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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780702255465 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Queensland Press |
| Publication date: | 03/23/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 252 |
| File size: | 994 KB |
About the Author
Professor Ian Lowe AO is emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University in Brisbane, as well as being an adjunct professor at Sunshine Coast University and Flinders University. His previous books include A Big Fix, Living in the Hothouse, A Voice of Reason: Reflections on Australia and Bigger or Better? Australia’s Population Debate.
Read an Excerpt
The Lucky Country?
Reinventing Australia
By Ian Lowe
University of Queensland Press
Copyright © 2016 Ian LoweAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-7022-5546-5
CHAPTER 1
ENVIRONMENT
Australia has some very serious environmental problems. If we are to achieve our goal of ecological sustainability, these problems need to be dealt with immediately ... The problems are the cumulative consequences of population growth and distribution, lifestyles, technologies and demands on natural resources ... No single government or sector is to blame for these problems. We are all responsible. — Australia: State of the Environment 1996
Much of Australia's environment and heritage is in good shape, or improving. Other parts are in poor condition or deteriorating ... Our changing climate, and growing population and economy, are now confronting us with new challenges. — Australia: State of the Environment 2011
The current observed changes to the Earth systems are unprecedented in human history ... several critical global, regional or local thresholds are close or have been exceeded ... abrupt and possibly irreversible changes to the life support functions of the planet are likely to occur. — GEO5, UNEP 2012
The first edition of Donald Horne's The Lucky Country says absolutely nothing about environmental issues, because they were not on the radar in 1964. Most observers see the 1962 US publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson – which set out the detrimental effects of pesticides on birds, animals and the world's food supply – as the beginning of broad awareness of the impacts of human activity on natural systems. It began a discussion of these issues among scientists and the more aware public officials. The first laws seeking to protect environmental standards emerged about ten years later. Of course, there had always been a link between industrial production and local pollution, as recognised in the old Yorkshire saying 'where there's muck, there's brass' – wherever there is a mess, it is the result of somebody making money. The problem that has developed in the last 50 years is that our growing human numbers and increasing consumption have dramatically increased the scale of environmental effects: from the local to the regional and now the global. Our ecosystem is under serious threat – from climate change and other effects of human activity – and our political efforts at regulating these threats have been seriously compromised by those with economic interests in maintaining the damaging behaviour. These issues clash most strongly in the areas of energy use and resource exports, and the strain that population growth puts on our urban development and infrastructure. Shifting our development trajectory onto a path that could be sustainable will require a concerted effort by our politicians to act in the interest of future generations. It will also need all of us to accept less wasteful living standards.
THE DAMAGE WE'RE DOING
Twenty years ago, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) decided to develop reports on the Global Environmental Outlook (GEO). I was in a workshop UNEP convened to discuss the structure of these reports. Five have now been issued, each one expressing the need for change more urgently than the previous study. As long ago as 1999, the second GEO report warned that serious problems were emerging from increasing human consumption of resources. It concluded that the standard development model, assuming continuing growth in material living standards everywhere in the world, was not sustainable and 'doing nothing is no longer an option'. World leaders essentially ignored that clarion call. As subsequent reports have pointed out, the global environmental problems are steadily worsening, arguably the inevitable consequence of the continually growing population and increasing consumption per person. One recent report, GEO5, said in 2012 that despite efforts to 'slow the rate or extent of change', neither the scope nor speed of these adverse changes has abated in the past five years. We are now close to or exceeding the thresholds of 'possibly irreversible changes to the life-support functions of the planet'. An abrupt and irreversible example is the accelerated melting of the Arctic ice sheet due to global warming.
GEO5 noted that such changes are already having serious consequences for human well-being. Droughts are combining with socioeconomic pressures to affect food production and human security. Increasing average temperatures have led to significant human health problems such as increased outbreaks of malaria. Increased frequency and severity of climatic events, such as floods and droughts, are affecting both human settlements and the natural world. Rising sea levels pose a threat to coastal buildings as well as reducing the capacity of some small island developing states in the Pacific to produce their food. Perhaps most importantly, biodiversity loss affects everything from our food supply to the loss of existing and possible future medicines from natural systems.
If we want to avoid these consequences, we need to recognise and respond to the root causes of the environmental problems, rather than concentrating just on the symptoms. As one obvious example, it is not enough to reduce individual impacts on natural systems; we need to reduce the total impact. The ecosystem does not recognise or respond to the number of humans on Earth or the scale of our industrial production, but it does respond to the sum total of our water extraction, our food production, our dumping of wastes, our destruction of habitat and our release of introduced species. There is no prospect, even in principle, of a sustainable future unless we recognise and respond to that fundamental truth. It calls into question the underlying assumption of most decision-makers, the myth that continuing growth is both possible and desirable. This is 'a toxic meme' which makes it impossible to have a rational discussion about the problems we face.
Climate change
The atmospheric concentration of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide, has varied over the period of human existence between about 180 and 280 parts per million. It is now over 400 parts per million and still increasing rapidly. This has already resulted in significant changes: the global average temperature has increased by nearly a degree, sea levels have risen, glaciers have retreated, rainfall patterns have changed and we are seeing more frequent extreme events: longer and worse droughts, heavy rainfall events, catastrophic bushfires and more intense tropical storms. Perth's average annual run-off into its water supply system is now about one-third of what it was between 1910 and 1975. The ability of its residents to continue to water lawns and gardens is being maintained only by using desalination plants which process Indian Ocean water.
The Australian Academy of Science recently advised that global emissions of greenhouse gases need to peak by 2020 and then be reduced sharply to have a 50 per cent chance of avoiding the Plimsoll Line of 2 degrees increase in average global temperature, the level beyond which our ability to adapt becomes problematic. Such an increase in average temperatures would see it get much hotter in inland Australia, so the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has shown our food production would be severely affected during my grand-daughter's lifetime. At the global level, scientists worry that beyond the 2 degree increase we are likely to see an unstoppable momentum toward such changes as destabilising major ice sheets, causing sea levels to rise several metres. That shows how seriously we should be taking the issue of climate change. We need an unprecedented level of international cooperation and willingness to invest in clean energy systems to achieve reductions on the scale required.
Biodiversity
The loss of the Earth's biological diversity is permanent. Extinct species do not return. (At least, that is true of our present technology. Optimists think it might be possible to bring back the thylacine or the woolly mammoth from DNA in the preserved bodies of these extinct creatures, but that capacity is certainly not proven.) The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and the Global Footprint Network, in the Living Planet Report 2014, reviewed some 10,000 species of mammals, reptiles, birds, fish and amphibians, and found that, on average, populations have declined by more than 50 per cent since 1970. The current rate of species loss was shown by the UN's Millennium Assessment report to be comparable with those during the previous great extinction episodes of the Earth's history. That study gloomily concluded that we could lose up to a third of all mammal, bird and amphibian species this century if present trends continue. That is not a minor blip, but a catastrophic loss of the planet's biodiversity. We cannot predict the consequences, but we do know that when a species disappears there are effects up and down the food chain; species on which it preys increase in numbers, while species that relied on it for food decline. We are pulling random rocks out of the wall of life, without being aware of when whole sections might collapse.
We know what is causing the decline and loss of species: the loss of habitat, introduced species and chemical pollution. All those forces are driven by growing human population numbers and increasing average consumption, causing us to make ever greater demands on natural systems. The Living Planet Report estimated that we are now using about 150 per cent of the sustainable productivity of natural systems. While there might be an economic case for deficit budgets in the short term, especially if the borrowing is used to invest in the capacity of future generations to have a good life, there is absolutely no ecological case for the present approach of systematically running down our natural capital. Our descendants will suffer terribly if we continue to disregard our reliance on natural systems and the wonderful biological diversity of the Earth.
Climate change adds an extra pressure to these three driving forces causing the loss of biodiversity; not just by increasing average temperatures but also by altering rainfall patterns, shrinking terrestrial glaciers and Arctic sea-ice, raising the sea level and causing more frequent and severe extreme events. Some animal species can move as the climate changes, and shifts of that kind have been well documented in recent years, but others are trapped on shrinking islands of acceptable habitat. Plant species are obviously less able to move in response to changing climate. That means the overall outlook is quite bleak unless we change our approach to natural systems.
PLAYING POLITICS WITH THE EARTH
Scientists started sounding warnings about our impacts on natural systems in the 1960s. In Australia, a group convened a meeting in Canberra which led to the establishment in 1965 of the Australian Conservation Foundation. The first modest step to change behaviour in the right direction was the national environmental legislation signed into law in 1969 by US president Richard Nixon. A response to the concerns arising from Silent Spring, it set limits on the release of some pollutants into the environment.
The Whitlam government introduced our first environmental law in Australia only five years later in 1974 and appointed Dr Moss Cass as minister. A medico before he went into politics, Cass was the driving force introducing environmental impact assessment for major developments such as the proposed Ranger uranium mine in the Northern Territory.
The subsequent Fraser government also used other legal powers for environmental protection. The Bjelke-Petersen government in Queensland was enthusiastic to permit sand mining on Fraser Island, but the proposal collapsed in the early 1980s when the Fraser government in Canberra refused to grant export permits for the minerals that would have been produced. That decision by the Commonwealth government set the stage for critical environmental struggles in Tasmania.
By the 1980s, most states had some form of environmental law requiring major property developments to be assessed for their possible environmental impacts. These assessments have often identified potential problems that could be ameliorated by modifying the proposed activities, and there is no doubt that improvements have been achieved. Critics point out that those proposing a development commission the assessment and, not surprisingly, almost all these 'independent' assessments recommend that the development should proceed, sometimes in modified form but often as originally proposed. From time to time, angry local community groups challenge these assessments in the courts; in a celebrated 2015 case, Commonwealth minister Greg Hunt conceded that due process had not been followed in his approval of the proposed Carmichael coal mine in central Queensland. While community groups generally feel that courts are not sympathetic to their arguments, the ability to challenge approvals is an important safeguard that some business interests and politicians would like to see curbed. The underlying problem is that governments generally think that environmental protection is less important than economic development, so even environment departments often behave as if their job was to reassure the public that the impacts of proposed developments should be tolerated.
Greenies in Tasmania
In the 1970s, the Tasmanian government proposed a new reservoir for hydro-electric development that would flood Lake Pedder, an iconic site long revered by bushwalkers. There were large-scale protests but the government of 'Electric Eric' Reece was determined to go ahead with the scheme. The flooding of Lake Pedder led directly to the formation of the United Tasmania Group, recognised as the world's first green party. It unsuccessfully ran candidates in state elections. Their actions in turn saw the election a decade later of the first 'Green Independent' politicians and the subsequent formation of the Australian Greens, now a significant third force in Australian politics, as discussed further below. In many ways, the Lake Pedder struggle was the overture to the consequent major drama, the proposal to dam the Franklin River.
In the late 1970s, the Tasmanian government proposed another addition to its hydro-electric system, based on the Gordon-below-Franklin dam. Environmentalists were outraged by the threat to this iconic wild river. A striking photograph of a rock island bend became the focus of a concerted campaign to stop the damming of the river, including a blockade of the site by a group of determined activists. A Tasmanian GP, Dr Bob Brown, was a prominent leader of the campaign; he was subsequently elected to the Tasmanian parliament and then the Australian Senate. The state government responded to the campaign by describing the Franklin as a 'leech-ridden ditch' and held a vote to try to show it had a public mandate for the project, offering voters a choice between two alternative sites for the dam. An amazing 33 per cent wrote 'NO DAMS' on their ballot papers. This spurred conservationists on the mainland to urge voters in a by-election for the federal electorate of Flinders to follow suit and write that message on their ballot papers. When 41 per cent did, it sent a clear signal to politicians that this was an issue of importance.
That action probably emboldened Bob Hawke, as leader of the ALP opposition going into the 1983 election, to promise 'The dam will not be built', although it was not clear that a national government had the power to stop the Tasmanian administration from its proposed action. Having swept to power, the Hawke government legislated to stop the dam. The Tasmanian government took its case to the High Court, arguing that the Constitution did not give the national government power to protect the environment or regulate the electricity industry. The Commonwealth argued that it was exercising its constitutional power to enter into treaties: having signed the UN's Treaty for the Protection of Biodiversity, it was arguably required to overrule state governments when necessary to protect threatened ecological systems. In a judgment that changed forever the legal basis of environmental protection in Australia, the High Court decided by the knife-edge margin of five judges to four that the Commonwealth did have the power to intervene. The project was stopped; the Franklin River remains a magnificent fast-flowing stream.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Lucky Country? by Ian Lowe. Copyright © 2016 Ian Lowe. Excerpted by permission of University of Queensland Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,Environment,
Geography,
Society,
Economy,
Balance,
Acknowledgements,
Sources,