The coming collapse?

A report (home page) was released last week by the United Nations Environment Programme on the current state of the environment and what, if anything, countries are doing to avert damage. It is not a hopeful picture. This Herald-Sun article from 8/6 provides a summary (you would think that such an important topic would make headlines, but it was hidden away back on page 43):

Earth in danger zone

Critical thresholds being exceeded

THE Earth’s environmental systems “are being pushed towards their biophysical limits”, the United Nations Environment Program says.

The agency’s 525-page report on the health of the planet paints a grim picture.

It says: “Several critical global, regional and local thresholds are close or have been exceeded. Abrupt and possibly irreversible changes to the lifesupport functions of the planet are likely to occur.”

The report, released yesterday, says changes include rising sea levels, increased frequency and severity of floods and droughts, and the collapse of fisheries.

The report, which compiles three years of work by 300 scientists, says about 20 per cent of vertebrate species are under threat of extinction, coral reefs have declined by 38 per cent since 1980, green house gas emissions could double over the next 50 years, and 90 percent of water and fish samples are contaminated by pesticides.

It says little or no progress has been made over the past five years on almost a third of the main environmental goals, including global warming. Significant progress has been made on just four of the 90 most important goals, the report says.

“This is an indictment,” UNEP executive director Achim Steiner told a news conference in Rio De Janeiro. “We live in an age of irresponsibility that is also testified and documented in this report. In 1992 (when the first of the agency’s five reports was released) we talked about the future that was likely to occur. This report 20 years later (says) … a number of the things that we talked about in the future tense in 1992 have arrived. Once the tipping point occurs, you don’t wake up the next morning and say, ‘This is terrible, can we change it?’. We are condemning people to not having the choice.”

Dr Steiner said: “Change is possible. Given what we know, we can move in another direction.”

The report was released in the run-up to the UN Rio+20 conference on June 20 and 21.

A few reactions: “We’re breaking our planet once and for all, warn scientists”, io9; “Irreversible”, MetaFilter post; “Earth could reach ecological tipping point by 2025”, Population Matters. This article links to a similar report in Nature journal (also: “Earth summit: Rio report card” there). (Annoyingly it is subscriber-access only. Surely they could make such an important report free-access?)

The reports state that Earth’s various ecologies will reach a “tipping point” before this century’s end with possibly dire consequences for the lifeforms here. If it comes to pass, many species will go extinct, forests will be decimated, the oceans will be toxic waste dumps. In effect, the grim barren Earth depicted in Avatar will become reality. The article linked back in my 31/3 entry, “Here’s a view of the world at 2050 – if you dare to look”, also is worth a re-read.

The July U.S. edition of Popular Science, featuring a “Future of the Environment” special, has a diagram showing four possible futures depending upon the choices made now, reproduced below:

Is all this doom-mongering, crying wolf? A lot of people will think so and dismiss it, as they have global warming, as there are so many more pressingly immediate issues – keeping their job, paying off mortgages and bills, all the minutiae of daily life. As individuals there seems to be little we can do, so we shrug it off and carry on as usual. Nations are locked into the same destructive path of consumption and endless economic growth, and lack the will to change. If the dire predictions come to pass (and for the sake of other lifeforms here, one hopes they do not), humanity can’t say it was not warned.

The coming collapse

Australia’s population growth expectations have been revised; Federal Treasurer Wayne Swan yesterday revealed a prediction of 35 million by 2049. Most of the articles in the links below regard this as a good thing; a “challenge” rather than a concern. 35 million may seem small compared to the populations of many countries, but take into consideration that most of the Australian continent is desert, fresh water supplies are scarce and its soils are ancient and infertile.

From the Herald-Sun, 18/9:

“Higher fertility and migration triggers Aussie population boom”.

“Population boom ‘a recipe for tragedy’ ”. Senator Bob Brown seems to be one of the few politicians who does have a clue. Short article reproduced below:

Australian Greens leader Bob Brown has taken issue with Prime Minister Kevin Rudd for expressing enthusiasm for a growing population. The Federal Government has released revised estimates showing Australia’s population will increase from 22 million at present to 35 million by 2049, boosting 2007 estimates by more than 7 million people.

Mr. Rudd said “it’s great” from an economic perspective that Australia’s population was growing as other nations experienced a decline. But Senator Brown said Mr. Rudd needed to explain how population growth would affect economic prosperity. “This population boom is not economic wisdom, it is a recipe for planetary exhaustion and great human tragedy,” he said.

The environmental campaigner pointed out that when Mr. Rudd was born in 1957, the world’s population was three billion. “There are 6.8 billion now. There will be 9 billion by mid-century,” Senator Brown said, adding economic growth needed to coincide with a steady population.

From The Age:

“Millions of reasons for celebration – or concern”, 19/9. MP Kelvin Thomson is another of the rare politicians who find growth a concern.

But as anyone in Melbourne knows, there are drawbacks to rapid population growth. Labor MP Kelvin Thomson is worried: “We are sleep-walking towards environmental disaster.”

Mr. Thomson says 30 per cent of Australia’s bird species are already under threat, and wildlife habitats are falling victim to increased urbanisation and food production. And trying to cut carbon emissions by 60 per cent while raising population by 60 per cent, he says, is “trying to fight with both hands tied behind your back”.

“Another 13 or 14 million people will not give us a richer country, it will spread our mineral wealth more thinly and give us a poorer one,” he says. He wants the Government to aim for population stability, not growth.

“35 million Australians? Start preparing now”, 19/9. This editorial treats such predicted growth as a “challenge” and says we must adapt to it. I say, bullshit!

Many Australians will respond to all this with a deceptively simple question: why not cap the population? Closing borders to a growing global population in a world of finite resources would be problematic, but the main reason that is not a good solution is a demographic one. The forecast proportion of people aged over 65 has been revised down slightly to 22 per cent in 2049 – it is now 13 per cent – but that still means a much smaller proportion of Australians will be of working age. Migrants are significantly younger on average than the general population, so their arrival improves the ratio of workers to non-workers. Immigration is needed to ensure the workforce is big enough to fund and provide the services that all of us require.

“Congratulations – it’s a boomlet. (But now the fun starts…)”, 19/9. Much the same: population growth will do wonders for the economy; it is a “challenge”, blah, blah.

From The Australian, who are even more clueless: “Population is destiny”, 19/9.

Meeting the needs of millions more Australians will also demand realistic investment in much-neglected infrastructure, especially dams and transport. It is clear the national interest is best served by growth. In a region where our neighbours are increasing by hundreds of millions, economic and population growth are essential for our long-term survival. The post-World War II axiom populate or perish should be updated to “populate and prosper”.

The usual argument of “demographics” is given in all articles; we must continue to encourage a high birth rate and import younger workers to support an ageing population and to further economic growth. But that is merely delaying the inevitable; both groups will age too and will require even more young people to support them. Where does this insanity end? Such a policy in a world of finite resources is ultimately unsustainable and environmentally devastating.

Some published letters in The Age from the last few weeks on these topics:

2/9:

It’s no business for big business

Senator Chris Evans’ claim that immigration should be the nation’s labour agency, meaning a continued high intake of migrants, especially younger, skilled workers, is absurd (“Migration rules set for revamp”, The Age, 31/8).

The Australian population should be our normal source of workforce. Decisions about who comes to Australia should not be left to employers. Big employers have a long history of making bizarre ambit claims about the numbers they propose to employ. Often the real aim is to create a surplus of job seekers and thus bully governments into giving the go-ahead for short-sighted projects to create jobs.

The livability crisis should be a higher priority than importing “skilled and willing” (read “temporarily more docile”) workers from elsewhere.

Senator Evans bizarrely claims that his “attempts to have a more sophisticated debate about the topic have totally failed”. What efforts?

The book Overloading Australia documents him claiming in May 2008 that net immigration was less than half what the Bureau of Statistics says it was. Recently he claimed immigration had been “slashed”, when it was soaring. Now he admits we have “an unprecedented, unplanned migration wave”. He should resign and be replaced by a minister who serves the Australian electorate, not vested interests.

– Mark O’Connor, co-author, Overloading Australia, Lyneham, ACT

It’s time to debate, people

I agree that it is “time for a reality check on immigration policy” (Editorial, 1/9). I would go further and say it is time for a national population policy. Tim Flannery, in his Australia Day address in 2002, indicated that a population policy was vital for Australia to have an environmentally sustainable future.

He said the way to achieve such a policy was for the nation to engage in a truthful, vigorous debate, together with a government inquiry charged with setting an optimum population target. Once the target had been decided we should determine our immigration policy in light of it. This, Flannery believed, would take most of the hysteria out of the immigration debate.

In my view, the bipartisanship way the major parties have kept immigration policy debate out of the public arena is an affront to democracy. I believe an appropriate forum for debating a population policy would also act as a prophylactic in keeping irrational ideologies out of the debate.

– Arthur Bassett, Blackburn South

Questions about the boom

The boom in immigration, resulting from the wholesale granting of permanent residency to international students on the basis of skill credentials obtained here, is at last being reviewed.

The demographic distortion from this influx may have resulted in increased unemployment and disaffection among migrant and native young people.

Any net benefit from the “education industry’s “export” earnings might not withstand examination, with the money cycle involving repayment of loans from Australian earnings, plus huge long-term costs to Australia. Issues include the diversion of educational resources to service this trade and the downgrading of the perceived value of Australian qualifications.

– Forbes Sprawson, Hampton

11/9:

Mad Max future

I suggest David Spratt relax (Comment, 10/9). Federal and state governments are looking far beyond the coming decades when our country runs out of natural resources, and have formulated a long-term plan to base our economic and social future on the film industry.

Decades ago they tested the waters with Mad Max. Our response to the notion of living in a barren wasteland, killing for petrol to run obsolete machinery and drifting into extinction was enthusiastic. Now, thanks to our politicians, our descendants can all look forward to becoming permanent extras in an apocalyptic wasteland dystopia.

– Ray Leung, Elwood

“Jared Diamond on Australia’s overpopulation problem”, (We) can do better. The chapter “Mining Australia” from his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive make for alarming reading; some paragraphs below:

The fallacy behind this policy of “filling up” Australia is that there are compelling environmental reasons why, even after more than two centuries of European settlement, Australia has not “filled itself up” to the population density of the U.S. Given Australia’s limited supplies of water and limited potential for food production, it lacks the capacity to support a significantly larger population. An increase in population would also dilute its earnings from mineral exports on a per-capita basis. Australia has recently been receiving immigrants only at the net rate of about 100,000 per year, which yields an annual population growth by immigration of only 0.5%.

Nevertheless, many influential Australians, including the recent Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, the leaders of both major political parties, and the Australian Business Council, still argue that Australia should try to increase its population to 50 million people. The reasoning invokes a combination of continued fear of the “Yellow Peril” from overpopulated Asian countries, the aspiration for Australia to become a major world power, and the belief that that goal could not be achieved if Australia had only 20 million people. But those aspirations of a few decades ago have receded to the point where Australians today no longer expect to become a major world power. Even if they did have that expectation, Israel, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Singapore provide examples of countries with populations far less than that of Australia (only a few million each) that nevertheless are major economic powers and make big contributions to world technological innovation and culture. Contrary to their government and business leaders, 70% of Australians say that they want less rather than more immigration. In the long run it is doubtful that Australia can even support its present population: the best estimate of a population sustainable at the present standard of living is 8 million people, less than half of the present population.

[…]

As for freshwater itself, Australia is the continent with the least of it. Most of that little freshwater that is readily accessible to populated areas is already utilized for drinking or agriculture. Even the country’s largest river, the Murray/Darling, has two-thirds of its total water flow drawn off by humans in an average year, and in some years virtually all of its water. Australia’s freshwater sources that remain unutilized consist mainly of rivers in remote northern areas, far from human settlements or agricultural lands where they could be put to use. As Australia’s population grows, and as its unutilized supplies of freshwater dwindle, some settled areas may be forced to turn to more expensive desalinization for their freshwater. There is already a desalinization plant on Kangaroo Island, and one may be needed soon on the Eyre Peninsula.

[…]

To those of us inclined to pessimism or even just to realistic sober thinking, all those facts give us reason to wonder whether Australians are doomed to a declining standard of living in a steadily deteriorating environment. That is an entirely realistic scenario for Australia’s future—much more likely than either a plunge into an Easter Island-like population crash and political collapse as prophesized by doomsday advocates, or a continuation of current consumption rates and population growth as blithely assumed by many of Australia’s current politicians and business leaders. The implausibility of the latter two scenarios, and the realistic prospects of the first scenario, apply to the rest of the First World as well, with the sole difference that Australia could end up in the first scenario sooner.

Fortunately, there are signs of hope. They involve changing attitudes, rethinking by Australia’s farmers, private initiatives, and the beginnings of radical governmental initiatives. All that rethinking illustrates a theme that we already encountered in connection with the Greenland Norse (Chapter 8), and to which we shall return in Chapters 14 and 16: the challenge of deciding which of a society’s deeply held core values are compatible with the society’s survival, and which ones instead have to be given up.

Repeating history

“Our civilisation will be just as fragile as those before”, The Age, 16/6 (reproduced below). An excellent article pointing out that our modern civilization could go the same way as others before us in history (the ancient Romans, Mayans, those in India and so on) due to resource depletion, environmental damage, greed and hubris. The current situation is unique in that the Earth has never had to cope with the sheer mass of 7 billion people before, nor the immense amounts of waste produced in the form of plastics that will persist for millennia. Our methods of storing information on digital media are fragile and are unlikely to last as long as those of the ancients, who carved their writings and art on stone.

We think of ourselves as more enlightened and aware than previous civilizations, but humans seem to repeat the same mistakes over and over again in history without learning from the past, and we are still doing it. It is a frustrating and avoidable cycle, but one we as a species seem locked into, in our current stage of evolution. Perhaps this is because we do not live that long and so can’t plan for the long-term future centuries or millennia away.

Our civilization will be just as fragile as those before

Geoff Strong
June 16, 2009 – 12:00 a.m.

If it is true all good things must end, I wonder what will be our end. Having stood in the remains of Rome, ancient Greece and the ruined cities of Sri Lanka and India, I have reflected on the fantasy of their invincibility and the truth of their temporary might.

The artefacts of once wondrous civilizations draw me to the one thought: if there are archaeologists in the future, what conclusions will they draw about us? What will there be of value or magnificence in our lives to study?

Most believe this to be the most remarkable civilization ever – yet it could also be one of the most temporary. Technical prowess aside, it is the first with a truly global reach. Its common thread is the business activity that has spread tentacles to most parts of the planet.

But the past year has taught us the hubris of thinking this economic system will survive regardless. Is it unthinkable to wonder whether the whole of our global civilization can fall?

Many of us who grew up in the shadow of nuclear annihilation of the Cold War used to dwell on it all the time. Spike Milligan wrote a satirical play later made into a film entitled The Bed Sitting Room set in post-apocalyptic London nine months after World War Ⅲ. “World War Ⅲ, the Nuclear Misunderstanding, lasted for two minutes and 28 seconds – including the signing of the peace treaty.”

Even Britain has decayed before. As a Roman province its population was thought to be four million, yet after the Norman conquest, the Domesday book of 1086 records a population of less than two million.

Now that the main nuclear annihilation threat comes from the lunatic regime in North Korea, other horsemen have taken the lead in the apocalypse gallop: pandemic disease, economic famine and climate change pestilence.

We forget climate change is not just about a rise in temperature. Victoria’s trauma of Black Saturday in February was as much due to wind as to heat.

The increased power of moving air recently made an impact on one of our civilization’s most potent symbols. During one of the storms to hit south-east Queensland in recent months, a man was killed when a sheet of glass fell from a Gold Coast high-rise building, such was the force of the wind. If there was ever a symbol of the global business civilization, it is the high-rise. Like the pyramids of Egypt and the temples of Greece and Rome, the high-rise is the architectural representation of deepest beliefs – in our case money and the organisations needed to accumulate it.

Some may say they are our temples to greed. They were certainly the real and symbolic target chosen when jihadists attacked the West via the New York World Trade Centre in 2001.

Yet as the storms demonstrate, it takes less than attack by fuel-loaded aircraft to show their fragility. Just as tourists crawl over the skeletal remains of ruined temples and the unearthed pathways of old towns, will there one day be tours to the bony remains of our high-rise cities?

Most of us now feel global warming caused by our species is likely to change this planet into a place more hostile to humans.

Melbourne is growing rapidly and running short of water. We will have to rely on huge amounts of greenhouse-generating electricity for desalination and a similar amount to pump water through the north-south pipeline.

A testament to the importance of water is one of the most wonderful abandoned cities in India, Fatephur Sikri, near Agra. Its magnificent buildings were constructed by Mughal emperor Akbar and served as his empire’s capital from 1571 until 1585, when it was vacated due to an inadequate water supply.

Our civilization also seems to operate in ever-decreasing circles of endurance. Just as we seek to shorten the time it takes to do anything, we seem happy to accept decreasing lifespans of anything we create. At 70 years old, our timber house has lasted twice as long as a builder acquaintance told me is expected from a house built today. New raw-earth housing estates are smothered with brick-clad homes, many dressed up with mock columns and pediments.

But even more alarming is the fragility of the knowledge stored in the way we like to do it now – digitally. Fragments of stone writing from ancient Sumeria or Egypt still give us an understanding of their world. But try getting information from an ancient computer system, such as an early Apple – less than 20 years old but now useless.

What will an archaeologist, a thousand years from now, make of the millions of CDs, DVDs and computer discs unearthed as they sift through the remains of our rubbish tips? The mathematical and electronic wizardry that helped them make sense to us will be long gone.

Geoff Strong is a senior writer.

“Population and Sustainability: Can We Avoid Limiting the Number of People?”, Scientific American, 10/6. Feature article in the June 2009 Special Edition. It concludes that empowering women with access to education and family planning will help slow population growth.

Collected letters:

Population fallacy

IT IS a fallacy that we need high population growth to sustain our economy. Denmark has a stable population of 5 million, with a low birth rate and immigration rate. Its unemployment rate is the lowest in the European Union and is lower than Australia’s. The country exports more then it imports, its GDP per capita is similar to ours, and it provides a high level of foreign aid. In Australia we use population growth as an excuse to destroy our environment, our amenity and our democratic processes.

– Jennie Epstein, Little River, 15/6

Dreams shattered, all for Mr. Nice Guy

Your article (Insight, 13/6) portrays Planning Minister Justin Madden as Mr. Nice Guy. Fair suck of the sauce bottle. “Harry” is responsible for the destruction of Marvellous Melbourne, given his fixation with fast-tracking high-rise, high-density developments to accommodate the huge influx of migrants and students, and to make jobs for the construction industry.

His supporters point to European cities as successful examples of high-density living but fail to mention that those city fathers have always provided public gardens for the wellbeing of their citizens.

While our parks, gardens and golf courses are progressively alienated for yet more sports stadiums and housing developments, we are brainwashed into believing that we can no longer dream of owning a house on a quarter-acre block with the Hills hoist and a vegie garden out the back. We have to be content with living in high-rise human warehouses or outer-suburban, featureless gulags. Why should we forgo our dreams just because Madden and his boss, Premier John Brumby, support unsustainable levels of migration to the state and adhere to the fallacious belief that all growth is good?

– Lewis Prichard, Hawthorn, 16/6

“12yo pregnancy: ‘DoCS should have done more’ ”, ABC News, 16/6. In my view the girl should be forced to abort; she is far too young to undergo the stress of pregnancy. The affair is a ridiculous farce; children’s and teenagers’ “rights” are too lenient in Western society.