PREFACE
In 1990, Jo Kwong, who was then research associate professor at George Mason University in the United States, published the book Myths about Environmental Policy in conjunction with the Washington-based group Citizens for the Environment. It was that work that provided the impetus to create Tall Green Tales. Many of the chapter titles in Tall Green Tales have their origins in Kwong's book. However, the content of every chapter has been prepared specifically for Australia in this volume.
Richard J. Wood
INTRODUCTION
Since the 1960s there has been increasing concern for the environment expressed by the Australian people. This has been manifest by the growth in the number and size of associations which have an environmental issue as their central focus. Amongst these groups are the Australian Conservation Foundation, the Wilderness Society, Greenpeace, the Worldwide Fund for Nature, as well as a host of smaller local or single issue groups of the "Save the ..." variety. Corporations have begun to target consumer markets with environmentally-friendly products. The media have found that television and radio programmes, newspaper articles and even whole magazines with environmental themes sell. Along with this growth in awareness has come an increase in political activity that is focused on environmental issues and thence policies. Disquiet concerning the state of the environment among groups in the population has spawned political activity and eventually the formation of a "green" political party. The environment has become an important piece in the political jigsaw.
The growth in awareness of, and concern for, the environment has had many positive consequences. Increased knowledge of the environmental consequences of individual and community actions has meant that many people and organisations have changed their behaviour. For instance, information regarding the land degradation consequences of various agricultural practices has convinced many farmers to adopt alternative, soil-conserving methods. Consumers look to recycle their waste paper and aluminium cans. Companies search for production technologies which will create safer products in a cleaner way.
There has, however, been a negative side to the growth in the perceived importance of environmental issues. Many of these issues are not only highly complex scientifically but are also highly emotive. Increased public awareness has not always been matched by increased public understanding of the scientific complexities involved. Frequently, this has been because the scientific community has itself been divided over the issues. An example of this is the Greenhouse effect. The lay person has little hope of being able to reach a clear conclusion about the debate which has raged amongst the professionals. Yet the dire consequences of Greenhouse that some scientists have portrayed have caused an alarmed response in the community. The same situation has arisen again and again in all sorts of environmental debates: toxic wastes, lead in petrol, the logging of forests, land degradation, sewage, etc.
The public alarm that has occurred has had political consequences. Special interest groups in the community have been able to take advantage of the level of public disquiet to push forward their own environmental protection goals in the political arena. Usually, these goals have been particularly narrow in focus. The broader, and often unforeseen, negative consequences have been ignored.
One reason for the lack of consideration of the unintended consequences of many environmental policies is that the complex interdependencies stressed by greens when analysing natural systems are neglected when social systems are incorporated into the policy equation. Societies are complex interactions of individuals, organisations and institutions and any analysis of the consequences of change must take into account these interdependencies. And because the social system is intricately intertwined with the natural system, it is all too easy to omit some of the important linkages. The consequences of such omissions can be environmental policies which work to the detriment of the environment and of society.
The author of this book has sought to understand the ways in which society and its component members interact with the natural world. What he found was that, often, the sentiments and policies propagated by the green movement are actually myths once their wider consequences are investigated. They are in fact Tall Green Tales.
1. INDIGENOUS PEOPLE LIVE IN HARMONY WITH NATURE AND HAVE MUCH TO TEACH US ABOUT ENVIRONMENTAL STEWARDSHIP
Many people believe that tribal or indigenous people live in harmony with the environment, and that they have a more "holistic", more spiritual, and far less materialistic, approach to nature than modern Westerners. A barrage of writings, films, television programmes as well as the statements of indigenous people themselves reinforce this belief -- and its corollary that an appropriate relationship between humans and the natural environment requires radical changes in Western culture in order to incorporate tribal wisdom.
Burger provides one of countless possible examples of the way in which indigenous peoples are portrayed as paragons of environmental virtue. He claims that "all [indigenous cultures] consider the Earth like a parent and revere it accordingly. ... [They have] a perception, an awareness, that all of life -- mountains, rivers, skies, animals, plants, insects, rocks, people -- are inseparably connected. Material and spiritual worlds are woven together in one complex web, all living things imbued with a sacred meaning. ... According to indigenous law, humankind can never be more than a trustee of the land, with a collective responsibility to preserve it." (1) Speeches, legends and myths of the American Indians and other indigenous people have been an important source of inspiration for the modern environmentalist movement. One of the most famous and influential of these speeches is attributed to Seattle, a mid-nineteenth-century chief from the Pacific North West Coast, which expresses all the sentiments -- and more -- which Burger has identified. The powerful rhetoric of Seattle's speech has moved churchmen to declare that it comprises "a fifth Gospel, almost". (2)
Such beliefs have a long lineage, going back to the revolutionary romantics of the eighteenth century such as Rousseau, with his idea of the "noble savage", and even further beyond, to the time of the ancients. Thus, in the first century A.D. the Roman historian Tacitus contrasted the degeneracy and moral laxity of Roman life with the simple virtues of the tribal Germans.
So it is not surprising that a significant element in recent discussions about land rights and environmental issues in Australia is the claim that Aborigines have much to teach the rest of the community about ecologically-sound ways of living. (3) As the anthropologist Lee Sackett has observed, such claims are motivated by a desire "to critique the status quo and spark change", (4) motivations which are little different from those of the eighteenth century revolutionary French intellectuals or even Tacitus. Certainly, if the environmentalists' depictions of indigenous cultures were accurate and fair, attempts to encourage similar cultural developments in Western societies might be defensible and constructive. But the depictions are mostly fantasy.
For one thing, they frequently depend on a revealing naïvety about the relation between stated ideals and actual behaviour amongst non-Western peoples. No environmentalist would be willing to argue that the behaviour of all Christians through the ages has reflected the altruism and compassion of the New Testament, yet they seem willing to make such generalisations when it comes to other culture. (5)
Certainly, there is ample evidence that many of the environmental sins for which Western cultures are blamed were also prevalent in indigenous cultures. For instance, a number of anthropologists have documented the indifference of traditional Aborigines towards conservation and the profligacy of their attitudes towards natural resources. As Christopher Anderson has observed, environmentalists "who are involved in dealings with Aboriginal people in conservation matters will become quickly disillusioned. One has only to camp in the bush with Aboriginal people in many areas and see children cutting down any and everything in sight to appreciate this". (6) Ted Strehlow described how the Aranda of the Central Australian desert responded to the times of plenty that followed heavy rains:
Animals were slaughtered ruthlessly, and only the best and fattest parts of the killed game were eaten; every tree was stripped bare of its fruits, and all that were unripe and tasteless were tossed away ... (7)
American Indians displayed a similar lack of sensitivity to the "complex web of life". The Sioux, as Daniel Guthrie has noted, "showed no qualms about driving a herd of buffalo over a cliff or about starting a range fire to drive the buffalo". And when buffalo were plentiful, often only the choicest parts were eaten, with the rest of the kill being left to rot -- Dances with Wolves notwithstanding. (8)
The low population density and rudimentary level of technology of most tribal peoples help to sustain the impression that their impact on the environment is minimal, particularly when considered over the short timespan in which most social and cultural research about these peoples has been conducted. (9) Archaeological research, which takes a much longer timespan, can show a very different picture.
Although the role played by tribal peoples in the extinctions that occurred around the end of the last ice age is controversial because of the difficulty of differentiating the effects of human actions from climatic changes, there is no such difficulty in assigning responsibility for later extinctions. In the Pacific Islands, the archaeological record shows that an enormous number of birds became extinct before European contact, but after settlement by the ancestors of contemporary indigenous populations. In many parts of the Pacific more species of land birds became extinct than survive today as a consequence of pre-European contact forest-clearing, hunting, and predation by the mammals which the islanders brought with them. (10)
The massive grasslands of the New Guinea highlands were produced by indigenous populations. Land was over-cultivated and forests were subjected to uncontrolled burning. (11) Research has shown that pre-Columbian land use in the Americas was no less harmful to the environment than the Hispanic plough agriculture which succeeded it. Analysis of sediment cores in central Mexico has shown that rates of soil erosion during two lengthy periods before the Spanish conquest were at least as high as the rates after the conquest. (12)
Anthropological research designed to assess carefully the environmental impact of tribal people has also shown that it can be very substantial and unmitigated by any sense of responsibility towards nature that might serve to curtail their damaging activities. Thus, although the gentle hunting and gathering Semang of the Malayan peninsula are too few in number to have much effect on the environment at a regional level, at a local level their impact is considerable. This includes pollution of the rivers as a result of their toilet habits, the widespread disruption and overexploitation of riverine fish populations through the use of their traditional fish poisons, the indiscriminate dumping of rubbish, the extensive destruction of forest plants in the process of harvesting their products and an extremely high level of air pollution in the vicinity of Semang shelters, mainly through domestic fires. As an anthropologist who studied the Semang writes:
If citizens of Malaysia's capital city of Kuala Lumpur were confronted with air pollution of the intensity normal in Semang households, they would rise up in outrage over the terrible state of the city's environment, and they would blame it on modernisation and capitalist industrialisation. (13)
There are three major reasons for treating with great scepticism claims that indigenous people's supposed reverence for nature provide an appropriate model for Westerners to follow.
First, some of the accounts on which the claims are based are fraudulent. The most egregious instance is Chief Seattle's speech, whose lofty words seem to provide such strong support for the kind of depiction that environmentalists prize. It was actually written in 1970-71 by the scriptwriter of an environmental film produced by the Southern Baptist Radio and Television Commission in the United States, and is therefore a product, not of traditional American Indian values, but of current North American ones. The circumstances of the dissemination of Seattle's "speech" reflect little credit on those responsible. The Southern Baptists knew that it was a work of fiction but still presented it as authentic. And people familiar with the geography and history of the Northwest United States -- as one might reasonably expect North American environmentalists with intellectual pretensions to be -- should have been able to recognise that some of Seattle's "observations" could not have occurred. (14)
Other famous examples of "indigenous wisdom" have also been misrepresented. Black Elk Speaks is one of the seminal texts of the modern environmental movement. Black Elk was an Oglala Sioux, whose recollections were written down and then published in 1932 by the US poet John Neihardt. But Neihardt, and those who followed him, chose to ignore the fact that Black Elk had been a devout Catholic catechist and missionary for 27 years by the time his words were recorded. Furthermore, some of the most quoted passages Neihardt attributed to Black Elk appear to have been the poet's invention, as they do not appear in the original typescripts of the conversations between the two that are held in archives. (15)
The second reason for scepticism is that indigenous spokespeople, like people anywhere, will attempt to present the strongest possible case for the causes they are promoting, such as land claims and sovereignty. They no longer live -- if indeed they ever did -- in a timeless world, totally isolated from developments elsewhere. They travel to regional or metropolitan centres, they listen to the radio, they often have access to cinemas and video, and many are educated or assisted by educated supporters. They recognise the importance of environmental and social concerns for public opinion in Western societies, and cast many of their arguments accordingly. As the late Roger Keesing noted, such self-representations are adversarial constructions and, because indigenous cultures are more malleable than either their adherents or outsiders usually recognise, frequently draw on elements that are not traditional, but that post-date colonial contact and control. (16) Oblivious to the political intent behind such representations, western environmentalists have left themselves vulnerable to great disillusionment. The most outstanding recent case involves the rock singer Sting, who toured the world with a Kayapo Indian from Brazil in order to save the Amazonian rain forests in the late 1980s. But now, having achieved their aim of protecting tribal lands from outside control, the Kayapo are very keen to obtain the maximum financial reward they can, and have demanded the right to continue their profitable deforestation of their property. " 'They're always trying to deceive you' says Sting, 'They see the white man only as a good source of earning money ... I was very naïve.' " (17)
Thirdly, even where it is legitimate to identify a conservation ethic amongst indigenous people, it is hardly ever characterised by the universalism which is an important component of Western environmental concerns. Their interests are invariably local, focusing on their own resource base, (18) and indifferent to the problems that may be faced by people or environments on the other side of the world. "Thinking globally" is very much a Western phenomenon. (19)
Certainly, many indigenous peoples had practices which assisted the conservation of some species, or elements of the ecosystems in which they lived. In some cases such consequences may have been the fortuitous outcomes of actions undertaken for other reasons, such as taboos imposed on certain activities or species because of supernatural beliefs. But insofar as the beneficial results of such practices remained unrecognised by the people themselves, they were always vulnerable to environmental or religious changes. In other cases the beneficial practices may have been the product of a recognition of the linkages between specific aspects of their environment. (20) But, even when indigenous people could offer rich accounts of the behaviour and characteristics of animals and plants in their environment, it appears that their knowledge was partial and unsystematic. Accurate observation often co-existed with fantasy. The anthropologist Robert Harms offers a telling example from the Nunu of Zaire. After Nsamonie, one of his old and valuable informants on Nunu culture, "had delivered knowledgeable discourses on the migration and spawning habits of the fish and on the various methods of catching them, I asked him if he ever worried about killing off too many fish. He burst out laughing. 'The fish come from the river', he said. 'The supply is infinite.' " (21)
Indigenous peoples appear not to have had the social institutions and traditions of rigorous critical questioning that would give them the kind of understanding of the world that can come from scientific enquiry. (22) Hence they lacked the capacity to develop rationally-based responses to environmental degradation when it occurred. As unpalatable as it may be to those who celebrate the wisdom of indigenous cultures, when it comes to environmental management indigenous people have immensely more to learn from Western knowledge than Westerners have to learn from them.
2. MANDATORY RECYCLING IS GOOD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT
For conservationists, a strong commitment to recycling has become the badge of environmental responsibility, and they have had considerable success in convincing citizens and governments to accept this view. In a 1990 survey conducted by the Resource Assessment Commission, 70 per cent of a national sample of over 2,000 people answered "yes" when asked "do you recycle things such as paper or glass?" (23) Whether or not people answered this question truthfully, the result shows that a substantial majority of the population believes that recycling is the right thing to do. Unfortunately, the enthusiasm for recycling more often seems to be motivated by middle-class guilt about consumption, than by any sensible assessment of its value.
Recycling is a fashionable way to display environmental consciousness -- a factor which affects business in subtle ways. Companies with a record in recycling are likely to find it easier to become registered as official Commonwealth Government suppliers, for example. For the same reason, children's television programmes with segments advocating recycling are more likely to be cleared by the authorities for transmission. Similarly, beverage manufacturers have found that promoting the recyclable qualities of their containers can both improve the acceptability of their products to consumers and help keep government regulators out of their hair.
The straightforward economics of recycling ensures that a great deal of it is already done. There are famous examples such as the break-up of ageing seagoing ships which occurs along the beaches in Pakistan. Less well known examples are all around us:
- metals have been recycled for thousands of years simply because they have high value relative to the costs of collecting and reprocessing them;
- about one-third of all paper and aluminium, and a quarter of all glass consumed in this country is recycled;
- with aluminium cans, recovery rates have reached about 60 per cent (recycling needs only 5 per cent of the energy required to produce the new metal and there are over eleven hundred buy-back centres around the country where people can sell their used cans).
Some of the recycling which occurs is quite mundane -- several popular brands of kitty litter are made from recycled paper, for example.
Australia's largest cardboard manufacturer is now actually paying one of the large banking companies for its waste paper. This contrasts with the usual pattern with paper, in which ratepayers pay to have the material taken from their homes.
In industry, recycling opportunities seem to be growing all the time. A new process has recently been developed in Canada for pickling steel which, by using an electrolysis process in salty water, allows the surface iron oxide to be recycled as ore; does away with the problem of having to recycle or dispose of used acid; and lengthens the life of equipment with which acids and acid vapours would otherwise have come into contact. Savings are estimated in one factory at $18 per tonne.
Sometimes, however, there are problems.
Clearly there is no point in recycling unless a demand exists for the reused materials. This can change markedly over short periods of time. For instance, the price paid for old newspapers dropped from around $100 per tonne to $10 per tonne in the fifteen months from December 1988 in Sydney, putting many local collectors out of business. (Even now the price in Sydney is only $50 per tonne.) And technological development has brought about the introduction of self-cleaning machinery in a number of industries, thereby wrecking the demand for wiping cloths, which were made from recycled textiles.
Also, people often forget that recycling has its own environmental costs. Before the materials can be processed, they have to be collected, transported to the factory, and in some cases sorted, and cleaned or otherwise prepared. These stages consume energy and other resources, and produce their own waste products, sometimes at very substantial levels. Depending on the process, recycling can result in large amounts of water contaminated with other pollutants being discharged into the environment.
Old newspapers are of limited use, for example, not just because people are reluctant to collect them, but because, when certain types of imported newsprint are involved, residual pollutants such as dioxins can be retained and concentrated in the effluent and the new paper. The international trade in old newsprint is swamped with subsidised product of United States origin which can find no use at home. Problems of this kind were identified in the Industry Commission's 1989-91 inquiry into Recycling. (24) As the Commission pointed out, "There is no simple relationship between recycling and conservation".
The big policy issue with recycling is whether governments should do more to encourage it. During the February 1992 conference of the Australian and New Zealand Environment Council, Federal and State ministers reached agreement on a wide range of recycling targets for the year 2000. Business leaders have agreed to meet them. The aim is to reduce the total quantity of solid waste going to landfill by 50 per cent by the year 2000. These targets are being monitored by the new Federal Environmental Protection Agency and if they are not reached voluntarily, regulatory means of enforcing them may be introduced. (25) Some States have been considering the introduction of levies on a wide range of disposable household products in order to encourage recycling. A couple of years ago, Victoria and New South Wales were looking at such proposals. The latest campaign has been in the ACT.
It is by no means clear that government promotion of recycling is either cost effective or, in some narrower sense, good for the environment.
One of the most popular arguments for government promotion of recycling is that people tend to undervalue recycling as an activity. This idea has some appeal, because industries and consumers often do not pay directly for waste collection and disposal costs -- or at least not in proportion to their responsibilities for them. The absence of a clear chain of responsibility in relation to waste costs seems quite marked in relation to littering in particular. Littering creates costs in the forms of unsightliness and health hazards which the perpetrator will not bear (or at least will not in the absence of fines or social pressures).
It is easy to accept that promotion of recycling in such circumstances might create economies in waste disposal and might help create a visually-improved environment. But the difficulty lies in designing an intervention which does not cause more trouble than it seeks to overcome.
Thinking on the role of recycling has been advanced in recent times by what is called "life-cycle analysis". If you look at the environmental effects of a product at every stage -- from raw material extraction and production to distribution and disposal -- favourable first impressions of mandatory recycling in particular can be overturned. At an OECD workshop in Paris in mid-1993, it was shown using this kind of analysis that the politically-popular practices of artificially encouraging recycling of cars in Sweden and newsprint in Canada could be more environmentally harmful than less interventionist policy alternatives. In the US, similar analysis has halted the movement to ban disposable nappies. It has also convinced McDonald's to switch its polystyrene clam-shell containers for hamburgers to a lighter wrap of paper and polyethylene rather than try to recycle the polystyrene. In Denmark, non-refillable paper cartons have been shown to be better for the environment than refillable containers, which has led the Danes to lift their ban on non-refillable containers and to remove their tax on milk cartons. (26)
Australia, too, has a law for mandatory recycling of containers which should now be abandoned. It is South Australia's so-called "container deposit legislation".
South Australia is the only State in Australia which has container deposit legislation. It was introduced in 1977. Its key provision is a requirement that beer, wine-cooler and soft drink producers offer a deposit for return of their containers. (Cider, wine, spirits and milk containers are exempt.) Its purpose, allegedly, was to combat littering and to save on waste disposal costs.
The legislation pushes the mix of containers used by beer and soft drink producers towards heavy-duty returnable glass bottles and away from lightweight glass and plastic bottles and cans. The difference between South Australia and other Australian States in this regard is striking. In other parts of the country, lightweight aluminium cans and single-use bottles are much more in evidence.
A study of the South Australian law was published in 1989 by the Commonwealth Business Regulation Review Unit (BRRU). (27) (The methodology and results of the study were endorsed in 1990 by the environmentalists' reviewer of choice, the British cost-benefit expert, Professor David Pearce.) (28)
The BRRU study found that indirectly, for reasons of consumer inconvenience and added producer costs, the legislation reduces consumer well-being and beverage company returns. The aggregate loss in the late 1980s totalled $25-50 million per year. The inconvenience effect depresses demand and thus works to suppress prices while the added-cost effect works to raise prices. So the net impact of the legislation on South Australian beverage prices is unclear. But this does not alter the fact that South Australian beverage producers and consumers suffer a big loss.
Paradoxically, nobody is able to demonstrate that container deposit legislation means there is less litter in South Australia. There are fewer cans, but more broken glass and bottle tops, so overall the litter-count is much the same as in other States.
Also, the landfill impact is small. Container deposit legislation was shown to reduce the volume of empty bottles and drink cans going to South Australian rubbish tips by about 40,000 tonnes per year. This sounds a lot, but at rates current at the time of the study, the value of the land-fill saved was only $2-3 million each year, or just 5-10 per cent of the inconvenience cost of the legislation to consumers.
The environmental ambiguity of the legislation is underlined by the fact that it works to protect an official chain of licensed collection depots from competition by kerbside collectors.
Environmental concerns aside, the industry politics of container deposit legislation in South Australia helps explain its origins. Yet, slowly the equation is changing. In the past, South Australian brewers and soft drink manufacturers supported container deposit legislation -- it raised their costs but protected them from interstate competition because of the smaller distance they had to bring their bottles compared with interstate suppliers. By contrast, today nearly all the soft drink sold is under international brands. And South Australia's main brewery is now owned by a nation-wide brewer, Lion Nathan, which is interested in South Australia as a market for its other beers. In fact, that brewer now owns the former Bond breweries which approached the High Court in 1989 for an injunction against the South Australian Government on the grounds that its container deposit legislation breached Section 92 of the Constitution because it impeded the sale of interstate beers in South Australia. Furthermore, interstate sales of South Australian beers are rising and container deposit legislation is only a nuisance as far as they are concerned.
The doubtful worth of South Australia's container deposit legislation is a story that is repeated as far as the recycling efforts of local councils around Australia are concerned. Here again, forced recycling has been failing to produce environmental gain.
During the 1989-91 Industry Commission inquiry, the Australian Bureau of Statistics undertook a survey of the costs which municipal councils had avoided by operating recycling programmes. These were the costs of collecting and disposing of materials that would otherwise have been included as part of household garbage. The costs of collecting the recyclables -- largely the subsidies that had to be paid to contractors to make it economically worthwhile for them to carry out the task -- were then subtracted to obtain the net savings. It was found that whereas councils in the Sydney region achieved total savings of around $0.5 million through recycling programmes, councils in the Melbourne region lost nearly $1.6 million. For Australia as a whole there was a net loss of $0.4 million. The message is that where the cost of disposing of household garbage is low, it is more cost-effective to rely on traditional garbage disposal methods and to place waste in secure landfills.
Worries that there is insufficient recycling in Australia would be better addressed through the more direct approach of carefully pricing waste collection and disposal services to reflect properly their costs. Why not charge households directly on a volume-related basis for their garbage service, for example? Why not have heavy fines for littering at a level which reflects the visual impairment and health risk that litter causes?
Charging enough to cover the cost of garbage services would be a big step forward in itself. It would help councils balance their budgets. Moreover, higher charges would encourage people to search for products which generate less waste. Further advances could be made with multi-part charging. For example, a two part charge -- the first part to cover the fixed costs of a weekly collection and the second to reflect the weight and volume of the waste to be disposed -- would be likely to provide a well-balanced incentive for households to search for recycling opportunities.
Coincidentally, the linking of garbage fees to garbage volume would heighten the incentive for households to shop around for cheaper waste-disposal options. In a properly-priced situation, alternatives such as personal visits to garbage tips or the utilisation of private collection services could be correctly weighed against the recycling options.
3. CLIMATE CHANGE RESULTING FROM INCREASING GREENHOUSE GASES WILL BE CALAMITOUS UNLESS GOVERNMENTS TAKE DRASTIC ACTION
Of the many contentious statements associated with Greenhouse trepidation, two are particularly misleading: first, that climate disaster threatens, and, second, that such changes are already evident.
- Typical of the first is: "some scientists are increasingly worried that greenhouse gases could wreak havoc with the earth's climate in future generations, creating huge floods and droughts from global warming". (29)
- And a recent example of the second is: "changes in carbon dioxide resulting from human activities are causing large and readily observable changes in both the average temperature and in the seasonal cycle". (30)
They are alarmist, based much more on fear than on fact, and absolutely unsubstantiated. Indeed the Greenhouse-Climate Change phobia has been cited by one eminent Australian scientist as an example of the use and abuse of science to create fear. (31) He asserts that "we have created the most unnecessarily fearful generation of human kind that ever populated the earth".
Before considering briefly the background to each of these two Greenhouse tall tales, it is useful to summarise relevant aspects of Greenhouse science.
Well over 99 per cent of dry air in the atmosphere is composed of nitrogen, oxygen and so-called "rare gases" such as argon. But the way in which the incoming sun's radiation and outgoing earth's radiation affect weather and climate is controlled by clouds, water vapour and "trace gases". The latter occupy less than 0.04 per cent by volume of dry air. In order of importance they are: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), nitrous oxide and ozone. Together with water vapour, these so-called "Greenhouse gases" can be thought of as a blanket around the earth, and well-established theory indicates that this keeps the surface some 30°C warmer than it would otherwise be. The thicker the blanket, the warmer the surface, and measurements clearly show that human activities are causing this blanket of trace gases to thicken.
Fossil fuel burning is the main reason that carbon dioxide is increasing, CFCs are entirely man-made gases and agricultural practices play a major role in the increase of the others. Water vapour is by far the most potent Greenhouse gas but human activities have virtually no direct effect on the total amount of water vapour in the atmosphere.
Thus, theory strongly suggests that the energy and food requirements for the increasing world population, together with the voracious demand of the existing population, will result in an increase in trace gases and hence in surface air temperature. The central questions are: by how much and how quickly? and, will this affect other characteristics of our climate too?
To estimate the amount of global warming likely to be caused by future increases in Greenhouse gases, it is usual to consider the effect of an equivalent doubling of carbon dioxide over its pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million by volume (ppmv). The benchmark value generally chosen is 600 ppmv, so-called 2xCO2 conditions.
Such conditions have not existed on Earth for many millions of years. Although imaginative estimates of regional climates and ambient CO2 levels during some of these past epochs have been made, they must be associated with very large uncertainties. Certainly the value of such palaeoclimates as analogues for future enhanced-CO2 climates is dubious.
The generally accepted technique for indicating possible climate change due to Greenhouse gas increases is the use of highly complex numerical/computer models as surrogates of the real atmosphere. The models' representations of our present climate are compared with their representation of a 2xCO2 climate. These general circulation models (GCMs) of climate are based on weather forecasting models developed over the past 50 years. They are associated with many scientific uncertainties and approximations. A very large amount of computation is involved, and even on the most powerful of modern computers, the models can be run only at spatial resolutions too large to describe adequately tropical cyclones and smaller scales of atmospheric behaviour. Accordingly, the important effects of these smaller scales are incorporated in the calculations by relationships with the larger-scale pattern, based on detailed observations of present-day conditions. In this and others ways they are tuned to be as correct as possible in their representation of present-day climate. Whether these relationships are accurate in a high CO2 climate is not known. Indeed, because they can be validated only on their ability to describe the broad features of present-day climate, it has to be assumed that they represent a high CO2 climate equally as well.
These GCM climate models take tens of man-years to develop and can be operated only by groups of scientists, each specialising in a particular aspect of the work. Such models are run at some 30-or-so research centres around the world, and the problems are so complex that a strong international network has been set up to share results and information on problem-solving.
The most comprehensive and up-to-date of these models give quite good simulations of broad-scale aspects of present climate but are less good on detail and regional variation. For 2xCO2 simulations, the models derive average global surface temperatures ranging between 1.5°C and 4.5°C above present-day values. There are no strong reasons for preferring any value within this range; the different results are due to different ways in which physical processes are represented. Temperature increases derived for high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere are higher than those elsewhere. The role of the oceans is regarded as preventing similar high values in the Southern Hemisphere. Rainfall changes vary considerably between models. Most studies indicate a small increase in the frequency of heavy rainfall events in some areas, but there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that the world in general, or Australia in particular, will be subject to more frequent extremes of climate such as floods and droughts. (32) A recent modelling study suggests no significant change in the frequency of the Pacific (El Nino-Southern Oscillation) phenomenon, generally regarded as an indicator of continental-scale drought in Australia, even for 4xCO2 conditions. (33) Further, a recent comprehensive review of all scientific research has found no significant evidence of any change in tropical cyclone occurrence in a 2xCO2 climate. (34)
It should be remembered, however, that the models on which these statements are based are only surrogates and are still associated with major scientific uncertainties.
It would appear, therefore, that fears of "huge floods and droughts from global warming", whichever (unspecified) scientists may hold them, are groundless.
Those perpetrating such alarmist suggestions are often on the periphery of informed science and appear to be concentrating on justifying policies to effect a decrease in Greenhouse gas emissions, regardless of their cost to society, rather than being concerned with the scientific justification for these potentially damaging measures. And, as if to justify their prejudices, these same people are apt to seize upon any emerging claims of current climatic anomalies as evidence of global warming or increased incidence of extreme weather. Such assertions are then disseminated by the media, only too ready to embrace hyperbole and to fuel anxiety.
The determination of a trend in global average temperature is, however, not an easy task. Normal climate varies from time to time and from region to region. Some years or seasons are warmer or colder than the previous one, and some parts of the world may experience warm spells while others experience cold snaps. A set of measurements representing the whole world is difficult to obtain. Further, the quality of these measurements is inevitably variable. Another difficulty concerns adequate exposure of the measuring instrument; increasing urbanisation will induce warmer temperatures. These problems are well known and have to be taken into account. Nevertheless, there is a broad scientific consensus that an increase in global average surface air temperature of between 0.3 and 0.6°C has occurred over the past 130 years. This result is obtained from land-based observations and ocean-based observations where, of course, there are no direct urban influences. This trend appears to be within the range of natural variability but is also consistent with model simulations of warming due to the observed 30 per cent increase in Greenhouse gases over the period. But the time variation of this trend of temperature is not consistent with that of the gases. The global temperature appears to have risen in two distinct steps separated by long periods of constant or even decreasing temperatures. The Greenhouse gas rises on the other hand have exhibited a fairly smooth and increasing rate of increase.
This is not the only reason scientists are hesitant to ascribe the apparent warming to increases in Greenhouse gases. Until all the possible causes of surface temperature change are understood and assessed, it is impossible to justify ascribing the trend to one cause that is itself associated with large uncertainties. Indeed an English climatologist was unwise enough to exclaim "... the data don't matter ..." when challenged on this point. But, for example, the role of atmospheric pollution both directly (by influencing the absorption of solar and terrestrial radiation) and indirectly (by influencing cloud formation) may significantly influence observed temperatures. (35) Indeed a recent analysis concludes that over large parts of the world, apparent average temperature trends are principally due to increasing cloudiness at night -- which is not a feature of Greenhouse climate model simulations. (36) Another author, whose global temperature graphs are widely accepted, asserts that the observed warming has been neither global nor in agreement with the expected structure of changes due to an increase in Greenhouse gases. (37)
Accordingly, a recent media-patronised assertion, (38) that a new statistical technique has determined that CO2-caused increases in surface temperatures are "readily observable", somewhat more readily reveals a surprising ignorance of climate science. A similar comment can be made about the misrepresentations and unique data selection of Greenpeace in its claim that numerous extreme weather events over the past decade can be ascribed to Greenhouse-gas-induced climate change. (39) Unfortunately this perception is continually embellished by a stream of media reports. The January 1995 floods in Western Europe, the February 1995 large iceberg in the Antarctic and another very warm summer in England are the latest examples of silly claims that they may be associated with global warming.
It is appropriate to quote again from the recent joint Australian Academies' Report: "Unequivocal detection of an enhanced Greenhouse effect will have to wait for five to ten years and will be based on comparison of detailed model results with observations". (40)
Unfortunately rash claims from a variety of opportunistic sources appear to have been encouraged by the reported (41) remarks of the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Program. If it is true that in his opinion "most of the damage due to climate change is going to be associated with extreme events, not the smooth global increase of temperature that we call global warming", this appears to be remarkably out of step with the current review by that same Panel of research. It would be extremely disappointing, and indeed potentially damaging, if such unsubstantiated opinions from some of the international scientific establishment were the reason why a decoupling of policy from informed science appears to have occurred and allowed something akin to panic reaction from some government policy makers. Such a decoupling has been partly responsible for many governments accepting unachievable national Greenhouse gas emission-reduction targets and signing the International Framework Convention on Climate Change without apparently being made aware of the enormous difficulties involved in achieving any level of concentration stabilisation within a credible time frame. (42)
4. CHEMICALS HAVE CAUSED A CANCER EPIDEMIC
The environmental movement has a number of concerns which are loosely, if at all, connected. (43) Apocalyptic scenarios and most pollution-related scares are based on false data, false interpretations or outright falsehoods. Fear of "chemicals" is not just a prominent example in this category of environmentalist concerns, but probably the easiest to demolish. (44)
In spite of this, statements (45) which are complete nonsense from the point of view of not just modern molecular science but elementary chemistry have been made not only by environmental activists, but by clearly sincere and often prominent people. The only explanation is that emotion will overwhelm facts most of the time.
Some pollution problems are undoubtedly real, the most prominent of these being the degradation of water quality by increasing concentrations of fertiliser residues and pollution by heavy metal ions where the effects are cumulative. However, these are not the concerns that the public hears about most, and they are not the concerns of the great majority of regulators. The focus of environmental publicity, public fears and regulatory activity is located in the apparently simple proposition that commercially produced "chemicals" represent a real and serious environmental threat. In particular, the principal fear is inspired by suspected carcinogenic action of industrial "chemicals". These fears are overwhelmingly unfounded, but have had the serious consequence of making the public neurotic and, to add injury to insult, have resulted in a regulatory regime which is vastly too severe and vastly too expensive. It is difficult to determine exactly how we have arrived at the present situation, that is, what part has been played by plain ignorance, wilful ignorance, the oversupply of lawyers, outright lies, the opportunism of politicians, the cowardice of public officials, the sensationalism of the media and the gullibility of the population. All that I can attempt here is to point out a number of widely-held fallacies:
There is no such thing as "a chemical". In the biosphere of the planet Earth all matter with the negligible exceptions of minute quantities of the noble gases (principally Argon and Helium), is in a chemically-bound state rather than in the monoatomic or subatomic states in which it is present in the bulk of the universe. This applies to the gases in the atmosphere, water (the "chemical" H2O), rocks, soils, plants and animals. Quite literally, everything is a chemical.
Substances can be described as "industrial chemicals". What the public and even the relatively-sophisticated members of it mean by "chemicals", are in fact industrially-produced substances. However, it is an indisputable fact that all properties (including carcinogenicity and toxicity in general) of substances are solely a function of their molecular structure and have nothing to do with their origin. The idea that industrially-produced substances are dangerous as a class is absolutely false because the chemical industry produces a vast variety of substances. Even the apparently more sophisticated recent campaign against all products containing chlorine is quite unsound, because the mode of biological activity (which is what concerns the public) is quite subtle: we are not talking here about the effects of falling into a vat of concentrated sulphuric acid -- we are talking about the very specific interactions between so called "small molecules" and the larger (macro-molecular) systems within the cells, particularly with DNA or enzymes. The fact that a molecule contains chlorine atoms is a very poor predictor of its biological activity -- in fact it is one of the greatest frustrations of pharmacologists that tiny changes in the structure of potential therapeutic agents may alter biological activity drastically.
Naturally-occurring chemicals are more benign than industrial products. This can be dismissed on theoretical grounds, by pointing out that both industrial and naturally-occurring substances come in an enormous range of structures, some of which are bound to have dangerous properties. Without actual data and given the fact that generally (46) it is not possible to predict biological activity from structure, it is certainly unlikely that industrial products taken as a class would be more dangerous than naturally-occurring compounds, again taken as a class.
Given the climate of public and even scientific opinion, the above theoretical argument would not convince many. However, there are three lines of purely experimental evidence which support it:
Incontestably, there are extremely dangerous naturally-occurring products. In particular, many alkaloids are highly poisonous thus making many plants inedible, and naturally-occurring substances, most prominently, the group called aflatoxins, are efficient carcinogens in animal studies.
There is strong epidemiological evidence for cancer causation by elements of diets, particularly aflatoxins. This evidence is much stronger than the evidence against any "industrial" chemical and indeed against any man-made product except cigarettes.
There is evidence (47) that randomly selected groups of chemicals from whatever source (that is, from naturally-occurring or industrial substances) contain roughly equal proportions of mutagenic (48) substances. This is exactly what one would predict from theoretical considerations: if you take random selections from a great variety of structural types of molecules, you would expect to get a random distribution of biological activity.
We have evolved to deal with threats from naturally-occurring substances. This statement, viz., that evolution protects us from naturally-occurring carcinogens, is a last-ditch defence of people presented with the above series of proposition. We have not evolved with the overwhelming proportion of the naturally-occurring components of our diets. Most fruits and vegetables have been introduced to most populations quite recently, whereas the evolution of biological systems is very slow. Similarly, food preparation, particularly frying and grilling which produce carcinogenic substances, is also a relatively recent invention. Indeed, the fact that strong epidemiological data link the occurrence of specific cancers to the consumption of certain quite "traditional" diets suggests that our organisms are slow to develop protection against carcinogens. This is, of course, entirely predictable from the point of view of evolutionary fitness, as cancer is a disease typically occurring after the end of the reproductive age.
The above series of four propositions, while demonstrably fallacious, pale into insignificance when considered against another equally demonstrable fallacy: there is a cancer epidemic. The rates of occurrence of cancers in industrialised countries have remained steady when corrected for the fact that the population is ageing. The single, marked and highly significant exception is lung cancer where the cause (smoking) is well known and easily preventable. Given the fact that detection rates of all cancers could only have risen, there must have been some decline, possibly connected with a decrease in bacterial infections which have been implicated in some types of cancer. (49) The small concentration of numerous industrial products, particularly pesticides to which the general public is exposed thus appears to have had no discernible effect on the incidence of cancers and the ever tighter net of regulations is a misuse of resources which could be infinitely better directed at real health problems.
There appears to be an independent piece of evidence for the proposition that low exposure to proven (animal or epidemiological) carcinogens fails to cause cancer: most smokers, even relatively heavy ones, die of other causes although they actually inhale quantities of proven carcinogens very much higher than equivalent exposure of the general population to probably inherently less harmful pesticides. This point strikes me as significant, although I am not aware of it being made in the literature.
None of the above denies the reality of the existence of carcinogens of both natural and industrial type: what appears to be true is that at the concentrations to which the general public is exposed, the risk ranges from minuscule to quite undetectable. Public concern is thus misplaced, principally because of a general lack of understanding of the simple facts presented above and partly because of a failure to distinguish (50) between toxicity (the ability of a material to damage a living organism through other than mechanical means) and toxic hazard (the actual risk associated with such materials in real situations). It simply turns out that the feared substances are "toxic" (often carcinogenic), but apparently do not represent a significant toxic hazard at the levels to which the general population can possibly be exposed. They could, and sometimes do, present a significant hazard at higher (for example, occupational) exposures which clearly require regulation and education of a specific type.
It is quite obvious that the cost of unnecessary regulation, which runs into tens of billions of dollars annually in the USA alone, but addresses imaginary risks, represents a scandalous waste of resources which could have been used to produce a very real improvement in the health of the population. It is perhaps less obvious that the "cancer from chemicals" scare makes a major contribution to neurotic fears. It is an irony that while there is no convincing evidence that one could develop cancer simply by worrying about it, one can certainly make oneself quite sick, unhappy and dysfunctional.
The responsibility for this scandalous situation is undoubtedly divided, but it distresses me that the Green movement, which I support in many of its endeavours, bears some of it.
5. WE MUST ADOPT A RISK-AVERSE APPROACH AND ALWAYS ERR ON THE SIDE OF CAUTION WHEN DEALING WITH ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES
In the mid-1960s, a committee of West German public servants invented the "precautionary principle", (51) and a few years later it first appeared in German environmental legislation. Since then -- and especially in the last five years -- the principle has been remarkably successful. It has been so widely incorporated into international declarations and treaties that some commentators have argued that it "now constitutes a general principle of international law". (52) And although there has been little public discussion about the precautionary principle in Australia, it has already found its way into domestic agreements and policy documents. The 1992 Intergovernmental Agreement on the Environment, whose signatories are the Commonwealth, all the States and Territories, and the Australian Local Government Association, adopted it as one of four guiding principles for environmental policies and programmes, defining it as follows:
Where there are threats of serious or irreversible environmental damage, lack of full scientific certainty should not be used as a reason for postponing measures to prevent environmental degradation. (53)
The precautionary principle has been defined in a variety of ways, but the underlying idea is that when faced with scientific uncertainty, "regulators should act in anticipation of environmental harm to ensure that this harm does not occur". (54) A more formal and stringent phrasing states that "where the environmental risks being run by regulatory inaction are in some way (a) uncertain, but (b) non-negligible, regulatory action is required". (55)
This involves a shift in the onus of proof. Environmentalists or regulators will not have to show that damage could result from particular projects or actions. Rather, the advocates of economic and technological developments would have to prove that their proposals would cause no harm before they could proceed. (56) As even supporters of the precautionary principle admit, this would force developers to achieve a logical impossibility. (57)
Certainly, at first glance the precautionary principle seems to express a sensible approach: few people are willing to take cavalier risks with the environment. But there are no grounds for thinking that any attempt to put the principle into practical effect would lead to more favourable environmental or social consequences than a policy of allowing projects to be blocked only if scientific appraisal showed that they presented an unacceptable degree of risk. All situations involve some degree of uncertainty. (58) And risks are culturally selected. People with different cultural and social characteristics vary in the kinds of risks they focus on and those they neglect. (59) Greens worry about the dangers that a runaway Greenhouse effect would pose to the planet and demand great economic and other changes to guard against the threat. But they ignore, and even ridicule, the dangers of a collision with an asteroid, even though Earth's orbit is crossed by hundreds large enough to cause catastrophic global damage. The reason is probably that the only response to an asteroid threat is the kind of large scale technological development -- including nuclear missiles -- that greens abhor. (60)
In practice, institutionalising the precautionary principle and allowing it to become the guiding force in environmental management would mean that decisions would be the outcome of a political process heavily influenced by greens and their particular view of the world. Their perceptions of risks and the appropriate regulatory actions would predominate, whether or not there were any independent scientific bases for supporting their assessments.
The precautionary principle is a political concept, not a scientific principle. (61) It expresses attitudes towards risk and towards the relation between humans and nature that, though often concealed, are both highly questionable and inconsistent with other -- even broader -- principles that greens affirm. It depends on a one-dimensional understanding of risk, on the false assumption that in the face of uncertainty specific regulatory actions can make the difference between safety and risk, rather than shifting the risk from one situation to another. Milne offers the example of Norwegian environmentalists' opposition to maritime dumping of ilmenite, the source of titanium, even though it is a non-toxic mineral that forms the beaches in some parts of the world. They demand that it should be stored in a specially constructed dam on land, against the opposition of local people who say that this represents a greater hazard than dumping. (62) In a similar vein, Bodansky points out that the prohibition of hazardous waste incineration at sea is likely to increase incineration on land, which could release dangerous pollutants into more vulnerable ecosystems. He also observes that the banning of DDT has forced farmers to use other, more toxic pesticides. (63)
Apart from such specific examples, the precautionary principle represents a more general danger. The greens who advocate it ignore their own injunctions to think "holistically". The principle can only seem sound by treating certain things and actions in isolation, and by ignoring the way in which safety and danger may be intertwined in the same objects and practices. It disregards the crucial importance of developing resilience as the best strategy for dealing with uncertainty. We cannot know in advance what environmental dangers and other threats to our welfare we may face in the future. But unless we continue to expand our knowledge and ingenuity in the course of dealing with "non-negligible" risks, we are jeopardising our capacity for coping with future adversity. Resilience is promoted by encouraging trial and error; it is threatened by always "playing it safe" and seeking to make "risk-averse" decisions. (64) As Wildavsky has noted, "we are in an enormously more favourable position to deal with AIDS now than we would have been 20 years ago, as an unanticipated consequence of the tremendous progress in molecular biological understanding. ... Had the progress of molecular biology been stifled in the 1960s as it might have been in the 1980s by the concern over the creation of new genetic organisms we would now be at a loss in searching for a cure for AIDS." (65) In a sense, the do-nothing, conservative option, which would seem to be the one that is supported by the precautionary principle, can ultimately be unacceptably risky.
As well as relying on an indefensible view of risk and safety, the precautionary principle expresses a jaundiced, even paranoid, attitude towards the relationship between humans and the environment. It sees any attempt to change the environmental status quo as likely to be destructive. (66) It assumes that human activity -- particularly technologically-advanced industry -- has an unlimited ability to create unsuspected severe or irreversible damage, but not benefit, to the environment. The principle thus provides a justification for taking seriously all kinds of spurious or non-existent -- but supposedly deleterious -- links between human actions and environmental effects and so offers the basis for potentially massive, and frequently counterproductive, regulatory intervention. It is predicated on notions of causation that are the equivalent of claiming that because a strong positive correlation exists between the price of rum in Barbados and the salaries of Methodist ministers, the Methodists are secretly financed by rum distillers who provide more money to the church when the price of their product is high. (67)
A genuinely precautionary approach would be one that raised our chances of coping with unforeseen environmental threats in the future and strengthened our ability to maintain and improve the quality of existing environmental resources. It would acknowledge that, while mistakes are inevitable, regulators responding to political pressures are just as likely -- if not more likely -- to make them as are scientists working within institutional settings that facilitate rigour and objectivity. And it would recognise that the safest way of dealing with these mistakes and uncertainties is to adopt a strategy of development that does not avoid acceptable risks. (68) This will enhance our resilience by increasing our experience, wealth and control over resources.
6. WE NEED TO HAVE A MASSIVE CHANGE IN VALUES AND BELIEFS IF WE ARE TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT, BECAUSE THE JUDAEO-CHRISTIAN HERITAGE OF THE WEST HAS LED TO WIDESPREAD ENVIRONMENTAL DEVASTATION
Many people have come to believe that Western culture is fundamentally flawed in its approach towards the environment. One of the most widely cited expressions of this belief is the statement that contemporary environmental problems stem from our Judaeo-Christian heritage.
The best known exponent of this belief is the American historian Lynn White Jr, who in 1967 published a famous paper in the prestigious journal Science, called "The historical roots of our ecological crisis". White, following some earlier writers, argued that the West had a uniquely destructive approach to the natural environment and that this was an outcome of a Biblically-derived authority to dominate and exploit nature. In contrast to Eastern and tribal religions, Jews and Christians supposedly believed that humans were set apart from nature, which existed solely for their own benefit.
White's argument has led to a great deal of controversy, and many scholars have accused him of presenting a caricature of Judaeo-Christian beliefs. They have pointed out that his argument depends on a selective and distorted reading of Genesis and other Biblical texts, and on ignoring the extent to which the Judaeo-Christian heritage fostered a strong appreciation of the need for the sound stewardship of a natural world created by God. (69)
Indeed, there is a strong argument that the environmental concerns which are so prevalent in the contemporary West are a direct outcome of the Judaeo-Christian heritage rather than a denial of it. In the words of Ellen Bernstein, a Jewish environmental activist, "Judaism is a 4,000-year-old system that teaches us that we don't live in a vacuum, and that every act has a consequence. Judaism and ecology share similar values -- the notion of the sacredness of land, a respect for the past, a global view, and an appreciation for time and the cycles of life". (70) Other scholars have pointed to the affinity between Protestant natural theology and the scientific discipline that is central to our understanding of environmental degradation and our attempts to reverse it. Thus Clarence Glacken argues that "modern ecological theory, so important in our attitudes toward nature and man's interference with it, owes its origin to the design argument: The wisdom of the Creator is self-evident, everything in the creation is inter-related, no living thing is useless, and all are related one to the other". (71)
Our cultural heritage is complex and differentiated. A proper assessment of its environmental implications needs to recognise that for every example of Western environmental indifference or despoilment there are as many or more counter-examples of an abiding love of nature. It must also recognise that the Western emphasis on the importance of individuals taking responsibility for their own actions provides a stronger basis for achieving a proper relationship between people and nature than is possible in traditions with more fatalistic or collectivist attitudes.
Certainly, in the past quarter of a century there have been major changes in public values and beliefs regarding the environment. Although an aesthetic and moral regard for nature and a concern about the wasteful use of natural resources long antedates the 1960s, environmental issues have acquired far more salience than previously. There is a greater readiness to incorporate possible environmental consequences into the decision-making process for public policy, and a general acceptance of the deleterious effects of many practices that were followed in the past.
These are positive developments, as sound environmental management clearly depends on widespread agreement that such management is a desirable goal. But insofar as it is accompanied by incorrect analyses of the causes of environmental problems, and an unwillingness to place the Western record on the environment in a proper comparative perspective, it can be counterproductive. It would be perfectly possible to have an even stronger and more widespread public commitment towards the environment and towards adopting "environmentally friendly" values, without this resulting in any concrete improvements. Unfortunately, there is a tendency amongst many greens, in common with other radical groups, to adopt what the American critic Richard Grenier has called "the politics of intent", as opposed to achievement. "If one has noble intentions, and means well toward one's fellow man, and one's heart is pure, and generous, and filled with love, then that is what matters. If one's ideas are unworkable, bring social disruption, disaster, and even tragedy on a colossal scale -- one can't be expected to foresee all that, can one?" (72)
Greens rightly call for a holistic approach to the environment, but it is an approach that is often lacking from their own analyses. They show a marked reluctance to consider the actual interactions between various elements of the human-environment system. A holistic understanding of the relations between human cultures and the environment would recognise that supposedly non-anthropocentric cultures can have highly adverse impacts on the environment. It would also recognise that people in the developed societies of Europe, North America and the South Pacific -- whose values and beliefs are derived from the Western tradition -- evince a much greater concern about the environment than people from other countries, and that attempts to alter these values and beliefs in any radical ways, could have unanticipated and highly undesirable environmental and social consequences. In addition, recognition would be given to the principle that human behaviour cannot be predicted in a linear or deterministic way from the values that people may claim to hold. It is also necessary to recognise the importance of a realistic approach to human nature and its expression -- and that means giving careful consideration to the structure of incentives and institutions that are most likely to encourage responsible actions towards the environment.
7. IMPORTANT ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES SHOULD BE PUBLICLY OWNED SINCE THEY ARE TOO PRECIOUS TO BE OWNED BY PRIVATE INDIVIDUALS
When making comparisons between alternative resource-ownership regimes, it is necessary to investigate the incentives for care that each is able to offer. For the case of important environmental resources, two broad categories of ownership are possible -- public and private -- but this is an undue simplification of the real situation. Complications arise for two reasons. First, for many environmental resources, ownership is not defined at all -- these are the so-called "open-access" resources. Examples of such resources are the atmosphere and fishing grounds beyond territorial limits. Second, there is frequently a mixing of private and public ownership rights in any particular resource. For instance, the private owners of land may have their ownership rights limited by public statute or the public owners of land may choose to allow private individuals to operate enterprises using that land. However, to begin, it is useful to consider the incentives for care offered by purely public and purely private ownership where ownership is possible.
Ownership is possible where a property right can be defined and then defended, if necessary, against transgression. Under public ownership, the rights to an environmental resource are held by some level of community aggregation, usually a government -- either Local, State or Federal. Responsibility for the care of the resource therefore falls on that government. Usually this involves a branch of that government's administration taking control.
The implication of public ownership is that nobody in particular owns the resource. In a sense, it is owned by all but by no one. Where there is a large group of people involved in the public ownership -- say at the State or Federal level -- individuals using the resource generally feel no personal responsibility for its care. The usual result is that people seek to use the resource so as to benefit most from it but try to side-step any responsibility for the costs of maintenance. This is classic "free-rider" behaviour. The larger the group that is involved with the ownership of a resource, the greater will be the prospect of that resource being abused. Community ownership, per se, does not imply that a resource will be over-exploited. For instance, the village "common" can be successfully managed through the enforcement of rules agreed at a local community level that control individual usage. But if ownership and control is removed from the local community, then, almost inevitably, resource abuse will be the result.
If the resource degradation that is caused by such careless use of a publicly-owned environmental resource is sufficient to cause general alarm, the government agency in control may introduce regulations on use. But once the bureaucracy becomes involved, a whole different raft of incentives for care become apparent. These incentives can have more to do with maximising the influence and control of the bureaucrats than caring for the resource. Frequently, the result is a burgeoning bureaucracy which runs at high cost to taxpayers and at the expense of protecting other environmental resources for which the available public budget cannot provide. In addition, a centralised bureaucracy faces the difficulties of dealing with the informational requirements needed to make optimal decisions for all the resources under its control in circumstances that are frequently changing.
Under private ownership different incentives are apparent. Where the environmental resource is associated with the production of a saleable product, there is a strong incentive for private owners to protect their source of livelihood and the value of their assets. Even if no saleable output is available from an environmental resource, private owners may wish to protect their assets simply for the benefit that they receive personally.
The case of soil as a precious environmental resource is instructive. In the western districts of NSW, it was decided that the environment was too fragile to allow private ownership of land. Crown ownership was therefore maintained and use was permitted on a leasehold basis. Severe soil degradation followed simply because the leaseholders had little incentive to care for land which was not theirs. The clear incentive was to get what return they could from the land over the period of the lease. The logic that keeping the lease length short so that maximum control over the leaseholder's activities could be exerted by the government was fallacious. Only by lengthening the lease would the lessees increase their level of care. But even then, as the time approached for the lease to expire, the incentive to care would decline. Only if the land had been held in private hands, would the incentive to "mine" the soil not have been so strong. The reduction in the value of their land asset that such action would have caused would be a strong incentive to maintain the level of care.
Another example of public versus private incentives comes from wildlife protection. The elephant in Zimbabwe was, until recent years, a publicly-owned resource. The incentive for individual villagers to care for the animals was negligible, particularly as they were perceived as a pest that would periodically destroy their gardens. Poachers were therefore unhindered or even assisted by locals. In a shift of policy, the rights to elephants have now been transferred to local villages. The bounty that these animals confer on villages through the sale of viewing and even hunting rights has given them a status worthy of care. Poachers are now reported to the authorities. A reversal in the population decline of the species has occurred, and now culling programmes are required to prevent overstocking from causing land degradation.
With the growing interest in nature conservation there is a surge in interest in "eco-tourism". This in turn provides an impetus for private entrepreneurs to acquire areas of environmental significance in order to profit from supplying visits and associated services. Individuals with particular interests in nature conservation are also buying areas of significance for their personal pleasure. Both of these trends result in ecosystems which receive care through private ownership, to the benefit of the wider community through the protection of ecosystem integrity.
All this is not to say that private ownership will always be the option that ensures environmental care. For some environmental resources, there will be no saleable item produced and they will be unattractive to personal owners. Yet these resources may be beneficial to society as a whole. For instance, the species of plants and animals found in an ecosystem that holds no interest to tourists may be of value to society in terms of the biological diversity it holds. In such circumstances, the only option that will ensure the continued supply of that biodiversity will be public ownership or a strict regulatory regime.
What is apparent, however, is that there are some distinct advantages to be gained through private ownership incentives. These may be tapped without the ownership of an environmental resource being transferred out of the public's hands. For instance, although public ownership of an area of natural ecosystem may be deemed necessary because of its low "marketability" but high community value, the management of the area may be more effectively carried out within the private sector. This would help reduce the prospect of bureaucratic inefficiency.
The most severe problems for the care of environmental resources comes when those resources cannot be owned or when any established ownership rights cannot be practised. If it is impossible to define the rights to a resource or to prevent people who have not been granted the right to the resource from using it, there are no incentives for users to take care. It is not unexpected, therefore, that the upper atmosphere has become overused as a waste dump for pollutants and that the open ocean is over-fished. To overcome this problem some form of property right regime needs to be created. The international nature of the resource involved necessitates inter-governmental agreement and this itself is a substantial obstacle. It is, however, one that can be overcome as the Montreal Protocol to limit the production of ozone-depleting substances has demonstrated. But once limits to the use of an environmental resource have been agreed they must still be enforced. This can be achieved effectively within the jurisdiction of a single country through the application of a tradeable permit system. This relies on the issuing and then trading of permits to emit pollution, where the total of the permits equals the allowed limit of the pollutant. The system uses the incentive structure of private ownership (through the buying and selling of permits) to ensure the cost-effective control of pollution. Again, the mixing of public action -- in this case involving the international community -- with private sector incentives, creates a package which can successfully provide for the care of an environmental resource.
8. CONSERVATION GROUPS WORK SOLELY IN THE INTERESTS OF THE COMMUNITY WHEREAS CORPORATIONS CARE ONLY ABOUT MAKING PROFITS
It is difficult to be categorical about the motivations of various organisations in the community. What drives people will differ between individuals, and the same applies to groups of people. In any consideration of organisational motivations, it is therefore necessary to take into account a range of potential driving forces and look at the outcomes that each would yield.
For conservation groups, one behavioural model is that they are democratic organisations whose leaders work in the interests of their members. How valid is this model of motivation? So long as the members are actively involved in their organisation, it would seem reasonable to predict that if their leaders choose to pursue other goals, the membership would vote to remove them from office. To predict the actions of the group, it is therefore important to consider the goals of the membership. No doubt, the membership of any conservation group has a preference for environmental conservation. It is hard to understand why someone would pay the membership dues of a bird protection society, for instance, if they did not wish to see more protection afforded to birds. But it is also true that the membership of conservation groups does not extend to 100 per cent of society. In fact, the membership of conservation groups accounts for only a very small sub-section of society. Only those with a particularly strong preference for environmental conservation would appear to be interested in membership. Others with a weaker preference will often be tempted to "free-ride" on the work of the organisations.
Conservation organisations, under the democratic model, will thus be special interest groups working to secure the interests of their membership. Because the membership is such a specific sub-section of society, it is hardly likely that they will be working solely in the interests of the community at large. The observation that conservation groups frequently use political action to pursue their goals provides evidence to support this contention. By using political means, conservation groups can achieve substantial "leverage" for their membership. For instance, by targeting marginal electorates a small but active group can effectively control the outcome of a much wider decision-making process. In this way, the point of view that is held by members of the environmental lobby can be foisted onto the broader community. The justification for this type of action is often that the rest of the community is ignorant of the consequences of their actions. Educating the rest of the community as to the "error of their ways" is seen as an important adjunct to policy making. If this course of events were to be described in harsher words -- "society is forced to conform to a set of rules and then educated to believe that the set of rules is right" -- it is not hard to see that the interests of the community as a whole are not necessarily at the root of conservation organisations' actions.
An alternative behavioural model is that conservation groups can be characterised as undemocratic. The membership under this model is sufficiently remote from the leadership of the organisation to make the leadership largely independent. The goals of the organisation as a whole, under this model, more closely follow the interests of the executive. Given that the executive of most conservation groups consists of those who are most dedicated to the cause, their goals are likely to be more extreme than those of the broader membership. Thus the stance taken by the group is likely to be stronger than that predicted under the democratic model detailed above.
The goals of the executive may also extend beyond anything to do with the environment directly. People may seek out positions within an environmental organisation in order to pursue personal goals of power and influence in society. The actions of the organisation will then be, at least partially, aimed at increasing the personal stature and power base of the leader.
In reality, conservation groups can probably be described as having a mixture of democratic and undemocratic characteristics. Certainly, in almost all groups a proportion of members are not actively involved in the monitoring of the day-to-day activities of their group and so afford a degree of independence to the executive. However, if some controversial actions on the part of the executive are drawn to the attention of members, there is the possibility of a vote to dismiss the incumbent leaders. But even with a mixture of motivating forces, it is clear that conservation groups will not necessarily be working in the best interests of the whole of society. The disdain for conservation groups that is displayed in towns servicing the mining and forestry industries is ample evidence of this.
The motivations of corporations are similarly difficult to untangle. In almost every case, however, profits are undeniably a primary driving force. The very existence of a corporation is determined by its ability to hold its shareholder funds. If no one wants to own shares in a company, the price of its shares will collapse and it will be forced to cease trading. To maintain its shareholders' funds, a company must make itself an attractive investment by offering a rising share price and/or a healthy dividend. Both of these require a current profit and/or the expectation of future profits. The company's board of directors and its managerial staff, if they wish to hold their positions, have a clear objective to earn profits, at least sufficient to keep their shareholders satisfied.
It is possible for a company to be owned by shareholders who pay little attention to their investment. This is akin to the undemocratic model of a conservation group. Again, independence is afforded the management and they may seek out non-profit goals such as expansive corporate headquarters or extravagant expense accounts. There is, however, some limit to this type of behaviour through the threat of a hostile takeover. If a company is being managed so that its profit performance is below what an alternative management group could achieve, the company's shareholders could be approached to sell their shares at a premium over the current market price. Such an approach may be sufficient to shift the shareholders from their inattention.
Although profits are undoubtedly an important factor in motivating corporations, that does not mean that corporations pursue profits to the extent that they will seriously damage the environment. It is increasingly apparent that for companies to sustain profitability, they must be attentive to environmental issues.
For many companies, the source of their profitability is the environment. Farmers, for instance, rely on their land for their livelihood. To degrade their environment is therefore to reduce their flow of profits through time. This reduction could be experienced through either a reduction in income or through a drop in the value of their land asset, which is after all a reflection of future profitability. Prospective buyers will not be willing to pay as much for a property which is degraded. Similarly, companies with interests in harvesting timber will want to ensure a continuing supply of the resource. The alternative would be akin to mining a finite deposit.
Other companies without direct ties to an environmental resource base will seek to maintain the quality of the environment in the vicinity in order to make it attractive for their workforce. A clean environment is increasingly important as a drawcard for workers and managers to relocate.
Perhaps most important for companies is the increasingly strong link between profitability and consumers' demands for products which are environmentally sound. With a growing awareness in the community of environmental issues, the profitability of companies is more and more linked to their ability to supply products which are "green and clean". If consumers favour a particular brand because it uses recyclable packaging, then unless its competitors follow the green trend they may well fail. In other words, companies will respond to the demands of their customers. If the customers show a willingness to pay for environmentally-sound products, then companies will respond. Hence we see organically-grown breakfast cereals, phosphate-free detergents, plantation-grown timber, "dolphin-safe" tuna, recycled papers etc., appearing on markets. Similarly, companies providing services to tourists now seek to protect the environment in recognition that it is the drawcard for visitors.
Companies thus act in accord with the sentiment of the community they supply. Certainly they act to secure profits, but because those profits are derived from consumers, companies will be environmentally conscious if the community is that way inclined.
Of course, corporations are also under the regulatory eye of government. They are required by law to satisfy certain environmental standards. It is frequently observed, however, that companies go beyond the specified standards. They may do this for a number of reasons. First, the factors detailed above may be sufficiently strong to encourage overcompliance. For instance, regulations requiring not more than a particular dose of pesticide on a fruit crop may be irrelevant if a producer is seeking out a market for organically-grown produce. Second, a company may wish to build its "corporate image" in the community by being a good, non-polluting neighbour. Such actions are not necessarily independent of the profit motive. Having good relations with neighbours, including the workforce, can be a very cost-effective strategy. Finally, companies may wish to avoid potential additional regulations in the future by demonstrating to governments that they are unnecessary. Such pre-emptive action can be cost-effective because regulatory requirements may be more costly to fulfil than self-imposed environmental controls.
Corporations do care about making profits. Their existence depends on a continuing ability to generate returns for their shareholders. Corporations therefore seek to satisfy their customers in order to earn revenues. If their customers are environmentally concerned, corporations will respond by acting in ways which respect those concerns. In this way, corporations work in the interests of the community they supply. A green community will spawn green corporations. Conservation groups, given their limited membership, cannot claim such a broad representation.
9. PEOPLE NEED TO BE PRESENTED WITH THE SCARIEST ENVIRONMENTAL SCENARIOS TO ENSURE ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION
The past 20 years has seen a range of environmental issues presented in apocalyptic terms. Among these have been the Club of Rome's predictions about the limits to growth, (73) the assertions made about the rates of extinction, and the scenarios presented about global warming and the Greenhouse effect. As well, there are many smaller-scale issues where the environmental movement has chosen to be flamboyant and radical in presenting the issues to the public.
It is no accident that many environmental groups regard their campaigns as battles to be either won or lost, and supporters as frontline troops in the defence against environmental destruction. Environmentalists see themselves as outsiders, challenging the government and business decision-makers. There is a religious fervour to many campaigns, which together with radical and dramatic actions, anti-establishment views and a sense of purpose, are effective in attracting the idealistic young.
Of course it is only to be expected that any pressure group will emphasis the issues favourable to its cause. In many cases, though, environmental movements go beyond the normal actions of a pressure group in three main ways. First, the consequences predicted are often foreboding and dramatic, in that either the world or living conditions are on the threshold of being destroyed unless urgent action is taken. Second, the evidence for these predictions is presented in the form of established scientific fact that has somehow been suppressed or ignored by the economic and government institutions in power. Third, there is no possibility allowed for compromise.
These extreme scenarios are misleading in a number of ways. First, there are few real thresholds of environmental disaster. Environmental damage can be more accurately portrayed as increasing levels of risk or preservation cost as the prospects of an environmental asset diminish. Second, the presentation of extreme scientific predictions as fact often ignores opposing evidence and statistical reservations. Third, most presenters of disastrous scenarios choose to bypass the conventional institutional structures that we have developed to handle situations of risk and uncertainty. Consider the evidence of three general cases -- limits to world growth, extinction rates, and the Greenhouse effect.
The Club of Rome's 1972 predictions about the rapid depletion of the world's resources have proved completely false because the predictions ignored the self-correcting economic mechanisms that operate. As resources become scarce, prices rise, prompting searches for new deposits, better technology and substitute goods. Advances in discovering new resources, making more efficient use of them and finding substitutes (such as the silicon chip or fibre optics made from sand) have been so prolific that world resource prices have continued to fall in real terms.
Citing high extinction rates, environmentalists have called for an end to development, particularly the clearing of tropical rainforests. Claims that 20,000 or 40,000 species are becoming extinct each year (up to 100 each day) have appeared in the environmental literature and even in Australian government reports. (74) Yet the basis for such estimates is a rule of thumb which states that the loss of 90 per cent of forest cover means a 50 per cent loss of species. On this basis Europe, with almost no original untouched vegetation, should have the largest litany of extinction losses. There is very little evidence that such large-scale extinctions are taking place. While reliable data only exist for mammals and birds, the data indicate that about one mammal or bird species becomes extinct each year, which is far below environmentalist claims that a plant, mammal and bird becomes extinct each day in tropical rainforests.
Actual extinctions remain a cause for concern, but the high rates reported by the environmental movement in the popular press have no scientific basis, and the demonstrated loss of species in recent years is very low. The environmental campaign reflects an assumption that any forest clearing causes extinctions and ignores the complexity of the process. In Australia, for example, the principal cause of species loss has not been farming, grazing or mining with its associated land clearance, but the introduction of feral species, particularly foxes and cats.
The Greenhouse effect, supposedly due to the production of gases from industrialisation, was predicted to lead to increased temperatures and rising sea levels. The Greenhouse effect was estimated to lift world temperatures by 2.5°C by 2050. Scientists generally agree that temperatures have risen about 0.5°C over the last century. But nearly all of the increase occurred before 1940, while most Greenhouse gases have been released after 1940. More recent data suggest that the trend towards global warming is very slight, and may range between 0 and 0.5°C by the year 2050. (75) At that level, temperature rises may simply reflect urban warming and natural variability. Also of significance is the fact that the predictions involved are very inexact. Environmentalists seem to have accepted that 40-year predictions of global warming are accurate when scientists cannot predict next year's, or even next weekend's, weather with any degree of certainty.
In each of these examples, environmentalists have chosen to highlight the "worst case" scenarios, ignoring opposing scientific evidence and glossing over the statistical difficulties of presenting extreme conclusions as established fact. There are several reasons why the environmentalist movement chooses to present scenarios in these forms.
The first reason is that it is seen as a means of getting results. By presenting the public with terrible scenarios, the environmental movement can capture attention and ensure that the concerns of the public mobilise governments into action. Implicit here is an assumption that environmentalists hold "correct" values, and that any means of moving the public towards holding those values is justified. Often these values are expressed in terms of rights or values intrinsic to environmental entities. Scary scenarios are a tool for imposing extreme views about ethics and environmental rights onto a community which is seen as too complacent and too caught up with consumer values to appreciate environmental assets.
The second reason for presenting scary scenarios is that it attracts support. In the same way that people are prepared to make extreme sacrifices in times of national crisis such as a war, the presentation of alarmist scenarios mobilises sympathy, commitment and financial support from a wide range of people. Most people only have the time, knowledge and commitment to support a small number of issues at any one time. Charities are well aware of this, and try to use particular dates, personal contact through door-to-door collection, and special effects, such as red noses, to place themselves in the public eye and gain support. In the same way, environmental groups have to jostle for attention in a world where there is a plethora of interest groups and worthy causes. What better way to get attention and support than to present the public with terrifying, although ultimately mythical, prospects?
The third reason for presenting scary scenarios is that it bypasses the framework of institutions that western culture has established to handle problems of uncertainty and scientific prediction. This framework includes the institutions of government, scientific bodies, research departments and the market mechanism itself (which penalises companies and operators who run down the value of assets). By appealing directly to the public with scary scenarios, environmentalists are challenging the normal way in which our society makes decisions.
Our society tends to make compromises when faced with tough decisions. We balance personal independence against government control, accept a level of progressive taxation to promote equality, and pursue a variety of sports and leisure activities when we could work harder and increase our level of wealth. Such compromises make Australia a wonderful place to live. Yet this balancing act performed by our institutions explains why the environmentalists bypass the system. For many environmentalists, a compromise is a loss. If environmental assets are being endowed with inherent rights and moral attributes, then there are no possibilities for trade-offs. From this position, then, the only way to avoid a compromise is to make the trade-off seem so terrifying to the general public that political pressure operates to achieve the desired goals.
Scary scenarios sometimes have a further effect on people -- they inhibit questions. Like religious groups, there is an all-or-nothing fervour to the campaigns. People feel that when so much is at stake they would be betraying the cause if they questioned the smaller details. Unconditional support is seen as necessary to counterbalance the powerful interests of business and the government.
This all-or-nothing style of the environmental movement fits uneasily with the framework of Australian society, where tolerance and trade-offs allow most interests to be met. Scary scenarios suit the environmentalist causes, but may only lead to short-term decisions. The Australian public is much better served by a careful weighing-up of the issues than by adherence to the latest fashionable cause. There are several reasons for this.
First, scary scenarios invoke a roller-coaster ride of decision-making, where quick decisions are made and future choices decided on before the debate swings to the next area of contention. Decisions have to be made on the spot before fear turns to boredom, before an alternative disaster is announced and before public support melts away from a particular issue.
Second, the choices involved are often difficult, large, and have consequences that extend well into the future. A scary scenario suggests that an immediate choice should be made over issues that will affect our children and grandchildren, when most of us agonise over a simple purchase of a car or house. Scary scenarios rush important decisions that should only be made through a careful analysis of the facts and a weighing of the consequences.
Third, there is a distinct danger that scary scenarios can make the public blasé about genuine environmental dangers. Like the boy who cries "wolf" too often, scary scenarios that do not eventuate run the real risk of leading the public to believe that all scenarios have been overstated. How are we to distinguish which scary scenarios have been overstated and which are realistic in these cases?
A similar problem flows from the same logic. Scary scenarios imply that only the major issues are important. If we are all going to die from global warming anyway, there is not much sense in trying to save the bilby from extinction. Scary scenarios distract us from less impressive though nonetheless important issues, and tend to trivialise them.
Today's society looks back at the witch-burnings of the Reformation as being barbaric and misguided. Yet the persecutions were in response to the scary scenarios of those times: hell and the fear of the devil. Playing on the fears of a population invites hasty and misguided reactions, exemplified by the sufferings of those poor unfortunates accused of witchcraft.
Environmental doomsday scenarios are the modern equivalent of witchcraft trials where the scary scenarios are necessary to gain support for extreme policies. Playing to the fears of a population invites incoherent responses because of the problems involving perspective, information and haste. To make intelligent and informed choices about the future, people need to be presented with the facts, not fantasies inflamed with fear.
10. THE ETHICAL IMPERATIVE OF INTERGENERATIONAL EQUITY REQUIRES US TO PLACE ECOLOGICAL CONSIDERATIONS, SUCH AS THE CONSERVATION OF BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY, AHEAD OF OTHER MATTERS
My daughter is less than one year old. I care deeply about her future, and want her to have every opportunity to enjoy life. Part of those opportunities extend to enjoying and interacting with nature, and being able to experience the diversity of life on earth. If I have grandchildren one day, I will no doubt wish that they have the same benefits. I expect that my grandchildren will be around to usher in the twenty-second century, some 95 years away.
I assume my hopes for the next two generations are shared by nearly everyone. For most people, these expectations go beyond two generations and their immediate family. Yet many environmentalists argue that people's actions and choices are essentially short-sighted, and that special safeguards need to be imposed to ensure that intergenerational equity is maintained. The main charge is that the current generation, through excessive consumption and use of natural resources, is squandering the inheritance of future generations. To ensure equity, some safeguards are regarded as being necessary to stop current generations squandering resources. "Ecologically sustainable development" is one response to concerns about intergenerational equity.
How can our concerns for our grandchildren be reconciled with environmentalist claims that we are squandering their inheritance? Should society preserve environmental assets for future generations on the basis of intergenerational equity considerations? If this really is the "me" generation, is it likely to support any mechanism which passes control of environmental assets to future generations?
Environmentalists have two main concerns with the issue of intergenerational equity. The first is that they are concerned with the rate at which non-renewable resources are being used. The second is that they are unhappy with the widespread use of discount rates by economists and governments, which have the effect of diminishing the significance of costs and benefits the further away in time they occur. The criticism is that discounting means that a far-off disaster is trivialised in comparison to a current consumption desire.
Both of these concerns lead environmentalists into difficulties. The first implies that any use of non-renewable resources impoverishes future generations. Yet non-renewable resource-use allowed civilisation as we know it to develop, and enabled technology to discover new resources as stocks of previously used ones became relatively scarce. Increases in wealth and knowledge provide opportunities to search for new alternatives, or to set aside resources for special purposes, such as preservation.
The difficulty with not allowing any use of non-renewable resources is that the same problem exists for each generation in turn -- they cannot use a resource because it will deprive a future generation. Should the Bronze Age have never occurred? Should the Industrial Revolution have been put on hold? Without these advances, society would not have the wealth or the knowledge today to support an environmental movement. What makes more sense is to allow a trade-off where a depletion of resources is matched by increases in knowledge, technology and capital. In this way the overall ability of a system to meet environmental pressures is undiminished. Of course there are some cases where the trade-off is not worth it, and some mechanism is needed to signal when environmental resources are relatively so scarce and precious that they should be preserved.
The development of one of our most important institutions, the market mechanism, transmits signals about the availability of resources very efficiently. As a resource becomes scarce, its price rises. This sends a signal to the market for all to be more judicious in the use of the resource, and to intensify the search for alternative goods. As well, the market mechanism operates across time to capture demand from future generations for goods and services. High-rise buildings are designed to last beyond their current tenants; commercial forests are planted for harvest in 20 to 50 years time. An asset derives value not only from use by the current generation but from future generations as well. If the demands from future generations were not included, many projects would not be viable.
Discount rates enable the market and governments to assess the current value of future costs and benefits. There are two problems with the argument that discount rates allow environmental problems to be trivialised. The first is that discounting is a widespread phenomenon. People place higher values on events in the near future than they do on ones in a distant timeframe. Immediate problems assume greater significance than ones in the distant future. Arguing that discounting should not occur ignores the reality of choices for the current generation.
The second problem is that setting discount rates at low or zero levels may actually hasten environmental problems and the use of resources. This is because investment analyses that use low rates are more likely to give the go-ahead to projects that have large immediate construction and environmental costs, but benefits spread into the distant future. Low discount rates allow those benefits to be valued highly, and therefore projects that are currently uneconomic would become operational with low discount rates. As well, discount rates really reflect the cost of borrowing from future generations. Setting artificially low rates means that we are deciding the trade-off choices for future generations and shortchanging them by using resources now.
The failure of numerous large-scale government projects reflects many of these dangers. Governments, particularly those in the Eastern bloc countries of Europe, have been responsible for the construction of dams, irrigation projects, settlement programmes and industrial developments that have only been made possible through the setting of very low discount rates. The social and environmental costs of these projects restrict the opportunities of future generations.
Some environmentalists argue that intergenerational equity can only be achieved by having the government, rather than the marketplace, make environmental decisions. Yet the low discount-rates example shows that government failure is also a major problem. Government decision-making can be manipulated by lobby groups, constrained by the pressures of the electoral cycle and influenced by the career aspirations of bureaucrats. At the other extreme, no government means that the market place operates in a lawless environment. To allow the consideration of long-term demands and costs, the market mechanism has to operate within a carefully constructed framework of rules and institutions that offer some assurance of continuity. For example, forest plantations with a 50-year maturity will only occur where there is both an expected demand for the future product (reflected through the market mechanism), and an expectation that the property rights for the plantation are going to be upheld for the next 50 years.
The expansion of property rights offers the most promise for safeguarding the interests of future generations. Both the government and the market mechanism have a role to play in this process. In some areas, the extension of property rights allows something to be valued and treasured in the normal process. Allowing villagers in Africa to have property rights over wild animals means that the animals are no longer just crop-destroyers but have value in ecotourism. The anticipation of future demand for ecotourism signals that wild animals are assets to be conserved carefully.
Suggestions that environmental conservation must be safeguarded on the basis of intergenerational equity raises the implication that future generations will have an overwhelming demand for environmental goods. If we are so sure that this demand will eventuate, why is society not rushing to conserve everything? The answer is that future generations will demand a variety of services and assets. My hopes for future generations are not confined only to the environment, but extend to areas such as education, health and living standards.
This is where the awarding of trump status to the environment on the basis of intergenerational equity encounters difficulties. I suspect, from my own experience, that future generations will demand environmental assets as only part of their life opportunities. The predicament is that there is sometimes a trade-off between an environmental asset and other opportunities. The trade-offs made by past generations have seen living standards and life expectancies rise considerably. Trade-offs made by the current generation that focus on environmental assets to the detriment of living standards are unlikely to be welcomed by future generations.
I expect that my daughter will one day travel to see coral reefs in Queensland and elephants in Africa. Stakeholders in these areas are already anticipating the demands of her generation and valuing the environmental assets accordingly. But without education and an adequate standard of living, my daughter will not have the knowledge or ability to enjoy the environmental assets conserved for her. Fixed rules that ignore the life prospects of future generations have no real claim to an ethical basis. The best legacy to pass to future generations is the knowledge and endowments necessary to give them freedom to manage their environmental assets and personal well-being.
11. THE MORE WE SPEND ON ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION THE CLEANER THE ENVIRONMENT WILL BECOME
Environmental regulation is often imposed on activities that impose "spillover" or "external" costs, such as pollution. But regulation is not the only way that external costs can be controlled. In general, the appropriate means of control depends on the nature of the spillover. For example, if a factory imposes costs on a neighbour, bargaining between the two parties will often resolve the conflict. If not, private law remedies may be appropriate (such as actions in nuisance).
However, the use of the term "spillover" or "external" cost disguises the fact that our perception of these as running from those creating it to those being affected is too simplistic. If a polluting firm had no neighbours then the pollution would, by definition, affect no one and so impose no costs. In a sense, neighbours also impose a cost on the polluter, particularly if they arrive after the polluter. The real issue revolves about competing claims for the use of a single unowned resource -- for example, a river, the air, etc. The question is how best to resolve those conflicting claims?
From an economic point of view, the conflicting claims should be resolved in the way that maximises net joint benefit. Thus the costs and benefits of the parties need to be examined, not only the costs imposed by one party on another. Even large levels of pollution may maximise joint net benefits where the benefits of production are large. Regulation that results in an outcome different from that maximising joint net benefits imposes unnecessary costs in terms of forgone production benefits.
Where large numbers of people are effected by a spillover like pollution, private actions through the courts are not appropriate due to the high costs of taking legal action, the likelihood that those benefiting from the action will attempt to free-ride on the litigation, difficulties of proof and so on. Where a spillover affects a large number, regulation is more appropriate. But how much regulation?
Environmental regulation is not justified simply because an activity imposes costs on large numbers of people. Sometimes those affected receive compensation either before or after the cost is imposed. For example, those buying a house next to an airport pay less compared to similar houses without an airport. Here, anticipated aircraft noise does not create a spillover as the market has already taken the external cost into account. Regulation to reduce the noise simply gives a benefit to those who have already been compensated. In other words, markets often correct for spillover costs.
Regulation should be considered as a last resort and only used where markets do not, adequately, take the spillover costs into account. Regulation should be based, also, on a proper understanding of the problem and analysis of relevant information. As with any regulatory intervention, the benefits of regulation should exceed the spillover and regulatory costs. The avoidance of environmental damage involves three regulatory costs. They are:
- administrative costs;
- compliance costs; and
- indirect costs (the costs of regulatory mistakes).
Standard-setters need to be aware of the trade-off between these costs and the benefits of environmental regulation. In practice, policy makers and regulators lack adequate information. The less data available, the greater the scope for private interests (both those polluting as well as those who exaggerate the costs) to affect the regulatory outcome. This happens not only at the standard-setting stage but also the administrative stage. Administrators may be subject to political pressures. For example, standards may be relaxed or tightened according to the level of unemployment in an area.
Assuming the highly improbable situation that we have sufficient information to maximise joint net benefits, is it likely that regulation will achieve that goal or even improve the environment? There are a number of reasons why extra spending on environmental regulation may neither improve overall welfare nor improve the environment.
Regulation requires regulatory bureaucracies. Considerable funds can be spent on setting up regulatory bodies and in setting standards without any change to the environment. Regulators may be motivated to over-regulate to enhance their prestige. Money may be spent on more staff or regulatory outcomes that reflect bureaucratic goals. Regulation may focus on administratively-simple standards that can be measured more easily (so as to indicate success). For example, policies may be set to reduce pollution by large firms but, at the same time, overall levels of pollution may increase because small firms are ignored by the regulators. A lot of little victories provide fewer bureaucratic benefits. Regulatory bodies can be "captured" by certain groups who have particular axes to grind.
Setting pollution standards creates problems for a number of reasons. Usually it is difficult to determine how much environmental damage has been caused. Even if the physical nature of the damage can be identified, it is the value of the damage that is relevant to the regulatory question. Is the value of the damage sufficiently great that costs should be incurred to prevent it? Valuing the benefits of environmental regulations is a complex exercise, particularly where the valuations of future generations must be taken into account. The impact on regulation on variables such as health is hard to measure, and, because the costs of regulation are high, there is considerable disagreement about the appropriate trade-off between the benefits of production against the costs of pollution. Even if agreement can be reached on the appropriate standard, their implementation may not be by the cheapest route. Some standards will impose more costs on some firms than on others. As a result, standards can be sought by some firms as a way of obtaining a competitive advantage. Those being regulated may be able to avoid regulation by lobbying to ensure that new environmental regulations apply only to new entrants (thereby raising the barriers to entry and so ensuring that incumbents have a quieter life and higher profits). The actual environment may not be improved at all -- except in a potential sense.
Compliance expenditure may "crowd out" private environmental expenditure that would have occurred in any event, so that the net impact of the regulation may be marginal. The impact may be negative if the imposed regulation is more costly than planned private expenditure.
Regulation may not have the intended effect either because the regulations create perverse incentives. This can result from inadequate information at the policy stage where important side effects are not anticipated or avoidance activity is not taken into account.
The regulatory burden of proof is on those proposing environmental regulation to demonstrate net benefits in a rigorous manner, taking the foregoing concerns into account. To date, the environmental agenda has been driven more by ideology than tangible net benefits.
12. THE ENVIRONMENT IS TOO CRITICAL TO PUT A PRICE TAG ON
Decision-making in our society, be it at the individual, family, local community, corporate or governmental level, involves trade-offs. The various options available are weighed up against each other and a choice is made. The processes involved in that weighing-up can be extremely complex. Comparisons need to be made between all sorts of differing outcomes. For instance, a family trying to decide if they should buy a new car or use their money to extend their house will need to make a trade-off between the comfort and safety afforded by a new car against the space that an expanded house would provide. By choosing one option over another, the family simply implies that the preferred option is more valuable to them than the other. Family decision-making can take into account environmental consequences. For instance, a family may decide to buy a brand of tinned tuna which gives a guarantee to have been caught without harming dolphins, even though it is more expensive than an alternative brand which gives no such guarantee. By making this choice they demonstrate a willingness to pay some premium for the environmentally-sensitive option. However, the family may decide not to buy phosphate-free detergent because the price premium charged for it is considered not to be worth their perceived value of the environmental damage caused.
The same basic principles applying to the household are also relevant at the level of government. Decisions that are taken demonstrate the relative values of alternative courses of action. If, for a moment, we can assume that governments elected in a democracy act in the best interests of the voters, then we can conclude that the decisions of governments implicitly show how the community as a whole values the various outcomes of decisions. Hence we can conclude that when a government decides that an area of land under its control is dedicated as a National Park instead of being leased out for mining or grazing, the government, and hence the community, values the park option more highly than the alternative uses. Similarly, if permission is granted by the government for a forest to be logged rather than declaring it a Forest Reserve, the implication is that the environmental values of the forest are less than the financial and employment returns that flow from logging.
Trade-offs made in decisions which have an impact on the environment therefore imply relative values for the environment. The observation that the environment does not always come out the winner in these decision-making processes indicates that it does not automatically have "trump status". If the option that must be given up for the environmental option to be implemented is of greater value, it will be selected. To argue that the environment is too critical to place a price tag on implies that there is no option which is of greater value than the environment. If this were the case, society would choose never to disturb the environment. Clearly this is not so, as we observe almost everywhere on the planet and in its atmosphere, evidence of choices which have altered the environment. Society is prepared to cut down some of its forests in order to build houses and print newspapers. It chooses to suffer some pollution of its atmosphere so that it can be mobile through its use of the internal combustion engine. Taking the point to an extreme, it can even be argued that the very existence of humanity requires environmental disturbance and given that we continue to want to exist, the environment cannot be granted trump status.
However, that is not to say that environmental consequences are unimportant and should be ignored in decision-making. As more and more impacts on the environment are felt, the trade-off price will rise. The value of what remains of the environment increases as there is less of it. For instance, as the area of undisturbed forest is reduced by logging activities, what is left becomes increasingly valuable, especially as it has few, if any, good substitutes. Ignoring this increasing value is just as short-sighted as believing it is infinite. The nature of the trade-off process in decision-making should therefore be seen as an important safety mechanism against the implementation of absolutist rules favouring either development or conservation. Neither deserve trump status. A government conferring trump status to development will uniformly create environmental disaster in the order of that found in the former Eastern bloc countries. Conversely, a government conferring trump status to the environment will create poverty, starvation and social unrest. The concept of a trade-off allows a spectrum of conservation/development states.
While it is comparatively simple to demonstrate that the environment is not infinitely valuable, determining its actual value is not so straightforward. The complexities of decision-making, particularly at a community-wide level and especially when there are environmental consequences involved, have caused governments in many countries around the world to seek out techniques of comparing the values of alternative options. One of the most widely used of these techniques is known as cost benefit analysis (CBA). The basis of CBA is the explicit valuation of the outcomes of each available alternative. Where alternatives involve environmental consequences, CBA requires that their values be assessed.
For most of the non-environmental consequences of alternatives, valuations for CBA can be achieved through information provided in markets. Where goods are bought and sold, economists have developed techniques to infer values from transactions. However, it is usually the case that environmental consequences are not bought and sold. Putting a price tag on the environment must therefore be achieved through non-market valuation techniques. Economists have developed such techniques, but their success has been queried even within the profession of economics. Debate as to their usefulness has often been heated. Most well-known of these non-market valuation techniques is the contingent valuation method (CVM). This technique relies on the responses of people asked for their willingness to pay for some environmental consequence, in the context of some hypothetical setting. It came to prominence in Australia when it was used by the Commonwealth Government to estimate the value of the environmental degradation that would have been caused if the Coronation Hill area (adjacent to Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory) was allowed to be mined. (76) A sample of people were asked if they would be willing to pay to prevent a mine from being opened at Coronation Hill. The CVM-generated estimate of the environmental consequences of mining proved to be in the order of ten times greater than the value to the Australian community of mining at the site. Such was the controversy surrounding the validity of the method, however, that the final decision regarding the fate of the Coronation Hill mine appeared to be made on the basis of other information.
Overseas, the CVM is relatively widely used. In the United States, CVM-generated estimates of the value of environmental damages can be used in the courts as the basis of compensation claims. Best known of this type of case was the suit filed by the US and Alaskan Governments against the Exxon Corporation following the grounding of the Exxon Valdez in Prince William Sound, Alaska. In Scandinavia and the United Kingdom, the CVM is increasingly being used in the generation of government policy, particularly as it pertains to matters of land use and pollution. The technique is, however, far from being universally accepted as accurate and is difficult to implement effectively.
Other non-market valuation techniques have proven to be less controversial. For instance, the Travel Cost Method has been widely applied to put a price on the environment for recreation activities. (77) The Hedonic Pricing Technique has also been used to infer the value people place on differing amounts of air and noise pollution through the analysis of property prices. (78) But these techniques are still far from being straightforward and have their own theoretical and practical problems.
On many occasions in the past, the difficulties involved in valuing environmental consequences have relegated them to the "too hard basket" and they have been omitted from CBA comparisons of alternatives. The implication of this approach is that environmental consequences have no value. Clearly, such an approach is equally as dangerous to sensible decision-making as any which affords trump status to the environment. The appropriate way forward begins with a recognition that decision-making will necessarily involve trade-offs which will require careful consideration. How best to weigh up all the outcomes at the level of the community as a whole is far from clear. However, information provided to decision-makers through techniques such as CBA and CVM can assist in the selection process and go some way in ensuring the transparency of the decision-making process. Transparency is a key ingredient in ensuring that governments make decisions in the interests of their constituencies and not their narrow self-interest.
The environment performs a range of important functions. Its protection is valuable to society. That value, however, is not infinite when decisions are being made about the appropriate use of resources. Such decisions require trade-offs to be made between the value of the protected environment and the value generated by using the environment for development purposes. In making these choices, society either implicitly or explicitly puts a price on the environment.
13. EVERYONE BENEFITS FROM THE PASSAGE OF ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS
Environmental laws are often justified on the basis that the unregulated price of a good or service does not reflect the true social costs of production. The difference between the social cost and the unregulated price of an activity is a "spillover" cost (called an externality by economists). Thus, a factory polluting the waterways imposes costs on society not taken into account in the factory's production decision. Spillover costs are a form of "market failure" which, it is argued, justifies environmental regulation.
If, at first glance, some activities impose spillover costs, what should be done about it? Lawyers, politicians and bureaucrats tend to see the solution in terms of passing more laws. Those affected need to be protected from the spillover costs imposed on them. Standards of acceptable conduct need to be imposed on those creating the spillover costs.
Whether setting standards improves outcomes depends on how the standards are set. If high standards are set, then, although the spillover cost may be reduced, so will the benefits of the spillover-creating activity. Whether society is better off depends on weighing the reduced spillover costs against the forgone benefits from the activity. Some will gain while others lose. For example, imposing high tolls on road access to cities reduces pollution, but disadvantages people with limited mobility -- the aged or the disabled. Protecting the environment by stopping the use of DDT will increase the number of malaria deaths, particularly in developing countries.
If regulation imposes gains and losses, should it be imposed? Economists have long struggled with developing criteria for evaluating change born of regulation or other public policy. In general, it is accepted that regulation or a new law should go ahead if those who gain can compensate, properly, those who lose, and still be better off. This approach emphasises that all individual valuations of the costs and benefits of a change are important, not simply the valuations of proposing or opposing the change.
Can environmental regulation improve community welfare? Usually, the answer to this question is next-to-impossible to determine. In practice, comparing losses and gains is difficult. Many people will exaggerate the spillover costs imposed on them (to increase their compensation). Likewise, those who gain will understate benefits to minimise any contribution they may have to make to compensate the losers.
Those who lose their jobs because of a lower level of the spillover-causing activity may place considerable weight on their loss if no other jobs are available. Consumers facing higher prices will also suffer a welfare loss, the extent of which will depend on the importance of the lost product or service. On the other hand, those not directly or indirectly affected may place little value on the production activity but at the same time value the resulting cleaner environment, however intangible those benefits. For instance, imposing new environmental standards on an industry (for example, logging) in a remote area may lead to substantial local job losses and a drop in income for those remaining. Those arguing for the new standards often live a long way from the affected area and do not have sufficient local knowledge to understand the proper environmental impact. Instead, the "value" is seen in political terms, that is, as providing more influence to affect a wide range of environmental issues. The costs of environmental standards in particular cases such as this may easily outweigh the benefits.
Who benefits and who loses from environmental regulation, and by how much, are unlikely to be known in advance. In practice, regulatory costs (such as the costs of complying and costs of making regulatory mistakes) and the benefits of regulation are substantially uncertain. Compliance costs may be unknown because technologies have not been developed. The additional benefits from pollution control are difficult to estimate.
Potentially, it may be possible for those gaining from an environmental law to compensate those who lose. For example, environmentalists could buy woodchip licences from loggers (if the licence does not require production). But this is a costly exercise in terms of getting people on both sides together, finding the money to compensate (as there will be a tendency to free-ride by those who benefit but who do not want to pay), and agreeing on appropriate compensation (as valuations will differ).
For environmentalists there is a cheaper alternative to compensation: lobby for more environmental regulation, or "capture" the bureaucracy administering the environmental regulation. In so doing, no compensation need be paid by those benefiting from the change. If political pressures dictate compensation, this strategy also allows for the compensation burden to be shifted onto the general taxpayer, not those proposing the changes. Taxpayers will not oppose the compensation because, individually, their costs of complaining usually outweigh their extra taxation costs. In that sense, taxpayers are "rational abstainers" from the political process.
The difficulties involved in identifying cost and benefits, which necessarily involves identifying those who lose and gain, should not preclude more rigorous evaluation of proposed environmental laws. Not doing so allows single-interest pressure groups to determine regulatory outcomes by relying on the fact that, unless directly affected in a substantial way, most people are "rationally ignorant" of the passage of environmental laws -- the costs of action exceed any benefit they receive from preventing the law.
14. REGULATIONS THAT AMOUNT TO "LICENCES TO POLLUTE" ARE UNETHICAL AND IMPRACTICAL. INSTEAD WE SHOULD BAN HAZARDOUS CHEMICALS AND POLLUTANTS
Hazardous chemicals and pollutants are not items that the majority of people enjoy in their own right. They are found in society largely because they are required for, or are by-products of, the production of things people do value. Hence, people do not want to breathe nitrous oxides and sulphur dioxide, but they do want to be able to turn the lights on at night. Unfortunately, the generation of electricity through the burning of coal results in the production of some noxious gases. Similarly, people don't want to ingest pesticide residues, but they do want to eat fruit which is unblemished and low-priced. And the benzines and phenols produced in the petrochemical industry are not enjoyable per se but the plastics which are the final outputs pervade Australian households.
So, while hazardous chemicals and pollutants can be harmful, they only come about in the process of securing benefits. Banning them would certainly prevent the harm, but it would also choke off the benefits. An analogy can be found in the case of the motor vehicle. There are significant risks of death involved in driving a car. Yet to implement the "simple" solution of banning the use of cars would be met with public outcry simply because of the loss of benefit such a policy would cause.
It is important to recognise, however, that there is a balancing process involved here. The harm that the hazardous chemicals and pollutants cause has to be weighed against the benefits that are derived from them. If we find that, in the production of more electricity, the damage caused by the resultant pollutants is greater than the benefits arising from the augmented supply of electricity, then society is better off without that production.
The balancing process is also evident in choices made between production processes. For instance, "clean" power may be available from the sun and the wind but at a price premium. Fruit grown without the use of pesticides may be available on the market, but at a higher price than conventionally-grown produce and may have a less attractive appearance.
It is often difficult to get this balancing process right. This is because, usually, the damage done by the pollutants is not felt by the polluter or the user of the finished product. The damages are "spillover" effects and are ignored by the polluter. Hence, the motorist whose driving through a city contributes to the smog is usually not the one who suffers an asthma attack. The decisions of motorists to drive are therefore taken without consideration of the costs they impose on those with breathing disorders. Similarly, the lower price paid for coal-fired, thermally-generated power may not incorporate the costs imposed on those affected by the carbon dioxide and ash-waste products.
It has become the norm in such circumstances for governments to step in to regulate the activities of polluters and the use of hazardous chemicals. The style of regulation has generally been of the "command and control" variety whereby the authorities put into place across-the-board limitations on use or production. The appeal of this style of regulation to the authorities is that the results are readily observed. Success in their endeavours is easily demonstrated to their political masters. Furthermore, it can be presented to all as being "fair" in that every user/producer bears an equal burden in the endeavour to reduce the damage of chemicals/pollutants.
The problem with this approach is that it is wasteful. In other words, it is possible to achieve the same "clean-up" result with the use of fewer resources.
The way the pollution control process can be carried out with least cost is through the operation of a pollution permit system. This involves the government authority setting the overall level of pollution or chemical use that is decided to be appropriate. Permits, which give the holder the right to emit a specified level of a pollutant or use a given amount of a toxic substance, are then defined. The total of the permits is set equal to the pre-decided level of pollutant/chemical. Those interests wishing to pollute or use chemicals are then allocated the permits. This may be done by free allocation to those currently involved (so-called "grandfathering") or by offering them up for auction. Through the buying and selling of permits, the least-cost way of achieving the clean-up target is implemented.
Permit-trading brings about an efficient clean-up because different polluters have differing costs of achieving the clean-up. For those who can clean up cheaply it is better to sell off any permits they have and reduce their pollution. For those whose processes are not so easily cleaned up, it is cheaper to buy permits and continue to pollute. Thus, the buying and selling of the permits enables the advantages of specialisation in the clean-up process to be achieved. Those with the lowest costs of achieving pollution reductions do the clean-up while those with difficult-to-control emissions find it cheaper to buy the permits.
Whether the operation of a regime of pollution permits is unethical is a value judgement. It is, however, only as unethical as any other policy option designed to reduce the level of pollution or the use of toxic chemicals. And pollution itself is only as unethical as the use of those products and services that result from the polluting process. Some will regard the use of motor vehicles as unethical because of the pollution they cause. Others will consider the generation of electricity by the burning of coal as unethical. There may even be some in the community who will reject plastics. It is clear, however, that society as a whole does not share any of these judgements and so long as it continues to do so, pollution and the use of toxic chemicals in general, cannot be judged from a societal perspective as being unethical.
The ethics of permit trading is sometimes linked to a general belief that market allocation is immoral because free markets are lawless and grasping, thus inviting lower standards of behaviour than would be observed under government-set regulations. Far from being lawless, free markets operate under both "hard" institutions such as the legal system and "soft" institutions such as social conventions about honesty. The market system is merely an encapsulation of the ethics of the society within which it operates as they are embodied in its institutions.
Nor can the operation of a tradeable permit system be condemned as impractical. Numerous versions of the system have operated smoothly in the United States and Europe and there is a growing trend in Australia for their implementation. It is common for the introduction of permit trading to strike resistance from the pollution control bureaucracy because it involves a much more "hands-off" approach. Rather than dictating to individual polluters the level of emissions they are allowed, the regulators find themselves setting only overall levels of pollution. Individual polluters are allowed to work out among themselves the best way of achieving the goal. The end result is a system which is pro-active in achieving pollution control goals. There are significant advantages to be achieved over time through a shift away from the re-active approach that results from the regulatory approach. Individual polluters, under a permit-trading system, have a strong incentive to search for less polluting technologies or more cost effective measures to control pollution. Hence, over time, pollution control would be more effective and cheaper.
Banning pollution and hazardous chemicals ignores the benefits that society enjoys as adjuncts to their production. It is more appropriate to ask:
- what is the level of pollution/hazardous chemical production that optimally balances the trade-off between their costs and benefits; and
- how is that optimal balance best achieved?
The use of tradeable emission permits is a mechanism to ensure that an optimal balance is achieved in a most cost-effective way.
15. EUROPEAN FARMING METHODS AND ASSOCIATED LAND DEGRADATION HAVE DESTROYED THE SUSTAINABILITY OF AUSTRALIAN AGRICULTURE
EUROPEAN FARMING
A view put by some conservationists and others is that degradation of land and soil in Australia has been caused by the continued application of European-style agricultural practices over 200 years. Further, they argue that these practices have led to the unsustainability of Australian agriculture, with the implication that farming systems need radical change.
Uren has pointed out that the earliest white settlers had the apparent choice of adopting either Aboriginal practices or those with which they were familiar. (79) Quite naturally, they applied what they knew (which was very little) and they quickly discovered that the climate and soils of Australia were very different from those of England and that some European practices did not work. Since that time, Australia has developed its own styles of agriculture in a diverse array of enterprises and environments. The development is the result of agricultural research and of farmers adopting and adapting practices such as cultivation, fertilisation, rotations, breeding, irrigation, conservation tillage and so on from all over the world and not just from Europe: "... an agricultural system was forged which ... was vastly different from the farming systems of Europe". (80)
The history of Australian agriculture is replete with discoveries and inventions stemming from the necessity to adapt to the Australian environment, particularly the climate and the infertile soils. The accumulation and dissemination of a vast body of scientific knowledge have made a major contribution to this development. Mistakes were made and will continue to be made. But usually they are gradually rectified because this is in the best interest of farmer. (81)
So part of the tall tale has been disposed of: "European" practices are not to blame. Further, the alternatives to "western" systems of agriculture that have been proposed in recent years, such as agro-forestry, organic farming, or permaculture systems, have failed to contribute to food or fibre production in any significant way.
What of the sustainability component of the tall tale? It will come as no surprise to many that it all depends on how one defines "sustainability".
WHAT IS SUSTAINABILITY?
A dictionary definition of "sustain" is to keep from falling for a prolonged period. This is the essence of the meaning behind most interpretations of the contemporary concept of "sustainability". People have developed an increased concern, for example, that agricultural systems show sustainability in the sense that yields are maintained or improved, that the supply of necessary inputs is sustainable, that the environment is not irreversibly harmed, and that the welfare and options of future generations are not jeopardised by the production and consumption activities of the present generation.
Chisholm suggested that "For an agricultural exporting country, a sustainable agricultural system may be broadly defined as one which meets domestic and international demands for agricultural products at socially acceptable economic and environmental costs to current and future generations". (82)
In terms of developing operational indicators of sustainability, most definitions skirt round some important questions: How long is "prolonged"? What should be the scale of sustainability in space and time? What is to be sustained? Edwards sheds light on some of these questions, as reflected in the following discussions. (83)
The time scale of sustainability
Do agricultural systems need to be sustainable forever to pass the test, or is 400 years long enough? As one measure of soil erosion, Milliman and Meade estimated the annual discharge of suspended sediment from various drainage basins of the world. (84) The discharges are particularly heavy in the Asian and Oceanic regions, where about 10 billion tons of sediment per annum are estimated to move to the oceans. The discharges from Australia are relatively minor. The discharges from China are huge. It might be suggested that the system of agriculture practised in China has been unsustainable for 5,000 years.
The uncertainty surrounding events that are more than a few years away makes it impracticable to imagine that we can foresee all aspects of the sustainability of agricultural systems in the very long run. Does sustainability imply preservation of all natural resources? All economic activities draw directly or indirectly on natural resources. Reserves of minerals are finite in size and their exploitation is not sustainable in the very long run. Does this mean that mining operations should not proceed?
It has been estimated that sources of phosphatic fertilisers, upon which Australian agriculture depends, will become exhausted within the next five hundred years. (85) This would mean that present-day practices cannot be maintained indefinitely. It is to be expected, however, that the people involved in production and knowledge systems will respond in a dynamic fashion to any future changes in the relative scarcity of phosphatic fertilisers, just as they have in the past.
The geographic scale of sustainability
At what level or scale should we seek to identify sustainability? Should Australian agriculture be sustainable in every region of the country, or on a national basis? Given that Australia is such a small country in global terms with respect to population and the size of its economy (about 0.5 per cent of the world total in each case), does it really matter if Australian agriculture is sustainable or not, so long as agriculture is sustainable on a global scale? Furthermore, it should be recognised that many determinants of the sustainability of Australian agriculture will originate overseas and will be firmly beyond our control. Lynam and Herdt suggest that sustainability first needs to be defined at the highest level before proceeding to smaller scales, and that the sustainability of a system is not necessarily dependent on the sustainability of all its subsystems. (86)
What is to be sustained?
In an ideal world, there are many components of agricultural systems that we may wish to see sustained. We may wish to sustain the number of people employed in agriculture. By this indicator, Australian agriculture has been distinctly unsustainable -- the number of people employed in the industry has declined for the past 60 years. (87) The real net income of farmers has also fallen steadily for many years and is now only about 60 per cent of its level in the 1950s. (88) While nominal (undeflated) agricultural commodity prices have risen, real prices (deflated by the CPI) have fallen. (89) On the other hand, as will be seen later, Australian agricultural productivity has increased steadily for the past 40 years, despite the existence of various forms of land degradation. (90) With few exceptions, agricultural yields per unit area of land either have been maintained or improved.
TRENDS IN AGRICULTURAL YIELDS
Wheat yield data are widely available for Australia for extended periods of time and represent an important source of information, integrating many of the soil- and land-related determinants of the productive capacity of agriculture, such as soil structure, nutrient availability and soil pH.
Donald has analysed mean Australian wheat yields for each decade since 1860. (91) The results in Figure 1 suggest that yields reflected unsustainable agricultural practices in the early years of European settlement, but that since about 1900 there has been a steady increase in yields per unit area. Hamblin and Kyneur showed that trends for 1967 to 1991 continued upwards on average (Figure 2), but varied substantially across the Australian wheat belt and had not risen in some areas. It appeared that yields were trending down in some areas over the past 10 years.
Hamblin and Kyneur also compared Australian trends in wheat yield with those for 14 other major producing countries, for the period 1952-1988. Australia ranked last with a trend of 8 kg per hectare per year, with the highest increase in France at 122 kg per hectare per year. But these results should be treated with caution from a sustainability point of view -- the data do not show what inputs are required to produce the increases in yields. Australian agriculture is "low input" by international comparison.
Many of the countries in Hamblin and Kyneur's comparison (particularly France) heavily subsidise their agricultural industries, making it profitable for their farmers to use much higher levels of inputs than in Australia, where agriculture is only lightly assisted. Even for a country like Argentina, which doesn't assist its agriculture, there are other forces at work. Argentina has moved from a system of taxes on agricultural exports to one of taxes on agricultural land, providing incentives for farmers to intensify their use of land. Finally, land in Australia is relatively cheap, providing incentives to acquire more land and use modern technology to farm large areas, rather than to increase yields per unit area.
Hamblin and Kyneur also drew attention to declining grain protein levels (Figure 2) as a cause for concern. Even here, however, there are reasons for farmers allowing their soil- and grain-nitrogen levels to decline over time. Increased grain protein (%) can normally only be obtained at the expense of grain yield (t/ha). It is only recently that wheat-marketing authorities have begun paying a premium for the protein content of grain. In future we can expect to see increasing use of nitrogenous fertilisers and increases in soil- and grain-nitrogen concentrations.
Yield data for several other agricultural commodities, compiled from ABS and ABARE data, also show increasing trends for coarse grains, oilseeds, rice and cotton. The data for sugar, however, support Henzell's observation that there appears to be a yield plateau for the last 20 years, despite the adoption of potentially higher-yielding varieties. (92) Henzell suggests that soil factors are responsible for the plateau, however it may also be due to the expansion of sugar production onto more marginal areas of land.
TRENDS IN AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTIVITY
The term "agricultural productivity" is open to numerous interpretations. The yield per unit area data presented in the preceding section can be seen as a measure of productivity. But, as was seen, this measure takes no account of the resources, other than land, that are required to produce yields.
"Total factor productivity" (TFP) is an index of productivity growth which attempts to include all resources (or factors of production) and all products for an industry, usually at a national scale. The resources are normally grouped into those associated with land, labour, capital and operating expenses. Estimates of TFP provide a measure of the physical productive capacity of agriculture.
A definition of sustainability that could be derived from TFP is that a sustainable agricultural system is one with constant or increasing total factor productivity and output over time, where the inputs include any environmental costs associated with agricultural production.
This definition does not lead to the insistence, for example, that particular commodity yields per unit area, or the number of people employed in agricultural production, should be maintained. Instead, it accounts for all the inputs and outputs associated with agricultural production, and allows for substitution between them.
Chisholm draws attention to the substantial productivity increases in global and Australian agriculture over the past 40 years. (93) Knowledge was the key resource accounting for the increases, (94) which were accompanied by only a modest expansion in the quantities of land and water devoted to agricultural production. (95)
Improvements in productivity may arise from a vast array of technological changes, including improvements in plant and animal genetic material; computerisation of agricultural production processes; improved management of crops, pastures and animals; new fertiliser technology; improved financial management; and new technology in irrigation equipment.
Over the 40-year period from 1950-1990, farm output in Australia increased two-and-a-half times, or about 2.5 per cent per year (see Figure 3), while real per-unit costs of production declined. The rate of increase in output per unit of land over the last three decades has been higher than that for any other OECD country. (96)
Chisholm compares the value of the increase in the productive capacity of agriculture with estimates that have been made of the annual costs of land degradation. (97) He concludes that the additional annual value of agricultural production (about $15 billion in 1988-89) made possible by technological change has dwarfed the annual costs of land degradation (about $0.6 billion per year). Another way of viewing this result is that if degradation could have been avoided at no cost, annual productivity growth over the period 1950-51 to 1988-89 would have been 2.6 per cent instead of 2.5 per cent. In approximate terms, the cost of repairing the damage caused by the last 200 years of Australian agriculture is offset by the value of just one year's productivity improvement. Davidson has estimated that the total cost of repairing all of the damage due to erosion caused by 200 years of European occupation was less than the loss caused by one severe drought. (98)
EXPLAINING THE PARADOX
How can we resolve the apparent paradox of rising agricultural productivity in the presence of land degradation, accompanied by falling agricultural incomes? What does all this mean to the sustainability of Australian agriculture?
The relationship between land degradation and productivity growth is complex, as shown by Hone. (99) Increasing productivity may be accompanied by unchanged, increasing or decreasing land quality, depending on the nature of the technology. Although it is true that land degradation is present in the Australian environment, and that some forms, such as salinity, appear to be increasing, it is also true that considerable areas of land have been improved from the perspective of agricultural productivity, as was seen earlier (Figure 1). There is no evidence that there have been net increases in the degradation of Australia's agricultural land over time. Rather, the evidence is that there has been net improvement in land quality over the last 200 years.
In summary, estimates of total factor productivity suggest that the productive capacity of Australian agriculture has increased dramatically in the past 40 years, despite the presence of land degradation. Not all the costs of land degradation, however, may have been included in these estimates, and they may not adequately reflect the effects of future degradation. The rate of increase in productive capacity has been more than offset by a decline in real commodity prices, with the result that real farm incomes have fallen. The decline in commodity prices has been largely due to overseas forces. In other words, Australian farmers and scientists have developed agricultural systems that are sustainable from an ecological point of view but which are under threat from economic forces partly beyond their control.
CONCLUSIONS
Australian agriculture has proven to be sustainable in ecological and economic terms, although international economic forces and natural environmental events continue to threaten the economic viability of many farmers. Further, Australian agriculture has proven to be more sustainable than the agricultural systems of most other countries.
Chisholm has suggested that the bottom line to all this is that for Australian agriculture to remain sustainable, the industry must maintain rates of productivity improvement that are equal to, or better than, its international competitors. (100) The development of new knowledge through research and development is the key to this improvement. The effects of new technologies should be assessed for their effects on land quality, but the tall tale referred to in this paper should not be permitted to distract Australians from the important issue of international competitiveness. An important environmental benefit of rejecting the tall tale will be that more agricultural output will be produced on fewer hectares of land, allowing significantly greater preservation of wildlife habitat than would otherwise be the case.
16. IT IS IMMORAL TO HARVEST OR FARM NATIVE ANIMALS FOR HUMAN CONSUMPTION
Each year, some environmentalists protest against the commercial harvesting of kangaroos in Australia. (101) Recent changes to State laws have made it legal to serve kangaroo for human consumption, and emu meat has also been introduced to restaurants and served by QANTAS to their first-class passengers. Woolworths started to sell both kangaroo and emu meat in their supermarkets in 1994. Environmentalists have protested stridently against the offering of these meats for human consumption. QANTAS received letters from United States residents who argued that emus were being hunted to extinction. Both Woolworths and QANTAS have withdrawn kangaroo and emu meat for human consumption, although they deny that the withdrawal was in response to the variety of complaints.
The arguments advanced by environmentalists in support of their claims do not stand scrutiny. The first main argument used is that harvesting of emus and kangaroos is not sustainable. Nothing could be further from the truth. There are 30 million kangaroos in Australia, of which about 5 million are harvested each year. There are more kangaroos than sheep in the rangelands area of Australia. Prior to white settlement, kangaroo populations in the rangelands areas were controlled by the lack of water, by dingoes, and by seasonal variations. Numbers would build up in good seasons, only to plummet in dry times as animals died of thirst. Now large areas of Australian rangelands have multiple watering points and are free from dingoes because of eradication campaigns and fencing. Without management and culling, kangaroo numbers would soar to unsustainable levels. In this case, dry times mean that the country is overgrazed, animals die from starvation and thirst, and the population can collapse to well below a normal sustainable level. The heavy pressure on grazing lands would be likely to hasten land degradation.
Emus cannot be legally harvested from the wild. Emus are farmed under a licensing system, and breeding stock must be purchased from existing farms. A number of farms have been established in Australia -- feathers, oil and leather are important products along with the meat. Interestingly, some emu farms exist in the United States, even though environmentalists from that country decry the consumption of emu meat on the mistaken basis that emus are rare and endangered. (102)
The second main argument advanced by environmentalists is that it is cruel to harvest native animals. Again, the facts suggest the opposite. Kangaroos are harvested by professional shooters in the country where they graze. Nearly all are killed instantly with head shots because shots to the body cause hide and carcass damage. Kangaroos have almost no contact with humans before harvest. They are not caged like battery hens during their life, nor penned and transported to slaughter like cattle from feedlots. For kangaroos, the alternative to culling and management is to starve or die of thirst in dry times, hardly a preferable option.
Emu farms involve birds being raised in outdoor pens and breeding areas. In many cases the birds are slaughtered on the farm. Again, the husbandry involved is minimal compared to battery hens or other intensive livestock practices. Farmers have a vested interest in the well-being of their emus, and birds that are raised with a minimum of stress are likely to produce the highest returns.
The third main argument advanced is the "Skippy" one, where environmentalists say that it would be sacrilege to eat a national symbol of Australia. They forget that Benjamin Franklin advocated the wild turkey as the emblem for the new United States of America. If he had been successful, would turkey have disappeared from the dinner plate? The Welsh eat their leeks, and the Canadians love maple syrup. If it really is sacrilege to eat our national symbols, then Aboriginal people have been committing heresy for thousands of years.
Some environmentalists have substituted sentimentalism for ecological good sense. Kangaroos and other native animals are well-suited to the Australian environment with their soft paws, neat biting patterns, and mobility and endurance in the face of harsh conditions. As Australia is discovering, hard-hoofed animals, such as cattle and sheep, damage our fragile soils and strain the resilience of our native pastures.
It makes excellent ecological sense to replace sheep and cattle in some of our arid regions with kangaroos. Instead of producing meat from introduced animals, the same land could produce meat from kangaroos and face a far lower level of environmental pressure. At the present time, however, landholders receive almost no incentives to produce kangaroos instead of cattle or sheep. Instead, kangaroos are unwelcome competition to their stock. The development of a high-quality, kangaroo-meat industry will encourage landholders in what are currently marginal areas to swing away from introduced stock towards kangaroo-meat production and subsequently improve land management practices. Harvesting and management of kangaroo populations will ensure that the carrying capacity of pastures is not outstripped.
In a similar vein, emus produce excellent leather, oil for medicinal and cosmetic purposes, and meat that is low in saturated fats and thus very healthy. They are a soft-footed animal that can eat plants toxic to cattle and sheep and can drink reasonably saline water. Their use offers an environmentally-friendly alternative to the introduced European animals.
Perhaps the real reason we have not found immediate acceptance of kangaroo- and emu-farming in Australia relates to our cultural heritage. Some early settlers and explorers ate native foods with relish. Leichhardt and his party relied heavily on emu meat on their trip to Port Essington. Most of the population, however, disparaged the use of native foods, and where necessity did not dictate, the settlers and squatters stuck to mutton and beef. Social etiquette demanded that the staples introduced from Europe formed the diet of early Australians. For the middle and wealthy classes, flesh from a cloven hoofed animal was the only red meat permitted on the dinner plate. Even in the Great Depression, poor people could eat rabbit without risking social stigma, while meat from kangaroos grazing on the same pastures was social taboo.
Perhaps our colonial past still guides the wheels on our shopping trolleys and some subconscious social programming tells us to pass up the variety meats on offer. The hypocrisy of the arguments of some environmentalists is revealed by their ready acceptance of Aborigines in traditional lifestyles continuing to eat kangaroo and emu. One implication is that these people are exempt from the ethical standards that should be adopted by other Australians. Another is that assumptions about our cultural superiority still demote native foods used by Aborigines as somehow inferior.
The real evidence about the level of maturity and independence that Australia as a nation has reached will not come from the debate about changing the flag, but from the decisions made about the use of natural resources and the environment. Acceptance of kangaroo and emu on our dinner plates will not only be good news for the health of our rangelands, but will also be evidence that, after more than 200 years, Australians are coming to embrace some traditional foods as their own.
ENDNOTES
1. J. Burger, The Gaia Atlas of First People, Penguin, 1990, pages 21, 23.
2. Rudolf Kaiser, " 'A fifth Gospel, almost', Chief Seattle's speech(es): American origins and European reception", in C.F. Feest (ed.), Indians and Europe, Aachen, 1987, pages 507, 523.
3. See, for example, the special issue of the ACF magazine Habitat, "Caring for country: Aboriginal perspectives on conservation", June 1991.
4. Lee Sackett, "Promoting primitivism: conservationist depictions of Aboriginal Australians", The Australian Journal of Anthropology, volume 2, 1991, page 241.
5. For a discussion of the difference between environmental ideals and performance see, for example, Yi-Fu Tuan, "Our treatment of the environment in ideal and actuality", American Scientist, May-June 1970.
6. "Aborigines and conservationism: the Daintree-Bloomfield road", Australian Journal of Social Issues, volume 24, 1989, page 220.
7. Strehlow, Aranda Traditions, Melbourne, 1947, pages 49-50; see also Sackett, op. cit., pages 238-9.
8. "Primitive man's relationship to nature", Bioscience, volume 21, 1971, page 722.
9. Roy F. Ellen, "What Black Elf left unsaid: on the illusory images of Green primitivism", Anthropology Today, volume 2, number 6, December 1986, page 11.
10. D.W. Steadman, "Extinction of birds in Eastern Polynesia: a review of the record, and comparisons with other Pacific Island groups", Journal of Archaeological Science, volume 16, 1989.
11. See Ellen, op. cit., page 10.
12. Sarah L. O'Hara, F. Alayne Street-Perrott and Timothy P. Burt, "Accelerated soil erosion around a Mexican highland lake caused by prehispanic agriculture", Nature, volume 362, 4 March 1993.
13. A. Terry Rambo, Primitive polluters: Semang impact on the Malaysian tropical rain forest system, Anthropological Papers, University of Michigan, 1985, page 79.
14. For more details, see Ron Brunton, "Chief Seattle: white man's Indian", Review, volume 45, number 2, 1992, pages 54-6. Chef Seattle did make a speech around 1854, and a white physician who heard it took notes from it which were published over 30 years later. But the ecological sentiments and criticisms of Europeans' approach to the environment which are central to the bogus version are completely absent.
15. New York Times Book Review, 31 October 1993.
16. "Kastom re-examined", Anthropological Forum, volume 6, 1993, page 589.
17. Suzanne O'Shea, "Bitter Sting learns laws of the jungle", The West Australian, 3 May 1993; see also "The savage can also be ignoble", The Economist, 12 June 1993.
18. See, for example, Robert Harms, Games Against Nature, Cambridge University Press, 1987, page 55.
19. See, for example, James Q. Wilson, The Moral Sense, 1993.
20. See, for example, Robert B. Edgerton, Sick Societies, Free Press, 1992, pages 194-6.
21. Op. cit., page ix.
22. See, for example, Roger Sandall, "Unnatural science", Review, volume 46, number 3, 1993.
23. David Imber, Gay Stevenson and Leanne Wilks, A Contingent Valuation Survey of the Kakadu Conservation Zone, Resource Assessment Commission Research Paper Number 3, AGPS, Canberra, February 1991.
24. Industry Commission, Recycling, Report No. 6, AGPS, Canberra, 22 February 1991.
25. Hinting at how schizophrenic governments can be on these issues, on 5 February 1992 the Commonwealth Government made Australia a signatory to the Base1 Convention. Perversely, in the name of environmental safety in poor countries, this curtails a number of valuable recycling opportunities for Australian industry. We will not pursue the matter further here.
26. These examples are cited in "Life ever after", The Economist, 9 October 1993, page 77.
27. Business Regulation Review Unit, Container Deposit Legislation and the Control of Litter and Waste, Information Paper No. 14, Canberra, June 1989.
28. This was reported, for example, in Leith Young, "Drink deposits too costly, says economist", The Age, Melbourne, 6 October 1990.
29. Caroline Milburn, "Where there's smoke, there's strife", The Age, (News Extra section), 16 February 1995.
30. "Springtime for scientists in Georgia", a report on the 1995 American Association for the Advancement of Science, The Economist, 25 February 1995.
31. John L. Farrands, Don't Panic, Panic! The use and abuse of science to create fear, The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne, Australia, 1993.
32. "Climate Change Science: Current Understanding and Uncertainties", A Report by the Steering Committee of the Climate Change Study, Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering, February 1995.
33. Thomas R. Knutson and Syukuru Manabe, "The impact of increased CO2 on ENSO-like phenomena in a coupled ocean-atmosphere model", Geophysical Research Letters, 1994, records that even for 4xCO2 concentrations their model showed no increase in the frequency of ENSO-induced droughts.
34. James Lighthill, Greg Holland, William Grey, Christopher Landsea, George Craig, Jenni Evans, Yoshio Kurihara and Charles Guard, "Global Climate Change and Tropical Cyclones", a scientific review in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 1994, concluded that: "... even though the possibility of some minor 'indirect effects' of global warming on tropical cyclone frequency cannot be excluded, they must effectively be 'swamped' by large natural variability".
35. Patrick J. Michaels, "Sound and fury", Cato Institute, 1992.
36. George Kukla, Robert G. Quayle and Thomas Karl, "Is global warming mostly at night?", in C.V. Mothai and George Stensland (eds), Global Climate Change: Science, Policy and Mitigation Strategies, Proceedings Air and Waste Management Association, International Speciality Conference, Phoenix, Arizona, April 5-8, 1994.
37. P.D. Jones, "Decade-to-century timescale variability of regional and hemispheric scale temperature", in ibid.
38. "Springtime for scientists in Georgia", a report on the 1995 American Association for the Advancement of Science, The Economist, 25 February 1995.
39. Jeremy Leggett (ed.), "The climate time bomb; signs of climate change from the Greenpeace database", Amsterdam, Stichting Greenpeace Council, 1994.
40. "Climate Change Science: Current Understanding and Uncertainties", op. cit.
41. Leggett, op. cit.
42. See Richard J. Wood, "Greenhouse: facts and fancies", for a detailed discussion of both science and policy aspects of the Greenhouse issue, Environmental Backgrounder, number 21, 28 November 1994.
43. S. Sternhell, Quadrant, November 1990, page 32.
44. S. Sternhell, Chemistry in Australia, 50, 78, 1993.
45. E. Efron, The Apocalyptics, Simon & Schuster, 1984, pages 28-30.
46. There are exceptions. Thus an easily recognisable class of substances which can act as "alkylating agents" are capable of damaging DNA and causing cancer.
47. I. Swirsky Gold et al., Science, 258, 261, 1992.
48. Mutagenicity is the ability of a substance to induce genetic changes (mutations) in certain standard strains of bacteria. A mutagen is thus a suspect carcinogen.
49. There is increasing evidence that bacterial infections bear responsibility for the development of certain cancers (for example, B. Stewart, "Chemical Carcinogenesis", Address to the Royal Australian Chemical Institute, 7 June 1995).
50. For formal definitions of Toxicity and Toxic hazard, see for example, J.T. Spickett, Chemistry in Australia, 258, 1990.
51. Alex Milne, "The perils of green pessimism", New Scientist, 12 June 1993, page 35.
52. James Cameron, "The precautionary principle -- core meaning, constitutional framework and procedures for implementation", Paper presented at the Precautionary Principle Conference, Institute of Environmental Studies, University of New South Wales, 20-21 September 1993, page 2.
53. IGAE, May 1992, paragraph 3.5.1.
54. Daniel Bodansky, "Scientific uncertainty and the precautionary principle", Environment, volume 33, number 7, September 1991, page 4.
55. Cameron, op. cit., page 6.
56. Cameron, ibid., pages 14-15; R.C. Earll, "Commonsense and the precautionary principle: an environmentalist's perspective", Marine Pollution Bulletin, volume 24, 1992, page 184.
57. Ronnie Harding and Liz Fisher, "The precautionary principle in Australia: a background paper", Paper presented at the Precautionary Principle Conference, Institute of Environmental Studies, University of New South Wales, 20-21 September 1993, page 5. See also Milne, op. cit., page 36.
58. Aaron Wildavsky, Searching for Safety, Transaction Books, 1988, pages 4, 42.
59. Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture, University of California Press, 1982.
60. Ron Brunton, "Moral panic", Review, volume 45, number 3, 1992, page 59.
61. A.D. Stebbing, "Environmental capacity and the precautionary principle", Marine Pollution Bulletin, volume 24, 1992, page 294.
62. Op. cit., page 37.
63. Op. cit., page 43. The banning of DDT has also had other very deleterious effects on human welfare. See Richard Stroup, "Chemophobia and activist environmental antidotes: is the cure more deadly than the disease?" in Jeff Bennett and Walter Block (eds), Reconciling Economics and the Environment, AIPP, 1991, page 189. This article provides further examples of the risk-shifting consequences of regulatory caution. Many other writings can also be cited. See, for example, Ben Bolch and Harold Lyons, Apocalypse Not, pages 16-21, 42-3.
64. Wildavsky, op. cit.
65. Op. cit., page 221.
66. See, for example, Cameron, op. cit., page 15.
67. This droll example, based on an actual research discovery, comes from Michael Procter, "Analysing survey data", in Nigel Gilbert (ed.), Researching Social Life, Sage Publications, 1993, page 248.
68. Richard J. Wood, Nationalising the Australian Environment: The Agreements of '92, Policy Paper, number 23, April 1993, page 44.
69. See, for example, Richard J. Wood, "God and the Greens", Environmental Backgrounder, number 18, 24 January 1994, which presents an excellent discussion of the failings of the White thesis.
70. Vicki Brower, "Earth sabbaths and eco-kosher: activists rediscover Judaism's Green tradition", Utne Reader, July-August 1993, page 34.
71. Traces on the Rhodian Shore, University of California Press, 1967, page 423.
72. "Bolshevism as the politics of intent: Warren Beatty's Reds", in Capturing the Culture, Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1991, page 41.
73. D. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report from the Club of Rome's Project on the Predicament of Mankind, Potomac Associates, New York, 1972.
74. B. Maley, Ethics and Ecosystems, Centre for Independent Studies, Monograph No. 29, Sydney, 1994.
75. Maley, ibid., page 56.
76. See D. Imber, G. Stevenson and L. Wilks, A Contingent Valuation Survey of the Kakadu Conservation Zone, Resource Assessment Commission Research Report No. 3, Canberra, Commonwealth Government Printer, 1991.
77. See A. Ulph and I. Reynolds, An Economic Evaluation of National Parks, Australian National University, Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies, CRES Report R/R4, Canberra, 1980.
78. See M. Streeting, A Survey of the Hedonic Price Technique, Resource Assessment Commission Research Report No. 1, Canberra, Commonwealth Government Printer, 1990.
79. N. Uren, "Sense and non-sense about soil degradation", Policy 8(2), 1992, pages 27-30.
80. B.R. Davidson, European Farming in Australia, Elsevier, Amsterdam, 1981, page 2.
81. Uren, op. cit., page 30.
82. A.H. Chisholm, "Australian agriculture: a sustainability story", Australian Journal of Agricultural Economics, 36(1), 1992, addendum to page 6.
83. G.W. Edwards, "Economics and sustainability: a critique of the ESD Working Group Reports", paper presented to the 37th Annual Conference of the Australian Agricultural Economics Society, University of Sydney, 1993.
84. John D. Milliman and Robert H. Meade, "World-wide delivery of river sediment to the oceans", The Journal of Geology, 91(1), 1983, pages 1-21.
85. H.E. Goeller and A.M. Weinberg, "The age of substitutability", American Economic Review, 68, 1978, pages 1-11.
86. J.K. Lynam and R.W. Herdt, "Sense and sustainability: sustainability as an objective in international agricultural research", Agricultural Economics, (3) 1989, pages 381-398.
87. D.B. Williams (ed.), Agriculture in the Australian economy, 3rd edition, Oxford University Press, Sydney, 1990.
88. Chisholm, op. cit.
89. P. Hone, "The impact of productivity growth on the management of land in the Australian wool industry", PhD thesis, La Trobe University, Bundoora, 1994.
90. Uren, op. cit., questions the very existence of several supposed forms of soil degradation such as soil acidification or decline in soil structure or soil nutrients.
91. Cited in A. Hamblin and G. Kyneur, Trends in wheat yields and soil fertility in Australia, DPIE, BRS, AGPS, Canberra, 1993.
92. E.F. Henzell, "Sustainability of the Australian agricultural system", pages 5-7 in A. Hamblin (ed.), Environmental indicators for sustainable agriculture, Report on a National Workshop, 28-29 November 1991, Bureau of Rural Resources, AGPS, Canberra, 1992.
93. Chisholm, op. cit.
94. P. Crosson and J.R. Anderson, Resources and global food prospects, World Bank Technical Paper No. 184, Washington, DC, USA, 1992.
95. A.H. Chisholm, "Land use choices in a changing world", Land Degradation and Rehabilitation, 5(2), 1994, pages 153-178.
96. J.M. Alston, J.A. Chalfant and P.G. Pardey, "Structural adjustment in OECD agriculture: government policies and technical change", Paper prepared for the Quantitative Analysis and Special Studies Division of the OECD's Directorate for Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Paris, 1993.
97. Chisholm, op. cit., (1992).
98. B.R. Davidson, "Comments", Appendix B in A. Chisholm and R. Dumsday (eds), Land degradation: problems and policies, Cambridge University Press, 1987, page 360.
99. P. Hone, "The impact of productivity growth on the management of land in the Australian wool industry", PhD thesis, La Trobe University, Bundoora, 1994.
100. Chisholm, pers. comm., 1995.
101. For further detail on the animals discussed in this chapter, see D. Freundenberger, "Beyond the Kangaroo", Australian Natural History, 24 (9), 1994, page 80, and T. Low, "The Good Oil on the Emu", Australian Natural History, 24 (8), 1994, pages 20-1.
102. There are several million emus in mainland Australia and about one million wild emus in Queensland alone. The conservation status of the bird is generally listed as common across Australia.
