There was a published reply to my 21/2 letter in yesterday’s The Age from someone who disagreed with me:
Liveable for all
Susanne McHale [Grrr! You spelled my name wrong – it’s Suzanne with a z!] (Letters, 21/2) talks about liveability and the destruction of once-pleasant leafy suburbs. I’m not a developer and I have no economic interest in building. But you have to balance the fact that we have more people than houses in this city – already enormous in area for its population. We don’t need to talk about public transport and road congestion, do we?
The population will keep growing, with or without incentives. I support green and open spaces, good architectural design, and also a liveable city for most of its population, not just for the people in inner suburbs or the rich eastern suburbs. They can put it any way they want, but this is NIMBYism at its best.
– Sebastian Topet, Ivanhoe
Well, if the government makes an effort to restrict population growth, housing shortages won’t be such an issue! Also, the point I was making (perhaps not very clearly?) is that so many modern houses are huge and ugly – well, refer back to my letter. I wouldn’t have such a problem with development if houses were reasonably-sized (preferably single-storey), left ample room for vegetation (not those barren “designer gardens”) and had environmentally-friendly features such as solar power, water tanks, insulation and so on. But too many houses don’t – they are just ostentatious “McMansions” for people to show off in.
Another letter from the same day:
It’s in the plan(ning)
THE “modernisation of our state” (Letters, 23/2) is a matter of judgement. There are legitimately conflicting views as to what it should entail.
The denigration of citizen input as representing a NIMBY mentality reflects a political culture that has eroded any semblance of democratic process in urban planning in Melbourne.
Since the abolition of the Board of Works in 1982 and the neutering of councils in the 1990s, planning power has essentially been centralised with the planning minister – an easy target for property developers. Can the executive director of the Master Builders name any OECD country where local government and citizenry are as marginalised in land use planning as in Victoria?
– Angela Munro, Carlton North
A letter from today’s Sydney Morning Herald which makes a good point about the unsustainability of economic growth:
Growth fetish drives us to environmental disaster
The admission that worldwide carbon emissions will continue to rise despite the economic downturn, as reported on ABC radio yesterday, comes as no surprise. The seldom quoted correlation between economic growth, population growth and emissions growth will guarantee this.
With governments all over the world single-mindedly focused on expanding their economies, any new technologies will be able only to slow the rate of emissions growth. While desirable, that won’t save our bacon.
The unwillingness of politicians, business groups, academics and media commentators to acknowledge the absurdity of continuous growth is chilling. Possibly all are too frightened to admit that we have based our entire civilisation on a concept that has no credibility.
The transition to an economic system based on stable levels of production and consumption will be full of challenges, but continuing with the intellectually bankrupt system of endless growth can only hasten our headlong rush to environmental disaster.
The greenhouse charade that parades before us day after day, with a cast of well-scripted actors offering proclamations of how to keep the economy growing while reducing emissions, reminds me of the courtiers who complimented the naked emperor on his new suit of clothes.
So pervasive is the acceptance of continuous growth that it is almost impossible to conceive that so many people could be wrong about the wisdom of this system. In the end it was a young boy who pointed to the emperor and laughed out loud.
Sometimes I feel like that boy, but I am not laughing.
– Kris Spike, Castle Hill
Various governments’ “solution” to the credit crisis and economic downturn is merely more of the same: financially bail out the institutions who got their countries into this mess, and continue with the unsusainable policies of encouraging economic growth! The world’s growing population is the basic problem: all these people need to have jobs, but there are simply not enough (cannot be enough), so there will be increasing social unrest.
“The Vanishing Face of Gaia”, Times Online, 22/2. Review of a new book by James Lovelock.
Now in his 90th year, and still dauntlessly proclaiming unpalatable truths, James Lovelock is the closest thing we have to an Old Testament prophet, though his deity is not Jehovah but Gaia, his concept of planet earth. In his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, he warns, as he has before, that global warming is probably irreversible, and that once a tipping point is reached change to a new climate may be rapid. The Earth’s landmasses will be largely destroyed by flood and drought, and most of the world’s seven billion inhabitants will not survive. All this should make for a bleak read, yet Lovelock writes with such challenge that the effect is strangely exhilarating.
[…]
With his grandchildren, his American wife Sandy, and his 35 acres of woodland, wild orchids and badger setts “given back to Gaia”, he emerges as a happy, kindly man. Yet he does not always seem fully alive to the horrors that must ensue when the starving, terror-crazed masses of climate refugees arrive in the earth’s few remaining “lifeboats”, one of which, he believes, will be Britain. Observing that “genocide by tribal mobs is as natural as breathing”, and anticipating a “massive natural cull of humanity”, he seems to hark back to the scientifically detached Lovelock calmly eating his blood omelette. Yet he is still imagining ways to save civilisation – synthetic foodstuffs; a carbon-fibre disc orbiting the sun to protect us from its heat – and he has been allocated a seat on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, so that he may at last see Gaia from space. Let us hope she is still habitable when he gets back.
I also feel that it is too late to prevent the upcoming environmental catastrophe; that “carbon trading” and all other efforts are useless token gestures, if continued population growth continues. By century’s end there will have been a massive environmental collapse and extinction of many species that will be very unpleasant for humanity. In 2050 I will turn 80, and I dread to contemplate what Earth will be like then. Younger generations will ask, “Why didn’t you do something to change things when you could?” and the only answer will be, “Governments would not listen.”
“A 10,000-year misunderstanding”, ABC News, 12/5/2008, says that only the discovery of fossil fuels (which are not unlimited) and agricultural developments has enabled such explosive population growth, but this cannot go on forever.
On April 14, 2008 we heard Robert Zoellick, head of the World Bank, calling for a crash program of food production increases to stave off the approach of famine. How many times does he think we can pull new “productivity rabbits” out of the hat when soil resources of the planet continue to be degraded to produce more food for the irresponsibly breeding horde?
At the core of our problems today has been our unwillingness to see the relationship between the population numbers that we have built up since the advent of cultivation agriculture, and the sustainability problems that we have been sidestepping for 10,000 years.
Many keen thinkers have understood that the driver enabling our numbers to shoot so far over long-term carrying capacity has been the one-time gift of fossil fuels, and that this overshoot has resulted in our rampant destruction of the biosphere. The global human population, before the start of the fossil-fuel revolution, was about 1 billion, while it is now about 6.7 billion and rising. These holistic thinkers suggest that without oil, the earth will only support about 2-3 billion people.
Their forward thinking has not yet included an understanding of the thesis that the other major factor that has enabled our numbers to shoot so far over long-term carrying capacity has been the one-time gift of erodible soils and the vast store of nutrients they contained – until we began to irreversibly mine them about 10,000 years ago with cultivation agriculture.
“Animal Extinction – the greatest threat to mankind”, The Independent, 30/4/2007: an alarming article on the mass extinction of species silently taking place around us – the sixth in the history of Earth (the fifth being the dinosaurs) – much of it due to human activity.
We now understand that the majority of life on Earth has never been – and will never be – known to us. In a staggering forecast, Wilson predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of all plant and animal species by 2100. You probably had no idea. Few do. A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside science.
[…]
All these disappearing species are part of a fragile membrane of organisms wrapped around the Earth so thinly, writes Wilson, that it “cannot be seen edgewise from a space shuttle, yet so internally complex that most species composing it remain undiscovered”. We owe everything to this membrane of life. Literally everything. The air we breathe. The food we eat. The materials of our homes, clothes, books, computers, medicines. Goods and services that we can’t even imagine we’ll someday need will come from species we have yet to identify. The proverbial cure for cancer. The genetic fountain of youth. Immortality. Mortality. The living membrane we so recklessly destroy is existence itself.
It seems that humans will only try to do something about this when it is already too late…what is needed is a radical change in lifestyles, the economic system, social structure (and a reduction in human population); to systems that are more sustainable than the current orthodoxy of endless consumption. I hope the grim prospective future of humans fighting for declining resources in a devastated and barren world can be averted, but I am not optimistic.
This may all be “doom-mongering”, but isn’t it better to be safe than sorry? I do have despairing thoughts that, though there are many people concerned about overpopulation, this is a lost cause – few if any influential people in power (i.e. governments, corporations) are similarly concerned, and just wish to continue “business as usual” though this is destructive to the planet and humanity’s ultimate survival.
