The idea of putting a cost on carbon was just a small step
toward helping us understand that an externality is a real cost that someone, somewhere
has to burden.
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| The Yellowstone National Park - the return of wolves brought new life to all aspects of the park. |
Corporations and businesses of the world, including all
those in Australia, have for centuries cheerfully ignored, to the benefit of
their bank balances, the real cost of externalities.
Of course, it is unfair and irresponsible, to lump responsibility
for ignoring externalities upon only business, as individuals, you and me, are
equally liable for how the machine, that is the economy, works as we are also intimate
players in the activity.
Speaking on a panel at Shepparton’s Eastbank before the
naming of the winner of the 2014 Indigenous Ceramic Arts Award, Arts Victoria’s
Liz Little said “Everything affects everything else”.
Liz was obviously speaking about art, but she could have
been talking about externalities for everything we do clearly impacts
everything else.
A clear and obvious example of that comes from America’s
Yellowstone National Park where wolves, which had been missing for 70 years,
were reintroduced in 1995.
Although a predator, the wolves controlled the size of deer
herds, forced them to different parts of the park, allowing amazing regrowth or
trees, plants and shrubs encouraging the return of birdlife; beavers began
damming streams and rivers again encouraging the return of various species that
thrived in the pools; and balance was returning to the park.
Ms Little wasn’t talking about wolves in Yellowstone Park
and nor was she talking about externalities when she said “Everything affects
everything else”, but her comment was prescient.
Her truism takes us direct to the problem and until we are
prepared to put a cost on our externalities, those things we dump in our
atmosphere, our oceans, our rivers and many landfills, we will continue to soil
our own nest, making it ultimately unliveable.
Australia’s “great big new tax” (the carbon tax) was a
first, and timid step toward seeing people here at least acknowledging that
“Everything affects everything else”.
It was also a somewhat apprehensive move toward having us
understand the real costs, financial and otherwise, of externalities and the
complication of ignoring the rather brutal reality that “Everything affects
everything else”.
Solutions to this dilemma are straightforward and simple,
but as they require significant changes to our behaviour they are not socially
palatable.
However, necessity will soon override any reservations as
our abuse of those externalities will brings changes to what we see as normal.
Maybe it is time we familiarized ourselves with the idea
behind the Yellowstone Park wolves and brought the balance back into our lives.
