Session 4: Questions/discussion

Paul Monk: I would like to ask you, Graeme, on your last point about reforms of the university system, whether you have some specific reforms in mind. I know 20 years ago, when I started my PhD at Australian National University, I took on an ambitious topic that would have benefited greatly from being able to work across a number of departments, and basically wherever I knocked on doors – with the exception of political science – I was told, 'Well, you're not part of our program. We can't really accommodate you.' I don't have a particular gripe about that at this stage, but I am interested in your observation that reforms might help and I wondered whether you had specific reforms in mind.

Graeme Hugo: I guess I had better not get started! There are a few things which I think do have to be done. One is in relation to the thing I referred to previously, the war between different parts of the university about EFTSUs, equivalent student units. While they are there and while the funding mechanisms within the universities are based purely on those distributions, we are not going to get genuine multidisciplinary cooperation.

There have been, I think, some interesting experiments within particular faculties in Australian universities where they have neutralised those impacts, and it really is going to take some very visionary administration by leading people within universities to fight against some of the stronger faculty elements within universities, to neutralise those effects. Once that is done, I think there is a lot of genuine will on both the physical and the human sides to actually work together in a meaningful, respectful sort of way. It is just that we don't have the structures there yet for it to take place.

Jenny Goldie: I am a member of Sustainable Population Australia and until recently I was the National Director. I have had a long association of 15½ years with the organisation, and I felt that in Ruth Fincher's talk there was some implied criticism of organisations like ours which deal primarily with population as an environmental issue. One point is that we don't deal with such things as emigration or consumption and so on. I would like to say that SPA has always dealt with issues like fertility and net migration, tourism and the other aspects in the debate.

But my question is this. Are you aware of the table that has been produced by Optimum Population Trust, in England, which sets optimum populations for each country and the world as a whole at different levels – at current standard of living, at modest standard of living as determined by the World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet report, and at one where the average greenhouse gas emissions is 2.5 gigatonnes or something a year? For Australia, for instance, at current standard of living the optimum population is 10 million, at modest standard of living it is 21 million and, if we abided by the greenhouse gas emissions which would stabilise the atmosphere, it would be 2 million.

Are you aware of this table, and as an academic what do you think of it?

Ruth Fincher: Like my geographic colleagues, don't work on this topic. So I wasn't aware of that table, although I am aware that through the 20th century there has been a long interest in producing optimal population numbers. I wasn't aware of that one having been produced, but I suppose if I were, and if I were working in this field and making an analysis of it, then my concern would very much be with the way, as I have said, that a national figure really isn't that much use to us in terms of analysing regional environments and where certain population sizes might be more appropriate, given particular characteristics.

I think that, in looking at the characteristics of my discipline, that has been the concern that people have always had with that very reducing approach of just giving one figure as a proxy for a very complicated matter.

Jenny Goldie: Three, not one.

Ruth Fincher: Even so, it is not disaggregated to different scales for different sorts of environments. I think in a discipline whose focus is on place and scale of processes and so on, that would always be the primary interest in the analysis of this question.

Bob Douglas: I am chair of the board of Australia 21. For people who don't know of Australia 21, it is a new institution that is attempting to address some of the problems of silo-isation in the kinds of dialogues that we have been talking about. It is modelled on the Canadian Institute of Advanced Research, which essentially tackled this silo-isation problem by building sustained networks across institutions and across disciplines on key problems of major importance. A group of us have developed this organisation for a number of the reasons that I think both Ruth and Graeme have been alluded to, and that I think were alluded to in the earlier session, namely, that somehow or other the extraordinary capacity we have got in Australia is not being focused on the biggest questions and the most challenging questions that face us and mankind.

It is unthinkable, surely, that we aren't going to be faced with huge pressures on our population and on our border security in the next little while, and yet we have admissions from the economists and also from the geographers that the institutional constraints and the institutional experiences are not enabling them to properly engage in the debate.

I know that the Australian Research Council has been attempting to engage in some better networking process, and I wonder, Graeme, whether you would like to comment on the network granting process that seems to be attempting to address some of this lack of institutional and cross-disciplinary discussion.

Graeme Hugo: Definitely the new ARC initiative on networks has been already enormously successful in bringing multidisciplinary groups together around important issues. But the networking money is just for that: it is for networking.

However, the mainstream programs of the ARC, which are the Discovery Grants and the Linkage Grants, are still almost totally disciplinary based. What I believe is that we really do need an expansion in our knowledge of these complex population-environment relationships. It is not just bringing people from the human sciences and the physical sciences together and getting them to talk together. They have to research together, because I really don't think there is the body of evidence there for us to really understand what the complexities of the processes are.

I believe this is only going to be overcome when we have a dedicated fund for real multidisciplinary research, rather than something at the moment where it is possible to submit a multidisciplinary grant topic but it is very, very difficult to get it funded because usually it will tend to be sent initially to one panel or the other; if it is not totally within the central research areas of that panel, it is really difficult for it to have a chance of success.

I think we really have to put our money where our mouth is and say, 'These cross-disciplinary issues are really fundamental, and we should have dedicated research money for real, equal research right across our disciplines.'

Alan Rich: Professor Fincher, I congratulate you on your talk, in so far as the goals of this conference go to have cross-disciplinary perspectives put forward, and I found your presentation interesting because I am not coming from the same perspective.

As a consequence I was a bit frustrated at some of the things that I wished you perhaps had more time to elaborate on – the concept, for instance, that population should be reduced to an absolute number and even more so that this absolute number somehow has widespread support in the debate out there. I think that there are a lot of people who take the precautionary principle approach rather than an absolute number approach, and that is another perspective.

Likewise, in the studies that you referred to, with the causes of environmental degradation, maybe it went too quickly for me but although I thought habitat loss was a major environmental problem I didn't notice it as being identified in that study. Perhaps there are some good reasons for it.

But, just generally, and besides the final disappointment of your not having been able to articulate the ultimate question – I guess it was a little bit optimistic of me to think that might be achievable – the question to you is: what are your comments on that perspective that there are other views that you might address? I am just frustrated that you are saying the geographers aren't coming into the debate because, if I could play the devil's advocate, it is too hard. What would you say to that?

Ruth Fincher: Well, I did turn my own talk into a simple polemic, really, by just talking about the simple version of the population-environment debate as it was engaged in in the 1920s, which I think has had a big influence on the way that geographers in Australia see this issue. As I said, fairly awful things happened to the fellow who was involved in it, who was a geographer.

I think that really what I am trying to say is that, from looking at the sorts of research questions that that perspective gives rise to – or the sort of knowledge that that perspective, if you take that simple research question, produces in us when we respond to it – I actually think it is not the right question any more. It is too general, and if we are going from my discipline's perspective to look at a non-national scale of environmental outcomes, to whatever degree they are associated with particular social features of those areas and particular environmental features, then we have to be asking different questions about those particular localities.

The point you raise about the study that I just summarised incredibly briefly, that Stephen Dovers and his colleagues from CRES did, was that they were mainly urban environments, and so what was being looked for then were contemporary indicators of urban environmental degradation, like pollution and so on. Perhaps that is why the question of habitat loss was not raised in those urban environments as a current pressing issue, because it happened a long time ago.

But to return to my central point: this sort of stuff is supposed to be our bread and butter in geography but there are a lot of institutional reasons why we are not doing this topic much any more, yet I think there is also another issue there, that the central question we have been asking is the wrong question. It becomes too hard for us to answer that question, as the Dovers report showed. That was a really excellent study and a very detailed study, which found that it was just too difficult to answer that very general question.

So I suppose my plea would be: let's phrase some questions that allow us to create the sort of knowledge that we in contemporary social and environmental science want to create and believe in. Let's not ask for these simple certainties, these simple one-off figures about a whole nation that really, from the point of view of social science – and, I think from my knowledge of it, the point of view of the physical scientists in my own discipline – are just not meaningful any more.