An estimated one to three species of insects and other native invertebrates are becoming extinct in Australia every week, according to a new study revealing the immense scale of the nation’s biodiversity loss.
Dr Valerie Yule describes how our economic system removes our ability to choose what we really want and need.
A major reason why we do nothing to stop our experiment in destroying the planet is that reining in our wasteful life styles would cost jobs and profits.
Stephen Emmett, an Oxford professor of Computational Science and head of the Microsoft Computational Science laboratory in Cambridge is the star of Ten Billion, a theatrical work which shows our planet's environmental tragedies with ‘compelling impeccable logic.’ He thinks we are ‘already fucked’ as humanity's experiment with the planet destroys ecosystems, eradicates other species, pumps more and more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, temperature rises, swelling populations, rising middle-class aspirations, and spoils the ocean, air, water and soils. (Account in Guardian Weekly, by Robin McKie, ‘Climate change is big drama’, 17 August p 21)
Humanity is now using nature’s products 52 percent faster than what Earth can renew, according to Global Footprint Network’s latest data, published in the 2012 edition of the Living Planet Report.
And we do nothing.
A major reason why we do nothing is that reining in our wasteful life styles would cost jobs and profits. These would be especially in travel, production of really-not-needed goods, and retail.
Every one of us – including me - has some habits that could be changed to save resources and greenhouse emissions. Let us look at what would happen to a typical single-person household, if recent advances in waste were to be cut. (They are recent. Our grandparents were not so wasteful.)
Food – Eat less, especially processed foods, and be less obese – although this will cut jobs and businesses.
We heat our homes more than needed with central heating and cool them more than needed with air conditioners. That is because we have open-style housing and cannot shut the doors to where we are. We do not dress according to the weather. We could sit with an electric rug over our knees rather than heat the room.
Yet, change our ways and we cut jobs and businesses.
Our homes are designed to be ever more wasteful. Perfectly good houses are pulled down to build McMansions with no eaves, no gardens or yards, dark roofs and enormous rooms not all really needed.
Bathrooms at several per house, with square handbasins and baths with claw feet, with no regard for cleaning and waste of water. People wash their hair daily, and usually themselves, whether they need a shower or not.
Yet, change our ways and cut jobs and businesses.
We use appliances not only when needed, but when we really could do with ‘household exercise’ with carpet-sweepers, manual lawn mowers, and twin tub washing machines. Then we drive to the gym to get exercise.
Yet, change our ways and we cut jobs and businesses.
We wear the latest fashions and throw out rather than re-use the old.
Yet, change our ways and we cut jobs and businesses.
Travel on holidays and business include too many trips by plane. We go to our many conferences by plane, even when video-conferencing and email give us communication we did not have yesterday. 
Yet, change our ways and we cut jobs and businesses.
Commuting to jobs and shops is usually by one-tonne family-size vehicles, although many households have two cars. One of those cars could surely be a compact two-seater, that would save fuel, energy in the making, and cut traffic snarls in half. This would open a new field for car manufacturers.
In the laundry: Our appliances are made for big households for children and workers with lots of dirty clothes. We have these big appliances using excess water and energy for small households, with most of the washing being only to refresh most clothes. Yet people change their clothes whether they need to or not. They use hot water and too much detergent. They get new washing machines regularly.
Yet, change our ways and cut jobs and businesses.
Retail stores benefit particularly from selling big appliances that need replacing soon. We do not have updated electrics for the old carcasses.
Yet change our ways and we cut jobs and businesses.
We use electric dryers – often because there is no room for outside dryers. We iron. Today’s fabrics rarely need ironing – even pillowslips and hankies go smooth if folded and put away.
Yet, change our ways and cut jobs and businesses.
Furnishings are not mendable or renovatable. We could have mendable furniture and washable stretch coverings. Instead Council hard rubbish pictures show goods that have minimum defects as examples of what to throw out to the tip. Microsoft Spellchecker does not even recognize the words mendable or renovatable.
Yet, change our ways and we cut jobs and businesses.
Schools are large and centralized, so that whereas two generations ago most children traveled to school on foot or bicycle, now parents add to the traffic and costs by ferrying them. Small schools are better for small people, and can share online materials and specialist teaching. They would increase useful jobs – but to sell their land aids developers.
Families: Parents are still described as ‘generous’ if they have large families, whereas today to have a small family oneself and care abut other people’s children is true generosity. Most of the children that come into care were unwanted in the first place.Why encourage people to have children they do not want and cannot care for?
Pets: Do people consider that pets that eat meat, are over-large, and are too many. put another burden on the earth’s resources? Working dogs of course are another matter. Many people need cats to keep down vermin, but let them out at night to catch our wildlife birds and small creatures.
Yet change our ways and we cut jobs and businesses.
Our lifestyles have also become more wasteful with children’s toys, garden prunings, plastic bags, quickly obsolete electronic gear, waste of paper, re-using rather than recycling. Look around your home.
We need to go back to our grandparents’ saving ways and many of their appliances.
We need also to go forward – in sewage, for example, with separation of liquid sewage for local use as fertilizers and solids for centralized production of equally useful sludge. What a saving of water!
New jobs and new businesses could employ thousands, and people-care is still under-serviced.
The poor of the world look to live our life-styles. The planet staggers as they try. Our life-styles can be full of pleasure, and healthy too, in giving more chance for the earth to survive.
About Dr Valerie Yule, M.A., Ph.D, Dip.Ed., M.B.Ps.S. Academic positions at Melbourne, Monash and Aberdeen Universities in departments of Psychology and Education; Teacher at all levels, from preschool to adult and migrant literacy and PhD supervision; Clinical child psychologist at the Royal Children’s Hospitals, Melbourne and Aberdeen; Schools psychologist chiefly but not only in disadvantaged schools, Present research on imagination and literacy.
Resource scarcity is the root of war and terrorism, and liberty is the first casualty of conflict. But as oppressive as state surveillance and detention can be, nature's noose will be even tighter.
The window of opportunity is shutting down for all of us everywhere. In Canada, the United States, Britain....and as you can see here, Australia as well. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-07/brown-slams-spying-on-environmental-activists/3762308 We are being monitored, and as surveillance cameras track us, legislation is being prepared or has been prepared to give governments emergency powers to arrest and detain us without further ado. Consider the stakes----trillions of dollars of oil, natural gas, coal, hydro-electricity, pipelines and transmission lines that need to be marshalled for the insatiable and desperate appetite of our voracious industrial economy. Surely it would be naive to think that the fate of this goliath of capital investment would be put at risk by any democratic indulgence. Corporations and governments have a kit bag of dirty tricks to reach into, and a media that can spin the news to depict us as enemies of the people. Why do we think that we are exempt from the fate that has befallen protesters in other lands without democratic traditions, people who stood in the way of logging in Sumatra or environmental vandalism in Nigeria or the former Soviet Union? One could recall the prescient remark of Louisiana's Huey Long, after he was asked in the 1930s if fascism would ever come to America. "Yes," Long replied, "only they'll call it anti-fascism". American resource analyst Chris Clugston has made a similar prediction:
"Interestingly, those who claim today that any and all forms of "uncivilized behavior" are despicable and unacceptable, will be those who will justify them in the next few years, in the name of "the people". Those who protest now are considered "extremists"; those who protest in the future will be considered "enemies of the people", and will be dealt with according to the provisions of laws such as the Defense Authorization Act. It will be like Nazi Germany on steroids... NNR scarcity is like a vise around the collective skulls of humanity; a vise that tightens at the rate of 1/1000 of a turn per day. While the incremental pressure is almost imperceptible on a daily basis, the handle on the vise will turn 3 full revolutions in 10 years, and 6 full revolutions in 20 years. Somewhere along the line, humanity will crack. Given such phenomena as the incessant global riots, the OWSers, and our persistent global economic malaise, I'd say we're showing signs of stress already."
Democracy needs an educated, vigilant and assertive citizenry. Do you see that now in Idiot America? How many of the 99% bothered to get off their duffs or make a statement about our current predicament? Statistically, quite few. And the few who did were far from clear in their message. The Department of Education spent over $67 billion on dummed-down "education" in the United States in 2009, and the result? A population most of whom believe in the literal truth of Genesis, and a generation of teenagers whose conversation is much like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0i_5YBnQdac&feature=relmfu
Think about it. This you tube got 10 million hits, while this you tube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTWduFB_RX0 about our critical overpopulation crisis will be lucky to be seen by five percent of that number. And just for good measure, for the ten or fifteen percent of the population who do understand that something is terribly wrong or dysfunctional about the "system", our so-called environmental "watchdogs", flush with corporate donations, and the "progessive-left" media, stand ready with greenwash and politically correct euphemisms to further stupefy us.
As Orwell told us, the purpose of "Newspeak" is to narrow our perceptions by limiting our vocabulary, to render us incapable of thinking "outside the box" by robbing us of the words we need to get there, to channel our thinking along prescribed lines. Language is now more a tool of deception than elucidation. Some of us may know that the system is broken and the industrial machine is rigged for destruction, but having gotten by that first line of defence, we can't go further because we can't identify root causes for want of verbal precision and the critical thinking it permits. The language of radical insight has been coopted and twisted to mean its opposite. What remains are the time-worn shibboleths of the civil rights movement and various identity groups, including the pathetic lexicon of a rejuvenated Marxism that dresses up in green colours to beguile a new generation while preaching a line so obsolete that it would be comic if not so dangerous.
As John M. Owen IV recently wrote in the NY Times ("Why Islamism is Winning" Jan. 6, 2012)), the ideology that harvests current discontent can be compared to a channel dug by one generation of activists and kept open, "sometimes quietly", by their successors in the next generation. "When the storms of revolution arrive, the waters will find those channels." Thus it is the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamic extremists who will reap the dividends of the Arab Spring, and I would add, just as the myths of the New Left were launched from the platform of the Old Left, this generation of so-called "Eco-socialists" and "climate justice" or "environmental justice" activists carry on to lay down the channels of thought and discourse which form concrete conduits that steer the digital generation away from any real grasp of biophysical laws or the concept of ecological limits. They don't see overpopulation or the terminal and unrelenting decline of non-renewable resources because they live in a conceptual straitjacket defended by impenetrable jargon and politically incorrect no-go zones. They have a religious conviction that poverty is merely a function of maldistribution and the profit motive and some even have the cheek to call this conviction "scientific" socialism. Theoretically, an equal division of the global economic pie would indeed, for the time being, secure a per capita income equivalent to a decent 'Brazilian' lifestyle. The problem however, is that the pie would continue shrinking as affordably accessible non-renewable resources upon which we all depend remorsely diminish.
The point is, we are hemmed in on both sides. On one side by those who would physically quarantine us as security threats, and on the other side by those who would quarantine our ideas because they contest their version of radical change, the managed dissent of fake rebellion. Lenin said that the best way to beat the opposition is to lead it. It looks like corporations have it all covered. They fund Green Inc. and then let their useful idiots on the green-left lead a charge down a blind alley. The truth is, direct action can theoretically shut down a pipeline or an energy project, but it cannot solve non-renewable resource shortages. We can protest against envrionmental devastation, but nature is deaf to any protests against peak oil, metals and minerals. There are too many of us, we consume too much, and more than that, our existence depends on consuming stuff that cannot be replenished. The language of social justice and equality apparently does not have a word for that kind of scarcity. Like the inmates of a remote Siberian gulag amidst an endless frozen wasteland, we don't really need Patriot Acts, surveilance and prison guards to control us---- nature is our ultimate jailor. Amoral, indifferent and unmoved by our pleadings for justice and fair play.
Tim Murray
January 9, 2012
ABC News
January 07, 2012
Greens leader Bob Brown has accused Federal Resources Minister Martin
Ferguson of turning Australia into a police state, after reports he
pushed for increased surveillance of environmental activists.
A report in Fairfax newspapers details documents, obtained under Freedom
of Information laws, that show Mr Ferguson requested additional
monitoring of anti-coal mining groups and other environmental groups.
Senator Brown claims coal and fossil fuel companies pressured Mr
Ferguson into having the federal police spy on environment groups who
protest against energy companies.
Senator Brown says tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayers' money is
being spent having private contractors monitor activists.
"That paying of private corporations to spy on community groups is an
abuse of taxpayers' money," he said.
"Martin Ferguson should never have been allowed to promote that and it
should be stopped.
"The Attorney-General, if not the Prime Minister, should see that it
stops immediately."
A spokeswoman for Mr Ferguson says governments are concerned with
maintaining energy security.
She says this includes maintaining the rule of law and energy supply,
where issues-motivated groups seek to engage in unlawful activity.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-01-07/brown-slams-spying-on-environmental-activists/3762308
The joke is on you, you green fool! You and your idiot faith without evidence! Your techno-optimism and cornucopian denial! Renewable technology? What a laugh! Who did you think you were kidding? Mr. Jevons? What a paradox! Smart growth? Ha! What's next, "Smart" cancer? "Smart" extinction? "Smart" deforestation?
We're Screwed! We're Buggered! Cooked! Done!
Ha ha! We thought we were smart enough to manage complex systems!
The joke is on you, you green fool! You and your idiot faith without evidence! Your techno-optimism and cornucopian denial!
Renewable technology? What a laugh! Who did you think you were kidding? Mr. Jevons? What a paradox! Smart growth? Ha! What's next, "Smart" cancer? "Smart" extinction? "Smart" deforestation? Oh and "Sustainable" Growth! I love that one, and I laughed even harder at Sustainable "Development"! Nice try. As Garrett Hardin said, we got a moratorium on thinking with that one! Mr. Greenwash you really have a sense of humour---too bad your euphemisms didn't fool Mother Nature! But I must at admit you sure put one over on the Sierra Club membership! You even had them believing that we could "de-couple" economic and population growth from environmental degradation! Those comedians from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, the Eco-Socialists, what a piece of work they are! And then there is the Queen of Smear from Hampshire College! Good work on character assassination babe! You, Morris Sleaze and the Center for New Community make a great team shutting down debate about crucial environmental concerns !
Were goin' down folks! It's Good Night Gracie! Another failed evolutionary experiment for the fossil record! Ha ha!
Ladies and Gentle....men! Welcome to the Doomsday Auction. What we have here tonight is Human Catastrophe offered to you at an incredible price. This is a once-in-a-life time opportunity to make a claim on that disaster which will end civilization as we know it. You have been brought here by special invitation. All of you here are prominent and credible threats to humankind, but your challenge tonight is stake a claim to catastrophe by producing evidence that you have the largest constituency of public opinion behind you. That is, the more people who take you seriously, the more attention you deserve. And if you command the most attention then you, and you alone, can take home the prize of being Boogeyman Number One, The Top Dog of Human Catastrophe!
First, let me introduce viewers to the contestants. We have, in no particular order, Nuclear Accident, Terrorist Attack, Global War, Cyber War, Global Warming, Economic Collapse, Fuel Shortage, Oil Spill, Industrial Accident, and Famine. Sorry, but even though we now have over 7 billion people, "Overpopulation" was not invited to this auction because mainstream environmental organizations refused to size its nomination papers in deference to their corporate donors and political correctness, and the eco-socialists claimed that he was a rich racist who was trying to blame the global poor for his own excesses. "Natural Non-Renewable Resource Shortages" are not here either because Peak Oilers protested that it was all about energy and that the shortage of minerals and metals vital to an industrial economy were not deserving of a voice---a view seconded by PC book publishers who won't print any manuscripts from Chris Clugston.
OK, lets get rolling. Let’s start the bidding at 5%. Who will offer 5% of public opinion to back their claim to fame as a credible and lethal threat to civilization and life as we know it?
Industrial Accident? Thank you. Industrial Accident bids 5%. Now Oil Spill bids 6%. Famine? Famine bids 8%! Cyber War has matched you but Fuel Shortage doubles the offer at 15%. Its Fuel Shortage at 15%. Do I hear 16%? Global Warming raises the offer to 22%! 22% of the people worry about Global Warming. Now Nuclear Accident bids 25%! Its 25% going once, 25%...What’s that? Global War says 27%! Ladies and Gentlemen its 27%..... now Global Disease Outbreak makes it 33%. It looks like we are witnessing a contest here! And yes, yes....Terrorist Attack I hear you. You bid 44%! Now Natural Disaster sees you and raises that to 46%! It’s 46% once, 46% twice, 46%.....Economic Collapse, do I see your hand, yes! Is that right? 63%? You have 63% of folks worried about you? Do I hear 64%? Anybody at 64%? It’s 63% going once, 63% going twice, 63% SOLD to Economic Collapse because you sir look like your looming just around the corner!
Well Ladies and Gentlemen I guess you could have seen it coming. Economic collapse is keeping us awake at night. That wolf at your door has certainly got your attention hasn’t it? Greens have tried to take your eye off the ball with global warming but who the (expletive) cares about another metre or two of rising sea water in 60 years when you will be on the bread line tomorrow, and you will have give away your kids to an orphanage!
If that is not worry enough for you, come back next week and maybe, just maybe, Overpopulation, Peak Everything, Depleting Aquifers, The Collapse of Biodiversity Services and Critical Metal and Mineral Shortages will show up! That's if tensions in the Gulf don't trigger a nuclear exchange!
Have a safe journey home now---- that's if it hasn't been foreclosed on you! As the saying goes, if the bailiff doesn't get you the Grim Reaper will! Now go back to sleep and have an American dream!
Tim Murray
January 2, 2012
Cf. The National Survey of Pandemic Awareness and Attitudes October 28-31
http://www.ecohealthalliance.org/sup/downloads/EcoHealth%20Alliance%20Survey.pdf
Thanks to Emily Spence for bringing this survey and article to my attention through
http://www.ecohealthalliance.org/sup/downloads/EcoHealth%20Alliance%20Survey.pdf
Most objections to Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard's Carbon Tax are founded on the apparent belief that it is possible for human society to continue its wasteful consumption of non-renewable natural resources and destruction of our natural environment without posing any risk to the life support system which exists in this tiny corner of a Universe, mostly barren of life.
However, compared to what can be done and what must be done if human civilisation is to hope to further endure for a period which even remotely approaches the 32,000 years since our ancestors left evidence of intelligence probably equaling our own in the in the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave of the Ardèche department of southern France, the proposed Carbon Tax is a joke in extremely poor taste..
At best, the Carbon Tax is token gesture by Government and its corporate masters to be acting to protect our future. At worst, it is another paper economy scam that will allow wealth to be gouged from the rest of us by unproductive members of society whilst weighing us down with yet more more red tape.
This article was adapted from a #comment-159465">comment I made in response to A long time coming … an article by Professor John Quiggin written on 13 October. It has yet to draw a response there. If any visitors to candobetter.net decide that this article is more worthy of a response than visitors to johnquiggin.com have so far indicated, comments, whether critical or supportive, are most welcome.
I have sympathy with very few of those who are so stridently denouncing Julia Gillard's Carbon Tax.
True, the way she went about introducing it is questionable from the standpoint of democratic principles, but those who are against the Carbon Tax seem to want us to believe that Earth is not facing an environmental crisis which could well threaten threaten the life support system that sustains human life.
Without getting into the scientific argument, when the conditions which support life are so rare in the Universe and those which support the sort of complex life forms which exist on Earth are rarer still, it defies common sense to think we can materially change our planet as much as we have done in the last three centuries and continue to do so at an an even faster rate without putting at risk the very conditions which sustain life.
We have substantially altered the concentration of the Earth's atmosphere by having dug up and burnt much humankind's nonrenewable endowment of fossil fuels that took at least tens of millions of years of sunlight and terrestrial biological and geological to produce.
How anyone can know for a fact that these changes to Earth's protective atmospheric blanket won't cause runaway global warming is beyond me. Given that our very future and the future of our children and descendants is at stake, it is surely most imprudent to assume that we can continue to quarry and export coal iron and other non-renewable natural resources at the accelerating rate that the likes of Qld Premier Anna Bligh and our leading 'free market' economic ideologues would have us do.
My own problem with the Carbon Tax is that it is, at best, a small fraction of what needs to be done to make human civilization truly sustainable.
If the Carbon Tax were to be adopted, even if comprehensively at the international level, does anyone seriously imagine that it will somehow induce the market to reduce, to any worthwhile extent, activities that are now consuming non-renewable resources?
Just go to the rubbish tip and ask for how many more decades they believe we can continue to extract the resources necessary to manufacture all the artifacts -- thrown out hi-fis, computers, TVs, fridges, cars, furniture, toys, etc. --- and packaging that has ended up there?
How is this going to stop manufacturers continuing to manufacture and sell, at an enormous cost to our natural capital, so many artifacts that are designed to fail after only a few years and which become inoperable when parts and batteries are lost because they refuse to make these compatible with similar artifacts?
Does anyone imagine that we could go on the way we are for more than a hundred more years?
David Montgomery's "Dirt - the Erosion of Civilisations" of 2007 shows how past civilisations -- Mesopotamia, ancient Greek civilisations, Rome, the Chaco Anasazi of North America. etc., which did not dig up dug up coal, oil and metals still only lasted hundreds of years, so could not be considered sustainable.
If they had dug up and wasted coal, oil and metals and deforested at the same rate as 21st century human civilisation does they could not have even lasted that long.
Any Government which does not attempt to make human civilisation at least as sustainable as those past failed rural civilisations once were is not serious about sustainabilty.
Gillard's Carbon Tax is only a token pretence of an attempt to achieve sustainability and nothing more.
Any serious sustainability policy would comprise at least:
Imagine trying to drive your car from Alice Springs to Melbourne or from Vancouver to Winnipeg on one tank of gas. One passenger, the environmentalist, suggests that by driving at moderate speed, the car will run for more miles per gallon. Another passenger, the techno-optimist, believes that if the car has a tune-up, it will go farther on that tank of gas than if it didn't. The socialist passenger, meanwhile, believes that conflict in the car between the two privileged people in the front and the 5 people jammed in the back could cause you to drive off the road. Guess what. They are all right---the car would probably go further if you followed their advice. One problem. The difference would be marginal. The car would still fall well short of its destination. Living 'smaller', increasing technological efficiency and achieving equality would make but a trivial and short-lived impact on overshoot. To suggest otherwise reflects a serious lack of perspective and scale.
Source of red devil figure was http://kalaalog.com/2008/02/17/painting-little-furry-devil/
That is our predicament. We won't make it with 7 billion people, and the preoccupation with green living, technological efficiencies and wealth redistribution will not make a dent on overshoot. The focus then, must be on rapid population decline. The fight for sustainability cannot be a war fought on all fronts, but a single-minded determination to remove the first stumbling block to solving all other problems.
What is to be done? What should be done? What can be done?
Who are we and why do we write? And for whom? Should we be addressing environmentalists, or a broader readership that is not captive of their myths? If so, how can we reach them?
A friend of mine, "Barry", is a Jehovah's Witness. He is a sincere and decent man with the best of motives and intentions, filling his day with small acts of kindness and good works. But like me, his motivations and efforts are most probably for naught. We obviously share a burden. The burden of being Cassandras who have a vision of doom that few wish to embrace. Yet despite his tribulations, he and his brethen seem to be attracting more support than I am. Upon further discussion, he confided that he and his fellow missionaries get an overwhelmingly hostile reception---- yet his denomination is the fastest growing sect of any religion. Why? "Because after we tell people that this system of things will soon end, we tell them that there is hope for them and the people they love." That is the clincher. People don't want to be sentenced to a diet of bad news. Even those who take it in look for escape hatches. They grasp at straws. The Sierra Club and other religious organizations thrive only because they fire with both barrels of the shotgun. One convinces people that the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, while the other offers them false solutions. It is a proven combination. "This is going to kill you, but this can save you". The Green Merchants of False Hope tell us that we have a terminal illness but that their elixir of green living, land-use planning and tech fixes are a miracle cure. It is a message that reaps donations and membership dues, and encourages New Society Publishers to publish a bushel of their books. Hope sells.
Bottom line: People want religion. They want comfort food, not the castor oil of unvarnished truth. So the question is, how much of a liar are you willing to become to gain a hearing? You have already swallowed your own lie---that is the first step to becoming a successful salesman. If the audience doesn't believe that you believe in your product, they will not buy your vacuum cleaner. So you have convinced yourself that you have a solution, and that it will eventually be adopted and implemented.
Now you must put on a happy face, and win over a literary agent with your charm. You buy him or her dinner, ask them about their kids and their hobbies and then present your message of doom wrapped up with Disney ending. Something Chris Clugston, in his book, "Scarcity", didn't do and refuses to do. Any more than a lab technician would doctor the results of my blood test to buoy my spirits and allow me to forget about my mortality. Some people have integrity, while the rest of us make compromises. We do that either because we are delusional or egotistical. We think meaningful change is possible and that we have a significant role to play in it.
The question to consider is, why would we want to write a book? Do we want to effect change or do we want to want to tell the truth? Are we politicians or objective analysts? If we find that there are no practical solutions that have a reasonable expectation of success, do we want to broadcast that conclusion? Is there any point in writing an autopsy report on our civilization? Do we write so that we can eventually say "I told you so"? Is writing about the coming collapse just a release, an outlet for frustration? If we write to motivate change that would mitigate or prevent the catastrophe even though we believe the probability of change to be remote, does that not make us merely spin-doctors and propagandists? Are we comfortable with that?
I am thinking out loud here because these are the recurring questions that have bedevilled me with increasing frequency for the past two years. I am apparently not content just to be a spectator to an unfolding disaster---I want to do "something". But isn't that part of the problem-- that too many sincere people---environmentalists----in an attempt to do "something" by pushing half-solutions, are actually making the problem worse? What did Norman Borlaug actually accomplish---other than allowing our species to add another 2 or 3 billion to its numbers? Was that not his fear? What does 'smaller' living by the rich accomplish? What does smart growth accomplish? What does the introduction of more efficient technologies accomplish? What would population stabilization accomplish? What would egalitarian redistribution of wealth accomplish if there are not enough non-renewable resources to sustain all the passengers on our overloaded global lifeboat for the whole voyage? What would absolutely air-tight borders and gated communities accomplish? What would a steady-state industrial economy accomplish? What would a one-child-per-family regime in only one or ten countries accomplish? Is slowing growth enough? Will Mother Nature grant us a reprieve or a consolation prize for simply not growing any more?
Rick Belfour bowed out of an Internet debate provoked by Dirk Becker with the lament that it was demoralizing to witness such rancour among people who essentially are on the same side--or words to that effect. The point is, however, we are not on the same side. The prescriptions that environmentalists offer are, in truth, growth-enablers. They promote growth by making more room for it. Their message is, "Move over and squeeze tighter to make room for more and more incoming people, either from the maternity ward or the airport (it makes no difference)." That is what land use planning, frugal living, and technology improvements do. They create space for continuing growth. It is not coincidental that the title of the book that formed the plot for Charlton Heston's movie, "Solyent Green", was "Make Room! Make Room!" That would be an apt slogan for the environmental movement. Their goal is to essentially manage the environment to accommodate population growth. Mine is the reverse. To shrink the population to accommodate the environment. Yet they have assumed the mantle of "environmentalists". A more appropriate description would be "growth-managers".
The source of our difference is a matter of speculation, but I have a hypothesis. Their worldview---and mine---has been typically fashioned by different educational experiences and the biases inherent in each discipline. And we continue to live in different silos. I did not take a course in biology, yet somehow I ran the gauntlet of a liberal arts education with a conceptual grasp of "limits" still intact---- but that was in an era when universities were an oasis of intellectual tolerance. Statistically, I should be parroting the same line as the "environmental justice" movement, as if nature cared about human notions of justice. But here's the point:
Environmentalists and Malthusians are at ideological loggerheads. Ours is not a sectarian division, but a fundamentally unbridgeable chasm. There can be no alliance between us. There can be no fellowship between lightness with darkness. Or in less Biblical terms, between clarity and confusion. If that sounds arrogant and presumptuous, let me add that confusion is not a character flaw. It is just a point on the learning curve---- and hopefully we are all on a learning curve with an ambition to learn more. I was once confused--- and I am still confused--- but much less so than I was, I believe. My curve was not a continuum. I had that famous "paradigm-shift", and it was a "quantum leap", not an incremental progression. I leapt from one decompression chamber to another one, closer to the surface. Rather abruptly, I came to the realization that saving the environment was not a juggling act between causes and factors that demand equal attention, but more like a golf game. In golf, you don't begin by trying to figure out how best to sink the ball in 18 holes, by dispersing your attention to all of them simultaneously. You focus on the first hole. Without sinking the ball in the first hole, all other holes are irrelevant. In terms of environmental degradation, achieving a sustainable population level is that first hole. It is a pre-requisite of ultimate success, not a variable that must be balanced off with other variables. Thinking about the rest of them is a counter-productive distraction. Without rapid population decline, all other good destinations --- human rights, lasting peace and equity, sensible planning and durable zoning limits, or gains from technological improvements---are unreachable. The problem must be treated as one of priority and sequence, not balance.
In deference to political correctness and the sensibilities of corporate donors, the environmental movement took the "P" (population) out of the foundational formula, the "IPAT" equation, making nonsense of their project. Initially, I took the conventional view that the P must be re-inserted to restore the IPAT filter. But that reflected another kind of misunderstanding. "A" (per capita consumption) and "T" (technology) are not equal partners with "P" because a shrinking human population is a pre-condition for meaningful improvements elsewhere. Now I am putting it back in and putting the "A" and the "T" on the shelf, at the back of the queue for future consideration---where they belong. Let's focus on the first hole.
I was once an environmentalist who attacked symptoms, rather than address root problems, and for all my zeal, I did not make a difference,----unless, in my own small way, it was to make our problems marginally worse. Now I am an ex-environmentalist, still struggling to forgive those who have not followed my path, too often forgetting that I was once on theirs. If I know what they do not know, it is still a small fraction of the whole truth---which is unknowable. In the end, we may all prove to be inconsequential. In fact, that is a certainty. One day the human experiment will end---like that of every other species. But it would be nice if it didn't happen so soon.
Tim Murray
March 14, 2011
Correspondence between two friends on the brink of major life changes driven by what looks to be climate change.
This is a true story told to me by Alberta E., a woman whose hair acts as a constant gauge of air humidity. She is happy and in control of her locks in the dry season in dusty central Australia. or Rajasthan but the tropics present a true challenge to her coif. Yesterday after nearly two days of constant rain, followed by uncharacteristic steaminess in Melbourne, I received the following electronic cris du coeur.
"I am writing to you as the first person I thought of who might sympathise with the new plight of the Melbourne-born woman who has VCH (Very Curly Hair). I mean, it's no use my writing to Anna Harrison whose straight lank mousey awning we used to admire so much, is it?"
She continued, as though the topic would be of intense interest to me, "My hair, since attaining its maximum curling wiry strength when I was about 13, just before we met, has since then acted as a very sensitive gauge of moisture content in the air . After moving temporarily from Melbourne to Sydney as a 20 year old, it was in a constant unmanageable frizz due to the sub tropical humid climate but I knew all the time that I only had to return to Melbourne to be once more in control of my mane. "
"It appears now, however, that climate change is on the march, somewhat more dramatically, and quicker than most of us would have imagined. Sydney's weather has come to Melbourne, the air hangs over me like a warm sodden blanket even if it is not raining and my hair is standing out in an undifferentiated halo of frizz. The only solution, it seems, to regain control over my unruly, moisture-sensitive locks, is to move to Hobart and give that a go for a while. I will make do with the sun's pale attenuated, angled rays in the more polar capital if I can regain control of what should be my crowning glory."
How much time do we really have?
"How quickly will climate change advance though? The Hobart solution may not be a permanent one. As the warm moisture laden air advances south, might I need to make plans for an international flee from Hobart to Invercargill? By this time might the cultural and linguistic differences - especially the extreme vowel shifts - be too much to adjust to? Should I instead plan for a direct move from Hobart to Macquarie Island, by-passing "New Zullun"? When will it be possible to buy real estate, possibly a villa unit with ocean views on the mainland of Antarctica?"
"As you know," (she added) "I don't often plan so far ahead, but my hair, so plagued by atmospheric changes is driving me to these lengths!...."
Alberta E., an old school friend was always rather self-centered, a little vain and inclined towards hyperbole. She did not mention in her email this week's terrible floods in Queensland, which could also be due to climate change, nor the floods right here in our own state, Victoria.
The floods have killed people and animals. Many survivors will be struggling for months to come and many more animals will die from lack of food and loss of habitat.
My old friend, however seems to be capable only of seeing the local climate through the prism of her own image in the mirror. The tresses which she describes in terms which conceal her actual pride in them must by be showing some silvery signs of wear and tear but the world is not allowed to see this. We could judge and dismiss her as a shallow, self-centered creature, but I know her finer qualities and will reply to her with sympathy to her plight with the following message.
"Dear friend,
I have made the same journey myself in my mind- to Hobart, to Invercargill and then further south perhaps, not only to retain control over "the hair" but maybe in a quest for the impossible- survival. Weather is not just something that affects our hair, it could affect our feeding patterns and food availability. You may need to buy a property with the capacity to grow food. Just wear a scarf if the early morning drizzle gets to your hair as you harvest your snow peas.
Whilst I don't make decisions as you do using your hair as a gauge, I think we have reached the same conclusion as to our future. We will no doubt catch up shortly in Hobart. Please keep in touch by email, meantime, I pass on advice from one who has spent extended periods in the humidity of Brisbane: the application of hair styling mousse -even a cheap brand from the supermarket - will work for a while she tells me. Until our relocation to Hobart, stay in control :-)
I look forward to meeting her in Hobart and hope that the Invercargill stage of our plans does not become necessary.
Without obtaining the prior mandate of the electorate, successive Australian governments have been seeking to establish a water-market in this country. For as long as the people of Australia are required to “buy-back” the nation’s water, especially during times of crisis, they will have no water security. Bidding-wars, as currently being waged by Senators Wong and Joyce, are now an unattractive and dangerous feature of Australian water policy: profits arising will be privatised but the impacts will be borne by the Australian public. The electorate of this country must be given the opportunity to indicate whether it wishes its water to be privatised and exposed to global speculation - or protected for future generations of Australians.
The much-vaunted water policy announcements from the major parties over recent days should be treated with great scepticism, according to a statement released today by national public water-rights and environmental advocacy group, Fair Water Use (Australia):
“Without obtaining the prior mandate of the electorate, successive Australian governments have been seeking to establish a water-market in this country.
As an inevitable consequence, private corporations are wielding ever-increasing control over Australia’s water future. This has led directly to the current chaos in water management and has serious long-term implications for all Australians and the environmental health of this country.
Privatisation is severely compromising attempts to resolve the plight of the Murray-Darling. In a privatised setting, once sustainable diversion limits are set, subsequent to the eventual adoption of the Basin Plan, further remedial action will largely be limited to the purchase of water from the private sector; water that was at no time sold by the nation.
Bidding-wars, as currently being waged by Senators Wong and Joyce, are now an unattractive and dangerous feature of Australian water policy: profits arising will be privatised but the impacts will be borne by the Australian public.
For as long as the people of Australia are required to “buy-back” the nation’s water, especially during times of crisis, they will have no water security.
Australia has been identified as one of the parts of the world most threatened by severe water shortage.
The CMO of Summit Global Management, a large, US based, water investment company recently stated, “There are few areas where we can execute our strategy - but Australia is one of them."
Widespread problems overseas have resulted in a growing number of countries turning their backs on water privatisation.
However, in Australia, opportunistic administrations from both sides of the political spectrum continue to encourage consideration of the nation’s water as a tradeable commodity, rather than an essential public asset.
This unsanctioned process must be halted and reversed if governments are to ensure responsible management of our struggling water resources, including the Murray-Darling river system, for the benefit of all Australians, now and into the future.
Fair Water Use believes that Australian water must be removed from the portfolios of corporate investors, who seek to control the availability and price of this vital natural resource, and returned to public hands. Resolution would entail fair reparation of those impacted by this process, not “buy-back”.
The electorate of this country must be given the opportunity to indicate whether it wishes its water to be privatised and exposed to global speculation - or protected for future generations of Australians.
Source: FairWaterUse, 13th August 2010
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