Chain Reaction, #91, 2004

Beautiful lies: population and environment

A review of Tim Flannery's Quarterly Essay (QE): Beautiful Lies; population and environment in Australia.

QE seeks to present 'significant contributions to the general debate'. In 2003, the 9^th Quarterly Essay was published, featuring a piece by noted Australian author Tim Flannery, whose books include the award winning Future Eaters.

Tim Flannery, in QE 9, talks at length about the notion of the beautiful lie; the various mis-truths we turn into mythology in order to justify what we believe and do. These lies are used as a defence against reality, allowing us to continue what is essentially indefensible behaviour when confronted with empirical evidence. It is strange, then, for someone so well trained and careful in his research, to use this essay to reinforce one more (perhaps not so beautiful) lie; the suggestion that population growth, considered in isolation, is one of the key threats to the Australian environment.

Tim rightly observes that Australians will need to accept that we have based our existence here on various half truths and outright lies; including the myth of terra nullius, the impacts of the removal of Indigenous fire management on native ecosystems in many places, the overwhelming threat of our agricultural practises. He also sees precedent for hope; the multicultural diversity of early colonial Australia, the need to develop a truly authentic sense of what it means to be Australian, and what this might look like in terms of agriculture and living patterns.

Having said this, there is a substantial and troubling omission in his handling of population. The section on ‘population’ is strange in that it is almost non existant. His treatment of other issues in the essay, including terra nullius, fire, and extinction is far more straight forward. But in population, he raises a series of issues and then goes no where with them. Although, in amongst a great deal of ambivalence, he does suggest that population growth is such a grave threat that we will perhaps need to start yelling "full" to those seeking refuge here. In this he does a grave disservice to the debate we need to have about what may be Australia's 'carrying capacity'. He suggests that our own xenophobia may be a determining factor in deciding when the country is 'full'. Having framed his central premise (that human activity is leading to substantial, possibly catastrophic impacts on the Australian continent) on sound science, he then relies on opinion polling to, in effect, shrug his shoulders and put the need to reduce immigration down to the fact, that as a 'relatively homogeneous society', there is only so much diversity we can stand.

Prior to this conclusion, the essay describes the profound change witnessed in attitudes to the land and approaches to environmental responsibility due to the influence of the Natural Heritage Trust (NHT) funding made available through the partial sale of Telstra. I think this is something of a long bow to draw, as it neglects to acknowledge several decades of quiet influence by the LandCare movement; the NHT certainly provided the funds to increase the amount of physical work being done, but didn’t create the mind set that desires ecological protection. But leaving this aside, he suggests that, with political will, access to funds, and leadership by the government, we can transform two centuries of ecological disaster (and the entrenched mind set that created it). Why then, can a similar outcome not be achieved with the xenophobia he sees in Australian society? Granted, the current federal government has fed, and fed off, this perceived racism, but the question remains; why does he believe this racism, which he suggests underlies our society, is so immutable?

So, as an argument for us 'doing what we can', which possibly means returning over time to a population somewhere around 8 million, with the resulting reduction in immigration that this will require, he implies we will need to bow to our own xenophobia. This is hardly a good basis to make such a profound judgement.

Tim raises many salient points around the bleak future facing the Australian environment unless we make profound changes; but, given that the focus of the essay was 'population and environment', and noting what a fraught issue population is, both politically and morally, he gives an almost scandalously brief treatment of the issues that frame and influence ecological destruction. Consumption, the other half of the population coin, is handled in less than a few sentences. More than 30 years ago, the population theorists, Paul Ehrlich and J. Holdren, identified a model of understanding ecological impact in the following way: I = PAT, meaning that people's impact on their environment (I) is a product of population size (P), affluence (A, representing the level of consumption) and technology (T, representing the per unit output or efficiency in production). This has been refined by many others, including the CSIRO. Yencken and Wilkinson, in Resetting the Compass; Australia's Journey Towards Sustainability (2000) suggest that Damage = Population X Economic Intensity X Resource Intensity X Environmental Pressure of the Resource X Susceptibility of the Environment. There is a wealth of knowledge that is widely available that shows that we cannot separate population from other factors when considering ecological impact. Perhaps Tim should have spent less time telling us how environmentalists and animal libbers have 'got it wrong' on everything from cows to whales, and a little more time elaborating on the scientific arguments which would explain why he would pluck population out of the equation and then pin so many of our problems on a single factor. His previous public statements must have alerted him to the complexity of the issue, yet he remains steadfastly simplistic in his analysis; that population is a dominant element in environmental deterioration, whilst basically ignoring other factors.

Why do his comments on population seem so subordinate to a zero population growth ideology? And why does it leave his essay so open to critique on the grounds of not dealing with consumption? A few simple examples: using ecological footprint analysis, it can be argued that the average Australian has five times the ecological impact of the average Indonesian (this is an over simplification, as it does not address part of the Impact formula; the types of technologies used). But in simple terms, we do consume around 5 times the land space - ie, resources - to meet our needs compared with our Indonesian neighbours. Another issue; many of the most destructive processes on our continent, which focus around production for export (meat, other animal products, minerals, coal, woodchips) are, in real terms, de-linked from domestic population levels. Even trends like housing preferences are an issue. For instance, an edition of New Scientist magazine published in 2003 suggests that the trend towards households with fewer people is ‘more damaging than population growth’. The reasoning behind this is that more people living on their own, even with the same population, means more accommodation needs to be built, and the ecological costs of heating and cooling, say three apartments are far greater than doing the same for a house with three people. These few points highlight that there is a whole raft of issues that are intrinsically linked around the population – ecological depletion interface, and a reasoned position will acknowledge the diversity and complexity of this fact.

Knowing what we do, we could get a lot smarter about how we meet our needs (this is where personal choice, government intervention and technology come into play) and still have less overall impact than at present, while actually creating 'space' for more people through reducing our ecological footprint. We need to see population as one element in a policy that seeks to stabilise and ultimately reduce our ecological impact. This means dealing with resource consumption, our role in creating refugees (including our greenhouse gas emissions and the appallingly low foreign aid Australia currently contributes), land use patterns, sustainable agriculture, and so on. For someone of Tim’s stature and reputation, to simply raise the spectre of ‘population’, with all it’s resonance for xenophobes, without taking a more complex analysis, is simply not good enough.

Quarterly Essay, issue #9, 2003. Beautiful Lies; population and environment in Australia by Tim Flannery. Black inc. http://www.quarterrlyessay.com