By Diana Evans
[This article is a response to "What is an Ecologically Sustainable Population?" by Emma Webb, in our March 23 issue.]
In the debate on the causes and solutions to our rapidly deteriorating global environment and social structures, Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population (AESP) and the left, although having many similar objectives, approach the enormous problems facing us from differing perspectives.
Emma Webb states that AESP often criticises the left for putting the environment last on its list of priorities, yet concludes her article with the statement that a sustainable population is "a society of people who have a decent standard of living including access to education, health care, housing and so on ..." At the very end of her long wish-list Emma does, finally, include the environment.
AESP does put the environment first, not because it disagrees with Emma's objectives, but because it realises that without our life-support systems none of us can survive, let alone experience a reasonable quality and equity of life.
It is difficult for people raised in an urban environment (as most of us are) to realise to what extent the world's and Australia's environment is injured. AESP believes it will become mortally so if present levels of consumption and population increase are maintained. We believe an ecologically sustainable population to be one that lives on its environmental interest only, leaving the capital intact for future generations. Clearly, not one country in the world is currently coming within cooee of doing this.
Contrary to Emma's claim that there is enough for everyone, world production of food has been declining since the 1980s. Even if this were not so, the 95 million people being added to our present 5.5 billion each year (to culminate somewhere between 10-15 billion sometime next century), coupled with severe water shortages and massive soil erosion, requires an extreme optimist (or an economic rationalist) to believe we are not facing problems on a scale never before experienced by our species.
Emma questions whether all of us in Australia have a negative impact on the environment. The answer is quite simply, yes.
Even relatively poor people in Australia (other than the homeless) have homes, take showers, drive cars (frequently old, polluting ones), buy packaged food, cigarettes, alcohol, toilet paper, newspapers, imported coffee, cocoa, clothes, shampoos, soaps, solvents, paints, furniture, carpets etc etc. Every house that is built, be it by profiteers or by governments concerned with social well-being, impacts disastrously on our environment, requiring timber, sewerage, power, waste disposal, roads and water, and encroaches further and further on our precious, ever-diminishing land.
As the 20th century draws to a close, many people like to imagine that the next century will see the dawning of a new age of internationalism, with only the finishing touches needing to be put in place to complete our cosy global village. People from both the left and right have faith in this picture that will finally negate the necessity of restrictive national boundaries.
These people overlook one vital factor — the environment.
While the "developed" world desperately searches for more and newer markets as old ones collapse or are saturated and the "developing" nations race to acquire the riches of the "developed" world, both share a "get rich(er) quick, clean up later" mentality (which is also applied to human rights and social equity issues).
There is now considerable consensus among many experts that further neglect of pressing environmental problems will lead to global catastrophe in the early decades of next century, with possibly a proliferation of wars from increasing ethnic, religious and geographic tensions brought on by severe resource depletion and demographic imbalance. Such events would also most likely trigger the collapse of global economic markets.
Which scenario is the more likely to eventuate — globalisation or global fragmentation? We do not know. If it is the latter, what can Australia do now to avert possible catastrophe?
We have little influence in the international arena. Perhaps the only way we could influence global events is to remove ourselves from the capitalist/consumerist/exploitative global economic treadmill and instead try to get our own house in order. Perhaps through this example we could show the rest of the world the way to both sustainability and social equity.
This would be a gargantuan task. Australia's current material prosperity has exacted a terrible toll on the environment: our soils are in crisis, our waterways depleted and polluted, our forests, wildlife and flora either destroyed or seriously threatened.
Socially we have a growing US-style deprived underclass, 50,000 homeless, effectively 2 million unemployed and the highest suicide rate in the developed world. Our lifestyles, consumption and agricultural practices are totally unsustainable even in the relative short term.
Author F.E. Trainer and ACF councillor Geoff Mosley, among others, believe we can have an ecologically and socially sustainable self-sufficient population, but not without fundamental change of our economic and social structures which would involve much reduced consumption of renewable and non-renewable resources.
Even with much reduced consumption, we would need over time to gradually reduce our population numbers in order to restore the balance between our species and others in the ecosystem who also have a right to survive; sustainability can never be achieved while the population of one species continues to grow exponentially, a fact most indigenous people have known for thousands of years.
Australian society, Ted Trainer writes in Abandon Affluence, would need to be reorganised to embrace a much simpler, more self-sufficient and cooperative way of life. He advocates "de-developing" into small interactive communities and neighbourhoods in which most of our food, furnishings, goods and services, even housing, would be produced in and around the home and neighbourhood in labour-intensive and non-commercial ways. In time, areas within city suburbs could become permanent self-maintaining ecosystems yielding food and materials with a minimum cost in non-renewable and renewable inputs.
Australia's multicultural society is well suited to thrive under such conditions, thereby setting the world another example of peaceful coexistence between peoples.
While we must never imagine we can divorce ourselves from turmoil in other parts of the world and must do what we can for refugees and those suffering human rights abuses, ultimately we would have to trust that our example of a conserver rather than a consumer society would influence others to adopt our alternative way of life, thereby defusing the many problems being generated by our present consumptive and destructive way of life.