This was originally posted on Tasmanian Times in 2008. How far have we progressed since then?
We are pleased to re-present this very thoughtful piece by Brenda Rosser. Unfortunately the original footnotes are unavailable.
Seven Ways to be Wise in our Time and Place
1. Make our industrial processes and our way of life sustainable.
2. Understand that natural systems are booby-trapped with potentially catastrophic tipping points and feedback loops.
3. Know there are ongoing costs to the action/inaction that has already occurred.
4. Value biodiversity.
5. Know that a free market requires ethics and regulation and not everything is for sale.
6. Add up the costs of inaction.
7. Realise that technology alone cannot meet our challenges.
There has come a time when it is clear that many Australian citizens have lost sight of the essential nature of things. Where our patterns of thought and behaviour – our everyday social ‘norms’ – are inevitably leading us to an apocalyptical future of deprivation and long-lasting ruin.
In the hills and valleys of Tasmania I see a merger of humans with machine. Where minds have become twisted and adapted to the dreadful logic and form of industrial tools. The vast destruction of our native forests and the attendant poisoning of our natural environment, the overfished seas, and the now vast weed-and-vermin-filled lands of absentee corporate owners, are merely the physical manifestations of a system of laws and inherent structural rules that have trespassed way beyond human ‘morals’ or concerns for community.
It is an automatic momentum that denies recognition of nature and natural processes.
The moving out of our self-imposed subjugation will not require the piling up of facts. Rather it will require the simple anticipation of consequences. To be wise in our time is to:
1. Make our industrial processes and our way of life sustainable.
Profit, in Australia and other ‘developed’ nations is only conceived as returns to shareholders and ‘farmers’. Land is treated as dead matter that “has no significance beyond a quarry for exploitation” as Schumaker puts it. EF Schumaker goes on to say that, in our economic systems, the ideal of industry is to eliminate the living factor, even including the human factor, and to turn the productive process over to machines. Just as “Alfred North Whitehead defined life as ‘an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe’, so we may define modern industry as ‘an offensive against the unpredictability, unpunctuality, general waywardness and cussedness of living nature, including man’.”
Industrial-style agriculture and agribusiness were introduced into the countries of the southern hemisphere by the US Ford and Rockefeller foundations [1]. It relied on dangerous technologies that included artificial fertilisers and toxic man-made pesticides along with heavy reliance on irrigation. This new-style farming resulted in escalating costs of inputs that deepened the economic divide between large and small farmers. It set the scene for the taxpayer-funded corporate takeover of vast areas of prime farming land; with resulting devastation to farming soils, water resources, forests and ecosystems that are all now on the point of exhaustion.
Agribusiness is energy-intensive as well and with global energy shortages now looming the resultant attempt to takeover even more land with the production of biofuels has resulted in a sharp escalation of all the problems mentioned above coupled with alarming rises in the price of food and now water. Biofuels cannot possibly replace the energy-intensive fuel of liquid petroleum, in any case. Making ethanol uses more energy than it creates. [2]
In 2006 the United States Department of Agriculture expected that energy-related farm expenses were to climb 50% above what they were a mere three years earlier [3]. With the dramatic climb in the cost of fuel just in the last few months that figure surely must have evolved into a massive underestimate.
2. Understand that natural systems are booby-trapped with potentially catastrophic tipping points and feedback loops.
There are thresholds past which the slow environmental change gives way to sudden and self-perpetuating global systemic collapse. Scientists are observing that climate change is happening faster than anyone predicted and many in the field are openly expressing alarm. [4] It is not even clear yet whether or not we can reverse the changes that global warming has wrought already and Dr Hansen, from NASA, is saying that a major tipping point will be reached by 2016 if levels of greenhouse gases like methane and CO2 are not reduced. [5] We need to acknowledge that there is a need to draw unambiguous and strictly-enforced limits immediately on destructive practices and lifestyles.
3. Know there are ongoing costs to the action/inaction that has already occurred.
Australian federal and state governments should have taken action decades ago. “It is too late for the city [of Sydney] to avoid a warming of about 1 degree by 2030 as well as a 3 per cent reduction in annual rainfall because of polluting gases already in the atmosphere.” [6] [7] This will occur on top of the drying and increased temperatures that have already occurred in south-east Australia; changes that have exacerbated the effects of drought and reduced snow cover.
The ocean waters are warming off the east coast of Tasmania at a rate triple that experienced globally [8]. Because CO2 stays in the atmosphere for about a century then a stabilisation of current levels of this gas will not prevent the levels from rising. This situation means, according to Joh Palfreman, that we have to phase out the use of fossil fuels altogether – an extraordinarily difficult task [9].
As if this isn’t bad enough we can look at the alarming consequences of just two other unsustainable practices. If we were to cease the current use of toxic and residual industrial pesticides in agriculture and ‘forestry’ today these poisons will still continue to leach into the rivers and streams for a hundred years. In respect of biodiversity, ANU’s Professor Lindenmeyer has warned that the attempt to offset land clearing with replanting will not restore an area’s biodiversity for hundreds of years [10].
4. Value biodiversity.
Our significant dependence on our wildlife and plants is grounded in scientific fact. Nature is our source of all forms of wealth and, quite opposed to what you might have learnt at school, there is no such thing as an economic ‘externality’. Any change to the diversity of living things and anything that impacts on their quality of life will also affect humans.
Interrelatedness, not hierarchy, is the way of nature.
However, because our economic and political systems don’t acknowledge this fact, we now see that one in eight Australian animals and plants are now under threat of extinction. Half of those threatened or endangered species are at the margins of expanding cities, like Melbourne. [11]
Globally, the rate of extinction of species “rose dramatically over the last century, with global loss estimates varying between 1% and 11%” [12]. However, “the absolute rates of species loss in rain forests are 1,000 to 10,000 times the level before human intervention” [13], and “it is [also] estimated that we could lose 50% of total biotic diversity in the next 100 years”. [14]
5. Know that a free market requires ethics and regulation and not everything is for sale.
If economic agents were to do precisely what they wanted, regardless of the consequences, who would want to enter contracts with these people? Indeed at this very moment we are seeing global credit markets shut down for this very reason; a basic lack of trust due to widespread fraud and lack of transparency in transactions.
Think about this.
Would you buy products from a company that engaged in practices that contaminated your drinking water with dangerous chemicals? Would it make sense to read newspapers compiled by corporations that hid the truth from you? Only if they enjoyed an obvious monopoly over the market!
The irony is that well-functioning markets are that way because they are heavily regulated. On the other side of the equation not all that is of value can be subject to quantitative measurement or made amenable to a process of exchange. Water, for example. To trade water is to implement a social system where life itself is for sale.
6. Add up the costs of inaction.
Preventative and remedial action may be far cheaper than the cost of not doing anything at all. In fact, the former may be considerably rewarding to ordinary citizens. Rewarding jobs can be found in the development and implementation of alternative energy technologies, organic agriculture, construction of efficient housing, native forest conservation and scientific research. Doing nothing, on the other hand, will bring our family farmers to bankruptcy, increase the severity of droughts in South East Australia and escalate disease and malnutrition amongst our population.
7. Realise that technology alone cannot meet our challenges.
Once the fundamental laws are understood judgement is required to know how (meaning the method, and/or the technology used) to apply them.
Anthropologist K Sivaramarkishm pointed out that ‘when environmental protection is to be accomplished through the exclusion of certain people from the use of a resource, it will follow existing patterns of power and stratification in society’. [15] Our social values, those such as democracy, egalitarianism, non-violence, and earth-centredness must dictate how and when technology will be used. Above all we should keep in mind the four rules of ecology that the American environmental scientist, Barry Commoner, articulated:
1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.
2. Everything Must Go Somewhere. There is no “waste” in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.
3. Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, “likely to be detrimental to that system.”
4. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid. [16] [17]
