Growth idealogues celebrate as Australia's population tops 23 million

Growth ideologues should be smiling now that Australia’s population has topped 23 million.

Prof Tim Flannery posits
 Australia's ideal population
 carrying capacity is
between eight and 12
million.

More people, in corporate talk, equates with more profits.

Behind that shiny corporate facade, is a paradigm that encourages endless expansion; a tumour-like growth of which any talk about control is taboo.

Beyond that, any discussion about limiting population growth is equally distasteful for almost immediately reason and logic is abandoned and emotion hogs the spotlight.

The 2007 Australian of the Year, Professor Tim Flannery, presently a member of the Australian Climate Commission, has calculated that Australia’s long-term carrying capacity was between eight and 12 million.

He points out that Australia’s population had reached those marks in 1950 and 1968 respectively.

Considering Prof Flannery’s observation we have either, in the first instance, more than doubled Australia’s population carrying capacity or nearly doubled the second number.

The idea of a “big” Australia is out of step with what Australian’s actually need; rather than bigger, we need better.

Shepparton is bound for “bigger” with statistics on the City of Greater Shepparton website suggesting that by 2031 a further 16 500 people will live here, producing a population nearing 80 000.

Arguments that bigger is always better and more beautiful are riddled with fallacies; unintended consequences that are assembling on the horizon now, poised to disable humanity.

Questions about the cause of climate change, an undeniable scientific and practical reality, attract varied answers, most of which are in themselves correct, but rarely do they focus on the reality that there is simply too many of us.

Any suggestion that we somehow humanely control our numbers produces an almost immediate and sharp passionate response loaded with accusations of Nazi-like eugenics and a big brother-like forced abandonment of our responsibility to pro-create.

That “responsibility” is many faceted, yes, we do have a responsibility to pro-create, but at replacement level or less, but we also have an intergenerational obligation, a responsibility to those that follow to live with restraint, care for the planet and so leave the earth healthier than it was then when we arrived.

Population growth is exponential and the likelihood of us leaving the earth in better shape than we found it is becoming more remote as each day passes.

Education is the first, the last and beyond birth control, restraint and good sense, the only ally upon which we can call to slow the world’s burgeoning population growth.

Modern life is loaded with endless distractions and the corporate world, aided by myriad problematic institutions, would have us believe all is well.

It is unfair however, to blame upon the world’s corporations and our institutions as the real responsibility rests with us for we have failed to educate ourselves and so do not understand the limits to growth.

Youth talks and age listens

Age sat quietly and listened intently as youth explained the building blocks of life and what is “here?”

A view inside the Large
Hadron Collider.

A journey that began as a different way to take a “gap year”, hesitated momentarily in Shepparton recently to explain a sliver of particle physics.

Listening as the Shepparton born and bred, Kristian McDonald, told a little of himself and then explored the universe, the one we can see, and then, his speciality, the one we can’t, were about 30 members of Shepparton’s University of Third Age (U3A).

Kristian, 36, an advocate of education, at any age, exposed the wonders of modern particle physics in a two hour presentation to inquisitive, but older minds, some of whom described what they had seen and heard in rapturous terms.

Kristian had boldly taken an idea so broad in concept and yet so small in reality that it can’t be seen and helped those at U3A’s “Big Issues in Science” class understand “what is here?”

Oddly it was that very question that arose during a gap year after first studying aerospace and modified to “why are we here?” that helped Kristian understand that it was science that ignited his interest and spawned a whole new life for him.

The pursuit of science, specifically the examination of the near invisible, took him around the world to experience science in Canada and then for a time the excitement and wonder of working at one of the world’s leading science institutions in Germany, the Max Planck Institute.

After his brief stopover in his hometown, Kristian is now working at the University of Sydney.

Kristian has not been to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) on the Swiss-Franco border near Geneva, but sees this nearly 30 kilometres in circumference piece of equipment as a wonderful example of what can be achieved when people have a common goal and so work together.

The LHC was built in collaboration between more than 10 000 scientists and engineers from over 100 countries, as well as hundreds of universities and laboratories, again from all parts of the world.

As an example of one of the great engineering milestones of mankind, the LHC, according to Kristian, epitomizes what happens when people collaborate for good, rather than behave in a confrontational manner.

Collaboration was also apparent in the room – the combined wisdom of the U3A members matched Kristian’s youthful knowledge and together they become a powerful resource that balanced his vigor, enthusiasm and acute understanding of physics with the prudence and scholarship that only age can provide.

Years of intense study for Kristian could not be articulated or illustrated in just two hours, but after that brief session, those listening understood more fully what is “here”.

 

War is a reality, but our imagination sustains it

Humans, it is believed, are unique among earth’s fauna in being able to imagine.



Lawrence H. Keeley
helps us understand
some about war in
his 1996 book.

In fact, it is such a powerful facility that the lives of many are completely derailed through an addiction to uninhibited imagination.

The power of the mind is such that it can lock an individual, a community, a nation or a whole raft of people around the globe into a mindset that draws criticism from an equal number.

Being right or wrong can depend upon one’s faith, belief in science or an alliance with whatever frippery it is that has swept around the world ensnaring the vulnerable imaginations of people as it went.

As humans we are loaded with frailties and those fragilities are capitalized on by those eager to see the life, and its various incumbencies, they prefer embedded in the world community.

Imagination, with all its distortions and blemishes shapes our lives and another of those moments upon which its continuance hinges on imagination has just passed.

The invasion of Turkey by Australian and New Zealand soldiers and other allied forces in April 1915 has set alight the Australian imagination and although fundamentally wrong, hundreds of deaths are made right through appeal to misplaced human sentimentalities.

The Anzac Day “industry” is driven by governments at all levels and they obscure the brutality and tragedy of war behind a murkiness that dissuades us from allowing our imaginations to focus on the actual catastrophe, rather to be drawn in by repeatedly retold stories of mateship, valour, courage and success in the face of overwhelming opposition.

Life for most of us, beyond a few personal highs and lows, is pretty bland and rarely do we ever experience anything like the dynamics of a war that allow us to unleash our emotions and imaginations.

Anzac Day is one of the moments that directly target those sleeping emotions and imaginations tapping into our covert nationalism from which our politicians draw their sustenance and legitimacy.

In his 1996 book “War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage”, Oxford University archaeology professor, Lawrence H. Keeley, said: “The stimulus of war has incited human beings to prodigies of ingenuity, improvisation, cooperation, vandalism, and cruelty. It is the richest field on which to match wits and luck; no peaceful endeavour can equal its penalties for failure, and few can exceed its rewards for success.

“It remains the most theatrical of human activities, combining tragedy, high drama, melodrama, spectacle, action, farce, and even low comedy, War displays the human in extreme,” he wrote.

The good life is found in anchored emotions, with war quite the opposite when passions are let off the leash, set free and so able to respond without inhibition to our imaginations, wicked or otherwise.

Celebration as free-market juggernaut staggers

The free-market advocates should be celebrating.

Holden has worked the system perfectly in that the car manufacturer has privatized the profits and socialized the costs.

In the past decade, the Australian and State Governments, that is you and me, have given more than $2 billion to the company and now, to further enrich its takings, it has sacked 500 people – Holden has pocketed the profit and we pay the bill.

Simplified equations can always be interpreted in any way preferred, but this one is loaded with indiscretions that are not a public responsibility, rather the success, failure or otherwise of Holden should be contained within the free market it so idolizes.

The world in which Holden was founded, grew, boomed and profited massively was different from what exists today; different in that growth, as it is traditionally understood, equates with difficulties we can’t yet comprehend.

Rather than prop-up what is a struggling, if not dying industry, our governments, Local, State and Federal, should be using their resources to help us understand how we can flourish in a society that is not dependent on economic growth.

That is quite the opposite of the philosophy that saw us align ourselves with an industry that because of what it is and the appeal it has to our egoistic wants, holds humanity hostage as it plunders our fancies and earth’s finite resources.

It seems our governments believe they have a mandate, and maybe they do, to ensure the validity of these inappropriate businesses; inappropriate as they are entirely about only answering wants and pay little, or no role in ensuring human needs are attended to.

We face multiply difficulties, among them the fact that we live in a liberal democracy; a fundamental good that has within it a disabling difficulty enlivened by the inability of politicians, and us as the electors, to look beyond their present terms of office.

Humans have solidified their supremacy in the food chain through their unique ability to imagine, memorize and plan ahead, skills that have been absent as we have sacrificed altruism, decency, fairness and an ethical understanding of our responsibility to care for other species and the environment on which they, and we, depend to economic growth.

Rather than support a dying and monolithic industry, our energy, and cash, should be directed at reassessing the corporate world and replacing it with a more fine-grained society that emulates the belief of Chief Economic Advisor to the UK National Coal Board and author, the late E.F. Schumacher, who said “Small is beautiful”.

If we are to have anything significant in society that has access to the communal bank, our taxes, it should be something that carries the pre-fix “public”, such as a nation-wide transit system.

The promised land awaits, but we can't get there from here

The promised-land is close, but you can’t get there from here.

It is so close that you can almost see it breathe and yet while the vision may be clear it is, in fact, unreachable.

Victoria's Premier,
Denis Napthine.

The promised-land is exactly that, promised. You work, you save, you deal and you even make promises, but still the destination seems as distant as ever.

With your shoulder to the wheel, with your back bent and your mind tuned to the task, you draw a little closer to your goal, but then the illusion simply slips away.

The promised-land glistens on the horizon, it shines with the assurance of new day, a day so glorious that the sun never seems to set and if you listen to the corporate boosters, life just keep getting better.

Humanity is locked in something of an ideological arm wrestle with some, for whom life is getting better, declaring the promised land has arrived, while others are as equally convinced that the promise is not only hollow, rather a fallacy, an illusion manufactured by the rich minority for their benefit, paid for the majority.

The promised-land can be seen as an allegory of a gated community – you can see it, you know it is there, you see many coming and going, but the gates remain forever closed to those without the necessary social connections and, even more importantly, a handsome bank balance.

Events of the past week have blunted budding optimism with Tony Abbott declaring that, as Australia’s Prime Minister he would disband our Climate Commission, effectively sacking the head of the organization and former Australian of the Year, Tim Flannery.

The promised-land as seen by Abbott is really the stone-age for he would also repeal Australian’s only true effort to combat our carbon dioxide emissions, the misnamed “carbon tax”.

His Victorian Coalition Party compatriot and Premier, Denis Napthine, also stands with those who misunderstand world events; those seemingly unable to understand that tomorrow will be different in every sense from today and his government is spending millions researching a container port will be ultimately as useful as an umbrella in a tornado.

The promised-land must be somewhere else for many in the world are behaving in a manner unbecoming a child; they glare at each other, belligerently brandishing nuclear weapons and declaring their use will reveal a better world.

There must be parallel universes for this one, it seems, has been taken over by aliens, those who put profit and property ahead of people, and strangers who see the good life as amounting to little more than accumulation and subjugation of the other.

The promised-land awaits but that is what it will remain until those in “this land” understand access rests with inclusivity, fairness, collaboration and sharing.

Living the 'good life' demands a Steady State Economy

It is dramatic, but humanity stands nervously and with decided uncertainty in shadows cast by a pall of serious environmental degradation.

Herman Daly.

The world shudders as man, who equates success with growth and has long enjoyed a free ride, can hear the banker, nature, saying “enough is enough”.

Rather than reach for an economy that is always expanding, it is time we reset the economical thermostat and attuned ourselves to understanding and living with a Steady State Economy.

Growth for the sake of yet more growth, an author and professor of environmental studies and politics, David Orr, says is a bankrupt and eventually lethal idea.

Author and Canadian academic, science broadcaster and environmental activist, David Suzuki has said: "Somehow, we have come to think the whole purpose of the economy is to grow, yet growth is not a goal or purpose. The pursuit of endless growth is suicidal."

One of the founders of the field of ecological economics and a leading critic of neoclassical growth theory, Herman Daly, has defined a Steady State Economy.

He says it is: “An economy with constant stocks of people and artifacts, maintained at some desired, sufficient levels by low rates of maintenance ‘throughput’, that is, by the lowest feasible flows of matter and energy from the first stage of production to the last stage of consumption.”

A Steady State Economy, therefore, aims for stable or mildly fluctuating levels in population and consumption of energy and materials. Birth rates equal death rates, and production rates equal depreciation rates.

Complex? Probably, but no more than that which would confront us if we sat down now with a blank slate to design what exists; a process that has unleashed massive inequality and equally distressing environmental ruin around the world.

What we have works for a rich minority – less than one per cent of Americans control most of the country's total wealth, and although Australia is different, it is similar.

A Steady State Economy would inherently embrace a redistribution of wealth, arriving at a point at which rewards were not recognized in dollars, rather in happiness and contentment enabling an escape from the proven pointless rigour of the traditional measure of economic success, the Gross National Product (GNP).

The GNP is simply the flow of money, that in no way separates good from bad and so payment to skilled workers is measured just as is the cost of providing relief to communities damaged by recent tornado in north-east Victoria; repairing flood damaged Numurkah or Nathalia; restoring large swathes of Victoria drowned in flood waters or attending to the death and damage of Victoria’s Black Saturday fires.

A Steady State Economy makes the good life possible, uninhibited growth condemns it.

Blind adherence is leading us toward the abyss

Our blind adherence to what exists stands between us and mitigating the effects of climate change.

It is not too difficult to see and
understand how our global
temperatures continue to rise.

A never-ending retinue of recipes aimed at resolving climate change or global warming, call it what you please, are paraded before us, but in nearly every instance those ideas are about maintaining life as it is, or at least as it is for the rich minority, and so ensuring the sustenance of ways of living that brought upon humanity the very troubles these schemes purport to resolve.

Emerging dilemmas have the potential to decimate humanity with climatologists illustrating, unquestionably, that the human-induced changes to earth’s atmosphere, and so the earth’s weather patterns, are so expansive and dramatic, that the near “goldilocks” conditions of the past 10,000 years of “not too hot, not too cold, but just right” are quickly ending.

Earth’s surface temperatures are nearly one degree above pre-industrial levels and carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen from about 280 parts per million (ppm) prior to the 18^th century to nearly 400 ppm today, breaking the nexus we have enjoyed for millennia between rather pleasant, predictable and understandable weather and something that is quite different and largely untenable for many species on earth, among them humans.

Circumstances arising from lifestyles rooted in a paradigm that depend upon endless growth and the continued combustion of fossil fuels, primarily coal and oil, threaten us all and will only get worse before they get better for carbon dioxide, a natural by-product of that process is a long-lived chemical compound and so what is produced today will be with us for centuries to come. The maxim, “This too shall pass” doesn’t apply.

At a less than one degree increase in global temperatures we are witnessing some unexpected changes to the world’s weather, changes to which humans and associated infrastructure are not adapted, and yet a two degree increase is not simply predicted, rather unavoidable; changes that will bring with them what we, humans and many other species, will find not only challenging, but rather difficult to survive.

The science of climate change is quite complex, but even a layperson can understand it to see that what lies ahead will be, by brute insistence, quite different from what has been.

Proposals to avert the difficulty (we can no longer avoid it for we are 30 years too late) include high-risk and unproven geo-engineering ideas, including carbon dioxide sequestration, and significant alternative energy intervention (unlikely as the fossil fuel industry has massive political and social clout), but never have we truly explored dramatic changes to our way of living, substantially reducing energy use, changing our egoistic consumptive wants and switching our near obsessive interest from building bank balances to building resourceful and resilient neighbourhoods.