

Bill looked.

"Four barbecues," he said.

"Yep."

"Same four we had before."

"Yep."

"Same sausages. Same people. Same picnic ground."

"That's right."

Bill scratched his head.

"So what's actually changed?"

Tom sighed.

"You found four perfectly good places for barbecues, Bill. Trouble is, you ruined one perfectly good picnic ground."

Bill contemplated this for a moment.

"So you're saying I should've thought about the whole park instead of just the barbecues?"

"Exactly."

"Well, why didn't you say that in the first place?"

Tom opened his mouth, thought better of it, and took a bite of his sausage sandwich.

There was a brief silence.

Then Bill brightened.

"Actually, Tom, I've been thinking. We could fit another six barbecues along that gravel area. Maybe eight!"

Tom stared at him.

"Bill, how many sausages do you think people can eat?"

"That's not the point. We've got room!"

Dog, meanwhile, had discovered that the new arrangement offered an unexpected advantage.

With all four barbecues together, he could patrol the entire sausage supply without crossing the picnic ground.

He had already stolen three.

For once, Bill and Dog were thinking along exactly the same lines.

Just because there's room for something doesn't mean you need more of it.

But Dog wasn't interested in philosophy.

He was working on number four.

What Bill Learned

Imagine two rural districts. Both have the same amount of farmland, bushland, houses and industry. In one, industry is grouped near major roads and services. In the other, it's scattered among farms and homes.

Same amount of land. Same uses. But two very different places.

How we arrange and use land matters just as much as what we do with it.

Every property is part of something bigger. Farms, forests, waterways, roads, towns and businesses all interact. Together, they create a landscape with characteristics and benefits that no single property owner controls.

We can own individual pieces of land, but the larger landscape belongs to all of us in a different sense.

Land use is a public asset. And perhaps one we don't think about nearly enough.

The commons — what we all share

Most of us understand the idea of the commons. Things like clean air and water are shared resources. We all depend on them, and what one person does can affect everyone else.

But there's a bigger commons we rarely recognise.

Think about what makes a rural district work. Productive farms, healthy waterways, areas of bushland, suitable places for industry, roads connecting communities, and open spaces that give the region its character.

It's not just the individual parts that matter. It's how they fit together.

This is a simple example of an idea called gestalt: the whole has qualities that cannot be understood by looking at its parts separately.

There's another important point. The capacity of our shared landscape to absorb change is not unlimited. Every decision can affect what's possible elsewhere. Some changes use up that capacity. Others, including restoration, can help recover it.

This isn't some radical attack on private ownership. We already accept that owning land comes with obligations. Setbacks, zoning, environmental protections and other rules limit what we can do on our own properties because our actions affect others.

Some countries state this principle very clearly. Germany's Constitution says:

• Property entails obligations. Its use shall also serve the public good.

The idea is straightforward. We may own the land, but we all have a stake in what happens to the landscape.

This is also part of the thinking behind planning schemes and regional strategies. They're intended to look beyond individual property boundaries and help determine where different land uses belong, how they fit together, and what sort of region we want to create.

Zoning is one way of putting those wider decisions into practice. But there's an important question: how well do we carry that bigger picture through when assessing individual development proposals?

What have we already lost?

The landscape we see today is the result of generations of decisions. Land was cleared, farms established, roads built, towns expanded and industries developed. Many of those decisions made sense at the time.

But what did they add up to?

We might now have fragmented bushland, altered waterways, declining wildlife populations or land uses that increasingly conflict with one another. Nobody necessarily planned those outcomes. They emerged from thousands of separate decisions.

Worse, we may not even know how much we've lost.

Each generation grows up accepting the landscape around it as normal. We forget what earlier generations experienced, what the land once supported and what possibilities have disappeared.

Scientists call this the shifting baseline problem.

And it matters because we tend to judge new proposals against what exists today, without always asking whether today's condition is already badly degraded.

We could end up accepting one small loss after another, never realising how far we've travelled from where we started — or how much better things might be.

Are we asking the right questions?

We spend a great deal of time calculating the economic value of development. Jobs, investment, production, costs and benefits.

We also assess environmental impacts, usually concentrating on what a particular proposal might change.

But how much effort goes into understanding the bigger picture? Or investigating what we might gain by repairing damage already done?

This is the difference between valuation and evaluation.

Putting a dollar value on something is useful, but it doesn't tell us everything about how it works, what it contributes to the wider landscape, or what we might lose by changing it.

A broader evaluation would ask different questions.

What does this landscape currently provide? How has it changed? What have we lost? Could some of that be restored? What do we want it to become? And how would a new development affect those possibilities?

This isn't about stopping change or preserving the countryside exactly as it is.

We need farms, houses, roads, factories, waste facilities and plenty of other activities that may not always make ideal neighbours. They all need somewhere to go.

The challenge is finding where they fit best, while protecting and improving the functioning of the whole.

And as populations grow and land use becomes more intense, getting those decisions right becomes increasingly important.

Looking at development differently

Our usual starting point is a proposed development. We examine its impacts and decide whether they are acceptable.

What if we started with the wider landscape instead?

What is it capable of supporting? What condition is it in? What do we want to protect, recover or improve? Where would a proposed activity best fit within that larger picture?

This doesn't mean every small land-use decision needs an enormous study. The level of evaluation should reflect the scale of the consequences and how intensively the land is being used.

But it does mean recognising that the effects of individual decisions can extend far beyond individual property boundaries.

Where I'm going with this

Over a series of articles, I want to explore these ideas in more detail. We'll look at the commons, how complex systems work, what we can learn from the past, the value of restoration, and how societies make decisions about their shared landscapes.

There is already some fascinating work by scientists, philosophers and legal thinkers in these areas. Australia also has examples where similar thinking has influenced real decisions and produced measurable results.

I'll look at those examples and consider whether we can bring the ideas together into a practical framework for evaluating land use.

The proposed biosolids processing, incineration and fertiliser facility at Glan Devon may provide a useful local case study. As the ideas develop, I'd like to explore whether applying this broader approach reveals something that a conventional assessment of the project might miss.

But the underlying question goes well beyond Glan Devon.

We have become accustomed to evaluating what we want to change. Perhaps we should spend more time understanding the whole we are changing, what it has already lost, and what it might yet become.

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