Conference wrap-up

Doug Cocks (Chair)

I have just realised that I don't have to come up with the ultimate penetrating comment, because the brilliant Ian Lowe is lurking around somewhere and he is going to sum up the whole conference for us in 10 minutes. So I think, Ian, we might hand over to you.

Ian Lowe

That sounds to me like an adroitly dropped banana skin. It seems to me that you are really pushing your luck, standing up between people and fermented beverages or their plane out of the place, to tell them what they should have learnt over the last two days. So I am not going to try and summarise the conference. I wanted to try and add value by reminding you of a framework for looking at difficult issues, which is recognising that the discussion is often going on at different layers, and unless you engage at the different layers or the appropriate layers, we are always going to be at cross-purposes.

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This is a framework developed by Richard Slaughter and Sohail Inayatullah for discussion of complex future-oriented issues, and I think this is one to which it applies. They say that the discussion is usually going on simultaneously at three levels.

The first is the litany or 'pop futures' level, which is mainly slogans and half-baked, ill-considered statements. Much political discourse is at the litany level and, alarmingly, so is most discussion in the print media as well as on television and commercial radio.

Most discussion in the academy is at the social causes level, where different disciplines, through their disciplinary lenses, address the social causes, the driving factors, the links, the systemic factors.

But there are also, implicit in the discussion, underlying myths and metaphors. You know you have got an underlying myth or metaphor when you get a response like, 'I have no data but I don't agree with you and my mates wouldn't agree either,' or 'We follow conventional wisdom.' Conventional wisdom is code for 'the prevailing myths and metaphors of the dominant group that I take my orders from'.

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So, for example, if we are thinking about the role of the economy in society, the model which Glenn Withers suggested to us yesterday was the three-legged stool: society, environment and economy. This is one approach. The problem with it is that it presumes that what you do in each box doesn't affect the others unless the stool gets so out of balance that it falls over. In practice I don't know of any decision making structure in which society, environment and economy are given equal standing in the minds of the decision makers. What we actually have in Australia is, as I have said to some of you before, the pigheaded model, in which the economy is the main game, like the face of the pig, and society and environment are minor protuberances. And if you see this as a Venn diagram, it reflects the fact that you are much more likely to get attention to an environmental problem if it overlaps economic criteria than if it is sitting off by itself.

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If you look at the world from space you can't actually see the economy. What you see is the natural world and the perilously thin membrane that supports life, and some of the physical boundaries that demark separate societies, like oceans or rivers or mountain ranges.

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And if you take that as your starting point, you get what I would argue is a more rational way of seeing the world, one that recognises that human societies live within natural ecological systems on which we depend for breathable air, drinkable water, edible food, our sense of cultural identity, spiritual sustenance and so on, and the economy is a subset of each of those societies – a very important subset but only a subset.

Glenn Withers suggested that that is an attempt to establish superiority for one disciplinary framework over another, but it seems to me that it is accepting Stephen Boyden's point that the bottom line is ecological sustainability, and unless our society is ecologically sustainable, then there is no prospect of maintaining social or economic desiderata.

A second underlying myth or metaphor is that of the individual as consumer. What a metaphor that is – the individual represented by their stomach! It flows from the notion of our not being humans, with feelings and wishes, but as consumers: the notion that consumption, the destruction of natural resources, is not an understandable human weakness but almost a moral duty, something that you do as part of society. Somebody recently observed that the seven deadly sins of antiquity, such as pride and lust, gluttony, sloth and envy, have become the seven marketing imperatives of the modern world – that they are used to incite us, as Clive Hamilton said last night on Four Corners while we were at dinner, to use money we don't have to buy things we don't want, to impress people we don't like. But that is another underlying myth or metaphor, and unless we address that underlying myth or metaphor that consumption is not only necessary but desirable...[tape ended]

Ian Lowe (cont.): still implicitly based on the myth that there are infinite natural resources.

The final one I want to mention is the topic of this conference, which is population and environment. The notion of environment connotes surroundings of which we are not part, and it I believe reinforces the idea that we are somehow separate from ecological systems, in a way that other species are not. I would rather we talked about 'ecology' than 'environment', because the notion of ecology integrates the notion that we are part of natural systems, just as much part of natural systems as 'gumtrees or goalas or goannas', and like them we cannot escape the ecological laws.

So all that suggests, as we have heard time and time again over the last two days, the need for a transdisciplinary approach that draws on the skills and knowledge of a range of disciplines – and not just those that are represented here. I can think of others, like psychology, like various branches of engineering, for example, that are clearly both part of understanding what the problem is and part of developing solutions.

I think it is also clear that we need institutional reform if we are to even define the task, let alone engage in solutions. If we agree – and I think we should – with Stephen Boyden's point that sustainability is the bottom line, we should be trying to define targets that are limits for what the human population can draw from the finite biosphere. I think we need to think carefully about whether they should be couched in per capita terms or total terms.

Per capita terms are easier to get political engagement with in the short term, but as with emissions of greenhouse gases, the atmosphere doesn't understand per capita emissions; it only understands total emissions. And the ecosphere doesn't understand per capita ecological footprint; it only understands the total demand of humans on the biosphere. It seems to me that couching the limits in absolute terms reinforces the message which ought to come out of this conference, which is that there is a fixed productive capacity, and if there are more 'caputs' there is less 'per capita'.

And so we are making social choices in talking about population, making social choices about what per person is available. Since it seems to me that we ought to be engaging with the task of developing a vision of a future Australia which sees a stabilised population, sustainability supported, I think that means we need to engage with that issue of defining a total target.

In those terms I wanted to pick up Alexa [McLaughlin]'s point that we need a broader conversation about this. The movement towards sustainability science argues that experts need to be engaging the broader community in defining the terms of the problem, in agreeing what is acceptable data, and in working towards solutions, because if we are making difficult social choices which do limit people's opportunities, which do set boundaries, those choices will only be politically sustainable if they are owned by the community as a whole. So they can't be handed down from the mountain by a group of experts; they need to be developed in concert with the wider community.

The final thing I believe we need is courage and optimism. It is easy to be overwhelmed by the enormity of the task, and I think it is no exaggeration to say that the future of civilisation will be determined by whether we are able to cope in a socially civilised manner with the task of reducing our consumption to what is ecologically sustainable. But I believe we should go forward with optimism, not only because that is the only approach which gives you a fighting chance of succeeding but also because what history shows is enormous transitions that have been made possible by the will and the thought of small groups of people who are determined to bring about a better world.

In those terms I thank the organisers for bringing us together for this meeting, and I hope that when we look back from a future sustainable Australia we will see this conversation as having been an important step in at least raising the consciousness of a range of academic disciplines about what they can bring to bear on the problem, and, hopefully, developing the collective will to do something about this most urgent of all problems.