8 Mike Seccombe, Baird Man. The Saturday Paper 11th June, 2016. 9 Paddy Manning, A hidden agenda? Larry Marshall and the CSIRO's climate scientists.
Chapter 1. How Did We Get Here?
So many try to say Not Now, So many have forgotten how To say I Am, and would be, Lost, if they could, in history. W.H. Auden, Another Time1
It is early June 2016, three weeks into the Federal election campaign. On a blustery Canberra Saturday morning at my local shopping centre, clean-cut young men in white moleskins and identical blue ski jackets hand out leaflets in support of Liberal Senator for the Australian Capital Territory, Zed Seselja. I body-swerve past the grinning Zed, avoiding eye contact, and almost collide with a Labour campaigner who is struggling to hold her placards from blowing away in the gale. It is the week after the Sydney storm. King tides and a massive east coast low pressure system had combined to deluge the Sydney blue ribbon electorates of Wentworth, Warringah and Mackellar, ripping the land into the sea and destroying beachfront properties.2 The blame game started immediately in the Northern Beaches suburbs over a sea wall that had been approved by Warringah Council but was not constructed. The Narrabeen-Collaroy beach narrowed by fifty metres in twenty-four hours, eroding almost half a million cubic metres of sand into the ocean. Warmer than average sea surface temperatures had increased the amount of moisture in the atmosphere, and on Sunday 5th June the coast of New South Wales had its wettest day on record. As the east coast of Australia was inundated, politicians were wary about making a link between a single weather event and climate change. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, surveying the flood damage in Tasmania, said “larger and more frequent storms are one of the consequences that the climate models and climate scientists predict from global warming” and called on the need for “ensuring that we have the measures in place to mitigate the impact of natural disasters."3
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If the June 2016 storms were not a sufficient reminder that the effects of nature are all around us in our everyday lives, and were front-and-centre in the politics of the election, the previous week’s news story had been about the massive coral bleaching event of the Great Barrier Reef. It emerged that senior bureaucrats at the Federal Department of the Environment had sought to censor a UNESCO report on the negative effects of climate change on World Heritage sites and tourism by having removed any mention of the Great Barrier Reef.4 Greg Hunt, the Federal Environment Minister, claimed he was “not aware” that officials of his Department had requested that information be deleted, but claimed the report was inconsistent with an earlier ruling by the UNESCO World Heritage Committee that the reef be taken off its watch list and that Australia was, according to Hunt, according to UNESCO, “the global role model” for the management of World Heritage sites. I watched Hunt being interviewed by Waleed Aly on The Project. After answering each question, I noticed Hunt’s blink rate accelerated alarmingly. Was this a sign that he was hiding something or were the studio lights just a bit too bright?5 Hunt’s assertion that the Turnbull government represents a role model for environmental management of world heritage sites is at odds with his approval of the massive Carmichael coal mine development in the Galilee Basin of Central Queensland, a decision that has been challenged by the Australian Conservation Foundation in the Federal Court. Yet Hunt seemed sincere, almost passionate, in his belief that his government’s investment in reducing nutrient runoff from the sugar-cane growing catchments adjacent to the southern sector of the Great Barrier Reef demonstrates world-class commitment to environmental stewardship. Coral reef scientists beg to differ, having found the worst bleaching in the northern sector, and that the major threat to the reef is not water quality from the southern catchments but ocean acidification and elevated ocean temperatures due to global warming.6 Undeterred, Hunt states that water quality is an issue that the Australian government can address, but tackling carbon dioxide emissions requires a global effort, and there is no point in Australia reducing its emissions at the expense of economic development if other large emitting nations do not follow suit. It seems to me that Hunt is caught in a paradox between genuine concern for the reef and his government’s continued support for coal exports, with associated port facilities and dredging near the reef. Yet in a
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recent survey nearly eighty per cent of 49,900 Australians polled thought that the health of the Great Barrier Reef should be prioritised over coal mining.7 Back home from the mall, I sit at the kitchen table with a cuppa and read an article by Mike Seccombe in The Saturday Paper about how the New South Wales government under Premier Mike Baird had just begun drafting draconian laws to guard the interests of the private sector and criminalise its opponents who are protesting against a mass of social and environmental issues ranging from council mergers and the felling of trees to make way for light rail projects to the massive expansion of mining and coal-seam gas developments. President of the New South Wales Bar Association Noel Hutley was scathing about the Serious Crime Prevention Orders Bill 2016, calling it “an unprecedented attack on individual freedoms and the rule of law".8 The erosion of civil liberties and the restriction on citizens of their freedom of movement, expression, communication and assembly seems far more in keeping with the machinations of a backward and paranoid police state than a prosperous, well-educated liberal democracy. The imminent introduction of new environmental laws in New South Wales, scheduled for Spring 2016, opens the way for wholesale land clearing, requiring only minimal consent and the monitoring of impacts, and a winding back of the hard-won environmental gains of 1990s and 2000s. Sue Higginson, Chief Executive of the New South Wales Environmental Defenders Office, described the changes as “a catastrophic step backwards”. The CSIRO, the national scientific research organisation, was also in the process of taking a major step backwards in its research into the effects of climate change on the environment. In February 2016, Chief Executive, Larry Marshall, a laser technologist turned venture capitalist, announced a plan to retrench 350 scientists, including 110 from the Oceans and Atmosphere Division and another 100 from the Land and Water Division. An international outcry ensued. Marshall, appointed in January 2015 by the Abbott government, remarked that there was so much emotion in the debate it almost "sounds more like religion than science". He later apologised for his remark, to religious people but not to scientists, and stated that because “we have proven climate change” CSIRO’s shrinking resources should be directed to other areas of research, primarily ones that were technology based and that were likely to turn a profit. In a tempestuous meeting with staff from CSIRO Land and 3
Water, Marshall declared that public good research was defined by whatever the government of the day decided. Channelling Malcolm Turnbull’s mantra of ‘jobs and growth’, Marshall told staff that CSIRO would focus on innovation and products from digital technology that would create new jobs and revitalise the economy.9 Marshall’s pronouncements led to widespread speculation that he had been appointed as part of an anti-climate science offensive from within the Abbott government, from which CSIRO had copped a massive funding cut in the 2014 Federal budget. CSIRO had shed over 1200 staff since 2013; about twenty percent of the workforce. Some CSIRO scientists felt so strongly about the cuts to climate and environmental science and the political interference in CSIRO that they mobilised as volunteer canvassers against the Turnbull government in the Federal election campaign.10
Conflicting environmental ideologies
How have we come to this? Why did we not notice what was happening around us and what it meant for the relationship between people and environment? Conservative governments in Australia and their supporters in the private sector have arrived at positions of entrenched disregard for those who support the environment and environmental science, civil liberties, Aboriginal land rights, public benefits, common property rights, freedom of speech and public accountability. Why do right-wing politicians feel compelled to pursue policies and enact laws that empower the State to suppress the rights and values of its citizens, and to censor scientific information about the effects of climate change on our environment? But more broadly, one of the questions I try to address in this book is how have we arrived at such a polarised and antagonistic state over our differing world views on the environment and what we can we can do to move forward at a time when our planet is under such intense pressure that our very life support systems are threatened?11 At the heart of the ideological conflict about environment is series of deeply held beliefs about what we perceive to be important, good, correct and just. It is about the conflicts between our own personal interests and those of others; often people considerably worse off than ourselves in countries far more vulnerable to the effects of global change than our
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own. It is about conservatism versus openness to change. Will the status and trends of our earth support systems require a transformative shift in the way we exist on this planet and how our societies operate or will we get by with some minor adjustments to “business as usual” and an unswerving faith in technological solutions to our environmental problems? It is also about how we assess long-term risk and perceive the future; capabilities that we have exercised pretty poorly in the past. We struggle to learn from our mistakes, and even when we do, those lessons seem rarely become embedded as societal rules and have to be relearned painfully, over and over: do not build on a floodplain, a storm-exposed coast or in a bushfire-prone forest; do not dump your waste in the rivers, the ocean, the land and the atmosphere; do not use up all the water, or harvest all the fish, or chop down all the trees. There will be always be a price you will have to pay, not least in reputational damage and social licence to operate, even if you manage to externalise some of your costs. There is always some new and powerful special interest group that comes along, declares it is not to its advantage to stick to the rules, and expects everyone else to bear the cost of their selfishness. Our world views and belief systems represent narratives by which we make sense of ourselves and our environment. Science is very much part of that process. But in a complex, changing world, we are now facing risks we cannot easily analyse or understand and which contradict our deeply held beliefs. As Marcia McNutt, president of the US National Academy of Sciences put it: “Science is a method for deciding whether what we choose to believe has a basis in the laws of nature or not.”12 The method and rationale of science does not come naturally to most people, including scientists, because many of the laws of nature are counter-intuitive. It requires a suspension of disbelief and a rigorous approach to assessment of evidence for us to accept, for example, that small changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide, a minor constituent of the earth’s atmosphere, can result in an increase in global temperature. Our tendency when faced with counter-intuitive facts is, therefore, to hang on to our naïve beliefs. Yet, paradoxically, as people become more scientifically literate, they suppress their naïve beliefs but do not discard them. Dan Kahan and colleagues found that scientific literacy tends to promote the polarisation of world views rather than achieve consensus because people use scientific knowledge to reinforce beliefs that have already been shaped 5
by their particular world views. Beliefs on climate change and the environment have come to signify the kind of person one is, and what group in society one identifies with and belongs to. Under such circumstances, adopting a set of shared beliefs is a less risky strategy for an individual than accepting contrary evidence for those beliefs. To go against groupthink is to risk being ostracised.13 The polarisation of beliefs about climate change and the environment have, at one level, been explained as a clash of values between those that support the ideology of the free market and those that recognise the cost of market failures to the environment. The belief in free markets as the only way to run an economy, and the only way to protect the freedom of citizens against unwelcome and unwarranted regulation by Big Government, is based on the premise that the common good can only be served by individuals being free to pursue their own self-interest. By allowing such freedom, markets compete, and supply and demand is brought into equilibrium thus ensuring the optimal distribution of resources. The problem with this world view is that in reality markets do not work in this way, though the adherents of laissez-faire economics believe they do and should, even in the face of massive evidence to the contrary. External costs that the market fails to account for, such as environmental degradation, represent market failures. Regulation is needed to address these external costs, either by prevention of damage or compensating those people who are negatively affected by those costs.14 The finding that nearly eighty percent of people placed the Great Barrier Reef as a greater priority than coal mining tells us something important about the relationship between Australians and the environment. Such a survey would have included citizens of all political stripes, not just Greens supporters. And if that many Australians value the reef for what it stands for and the meaning it has to them, then this perspective represents a positive and hopeful indicator of the relationship between people and environment. The reef is not just a global hotspot of extraordinary biological diversity. It is not just one example of the extraordinary, breathtaking, heart-warming, achingly beautiful and inspiring landscapes and seascapes of this country. Because of what it is, the reef holds meaning for people. They relate to it in all sorts of different ways. And because they relate to it, the reef represents part of what people hold dear and how they see themselves. Thereby the reef has a profound significance, beyond the biological, beyond just its physical presence and its 6
structural and functional attributes. What it means to people says something about who we are and what fundamental values we share. And if the reef is in trouble because of climate change and other human-induced pressures, then what does this say about us? Under such circumstances, can we justly claim to be stewards of the earth? Can we assert that the Judaeo-Christian viewpoint of human dominion over nature and its derivative, the “development ideology”, is anything other than wishful thinking? And if it were, then surely would not God have made us better stewards?
Improving upon nature
According to environmentalist Beth Schultz, ‘Improving on nature’, along with ‘value adding’ are euphemisms used by resources industries to portray their activities as benign or even beneficial: “Both expressions imply there is automatically more value in the products of human endeavour than in nature’s creations.15 The term persists in usages such as “improved pastures” and “landscape improvements”, with all its assumptions on the part of the improvers about landscape design, aesthetics and function. The history of ‘improvement’ as concept and practice goes back to the beginnings of the colonial period, when the term was used to mean clearing the land and cultivating the soil. The colonists and subsequent waves of settlers regarded the country as unproductive land and set about clear felling and ringbarking trees to grow crops and raise livestock. For Aboriginal people closely observing the activities of the ‘white ghosts’ on their country, this activity was not only an act of desecration but clearly signalled that these invaders were here to stay. Tree felling was the harbinger of Aboriginal dispossession. To the British arrivals, the natural landscape was disempowering, alien and hostile. It could not provide adequate food to support the growing white population without improvement. The poverty of the land and waters was perceived to be reflected in the diet and condition of the Aboriginal people. Governor Arthur Phillip observed in a letter of 1788: “There are several roots which they Eat, and I have seen the Bones of the Kangaroo and flying Squirrel at the entrance to their huts, but Fish is their principal support which on these Shores is very scarce and I believe many of them are starving.”16 For Phillip, improvement was essential 7
not only to provide for the colonists, but also, in the words of historian Inga Clendinnen, a means for Aboriginal people “to recognise the benefits of the British presence among them, not only in material matters, but in the unique, incomparable gift of British law.” 17 Phillip’s observations about the shortage of food in a seemingly unproductive landscape indicate his lack of understanding about how Aboriginal people had adapted to an environment in which the supply of food and resources differed dramatically over time and space, both in abundance and diversity. Particular foods were seasonally available at particular places; no one spot—such as Sydney Cove—could possibly have provided for all of their needs. As the anthropologist W.E.H. Stanner put it: “Phillip never comprehended how they could support themselves in what seemed to him the sterile and foodless bush. The whole system of nomadic ecology was so woefully misunderstood that, even half a century after the landing, the explorer Grey could still find pleasure in describing it.” 18 This difference in relationships between landscape and people could barely be more polarised. The British concept of landscape which people settled and modified to produce for their needs was completely at odds with that in which people roamed from place to place in a cycle determined by season and the availability of food. From these two basic constructs of people and landscape comes a whole host of other differences; in how society is organised; in belief systems and codes of behaviour; in how environmental knowledge is constructed, used and passed on and in concepts of land and property rights and the laws governing possession and use. The settlers lacked the practical knowledge for survival in the bush or any sense of connection with it beyond the material. Aboriginal people who interacted with the settlers mocked their clumsiness and ignorance as they attempted to find their way in the new environment. The motivation of settlers to learn about the landscape focussed on its topography and physical layout and on finding well-watered land that was not too sandy or infertile and required only the labour available to them to prepare for cropping and the rearing of livestock. ‘Improvement’ was a means to remake the character of landscape into one that was empowering, familiar and agreeable. The intense physical labour of improvement had tangible results, measured in acreages cleared, bushels of wheat harvested and the head of sheep raised. Such endeavours were not just a measure of 8
improvement, they were considered heroic. There was also a moral dimension to these labours: the transformation of a savage, impoverishes and lawless land into a civilised, bountiful and peaceful place. Once this mindset and course of action was set in train, the incursions and appropriation of land was defended by “the ruthless assertion by Europeans of exclusive proprietorial rights.”19 As the two opposing world views on the environment were set on a collision course, neither group knew, or had the means to know, the perspective of the other. The philosophy and practice of improvement became the basis for fixed perceptions of the environment by the settlers. It provided their justification for the theft of Aboriginal land and sense of superiority over Aboriginal people who were regarded as primitive because they did not use available resources to their full potential, had no permanent settlements, raised no crops, created no wealth and lived in a land in which the flora and fauna were inferior and impoverished. Aboriginal people had an intimate knowledge of the capabilities of the land and how to live as part of it, but this knowledge could not fit within any framework that the settlers could acknowledge.20 Over time, improvement became fixed into a belief system about the nature and desirability of progress. As landscapes were changed and Aboriginal people driven by frontier violence and dispossession to retreat beyond their former territories or to the margins of white society, so in the latter part of the 19th Century the full scale of improvement was unleashed through new road networks, railways, ports, townships, irrigation schemes and acclimatisation societies. The importation from Europe of plants and animals considered ‘useful’ was one of the most powerful assertions of possession; a deliberate attempt to transform the landscape and augment its outlandish and useless biota by populating it with fauna and flora that accorded with the desires of the settlers for the familiar, the nostalgic and the useful.
Progress and development
Throughout the 19th Century free migrants came to Australia mostly from Britain and Ireland, but also other European countries and China. Many arrivals were poor and illiterate manual
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workers escaping harsh economic circumstances back home. Having gained a basic intelligence of the opportunities available in the new country, they set about bettering themselves, mostly by backbreaking work on the land, prospecting, droving and trading and they accumulated and speculated what wealth they were able. This pragmatic philosophy of hard work, independence and bloody-minded determination to survive and succeed has endured to this day. A friend whose father was descended from Irish migrants and spent a tough and impoverished working life as a goldminer in north Queensland told me about his perspective: you worked every hour you could and relied on nobody but yourself. To leave gold or other mineral resources in the ground because they were on somebody else‘s land or because of negative effects on the environment would have been a wanton act of wastefulness and stupidity. To do so would be letting down yourself, your family and its subsequent generations, as well as your country. And if you destroyed a landscape or polluted a river in the process, well that was the price to be paid for mining. There were plenty more intact landscapes and pristine rivers out there. The work ethic and motivation of the landless poor of Britain to generate personal wealth translated into an environmental ethic of exploitation of common pool natural resources at the expense of the land and its first people onto whom the costs of exploitation were externalised. Terms like ‘pioneer’, ‘settler’ and ‘prospector’ have been used as euphemisms by some historians, politicians and their supporters to depict these activities as beneficial to colonial society and economy; heroic feats of progress in the building of a new and developing nation. Yet those who were among the first white people to settle on Aboriginal land and exploit it for natural resources were likely involved in bloody conflict with Aboriginal people. If not active participants in violence, they were complicit in ignoring or whitewashing the ruthless brutality meted out to the blacks. The culture of forgetfulness of these atrocities persists, and the reason for denial is clear. To admit that Australia has a blood-soaked racist past is to reframe the epic achievement of nation building by the settlers as a history of shameful acts of theft, murder and dispossession.
Facing up to history and ecology
Coming to terms with history of colonialism. It is not a narrative of white progress. 10
The externalisation of the costs of development of natural resources play out as negative effects on ecosystems and the way they function, and on the people who rely on those ecosystems as a basis for their livelihoods and wellbeing. Sometimes those negative effects appear in the short-term, such as rapid soil erosion and siltation of rivers and creeks caused by mining of alluvial gold and felling of riparian forests during the Victorian gold rush. In other examples lag times between the cause of ecosystem change and its effects are longer and incremental, as in the case of land clearing during the latter part of the 19 th Century leading to dryland salinity in the Murray-Darling Basin in the mid-20th Century. The longterm negative effects of deliberate introductions of exotic plants and animals by acclimatisation societies and State Departments of Agriculture between the 1850s and 1970s are one of the reasons Australia has amongst the highest diversity of weeds and feral animals and some of the strictest quarantine regulations in the world. What is the opportunity cost to ‘national progress’ of the damage caused by rabbits, foxes, deer, carp, cane toads, camels, willows, blackberry, lantana, serrated tussock, water hyacinth and gorse and the resources spent on control and eradication? As Eric Rolls remarked of acclimatisation societies, “there was never a body of men so foolishly, so vigorously, and so disastrously wrong.”21 The idea that contemporary perspectives on the environment held by non-Indigenous Australians are connected with their attitudes towards Aboriginal people is an important part of the consideration of environment, people and culture in Australia. While there are some obvious associations, the relationships between attitudes are elusive and hard to identify.22 The perceptions of settlers of both landscape and Aboriginal people as savage, impoverished, lawless and unproductive provided a justification for not only improvement but also for dispossession and violence. The triangle of relationships between landscape, Aboriginal people and European settlers that was shaped early on in the history of colonial Australia is still with us today, underpinned by our profoundly different understandings, customs, practices and ethics of our relationships with the natural world. Where does an appreciation and an understanding of this triangle of difference take us? What can we do about it and how can we use that understanding to reframe relationships between landscape and people so that we can one day proudly proclaim, in the words of Stan Grant, “Australians all, let us rejoice”?23 11
Notes
1 W.H. Auden (1966) Collected Shorter Poems 1927-1957. Faber and Faber, London, p. 170. 2 Peter Hannam and Melanie Kembrey, Sydney storm: lessons from a tempest. The Sydney Morning Herald 10th June, 2016. 3 Fergus Hunter and Jane Lee, Election 2016: Malcolm Turnbull's warning on climate change disasters. The Sydney Morning Herald 9th June, 2016. 4 Will Steffen, Science censorship: Great Barrier Reef scrubbed from UN climate change report. 27th May, 2015, Climate Council. https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/reefgate. Will Steffen, Speaking out in defence of science: Great Barrier Reef & climate change. Climate Council, 31st May, 2016. https://www.climatecouncil.org.au/reefgate-update. Adam Markham, Australia’s iconic Great Barrier Reef World Heritage Site at risk from global warming. Union of Concerned Scientists, 26th May, 2016 http://blog.ucsusa.org/adam-markham/australias-iconic-great-barrier-reef-worldheritage-site-at-risk-from-global-warming 5,Climate report censored? The Project, Channel 10, 27th May, 2016 http://tenplay.com.au/channel-ten/the-project/extra/season-7/climate-report-censored 6 Only 7% of the Great Barrier Reef has avoided coral bleaching. Media Release, ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, 20th April, 2016. https://www.coralcoe.org.au/media-releases/only-7-of-the-great-barrier-reef-hasavoided-coral-bleaching 7 Nicole Hasham, YourVote: Great Barrier Reef should be prioritised over coal mining, survey shows. Sydney Morning Herald, 14th June, 2016. 8 Mike Seccombe, Baird Man. The Saturday Paper 11th June, 2016. 9 Paddy Manning, A hidden agenda? Larry Marshall and the CSIRO's climate scientists. Background Briefing, Radio National, 6th June, 2016 http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/backgroundbriefing/a-hidden-agendalarry-marshall-and-the-csiro-climate-scientists/7480370 10 Farrah Tomazin, People power: CSIRO scientists campaign against Coalition cuts. The Age, 4th June, 2016. 11 Röckstrom, J. et al. (2009) A safe operating space for humanity. Nature 461, 472–475.
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12 Joel Achenbach, Why do many reasonable people doubt science? National Geographic, March 2015. 13 Kahan, D. (2010) Fixing the communications failure. Nature 463, 296-297. Kahan, D. (2012) Why we are poles apart on climate change. Nature 488, 255. Kahan, D., Peters, E., Wittlin, M., Oullette, L.L., Braman, D. and Mandel, G. (2012) The polarising impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks. Nature Climate Change 2, 732735. 14 Naomi Orsekes and Erik M. Conway (2010) Merchants of Doubt. Bloomsbury Press, New York, pp. 240255. Klein N (2014) This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate. Simon and Schuster, New York. 15 Beth Schultz (2001) Language and the natural environment. In: Alwin Fill and Peter Mühlhäusler, eds. The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology and Environment. Continuum, London, pp. 109–114. 16 Letter of July (?) 1788, Mitchell Library, Sydney, ms C 213, quoted by Inga Clendinnen (2003) Dancing With Strangers. Text Publishing, Melbourne, p. 26. 17 Inga Clendinnen (2003), p. 29. 18 W.E.H. Stanner (1979) ‘The History of Indifference Thus Begins’. In: White Man Got No Dreaming. Essays 1938-1973. Australian National University Press, Canberra, p. 173. Reprinted in W.E.H. Stanner (2009) The Dreaming and Other Essays. Black Inc., Melbourne, pp. 101–102. 19 Henry Reynolds (1982), p. 66. 20 Henry Reynolds (1982) The Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the European Invasion of Australia. Penguin Books, Melbourne, pp. 30–32, 58–60. 21 Eric Rolls (1984) They All Ran Wild: The Animals and Plants that Plague Australia. Angus and Robertson. Sydney, p. 210. 22 David Yencken and John Fien (2000) Songlines and the Gondwanan inheritance: environmental attitudes and education in Australia. In: David Yencken, John Fien and Helen Sykes, eds. Environment, Education and Society in the Asia-Pacific: Local Traditions and Global Discourses. Routledge, London. pp. 135–162. 23 Stan Grant (2016) The Australian Dream: blood, history and becoming. Quarterly Essays 84, p. 5. 13
