Home Object Activities Contact Who's who How to join NSF How to support NSF What's on Nature and Society Editorial Few Australians could be unaware that a new disease has entered the country. Starting with a couple of horses exhibiting a raised temperature, the fear of an equine influenza outbreak dominated the news, movement of horses was banned and the word quarantine attained a new prominence. It was not the suffering of individual horses that made the outbreak newsworthy, but the fear that the spring racing carnivals might not be held, and the thoroughbred breeding industry would be disrupted. Although racing enthusiasts would not agree, human society would not be harmed in any way if horse racing ceased to exist. Yet the threat of hundreds or thousands of jockeys, strappers, trainers and other staff being out of work, and of flow-on effects on the tourism, hospitality and fashion industries, led to calls for the outbreak to be declared a natural disaster, with federal relief for those affected. Weeks later the impact of this flu has continued spreading, affecting recreational riders, saddlers and others well away from the racing world. There are lessons for society to be learnt from this episode. One is that quarantine is important and must be maintained and enforced – despite those who call for its weakening to allow more imports. A second lesson is that our lives and the economy are interconnected in many ways and disruption spreads in many directions. What then can we expect in the near future when people finally wake up to what is happening in the natural world and the effect this will have on our unnatural economy? Two films, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth and the documentary A Crude Awakening have tried to show the public what we are facing with regard to human-induced climate change, and oil depletion, respectively. Gore’s film has certainly made quite an impact. Now a third film What a Way to Go has linked these two problems with two others, human overpopulation and loss of biodiversity. Some viewers find this film too confronting. Yet even this film does not cover the range of major problems we can identify. The plight of the oceans, deforestation, falling food supplies and many others are already on the list. Occasionally environmental organisations put out surveys asking respondents to rank their greatest environmental concerns. Which one would you choose as the most urgent, most serious from all the above? This misses the point. Each one on the list is enmeshed in all the others. There is one problem with many facets and that problem is human destruction of the planet’s life support systems. This destruction is caused by our over consumption of practically everything, and our equally great propensity to make garbage out of everything. Humans are an ingenious bunch and they constantly find new ways to trash the planet. In nature every species takes whatever it needs from the environment, and its wastes in turn are used by other species, in a never ending cycle. We, in contrast, take what we need, and then what we want, and invent more wants. We often find ways to make the resulting wastes poisonous or indestructible or both. Then we wonder why nature cannot cope. To solve the problem we must address the whole problem, which is, basically, the way we run our lives and our economy. Until we realise this, most proposed solutions will not prevent environmental destruction. If you think that climate change is the main problem, and that it is caused only by the burning of fossil fuels, then you can imagine that changing to ethanol, or nuclear power, might be the solution. If you think more deeply, you find that large scale production of ethanol would probably need industrial agriculture, which uses more energy than it produces. It also uses grains that are needed for food. Indeed this competition is already forcing up the price of many staple foods around the world, and, combined with poor harvests in many places, causing a decline in grain stocks. In addition it is being used as an excuse to destroy native forests to plant crops, resulting in ever greater carbon dioxide emissions. Nuclear power is far from greenhouse neutral once you consider mining, processing, transport and construction costs. Also it causes intractable waste problems. Wiser heads have concluded that the worst thing that could happen to the world would be for humans to find an inexhaustible source of energy that enabled us to continue on our blind way to ever more growth, ever more destruction. Over the last two centuries we have indeed acted as though we have such a source. Coal fuelled the industrial transition. Then oil provided the most energy intensive and versatile fuel source we are ever likely to have. We have acted as though that could continue forever, but now the oil age is coming to an end. Few people realise what that will mean. When the financial markets finally wake up to the ramifications of a decline in oil supplies it could lead to panic and a financial meltdown. By then it may well be too late to take the measures we will need to weather the storm. The only sane approach to limiting the damage we are doing to the planet and to our descendants is to cut back on our demands on the earth, starting now. We need to learn to live within the planet’s limits, using the daily ration of energy provided by the sun, the amount of food the earth can grow, and restricting our consumption to leave room for other species to live their lives, too. Rather than being lords of creation, we are actually dependent on all the other species that together provide the ecosystem services that keep the planet habitable. They purify the water, make the soil fertile, keep the air breathable, modify local environments and provide our food. Unfortunately, as Chris Mooney wrote in his review of Al Gore’s new book The Assault of Reason (New Scientist 21 July 2007) ‘Perhaps the most inconvenient truth of all is that reason itself – and particularly social science research – shows that most citizens will not have a deep understanding of most issues most of the time. They have neither the time nor the inclination to become fully informed about everything – and who can blame them?’ Maybe we should not blame most ordinary citizens, or even most ordinary politicians, but unless many more of them actually become aware of human dependence on the vast interconnectedness of life and all natural systems, then we cannot have much hope for the future. With an election in the offing, we have to try to get all political parties to increase their understanding of these issues. And we are in urgent need of some extraordinary politicians who can understand our situation much more clearly than most do now. Jenny Wanless October - November 2007 edition accessible here Back to top ________________________________________________________________
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