Comments for World Environment Day

An Address at Melbourne University, 4 June 1999

OUR EARTH, OUR FUTURE,
ARE WE ON TRACK TO SAVING IT?

The first thing to say is that we are not in the midst of environmental collapse, nor, indeed, anywhere close to it.  Unlike certain past human societies, we are not facing large-scale human die-back due to environmental failures.  Population and human life expectancy is increasing.

Nor does the increasing prosperity which lies behind the increases in population and life expectancy mean that any environmental crisis or collapse is inevitable.  It certainly leads to increased environmental pressures, but whether those pressures cause major environmental problems depends on how well or badly the systems we have in place cope with those pressures.  The developing world is going to continue to aspire to our standard of living:  our present is their, very visible future.

Now, we know what not to do.  Don't have a command economy.  The command economies of the old Soviet bloc inflicted a level of damage on their environment which is unparalleled in human history.  70 years of Soviet socialism created the only industrial society in human history with a declining life expectancy -- and environmental damage was a major reason for that.

Do have democratic government. Voters tend to be somewhat adverse to having their environmental amenity reduced, and vote accordingly.

Don't rely on public ownership. The command economies show that, but the point is illustrated elsewhere.  Beef cattle and bison occupy the same ecological niche.  Cattle were owned, were looked after and multiplied enormously.  Bison were unowned, and were hunted almost to extinction.

Nowadays, we see the same with the African elephant.  Zimbabwe pioneered giving local villagers property rights in elephants (which can be very destructive to local farmers:  trampling crops, ripping up storage sheds, they are capable of eating an entire year's supply of grain in one day), allowing the locals to harvest ivory and giving them a vested interest in increasing elephant populations.  East Africa banned the ivory trade completely, adopted a blanket "don't touch" policy, the elephants remaining publicly owned.

Between 1960 and 1992, the elephant population of Zimbabwe more than doubled. ⁽¹⁾  Meanwhile, from 1979 to 1989, the East African elephant population more than halved. ⁽²⁾  Beef and bison again -- except it is the same species with different property rights in different jurisdictions.  The Kenyan state did not have the power to enforce its edicts.

Even in Australia, governments may be fond of proclaiming National Parks, they are much less reliable in looking after them.  Governments have, for example, consistently sold logging rights and provided water at well under the price that a private provider would have done, to our environment's detriment.

Use markets intelligently:  be sceptical about government interventions which restrict the role of markets. Markets register scarcity and provide incentives to adjust for it:  environmentally, this is generally a good thing.  It is typically the things which no-one specific owns and which are not properly incorporated into market activity, like air, fish in the oceans, waterways, Elephants in East Africa, bison and so forth which are under the most environmental threat.

The artificial inflation of production by Europe's Common Agricultural Policy impedes the process of re-forestation such as occurred in nineteenth century New England.

Be in favour of prosperity. Environmental concern is what economists call "a luxury good", it goes up with prosperity.  People will worry about the environment after they are confident of feeding their families, having a roof over their heads, educating their children, not before.  It is in poor countries, not rich ones, where one sees the greatest environmental destruction -- places like Haiti and of the southern Sahara.

Even in developed countries, environmental concern goes up in booms and down in recessions.  We are in a boom, so environmental activism is up.  In the developed countries, there has been environmental improvement.  The Ohio River no longer catches alight, fish are now seen in reaches of the Thames where they haven't been seen for decades, even centuries.  Air quality has improved, pollution levels have dropped in the cities of the industrialised West.  The air quality in Beijing or Bangkok, by contrast, is appalling.

One would hope that environmental quality in the West has improved, given the enormous resources poured into environmental improvement, the legislative action.  If it hadn't we would be doomed.  Fortunately it has.

Finally, be suspicious of the doomsayers.  Fear and conflict are terribly useful for raising funds, gaining members, mobilising action.  They are so useful they are over-resorted to.  It is nice to line up people into good altruists and the evil greedies, but life is much more complicated than that.  Human institutions have much more complex and mixed motives.

With global warming, for example, as the Chairman noted, the global temperature was higher a 1000 years ago, the official UN predictions of temperature change are well within the range of past climatic changes in Earth's history, even within human experience.  The official predictions of temperature increase are also dropping and are likely to drop further.  Human-induced global warming is still only a predicted event:  we should not go into premature certainty.  Given that human action is responsible for a small percentage of total global carbon dioxide emissions, the lack of confirmation is not surprising.

There are many serious environmental issues in Australia -- the Murray-Darling system is in poor condition, land degradation problems are a genuine concern.

So, yes there are environmental pressures and yes these will increase, but if we make the right choices, we will be able to handle these environmental pressures.

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ENDNOTES

1. From 32,000 to 77,000.

2. From 866,000 to 404,000.