2004 FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

Ruth Fincher is Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, and has been Professor of Urban Planning there since 1997. Prior to this she held academic positions in Geography at the University of Melbourne, and at McGill and McMaster Universities (in Canada). In the early 1990s, she worked in the Australian Bureau of Immigration Research, conducting and managing research on immigration, population issues and cities. She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2002.
Her research interests include urban outcomes of immigration and multiculturalism, diversity in cities, inequality and locational disadvantage. She co-edited Creating Unequal Futures? Rethinking Inequality, Poverty and Disadvantage (2001), Australian Poverty: Then and Now (1998), and Cities of
Difference (1998).

Geography and the population-environment debate
by Ruth Fincher

Session 4: Questions/discussion

We now move to talk about the discipline which perhaps of all those we have discussed this morning has questions of social science and environmental science at its very core.

In Australian geography since the early 20th century work of Professor Griffith Taylor, of the University of Sydney, the population-environment debate has been synonymous with the question of the appropriate population size for our continent, given its environmental characteristics, or what its overall carrying capacity would be. Eminent geographers through the 20th century have supported Griffith Taylor's view that cultivation and settlement should not spread into certain tropical and desert regions, but because of the form of this population-environment debate contemporary geographers rarely engage with it, so inconsistent is it with forms of knowledge produced in contemporary geography.

The politicisation of the population-environment debate and the readiness with which it can, and has in the past on several occasions, become polemic have also dissuaded scholars from identifying with it and caused them, in my view, to think that there are more important and tractable questions to consider about our environment and our population. So really I cannot describe the work geographers characteristically do on this debate or topic at present, because I don't think they are trying to advance the debate in the terms in which it was presented historically.

So in this very brief set of comments today I want to do basically two things. The first is to itemise the characteristics of the population-environment debate as I think they are generally understood by contemporary geographers and therefore avoided. Second, I want to say how contemporary 'geographies', part company with this sort of thinking.

The history of the issue and Griffith Taylor's role in the discipline of geography, I think, is important because it has affected very considerably the way the population-environment debate is seen in geography. Some fairly unhappy things happened to Griffith Taylor which I can talk about in question time if anyone is interested, but I think that really has, soured the debate a little in the discipline.

In this paper I describe the work of Griffith Taylor in its inter-world war context of a nationalist and imperialist focus on Australia's population numbers and spreading the white population throughout the continent. I draw on the work of the historical geographer Joe Powell, who has done a lot to analyse the work of Griffith Taylor in his time.

[Map unavailable]

This is a typical type of map that Griffith Taylor would have produced in the 1920s to counter the boosterist and populist claims for a huge population size for this continent. His aim was to advance public understanding of his analysis that the limits to Australian settlement had in fact been reached by the 1920s. You will see on the map the numbers that indicate the sequence in which he thought settlement should proceed through different regions of Australia.

Taylor is really known as the person from the 1920s who said that the population size of Australia could or should be 20 million by the end of the 20th century, but in fact that comment of his, which he revised on several occasions, has to be seen in the context that lots and lots of people made predictions like that, right up until the 1970s.

I note myself that discussions about the impact of immigration on Australian environments were going on in 1971 between Fenner and Borrie, at a meeting of the Australian Institute of Political Science, at which the demographer Borrie claimed that Fenner was presenting Griffith Taylor's points anew on the limitations of Australian environments, and asked, 'Do we never learn or are the questions simply incapable of resolution, or do we have new knowledge, new insights, that enable us to get closer to definitive answers this time than we have been able to in the past?'

I don't think there has been much precise scholarly attention to these questions since, in the way that those questions were posed from the 1920s, and unlike Borrie in 1971 I think the phrasing of the question is the problem, not our inability to form definitive answers to it. So I want to spend some time now just looking at the characteristics of the question as they are seen in geography basically since the time of Griffith Taylor, and talk about the resistance of contemporary geographers to the sort of thinking that this research question asks us to produce.

I have this fairly peculiar two-part table, which is basically about the type of knowledge that I think is called for by the central research question of the population-environment debate: what is the sustainable population size for Australia?

[Table unavailable]

On this [left] side of my table you see the knowledge characteristics called for, and on the other [right] side what I have called the forms of resistance of contemporary geography to producing this type of knowledge.

First of all I argue that this question polemicises responses. It basically asks for us to come down on the side of population or on the side of environment. Geographers, in their work, which is often about places and about the interactions of social and physical features of places, find generally, I think, that you can't overemphasise either population or environment.

The type of knowledge called for from this central research question is a knowledge which asks for certainty and simplification in a one-figure response on optimal population size. What I am arguing here is that geographers, at the core of their discipline, work with a concern for scale - the scale at which processes operate, the scale at which outcomes of processes can be seen. They are concerned with what goes on in places, and the environmental and social specificity of what happens in those places. So broad generalisations about the continent as a whole and the population as one number are meaningless for a discipline with spatiality and place at its very core.

The sort of knowledge called for by this central research question as well is knowledge that produces a focus disproportionately on population numbers, and against that I would argue that contemporary geographers would agree with the comments many people have made today, that it is often not the sheer numbers of people in a place that may cause degradation to it - though indeed in cities that may be more likely to be the case than in rural areas - but rather they would emphasise what the people who are there actually do in terms of production and consumption.

I think that many geographers would feel that the focus on numbers, this numbers fetish, means in policy and political practice that we will see a focus on immigration and the numbers of immigrants arriving, with a disproportionate emphasis on population policy, and rarely is emigration considered adequately.

Finally, the third characteristic of that research question from the population-environment debate as it is understood in contemporary geography is that the environment of the past is essentialised in the sort of knowledge this calls for, as having particular and knowable characteristics whose changes we can then measure alongside particular increments of population within it.

I know that contemporary geographers argue that setting a benchmark of what a particular environment was like and should now be like if it were to approximate its original state, by reducing the human population there to allow that, is an impossible or at least a very contested exercise. Furthermore, imagining any Australian environments as non-social, without human life, and therefore seeing the impact of population on environments as some exogenous thing that is affecting environments is difficult to justify conceptually.

I thought that I would just refer very briefly to a study that was conducted by a bunch of people at the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at the Australian National University, whom I am treating as geographers because the thing that they were trying to do was to look at environments by reducing the scale of their focus, and talk about whether you can look at the population-environment question at the local or regional scale. It was a consultancy that was commissioned by the Bureau of Immigration Research in the early 1990s.

The starting point of the study was that population growth and environmental degradation are positively linked, and the purpose of it was to say, 'Well, how can we identify how this happens at a local or regional scale?' Therefore, it was against that national scale of the Griffith Taylor type of debate.

The findings of the study, very crudely and simply summarised, were these. The study sought to show how population growth and environmental degradation were related, by taking three case studies, two of which were urban and one of which had a settlement in the middle of it. The first study was of the ACT, around Canberra, and the problems they identified when looking at population growth and environmental degradation were water resources, land allocation, energy and nature conservation. In the Illawarra, around Wollongong, problems included industrial pollution and waste management. Around Alice Springs the problems included water, energy, fragile natural environments and so on, and very particularly and very interestingly, the comment that it is not just a settled population that can have effects on local and regional environments. We also have to take into account temporary populations, tourist populations, which can influence environments in particular ways.

Broadly, the conclusion of this study, having undertaken these three detailed case studies were the links between population growth and environmental problems are very clear at the global level but vary greatly at the local and regional scale, therefore justifying any geographic perception that you really can't talk about this at the national level. Second, determining an optimal spatial distribution of population that is in keeping with regional environmental character is complicated. (That refers to the task of trying to say, 'All right, let's have some regions or local areas and talk about the total population that could exist there, given certain consumption and production characteristics.') Furthermore, reducing per capita consumption and environmental load is no less problematic.

Let me just conclude. What I have tried to argue is that the form of the central research question in the population-environment debate calls for the production of knowledge inconsistent in various ways with the forms of knowledge currently being produced in geography. The central research question I have outlined is at once too general, too simple and too binary.

I think contemporary geographers have concluded by voting with their feet on involvement in a reconstitution of the population-environment debate, affected as they have been by Griffith Taylor's experience with it, and they are working in such a way as to be claiming that if environmental degradation is what we want to stop, then a general population policy of national numbers is not the pathway to this, and a regionally specific population policy is very difficult to achieve.

If we want to grow or reduce population for reasons of bettering the circumstances of the population or for reasons of international human rights, then contemporary geographers are likely to argue for doing this directly and not via pleas about environmental degradation.