“We must all have a great sense of responsibility and not let things happen because everyone takes the comfortable view that someone else is looking after it. Someone else isn’t looking after it.” – Rachel Carson, 1962
Steve Biddulph
THE great travesty of Tasmania under Lennon/Bartlett is the obsessive focus on forest exploitation. It has never made sense, a mere 1% contribution to our GDP and employment is used to tarnish our tourism, poison our waters, destroy our climate, and corrupt our politics. The Pulp Mill proposal threatens to tie the whole of Tassie’s land use pattern into a single mega-industry, devouring 360 log trucks of forest a day, requiring both native forest and farmland conversion on a massive scale.
This lovely extract below sums up how dangerous and irrational single industry economies are, and how rich and resilient Tassie would be (and in fact already is) without them.
From http://www.grist.org/article/2009-toward-a-less-efficient-and-more-robust/
In her great book, The Economy of Cities, Jane Jacobs praised what she called the “valuable inefficiencies and impracticalities of cities.” To illustrate her point, she invited readers to consider two examples from Victorian England: Manchester and Birmingham—or as she put it, “Efficient Manchester,” and “Inefficient Birmingham.”
A 19th century marvel and widely hailed as the “city of the future,” Manchester represented a break from the past. What Manchester did that was so new and different was simple—it specialized. The city threw its lot with one industry—textiles. Jacobs refers to the “stunning efficiency of its textile mills.” By the 1840s, the textile industry dominated the city entirely, Jacob tells us. The industry was brutally competitive; less efficient producers got swallowed up by larger, more streamlined players.
Contemporaries were impressed. For boosters, Manchester’s textile industry represented the triumph of the industrial revolution, the vindication of the power division of labor and specialization. As for detractors, a German writer named Karl Marx witnessed Manchester’s boom period and loathed the inequality he saw—a few wealthy mill owners and the thousands of impoverished mill workers. He also deplored the dehumanization of labor—the need to force humans to behave repetitive-motion machines. But like the boosters, Marx saw Manchester as a portent of the cities of the future—places that consolidate economic activity into a single industry, and then produce a single kind of product with terrible efficiency.
Now, a little ways to the south of Manchester lies a city called Birmingham. By the mid-19th century, Birmingham looked mired in the past. No one gaped at its “terrible efficiency.” Birmingham had a few relatively large industries, Jacob writes, but nothing to compare with Manchester’s textile behemoth. What really made Birmingham’s economy tick were its small operations. Jacobs tells us that “most of Birmingham’s manufacturing was carried out in small organizations employing no more than a dozen workman; many had fewer.”
There was a competitive spirit in Birmingham, but also plenty of cooperation. “A lot of these little organizations,” writes Jacob, “did bits and pieces of work for other little organizations.” In other words, they worked together; they formed networks, loose informal cooperatives.
And unlike in Manchester, there wasn’t a lot of big fish swallowing little fish. Birmingham’s little organizations “were not rationally or efficiently consolidated,” Jacobs writes. “There was a lot of waste of motion, duplication that could certainly have certainly been eliminated by consolidation.” In fact, organizations were more likely to spawn new organizations then to swallow old ones. “Able workman were forever breaking off from their employers … and setting up shop for themselves, compounding the fragmentation of work,” Jacobs adds.
She says few people took time to comment on Birmingham’s economy—and those who did were puzzled that it worked at all. Observers scratched their heads about why the people of Birmingham weren’t striving to imitate the emerging textile barons to the north.
Manchester geared its economy outward; it sought to maximize trade, to import what it didn’t produce, and export what it did produce, which was textiles. It strove to be the textile supplier to the British Empire and beyond. Meanwhile, humble Birmingham was mainly taking care of its own needs, turning to outside trade only at the margins.
Of course, as you’ve probably guessed, things turned out quite a bit differently than most 19th century observers predicted. Efficient Manchester turned out to be a bust. In short, people in other places—namely, in Britain’s colony on the Indian subcontinent—learned how to churn out textiles more cheaply. The city’s textile industry entered a long and slow phase of decline. Manchester was built not for the future, but rather for obsolescence.
Meanwhile, inefficient Birmingham thrived. “Its fragmented and inefficient little industries kept adding new work, and splitting off new organizations, some of which are very large but still outweighed in total employment and production by the many small ones,” Jacobs writes. She adds that by the middle of the 20th century, “only two cities in England remain[ed] vigorous and prosperous. One is London. The other is Birmingham.”
