Session 2: Questions/discussion

Doug Cocks (Chair): I have got one general question which I am going to put our two speakers on notice about. In our attempts to get a transdisciplinary understanding of the population-environment nexus, what is the special contribution of environmental science?

Jenny Goldie: Bob , you said that poverty is the major cause of environmental decline. As you and I know, poverty in the world is such that we have got 1.1 billion people without clean water and 2.4 billion without sanitation, and we have got another 2 billion poor expected in the next 40 or 50 years. Obviously, if poverty causes environmental decline we have got to get the poor out of poverty – for humanitarian reasons, as well. But Barney's first slide showed the close relationship between GDP and energy use.

Until we move over to renewable energy in a big way, how do you reconcile this issue of trying to get the poor out of poverty? Clearly, if their GDP per capita is to increase, they have got to use more energy, but Barney was talking about the need to cut energy use and consumption down to 30 to 50 per cent of what it is today. So how are we going to get the poor out of poverty without stuffing up the atmosphere?

Robert Wasson: I was actually quoting from a book which, as I said, I have only read about a third of thus far – that's not an excuse, it happens to be the reality – by a man by the name of Hollander, who argues that poverty is the major threat to the world's environment now, because of the lack of choices. It seems to be his principal thesis. And I know that to be true in parts of the less developed world that I have worked in.

Yet some of those choices are limited by the actions of others. For example, the forest-dwelling people and the people who use forest resources in South East Asia have had their choices severely limited by very large logging companies coming from other countries, which have reduced the forest cover dramatically. The forest reduction by swidden agriculturalists et cetera is trivial by comparison. The control of such ventures is one option, and it is happening. But it is probably a bit late.

So these people don't necessarily have to have the lifestyle of you and me in order for them to have less of an impact on their local environment. The notion that all the Chinese have to have the standard of living of all Americans strikes me as being absurd, at a whole range of levels, and would probably be so to most Chinese. I think that there are a whole range of options, like the example I have just given, that are open.

This is not to say that people in these countries are sitting on their hands, waiting for economies to develop so that their population can pass some theoretical threshold and then become able to deal with these problems. Some years ago the Thai government, for example, declared that it had no choice but to develop its economy to a point where it then could afford to fix up the environmental damage it had done by developing its economy. And this was an overt statement by the responsible Thai minister. Some years into that program, he announced – again publicly, these are brave politicians – that this was not going to work, because there was no way that they were going to be able to generate sufficient economic benefit to restore extinct species. Well, that was an insight which he took several years to get, but at least he got it. And, thylacines notwithstanding, we are in exactly the same situation.

It strikes me that this is a much more sophisticated matter than simply saying, 'You have to develop your economy to some developed world level in order to be able to deal with the environmental damage that you have then multiplied many-fold in the process of getting to that new economic state.' There are many things happening in parallel. The Thais have done it to some degree, and it is happening in other parts of South East Asia and elsewhere in Asia, such that they are not simply heading for some utopia which I don't think is achievable anyway, though I could well be wrong on that, and waiting for that to happen and nothing else is happening.

Bill Rourke: This is following on the comments that Jenny Goldie made. How much of our environmental future is dependent upon the rest of the world? No man is an island, and yet we seem to think we are an island. Yet it seems to me that what is going to happen to the poor and the population of the world is going to have far more influence on us in this country than anything we do here, just ourselves.

Barney Foran: I guess in a prosaic way I would start by saying that Australia is the least of any country in being able to lecture about environmental and economic purity, if you like. I think it behoves us to get our own environmental act together first, before we start lecturing the rest of the world. We are having a struggle doing that at the moment. If we are successful in the next 50 years, and learn things along the way that we can help the poorer peoples of the world with, I think that will be well and good.

This is not a callous attitude I am putting over. I think we have got enough troubles at home, at the same time as being rich enough to help our near neighbours. Perhaps one answer is to consider the Australian boundary as extending quite a few thousand kilometres off our continental shelf and to regard lifestyle, food, health – all those things that we are concerned about in Australia – as having a much wider boundary than they currently do. And perhaps that would be one way in which we can assuage our collective guilt, at the same time as we do make the profound changes in the structure of our economy, our lifestyle and society that my numbers make me think we have to do to get our environmental act together.

Adam Graycar: The South Australian government, a couple of weeks ago, released a population policy that looks at about a one-third increase in population over the next 50-odd years and also is very aware of the very fragile environment which is going to have to support that population if targets are going to be met.

If we look at doing that, and realising the sustainability difficulties, I would be interested in your observation on which levers are the important ones to pull first. Do we pull the environmental and sustainability levers, do we pull migration levers? And also, as a state government we are very concerned that we don't control all of the levers. We don't control federal migration policy, we don't control multinational decision making, as we saw with Mitsubishi recently. And so there is a very great balance we have to make, realising that there is a political and economic imperative of trying to increase the population – for a whole lot of reasons – and an environmental set of issues.

So I would be interested in your observations on which levers you would pull first. Would you go for the poverty-wealth thing, given that wealthy people have more choices? And what is the scale, and how big are the levers that we need to pull?

Barney Foran: I guess the first thing I would be thinking about is the generation of wealth. In South Australia, apart from what I call a taps, tubs and tiles economy, which is the making of houses, roads and culverts, to that extent I think the challenge is fairly and squarely in front of all of the Australian economy to think of getting its export trade together. I mean things like cochlear ear implants, if you want to think of those as one example, or a good pinot noir or a good chardonnay or whatever, things that bring a high value overseas for a moderately restrained environmental impact at home.

In terms of South Australia, you have obviously got wine. But, as I was saying to someone over lunch, I have recently had to take apart the whole Australian economy and think about each of these things sector by sector. I haven't got the answer yet, but the one thing that stands out, given a somewhat advanced agricultural base that South Australia has, though not a large one, is the whole idea of active and functional foods for the affluent markets of the world as being a thing by which we may be able to triple, quadruple, multiply by 10, if you like, the value of an agricultural product because it fixes up your hormone level or whatever. That generation of wealth for a low environmental impact is the first one I would go for. And that may have several levels.

It is almost like a negative screening aspect that a lot of superannuation funds go through. There are a whole lot of energy-intensive things we are trying to get into in Australia, on which – unless the accounting principles around the world change and countries are lambasted on their consumption levels rather than their production levels – I would go first for things that are worth a lot and have a low environmental content. That is, if you like, a technological lever, and that will lead you forward without having to rely totally on the population lever and a range of the other ones.

Now, that's a bit of a half-baked answer, I'm sorry, and not deeply analytical. But it is the first off the top of my head.

John Coulter: This is just a comment to Professor Wasson. It seemed to me that when you are talking about resource limitations and dividing them up into things like water and land, there is a far more fundamental resource: essentially, the low entropy which drives all the biological and physical processes, including all the human ones associated with civilisation. Following on from that, your comment about the amount of damage done in the early years of Australian white settlement, compared with today, simply collapses, because what we have succeeded in doing, through the availability and the use of low entropy, is to be able to afford to repair a lot of that damage or to avoid other repair by shifting our economy into other areas.

But fundamentally the total impact, the total demand which the Australian population is having on its environment, in terms of low entropy, has increased as Barney [Foran] has shown. Some of the expressions of that impact, in terms of land and water, have been avoided but can only be avoided temporarily because we are rapidly exceeding the availability of low entropy. We are taking too large a share, compared with the other species with which we share the planet.

And just a comment to Barney following on from that: can you see any of the indicators of environmental damage that you put up in your slides being improved by further increases in population? That picks up on the answer to the last question. You didn't mention perhaps undoing the attempts to increase population which we are getting, both in terms of immigration and through fertility. We have seen this in the latest budget, for instance. You didn't mention population as one of the levers we might pull to reverse that trend.

Robert Wasson: John, I made two points in that particular section of what I was talking about. I was talking about impacts in particular sectors of the Australian environment, namely, the rural sector. And I am sorry, but you are wrong. The impacts early on were far more severe than most of the impacts that have occurred now, except for salinisation, although the preconditions for that were set early on in European settlement.

I then went on to say that the second facet of what we have been doing in this country, to do with greenhouse emissions and pollution, has largely gone along in lockstep with population growth recently.

So both statements, in my view, are correct. I agree with your overall statement for the last 100 years or so, but not for the earlier part.

That leads me into, quite nicely, an answer to Doug [Cocks]'s puzzle that he set us earlier on. (It is not an answer, it is just a suggestion.) Despite all of my what may seem to this audience to be relativist remarks about environmental science, economy and society, I believe there are some irreducible bottom lines to environmental damage, and they are largely thermodynamic in much the way you have suggested.

If one species continues to increase the appropriation of resources in the way that we are doing, we are in deep trouble. We know that from ecological theory, we know it from thermodynamics. That's where environmental science needs to rule a line underneath what we do. There are some irreducible limits on what one species can do and get away with it.

Barney Foran: John, no, I don't see any of my blood-pressure items getting better with more population growth. I do see, however, that list of accelerators, if you like. Population growth is one of those, but there are also four other big ones, and I do see that somewhere in there is a unique mix. It could be a little bit of population growth with less economic growth, a number of those things, I don't know the settings. But I am as analyst open to the idea that there is a virtuous zone that I haven't managed to quantify yet where we might be able to pull things together. But if you ask, 'Will you bet your superannuation on it, Barney?' the answer is no.

Doug Cocks: Barney, could you reply to my comment? What is the unique contribution that environmental science might have for this debate?

Barney Foran: I think that the life forces that underpin our everyday life are all environmental: clean water, good soil, yummy tucker and all those sorts of things. And in view of all the toxification and degradation processes that are inherent in a lot of our current methods, I think we have to show the way to take many of our industrial and agro-industrial processes through into more benign zones where there are more goods than bads coming out of the entire production system.

Tony McMichael: I wanted to pick up, Bob Wasson, on the final comment you made, about that irreducible bottom line. I just wondered if you could tell us briefly how you see environmental science evolving with respect to, perhaps, taking an increasing readiness to engage with questions about population, impact on society, impact on human wellbeing, as opposed to studying the environment for the sake of the environment.

Robert Wasson: Well, I think Barney's answer was actually probably the closest to that. Environmental science engaging with economists and with public policy analysts is probably the most sensible way forward, because if you do take a material and energy budget approach, at least in the first instance, you can look at the production cycle in a way which gets it out of the grip of solely one discipline. (It has been in the grip of multiple disciplines but they haven't been talking to each other. That goes back to 'Polarised posturing and blissful ignorance'.) And that, it seems to me, is one of the engaging points between disciplines, where we can actually make a substantial difference.

But I think that, as I said, there are some bottom lines to this. Thermodynamics is real.