Sunshine Coast Hinterland Times

The Hinterland Times is delighted to present edited extracts from the latest quarterly, Griffith Review 29 Prosper or Perish. This edition presents startling and informative links between climate change and population, and their likely social impacts on humankind. We thank GR editor Julianne Schultz AM for her permission to feature extracts from three key essays, and we recommend our readers to this excellent publication.

A humanist on thin ice
Science and the humanities, people and climate change

Tom Griffiths
Professor of History at ANU and an adjunct professor of climate research at the University of Copenhagen. His latest book is Slicing the Silence: Voyaging to Antarctica (UNSW Press, 2007)

It was ice that delivered the scary sense of urgency that we now feel about global warming. The oldest Greenland cores go back to the last interglacial, about a hundred and twenty thousand years ago, whereas the deepest Antarctic cores currently retrieve eight hundred thousand years of climate history. In Antarctica, there is less precipitation and seasonality and more compression of the layers of ice; resolution is traded for time. In Greenland the layers are clearer, because of the greater annual accumulation of ice. And so the more discriminating Greenland cores are essential to calibrating the longer, more condensed Antarctic archive. The polar ice caps therefore combine beautifully to give us detailed long-term climate data.

… In Antarctica, in the 1990s, a long 400,000-year ice core was extracted from the middle of the ice sheet near the Soviet station, Vostok. The Vostok core, which charted four full cycles of glacial and interglacial periods, established that the carbon dioxide and methane concentration in the atmosphere had ‘moved in lockstep’ with the ice sheets and the temperature. It also revealed that present-day levels of these greenhouse gases are unprecedented during the past four hundred and twenty thousand years.

… So it was really only from the late 1980s, as abrupt climate change began to emerge from the ice record, that there was urgency and anxiety – and this coincides with the fast warming of the ’80s onwards. This was the same period in which ecological science abandoned the idea of the ‘balance of nature’ and accepted ‘disturbance’ as normal in ecosystems. It was the same period when ‘punctuated equilibrium’ – the idea of sudden change – re-entered debates in evolutionary science. Today, especially following the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen, we feel that we are responding to this crisis too slowly – and we are. Yet a clear sense of urgency among climate scientists is only twenty years old and a confident scientific consensus has been articulated only over the past decade. So the task of coming to terms with its social and political implications has barely begun.

… If a hundred years ago the defining Antarctic journey was the sledging expedition across the surface of the ice, and fifty years ago it was the tractor traverse that, with seismic soundings, measured the volume of the ice sheet, then the defining Antarctic journey of our own era goes straight down, with the help of a drill, from the top of the ice dome to the continental bedrock, a vertical journey back through time. And the ice core extracted enables us to see our civilisation in the context of hundreds of thousands of years of climate history. Right now, in Antarctica, the international race is on again – not for the South Pole, not for the first trans-Antarctic traverse, but for the first million-year ice core.

… ‘Climate is what you expect, weather is what you get,’ runs the old adage. But these days we hardly know what to expect. And what we expect depends less on statistics than on belief. The public debate about climate change is now not really about the science – even when it looks like it is. We are in the realm of competing ideologies and differing belief systems; we are engaged in politics. If you know your politics, it is easy to predict who will think what about the science. We need to wonder why, as Richard Hamblyn has observed, climate change may be the ‘first major environmental crisis in which experts appear more alarmed than the public’.

… Many previous scientific revolutions – the Copernican, the Darwinian, the discovery of deep time – have decentred and diminished the power and significance of humanity. By contrast, the scientific revolution of climate change reveals the cumulative, insidious, all-pervading power of people on Earth. This is not just a technical issue; it implicates and challenges our humanity.

… Australia is going to be at the frontier of climate change pain. As inhabitants of an arid continent in the grip of the El Niño Southern Oscillation, a land of drought and flooding rains, a place of escalating fatal bushfire, and with a small and embattled agricultural economy, Australians might have been expected to rush to sign Kyoto a decade ago and to have brought credible legislation for reducing carbon emissions to the Copenhagen summit. The growing Australian public rejection of climate change science may be merely another example of our southern isolationism. Or it may be further testimony to the power that American politics and culture have over Australian society. Or perhaps it is because, for two hundred years, the European colonisers of Australia have struggled to come to terms with the extreme climatic variability of the continent. Australia has a boom-and-bust ecology. Settlers have had to learn, slowly and reluctantly, that ‘drought’ is not aberrant but natural; they have struggled to understand aseasonal and non-annual climatic variation; they have had to accept a wilful nature that they cannot control or change. They are still learning. And now, suddenly, Australians are confronted by long-term, one-way climatic change for which they, in part, are held responsible. It challenges everything they have so far learned about their new land.

… Industrialisation has initiated a new geological era that historians like to call the Anthropocene, characterised by pervasive human influence on Earth processes. It is both awful and awe-inspiring that we are now crossing a threshold of geological eras. As a result of our own actions we may be leaving behind not just the Holocene, the past ten thousand years of relatively stable climate, but also the Pleistocene, the several-million-year period of cyclical ice ages that has seen the evolution of modern humans. We have collectively become a force in climate that is comparable to the astronomical causes of ice ages.

Monday morning in Mernda

Peter Mares
ABC Radio National presenter, author and adjunct research fellow at Swinburne University of Technology investigating issues of migration, borders and human movement.

As cities sprawl, infrastructure sags and politics stymies creative approaches to planning, public support is growing for a strategy that appears much easier to implement: rein in population growth. The thinking is appealing. Reducing the number of new residents will ease the pressure on transport, land, water and the environment. Fewer new people means less need for new housing on the suburban fringe. According to the rudimentary laws of supply and demand, this should also bring down prices and make housing more affordable. Such simple calculations fail to account for the effects of inflationary policies like negative gearing, a low capital gains tax, the privileged tax treatment of the family home and speculative land-banking by developers. But such complexities fade into the background against the allure of a simple population-based approach to our problems.

… Compared with other developed nations Australians are enthusiastic breeders, and this accounts for about a third of the country’s population growth. In 2008 Australia’s total fertility rate – the number of babies per woman was 1.97.

This is the highest recorded rate since 1977, and puts Australia ahead of some middle-income countries in the developing world like Brazil (1.83 babies per woman), Thailand (1.82) and Iran (1.78); substantially ahead of European nations like Spain (1.47), Greece (1.39), Italy (1.39) and Germany (1.3); and way ahead of rich Asian nations like Japan (1.26), Singapore (1.26) and Korea (1.22).

… In the long term, a fertility rate of 1.97 per cent would not, on its own, be enough to increase Australia’s population, were it not that, in the short term, we have got much better at postponing death. But no one lives forever, so barring an unlikely further sharp jump in fertility, natural growth alone would eventually lead to a stable or gently falling population.

This is why the population debate focuses on immigration, which accounts for the other two-thirds of Australia’s population growth. While there is no immediate, simple or direct relationship between reproductive choices and the introduction or removal of baby bonuses (or paid maternity leave, family allowances or tax breaks), the causal link between government-controlled migration levels and population increase appears obvious. The federal government need only pull the right policy lever and migration, and population growth, will slow.

… Successful in avoiding recession and in stoking the resources boom, Australia is drawing workers from around the world at a rapid rate. This is the ultimate irony – the population growth that ‘threatens our way of life’ is accelerated by the very prosperity that underpins it. The problem is not so much the escalation of our numbers but the escalation of our wants. Growing up in a house with only one bathroom did not mean my childhood was deprived. My parents were not unhappy because they lacked an ensuite and a walk-in robe. The average floor area of new homes increased by 40 per cent between the mid-1980s and the early 2000s, even though the average number of people per household fell sharply during the same period. Our homes are now the largest in the world, though the blocks they cover are no larger. Mernda, in the aptly named Plenty Valley, is just one of many sites of collision between our growing numbers and our ever inflating aspirations for ‘lifestyle without compromise’.

The greatest spoiler
Salvation in the cities

Brendan Gleeson
Professor of urban policy at Griffith University. His new book is Lifeboat Cities (UNSW Press)

Australia’s development history is, as the historian Geoffrey Bolton describes it, a tale of spoils and spoilers. White settlers unleashed a rough-handed growth model that saw the land as an enemy to be vanquished. Its original owners were not more than troublesome fauna.

… The population boosters dominating the Big Australia debate have assumed the mantle of realism. Their heralds are the business lobbies, sensible politicians and the experts paid to cherish their perspective with misty-eyed sincerity. Contrary views are forborne with an air of patient superiority. Whatever the arguments, the realists say, we are heading inevitably towards a bigger population. The debate, in their eyes, is merely a wash cycle, helping us to spruce up for a newer, larger Australia. And what of climate change, resource insecurity and the possibility of political reaction? To quote the cultural critic Terry Eagleton, these realists have clearly not been reading the newspapers.

In this most uncertain of worlds, a Western civilisation deprived of the certainties of ideology, faith and human identity, there is one thing we can be sure of: our species is already in transit to what the scientist James Lovelock calls ‘The Next World’. It will be a world dominated by a global climate shift that we cannot yet describe fully, but which is inevitable and approaching fast.

… According to James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies: ‘We have to stabilise emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade…we cannot wait for new technologies like capturing emissions from burning coal. We have to act with what we have.’

That was four years ago. For his part, James Lovelock sees humanity, in this century, battered to the point of near extinction and, at best, re-emerging from the crises as a changed and mortified species. He thinks a temperature rise of three or four degrees is unavoidable and will reduce the liveable surface to a few ‘lifeboat’ regions, now the cooler extremes of the Earth. Australia is not on his lifeboat register.

If we have just a few years to prevent the worst and prepare for what lies ahead, there is little point in considering the many palliative measures that bog down the climate and population debates. Until growth is rethought and reframed there will be no politics to support systemic climate response. In 2007 the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-Moon, pleaded: ‘I need a political answer. This is an emergency and for emergency situations we need emergency action.’ After Copenhagen, I think he’s still waiting for his answer.

… Taking to the lifeboats means abandoning the ship of fools that was the spoiler growth model. We will have to end the development game and all its entropic speculation and self-interest. An energised common purpose will be needed to bring us through the crisis. We must think about how to manage ourselves on a long voyage to uncertain shores. Rural and regional Australia will not be abandoned, but its fortunes will come largely in the wake of our cities.

… A challenge will be to define and practise what Lovelock describes as the ‘ethics of a lifeboat world’. These are ‘wholly different from those of the cosy self-indulgence of the latter part of the twentieth-century’.

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HINTERLAND TIMES