2004 FENNER CONFERENCE ON THE ENVIRONMENT

The population and environment debate: Geography
by Graeme Hugo

Graeme Hugo is Federation Fellow, Professor of the Department of Geographical and Environmental Studies and Director of the National Centre for Social Applications of Geographical Information Systems at the University of Adelaide. He is the author of over two hundred books, articles in scholarly journals and chapters in books, as well as a large number of conference papers and reports. His books include Australia's Changing Population (Oxford University Press), The Demographic Dimension in Indonesian Development (with T. H. Hull, V. J. Hull and G. W. Jones, Oxford University Press), International Migration Statistics: Guidelines for Improving Data Collection Systems (with A.S. Oberai, H. Zlotnik and R. Bilsborrow, International Labour Office), Worlds in Motion: Understanding International Migration at Century's End (with D. S. Massey, J. Arango, A. Kouaouci, A. Pellegrino and J. E. Taylor, Oxford University Press), several of the 1986, 1991 and 1996 census based Atlas of the Australian People Series (AGPS) and Australian Immigration: A Survey of the Issues (with Mark Wooden, Robert Holton and Judith Sloan, AGPS). In 2002 he secured a $1.125 million ARC Federation Fellowship over five years for his research project, 'The new paradigm of international migration to and from Australia: dimensions, causes and implications'.

Session 4: Questions/discussion

One of the central organising paradigms of modern geography focuses on examination of complex people-environment interactions in regions on the Earth's surface.  This provides the discipline with a strong conceptual and theoretical basis to actively contribute to, and participate in, the population-environment debate in Australia. For parts of the last century geography has been prominent in this debate.  Indeed Griffith Taylor, the first professor of geography in Australia, was a passionate and very public voice in the pre-war debate on Australia's future population.  He produced population projections which explicitly incorporated the environmental constraints on population growth and his projections of total population and its spatial distribution were surprisingly accurate.  His scientifically based arguments in the popular media that there were real environmental constraints on Australian population growth evoked such vehement opposition from the boosters of the 'Australia unlimited' school that he eventually sought exile in North America.  Yet so much of his writing resonates well with the present-day situation.  One could reasonably ask why contemporary Australian geography has not produced a modern-day Griffith Taylor to inform, energise and contribute to the national population-environment debate.  In many ways the reasons for this lie in developments within the geography discipline but they also are strongly shaped by the institutional structure in which the discipline in Australia has operated.  I believe there are four things which have constrained population-environment work in contemporary Australian geography:

1. Firstly, just as Australian physical and social scientists have increasingly begun to talk past each other rather than interact in a sympathetic, give and take, equal discussion; physical and human geography have generally become more separated in the last two decades.  This is reflected both in research and teaching in Australian universities.  At the research level, physical and human geography are dealt with by separate panels of the Australian Research Council (ARC).  The ARC has recognised the need for more real interdisciplinary research in Australia and has a process in the ARC Discovery and Linkage grant programmes to deal with multi-disciplinary applications.  Nevertheless, it would seem that if major cross-disciplinary research is to be done on the crucial population-environment relationship, there is a need for the making available of a dedicated research funding for that purpose from separate sources.  The ARC's recent initiatives of Research Networks and Special Research Centres are definite moves to encourage interdisciplinary research but the setting up of a dedicated fund to encourage population-environment research in Australia would seem the best way to facilitate research which brings together physical and social scientists (including physical and human geographers) to do truly collaborate research on population-environment issues in Australia.  In university teaching too, students at undergraduate and postgraduate levels are concentrating almost wholly on human or physical geography rather than balancing the two.  Geography subjects, which explicitly focus on people and environment relationships except at a very elementary level, have been significantly reduced in number.
2. Secondly, within geography, we have focused more and more on subdisciplinary specialities within either physical or human geography.  The focus is on multiple geographies rather than geography.  One of the traditional strengths of the discipline of geography has been the readiness of geographers to move beyond narrow disciplinary boundaries.  Accordingly, geographers readily publish in non-geography journals, work with non-geographers in research projects and participate in non-geography conferences and meetings.  This trend has increased so that subdisciplines in geography have grown closer to the other disciplines which they are related topopulation geography with demography, etc.  This has increased subdisciplinary specialisation so that few geographers now work across subdiscipline boundaries in areas such as population and environment.  It also means that within the subject it is difficult to get the physical and human parts of the subject together to put together holistic views of population-environment relationships which balance trade offs of environmental, economic, social, political and demographic dimensions.
3. Thirdly, within geography where population-environment relationships are examined by Australian geographers it has usually been in small regions and communities, especially in less developed areas in Asia and the Pacific.  There has been a retreat from examining population-environment relationships at the large or national scales which geographers like Griffith Taylor did not resile from.
4. A fourth factor relates to the increased trend toward siloisation in Australian universities.  The EFTSU (Equivalent Full Time Student Unit) wars, which the current university system encourages, means that faculties and disciplines explicitly design their degree structures to capture all or most of the EFTSU associated with the students majoring in these disciplines.  Accordingly there is no room for subjects which bridge disciplines and cross faculties.  Geography has suffered from this tendency in two ways.  Firstly, geography has traditionally been made available across faculties so that it has attracted students from both sciences and social sciences/humanities backgrounds.  The concentration on single faculties has reduced both the numbers of students doing the subject and more importantly the diversity of students doing the subject.  Secondly, geography students who plan courses of study, which incorporate physical and human parts of the subject in equal measure, have declined.  It remains one of the great paradoxes of many Australian universities over the last decade that while there has been an upsurge in the rhetoric of the overwhelming need for interdisciplinary research and teaching to tackle the complexity of contemporary problems, the university structure and institutions have moved in the opposite direction.

It is disappointing that there has been a decline in geographical teaching and research activity in the people-environment paradigm in recent years.  It is also surprising because of a number of other recent developments would seem to have been favourable to, and facilitative of, more geographic work in this area.  One factor has been the increasing importance of environmental issues, and especially population-environment issues, in Australian public discourse.  I'd like to focus more, however, on a second development.  This is the massive development over the last decade or so in geographical information systems or GIS.  GIS is the rapidly evolving branch of information technology which facilitates the collection, storage, retrieval, analysis and depiction of spatially referenced informationie, data which has a latitude and longitude.  It can be best conceptualised as a number of layers of information with each layer comprising information on a particular variable with each piece of information related to specific places on the Earth's surface.  These layers can be any number of population and environment related variables and GIS provides the technology to cut vertically through them and analyse their interactions at particular points on the Earth's surface.  GIS allows this to be done with very large numbers of variables and very large numbers of observations.  It allows much greater complexity in examination of population-environment interaction than ever before and provides the opportunity to integrate a great range of variables.  However, while GIS is well developed in geography and we have available an unprecedented richness of spatially referenced data on population and the environment, little GIS-based research in population-environment relationships has been undertaken.

In conclusion, contemporary geography in Australia has both the conceptual and theoretical underpinnings on the one hand and the methodology and technology armoury on the other to contribute to the better understanding of population-environment relationships in Australia.  However this contribution has been muted by developments within the discipline but also developments within Australian academic and research organisations and institutions.  In some ways these constraints on geography represent a microcosm of what has happened in Australian research and teaching in population and the environment generally.  There are strong structural elements within the Australian university and research systems which make it difficult for physical and social scientists to come together on an equal basis to examine the population-environment issue which involves a fair and sympathetic consideration of all of the cross-disciplinary complexities of the issue.  I believe these structural considerations need to be addressed if we are to see true interdisciplinary research in population and the environment flourish in Australia.