environment

Who should pay for repairs of damaged residential canals?

Wed, 2008-05-07 16:09 by James Sinnamon

This letter was published in the Sunshine Coast Daily of Wednesday 7 May 08.

Canals should be fixed by owners

There's a new council in town and promises made by Maroochy to its millionaire landowners need not necessarily apply now.

These people along the canals bought land that had been cleared from an old swamp. Their land and the mosquito pond in front of them is the lowest point on the landscape.

It was designed by nature to capture the silt and run-off from higher up the river system so that the offshore marine habitats are protected. It's still working fine, even after all of the alterations.

The land and its mosquito ponds have appreciated in value remarkably.

Anyone living on those canals can be rightly be called millionaires. Why should the rest of the Coast have to dip into their pockets to help them out?

The canals aren't public property and until the millionaires open up access through their land, similar to the British rambling laws, then they should be responsible for the upkeep.

If they think the developer of the projects on the Esplanade is to blame, sue, and if they win, use the money to fix the problem.

No one forced you to buy on a cleared swamp. Take responsibility for your own actions. Don't expect the rest of us to bail you out.

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Environmental Scientist makes Blue Moon edition of Courier Mail

Tue, 2008-04-29 21:04 by Sheila Newman

Regular readers should not be shocked. This kind of thing only happens once in a blue moon, when the 'developers' friend' struggles for token objectivity.

The front pages of the Courier Mail showed its priorities were unchanged, as it devoted two feature articles to another fait divers of Queensland's nightmare property market. This time a 25 year old man has spent 28 million to build a rather large house on the site of five blocks of land he purchased at Mermaid Beach over the last 6 years.

Meanwhile, on page 19, Griffith Uni School of Environmental professor, Tor Hundloe, tells us that,

"Of the 6.5 billion of us today about two-thirds are poor, a half of these are very poor and a billion starving,,, [but] we would need two to three mother earths to ... give every person a lifestyle equivalent to ours."

And, on page 27, journalist Paddy Hintz writes about the lot of the poor in Australia, in "Wanted: a room to rent",

"Rental experts are now predicting that - for good or for bad - room-by-room renting will continue its stellar rise as a serious option for those who haven't been able to scramble on to the mortgage bandwagon."

I wonder which lifestyle Tor Hundloe means, when he talks about 'a lifestyle like ours'? The Mermaid Beach 5 lot house lifestyle, or the 'room somewhere with one big chair' which hungry and homeless Australians must dream of.

Australia, like the rest of the world, is indeed a land of increasing contrasts.

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Gold Coast's new Council urged to reconsider growth targets

Tue, 2008-04-29 11:31 by admin

Media Release Tuesday, 29 April 2008

A Gold Coast planning seminar on Sunday resulted in a unanimous call for Gold Coast’s new Council to pull back on plans to accommodate an additional 150,000 homes over the next 20 years and to consider and protect the city’s values before signing off on a new population growth target.

The seminar, addressed by solicitor Larissa Waters from the Environmental Defenders Office and hosted by Gecko – Gold Coast & Hinterland Environment Council, was designed to empower community members to lobby for changes to the Local Growth Management Strategy (LGMS).

Ms Waters said that this figure of 150,000 almost doubles the existing accommodation of the Gold Coast and will add another 250,000 residents. “That’s over a quarter of all the growth forecast for the whole of South East Queensland being imposed on the Gold Coast alone,” said Ms Waters. “As an area of extremely high nature conservation value and narrow floodplains, it is difficult to see where this growth is going to go.”

“75,000 of these homes will be infill of already developed areas,” said Lois Levy, spokesperson for Gecko. “Unfortunately our councillors have not looked to see whether this is sustainable, safe or desirable, so we’re asking now that they urgently consider the implications of further development before they sign off on this Strategy.”

“Plans to put the other 75,000 homes in undeveloped areas will see the continued destruction of the highly valuable bushland that is left within the urban footprint,” said Ms Levy. “With no protection for bushland outside the urban footprint we stand to lose much bushland that provides our life support services and sustains the extremely high biodiversity of our city.”

Residents will convey their concerns to their councillors in the coming weeks urging them to reconsider the additional number of dwellings for the city in light of the following constraints:

Climate change impacts including risk of storm surges, bushfires, cyclones, and sea level rise;
Concern about extreme levels of density around transport nodes (between 30-80 dwellings per hectare), impact on quality of life – becoming the slums of the future;
That infrastructure plans are unrealistic and cannot keep up with this level of growth;
That development of infrastructure projects, such as roads, trains, dams, desalination plants, pipelines and power lines, will adversely impact upon natural areas, both urban and rural;
That currently the LGMS does not protect or enhance biodiversity or open space.

“We need policies to better deal with climate change, protect greenspace inside and outside the urban footprint, and reduce population to the carrying capacity of the region,” said Ms Levy.

For further information about this important issue, please contact the following at Gecko on 5534-1412 or directly: Lois Levy 5534-3706 or 0412-724-222 or Sheila Davis 5530-6600 or 0423-305-478

Gecko - Gold Coast and Hinterland Environment Council, 139 Duringan Street, Currumbin Qld 4223 Phone: (07) 5534 1412 Fax: (07) 5534 1401 E-mail: info |AT| gecko.org.au www.gecko.org.au

David Brower: An authentic environmentalist (1912-2000) Why the Earth Day co-founder quit the Sierra Club

Thu, 2008-04-17 11:39 by tim

Who was David R. Brower? He was the dean of the American environmental movement, to be ranked among John Muir and Teddy Roosevelt in importance. Nominated for the Nobel Prize three times, he founded the Sierra Club Foundation, the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, Earth Island Institute, North Cascades Conservation Council and Fate of the Earth Conferences. But it was with America’s flagship environmental organization that he was most associated with. He joined the Sierra Club in 1933, was elected to its board of directors in 1941 and was made its executive director in 1952. Under his leadership club membership grew ten-fold (7,000 to 70,000) from a group of affluent apolitical hikers to an aggressive player on the national environmental scene. David Brower was the catalyst in this transformation. He was the Sierra Club. Yet after 67 years this great crusader felt compelled to resign, “with no regret and a bit of desperation.” Brower, you see, had a problem. He had a problem with corruption, bribery, political correctness and myopia. He knew that demography drives not only human destiny but the destinies of the species we impact, and that unchanged immigration policies would double America’s population by 2100, or if liberalized, add as many as another 700 million by that time. He also knew that post-1970 immigrants and their descendants would be the decisive force fuelling American population growth. If unchecked, it surely meant ecological Armageddon for the country. In resigning Brower stated that “Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of the problem. It has to be addressed.” Brower, of course, was not alone in advancing those beliefs. Earth Day co-founder and former Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth First co-founder Dave Forman and Harvard professor and socio-biologist E. O. Wilson all warned of the environmental effects of current immigration policies. Just after the first Earth Day in 1970, the President’s Commission on Population Growth and America’s Future urged Congress to stabilize the population at 200 million expeditiously. Paul Ehrlich was among several ecologists who identified 150 million people, half the country’s present population level, as a number that would ensure sustainable habitat survival. The Sierra Club used to agree with them. It used to believe that population growth was a crucial variable in environmental degradation. After all the Ehrlich –Commoner equation (environmental Impact=Population x Affluence x Technology) was conventional wisdom and common sense. Population stabilization, a function of lower fertility rates and lower immigration quotas, were long a part of its program. According to its Population Report of 1989, “Immigration to the U.S. should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the U.S.” And then suddenly in 1996 that policy was dropped. It became politically correct to ignore the “P” in the IPAT equation and focus on “A”, affluence or reducing per capita consumption, and “T”, more efficient technologies. Greener lifestyles and renewable technologies would save the day and with the oxymoronic fraud of “smart growth”, we could pretend that we could shoe-horn half the world into this continent merely by channeling, or “managing” growth. But when a group of Sierrans, including Brower, saw the folly of this approach and attempted to restore traditional immigration policy, in stepped a billionaire, David Gelbaum, who threatened that if it was restored the Sierra Club would “never see a dollar of his money”. The ruling clique complied and was dutifully rewarded with in excess of $100 million in bribes, tendered in 2000-1 alone. Elizabeth May, for her part, threatened to change the name of the Sierra Club of Canada if the dissidents succeeded in returning the US Club to its original course. She has obviously carried her globalist convictions into the leadership of the Green Party of Canada with a pledge to chase immigration targets into the stratosphere, even beyond that of other parties. American Presidential Green candidate Ralph Nader, by contrast, denounced open borders and liberal immigration as “absurd” in his 2000 campaign, and for that reason enjoyed Brower’s support. Mass immigration can be understood as a right wing project that benefits from left wing collusion, with progressives essentially lining up behind Bill Gates and 40 major technology companies and agribusiness to drive down wages so that conservatives obtain their cheap labour and socialists obtain their cheap cause. Donations to conservation groups to look the other way while the invasion continues is an excellent return on corporate investment. No wonder Canadian members are kept ignorant about who gives money to environmental NGOs, how much is given and what directors are paid. No wonder sleazy arrangements are made between big corporations like the Royal Bank and Nature Conservancy of Canada, the Audubon Society of America and Toyota (a $20 million deal) and the Sierra Club’s deal to endorse the cleaning products of the Clorox corporation. Now you understand why this pioneer of the Sierra Club had to finally leave it just before his death. He could no longer stomach being a member of a corrupt, money-grubbing, corporate lackey that accepted a massive annual bribe to leave immigration, a vital ingredient of environmental degradation, out of the policy book. He realized that a clique purchased by David Gelbaum’s millions and intent on chasing after potential Hispanic members at the expense of defending the environment against the illegal invasion across the southern border could not be overthrown. And the organization was too irredeemably corrupt to be reformed. It had to be abandoned and by-passed. David Brower. An authentic environmentalist, a man of integrity and principle. A rare commodity in the movement. http://www.susps.org/index.html (The whole story on the Sierra Club) http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/1631 (The Royal Bank and Nature Conservancy) Tim Murray April 22/08

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Can the impact of rampant population growth be overcome by individual ecological lifestyle choice?

Sat, 2008-04-05 10:48 by tim

Tim Murray of Immigration Watch Canada asks of what overall benefit are personal lifestyle choices made to lessen our individual impact on the environment, when the good they achieve is far less than the harm done by population growth actively encouraged by our governments.

This article was originally published on Tim Murray's web-site, sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com with the title
THE LIMITS OF SUSTAINABLE LIVING: CBC Darling Pitches Gore's Bromides.

“It seems to me we gotta solve it individually…” from the 1968 hit song by the Young Rascals

Somebody hand me a barf bag. Quick. I was in the supermarket yesterday and came upon one of those innumerable escapist books on how we can ignore the big picture and the root cause of the coming apocalypse by retreating into private solutions. It was a book by cheery CBC talk show personality Gill Deacon called “Green for Life”, a compendium of some 200 “eco-ideas” (ego-ideas?) on how to pack school lunches, plan picnics, birthday parties and weddings, decorate and do what Sir Richard Branson called, in his endorsement, “the simple things in your everyday lives that will positively impact our future.” It is Deacon’s hope that just living sustainably in this fashion will become normal. Branson’s “normal” of course is burning up the stratosphere with jet trails all over the globe and investing in biofuels that entail the destruction of rainforests in Brazil, Indonesia and Malaysia. But those are just one or two simple things.

Deacon established her credentials for lecturing me about sustainable living by giving birth to three sons, who collectively will emit 69 metric tonnes of GHG this year. She must be a bona fide environmentalist, however, because she was a director of the World Wildlife Fund of Canada in 2002 and demonstrates her love of wildlife by living in Toronto. You are familiar with the WWF. They suction money from dupes who think you can defend wildlife from population and economic growth by creating sanctuaries for it, while refusing to take positions on population growth and immigration in whatever country they operate. In their defence though, they at least divert donor money away from Nature Conservancy, who make similar fraudulent claims.

The WWF deserves notoriety for providing ammunition to pro-immigrationists by producing eco-footprinting data that purports to show Canada as capable of accommodating more people than it should. The 2000 Living Planet Report, for example, identified Canada as having a carrying capacity of 38 million, an estimate that Optimum Population Trust UK declared took no account of the unsustainability of Canadian agriculture due to serious soil erosion.

It is rather telling that Deacon would devote a section of her “Eco-ideas” to selecting the environmentally correct kind of lubricant to, as she puts it, “grease the wheels of your lovemaking machine.” Yet it is apparently acceptable to conceive three sons in Toronto, or six for that matter, so long as you don’t fuck up the planet with petroleum jelly. I suppose inflicting a large brood on the world is a matter of “personal choice” but tossing a plastic container in the landfill is not.

One Green eco-idea Gill left out, I notice, was for consumers to send a letter to Ottawa or launch a petition against an immigration policy that makes all of her 200 “little things” a joke. Deacon might also send an eco-idea to her employer, the CBC, to drop their euphoric coverage of Canadian foreign aid missions, like Harper’s trip to Haiti, so that Canadians busy with their “Green” lifestyle might learn that their tax money is encouraging people in Haiti, Afghanistan and Africa to have four and five children each and ravage local environments for survival.

But one must not be too harsh with Gill Deacon of course. Cutting down her hypocrisy is like cutting off the head of a many headed hydra. There is a plague of these Green lifestyle books on the market. There is Adria Vasil’s “Ecoholic:Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products and Services in Canada.”. Kim McKay’s “True Green: 100 Everyday Ways You Can Contribute to a Healthier Planet”. Greg Horn’s “Living Green: A Practical Guide to Simple Sustainability.” Elizabeth Rogers’ “The Green Book: The Everyday Guide to Saving the Planet One Step at a Time”. And Ellen Sandbeck’s “Organic Housekeeping”, to name but a few.

The impetus for this myopic preoccupation with our personal lives can be traced to the famous entreaty by Al Gore in his documentary “The Inconvenient Truth”. There he states, absurdly, that “each of us is a cause of global warming, but each one of us can make choices to change that with the things we buy, with the electricity we use, the cars we drive. We can make choices to bring our individual carbon emissions to zero. The solutions are in our hands. We just have to have the determination to make them happen.” Gore does not appreciate that green consumers can never reduce their consumption to zero, and that an increase in the number of even green consumers is going to increase total consumption. The solution does not lie in the hands of individual consumers, but in the collective hands of citizens to effect political change.

The limits of green lifestyle habits can be illustrated clearly by a study conducted by Optimum Population Trust UK that found that one new citizen either born or admitted as an immigrant to Britain, wiped out 80 lifetimes of responsible recycling. Put differently, a lifetime of responsible recycling would only make up for one and one-quarter per cent of the damage done by a new citizen. Even if all of domestic waste was recycled, only 10% of the waste contributed by an additional citizen would be counter-acted.

It must be remembered that it is consumption that generates waste. While reducing our profligate per capita consumption is laudable and necessary, one must be aware that it is the number of “per capitas” which is relevant. Thus reducing our per capita C02 emissions from 23 metric tonnes to something reasonably obtainable will prove to have little effect if population growth is permitted to continue at 1.08% per annum.

Similarly our lifetime per capita consumption of 3.7 million pounds of minerals, metals and fuels, if reduced, will still be problematic if more people consume them even at a lesser rate. And turning off the lights for one hour, as we recently did in solidarity with other conservers globally, is a futile gesture if we allow population and economic growth to continue. Case in point. British Columbia Hydro encouraged customers with the thought that if they did that every night it would save enough energy to power an additional four thousand homes for an entire year. But as analyst Rick Shea of Salmon Arm, BC observed, “ British Columbians would apparently have to turn off their lights for about 6 hours each day in order to accommodate the provincial population growth in just one year. After four years of this, we will apparently have to leave our lights off permanently, 24 hours a day, to accommodate that growth.”

In summary then, the movement toward “sustainable living”, as represented by books like Gill Deacon’s “Green for Life”, is largely an exercise in ineffectual do-goodism and feel-goodism. If “every little bit counts”, it counts for little. If “it all adds up”, it doesn’t add up to much buried in a demographic avalanche. The call to “reduce, re-cycle and conserve” in the face of runaway population growth can only be likened to a cheerful cleaning lady tidying up a cabin in the Titanic as the ship is listing, making sure everything in the room is bio-degradable. She could never be relied upon to tell you the truth about the ship’s prospects, or yours, but she was hired by Captain CBC for her pleasant disposition and you will find her trivial advice entertaining.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC
April 4/08

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Should we destroy our environment for housing affordability?

Sat, 2008-03-29 02:25 by admin

The Queensland Government’s so-called "affordable housing strategy," signed in July with no community consultation, establishes an Urban Land Development Authority with sweeping powers, including the power to amalgamate land, to acquire land in its own right, and to on-sell their land with development rights to particular private developers.

The justification provided for such sweeping powers being given to the new authority is to speed up approvals. It has long been a complaint of industry that the approval process for development is slow and therefore costly resulting in higher prices to home buyers. The enabling legislation pushed through Parliament, again without any consultation and with unseemly haste, of course strips away some current protections.

Under the new legislation, the Minister can declare areas of land for urban development or as major development areas. In these areas, the Act removes the community’s right to appeal approvals, overrides provisions in local government planning schemes that protect steep slopes, floodplains and waterways and removes restrictions in state legislation designed to protect endangered vegetation and waterways from destruction. It also removes the requirements for assessment with regard to contaminated land, heritage places and many other values.

With these policies, "ecological sustainability" has been abandoned in favour of "growth at any cost" development. Premier Beattie, once seen as a bit of a champion of environmental protection and community participation in the planning process, has, after removing the hard-won environmental gains of his nine years as Premier with this legislation, now handed over the reins to an eager new Premier Anna Bligh.

In response to media earlier this year calling for a population cap, Ms Bligh said that we need more growth "in order to create demand to maintain the jobs of people currently employed in construction." At the same time, the state government also claims that we need more skilled migrants to build the infrastructure needed to cope with the demands caused by Queensland’s population growth (also, no doubt, more taxpayers to pay for these major infrastructure projects). In other words, we have no choice but to grow our population in order to deal with problems caused by past population growth!

Housing affordability is an issue for all of the community and there are many ways to make housing more affordable, not the least of which is to lower the demand. The declaration of land as urban without any regard for the views of existing residents, the costs of infrastructure, the provision of open space or the local constraints to development is a betrayal of everything the Beattie government said that it represented. Now it seems they believe they have no choice but to continue to grow the population. It appears the Queensland government has fallen for the growth lobby’s arguments hook, line and sinker.

By Sheila Davis a member of Sustainable Population Australia

OVERPOPULATION AUSTRALIA 2008 - Surprising admissions in McDonald & Withers latest beat-up for mass worker immigration

Sun, 2008-03-16 11:12 by Sheila Newman

OVERPOPULATION AUSTRALIA 2008 - Surprising admissions in McDonald & Withers' latest beat-up for mass worker immigration “Workforce needs more migrants!” screamed the headlines on the front page of “The Age” (Sarah Smiles, “Workforce 'needs more migrants,' “The Age,” February 6, 2008). Hardly news, when the Age is always going on about this purported ‘need’ – and ABC radio, and just about every news organ now for years. But the real news about Peter McDonald's and Glenn Withers', “Population and Australia’s Future Labour Force,” went entirely unreported. Amazingly, these two veteran population boosters, McDonald the coffin-demographer, (famous for implying the demise of populations not growing explosively), and Withers, the growth-mad economist, state: “…the Australian experience has been that significant environmental degradation and some resource shortages have arisen from the failure to plan adequately for population growth." And, they add that "the absence of government policies to coordinate population growth with energy and the environment [among other considerations] would be a sufficient reason for restricting immigration increases.” The full paragraph and recommendations are below, plus some concluding comments: “… the Australian experience has been that significant environmental degradation and some resource shortages have arisen from the failure to plan adequately for population growth. This stems largely from a failure on the part of governments to acknowledge the reality of population growth, accommodate that and plan ahead in a coordinated way. A ‘headin-the-sand’ approach that pretends that future population growth will be curtailed presents far greater dangers of future environmental degradation than does future growth with adequate planning. Hence, an explicit population/migration policy should be adopted that acknowledges the global environmental issue and gives weight to the argument that greenhouse gas emissions in Australia must be limited. It must also address the infrastructure issues related to congestion in cities, sewerage and waste disposal, and the provision of water and energy. In this respect, good environmental and infrastructure policies are a necessary component of a positive immigration strategy. “RECOMMENDATION: The Federal Government should adopt a forward-looking population policy that incorporates both domestic population growth and migration, acknowledges their impact on Australia’s economic, social and environmental goals, and design population and complementary strategies accordingly. The population policies should include fertility, migration, population distribution and social integration and settlement. Complementary policies should include education and training, infrastructure and housing, and energy and the environment. These need to be effectively coordinated with State and Territory Governments, and their absence would be a sufficient reason for restricting immigration increases.” Don’t hold your breath that this means that the population growth and development lobby or its cheer-leading economists and demographers intend to stop riding jocky on the bulldozers. What we are almost certainly seeing here is a strategy by the development-finance-materials lobbyists, who benefit financially from all that population growth, to get the government to do their damage control. Just as the same crowd blame the government for housing shortages, high land and housing prices, and overall inflation when they successfully lobbied for precisely this situation. Australians are enraged by the undemocratic transformation of every aspect of their landscape, government and society. Does the reader need reminding that a criteria of facism is the close association of governments with big business? Reference:www.assa.edu.au/Publications/OP/op12008.pdf

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The World is under attack! by Tim Murray, Canadian activist

Mon, 2008-03-10 16:55 by Sheila Newman

"(William Rees believed) that the truth was so shocking that he and Wackernagel felt a more moderate story might not turn off the audience completely." John Feeley Kind of reminds me of that Japanese horror flick I saw when I was a kid, "Gorgo". It was about a gigantic reptilian monster who emerged from the Sea of Japan and rampaged from one continent to the next destroying everything in its path. Nothing could stop it. Planes, tanks, artillery, flame-throwers. Much like economic growth and development. When after blazing a trail of devastation through the mid-west, it threatened to enter the Buckeye state of Ohio, one foremost herpetologist warned the Governor of the true state of the menace. Then an aide interjected emphatically, "We can't leak this to the press, Governor-why if the people of Cincinatti knew that Gorgo was coming to town there would be a widespread panic!" Well Gorgo did come to town and he laid it to waste, presumably killing everyone in the process. I remember wondering then, as a ten year old, what advantage there was to the population being kept in a state of ignorant calm, and I am still of that view. We walk toward the abyss with the serenity of somnambulists. Yet William Rees, David Suzuki, David Attenborough and the celebrities of environmentalism are whispering warnings about symptoms when they should be shouting about root causes in order to wake us up. When Gorgo is approaching the gates of the city, they should be more afraid of him than of shocking us. The monster of population and economic growth will consume us all because too many of us opted to become politicians rather than truth-tellers. Tim Murray March 9/08

Which is the most idiotic Green Party in the world?

Sat, 2008-02-02 22:26 by tim

The deadline is fast approaching. Send in your submissions now. The first annual contest to establish who indeed is the most idiotic of the world's Green Parties is upon us. Many candidates were surveyed. The Swedes, the nutty Germans and Brits, the hypocritical Canadians and Australians and even the Green Party of the United States along with some of its discordant constituent parts. The competition for lunacy is fierce. Here are but a few of the contestants. First, let me present as my personal favourites, Canada's Greens. Their leader, Elizabeth May, argues that we should reduce our individual ecological footprint but at the same time import 300,000 more "footprints" each year just to strengthen our "cultural diversity". This "Great Multicultural Project" as she calls it, of course takes precedence over any project to protect biological diversity or constrain GHG emissions, which her 300,000 incoming footprints will increase. The Canadian Greens are a masterpiece of contradictions and confusion. Ontario leader Frank de Jong told us privately that Canada is overpopulated by factor of "four to ten". Yet he told others, including an Australia audience, that "population is a red herring". Now recently, on January 30th of 2008, he made the incredible assertion that "a higher population means a higher quality of life." Economic growth is no problem either. The size of the economy can increase ten fold, he maintains, only "through-put" matters. The party stands for Green taxes. Down with those antiquated fair and progressive income and capital gains taxes. But some officials like Frank Walton are waking up to the fact that low income Canadians aren't buying it. He now favours a hybrid mix of progressive and green taxes so that the poor don't pay the shot for punishing polluters and shifting to renewable technologies. That's the Canadians. Let's take a quick peek at other Green hypocrites. The British Green Party, at first blush, offers a radical departure in consciousness from its Canadian counterparts with this promise: "To promote debate on sustainable population levels for the UK, to include consideration of consumption and material comfort." (P-120) But then they say that "Richer regions and communities do not have the right to use migration controls to protect their privileges from others in the long term." Note that P-120 calls only for a debate, as the population skyrockets, because "the aim is to increase awareness of the issues-not to set specific population targets." In policy MG 101 the UK Greens acknowledge an impending human tsunami by saying that "there is likely to be mass migration of people escaping from the consequences of global warming, environmental degradation, resource shortage and population increase." So how do they propose to respond to this, besides of course to work for a fairer world that would lessen the urge to migrate? "We will progressively reduce UK immigration controls." They will do that in a multitude of ways. MG 402: " Families will not be divided by deportation." MG 403 "We will abolish the 'primary purpose' rule under which partners are refused entry if it is thought that the primary purpose of the relationship is for them to gain entry to the UK." MG 405 "Migrants illegally in the UK for over 5 years will be allowed to remain unless they pose a serious danger to public safety." MG 420 "We will resist all attempts to introduce a barrier around Europe shutting out non-Europeans or giving them more restricted rights of movement within Europe than European nationals." And in MG 454 the British Green Party has this to say about human trafficking: "The Government should grant a temporary right to stay in the country to anyone who has been trafficked or appears to have been trafficked. It should also recognize the right of those who have been trafficked to apply for a longer term or permanent immigrant status." With shameless invective, it labels as "racists of the far right" all those persons in the United Kingdom and Europe who favour increased immigration controls. The population of the United Kingdom, an island nation of 60 million acres, is currently 61 million and rising rapidly. It is obvious that under a Green Party administration, it would soon be 71 or 81 million barring an international resource or environmental crisis, in which event it would be even higher. What consumption levels would Britons have to tumble down to then to achieve sustainability? But let us save the best to last. After spending much time talking about the need for family planning, (P123, P124, P125, P126, P128), they declare in P106 that "The Green Party holds that the number of children people have should be a matter of free choice." That is brilliant. You need a licence to catch a certain number of fish and a drivers licence to operate a car within a certain speed limit but you can go ahead and have five kids on the dole and have them dump 100 metric tonnes of GHG into atmosphere because its your free choice. Yet polluters would no doubt face tough restrictions under a Green regime. The Irish Greens similarly project an image not of an environmental party but a party obsessed with human rights. Not once in their dense 13 page document on Immigration Policy do they mention carrying capacity or the ecological impact of all the asylum-seekers and immigrants that they want Ireland to embrace. They state that "The Green Party opposes any common asylum policy for the Union which results in more restrictions on asylum-seeking or in reducing rights for refugees (and) we strongly condemn the trend whereby the European Union is becoming a fortress on whose borders there are people dying in the hands of traffickers." The Greens denounced the Immigration Bill of 2004 as "flawed on account of the negative tone of the language used in it and the basic lack of provisions for family re-unification for non-nationals." And for the party effective integration of immigrants and their families is best promoted by granting them citizenship. But why does Ireland need immigrants? Economic orthodoxy provides the standard answer. In the words of an Irish Green Party policy statement: "The Central Statistics Office, in their report for 2006-36, suggests the State will continue to rely on strong inward migration to maintain economic growth. It forecasts that the economy will need 45,000 immigrant workers every year for the next 12 years to sustain economic growth." And then the Irish Greens pull out the old Chestnut that since those over 65 will in 2036 "comprise one fifth of the population rather than one tenth", it is important that " a progressive (sic) immigration policy will be in this country to ensure that the economy will be able to fund the necessary pension schemes, health and educational facilities into the future." The Irish Green Party, then, fully buys into the gospel of economic growth and the myth of immigration as a cure for an ageing population. Without debating the profound vacuity of their ideology, it is best simply to refer them to authors Richard Douthwaite, Herman Daly and Phil Mullan. Case closed. In declaring that "as a rapidly developing economy, Ireland needs migrant workers to provide essential skills and services", the Greens concede the game before it begins. They accept the necessity of a "rapidly developing economy", not thinking that on going economic growth will create labour shortages that once filled, will generate the growth that demands more immigrant labour. And this mad spiral will degrade the quality of life and despoil the environment---which is what a Green Party is supposed to be about, isn't it? That is, when it isn't defending gay rights, migrant mothers rights, handicapped rights, Ethiopian rights----identity politics. The Irish are also concerned that immigrants "are not simply labeled as economic entities, while denying them social and cultural rights." The Irish public must be brainwashed into accepting the important role immigration in Irish society, "on the changing nature of Irish national identity", and on a universal Green theme, "the value of cultural diversity". Borrowing from the Canadian handbook on social engineering, they advocate "culture sensitivity for public sector workers." The concept that maybe immigrants should learn to be sensitive to the customs of the host country is a theme universally absent from Green thinking. One could find it ironic that all across Canada, particularly Atlantic Canada, there are clubs and associations dedicated to keeping Celtic culture alive. And yet, in the heart of Celtic culture, you have an Irish government that has quickly allowed one in seven of its residents to be from another country and at least one political party, the Greens, promoting the fragmentation of that culture by its support of multiculturalism and economic growth, which drew immigrants in the first place. One wonders why the Irish spent centuries spilling blood to get the British out only to invite the East Europeans in. So much for Sinn Fein, "Ourselves Alone". Raised on Irish Nationalist folklore, you can't fathom my sense of betrayal. The Swedish and German Greens duplicate the same trademark idiocies of their sister parties. Though one must admit that the German Greens in the former coalition voting to shut down their nuclear program so that they can turn around and buy natural gas from Mr. Putin displayed an astonishing ignorance about the relative risks of nuclear and NG relative to their impact on global warming. Once again, a steady state economic model was not considered as an alternative to natural gas consumption. A look across the globe yields no surprises. The Australian Greens, for example, believe that "our environmental impact is not determined by population numbers alone, but by the way that people live." Notice that they did not say, "our environmental impact is not determined simply by the way people live, but by population numbers." The Aussies are to be congratulated for being able to utter the word "population", but like global comrades, it would kill them to put the stress on it. Over-consumption is the name of the game. And in constructing a population policy, should not "ecological sustainability" be the governing factor, unmitigated by a series of other points like "multiculturalism" (shades of Elizabeth May) and "humanitarian migration" which the Greens say Australia has an obligation to accept, including climate change refugees?" If so, then, how many? 10 million? 20? 30? Your country is a lifeboat and metaphorically speaking it has a carrying capacity of 20 people. Period. Whether you think you have an moral obligation to haul another 20 refugees on board because they are righteous, their cause is just, or they would afford your lifeboat more diversity is immaterial to the laws of physics, which state that your craft will sink under that weight. The trouble with the Australian Green Party is, like the others, it cannot decide if it is an environmentalist party or a human rights party. Its policy statement on population and immigration should be shortened by 13 points to read concisely "Australia's population policy should be determined by its commitment to ecological sustainability." The environment before people. The boat before its passengers. The Green Party of the United States places the same priority on human rights as other Green parties. A Californian Green Party policy direction document states bluntly, "immigration policies should be based strongly on human rights." Not on carrying capacity or sustainability or peak oil or climate change or biodiversity collapse but human rights. The rights of wildlife in the United States to survive runaway immigrant-driven population growth for this anthropocentric "Green" Party is given no mention. Instead, in a press release of May 23,2007 they called on Congress to enact immigration legislation that will protect human rights and "facilitate the path to citizenship" of the 25-35 million undocumented immigrants in the country, who must of course be given amnesty, the universal theme song of the Green movement. The Greens of New Mexico harmonize with that position in their immigration policy document: "We must continue to respect the potential contributions and rights of other new immigrants." The California Green Party goes further. They argue for "an authentic free-trade zone where people are free to travel for work," and invoke Cesar Chavez , as many soft greens and liberals do, as an advocate of this position. In fact Chavez was strident advocate of immigration restriction in defence of the working conditions of Mexican-Americans and stood on the border to patrol to guard against illegal entrants. The foundation of the party's attitude on immigration is found in a statement that could have been lifted from the policy book of virtually any Green party in the world: "Those living in the industrialized world must end the habits of waste and over-consumption that place as much as stress on the environment as does population growth in developing nations." Consumption, consumption, consumption. Bring on the immigrant millions. After all, "we are all the same people, and need to break down those psychological barriers, not re-enforce them." We are the same, yes, but we are also "diverse" at the same time and this diversity must be celebrated and amplified like it or not. The host culture is of little account in Greendom. The best way to celebrate diversity of course is to offer tantamount support to an 80% immigrant-driven population growth rate in California of 2% , nearly twice the national rate of 1.1%. If unchecked the state's population will double to 64 million by 2035 and another 32% of its 100 million acres will have to be devoted to urbanization and highways. If the population continues to grow, per capita agricultural land will be reduced approximately half of what it is today, and in 33 years about half of California's cropland will be unavailable. Currently the state must build 250,000 housing units yearly and one school per day just to keep pace with growth and is already 40% more densely populated than Europe. This is the state which, under the leadership of Governor Arnold Schwartzeneger, Canadians believe is so environmentally progressive because of his initiatives to reduce GHG. There is not one jurisdiction in the world that has accomplished that in the context of rapid, unchecked population growth. In the face of these facts all the California Green Party can do is issue a statement referring to those who favour greater restrictions on immigration as being "xenophobic" and "reactionary". (Let us hope they choke on that statement when they are paying 50% of their income on food in 2035). In response, an activist for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) replied, "We're not concerned about who is coming here, but simply the number. It is not a matter of condemning those people who have come here, but looking at resources and asking how many people this land can support with what kind of lifestyle." It appears that CAPS is the authentic "Green Party" in California. And we don't even have to worry about developing countries either. The tonic for overpopulation is, you guessed it, "economic growth". They conscript the old, discredited Theory of Demographic Transition to say that "Current global demographics demonstrate that economic well-being promotes low birthrates. (No, but it does promote GHG emissions and habitat loss). Its amazing that this 72 year old theory still enjoys currency. So there are the nominees for idiocy. The Canadians, the British, the Irish, the Australians and the Americans. The list is by no means inclusive. You might provide better examples of idiotic parties with outrageously contradictory policies. But let's examine the Green parties that were disqualified from the contest on the grounds of sanity. The Green Party of Missouri states that "Because human impact is now beyond a sustainable level, we must take immediate action to reduce population growth. Our goal is zero population growth in our country as soon as possible." The Green Party of Minnesota: "We support efforts toward zero or negative human population growth. Overpopulation combined with the resource demands and waste production of modern lifestyles are root causes of environmental degradation." The Green Party of Hawaii says flatly "Population growth must cease. We need carrying capacity studies for all counties to determine development limits." Hawaii suffered 2.4% annual population growth from 1970-1986 overwhelmingly due to immigration. It is no wonder that the state elected the first legislator on record to openly declare support for a steady state economy, Senator David Hemmings. Now the best is left to last. The model of a what Green Party can and should be. The Green Party of New Zealand. Their six page Population Policy statement takes the sensible approach. It begins with an estimate of what population level New Zealand can sustain, based on the Ministry of Environment's footprint analysis. In 1998 that figure was 5.7 million, but the Green Party treats it with caution, "an indicative upper limit figure only", for it recognizes that unforeseen contingencies like the peak oil crisis, climate change refugees, war, the sudden return of 750,000 expatriate New Zealanders for example, should make government provide for "spare capacity". And "in order to maintain both spare capacity and a decent standard of living, the optimum population figure will be significantly lower than the maximum carrying capacity of the land." So while Greens the world over feel compelled to fill up the tank right away and keep it full, New Zealand Greens evidence a prudence and understanding of future calamity and existing overshoot. Points 2 and 3 of their "Key Principles" state that "A self-sustaining population cannot be increased beyond the carrying capacity of useable land available" and "The population cannot be increased beyond its capacity to offset its greenhouse emissions." Alas, the Greens of New Zealand, Missouri, Minnesota and Hawaii are the renegades of the movement, the exception to the rule. In most cases, your local "Green" Party is a misnomer. It is a name designed to attract the environmentalist constituency but its focus is not really on the environment, but on human rights. The rights of migrants take precedence over their environmental impact, which Greens won't even acknowledge. On the basis of this global tour of Green parties, a provisional international manifesto of generic Green-ness is hereby offered as a guide to their cosmology: International manifesto of Genereic Green-ness

1. Consumption is almost everything. Population is almost nothing.
Overpopulation is a global problem, so lets not try to stabilize our own.
Renewable technologies and greener lifestyles will save the day
We are committed to sustainability---and growth---at the same time.
Growth can be rendered ecologically benign if channeled, managed or deflected.
We share the consensus for the need for economic growth, therefore we favour liberal immigration.
Since we favour liberal immigration that is non-discriminatory, then we favour an aggressive multicultural strategy for the integration of migrants. We reject the concept of a national culture.
We place far greater emphasis on climate change than biodiversity collapse even though more species will be lost sooner to human overpopulation than to global warming, which is not as imminent or as catastrophic as the loss of biodiversity services.
We will only acknowledge overpopulation as a problem in developing countries. Migration of people to high consumption societies is to be countered only be lowering the per capita consumption rates of those societies.
Closed borders, immigration controls, or as we call the Bush fence, the "Wall of Shame" send out unfriendly signals to emigrant-countries whose cooperation we need to solve global environmental problems like AGW.
Relieve the wealthy of progressive income tax and capital gains tax and introduce Green Taxes. Punish those at the bottom of the income scale for not having the money to buy hybrid cars and retro-fitted houses.

Topic:

Why George Monbiot is wrong to downplay population question

Fri, 2008-02-01 15:06 by tim

The original title of this article was "Monbiot's flawed linear thinking could lead many astray"

Monbiot's statement below reveals a dangerous use of arithmetic and linear thinking.

In other words, if we accept the UN's projection, the global population will grow by roughly 50% and then stop. This means it will become 50% harder to stop runaway climate change, 50% harder to feed the world, 50% harder to prevent the overuse of resources.

It is certainly tempting to throw these concepts around because we all have a tendency to think linearly (the exception being that perhaps most people now at least realize that human population growth is exponential). Unfortunately, nature rarely works in such linear ways and there are thousands of examples of non-linear responses, threshold effects, and synergistic processes that undermine simple 1:1 relationships. So, increasing population by 50% will not necessarily result in a 50% more effort required to combat climate change (or whatever). It may mean that it takes 4 times the effort or who knows, that we cross a threshold where no amount of effort will result in a desired response.

Similarly, the recent use of the simple model that total consumption ("economy") is the product of population and the per capita consumption assumes that the two variables (per capita consumption and number of people) are independent and work in isolation. What we need to do is qualify this relationship by the phrase "all things being equal". So, for example, if population doubles and per capita consumption is cut in half, then total consumption remains unchanged all things being equal. Of course, all things are rarely equal and non-linear effects kick in, expected or unexpected. I doubt whether this relationship will ever really hold in this simple fashion.

This relationship also assumes steady state operating conditions and ignores indivisible baseline per capita consumption such as per capita use of oxygen, water etc. and upfront resource use needed to reduce human per capita consumption.

For example, in a de Jong world, (Frank de Jong is Ontario Green Party leader) we might imagine a projection of population of Ontario to double and might then go about (yeah right!) aiming at reducing per capita consumption to 50% of current levels in order to achieve no net increase in total consumption. However, doubling the population will entail upfront or continuing natural capital to achieve that lower consumption level and to simply meet baseline requirements of a larger population, regardless of its ultimate consumption level. Such up-front or one time capital is never included as an additive factor in the simple arithmetic relationship. Similarly, I am remined of China where the mean family size was reduced but the number of dwellings increased non-linearly with population due to the (unexpected?) desire of new generation Chinese to live without in-laws. You can all think of much better examples than mine but the bottom line is that we need to impress on people that nature is typically non linear and that we should qualify our simple arithmetic models with statements such as all things being equal and under steady state conditions. The more we use this kind of language the more we will be able to raise awareness of the myriad of caveats that are inherent in our (suboptimal) arithmetic.

Can you imagine for example the effect of a Green Party official saying something like:

If we double the population of Ontario and reduce per capita consumption by 50%, then, all things being equal and barring any non-linear responses by nature acting on our increased population, any unforseen threshold effects related to nature's goods and services (including abiotic and biotic), then under steady state conditions that ignore any first time start up consumption of resources, our total consumption will remain unchanged.

Keith Hobson is a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and a member of our pan Canadian Malthusian discussion group sinkinglifeboat|AT|topica com

Posted by Tim Murray sinkinglifeboat.blogspot.com

Topic:

The end of economic growth is a message of hope

Mon, 2008-01-28 23:31 by tim

In this lecture Josh Farley tells us that we can't sell the Steady State economic model if we preach gloom and sacrifice. "Martin Luther King would have gotten no where if he had given a "I have a Nightmare" speech. Farley demonstrates that it is we who have the positive message and that it will be the ideologues of classical economics who will have to purvey gloom and doom once it is apparent to all that there are no more cookies in the cookie jar. Even with their greedy target of 3-4% annual growth, which results in a frightening doubling time of 28 years, the growthists haven't eliminated poverty, globally or nationally. They've tripled the economy since 1969 in the United States, but poverty levels are even higher. The world economy would have to grow twenty times its present size to achieve this goal, but as we know, there aren't even resources to feed an economy of that magnitude or one a fraction of that size. And if there were, ecological damage would shut off the engine before the runaway train left the station, as it is in the process of doing. Sadly, it appeared to be the consensus at the Bali Conference that economic growth was the pre-condition for solving third world environmental problems, an attitude pervasive in the parliaments of Europe and North America. But as Brishen Hoff put it, "every economic boom leaves an environmental bust". Farley mentions that 70% of oceanic fish have been harvested beyond sustainability. But here is how classical economic theory breaks down. As certain fish become scarce, they become more expensive, and hence more attractive to harvest. The feedback mechanism works in the wrong direction. So much for the magic of the price system. And on the subject of sustainability, he made this remark about fossil fuel agriculture: "It takes 10 calories of hydrocarbons to produce one calorie of food." Farley said that the new sustainable economy would detach property rights from property ownership, and he cited the example of the "Commons Trust" in his home state of Vermont. Since 80% of Vermont consists of forest, the state government thought it prudent to purchase eco-system services from owners as has happened in Costa Rica. Vermont assigns property rights to society as a whole-there is no "right" to pollute or to damage the commons. After all, hunter-gatherers had no property rights, and we spent more time in that role than in our present role as "future-eaters". To the economics of the dismal science Farley counterposes "The Economics of Happiness" and discusses the relationship between GNP and well-being. The United States consumes 30% of the planet's resources but are Americans substantially happier than others? Are there buckets of smiles on the faces of Americans walking the streets of New York or Sacramento, California? Research shows that relative wealth is more meaningful to people than absolute wealth---as long as they stand materially close to their neighbours they are reasonably content. An egalitarian society of lower material standing is happier than a wealthier one with great disparities. Farley says that Colombians making $5,000 a year are as content as most Americans. In 1969, he points out that the United States consumed one-third of what it does today, but consumed just 17% of the energy in doing so. I haven't equivalent Canadian statistics, but I can tell you this about 1969. We produce more than 155% more goods and services today than we did then, but we have not increased our production of fertile soil, clean water, clean air, spacious parks or wildlife by 155%. And like the United States, there are one-third more of us competing for these finite resources than there were then. In 1969 a musical instrument was just as pleasant to hear then as now, a novel was just as enjoyable to read then as now, a dog was just as companionable then as now, a sunset was just as beautiful then as now and my family gave me even more sustenance then as now because folks had more time to give each other then. In 1969 we had fewer toys and fewer choices but also had less crime, less traffic, less pollution and less stress. And its all down to growth. To paraphrase Albert Bartlett, it is difficult to identify a single part of one's life that growth has improved. It shouldn't be a tough sell: Let's slow down, lower our standard of living, but raise our quality of life. Josh Farley's lecture is a little over 56 minutes long. Stay with it. It's at www.themadisoninstitute.org/audio/Josh_Farley_final.mp3 Tim Murray January 27/08 Tim Murray January 27/08

Topic:

Population is not a front page issue

Fri, 2007-12-28 12:05 by admin

By Valerie Yule - Monday, 17 December 2007

This article was originally published on Online Opinion. It is reproduced here under the terms of the Creative Commons License.

Not openly discussed at the Bali Climate Summit 2007 is the one factor that will make it hardest to stop increasing greenhouse gas emissions - population growth.

Ironically, population growth was the main issue at an earlier Bali international conference 15 years ago. The issue has not gone away. Rather, it has become more pressing in the world, including in the Asia -Pacific region, and it is illustrated by the island of Bali itself.

The 1992 conference was organised under the auspices of the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA). Its outcome was the Bali Declaration on Population and Sustainable Development, 1992. (See here and here.)

Thirty-six of ESCAP's 52 member countries participated, and they reached consensus at a ministerial level on the controversial issue of setting population targets in line with sustainable development goals.

The Declaration stated that the goals of population policy were to "achieve a population that allows a better quality of life without jeopardising the environmental and resource base of future generations ... taking cognisance of basic human rights as well as responsibilities".

This was the first international meeting at this political level that set an objective of attaining by the year 2010 replacement level fertility, which is equivalent to about 2.2 children per woman. In 1992 the countries in the Asia-Pacific region had a total population of about 3.2 billion. Although the annual growth rate has been steadily declining, an increase of 920 million people is still expected by 2010. This increase would be mostly in the less developed countries which have the most acute problems of poverty.

These enormous numbers contrast with Australia?s population growth, from 8 million in 1950 to 21 million now, and 24 million expected by 2050.

The location of the Climate Summit, Bali itself, illustrates the problem of growth. When I travelled around the island in 1969, the population of about two million had no tourist industry to speak of and needed none, although there were social stresses indicated by the violence of the massacres of up to 100,000 suspected communists in 1965.

By 2000, the Balinese population had increased by 50 per cent to over three million, and it continues to grow. The tourist industry and emigration are now essential to economic survival. Other countries in the region with high population growth have severe economic and social problems. They include Papua Niugini, grown from 1.4 million in 1950 to 5 million now and 10 million expected by 2050, other regions of Indonesia (growth 82 million to 224 million and predicted 336 million), and Pacific islands such as the Solomons, (106,000 to 466,000 and predicted 1.1 million) - all stressed by youth unemployment and resources destruction. How can they be expected to stop deforestation? Countries now carrying out family planning policies to restrain population growth include China, India, Thailand and even Pakistan.

Growth in population inevitably means increase in human contributions to greenhouse gases and resource shortages, even if most people still live far below the affluent level of the West that they aspire to. In developing countries, families seek to have sufficient children to ensure that some will survive, and provide for old-age. As security improves, family size can drop, unless pushed by religious or political influences.

However, for Bali Climate Summit 2007, population is not a front page issue, despite our world growth trajectory from 6 billion now to 9 billion by 2050 - almost paralleling how the proverbial lily doubles its size in the lily-pond.

The sticking points are the nations of the developed West, which also provide sticking points for other aspects of capping carbon emissions. Countries like Australia or France can hardly promote family planning in poor countries when they offer baby bonuses to persuade their own women to have more children.

Western countries have still not worked out how to maintain their prosperity with a stable population. They still fear lowered fertility, and have made a bogey of ageing populations, which need not be. Indeed, our increasingly healthy aged need less support than children. Almost every Western country in fact has a greater population than in 1950, and most are still growing. (US Census Bureau International Data Base population tables.)

Meanwhile European countrysides are filling up with housing. Water, oil and fish face future shortages. And millions of economic refugees in the world ensure that no country's population need shrink. Behind the beat-ups of fearing declining fertility rates and suppressing the real issue of world population growth is a different economic bogey. The paradoxical problems that are shaking the United States and hence the world are insufficient consumer spending and building construction in the world's richest country. Yet it is this type of economic activity that most boosts greenhouse gas emissions.

It is possible for our capitalist system, which has always continuously evolved, to develop and be able to sustain prosperity without constant increase in material production, which requires increasing numbers of people to consume it.

As things are, we can only observe. There may be no Bali declaration in 2007 about stabilising populations and thereby cutting the production of waste. Yet this, even more than carbon trading, would be a major strategy in cutting the human contribution to devastating our planet.

Canadian Socialist and Green Icons contest multiculturalism

Mon, 2007-12-24 00:00 by tim

Multiculturalism is Canada's Ingsoc, a state ideology so powerfully pervasive that few in the media, in the educational institutions or the political parties would dare challenge it. One might think that the left would offer criticism, but apart from journalist and former socialist parliamentarian, Douglas Fisher, and columnist Larry Zolf, none come to mind.

The Liberal Party was able to steal the affections of working class voters earmarked for the social-democratic NDP by appealing to their cultural identities. Running candidates of the same ethnicity as the prevailing group in the riding, and granting federal money for the construction of ethnic centres was a classic Liberal formula for vote-buying. And it usually worked.

The NDP approach has always been to appeal to people's class identity above and beyond the language they speak and to their sense of solidarity to people who live similar lives but have different cultures. Multiculturalism has not been good for class solidarity.

J.S. Woodsworth, the father of Canadian socialism, founder of the CCF-NDP and described as the "Saint of Canadian politics", I think knew as much. Allen Mills in "Fool for Christ-The Political Thought of J.S. Woodsworth", wrote that during his leadership in the twenties and thirties he continued to evince a profound concern for " the social integration of the alien." Allen writes that Woodsworth talked "of uniting immigrants into a new Canadian type: he worried that the melting pot was not working and the country would become 'balkanized', there was a necessity to 'absorb', 'weld' and 'incorporate, immigrants into the Canadian way of life.'p.228

Although Woodsworth was an opponent of immigration in the 1920s and 30s because there were not enough jobs, he also recognized the need for more social cohesion. A higher proportion of newcomers of our own British traditions would mould these incoming armies of foreigners into 'loyal subjects'.

Greens have been among the most effusive champions of Ingsoc, with Green leader Elizabeth May justifying the country's absurdly high immigration levels as Canada's ongoing "multicultural project". Environmentalists claim that "cultural diversity" is the analogue to biological diversity, the necessary variation found in plant and animal forms. Trouble is, the immigration levels required to sustain these culturally diverse ethnic enclaves is fuelling urban sprawl and crowding out wildlife. Variety is the spice of life, but the human is flourishing at the expense of the non-human. Multiculturalism has not been good for the environment.

But there is a JS Woodsworth of Canadian greens. He is none other than the famous co-author of "Our Ecological Footprint", Dr. William E. Rees. This is taken from his "Globalization, Trade and Migration: Undermining Sustainability?"

"... there is sufficient evidence to hypothesize that multi-racial or multi-cultural countries are more likely to unravel chaotically in the event of rapid ecological change, resource shortages, or economic decline than are more homogenous societies. Because socio-political stability is a prerequisite for ecological sustainability, we thus have yet another reason for a pre-emptive cautionary approach to large-scale migration in coming levels and adopt explicit 'melting pot' strategies designed to facilitate the integration and assimilation of new-comers into the social and economic fabric of their adopted countries. They should also include ongoing public education programs that stress both the need for, and the national benefits of, limited immigration.

The main objectives of this approach are to discourage the development of persistent immigrant enclaves, to accelerate immigrants' development of a sense of identity with the larger society, and to improve public understanding of the modern role of economic and environmental changes that may be required for ecological sustainability. Immigration policies that favour multiculturalism and that apparently succeed during periods of growth and plenty may not be adaptive in the face of rapid global ecological change of economic decline."

So while the sheep continue to bleet "diversity", the wise old shepherds speak of the virtues of integration and cohesion.

Just as Central Asia exported the bubonic plague, and Central Africa exported the Ebola virus, Canada gave the world the ideology of Multiculturalism. It might be cautionary then to heed the words of our brave critics as they spoke them right in the guts of the ogre before the Thought Police could silence them.

Tim Murray,
Quadra Island, BC
Canada
December 23/07

Topic:

The ball is in your court: Hard questions for Soft Greens

Sun, 2007-12-09 16:49 by tim

You say you’re OK with the idea of reducing our population. But you are not comfortable with immigration cut-backs. Birth control, more abortion services, tax incentives for fewer children are fine. But your parents, or grand-parents, or friends are immigrants and by the way, aren’t mine too? The problem is, all the measures you would agree to would do little to reverse population growth in North America. Immigration accounts for 70% of American population growth and two-thirds of Canada’s. Without immigration, population in both countries levels off. If immigration persists at current rates, the USA will see one billion citizens and Canada 70 million by century’s end. But you’re just not comfortable about dealing with immigration in a country of 33 million people. Will you be comfortable dealing with it when we reach Jack Layton’s goal of 40 million—shared by other federal leaders? Will you be comfortable with no immigration freeze at 50 million? 60 million? 70 million? At what point would you be willing to concede that we had exceeded our carrying-capacity in Canada? DO YOU EVEN ACCEPT THAT WE HAVE A “CARRYING CAPACITY” IN CANADA?” According to Millenium Assessment findings 60% of 24 ecosystem services were being degraded unsustainably over the past 50 years. There is a fundamental conflict between economic growth and ecosystem services and between economic growth and biodiversity conservation. Economic growth is a function of population level and per capita consumption. You say you want to reduce consumption. Great. But you apparently want to take population growth out of the equation. Absurd. Paul Ehrlich’s old “IPAT” formula still applies. When assessing environmental impact, its I (Impact)= P(Population)X A(Affluence or Consumption) X T for Technology. Biologist Neil Dawe of the Qualicum Institute, in the most optimistic guess I’ve read, said that biodiversity could probably subsist alongside Canada’s current population of 32 million---if we consumed at the level we did in 1950. Do you think that’s likely? You speak of hybrid cars, solar panels, windmills and retro-fits. How far toward 1950 will that get us? And when Jack Layton’s dream comes true—very shortly—and we have 40 million Canadians, will we then need to consume at the level of 1935? How “green” would consumers have to get to erase the damage that that extra 8 million consumers will inflict on the environment? And we haven’t yet talked about that great sacred cow of Canadian political discourse---REFUGEES. Oh dear me, we can’t keep them out, can we? OK then, how many? The UN says there are 15- 50 million right now. How many of these are we going to take in? 1 million? 5 million? 10 million? That’s just for starters. Along comes global warming and rising sea levels. Al Gore says that around the city of Shanghai alone 40 million people will be displaced. Multiply that a hundred times around the world. Where will your bleeding heart take us then? You call yourself an “environmentalist”. Your politics are “green”. But your concern for people obviously takes priority over your self-proclaimed concern for nature. Trouble is, nature is in the driver’s seat. Whatever number of people you want to admit to Canada is academic. It’s what the ecosystem will sustain. And with 33 million people, it’s not bearing up very well. To repeat , 60% of 24 ecosystem “services” are degraded. Your human rights agenda will come right up against biodiversity collapse. Its called a “Limiting Factor”. There is a limit, yes even in Canada, to population growth and to the economic growth it propels. And when push comes to shove, there will also be a limit to our compassion. Or to put it another way, our compassion toward the world will no longer come at the expense of our compassion to our own families, our community, our own nation, and the biodiversity that sustains us all. So the ball’s in your court, soft green. You won’t face up to the need for population stabilization. You would prefer runaway population growth to immigration cut-backs and an open-ended refugee policy without regard to the environmental consequences of such a course. Apparently, for you, the sky’s the limit. All we need do is be good little “green” consumers and reduce our footprint just a little bit more for each new entrant to the country. Now tell me how this is all supposed to work. How is biodiversity supposed to co-exist with 40, 50, 70 million Canadian consumers, however “green” they are? How do you reduce green-house emissions when you substantially increase the population. Tony Blair’s bold plan was to reduce emissions with tough new standards by 20% over 10 years. Instead, emissions increased 3% ! Why? Because although factories and cars spewed less noxious gas, economic and population growth increased the number of factories and cars! Back to square one! Numbers do matter. Until you cope with these questions, soft green, you are, in my estimation, a counterfeit green. And in your estimation I am, no doubt, all of those nasty adjectives in the politically correct lexicon—a callous, xenophobic, misanthropic, deep ecologist with a fortress mentality and a hidden “racist” agenda. It’s OK. I’m used to it. The race card always gets played when all other arguments fail. I’m inclined to believe that what was said of patriotism is true of anti-racism—it’s the last refuge of scoundrels. Tim Murray

Topic:

South East Asian wetlands threatened by overdevelopment

Thu, 2007-11-29 09:49 by admin

Article by Song Kinh, 29 November 2007.

The sea of nodding pink lotus extends into a misty horizon. Fishermen and women catch tiny fish in hand nets, while others herd ducks in the open water. Some net the quarrelsome crabs recently identified as being unique to this wetland. Rice fields hem the wetlands, heads stooped with ripening grain. A hunter in baggy cutoffs passes with a home made rifle, looking up at the trees in the hope of bagging some flying protein. The rural world in an urban confined space.

I wondered what this small piece of paradise would look like covered with the promised Chinese-built factories and houses.

The seemingly doomed 20 square kilometers of That Luang wetlands, that embrace Vientiane, the capital city of Laos, are a source of joy for the eye and for the belly. Even the Buddha gets a cut of the action, as women gather lotus buds to sell at the markets for offerings at temple ceremonies. In times of floods, the wetlands act as a reservoir, absorbing the excess waters and preventing the city from being submerged.

Areas such as this are under threat in all parts of Asia. In late October this year, Greenpeace, aided by hundreds of local villagers, blockaded a palm oil development site in Riau, Indonesia. They back-filled the eight-metre-deep canals being dug to channel water out of the peat swamp.

Just like in Indonesia, Vientiane’s wetlands provide food and generate income for the poorest of the city’s urban population. The day I visited, teenagers were collecting snails for sale and for food. The place is a haven for the poor, particularly women. Widows and divorced women without other means of support, fish here. "I was born here" one man told me. "My family has always lived here. The water is clean. Closer to the city", he said, waving his hand in the direction of the metropolis, "it is polluted and no fish live there. But here we can still catch them."

Yes, the fishermen and women knew about the plans. The swamp would be filled as far as that galvanised iron factory one said, pointing his chin to the west. Where would he go? He shrugged and looked at the water. The vast amount of pollution generated by the proposed development would kill the surviving aquatic life, overwhelming its capacity to biodegrade waste. What would that do to the livelihoods of the 38,000 people who are thought to live around the wetland’s rim?

Unlike Indonesia, protest is impossible, even if it was culturally appropriate. Individual and family punishment is still the norm for those that speak up in Laos.

It is said that the King, when he was alive, would attend the annual Ork Phansa (end of Buddhist Lent) celebrations by sailing down the Mekong to a wharf located near where the Beer Lao factory is currently situated. From there he would take a small but highly decorated pirogue to the highly revered That Luang temple for prayers. Some old Laotians can remember seeing that event, and remarked that it was a wonderful time when the marshes were full and water reflected the clouds and rich blue of the sky.

Wet Dreams

In 1995 I visited a wetlands project in South Sumatra, Indonesia. Labeled a swamp reclamation project, it supported the then President’s Soeharto’s fanatical if not deluded vision of making Indonesia self sufficient in rice-growing. The Asian Development Bank (ADB) had supported this delusion by lending more than US$200 million, most of which was filched by the nimble and creative bookkeeping of the Indonesians involved.

The swamps were converted into concentrated rows of rice fields, and hapless families were imported from Java and Bali to work the land. It was one of the worst projects I have ever seen. People’s lives were made a misery. The daily tide floated human waste to the surface where it contaminated drinking water; children died in huge numbers. The soil was acid when exposed to air, as well as saline, so nothing would grow. In despair, the valiant farmers grew orchids which they sold to nearby Singapore. The Department of Agriculture, keen to show the ADB their diligence, forced the farmers to rip the orchids out and replant the doomed rice seedlings. During later storm surges, the conversion of mangroves to rice-paddies enabled the seas to enter. It was development torture.

Recently World Vision, the Poverty Reduction Fund and World Food Program collaborated on a similar completely ill-conceived, but probably well intentioned, project in southern Laos. By filling the chain of wetlands they thought to provide poor farmers with more rice fields. What they did not understand is that the wetlands are sources of valuable protein and micronutrients. The local people had developed both a taste for the aquatic foods and well developed ways by which to maximize the haul. Filling the wetlands increased poverty and malnutrition, as fish is more expensive than rice. Selling fish had enabled landless farmers to buy rice, and rice farmers to balance their diets. Without the wetlands, malnutrition quickly set in.

Wet Waste

Wetlands are there because of subsurface run off and geological strata that funnel water into the ponds. Vientiane simply does not have alterative drainage and infrastructure to carry that amount of water. The Mekong in 2007 rose higher than it has in many years due to typhoons in the north. Now more than at any time, Vientiane needs these wetlands to ameliorate any future flooding arising from global climate chaos. Those needing a reality check should look at the photos of Vientiane in 1967, when flood waters engulfed the famous Morning Market.

However, wetlands seem to be perceived as wastelands. Engineers dream of filling them and town planners see flattened expanses to be covered in urban development. Already the incremental filling of the Vientiane wetlands have sent several animals into local extinction, the most dramatic being the population of Siamese crocodiles as well as several species of birds and fish.

While countries of the economic North are seeing the error of filling wetlands, and are now trying to reconstitute marshes, Laos seems to be hell bent on selling one of its national treasures to its neighbours. According to the Vientiane Times (October 12), the Government who owns most of the wetlands is about to re-zone them as a development area after a Chinese group showed interest and the colour of their money to some of the more starry-eyed in the government. There is I gather, a lot of controversy, as many in government are bitterly opposed to the conversions.

A significant amount of the already shrunken wetlands will be handed to Chinese developers for suburban development to house, it is said, 18,000 Chinese. The Times went on to say that the Chinese company is ready to invest billions, and turned down another site offered to them, claiming it was too far out of town. The developers promise shops, factories and hotels; and of course, housing for an increasingly visible number of Chinese people in Laos.

It is hard to know who will benefit, except maybe the folks that take the inevitable kickbacks. Laos is regarded as one of the more corrupt regimes by Transparency International who ranked them with Pakistan and Bangladesh. Several donors nations have threatened to pull up stakes, but they will not be missed, as private equity pours in.

Moreover, construction logistics are a nightmare. Structures need extremely deep footings and structural cross bracing, or will crack and crumble. Rising damp eats construction materials. In Florida, anyone who wants to build something as small as a boat ramp on the famous Everglades, has to get planning permission from the Environmental Protection Authority and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

A Laotian engineer commented "It’s the craziest idea I have ever heard in my life", suggesting it was an ecocidal money laundering project.

The ex-head of the newly defunct Mekong Wetlands Project suggested that the sacrifice of the marshes represented the crush between development imperatives and rising land prices. That may be true, but the land is clearly not for Laos but for Chinese companies and speculators, and the land loss will seriously compromise the livelihoods of thousands of Laotian residents. Rather it is a mark of the more brazenly open influence of the Chinese on the Laotian government. This year the Chinese government requested and were granted the ability to influence planning and development strategy in the northern provinces which border China. It is, some say, colonisation by stealth.

Wet Services

As the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) reported, the That Luang Marsh helps keep Vientiane's head above water.

The conservation of urban wetlands leads to economic gains for both urban residents and municipal councils, generates goods and services with an economic value in excess of US$ 4.8 million per year. These benefits accrue to the 38,000 people that live directly around the marsh, and the estimated 161,000 residents of Vientiane.

The wetlands offer flood attenuation and wastewater treatment services valued at US$2 million a year according to the IUCN and WWF. In the wet season, some city roads quickly become impassable. Existing urban infrastructure and the lack of reticulated sewage treatment means that Vientiane is unable to provide the vast sink that the marshes offer, much less convert the water into income. It has been estimated that the services offered by the That Luang ecosystem constitute investment savings of more than $18 million in damage costs avoided, and $1.5 million that would need to be spent on technologies required to fulfill the same functions. I now understand the engineer’s response.

These marshes have some of the densest settlements found in Laos and have the longest history of settlement, not surprising in view of the sheer generosity of the natural environment. In the 1990s about 1,000 hectares were reclaimed by rice farmers. Gordon Claridge, a specialist in wetland ecology and birds, reported that in the 1990’s the municipality dug a drainage channel and constructed a pumping station to enable new rice fields to be claimed, cutting off the direct link between the Mekong and the wetlands. The marshes have been decreasing ever since.

As pointed out by several Laotian scientific writers - Chanphhenxay, Latsamina and Xaphakdy - the problem is that there are no unified rules or regulations related to town planning, urban development or in this case wetlands. A Laotian economist recently calculated that the value of the rice produced is overwhelmingly trounced by the value of the wetlands just being there. The claims that filling and growing rice on the wetlands alleviates poverty may be true for the rice farmers, who often come into conflict with the landless over creeping intrusions, but not for the broader population.

The Laos Constitution insists that the state and the people have a responsibility to protect and use natural resources renewably. The development of the That Luang wetlands would seem, then, to run counter to the Constitution.

The ink has not been put on paper, so there is still time for those opposed to this project to make their voices heard. But the case is hindered by the absence of an avenue for protest, well resourced and independent town planning expertise or a cohesive city plan, and the fact that they stand between a minister and his payoff. Blatant land grabs by the well connected ensure that land is used according to economic gain and not national benefit. One only has to see the brands of cars that prowl the streets of Vientiane to realise that some are making lots of money in the least developed country.

The symbol of the Buddha, the lotus, may well soon be overtaken by the symbol of capitalism, the factory. That it is being done in and by nations that at one time eschewed capitalism, is the final irony.

Originally published in Online Opinion on 29 Nov 07. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Moreton Bay Threatened by Channel Dredging

Tue, 2007-11-13 11:58 by James Sinnamon

The following is a media release from the Wildlife Preservation of Queensland

Moreton Bay - Gold Coast channel dredging must consider fisheries

Channel dredging proposed in the Gold Coast Waterways Access Needs Study will impact upon a significant area of the Moreton Bay Marine Park and its fisheries, yet the environmental impacts of this dredging are not being considered.

Simon Baltais, spokesperson for the Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland Bayside Branch, said that the determination of the future management of Moreton Bay Marine Park is at a critical point and the Access Needs Study must consider impacts of dredging on seagrass and other valuable fisheries habitat as well as the physical features.

“it is ironic that the Review of the Moreton Bay Marine Park Zoning Plan is taking place, yet it seems the environmental impacts of dredging, promoted by the Access Needs Study, are not even going to be considered,” said Mr. Baltais.

“We are talking about a Marine Park - we must determine the environmental impacts and how these impacts will be addressed in this study.”

Mr. Baltais said, “If you are going to dredge you will need to know what environmental values exist and how you will avoid impacting upon them. This will have a great bearing on the location of channels and depth of dredging.”

“We already know previous dredging caused major changes in tidal movement which caused a significant loss of seagrass and high levels of boating traffic is increasing turbidity, the number one killer of seagrass,” said Mr. Baltais.

According to the 1993 Study by WBM Oceanics on the Southern Moreton Bay:
“Substantial losses of seagrass occurred during and after the construction of the Gold Coast Seaway. Aerial photographs taken in 1987 show that more than 90% of the dense seagrass beds present in 1982 were lost.

“Lower low tides within the Broadwater (up to 30 cm lower) aerially exposed seagrass beds on the intertidal sand banks for longer periods and resulted in some subtidal beds becoming intertidal.” (Source: “Fluctuations in Wetland Extent in Southern Moreton Bay,” R.M. Morton, 1993 – attached.)

“Seagrass is not only essential to turtles, dugongs and other marine creatures, but to healthy fisheries and therefore important to recreational fishing, which the boating industry is dependent upon,” said Mr Baltais. “If the boating industry is concerned about their future they must consider the environmental impacts of dredging.”

Simon Baltais, Spokesperson
Wildlife Preservation Society of Queensland – Bayside Branch
Mobile: 0412-075-334

There is No Sanctuary from Economic Growth

Fri, 2007-10-26 11:41 by tim

Peace in our time, Habitat forever?

For those who recall the scene when Neville Chamberlain stepped down on the tarmac of London's Heston aerodrome on September 30th of 1938 waving his piece of paper, the announcement by the government of the Canadian province of British Columbia (B.C.) on October 16, 2007 must have seemed like déjà vu. On both occasions, an announcement promising 'peace in our time' (for people or wildlife) was met with jubilant relief from people who wanted to believe that the insatiable appetite of a monster can be appeased with an hors d'oeuvre.

In 1938 the monster was Adolf Hitler and he was not to be believed or trusted. In 2007 the monster is economic growth, and its need for lebensraum will not stop at greenbelts, farmland, wetlands and nature reserves. It will devour what it needs to fuel its momentum and bend governments and laws to serve its ends. The strictest land use plans will fall before its armies. Even the home of 'smart growth', Portland, Oregon, stood helpless as growth forced population to spill over tight urban boundaries into adjacent farmland. British greenbelts are beginning to suffer the same fate. As planning consultant Eben Fodor was moved to comment, "smart growth is merely the planned, orderly destruction of our remaining environment."

Economic growth is a function of population growth, driven in North America largely by immigration, coupled with obscenely excessive consumption---and it is crowding out wildlife habitat. The question is, can the dedication of conservation areas permanently shield wildlife and flora from developmental pressures? Experience suggests that it cannot.

In their 2005 Report, the National Refuge Association of the U.S. revealed that "many endangered or threatened species are not even found on the refuges, including 40% of all listed mammals, birds and reptiles, 75% of listed fish and amphibians, and about 85% of listed plants and invertebrates." The area outside refuges will be more and more a killing zone. Much of the 40% of all housing units that will exist in America in 2030 will be built on previously open lands, and "lands within five miles of fully 78% of the western refuges have been mined, drilled , offered to or otherwise controlled by mining, oil and gas interests." And nearly 40% of refuges have greater than 50% human-impacted landscape within 5 to 40 miles. Particularly vulnerable are the 20% of wildlife refuges smaller than 1000 acres, or refuges fragmented into small parcels that can't adequately defend the ranges of the species that need protection.

Of course, the announcement on October 16 by the B.C. government offers habitat protection on a vastly larger scale. An area twice the size of Jamaica of old growth cedar, pine and spruce, and a buffer of forest that is to be harvested with sensitive care. The coalition of ten environmental groups who fought for the habitat are sanguine. But even with 2.2 million hectares set aside, they would be advised to keep their powder dry. Especially when you look at the province's barren mountainsides and remember the government slogan, "Forests Forever".

The hard truth is, as long as economic growth runs loose like a mad dog, no land of any size is safe from predation. Growing populations and growing development envelop pristine sanctuaries, reach a tipping point, and then the resources that these sanctuaries are harbouring will be ravaged. Just as the B.C. government set aside this Mountain Cariboo habitat, the U.S. Congress once established Yosemite National Park. When mining and logging interests came knocking at the door, with the stroke of a pen, Congress released 1400 hectares of the precious park for their exploitation.

Shocking betrayals of this kind by government have and will be made when the economic chips are down, as the Plains Indians will attest. The solemn Treaty of Laramie guaranteed the sacred Black Hills to the Lakota people in perpetuity, but when white prospectors found gold, all bets were off and the monster was let loose. Miners flooded the area and in just eight years the Dakota territory was a white colony and the sacred hills a hub of activity.

One day soon, in a country near you, with the oil the price of gold and power down, there will be a desperate and ruthless scramble to use up resources wherever they can be found, even behind the sacrosanct walls of conservation lands. And government will pave the way.

First it was the tiny Sudetenland, then it was Poland and then it was the vast steppes of Russia. Feed a crocodile a morsel and he becomes stronger and bolder, coming back for more and more. The only safety for nature is to slay the beast, not to hide from it within the confines of a National Park. Economic growth must be stopped and a steady state economy instituted. Now.

Tim Murray, dirrector of Immigration Watch Canada
Quadra Island, BC
Canada
October 25/07

Topic:

The Dependence Law

Fri, 2007-10-19 20:57 by denis

The freedom of humans to be creative and innovative is acclaimed – by us. This is the positive side of the uniquely human attribute. There is, however, a negative side that is not generally recognized. Humans employ a huge range of transient operations they have installed that invariably involve using and abusing natural resources. Each of these operations provides something deemed of value to society during its lifetime. Each of these operations incurs an irrevocable, un-repayable ecological cost. We are irreversibly drawing down on the irreplaceable natural bounty. I argue in ‘What went wrong? The misdirection of civilization’ that this Dependence Law is soundly based but that society generally does not weigh up worth against eco cost realistically. A natural law is the summation of what invariably happens during natural operations. It is therefore appropriate to classify the dependence of the material operations of civilization on what is available from the environment as a natural law. Natural operations are also dependent on what is available but generally they draw down on natural bounty income only. The consequence of society’s exuberance is unnecessarily rapid degradation of our life support system, the bounty available from the ecosystem. There are too many people consuming too much of what nature has left to offer and then providing irrevocable waste. This holistic consumption predicament is exacerbated by the demands on the bounty to maintain the aging foundations of civilization. It is made worse by the gluttony of the powerful. The spree is unsustainable. It is a plague coming to its end. Catabolic collapse can only be avoided by a wise power down. Even then, there is the problem of maintaining cultural benefits even as the population declines. The conventional economic growth paradigm is based on the fallacious argument that the materialistic structure and operations of our civilization can occur without exacerbating this holistic malaise, consumption of the natural bounty. So growth is being fostered even as the available bounty is declining more rapidly. This is an unsustainable double whammy exacerbated by the need to look after the structure of civilization. The Dependence Law really does under lay the operation and maintenance of the foundations of our civilization. Appreciation of that fact makes it much easier to understand how it is that current trends are based on false premises, so are unsustainable. It explains what went wrong. Denis Frith Melbourne Australia [email protected] ‘What went wrong? The misdirection of civilization.’ http://users.bigpond.net.au/jaymz/download/Gaia_and_Us-Denis_Frith-jun07... ‘The Usufruct Delusion’ http://candobetter.org/node/204

Illegal aliens burn precious forest while Sierra Club is mum

Mon, 2007-10-15 14:04 by tim

Funny, I never read about THIS in any Sierra Club publication or newsletter. I wonder why? Environmentalists have had much to say about the damage a Mexican border fence would do to wildlife movement. But precious forests being torched and they say nothing? Could it be that David Gelbaum's money has bought their silence on this outrage too? Is there any catastrophe involving immigration---illegal or legal---that WOULD awaken this organization's conscience? The website of our local Sierra club---"Sierra Quadra"---described themselves as a "respectable" environmental organization. If they were an authentic environmental organization they would not be "respectable", ie. compliant with government policy, but quite the opposite. Paul Watson, for example, understands the threat that human population growth in North America poses to wildlife habitat and is not willing to step around politically correct eggshells just to widen his subscription base and fund a bloated bureaucracy. From the Washington Times of 18 June 2007:

Illegals setting fires to burn agents out of observation posts and patrol routes

"U.S. Border Patrol agents seeking to secure the nation's border in some of the country's most pristine national forests are being targeted by illegal aliens, who are using intentionally set fires to burn agents out of observation posts and patrol routes.

The wildfires have destroyed valuable natural and cultural resources in the National Forest System and pose an ongoing threat to visitors, residents and responding firefighters, according to federal law-enforcement authorities and others.

In the Coronado National Forest in Arizona, with 60 miles of land along the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. Forest Service firefighters sent in to battle fires or clear wild-land fire areas are required to be escorted by armed law-enforcement officers.

Are these arsonists the kind of people the ruling clique of the Sierra Club referred to when it said it had to keep immigration reduction and population stabilization out of its policy book so it could broaden its membership base beyond English-speaking people---and keep David Gelbaum's $100 million bribe?

And then there are the thousands of tons of trash left by illegal aliens who have made the Sonoran Desert of Arizona north of the Mexican border a virtual landfill site. Have the self-appointed guardians of North American wilderness---the Sierra Club---said boo about this environmental disaster?

Apparently not. The Grand Canyon Chapter of the Club, stationed in Phoenix, is more worried about the damage that 7 miles of border fencing will do in impeding jaguars from reaching their historical American range. What the Sierra Club does not understand, because its livelihood depends on not understanding, is that nothing threatens wildlife like the traffic of HUMANS across the Mexican border. Runaway population growth will destroy wildlife habitat, and is rapidly doing so. Even the protected national parks are being loved to death. Oxymoronic 'smart' growth palliatives so favoured by the Sierra Club and the green establishment can't indefinitely sequester wildlife from developmental pressures propelled by rapid population growth.

If immigrants and their children will potentially add another 105 million consumers to America in the next five decades, the choice will not be, as the Grand Canyon Chapter would put it, between jaguars or a border fence, but between jaguars or illegal immigrants.

One cannot help but observe, with bitter irony, that both the environment and the North American working class would prosper from a "closed-borders" policy, and yet, both are betrayed by organizations led by those who take the contrary position.

Tim Murray
Quadra Island, BC

Topic:

Growth is OK if it is shared?

Fri, 2007-10-12 14:36 by tim

Premier Lorne Calvert, New Democratic Party (NDP) Premier of the Canadian province of Saskatchewan, in calling an election for November 7, declared that growth was a good thing, so long as it was "shared". This fascinating concept is meant to stake out a distinctive position for social democrats on the ideological spectrum. Whereas the Saskatchewan Party and the Liberals---the "right"---follow the old formula that growth of any kind is to be promoted because of an alleged "trickle-down"effect whereby even the poorest citizens feel its benefits, the New Democrats are so much more enlightened. While their opponents are campaigning from a 1925 policy book, the NDP is way ahead of them waving their 1961 ideas. Some choice. 1925 or 1961, as environmental Armageddon looms on the horizon. Calvert's thesis evokes interesting logic. His manifesto would read: It's OK to rob a bank so long as the proceeds of the robbery are shared among the fashionably oppressed constituency of the NDP. The 'working people' (Businessmen don't work). First Nations. The handicapped. Seniors. Single Moms. Transexual Dwarfs, whatever. It's OK to clear-cut old growth forests if timber revenues are equitably shared. It's OK to develop farmland if the sale of homes in new subdivisions reaps sales tax revenues for the provincial treasury and they are equitably shared. It's OK to generate radioactive waste if the nuclear plant provides power for low-income people. It's OK to wipe out an endangered species if the housing built on its habitat provides affordable options for low-income people. Growth is OK so long as it is shared. And if you still feel uneasy about it, go to the NDP website for Saskatchewan or Manitoba , and you will find that growth becomes "sustainable". Sustainable growth? Virgin birth! Whether these snake oil salesmen represent the left or the right, or the environmental movement, they can't make growth palatable to discerning taste by sugar-coating it with these oxymoronic neologisms that attempt to cloak the fact that economic expansion in a finite environment cannot be sustained. Calling it "shared", "sustainable", "managed" or "smart" will not rescue it from this ironclad law. Get real Calvert. Tim Murray, Quadra Island, BC Canada V0P 1N0

Topic:

Greenpeace Diesendorf: Carbon emissions reflect population numbers - Reduce immigration

Thu, 2007-10-11 21:02 by Sheila Newman

see: http://www.greenpeace.org.au/blog/energy/?p=90 and http://www.greenpeace.org/raw/content/australia/resources/reports/climat... for the full report. 3.2.4 Reducing business and professional immigration Australia's population is expected to grow from its 2001 level of 19.4 million to 23.3 million by 2020. This represents a population growth of 20 per cent over this period (2001-2020). The average growth rate for total emissions is higher, about 1.3 per cent per annum. Population growth is a signifi cant driver of residential emissions growth, for both stationary energy and transport. Regardless of their country of origin, immigrants tend to adopt Australia's energy-intensive lifestyle on arrival. Since Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world, immigrants will on average tend to increase their emissions. Thus this report proposes a measure to reduce business and professional immigration by 50 per cent, without reducing refugee and humanitarian immigration. See Appendix A for details on assumptions and calculations. Appendix A: Details of some calculations A.1 Population growth & emissions The following is a rough estimate of the impact on 2020 greenhouse gas emissions of changing the immigration rate. The calculation has a number of assumptions (e.g. that population and emissions grow exponentially). Population component: In 2005-06, permanent immigration into Australia was 180,000, comprising the following categories: * Family 46,000 * Skill (business and professional) 91,500, * Humanitarian 17,000, * Non-migration (mostly New Zealanders) 25,000 and Special 310 (DIMA 2006). Permanent departure was 68,000. Therefore, net permanent addition from migration was 112,000, or about 0.54% per annum. Australia's overall population growth rate is 0.95% per annum. By halving the Skill (business and professional) category of immigration, population growth would be reduced to (0.95 - 0.22)% = 0.73%. Then total population growth 2008-2020 would be about 10 per cent. Thus the projected population in 2020 is reduced from 23.3M to 22.8M; ? = 0.5M (reduction). Emissions component: The calculation now focuses on emissions from the Energy category (excluding fugitive emissions), which, to a good approximation, are directly proportional to Australia's population. The AGO's projected growth in emissions from stationary energy and transport over 2004-2020 is about 29.3% (Table 1), corresponding to an annual growth rate of 1.62%. Assume that emissions are proportional to population (as well as to "affl uence" and "technology"). Then rate of emissions growth from Energy (excluding fugitive emissions) after cutting Skill migration, equals (1.62 - 0.22)% p.a. = 1.4% p.a., giving a growth factor over 2004-2020 of 24.9% instead of AGO's BAU "with measures" growth rate of 29.3%. BAU emissions in 2020 from Energy (excluding fugitive), with reduced Skill immigration, become 444.6 Mt instead of AGO's 460.5 Mt, ? = 16 Mt (reduction). However, about one-quarter of these emissions would be for export from manufacturing and mining; these emissions are largely unaffected by population, and so the emissions savings are deemed to be reduced to 12 Mt. Conversely, parts of emissions from Agriculture, Fugitive, Land Use and Waste can be attributed to domestic use and hence Australia's population. However, this report has already pointed out that AGO's projected emissions from these categories could be slashed by other actions. Provided these suggestions are implemented, the additional benefi ts of immigration reduction on emissions from these categories will be small and are therefore ignored here.

New technology won't save us from the population bomb

Sat, 2007-10-06 19:36 by tim

Researcher Brishen Hoff of Massey, Ontario made some interesting calculations. He found that the benefits of much touted 900 acre solar panel "farm" planned near Sarnia, Ontario would be wiped out by the normal flow of immigrants admitted to Canada in just 22 days. Hoff laid out his case this way: "Let's assume that its purpose is to serve domestic Ontario needs, to relieve the pressure on Ontario's finite electricity-generating capacity, and be part of a plan to replace current environmentally-unfriendly power generation." "The solar farm would generate 40 megawatts, enough electricity to power 6,000 homes. As of 2002, there were about 2.6 people per household in Canada. That means that those 6,000 homes shelter roughly 15.600 people. If Canada takes 262,000 immigrants per year (as it did in 2006), it takes 717 immigrants per day. Within about 22 days of immigration, it has taken close to 15,600 new people. In that time, the benefits of the solar power marvel near Sarnia are used up." "In other words," Hoff concludes, "in less than one month of business-as-usual immigration, if we are to satisfy the assumptions we have made, Canada will need another solar farm or some other energy source to supply the needs of the other newly-arrived." It should be noted that immigration drove 74% of Canada's population growth over the last census period. But the problem doesn't end there. The 15,600 immigrants who are added in those 22 days will have an additional negative environmental impact, which Hoff lists in point form:

The construction of this solar electricity plant will consume large quantities of fossil fuels and produce a large amount of GHG.
The farm land that the solar panel site has taken over will be lost forever, thereby increasing our reliance on our areas, either on Canadian farm land whose supply is very limited or on nearby foreign farm land whose supply is decreasing because of population demands.
The immigrants will consume much more than the household electricity produced by the solar farm. They will consume water, electronics, paper products, air travel, etc. Increases in human population inevitably lead to the expropriation of other areas for the use of the new people.

Hoff's analysis seems to validate Kenneth Boulding's Second Theorem: ".technical improvement will enable population to grow, and soon enable more people to live in misery than before." Hoff observes fatalistically, "Whatever energy humans have been able to exploit, has been accompanied by growth in their population. Unfortunately, this only makes them more dependent on new energy sources. If humans did stumble upon a new source of energy more abundant than oil, it is probable that there would be a corresponding population explosion that would rapidly wipe out the benefits of the new energy source." Studies done in other countries have made similar correlations between immigrant-driven population growth and increased energy use and pollution. Professor Mark Diesendorff of the University of New South Wales warned that Australia would not be able to reduce its GHG emissions if it continued its mass immigration policies. It is no coincidence that while Australia's population has grown 31% since 1990 its GHG emissions have increased 30%. Immigration currently accounts for 54% of the country's growth, or one net immigrant every 3 minutes and 15 seconds. Leon Kolankiewicz of Numbers USA demonstrated that since 1970, 88% of America's increase in energy use was due to an increase in population, mostly driven by immigration. Only 12% was attributable to an increase in per capita energy consumption. In other words, it's not so much that people are driving SUVs rather than fuel efficient cars. It is just that there are 3 million more drivers on the road out there. In the UK, government statisticians reveal that of the 11 million new houses that will need to be built before 2050---much of it on formerly sancrosanct Greenbelt land---59% will be built to accommodate Britain's growing population, nearly 70% of that driven by immigration. More immigrants means more people, more houses, more energy consumption, more emissions in one form or another. Since the publication of Dr. William Rees watershed book, "Our Ecological Footprint", the Green mantra has been to reduce our individual footprint. But as these studies show, it is the sum total of individual footprints that matter. Not just the per capitas. The number of per capitas. Ultimately, it's a numbers game. As always, Garrett Hardin said it best. "The population problem has no technical solution." Tim Murray Quadra Island, BC October 5/07

Topic:

Book Review: Immigrants: your country needs them by Philippe Legrain

Thu, 2007-10-04 12:59 by James Sinnamon

The following review first appeared in the October 2007 newsletter (PDF 516K) of Sustainable Population Australia

Book Review: Immigrants: your country needs them by Philippe Legrain (Little Brown Book Group, UK, 2006) A$35.00 review by Mark O'Connor.

Some angst was caused in February 2007 when Philippe Legrain (with this book in tow) was featured at Perth Writers Week. The problem was not that a debate on migration was irrelevant to a literary festival but that there was no debate--and that the supposed expert (Legrain) seemed ignorant of Australian conditions.

I am struck by how little and how selectively Philippe Legrain has read in the area on which he claims to be an expert. Despite his Australian publicists' claim that he offers a lucid and enlightened account of "Australian policies, facts and statistics" the facts he states are frequently incorrect or slanted. His index is barren of references to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), which perhaps explains his bizarre claims that Australia's population is 19 million, that its net migration is some 90,000 a year (see p. 9), that births are not keeping pace with deaths (p. 108, in fact they are twice deaths), that immigration was slashed from 1996 by the Howard government (see p. 53) and so on. In fact we have never had such a high-immigration government as Howard's. Only in the immediate post WWII period, when most of our migrants were war refugees, has immigration been so high.

Australia, along with Canada and the USA is one of Philippe Legrain's three best examples of countries which have sought and accepted what is by world standards a bizarrely high level of immigration. For Australia, he seems to have relied on interviews with a couple of high immigration advocates (Stepan Kerkyasharian and Abdul Rizvi). The rest of his figures on Australia could have been gained from half-an-hour's googling---some time ago. Of critics of high immigration in Australia he seems ignorant. There are no references in his index to CSIRO's Ecumene project, to People and Place, to Sustainable Population Australia or even to the numerous publications of the Bureau of Immigration Research, which at least attempted a certain objectivity.

On the UK and the USA (his main market target) he seems only a little less ill-read. When referring to critics of high immigration he concentrates on Peter Brimelow and Samuel Huntingdon, but seems unaware of such important players as Britain's Migration Watch Committee or America's Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Centre for Immigration Studies. All of these have websites that could have provided him with an encyclopedia's worth of articles and information on relevant issues of which he seems ignorant. But I get the impression that Philippe Legrain is a gentleman who likes to make up his mind and then not disturb it by looking at inconvenient facts or contrary opinions.

A crucial document is the 1994 plenary resolution of the Australian Academy of Science on Australia's population options. This specified that our population should probably have been capped at 19 million, but must in any case be capped at no more than 23 million, and that net migration must therefore be kept below 50,000 a year.

1994 was also the year of the Cairo Conference on Population, in which the nations of the world pledged (with only a few selfish exceptions) to hold their populations in check, and not to use emigration as a way of unloading their population problems upon others. Needless to say, Cairo also is missing from Legrain's index. Nor does he mention the way in which the USA's immigration-fed increase has prevented its population stabilizing and made it dependent for its life-style upon a risky pursuit of foreign oil.

Nor does he mention the issue of the vast increases in greenhouse effect caused by migration from the low GHG to the high GHG producing countries. Most telling of all, against Legrain's irresponsible vision of open borders, is the fact that the two large-population countries that have had spectacular success in reducing their population growth (Iran and China) did so precisely because they had quarreled with the West and could not lean on it to take their emigrants. By contrast, those countries like Mexico and the Philippines, where families could hope that an extra child might be the lucky or talented one that would get to the US and bring in the rest of the family, have neither solved their own problems nor ceased to drive up population in the wealthier countries. Legrain complacently notes that the Philippines relies on remittances from its emigrants for something like 40% of its economy. (And still the babies keep coming.) By contrast, Legrain asserts (p. 20) that "freer migration is one of the best ways to help poor countries." For a capitalist economist Legrain is oddly naïve about the problems of population socialism. A visit to www.garretthardinsociety.org might trouble--yet expand--his mind considerably.

Legrain seems to share the common economist's delusion that growth can go on for ever, that there are no other species or environments to be considered, and that almost the only thing we lack (to fuel an eternal bonfire of growth) is more people.

Overall, this book, despite its parade of academic references, is not a serious attempt to examine the issues. It should be read as a piece of rhetoric: a first speech for the government in a student debate "That this house believes the world should have open borders". Legrain's 'lucidity', which some foolish reviewers have praised, is largely a reluctance to explain his economic modeling. He simply asserts. He claims at one point (p. 64, cf. p 19) that studies show freer immigration could 'potentially' make us all far richer--which is code for saying he won't explain the assumptions behind the calculation. [ revised: He offers no refutation--only an ad hominem put--down but no adequate refutation --of the detailed calculations of the Harvard economics professor George Borjas, a much more eminent economist, who draws the opposite conclusions. Legrain's calculations of the economic effect of immigration in the USA seem based on the assumption that one need only make sure that the supply of capital increases in proportion with the workforce. Then more immigrant workers simply make everyone better off. The inconvenient issues of resources, space, greenhouse emissions, and environmental degradation are ignored by Legrain (and one suspects by those economic studies he cites on his side). Perhaps Legrain knows he is writing for people who want a feel-good sense of moral superiority, and don't want to be bothered with inconvenient details. ]

Yet if Legrain can get us used to using cheap immigrant servants and cooks and nurses, he will then try to make us feel guilty about "the anonymous people whose existence you barely acknowledge . . . We just never bother to ask" (pp. 26-27). It doesn't make much sense. But as I say, Legrain is a rhetorician, not a thinker.

Perhaps most irritating is Legrain's glib sense of moral superiority--backed by his publisher's predictable assertion that he is offering an original "challenging and powerful" version of the open borders case. Not so. If the facts were as Legrain claims, and if the only issues to be considered were the ones he propounds, then everyone would come to his conclusions. Intelligence and moral superiority don't enter into it. Naivety and ignorance do.#

Race to the bottom on renewable energy

Mon, 2007-09-24 14:28 by James Sinnamon

The Greens today slammed Prime Minister Howard and the Queensland Labor government for their paltry commitments to renewable energy targets. “John Howard’s 15% target by 2020 and Queensland Labor’s 10% target by 2020 are both too little, too late,” said Australian Greens Senate candidate for Queensland, Larissa Waters. “And they both cheat by including non-renewable energy sources (the unproven ‘clean coal’), so the proportion of genuine renewable energy generated could be much less. “Neither federal Liberal or state Labor’s target will be sufficient to drive the switch to clean energy so desperately needed if we are to combat climate change and protect our tourism and farming sectors. “The Greens targets, which are informed by science, are 15% by 2012 and 25% by 2020, comprised of genuine renewable energy sources only. This is the sort of boost to clean, renewable energy that we need to see if we are to tackle climate change. “Australia, and Queensland in particular with its abundant sunshine, could once again be world leaders in solar energy technology as we were before John Howard came to power. “Other renewable energy sources like geothermal, wind, wave, tidal and biofuels are also very promising for Queensland jobs and profits. “We know all these renewable technologies work. Yet both Labor and Liberal are spending the lion’s share of public funds on unproven, non-renewable ‘clean coal’, and allowing it to be counted towards a clean energy target before we even know if it will work. “It’s cheating to include a non-renewable energy source in a renewable energy target then just change the label to call it a ‘clean energy target’. It will continue to undermine genuine renewable energy technologies by entrenching the lack of level playing field in the market. “Labor and Liberal still refuse to see how profitable renewable energy could be for Australia, and how many jobs with a long term future it could generate. “For a profitable and clean energy future which will protect our Great Barrier Reef and help our farmers by addressing climate change, Queenslanders must vote Green,” concluded Ms Waters. For more information contact: Larissa Waters 0421 844 280 larissa.waters|AT|qld.greens.org.au For biographical information see: www.larissawaters.net

Beattie call for 50 million reflects vested interests

Wed, 2007-09-05 14:55 by James Sinnamon

Sustainable Population Australia Media Release, 5 Sep 2007

Queensland Premier Peter Beattie's call yesterday for an Australian population of 50 million echoes those by vested interests of the housing, construction and real estate industries, according to Sustainable Population Australia inc (SPA).

National President of SPA, Dr John Coulter, says that this is not surprising given the very large donations that members of these groups make to political parties.

"But far more important than this distortion of democracy is the clear lack of any concern for the natural environment," says Dr Coulter.

"The most recent work by the Hadley Centre in the UK indicates that global temperatures are likely to rise sharply in the next few years as natural cycles augment the increase in greenhouse gas emissions. Eastern and southeastern Australia will be prone to even worse 'droughts', water shortages and crop failures than experienced in the last few years," he says.

"The industries that Beattie and his fellow travelers in both major parties want to establish to support this larger population will all add to the severity of climate change and make Australia less able to support even its present population."

Dr Coulter claims that Beattie, Rudd, Howard and the political parties they represent are caught in a time-warp.

"Their push for ever more population and economic growth is a recipe from the 1960s. It ignores the reality that humanity and its economy depends on the natural environment. And the environment is telling us, loudly and clearly that this continual growth is no longer sustainable.

"Fifty million in Australia is not achievable. But the attempt to bring it about will progressively destroy any possibility of making Australia environmentally sustainable. Far from being leaders these people and their parties are strongly inhibiting the transition to a new and sustainable relationship with our supporting natural environment.

"Science is warning that we have little time left to respond. Beattie has shut his ears to the message," Dr Coulter concluded.

Further information: John Coulter 08 83882153

Complaints about Melbourne 2030: record of submission to Planning Minister 16-8-07

Thu, 2007-08-16 22:53 by Sheila Newman

This clear and hard-hitting submission could help others who are trying to fight the heartbreaking effects of forced population growth, infrastructure expansion and intensification all over Australia.

The submission below about Melbourne 2030, which is a radical populate and develop plan imposed on Victorians, was made by Sustainable Population Australia Inc., Victorian Branch to the Minister for Planning, Justin Madden, re Melbourne 2030 August 2007 for meeting with community groups 16 August 2007.

Points made covered the following areas.

Melbourne 2030's raison d'etre of population growth,
Victorian Government's role in affecting and effecting the rate of population growth,
Melbourne 2030 and population growth - style and content of consultation with people of Victoria,
Quality of public information from Victorian Government regarding Melbourne 2030/population growth,
Effects of Melbourne 2030 and its Population growth.

1. Population growth and Melbourne 2030

Melbourne and outer areas do not have the option of stabilizing in any way as population growth is programmed into our future. In 2002 The Bracks Government and other stakeholders held a 'summit' in Melbourne to discuss the need or otherwise of a population policy. The then Premier, Mr. Steve Bracks, in his keynote introduction pre-empted the outcome of the conference yet to happen! He made the absolute assumption that experts would converge on the desirability of increasing Victoria's population. Many in the audience had huge reservations and objections to this path mainly on the grounds of environmental sustainability.

Melbourne 2030 is about a commitment to social engineering in the form of forced population growth.

2. Victorian Government's role in affecting the rate of population growth.

Excluding net increase from international and interstate migration, Victoria's population is increasing by more than 30,000 p.a. It will be more than this with the current baby boom. This fact should be well known, but it is not.

In the year to March 2006, the additional increase from net overseas migration was 37,068 . The total increase in Victoria's population annually is in excess of 60,000 people. The Victorian government has given itself a role in affecting this number. One way it achieves this is via its $6 million skilled migration strategy which includes international and domestic marketing (see www.liveinvictoria.vic.gov.au).

In the 12 months to March 2006, there were 65,700 extra Victorians, or in other words, an additional Ballarat.

The Victorian Government is not a passive recipient of population growth. It actively seeks it. Victoria only needs radical planning because it has very high population growth by western standards, of which more than half is not through natural increase.

3. Consultation with the Victorian people regarding population growth and Melbourne 2030.

Many people have told me that Victorians were not consulted on Melbourne 2030.... but we were. Glossy books and pamphlets were delivered in all letter boxes with invitations to attend public meetings which were facilitated to funnel ideas from the public to the master of ceremonies at each meeting. People were separated onto tables of about 8 people each and if there was sufficient volume of opinion of a particular aspect of Melbourne's future on any one table then that idea got up and was promoted to the end distillation of ideas. The underlying assumption however was that growth was inevitable rather than a political decision. The politics and policies of engineering growth remained outside the discussion and slow or no growth were not presented as options.

There was goodwill and cooperation at the meeting I attended in Moorabbin as people enthusiastically put forward their priorities apparently thinking they were having a significant say in the Melbourne which was being shaped for future generations.

I suggest that the audit of Melbourne 2030 must seek the attitudes of Victorians to the politics of population growth and to population growth itself. Adequate consultation thereto would rely on good information about what planning decisions are necessitated by population growth - in terms of amenity, environment and economic well-being of the average citizen.

4. Information re Melbourne 2030 and Population growth from the Victorian Government.

Please make clear in public statements what is actually happening to us. It is a fact that adverse changes are occurring very rapidly to our surroundings and many people express bewilderment over this. They look at housing estates covering what used to be farmland and ask "where are all the people coming from?"

We have a longstanding approximately 2:1 birth to death ratio which means our population is growing without any immigration. On 15 August 2005, the then Premier of Victoria Mr. Bracks told the Melbourne Jon Faine morning show audience that in Victoria we had a naturally decreasing population and that deaths exceeded births. I wrote to the Premier asking him where he got his figures from and told him that the reverse was true. He never replied to my letter and as far as I know never corrected this misinformation.

5. Effects of population growth

Most new settlers in Victoria go to Melbourne. Melbourne is full. Extra population puts pressure on land, there is pressure to intensify development. "Opportunistic infilling," (Dr Bob Birrell's expression) occurs in random fashion as houses come up for sale and private buyers are out-bid by developers.

There is pressure on public land. It is lost to the public (e.g. Royal Park lost 20 ha to private development plus 85 million cash) Trees and open space are taken from both private and public spheres including gardens, parks, reserves and roadsides.

Urban consolidation is not enough to accommodate the current level of population growth. This growth puts pressure on the outer areas, on wildlife, on open space. Melbourne 2030 standards are applied in what are essentially country areas, resulting in dense developments often unpopular with incumbent residents.

Wildlife - development occurs in areas inhabited by wildlife with an ensuing conflict over territory between humans and animals. This is often only managed when brought to the attention when locals complain vigorously to the authorities. It is never resolved in favour of the animals. They always lose. e.g. Somerton kangaroos.

We ask for a wildlife assessment to be done before any development takes place and for all planning to incorporate wildlife corridors in cooperation with the Coalition for Wildlife corridors - see http://www.awpc.org.au/newsite/documents/proposal_to_link.pdf

Water - we don't have enough for current needs. Melbourne 2030 and population growth exacerbate this situation. Any savings we make will be consumed by population growth.
Pressure on house prices is increasingly caused by population growth, in which demand exceeds supply. This causes prices to rise as we have observed particularly over the last decade, when we have had very high immigration.

Recommendations:

A real effort to keep the public accurately informed of demographic changes in all relevant government documents and public statements. Make information clear so as not to confuse or obscure data.
2. Seek public opinion on the underlying assumption, that we must boost our population. Does population boosting benefit the majority and, if so, in what ways? What are the negatives? How to they weigh up?
Real Estate spokespeople now connect house prices with population growth when speaking publicly. Government should do likewise.
Planning policy puts economic growth above environmental concerns. This needs to be redressed. Planning policy must take in the Precautionary Principle where growth compromises our environment.
High density living in the outer areas of Melbourne which are poorly served by public transport leaves communities vulnerable to being marooned in terms of basic requirements and transport by declining oil affordability / availability. In addition, tiny lot sizes remove most opportunity for self sufficiency in food provision. To remedy this the Government should make zoning changes. R1 allows very small lots in regional towns and outer suburbs (with potential for higher population density than in Singapore and Berlin). We need to keep outer suburbs open and spacious. SPA suggest a new Residential zone 3 with a minium of lot sizes at 500 square metres and above, plus minimum permeable area of 50% per lot.
More space for large trees in inner and outer suburbs is essential to maintain transpiration and microclimate, and to keep temperatures down. In the past 150 years increases in population and activities have impacted thermodynamically to raise city temperatures. (For instance snow rarely falls in cities anymore).
The expected effects of oil depletion should be taken into account in planning- i.e. the layout of the city and suburbs, transport needs for commuting and provision, delivery of food and degree of opportunity for self-sufficiency.

Jill Quirk
President, SPA Victoria
with Sheila Newman, Vice President, SPA Victoria

Help us put final nail in coffin of Mount Cotton Superquarry Wed 9am Cleveland

Tue, 2007-08-07 15:20 by julia

According to the Bayside Bulletin Newspaper (see below), the vote of two councillors who had formerly favoured approving the expansion of the existing Mount Cotton Quarry into a rainforest-destroying superquarry, may change in response to concerted community oppostion. Nevertheless it is still important that the pressure be maintained.

Protest outside Redland Shire Council chambers against plans to destroy Rainforest and Mount Cotton community with a giant quarry.

Where: Redland Shire Council Chambers, Bloomfield St., Cleveland
When: 9.00AM Wed 8 Aug 2007

Also please attend the protest on Sunday 12 August.

For further information see candobetter.org/SaveMountCotton or visit www.superquarry.com.au

Quarry plan on the rocks
Daniel Hurst
from the Bayside Bulletin of 16 July 2007

A QUARRY company has suffered a setback over its controversial expansion plans at Mount Cotton, with most Redland councillors looking likely to vote against the proposal.

Redland Shire Council appears set to block the so-called "super quarry" project, with seven out of 11 councillors saying they either oppose the development or are inclined to vote against it.

The news comes after nearly 1000 people sent submissions to the council last month and follows vocal objections from a protest group.

But the Barro Group, which wants to quarry hard rock from a new part of its Mount Cotton property, has urged councillors to consider the application on its merits.

The company has already mined about 18 hectares of its 241ha site and wants to quarry another 47ha over the next 60 years in a key koala area.

While critics have raised environmental, health and traffic concerns over the proposal, the quarry operator has argued that hard rock is needed for local construction work and 72 per cent of the site will be
conserved.

Councillors Toni Bowler, Craig Ogilvie, Debra Henry, Karen Williams and Helen Murray have told the Bayside Bulletin they oppose the quarry, while Cr Alan Beard and Deputy Mayor Peter Dowling said they were
leaning towards voting against it.

"I don't believe I can support it," Cr Dowling said, citing residents' concerns.

Mayor Don Seccombe and Crs Alan Barker, John Burns and Murray Elliott said they would wait for council officers to prepare their assessment report before committing to a position.

It may be months before the council votes on the proposal and council officers have not yet made a recommendation but the Barro Group could launch legal action if its application is rejected.

Meanwhile the State Government, which listed the site as a keyresource area in its planning policy on quarries, has the power to override council decisions.

"Despite the fact that the council may not have legal grounds to reject this application, I feel the only right course of action is to represent my constituents and for me to vote 'no' to the super quarry," Cr Williams said.

Cr Bowler, who has been campaigning against the proposal for years, cautiously welcomed the councillors' comments but said the community should remain vigilant as it was the vote on the day that counted.

Barro Group Queensland general manager Ian Ridoutt said he was confident the council would "carefully consider the officers' report when it becomes available to weigh the merits of our proposal".

Where do they sit?

THE Bayside Bulletin asked each councillor for their position on the Barro Group's quarry application at Mount Cotton:

OPPOSED: Toni Bowler (Div. 6), Craig Ogilvie (Div. 2), Debra Henry (Div. 3), Karen Williams (Div. 9) and Helen Murray (Div. 10).

LEANING TOWARDS OPPOSED: Deputy Mayor Peter Dowling and Alan Beard (Div. 8).

UNDECIDED: Mayor Don Seccombe, Crs Alan Barker (Div. 1), John Burns (Div. 5) and Murray Elliott (Div. 7).

Water or Votes: Victoria vs Howard & the Murray-Darling Basin

Sun, 2007-07-29 00:50 by Sheila Newman

The more I observed the conflicts between Howard and Bracks over water, the more I thought they were about votes and not water. I honestly cannot see why anyone who cared about safeguarding water for Australia would give more water to irrigators and take it from dryland farmers. This is what happened in the Victorian Government's push for piping in the Wimmera Mallee, replacing seasonal gravity-fed channels one hundred years old with expensive, cumbersome, motor-pumped pvc closed pipes, forcing farmers to bulldoze their dams and to lay expensive infrastructure for the privilege of receiving very expensive water which has been arguably taken from them to buy votes from irrigators who were also encouraged to farm even more intensively - feedlot pig farms, dairy farms and vinyards. Let's face it; the irrigated parts of the MDB are the most densely populated areas of inland rural Australia and water for irrigators is a handle on a substantial voting population. In contrast the dryland farmers, albeit far more sustainable even though broad acre, are too thin on the ground to matter to Bracks or Howard. So, is this about water? Yes, but only about branding water with a party name and the face of particular politicians. I thought that Howard was masterfully crafty in his sudden withdrawal from the Snowy Hydro privatisation plan, leaving Bracks, so to speak, high, dry and irrigation vote-less. It was eerily like watching the road-runner outrace the coyote, yet again - with Bracks the coyote and Howard the road-runner. I guess that is part of the reason that Bracks would be furious this time. Apparently the VFF suddenly decided to go National. The farmers followed. And then ...did Bracks resign or was he persuaded to resign? And what about Thwaites? I'm only sorry that I missed the detail. I have looked in vain for articles which would analyse what really happened. I certainly cannot credit Bracks or Thwaites with any sincere desire to actually guarantee hydration to Victoria. I have watched them side with big money (Pratt's piping; desalination; overpopulation, taking water from the Golburn to sprinking on the new suburbs their mates the property developers are building in every big country town) for too long. It is truly sickening to listen to both Federal and State politicians carrying on about precious water for future generations etc with their hands over the places where their hearts would be if they had hearts, when anyone can see that they are leading a stampede of salivating nabobs who are dying for full commodification to take place so that they can buy up the water and wait for the inflation and scarcity which is already arising with climate change, continuing population growth, and more intensification of agriculture. With a merchant banker in charge of water - Turnbull - we just know they are going to get what they want and the rest of us are all in really big trouble. Trading water separate from land is a terrible idea, but I am horribly sure that Turnbull will come up with much worse. He only seems to deal in really bad ideas - like schemes to assist banks to get more land from the same amount of mortgages. I wish we could all wake up and find that this was all a bad dream and that we 21st century Australians really are all too evolved to allow Australia to go the same way as treeless waterless Greece, Rome, Egypt, China ... Neutrino

Are nuclear fusion, fission and 'renewables' viable alternatives to fossil fuels?

Thu, 2007-07-12 14:03 by James Sinnamon

This blog entry is perhaps my hundred-and-umpteenth response on various online forums to the question of supposed alternatives to fossil fuel as an energy source for all of the demands of modern industrial society. The article was posted to a forum in response to an article Australia’s oversized footprint by Queensland Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett. The article had considerable merit but was fatally flawed by Bartlett's blindness to the question of Australia's population. Bartlett, whilst an avowed environmentalist, is in favour of high immigration (although he has yet to come out and give his explicit support to the current near-stratospheric unoffical annual rate of 300,000 now allowed by the Federal government) and population growth. He has used his profile to give practical support to community campaigns against environmentally unsustainable infrastructure projects such as the North-South Bypass Tunnel, but has failed to address one of the principle underlying causes, that is South East Queensland's relentless population growth which is officialy encouraged by both the Queensland state government and the Commonwealth government.

Andrew Bartlett's articles, as well as attracting posts from people, like myself, who are critical of his pro-population-growth stance, also attracts critical posts from extreme market fundamentalist anti-environmentalists, who object even to Bartlett's flawed and limited pro-environmental stance as well as his progressive humanitarian values. One of those contributors, 'alzo', posted the comment:

"Fission reactors should tide us over until fusion reactors become a reality. There are lots of possible energy sources."

This is my response.

Alzo, today we seem no closer to realising the dream of unlimited supplies of energy from nuclear fusion than we were thirty years ago. According to one scientist, who has worked on nuclear fusion, the nail in the coffin of nuclear fusion will prove to be the lack of sufficient supplies of the necessary hydrogen isotope tritium. For further information, see the forthcoming second edition of "The Final Energy Crisis" edited by Sheila Newman (http://candobetter.org/sheila).

Hazards of nuclear fission

In regard to nuclear fission, it is obviously a more viable source of energy that just may, if we are extremely careful, provide a bridge towards a more sustainable future whilst stocks of Uranium and Thorium last, however it has a very considerable environmental cost. If we increase the scale of nuclear power generation to the extent necessary to fill the gap power the environmental risks we currently face will be multiplied many times. The Chernobyl disaster. which could have been far worst if not for the quick thinking of those courageous workers on the spot is one illustration. On top of the hazards of nuclear fission electricity generation, even more environmental threats are posed by mining of uranium, enrichment, reprocessing and disposal of nuclear wastes. A likely consequence of the expansion of uranium mining in Central Australia is that the Eastern seaboard stands to be exposed to clouds bearing poisonous radioactive uranium and other toxic metals blown from the mine tailings dumps (see David Bradbury's film "Blowin' in the wind" for a graphic illustration of this threat). In the past, the long-term containment of tailings from mining operation has been problematic and, more often than not, fails in the longer term (as Jared Diamond has illustrated in describing past mining operations in Montana in Chapter 2 of "Collapse" pp35-41). I don't hold out any greater hope that the mining companies will do any better a job containing the mountains of tailings from the planned expanded Uranium mines.

Practical limitations of nuclear fission

Another problem with nuclear fission is that it can only be used to generate electricity. In order to operate transport or run factory machinery or mine milling equipment, the electricity has to be either somehow stored chemically, or transported directly as electricity using power lines, transformers and other expensive infrastructure. In the former case, energy is lost, in creating, for example, hydrogen from water, and the containment of hydrogen necessitates the fabrication of particularly strong and well-sealed containers. In the latter case, large quantities of non-renewable resources, particularly copper, are required, and it is expected that the world's production of copper will begin to decline next year (http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&articleID=000CEA15-3272-13C8-9BFE83414B7FFE87).

Practical limitations of other 'renewables'

The other "lots of possible energy sources" are essentially derived from solar energy or geothermal energy. All require the use of equipment, the manufacture of which now requires non-renewable rare metals, petroleum-derived plastics and fossil fuel energy. The problems in building renewable energy generators, on a scale necessary to indefinitely meet global society's demands, as well as to provide the necessary additional energy to build replacement generators and infrastructure, without reliance upon fossil-fuel energy, appear to be overwhelming. It seems unlikely that this can be done on a scale anywhere near the scale we have been able to do thus far relying on our finite endowment of fossil fuels.

Applying the precautionary principle

So, I would suggest that it would be extremely imprudent to continue to consume natural resources at our current rate, let alone to increase our rate of consumption, and to go on trashing the world's ecology as we are doing now on the assumption that we can find an easy replacement to so much of that conveniently packaged solar energy captured over tens of millions of years that we have found buried under the ground. It would be far more prudent to assume that our current practices are unsustainable, and to begin now to reduce those levels of consumption.

Those who are consuming the most whilst contributing the least to society, such as property speculators and financial advisers should be amongst the first to be made to do so.

Topic:

Mayor's 'bunkum' misleads and disturbs

Thu, 2007-07-12 00:00 by James Sinnamon

MEDIA STATEMENT 12 July 2007

The opinions of Cr Henry are not necessarily those of Redland Shire Council/

Division 3 Councillor Debra Henry is challenging the Mayor's dismissive remark that rapid population growth in the Redlands is 'bunkum' (Bayside Bulletin 10 July, p 2).

Labeling his comments as misleading, Cr Henry has called for him to "come clean on a growth rate that is putting environmental and social services under immense pressure".

"Comparisons with Ipswich, Caboolture and elsewhere are irrelevant. The people of the Redlands have persistently identified Redland's natural features and relaxed lifestyle as valued assets to maintain and enhance. But these are quite obviously being eroded by rapid growth" said Cr Henry.

Cr Henry is concerned that the Mayor remains fixated with growth and refuses to grasp the realities of the Shire's growth. "It's simple mathematics" she says "Even what appears to be a small percentage (2%) when applied to a large number, grows quickly".

"A two percent growth rate equates to a doubling in 35 years. With a population of 135,000 two percent growth means the Shire's population will increase by another 135,000 in 35 years. It is exponential growth and never before have we faced growth of this magnitude. The Mayor's refusal to acknowledge this is disturbing" Cr Henry said.

But she believes there is a questionable agenda behind the Mayor's dismissive remarks.

"The Local Growth Management Strategy (LGMS) recently passed 6-5 by this Council and now with State Government for approval is a planning document of the highest order. It will lock the Shire into high growth for the next two decades and with his cries of 'bunkum' it appears the Mayor is trying to detract from the significance of this document" said Cr Henry.

"If approved, the LGMS will result in at least another 60,000 people in the Redlands in less than 20 years. It will result in amendments to the Redland Planning Scheme and the State's SEQ Regional Plan. It will give legal rights of development, and compensation would apply should hindsight indicate the land zonings are inappropriate".

Cr Henry considers it ironic that some of the Councillors supporting the LGMS have lamented some land zonings at Mt Cotton, saying the decision made some 20 years ago locked us into approvals, no matter how inappropriate that decision is in hindsight.

"Let's learn from the past, and use some foresight here. We can negotiate levels of growth, and we don't have to commit vast tracts of land to non-negotiable development".

Cr Henry, who has posted an "e-Petition" relating to the LGMS on www.parliament.qld.gov.au added that the Mayor's "flippant response to a serious situation, is a hindrance to democracy and a threat to sustainability".

Debra Henry
Councillor Division 3
Cleveland South - Thornlands
Redland Shire Council
crdebrah |AT| redland.qld.gov.au
07 38298618
0439 914631

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Sustainable Population Australia Media Release, 5 Sep 2007

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