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Quotations featured in the April - May 2007 edition

We need to tackle social aspects of the problem such as over-population and why people are now so smitten with the idea of becoming rich. Why do we now prefer wealth over wellbeing?

Frank Fenner, NSF patron, at the opening of ANU’s Fenner School
March 2007

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We have made an appalling mess of this planet and mostly with liberal good intentions. Even now, when the bell has started tolling to mark our ending, we still talk of sustainable development and renewable energy as if these feeble offerings would be accepted by Gaia as an appropriate and affordable sacrifice. We are like a careless and thoughtless family member whose presence is destructive and who seems to think an apology is enough. We are part of the Gaian family, and valued as such, but until we stop acting as if human welfare was all that mattered, and was the excuse for our bad behaviour, all talk of further development of any kind is unacceptable.

James Lovelock
The Revenge of Gaia, 2006, p147

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In times of change, learners inherit the Earth while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Eric Hoffer
Reflections on the Human Condition, 1973, p. 32

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Until we can persuade people that they are going to have to make some serious adjustments to their lifestyles, then we won’t get near to solving climate change, even if we have the best scientists in the world working on the problem.

Frank Fenner, NSF patron, at the opening of ANU’s Fenner School
March 2007

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The chess-board is the world; the pieces are the phenomena of the universe; the rules of the game are what we call the laws of Nature. The player on the other side is hidden from us. We know that his play is always fair, just and patient. But we also know, to our cost, that he never overlooks a mistake, or makes the smallest allowance for ignorance.

Thomas Henry Huxley

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The external reality of ecological scarcity has cut the ground out from under our own political system, making merely reformist policies of ecological management all but useless. At best, reforms can postpone the inevitable for a few decades at the probable cost of increasing the severity of the eventual day of reckoning. In brief, liberal democracy as we know it — that is, our theory or ‘paradigm’ of politics — is doomed by ecological scarcity; we need a completely new political philosophy and set of political institutions. Moreover, it appears that the basic principles of modern industrial civilisation are also incompatible with ecological scarcity and that the whole ideology of modernity growing out of the Enlightenment, especially such central tenets as individualism, may no longer be viable.

William Ophuls and Stephen Boyan,
Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited, 1992, p2

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Nuclear has problems. If we adopt the same technology we’ve got now, it runs out of fuel before we’ve even started practically in about fifty years. We can operate at the same rate, and in fifty years all the fuel, even the warhead fuel, if you were convert it back into fuel, has gone. So that’s not really an option, that’s not serious. That’s just trying to support a local industry that wants to be supported at the moment, but it’s not really looking at the problem.

David Noone
ABC Science Show, 10 February 2006

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“I drive a V8 because I reckon Canberra needs a beach.”

Comment on the Canberra blog website
www.the-riotact.com in March 2007

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If Rome had nukes are we really to believe they would have stayed in the silos for the last 2,000 years?

A comment posted to the internet November 2006

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As for pointing to our mental failures with scorn or dismay, we might as well profess disappointment with the mechanics of gravity or the laws of thermodynamics. In other words, the degree of disillusionment we feel in response to any particular human behaviour is the precise measure of our ignorance of its evolutionary and genetic origins.

Reg Morrison
Plague Species

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All government – indeed, every human benefit and enjoyment, every virtue and every prudent act – is founded on compromise and barter.

Edmund Burke 1729 - 1797

We have made this appalling mess of the planet and mostly with rampant liberal good intentions. Even now, when the bell has started tolling to mark our ending, we still talk of sustainable development and renewable energy as if these feeble offerings would be ... an appropriate and affordable sacrifice. We are like a careless and thoughtless family member whose presence is destructive and who seems to think that an apology is enough. ...until we stop acting as if human welfare was all that mattered, and was an excuse for our bad behaviour, all talk of further development of any kind is unacceptable.

James Lovelock
The Revenge of Gaia, p148
Showing that, while Burke can bargain with other humans, we cannot bargain with nature; nature does not compromise one iota

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It’s no wonder we don’t defend the land where we live. We don’t live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away in space and time; and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.

Derrick Jensen
Endgame, 2006, p. 761

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We tell lies to each other. If Bill Clinton and the timber industry can frame the debate over deforestation as ‘jobs versus owls’, the deforesters have already won before we can start. If they can frame the debate such that people believe forests need to be cut down so they won’t be killed by beetles, they’ve already won. If George Bush and the timber industry can frame the debate over deforestation such that people believe forests need to be cut down to keep them from burning, they’ve already won.

If those in power can frame the ‘debate’ over the murder of the planet into the question of how to implement ‘sustainable development’ (look how they’ve already framed it by calling industrialization ‘development’) they’ve already won: we are fighting over techniques to salvage industrial civilisation with its burgeoning population, not ways to save the planet.

Derrick Jensen
Endgame, 2006, p. 756

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Human domination - some numbers

Consider the extent of our domination. Modern humans, now numbering six billion and predicted to go to ten billion, have left not one ecosystem on the surface of the earth free of pervasive human influence, transforming more than half the land on the planet for their own use (a quarter for forestry, a quarter for pasture, 3 per cent for industry, housing and transport), consuming more than 40 per cent of the total photosynthetic productivity of the sun, using 55 per cent of the world’s fresh water, controlling and regulating two-thirds of all rivers and streams, consuming a vast variety of plant, animal, and mineral resources, often to depletion, at a pace that is estimated not to be sustainable for more than fifty years.

Kirkpatrick Sale, After Eden, 2006 p. 3

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If a little knowledge is dangerous, where is the man who has so much as to be out of danger?

Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–1895)

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The third and most interesting claim is that we need a bigger population in order to make Canberra more cosmopolitan. This is an opinion about how Canberrans should live usually expressed by those who live elsewhere. The belief that it is not sufficiently cosmopolitan is based on a crude stereotype of life in Canberra. For these commentators ‘cosmopolitan’ seems to mean more cafe strips and inner city grunge. In reality there is no community in Australia that is more worldly than that of Canberra, with a high proportion having lived abroad for extended periods. It also enjoys more poets, artists and intellectuals per hectare than any other place in Australia.

Clive Hamilton
Canberra Times, 30 May 2005

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Even today money is a language for translating the work of the farmer into the work of the barber, doctor, engineer, or plumber. As a vast social metaphor, bridge, or translator, money – like writing – speeds up exchange and tightens the bonds of interdependence in any community. It gives great spatial extension and control to political organisation.

Marshall McLuhan
Understanding Media, 1964

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Management weaknesses

In the Australian Financial Review of 9 February 2007, Henry Ergas asked “Why is it that costs and times are usually underestimated, rather than being underestimated in some cases and overestimated in others?” He was writing in the light of research which showed that 84 per cent of all software projects do not finish on time, on budget and with all features installed. Other research showed that for projects not cancelled, costs exceeded expectations by an average 189 per cent; and for technically complex software projects, over 50 per cent failed completely and were abandoned.

He suggests three factors that seem to be involved – factors which we are also seeing in government responses to climate change and the reluctance to embrace change.

“First, overconfidence, which manifests in unduly optimistic forecasts, appearing to be an inherent feature of managerial decision making. While ‘gilding the lily’ can arise from the self-interest that proponents of projects have in getting things under way, that is not the whole story. Equally important, though more subtle, is the fact individuals with high levels of self-confidence (not only relative to others, but compared to their own abilities) tend to do better in organizations, including in terms of rising to positions of authority. This embeds as an ‘optimism bias’ into even the most stringent commercial decision-making processes.

“Second, as previously ignored difficulties emerge, the ‘tyranny of sunk costs’ comes into play. Projects which would not have been undertaken if their total costs had been known at the outset, are not cancelled because the benefits of completing the project are thought to be greater than the marginal cost of completion. Total costs mount as each evaluation concludes spending a (relatively) little bit more will make the exercise worthwhile.

“Third and last, as the time taken to resolve problems causes project timetables to stretch out, pressures arise to adapt systems being developed to take advantage of new technologies and to provide expanded functionality. This rework inevitably increases total project costs, especially in systems that rely on large numbers of closely integrated subsystems.”

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If we want to stay within the bounds of reality we must look to a more qualitative future, a future where there will be no certain answers to many of the important questions we have about the future of human interactions with the earth.

O.H. Pilkey and Linda Pilkey-Jarvis,
Useless Arithmetic: why environmental scientists can’t predict the future

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In the words of the Atlas of Population and the Environment, compiled by the American Academy of Science in 2000, “Like volcanoes and earthquakes, humans have become a force in nature.” Only more so—humans now produce about three thousand times more heat energy on average than the world’s volcanoes—and on a worldwide scale without precedence.

Kirkpatrick Sale
After Eden, 2006, p. 3

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Changing the management of farmland to use organic and permaculture strategies and techniques can rebuild the storage of soil carbon, fertilty and water to close to those of natural grasslands and forests. It is arguably the greatest single contribution we could make to ensure the future survival of humanity.

David Holmgren
Permaculture principles and pathways beyond sustainability, 2002, p. 37

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Freud, in Totem and Taboo, wrote of the earliest attempts to ‘subject the processes of nature to the will of man”’... you can do this only when you have a deep-seated conviction that humans have not only the power effectively to intervene in nature ... but the legitimacy of doing so, to achieve what J G Frazer called ‘a sovereignty over nature’ Freud remarked that this principle, standing behind all magic, was ‘the omnipotence of thought’, the notion that the world was governed not by independent physical laws, but by human mental constructs, and he noted that this delusional view in contemporary terms would be evidence of neurosis.

Kirkpatrick Sale
After Eden, 2006, p.44

April - May 2007 edition accessible here

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